BACKWOODSMEN: Stockmen and Hunters along a Big Thicket River Valley

Author: Thad Sitton
ISBN: 0806139641
Price: $26.95
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This book presents a detailed social history of the back-country stockmen, hunters, and woodsmen of the Neches River in southeastern Texas. As in parts of Appalachia, many elements of centuries-old herding and hunting lifeways survived in the Neches Valley into the 1960s. In what early settlers called the "Big Thicket" or "Big Woods," everything outside fenced fields was, by long established custom, "open range," a wooded commons in which hogs, cattle, and backwoodsmen were free to roam. Sitton details their daily activities, relying mainly on oral history interviews he conducted with dozens of Neches VAlley woodsmen.

Suggested reading:

• Big Thicket Legacy (Temple Big Thicket Series, 2)
• Tales from the Big Thicket (Number One in The Temple Big Thicket Series)
• Land of Bears and Honey: A Natural History of East Texas (Texas Pan American Series)
• Big Thicket People: Larry Jene Fisher's Photographs of the Last Southern Frontier (Bridwell Texas History)
• Ride the Wind