Cracker Times and Pioneer Lives: The Florida Reminiscences of George Gillett Keen and Sara Pamela Williams

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS Cracker Times and Pioneer Lives: The Florida Reminiscences of George Gillett Keen and Sara Pamela Williams. Edited by James M. Denham and Canter Brown Jr. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000. Pp. xvii, 215. Illustrations, maps. $39.95.) Colonial Plantations and Economy in Florida. Edited by Jane G. Landers. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. Pp. 219. Illustrations, maps. $49.95.) Other works by the editors of these collections have generated a growing interest in colonial and frontier Florida. Jane G. Landers's Black Society in Spanish Florida (1999) and James M. Denham's A Rogue's Paradise: Crime and Punishment in Antebellum Florida, 1821-1861 (1997) connect Florida history to two larger worlds of historical interpretation: the Spanish plantation era and the frontier era of the Old Southwest. But these two larger worlds have important connections to the early republic as well, for struggles over control of Florida were the source of much contention between the United States and Spain and contributed to the rise of Andrew Jackson. In addition, the expanding frontier of the plantation South revived slavery, and, in future years, would provoke conflict with Mexico and force the issue of slavery expansion. Understanding the world of one of these frontier regions, Florida, contributes to our knowledge of these larger processes. These books contribute to this growing academic concern in significant, but very different ways. Cracker Times and Pioneer Lives consists of the reminiscences of two Florida pioneers from the frontier era, both collected in the late nineteenth century. George Gillett Keen first settled in northern Florida as a child, when his parents relocated from Georgia in the 1820s. Much of his life experience was as a Floridian, and in 1899 the Florida Index, published in Lake City, began to publish his reminiscences in serial form. The editors have compiled these essays as part one of this volume. While Lake City, a town in northeastern Florida near the Georgia border, might seem an obscure locale, Keen's experiences read with a remarkable familiarity for those already familiar with the Old Southwest. His tales of unsolved murders, duels, and fistfights, along with the obligatory yarns of political and legal trickery, are all exemplary of an old Southwest tradition of storytelling filled with wit, irony, and satire. With one exception, Keen reminisced about events between the 1830s and the 1850s. These reminiscences can be read as the ramblings of an old settler, but they are much more. His stories, most committed to print only at the beginning of the twentieth century, were decades old, preserved through an oral culture that perpetuated itself late in the evening around campfires and hearths. Keen's reminiscences are an artifact of a culture of storytelling that was replaced by print and never took the same form. In addition to the storytelling of the Old Southwest, Keen related his experiences in the Second Seminole War from 1835 to 1842. As a youth of only eight years when the war broke out, Keen's experiences were quite personal, for friends and relatives were involved on both sides of the conflict. Keen described attacks and counterattacks, mostly from his own memory. Fortunately, in this edition, the editors have provided annotations verifying or correcting incidents and dates. Keen's perceptions of the war are influenced by an unfortunately common antipathy to the Seminoles and Creeks; however, having witnessed a violent conflict as a youth and lost friends and relatives, the prejudice is unsurprising. Equally unsurprising and unfortunate is his use of derogatory epithets for African Americans; however, the editors have done a fine job of contextualizing Keen's language without attempting to justify it. The second, and briefer, part of Cracker Times and Pioneer Lives consists of the diary of Sara Pamela Williams, born near Picolata (not far from St. …