Alligator wrestling is an attraction, that later evolved into a sport, that began as hunting expeditions by Native Americans. [1] It has been described as "alligator capturing techniques."[ citation needed ]
Alligator wrestling is an attraction, that later evolved into a sport, that began as hunting expeditions by Native Americans. [1] It has been described as "alligator capturing techniques."[ citation needed ]
Southeastern Native Americans hunted alligators as a food source for thousands of years. At the turn of the 20th century, showing off alligators as roadside attractions helped Native Americans generate revenue. Long before the first Europeans explorers wandered into the Florida Everglades, alligator wrestling existed. For tribes like the Seminole and Miccosukee, learning how to "handle" the reptiles was part of their existence.
We had to live off whatever Mother Nature provided us in the Everglades ... We'd eat the tail, the meaty part. Later on, when the alligator skin had a value, we would hunt and skin the gators and bring the skin to trading posts and trade for things we couldn't grow.
— Max Osceola, a Seminole tribal councilman. [1]
A common symbol of Florida in popular culture is the American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis). The St. Augustine Alligator Farm was one of Florida's earliest themed tourist attractions that opened for business in 1893. At the St. Augustine Alligator Farm and other tourist attractions such as Gatorland and Silver Springs, "taming" or hypnotizing alligators was a popular trick, along with other performances such as alligator wrestling. [2] Alligator wrestling is a common spectator activity for people to do in Florida and is most common near the Everglades' so-called Alligator Alley.
The Everglades is a natural region of flooded grasslands in the southern portion of the U.S. state of Florida, comprising the southern half of a large drainage basin within the Neotropical realm. The system begins near Orlando with the Kissimmee River, which discharges into the vast but shallow Lake Okeechobee. Water leaving the lake in the wet season forms a slow-moving river 60 miles (97 km) wide and over 100 miles (160 km) long, flowing southward across a limestone shelf to Florida Bay at the southern end of the state. The Everglades experiences a wide range of weather patterns, from frequent flooding in the wet season to drought in the dry season. Throughout the 20th century, the Everglades suffered significant loss of habitat and environmental degradation.
The Seminole Wars were a series of three military conflicts between the United States and the Seminoles that took place in Florida between about 1816 and 1858. The Seminoles are a Native American nation which coalesced in northern Florida during the early 1700s, when the territory was still a Spanish colonial possession. Tensions grew between the Seminoles and settlers in the newly independent United States in the early 1800s, mainly because enslaved people regularly fled from Georgia into Spanish Florida, prompting slaveowners to conduct slave raids across the border. A series of cross-border skirmishes escalated into the First Seminole War in 1817, when General Andrew Jackson led an incursion into the territory over Spanish objections. Jackson's forces destroyed several Seminole and Black Seminole towns and briefly occupied Pensacola before withdrawing in 1818. The U.S. and Spain soon negotiated the transfer of the territory with the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819.
The history of Florida can be traced to when the first Native Americans began to inhabit the peninsula as early as 14,000 years ago. They left behind artifacts and archeological evidence. Florida's written history begins with the arrival of Europeans; the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León in 1513 made the first textual records. The state received its name from that conquistador, who called the peninsula La Pascua Florida in recognition of the verdant landscape and because it was the Easter season, which the Spaniards called Pascua Florida.
The Seminole are a Native American people who developed in Florida in the 18th century. Today, they live in Oklahoma and Florida, and comprise three federally recognized tribes: the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, the Seminole Tribe of Florida, and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida, as well as independent groups. The Seminole people emerged in a process of ethnogenesis from various Native American groups who settled in Spanish Florida beginning in the early 1700s, most significantly northern Muscogee Creeks from what are now Georgia and Alabama.
The American alligator, sometimes referred to colloquially as a gator or common alligator, is a large crocodilian reptile native to the Southeastern United States and a small section of northeastern Mexico. It is one of the two extant species in the genus Alligator, and is larger than the only other living alligator species, the Chinese alligator.
Big Cypress National Preserve is a United States National Preserve located in South Florida, about 45 miles west of Miami on the Atlantic coastal plain. The 720,000-acre (2,900 km2) Big Cypress, along with Big Thicket National Preserve in Texas, became the first national preserves in the United States National Park System when they were established on October 11, 1974. In 2008, Florida film producer Elam Stoltzfus featured the preserve in a PBS documentary.
Gatorland is a 110-acre (45 ha) theme park and wildlife preserve in Florida, located along South Orange Blossom Trail south of Orlando. It was founded in 1949 by Owen Godwin on former cattle land, and is privately owned by his family.
