Cattle ranching was an important industry in Spanish Florida in the second half of the seventeenth century. The Spanish were in Florida for almost a century before ranching became widespread in the colony. Late in the seventeenth century, ranches were located along the middle St. Johns River, in Potano Province (present-day North Central Florida), and in Apalachee Province (the easternmost part of the Florida Panhandle). Ranches flourished despite conflicts with the native people of Florida. Attacks by the English colony, the Province of Carolina, and its native allies brought an abrupt end to ranching in Florida at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Conditions in Spanish Florida Spanish Florida in the 16th and 17th centuries was a frontier colony. There were only some 2,000 Spaniards in the colony, and between 800 and 1,500 people in the Presidio of St. Augustine. Florida was a poor colony, with no source of precious metals and little else of value to the Spanish. The European population was almost completely dependent on government salaries paid from the situado, an annual subsidy provided to the colony by the Viceroyalty of New Spain. Most goods used by the colonists had to be imported from Cuba and New Spain (Mexico). The situado was often late, sometimes by years, or even skipped. One year the ship carrying the situado was captured by a Dutch privateer. Another year, it was lost in a shipwreck. The small amount of the situado, and the frequent delays in its provision, left the colony constantly short of supplies and funds. The government and the Spanish people of Florida bought goods in Havana on credit, but growing debt caused prices to rise and credit to dry up. The Spaniards of Florida therefore sought means to generate additional income. Products grown or gathered in Florida and shipped to Havana and Spain included ambergris that washed up on the Atlantic coast of Florida, maize and beans from Apalachee Province, and deerskins and furs obtained from the Apalachicola people. However, cattle ranching was, for a few decades, the most successful effort in Spanish Florida to supplement the meager support provided for the colony by the situado. Early attempts Juan Ponce de León, Hernando de Soto and Tristán de Luna y Arellano all took cattle with their expeditions to Florida, in line with their intentions to found Spanish settlements there, but there is no evidence that any of those