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.