Backwoodsmen: Stockmen and Hunters Along a Big Thicket River Valley

by Thad Sitton

Stockmen and Hunters along a Big Thicket River Valley presents a detailed social history of the back-country stockmen, hunters, and woodsmen of the Neches River in southeastern Texas. Labeled "crackers," "pineys," "sandhillers," and "nesters" by townspeople at different locations across the upland South, throughout the years the southern backwoodsmen have been dismissed by historians as well. One of the first works to quarrel with these stereotypes was Frank Owsley's Plain Folk of the Old South (1949). In Backwoodsmen, Thad Sitton follows Owsley's stockmen and small farmers into the twentieth century.
Like parts of Appalachia, the Neches Valley was a cultural survival area. There many elements of the centuries-old herding and hunting lifeway persisted into the 1960s. In this area - called the "Big Thicket" and the "Big Woods" by early settlers - southern free-range stock raising served as the economic linchpin. Rural people allowed livestock to run free to forage for themselves in the river bottoms and pine uplands; there were no fences except those around cultivated fields. By long-established custom, everything outside the fenced fields was "open range", a wooded commons in which hogs, cattle, and backwoodsmen were free to roam.
And roam they did - not only stockmen, with their "rooter hogs" and "woods cattle," but also tie cutters, grey-moss gatherers, hunters, trappers, fishermen, and moonshiners. Their daily activities are detailed in Backwoodsmen. The stories in Backwoodsmen are told not about the participants but rather by by Avy Joe Havard, stockman; by Aubrey Cole, hunter; by Louis Bingham and Bob Allen, timbermen.

310 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1995