Harder than Hardscrabble: Oral Recollections of the Farming Life from the Edge of the Texas Hill Country (Clifton and Shirley Caldwell Texas Heritage Series)
Couldn't load pickup availability
About this book
Winner San Antonio Conservation Society Citation 2005 Runner-up Carr P. Collins Award Best Book of Nonfiction Texas Institute of Letters 2005 Until the U.S. Army claimed 300-plus square miles of hardscrabble land to build Fort Hood in 1942 small communities like Antelope Pidcoke Stampede and Okay scratched out a living by growing cotton and ranching goats on the less fertile edges of the Texas Hill Country. While a few farmers took jobs with construction crews at Fort Hood to remain in the area almost the entire populationand with it an entire segment of rural culturedisappeared into the rest of the state. In Harder than Hardscrabble oral historian Thad Sitton collects the colorful and frequently touching stories of the pre-Fort Hood residents to give a firsthand view of Texas farming life before World War II. Accessible to the general reader and historian alike the stories recount in vivid detail the hardships and satisfactions of daily life in the Texas countryside. They describe agricultural practices and livestock handling as well as life beyond work: traveling peddlers visits to towns country schools medical practices and fox hunting. The anecdotes capture a fast-disappearing rural societya world very different from todays urban Texas.
