Texas Wildlife November 2010
By
Henry Chappell
Although Texans are better known for action than reflection, we have vibrant body of outdoor literature. Here are the ten Texas-centered books that have most affected my thinking on nature, conservation, and culture. I offer these in no particular order, save for the first book, which belongs at the top.
On a raw November afternoon, in 1957, John Graves, a 37 year-old writer and decorated World War II veteran, launched his canoe on the Brazos River immediately below Possum Kingdom Dam. A few minutes prior, an employee at the dam looked at the canoe with disgust (and distrust) and said “Hit’s a hell of lookin’ kind of weather.”
It was indeed, and though Graves would later write, in Goodbye to a River, that October is the best time to go to the Brazos, November would have to do, either because of exigencies of weather and work or, perhaps, quiet but unmistakable ambition. He surely regarded the drizzle with satisfaction and recalled Ishmael’s cure for a “damp, drizzly November in my soul.”
If Graves’ own “watery part of the world,” the Upper Middle Brazos, seems insignificant beside the great whaling waters off Nantucket, his vision matches Melville’s breadth and richness.
Five reservoirs were planned along the Upper Middle Brazos. Their construction would virtually inundate the entire stretch, from Possum Kingdom to Lake Whitney. Ever distrustful of polemic, but subtly devastating, Graves wrote:
“We river-minded ones can’t say much against them – nor, probably, should we want to. Nor, mostly, do we…
“But if you’re built like me, neither the certainty of change, nor the need of it, not any wry philosophy will keep you from feeling a certain enraged awe when you hear that a river that you’ve known always, and that all men of that place have known always back into the red dawn of men, will shortly not exist. A piece of river, anyhow, my piece…”
As he paddles, Graves connects place and history, interwoven with hunting, fishing, camp-making, and observation so that we imagine the river as pools of memory laid out along a narrower historical stream - the Conquistadors, Bigfoot Wallace, Charlie Goodnight, Quanah, Iron Shirt, the old names “ringing like a bell in my head.”
Yet this Melvillian breadth begins with familiarity and longing. Early on, without sentimentality, Graves describes boyhood excursions with friends and parents, swimming against orders, and catfish caught on trotlines and sliced “then and there for breakfast…”
“Later still, entrusted with your own safety, you went out with homemade canvas canoes … Squirrel shooting on cold Sunday mornings, and ducks, and skunk-squirted dogs, and deer watching while you watched at dawn, and the slim river bass, and bird song of a hundred kinds, and always the fly-fishing for fat bream and the feel of the water on bare skin and its salty taste, and the changing shore.”
By the time he dragged his canoe out some three weeks later, he’d convinced himself he’d seen enough to say goodbye to his piece of river. Only two of those five dams were built. You can still float some of the same stretches that John Graves canoed, and I do every now and again. And every few years I take the trip with John Graves, in the pages of the finest book ever written by a Texan.
Of the J. Frank Dobie – Walter Prescott Webb – Roy Bedichek literary-intellectual triumvirate, I consider Bedichek the most elegant stylist, and his first book Adventures with a Texas Naturalist, superior to anything his more celebrated friends wrote, save for Webb’s best work, which I’ll get to directly.
Adventures is a collection of essays on natural history written at a time when a talented writer, voracious reader, and careful observer might think of himself as a naturalist though he lacked professional credentials.
Bedichek begins with “Fences: Fields and Pastures” in which he contemplates the loss of plant diversity in a fenced, overgrazed 200-acre pasture . Before we can dismiss him as an earnest but dull botanizer, he recalls the days of big pastures:
“There were endless swells of greenery in spring stretching away to the horizon in every direction, parched in summer, brown and sere in autumn and winter. There was still riding-room, space to follow a pack of greyhounds chasing jack rabbits. But every time a dog ran afoul of one of those cursed fences and split his noble back from neck to tail, my hatred flamed up against them.”
