Backwoodsmen

by Thad Sitton

Backwoodsmen: 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 th