Florida was pretty much free range when I was a kid, people earmarked their hogs and cattle and turned them loose. When they wanted one they would go catch it. People with no land could get permission to run livestock on timber company land and many did.
Every so often there would be a roundup to count and earmark new calves and pigs.
I feel fortunate to have known some of those old timers personally.
My wife and I retired from urban Arizona to rural Florida a couple of years ago. “City goin’ to country folk” they call it around here. She had inherited her grandparents homestead from the 1920’s. We built a new house on it and started raising beef cattle on the 25 acres surrounding the home. He uncle had lived on the property before us, before he died, and we hear stories from many locals and relatives of his cattle-raising days. He got permission from several timber companies to let his cattle graze on their idle timber land. He had cows everywhere in the surrounding woods for up to 10-15 miles away. He and his friends would use leather whips to manage his several hundred head of wild cattle by horseback in those woods. He had trouble keeping all of his cattle contained on the timberland because their fences weren’t always up to snuff for livestock. So many of the stories we hear are about his cows getting out on the highway or onto someone else’s property by accident. After he died, his friends and relatives tried to round up those cows from the woods and think they got most of them. But there are still a few strays roaming out in those woods to this day from his wild herd. And my wife cherishes his old leather whip he used in his cattle days. It is displayed in a prominent place on the wall in our home, a reminder of those wilder days gone by when her uncle was a cracker in rural Florida.