Romantic? Yes, thank heaven. An intractable purist? Hardly. In “Still Water,” he holds forth on a newly constructed stock tank on the Edwards Plateau:
“What an ecological revolution has been set in motion by the introduction of water to this spot of desert soil! Plant life is yet to come, and its coming will effect a still profounder revolution and present a further extension of the opportunity for life in one form or another.”
Along the way he muses on denatured chickens, golden eagles, mocking birds, nature as folklore, and a giant heronry. His final essay, the “Cedar Cutter,” is one of the most beautiful in all of Texas literature.
In “The Killers,” he gives hunters of his era a mixed review, pointing out that too many so-called sportsmen justified the shooting of herons and cormorants by claiming concern for fisheries. He continues, “But if they often do damage with a casual disregard of any interest in nature except the killing interest, they sometimes, in ministering to game, inadvertently load benefactions upon other species.”
I believe Bedichek would hold the modern hunting-conservation community in higher regard. I also believe that modern hunters should read Bedichek.
In the introduction to The Great Plains, the author, Walter Prescott Webb, wrote, “The historical truth that becomes apparent in the end is that the Great Plains have bent and molded Anglo-American life, have destroyed conditions, and have influenced institutions in a most singular manner.”
Clearly we’re not in the hands of a dry historian, but an intellectual capable of broad views and soaring prose.
Webb begins with “The Physical Basis of The Great Plains,” in which he describes the alluvial buildup on marine rock and subsequent eroding away of the Rolling Plains from the High Plains, the effect of climate through the eons and the importance of aridity in determining plant and animal life.
In the following chapters, he discusses the Indian, Spanish, and Anglo approaches to the Great Plains, the cattle kingdom, agriculture, the associated issues of fencing and the never-ending search for water.
There can be no understanding of modern Texas absent an understanding of the history of the Great Plains. Seventy-nine years after its initial publication, Webb’s treatment remains far and away the best.
In the foreword, to Land of Bears and Honey: A Natural History of East Texas by Joe C. Truett and Daniel W. Lay, Francis Edward Abernethy wrote “They tell a complex story simply, directly, and with deep feeling – but not with sentimentality.
Here’s a passage describing depression-era life in the Pineywoods:
“Hunting had been great sport before, but being hungry was serious business. Deer hounds followed the last track, and turkey hunters emptied the last roost. Squirrels retreated to their safest hollows, never quite secure from the bark of feist dogs and .22 rifles.”
What more can be said in a short passage?
Truett and Lay take us from virgin forest and a Caddo bear hunt through early anglo settlement, the rise of the lumberman, rapid destruction of the forests and depletion of game, then to gradual recovery. Quotes from explorers, settlers, and other early observers add color and eloquence.
At once elegiac, affectionate, and hopeful, Land of Bears and Honey is the best book ever written on East Texas.
I’m sure it’s possible to enjoy wild places without knowing something of their earlier inhabitants, including those who were there before white settlers, because I encounter fellow hunters and anglers who do so all the time.
Assuming they’re not too coarse or shallow to care, they could deepen their appreciation of their favorite hunting grounds by reading The Indians of Texas by W.W. Newcomb Jr. Although a bit more academic than the aforementioned works, The Indians of Texas is quite readable, with an opening chapter on prehistoric peoples followed by chapters on the dominant tribes in each region – the Comanche and Kiowa on the plains, the Karankawas of the coastal prairies, the Tonkawas of Central Texas, for example – with helpful maps and illustrations. The photos at the end, from the Smithsonian and other archives, are worth the price of the book.
Blackland Prairie is the most endangered habitat in Texas. The region has been so long dominated by the Dallas area that it’s easy to forget that it was howling wilderness, dangerous frontier, and agricultural powerhouse before being covered by freeways, strip malls, and housing developments.
Matt White was born on the Blackland Prairie, near Greenville. The country suited him, so he stayed. In Prairie Time: A Blackland Portrait, he reminds us of what has been lost, what little remains, and why it’s worth saving.
