If you’ve been following our magazine since its launch 16
years ago you may notice that we’re doing something different
this issue. Like the magazines of old, we’re running
a series.
The Cow Creek Chronicles follows a pioneering Treasure
Coast family and their cattle ranch through the generations.
The first installment starts with this issue and we hope you’ll
be looking forward to the next installment after you read it.
As a multimedia company, we’ll also be offering extras on our
web site, www.indianrivermagazine.com and through our
Cow Creek Chronicles podcast.
If you remember my column from the winter 2021 edition,
I revealed that my mom, Katie Enns, often suggested subjects
that we should write about. She had been suggesting one on
Jo Ann Raulerson Sloan, the subject of the series, for years,
and she continued to do so until her death in January 2021.
Mom was part of the story and, as the series progresses, I look
forward to sharing her involvement in it, as well as that of my
dad, the late Bob Enns.
You’ll learn about how the series evolved in our next issue, so I won’t go into detail here.
But I did want to share one terrific discovery we had in putting the story together.
We were having difficulty finding photos of the title subject, historical Cow Creek crossing
at Cow Creek Ranch near the border of St. Lucie and Okeechobee counties. During one of my
interviews with Debra Sloan, Jo Ann’s daughter, she volunteered that she had paintings of
Cow Creek and would be glad to allow us to use the images.
The paintings appear on our cover for our St. Lucie and Martin editions and on pages
18-19, 23 and 25. All are remarkable and evoke the spirit of Old Florida that we were trying to
set. As far as we were able to ascertain, the image of the old Cow Creek crossing on the cover
is the only remaining image of that landmark. So far, we have been unable to find any photographs.
Once we received Debra’s permission to take photographs of the paintings, we needed to
find the artist who had painted them to get permission to reproduce the images for the magazine.
SKIP STOWERS
E.L. “Buster” Kenton, whose paintings
are used in the Cow Creek
Chronicles series, is a former
rodeo performer and emcee.
We eventually learned that the artist, E.L. “Buster’’ Kenton, died in 1991. But luckily, we
were able to locate his daughter, Rose Marie Kenton Anderson of Orlando, who retained the
rights to reproducing his paintings.
We told her about the story we were doing and she provided us the necessary permission. In
our conversation she shared that her dad will be inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame
this year. The hall, established by the Florida Legislature in 1986, recognizes people who have
made significant contributions to the arts in Florida either as performing or practicing artists.
The Treasure Coast has a healthy number of these members in the hall, including fine artists
A.E. “Bean’’ Backus, Jacqueline Brice, Alfred Hair and Jim Hutchinson and writer Zora
Neale Hurston.
We hope this honor will shed more light on the works of Kenton, who was well-known in
his hometown of Kissimmee, where he was a former bronco rider and rodeo emcee. When not
cowboying, he painted works such as the ones you see in our magazine. Osceola County High
School still uses his cowboy images for the school mascot, Kowboy Jake, modeled after reallife
Kissimmee cowboy Pete Clemons.
“I thought his art was great,” says photographer Skip Stowers, a friend of Kenton who took
a rare portrait of the artist before his death. “It was interesting in many ways because the
cowboys in a lot of his art were larger than the animals they were riding. That is 100 percent of
what he was doing — preserving Florida’s cattle history.’’
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
Publisher & Editor
Gregory Enns
772.940.9005
enns@indianrivermag.com
Associate Publisher
Allen Osteen
Assistant to the Publisher
Lauren Shott
Design Editor
Michelle Moore-Burney
Associate Editor
Judith Collins
Copy Editors
Pattie Durham, Gaettane A. Paul
Writers
Susan Burgess, Donna Crary,
Rick Crary, Rachel Cuccurullo,
Wendy Dwyer, Kerry Firth,
Ellen Gillette, Janie Gould,
Mary Ann Koenig, Danielle Rose,
Anthony Westbury, Bernie Woodall,
Gregory Enns, Maria Sonnenberg
Covers
‘Ford at Cow Creek’
E.L. Kenton
(St. Lucie and Martin editions)
Kayakers
(Indian River edition)
Jason Hook
Photographers
Robert Adams, Rob Downey
Rusty Durham, Anthony Inswasty,
MaryAnn Ketcham, Liz McKinley,
Jason Hook, James Northen
Advertising Representatives
Kim Capen
772.634.1771
kim@indianrivermag.com
Sunny Gates
772.204.5043
sunny@indianrivermag.com
Rue Kindred
772.708.2487
rue@indianrivermag.com
Susan Haller
772.501.6701
susan@indianrivermag.com
Distribution
Wes Holloway
To Reach Our Office
772.466.3346 or
office@indianrivermag.com
Our Motto
‘We fly our own mission’
— Ed Drondoski, Founding Photographer
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Indian River Magazine is published by
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Series chronicles history
of cattle-ranching family
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Signatures:Signatures 2/25/13 4:25 PM Page 1
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