The Cracker

The cracker, a pioneer backwoods settler of Georgia and Florida, has come to be known as a gaunt, shiftless person, but originally the term meant simply a native, regardless of his circumstances. Belief that the name may have been shortened from 'corn cracker' is given credence in Georgia, but in Florida it derives from the cracking of a whip. It is a name honorably earned by those who made bold talk with their lengthy, rawhide bullwhips in the days when timber and turpentine were the State's chief industries. Those enterprises involved heavy-haul jobs, with oxen the motive power, bullwhips to keep them moving, and the pistol-shot crack of these whips to signal the wearisome progress of the haul through the woods.  Cracking the whip became, in fact, an art and a means of communication-an art of making a noise without permitting the whip to touch the animals, and a signal system by which conversations were held across miles of timber barrens. Today the whip crack echoes through the pines only when cowboys are rounding up their herds, and at rodeos and barbecues when the crackers demonstrate their skill.
To be continued....from the 1939  Florida, The American Guide Series.