Carol Matthews Gillen taught elementary school for forty years. A graduate of Ohio University, her love of history began at an early age when searching for arrowheads after the annual spring plowing of her father's cornfields. The last seventeen years of her teaching career were spent in a small agricultural town in Florida called Indiantown in western Martin County, where she discovered an unlikely history mentor in the form of a spunky cattle rancher, well known in her circle throughout the state simply as "Miss Iris." Cracker Horses and Cattle is her third book on Florida history.