At the low-water bridge below Tom Miller Dam, west of downtown
Austin, during the summer of his tenth or eleventh year, Ken
Roberts had his first encounter with cedar choppers. On his way to
the bridge for a leisurely afternoon of fishing, he suddenly found
himself facing a group of boys who clearly came from a different
place and culture than the middle-class, suburban community he was
accustomed to. Rather, "...they looked hard--tanned, skinny, dirty.
These were not kids you would see in Austin." When Roberts's
fishing companion curtly refused the strangers' offer to sell them
a stringer of bluegills, the three boys went away, only to reappear
moments later, one of them carrying a club. Roberts and his friend
made a hasty retreat. This encounter provoked in the author the
question, "Who are these people?" The Cedar Choppers: Life on the
Edge of Nothing is his thoughtful, entertaining, and informative
answer. Based on oral history interviews with several generations
of cedar choppers and those who knew them, this book weaves
together the lively, gritty story of these largely Scots-Irish
migrants with roots in Appalachia who settled on the west side of
the Balcones Fault during the mid-nineteenth century, subsisting
mainly on hunting, trapping, moonshining, and, by the early
twentieth century, cutting, transporting, and selling cedar fence
posts and charcoal. The emergence of Austin as a major metropolitan
area, especially after the 1950s, soon brought the cedar choppers
and their hillbilly lifestyle into direct confrontation with the
gentrified urban population east of the Balcones Fault. This clash
of cultures, which provided the setting for Roberts's encounter as
a young boy, propels this first book-length treatment of the cedar
choppers, their clans, their culture and mores, and their longing
for a way of life that is rapidly disappearing.
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