Saving the Big Thicket: From Exploration to Preservation, 1685-2003

313 Pages·2004·1.65 MB·English

by  James J. Cozine Jr.

Saving the

• •
Big Thicket
From Exploration to Preservation,
1685–2003
James J. Cozine, Jr.
Foreword and Afterword by Pete A. Y. Gunter
Number 4 in the Temple Big Thicket Series
Big Thicket Association
University of North Texas Press
Denton, Texas
©2004 James J. Cozine, Jr.
Foreword and Afterword ©2004 Pete A. Y. Gunter
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Permissions:
University of North Texas Press
P.O. Box 311336
Denton, TX 76203-1336
The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of the American
National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
z39.48.1984. Binding materials have been chosen for durability.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cozine, James.
Saving the Big Thicket : from exploration to preservation, 1685-2003
/ James J. Cozine, Jr. ; foreword and afterword by Pete A.Y. Gunter.
p. cm.
“Number 4 in the Temple Big Thicket Series.”
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-57441-175-6 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Environmental protection—Texas—Big Thicket. 2. Historic
preservation—Texas—Big Thicket. 3. Big Thicket (Tex.)—History. 4.
Big Thicket (Tex.)—Environmental conditions. 5. Big Thicket
National Preserve (Tex.) I. Title. II. Series: Temple Big Thicket series ;
no. 4.
F392.H37C695 2004
333.72’09764’14—dc22
2004005846
Saving the Big Thicket is Number 4 in the Temple Big Thicket Series
This book was made possible by a generous grant from the T. L. L. Temple
Foundation and the assistance of the Big Thicket Association.
The Foreword and Afterword by Pete A. Y. Gunter are based upon work supported by
the National Science Foundation, Grant CNH BCS-0216722 under Biocomplexity
in the Environment, Coupled Natural and Human Systems program.
DEDICATION
This dissertation is dedicated to my wife Sharon,
for her encouragement, support, and understanding.

