LIVING HISTORY
15
TALLAHASSEE BECKONS
Most young cowboys don’t grow up with a father who
suddenly gets tapped to serve on Florida’s Supreme Court.
But when he was 13 years old, the heavy hand of history
moved Bud more than 350 miles away to Tallahassee for
the rest of his childhood. But happily, he still got to spend
summers riding the range with Irlo Bronson, the legendary
rancher-politician who sold his land to Walt Disney. No
doubt you’ve noticed that the road to the Magic Kingdom
is named the Irlo Bronson Highway. Well, Bud got to go on
cattle hunts and cattle drives with Bronson, who would sleep
on the ground around a campfire with all the cowboys who
worked for him. Bronson, whom Bud refers to as “Florida’s
greatest cattleman,” taught Bud much of what he knows
about the illustrious heritage of ranching and its down-home,
egalitarian ways.
Surprisingly, most Floridians don’t recognize that Florida is
cattle country. Always has been ― always should be. Before
there were orange groves, coconut palms, beach resorts and
bulldozers, cattle roamed the pinelands and the swamps of
our peninsula. Hollywood has always narrowed the scope
of its imagination to cowboys of the West, which is probably
why the world still overlooks the stature and long history
of Florida’s cowmen. The cattle industry is Florida’s oldest
industry. It has been here for literally hundreds of years.
Ponce de León is thought to have abandoned Andalusian
cattle on the Gulf Coast in 1521, and Spanish colonial Gov.
Zuñiga introduced laws that sparked a cattle boom at the
beginning of the 1700s. Even the Seminoles became famous
for herding cattle.
As a young man enjoying the campfires of cattle hunts, Bud
became steeped in the
lore of renowned cattlemen
like Jake Sumerlin,
the legendary “King of
the Crackers,” whose
word was his bond.
Honor is the polestar of
the Florida cowman, and
honesty is strictly ― and
sometimes hotheadedly
― enforced. Sumerlin’s
famous cattle drives to
Punta Rassa, where he
was paid in gold, made
him one of Florida’s
wealthiest men in the
1800s. And yet the cattle
baron set the standard of
a noble, no-frills life in
the saddle that so many
ADAMS RANCH COLLECTION
During World War II, the Navy sent Bud to
cattlemen still admire.
Emory University to study nuclear physics.
NAVY YEARS
By the end of high school in Tallahassee, the Second World
War had drawn Bud away from early dreams of returning to
ranching. The Navy gave him a battery of aptitude tests at
Camp Blanding in the north-central part of the state. That’s
when he and the military realized he has the sort of mind that
can wrap itself around the greatest complexities of science.
“The Navy sent me to Emory University,” Adams said.
“And there I studied calculus and nuclear physics under a >>
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