Look around the Tampa Bay area, with its high-rise buildings, bridges spanning the bay, and more than two million residents, and it’s hard to imagine a time when only a handful of people lived here, a time when there were only a few small huts and no bridges or roads.
Only within the last 150 years or so has the Tampa Bay area gone from being ignored as unimportant to being a major metropolitan area and international destination.
For centuries, Spanish, French, and English explorers dismissed the Tampa Bay area as not worth settling. Even post–Civil War land speculators went elsewhere first because there was no railroad into the Tampa Bay area and not much in the way of roads. People who wanted to come here came primarily by boat.
In the mid-1800s, there was a military fort here and a small town with a harbor. Tampa became a shipping point for scrub cattle raised by Florida Cracker cowboys—so called because of the cracking sound of the whip they used to communicate with each other and to kill rattlesnakes and other dangerous critters—and sold to Cuban markets.
During the Civil War the cattle went north to feed the Confederate Army. After the war, cattle trade with Cuba resumed, and the gold that came back in return helped Florida recover from the war.
This established route to Cuba conveniently allowed the United States to send Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders and other troops to take San Juan Hill during the Spanish-American War.
By then, phosphate had been discovered nearby and the railroad had come in. The railroad brought tourists, and many of them decided they liked not having to fight blizzards in January. Clear Water Harbor and St. Petersburg began to grow on the Pinellas side of the bay.
Commercial aviation got its start in 1914 right here in the Tampa Bay area, and the 1940s war years brought Army airfields to both Hillsborough and Pinellas Counties.
But it was the invention of affordable air-conditioning that really changed the Tampa Bay area from a wintering ground for Northern snowbirds, as the locals call them, to a permanent home for 2.4 million people by the first decade of the 21st century.
Before we delve into the recorded history of the Tampa Bay area, let’s look further back into what this spot on earth might have seen over thousands of years. For even before Europeans “discovered” the Tampa Bay area, and even before earlier peoples settled here, these rivers and seas, swamps and marshes, lands and skies were home to other creatures.