CONTENTS
List of Figures ...........................................................................................vi
Foreword, Pete A. Y. Gunter...................................................................vii
Preface.......................................................................................................x
Acknowledgments...................................................................................xii
I. INTRODUCTION..........................................................................1
II. THE INDIANS’ ASSAULT..........................................................14
III. THE SPANISH ASSAULT...........................................................21
IV. THE ANGLO ASSAULT.............................................................32
V. A TIMBER BONANZA................................................................45
VI. OIL EXPLORATION IN THE BIG THICKET...........................68
VII. THE DRIVE FOR PRESERVATION ...........................................82
VIII. THE YARBOROUGH YEARS..................................................100
IX. URBANITES AND INTELLECTUALS ...................................120
X. CONSENSUS AND COMPROMISE .......................................135
XI. CONCLUSION...........................................................................161
Notes to Chapters I–XI.........................................................................170
Bibliography to Chapters I–XI..............................................................208
AFTERWORD, Pete A. Y. Gunter.......................................................223
Notes to Afterword ...............................................................................257
Bibliography to Afterword....................................................................266
Index......................................................................................................269
FIGURES
MAPS Page
1. MAP of Claude McLeod’s Ecological Big Thicket............................5
2. MAP of Big Thicket National Preserve...........................................13
3. MAP of Timber Holdings of Kirby Lumber Company and
Houston Oil Company, 1902...........................................................57
4. MAP of Proposed Big Thicket National Monument....................110
5. MAP of Congressman Bob Eckhardt’s “Wheel of Green”............137
PHOTOGRAPHS FOLLOWING PAGE 134:
1) A bear hunt, early 1900s
2) Longleaf pine stumps, circa 1920s
3) Dearborn Sawmill
4) R.E. Jackson, 1880–1957
5) Justice Douglas and Dempsie Henley on Thicket tour
6) Dempsie Henley, Texas Indian Commissioner, at
Alabama-Coushatta event, 1966
7) Representative Bob Eckhardt
8) Rep. Emmett Lack, Gov. Price Daniel, and Dempsie Henley
9) Archer Fullingim at Senate hearings, February 1974
10) Senator Ralph W. Yarborough and Lorraine Bonney,
Senate hearings, February 1974
11) James Webster, Kirby Lumber Company, at Senate hearings,
February 1974
12) Edward C. “Ned” Fritz at Senate hearings, February 1974
13) Geraldine Watson at Senate hearings, February 1974
14) Arthur Temple honored by Big Thicket Association
luncheon, 1976
15) The Preserve’s first Superintendent Thomas E. Lubbert
16) Professor Claude McLeod with Howard Peacock
17) Congressman Charles Wilson
18) Lance Rosier
19) Pete Gunter giving keynote address at Visitor Center dedication
FOREWORD
W
hen Saving the Big Thicket (then called “Assault on a Wilderness”)
reached completion, in 1976, the dust had just settled on a ten-
year-long struggle between conservationists and timber companies. The
upshot of this controversy was the creation, in 1974, of a sprawling southeast
Texas Big Thicket National Preserve of 84,550 acres: the first such biological
preserve in the history of the National Park Service. In giving an account
of this conflict, the author, James J. Cozine, had his work cut out for him.
To achieve an overview, Cozine found it necessary to work his way through
a long paper trail of newspaper and magazine articles, to read the many
books and pamphlets staking out positions on both sides, and, finally, to
interview personally political, conservationist, and industry leaders. The
result was a story of movement and counter-movement, protest and
response. As such, however, the project was incomplete. It was only a
beginning (or rather, an end) of a much longer history.
The conservationist struggle that culminated in the creation of the Big
Thicket National Preserve had been preceded more than a decade earlier by
another conservationist movement with its own problems and goals. It, in
turn, had been preceded by the unprecedented development of railroads
and cut-and-get-out timber operations and of oil field development in the
swampy, biologically rich area. Prior to oil booms and large-scale timbering
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Foreword
loomed legends of bear hunting backwoodsmen, escaped slaves, and outlaws.
These reached back into a not well worked-out past. Before the pioneer
epoch lay yet another, peopled by Spaniards and Frenchmen who quarreled
over an area that neither was quite able to settle or to conquer. Before the
struggles of the French and the Spanish was a time in which journals were
not kept or history recorded: a time when Native Americans lived along the
margins of the Big Thicket and hunted and camped there. All this had to be
recorded, too, and made into historical perspective.
Like many writers who chose to write history in depth Cozine was to
find that his subject matter had a history as tangled and dense as the
vegetation that had given the Big Thicket its name. The Native Americans
who once lived there are no more. The Bidais and Akokisas were wiped out
by illness, presumably contracted from European traders. The Hasinais
(termed “Tejas” or friendly by the Spanish, and from whom Texas was to get
its name) were similarly decimated, the remainder joining with their Caddo
relatives to the north. The author describes the intertribal relations and the
agricultural, sedentary way of life of the Native Americans, drawing on notes
by explorers and the studies of anthropologists. Probably his most surprising
conclusion concerns the way in which the Native Americans, though they
hunted in the Thicket, chose as a rule not to live there. Clearing the Thicket
forest, he speculates, would have been harsh and unrewarding labor.
Like the Indians, the author reports, the Spaniards chose to skirt the
Big Thicket and had little effect on it. They built their missions and other
settlements along the margins of the forbidding wilderness, locating the
missions next to the major Indian villages. The same was true of the French,
who, though they hoped to exploit trade with Native Americans in order to
get a foothold in Texas, left little in the way of settlements, locating these
too outside the Thicket’s dense forest walls. The brief Mexican interregnum
between Spanish and American domination had a similar non-effect.
From the time of the earliest Indian settlement, then, little had changed.
The French and the Spanish, as described by Cozine, played out their
geopolitical fantasies spasmodically and with little foresight. Move followed
countermove in a vast chess game, which never seemed to achieve checkmate.
The coming of the Americans changed everything.
The author describes the American onslaught in three stages: first, an
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Foreword
early period, starting in the 1820s, represented by backwoods settlers who
worked around fifty acres of farmland each and who largely lived off the
land. These early settlers did some timbering, floating logs down area rivers
in the wet season to small lumber mills downstream. Second came a middle
period, beginning in the 1870s, in which a complex of logging railroads
and often mobile timber mills radically transformed the region, leaving
extensive patches of scalped forest. To the ruthless onslaught of the timber
operations was added, after 1900, a period of oil discovery which
transformed sleepy villages into roaring boomtowns, compared to which
the cattle-kingdom railhead towns of Kansas were prim and proper New
England townships. The author’s descriptions of the boomtowns captures
their excitement and danger, just as his description of the corporation-
owned lumber towns captures their top-down paternalism.
The third period, which reaches well into the twentieth century, is
described by the author as a time of relative isolation and stability, in which
portions of the forest were able to regrow and capture some of their former
luxuriant depth, and in which the first stirrings of an environmental
conscience began to emerge. Those stirrings were, though at first
intermittent, gradually to grow into the first environmental movement in
the area. Associated with the name of R. E. Jackson, a Santa Fe railroad
conductor from Silsbee, Texas, this movement began in the late 1920s,
peaked in the period just before World War II, and then declined, dying
out in the late 1950s without achieving its goals. The emergence on the
scene of a new cadre of environmentalists (Bill and Price Daniels, Dempsie
Henley, Charles Wilbanks, and others) heralded the founding of the
second—and present—Big Thicket Association and the eventual creation
of the Big Thicket National Preserve.
This brief account of Saving the Big Thicket scarcely does justice to
either the author’s knowledge of detail or to his capacity to write. What
might have been a list of statistics or a series of graphs becomes through
his skill an engrossing narrative. It is, as newspaper reviewers like to put it,
a “good read.” It is also effective history.
Pete A.Y. Gunter
Past President
Big Thicket Association
ix