Like Bedichek, White is a serious amateur naturalist and literary stylist who never stoops to sentimentality. In his opening chapter, “Grass,” he considers virgin tallgrass:
“Growing from roots that are truly ancient, the grasses grow, mature, and die each year. This is the same cycle of life that exists in a forest, except that most of the forest’s trees do not always regenerate from roots. If the grasses are the trees of the prairie, then big and little bluestem, Indiangrass and switchgrass, were once its giant redwoods.”
An artful weave of natural and human history, folklore, and personal narrative, Prairie Time belongs on your shelf next to The Great Plains.
It might seem odd to list a field guide among Texas’s top 10 outdoor books, but Trees of Texas: An Easy Guide to Leaf Identification by Carmine Stahl and Ria McElvaney is as rich in lore as in practical botany.
For instance, after covering the basic ecology of the sweetgum, we learn that, “Aside from its brilliant autumn hues, sweetgum supplies thick shade and significant wildlife food. It would gain more popularity as a yard tree were it not for the spiny seed balls it drops during much of the year. But crafters employ those balls in wreaths and Christmas decorations.”
I find it a bit cumbersome in a daypack or vehicle, but the 11 x 9 format allows for large black and white photos of leaves, fruit, seeds, and blooms. You can count the veins in the oak leaves.
Among people fiercely proud of their frontier heritage, a book like Texas Land Ethics by Pete A.Y. Gunter & Max Oelschlaeger may seem threatening, even radical. Yet these two University of North Texas philosophy professors are as sympathetic to landowners, hunters, and anglers as to preservationists.
Gunter and Oelschlaeger assert that Texas has known two frontiers: a land frontier characterized by seemingly limitless territory for settlement, and a resource frontier beginning with the first oil and gas booms. One frontier is long gone; another is ending. We face the reality of limits.
Drawing on Aldo Leopold’s work, especially his Land Ethic, that a behavior is right when it preserves the integrity, stability, and beauty of the land community, the authors articulate what most of us sense, that it’s irrational to place blind faith in future technological fixes while continuing to exhaust the natural systems that make human life possible.
We can’t move forward intelligently without understanding the positions of all stakeholders. Professors Gunter and Oelschlaeger have done a fine job of clarifying some of the most important arguments.
The Sportsman’s Guide to Texas by Dick Bartlett and Joanne Krieger, edited by David Baxter, is far and away the best broad treatment of hunting and fishing in Texas. Unfortunately – and inexplicably - it’s long out of print, though still available on the used book market. Bartlett and Krieger’s crisp writing, along with Jack Unruh’s art, and scores of photos by Texas’s best photographers, will keep you turning the pages.
I defy you to find any aspect of the Texas sporting life uncovered by these authors. Chachalaca hunting? It’s there. Rabbit hunting with beagle and Bassett hounds? Page 204. How about a recipe for Bee Cave Squirrel? Got it.
The Sportsman’s Guide to Texas, originally published in 1988, should be reissued with updates. In the meantime, get your copy while you can.
Whatever skill we take to the field we owe to old-timers who hunted and fished more skillfully than we ever will, and with only the simplest equipment. I’m saddened by the local knowledge that has been lost as hunting and fishing have changed from food gathering to almost pure sport.
Campbell and Lynn Loughmiller gave us a precious gift when they compiled the profiles interviews that make up Big Thicket Legacy. In their own words, 22 residents of the Big thicket, most born in the nineteenth century, recall a life lived in intimacy with a place unique in its wildness, isolation and culture.
Hunting bears and bobcats with Trigg Hounds, wild hogs with “cur-dogs,” dying clothes with bark and indigo – a way of life worth knowing and admiring.
And the voices! Here’s Cecil Overstreet on his favorite type of working dog:
“What we call a cur dog was just a general mixture of dogs. They had dogs of all kinds and descriptions, took the best ones and interbred them, developed the cur dog, and the strain breeds true, the best dog in the world.”
That’s my list. No doubt you have your ten favorites. Perhaps our lists overlap. If we’re fortunate, our lists will change as Texas writers stand on the shoulders of their elders to see a bit further than anyone has seen before.