Florida Crackers were mostly English pioneer settlers and their descendants who began coming to the colonies after the British victory over France in the Seventy Years War. The word "cracker," an Elizabethan-era term for a braggart or a person who engages in entertaining conversation, by the 1760s had popularly come to mean settlers of the remote southern backcountry of the USA, and later was applied to cowboys in Florida and Georgia, many of them descendants of early American settlers. Today it indicates people from families that have lived in Florida for many generations. Florida also has the longest history of cattle ranching in the USA, where cattle workers were called cowmen and in the late 1800s were often called cow hunters, with "cracker" and "cowman" sometimes used interchangeably. Because dense undergrowth made rope lassoes less useful, cowmen used whips to herd cattle, and the cracking sound is popularly thought to be another reason for the name. These cowmen tended wild British and Spanish cattle that survived on natural forage and endured heat and insects, while fighting off panthers, wolves, bears, and cattle rustlers. Driving herds to market meant crossing marshes and dense scrub wood through burning heat, torrential rain storms, and hurricane winds, sometimes as far as Jacksonville, Savannah, and Charleston. Florida Crackers and Seminole Indians shared a connection to cattle: the first cattle in North America came with Spanish conquistadors, Ponce de Leon brought Andalusian cattle to Florida in 1521, and the earliest Florida cowboys were native people, called cow hunters, whose free-ranging animals were driven with braided-leather whips that made a cracking sound.