Sunday Favorites: The King of Cattle

Florida once crowned kings, not of castles, but of cattle, and Ziba King reigned supreme. Among the most legendary figures to emerge from this rugged era was Ziba King, a towering cattle baron from Arcadia who, at the height of his reign in 1898, was said to own over 50,000 head of cattle. According to historian Vernon Peeples in "Punta Gorda in the Beginning: 1865 to 1900," King’s reach and reputation made him the undisputed heavyweight of Florida’s cattle industry—a title he defended with both grit and gunpowder.

Standing at 6 feet 6 inches and weighing around 225 pounds, Ziba King cut an imposing figure. But it wasn’t just his size that kept rivals at bay, it was his ruthless sense of justice and unyielding control over his domain. As Peeples notes, when 2,500 of his cows were stolen, Ziba not only retrieved them himself but took a few extra as interest, claiming them as reparation for the theft.

The open-range days of late 19th-century Florida resembled the Wild West more than the sunshine state we know today. The cattle industry, driven by the free-roaming descendants of Spanish stock, was rife with conflict. With over 1,000 registered cow brands in Manatee County alone, it was common for rustlers to rebrand stolen cattle and rush them to shipping docks on the Manatee River for export to Cuba. The law was loosely enforced—if at all—and disputes were often settled through ambushes and shootouts. As Peeples puts it, cattle were branded and rebranded so many times that their ownership became “indecipherable,” fueling a cycle of theft, retaliation, and vigilante justice.

Ziba King thrived in this environment, building his empire in a time when cow hunters rode with whips and rifles, and when the threat of violence lurked behind every cattle drive. It’s no surprise that King himself survived several attempts on his life. His survival wasn’t just a testament to luck—it was a reflection of the respect (and fear) he commanded among his peers. His dominance was so complete that even in political affairs, his influence carried weight.

In fact, King played a pivotal role in one of the most controversial elections in U.S. history. During the disputed 1876 presidential race between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel Tilden, a clerical standoff in Manatee County threatened to silence the voices of Democratic voters. According to Peeples, when the county’s former Clerk of Court refused to certify election returns, local Democrats turned to King for help. True to form, Ziba confronted the reluctant official with a .45-caliber pistol and demanded he sign the documents. He did. Though the votes were ultimately rejected in Tallahassee, the bold action underscored King’s position not only as a cattleman but as a political force.

Yet for all his power, Ziba King and his kind were no match for nature and modernization. The arrival of barbed wire and land development in the 1920s closed off the open ranges that had made men like King rich. Worse still, two devastating epidemics—the fever tick in 1917 and the screwworm in the 1930s—decimated the hardy piney-woods cattle that had long roamed the Florida scrub. As fences rose and the free-range disappeared, so too did the original Florida cow hunters—the “Crackers”—and with them, the wild legacy of men like Ziba King.

According to "Punta Gorda in the Beginning," King’s story is more than folklore; it’s a lens into a volatile period of Florida’s past, where the open range wasn’t just a place—but a battleground. And in that untamed landscape, Ziba King wasn’t just a man, he was a monarch.