The Cedar Choppers: Life on the Edge of Nothing by Ken Roberts (review)

In this well-written monograph, economist Ken Roberts successfully explores the history of the Edwards Plateau hill people known as "cedar choppers." In nine thematic chapters, Roberts tells the story of the people who harvested the durable cedar posts that fenced the West from "South Texas to Montana" (106). Meant first for general audiences but badly needed by scholars, the work brings a neglected group into the southwestern history canon. Roberts conducted years of oral histories and read both the scant scholarly literature and the writings of Austin-based journalists who occasionally ventured out to capture a human-interest article. The author overcomes the stereotype of his academic field to write a readable, conversational narrative.

Roberts focuses on multi-family clans in western Travis and Williamson Counties but ranges freely, as sources allow, over a fifteen-county swath of cedar country from Liberty Hill to San Antonio. The heart of the work concentrates on the 1940–1960 "heyday," but begins in the 1600s in Scotland and Ulster, sketching the cedar choppers' forebears' journey through the Appalachians, Ozarks, and, eventually, to the Edwards Plateau (118). Some cultural features remained constant. They resisted outside authority whether it be the king of England or the sheriff of Travis County. They held little regard for wealth or the trappings of middle class respectability. Their community self-reliance included a family-based social safety net. Their honor culture saw no need for external law enforcement. Their rates of violence topped even the southern norm. Moreover, through the mid-twentieth century they spoke a distinctive dialect with "a sing-song Elizabethan cadence" once common in Appalachia (136).

Living splendidly off game, fish, wild edibles—and just enough corn to supply livestock, family, and sour mash—these mountaineers were not farmers but herdsmen and warriors. Their culture demanded equal treatment, enforced by violence if necessary. Roberts reports that outsiders puzzled over why cedar choppers did not fight for money or power. Instead, they fought when disrespected, immediately and without calculation. They rejected bosses. The reach of global capitalism would play hell with that arrangement by the 1960s.

Before the late nineteenth century, they did not stand out. They fought Indians, led Ranger companies, and blended in with the rest of the violent Anglos who took over Texas. The characteristics making them visible came into focus only because mainstream culture changed and they did not. When the Civil War came, the cedar choppers' grandparents showed levels of resistance to Confederate authority similar to mountain enclaves elsewhere; they saw secession as the policy of self-serving slave owners. Some followed the lead of other southern mountaineers by volunteering to fight for the United States.

After the Civil War, they continued to hunt and fish, raise corn and a little cotton, and run small free-range herds of cattle and hogs. However, neighboring cotton farms and cattle ranches overgrazed and depleted the soil, and cedar overtook the hills driving out market-based agriculturalists. The herdsmen stayed put. The great strategic necessity for maintaining their liberty was access to water. The Edwards Plateau's aquifers and limestone produced filtered springs, creeks, and rivers of clean, cold water that, along with the arrival of a market for cedar posts, allowed them to delay by a generation their slippage into wage dependency.

The cedar choppers' moment was a rearguard fight by a culture that prized independence above all but had outlived the economic basis for it. Giant lumber interests and mining companies destroyed subsistence independence in the Ozarks and in Appalachia but not yet on the Edwards Plateau. There into the middle of the twentieth century, the hills west of Austin remained free of fatal suburban encroachment and boasted cheap, mostly unfenced land providing access to squatter camps along streams and rivers.

Selling cedar posts tied them in the capitalist economy. Once leashed to the marketplace, even at their midcentury heyday, their...