The Treaty of Moultrie Creek, also known as the Treaty with the Florida Tribes of Indians, was an agreement signed in 1823 between the government of the United States and the chiefs of several groups and bands of Indians living in the present-day state of Florida. The treaty established a reservation in the center of the Florida peninsula. It also ceded all coastal lands to the United States Government, as the U.S. wanted control of overseas trade between the Florida and the Caribbean.
The indigenous people of the Everglades region arrived in the Florida peninsula of what is now the United States approximately 14,000 to 15,000 years ago, probably following large game. The Paleo-Indians found an arid landscape that supported plants and animals adapted to prairie and xeric scrub conditions. Large animals became extinct in Florida around 11,000 years ago.
A national push for expansion and progress toward the latter part of the 19th century stimulated interest in draining the Everglades, a region of tropical wetlands in southern Florida, for agricultural use. According to historians, "From the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, the United States went through a period in which wetland removal was not questioned. Indeed, it was considered the proper thing to do."
The Everglades is an American crime-adventure television series that aired in syndication for one season from 1961–62 and in reruns. Ron Hayes starred as Constable Lincoln Vail, a law enforcement officer of the fictional Everglades County Patrol who traveled the Florida Everglades in an airboat, a vehicle which was often the focus of the program. Hayes, a northern California actor and stuntman, was an avid outdoorsman and conservationist.
A crocodile farm or alligator farm is an establishment for breeding and raising of crocodilians in order to produce crocodile and alligator meat, leather from crocodile and alligator skin, and other goods. Many species of both alligators and crocodiles are farmed internationally. In Louisiana alone, alligator farming is a $60 to $70 million industry. Most crocodile farms are located in Thailand.
Tahar Douis is a Moroccan wrestler of alligators known for hypnotizing them and putting his head inside their open jaws. He was born in the 1950s in Marrakech, left home at age 6 to join a group of street performers, and later began performing for the London-based Circus Hasani at age 16. In the 1980s he was taught by Bob Tiger, a great third-generation Seminole gator wrestler from the Florida Everglades. Previous to his career as an alligator wrestler, he was a snake charmer and circus strong man. As a strong man, he earned a Guinness World Record in the 1970s by carrying 12 men weighing a total of 1,700 pounds on his shoulders, forming the world's heaviest human pyramid. In the late 1980s his alligator show was a star attraction in the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus as part of their "Safari Fantasy" themed shows. By the middle of the 1990s he was wrestling gators as part of the "Splash" show at the Riviera in Winchester, Nevada on the Las Vegas Strip.
James Edward Billie, known as Chief Jim Billie, is a politician who chaired the Seminole Tribe of Florida from 1979 to 2001, and again from 2011 to 2016.
Harriet Bedell was an Episcopal deaconess and missionary to the Cheyenne in Oklahoma, Alaska Natives, and the Seminole of Florida. She is remembered on the calendar of saints of the Episcopal Church in the United States of America on January 8.
Swamplandia! is a 2011 novel by the American writer Karen Russell. The novel is set in the Ten Thousand Islands, off the southwest coast of Florida, it tells the story of the Bigtree family of alligator wrestlers who live in Swamplandia! an alligator-wrestling theme park. Swamplandia! is Russell's first novel. The book originated as a short story, titled "Ava Wrestles the Alligator", published in the Summer 2006 issue of the literary magazine Zoetrope: All-Story, when Russell was 24 years old, and later collected in her 2006 debut collection, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves.
Gatorama is an alligator farm and visitor attraction in Palmdale, Florida, USA. Alligators and crocodiles are raised on the farm for meat and skins. Gatorama is one of Florida's oldest roadside attractions. Only six alligator farms are open to the public as attractions.
Everglades Holiday Park is an attraction park situated on 29 acres of wetlands in the Everglades in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The park is located on the western end of Griffin Road, off U.S. 27. Everglades Holiday Park is not affiliated with Everglades National Park.
Depicting African-American children as alligator bait was a common trope in American popular culture in the 19th and 20th centuries. The motif was present in a wide array of media, including newspaper reports, songs, sheet music, and visual art. There is an urban legend claiming that black children or infants were in fact used as bait to lure alligators, although there is no meaningful evidence that children of any race were ever used for this purpose. In American slang, alligator bait is a racial slur for African-Americans.
Everglades Alligator Farm is a wildlife park in Miami-Dade County, Florida, nearby the city of Homestead and the entrance of Everglades National Park. It claims to be the oldest and largest alligator farm in South Florida, along with containing over 2,000 alligators. Additionally, it provides airboat rides through the Floridian wilderness.