Reading material
gritsnhuntin1
Posts: 1,165 Officer
I didn't want to hijack Spangler's hunting thread so i started this. I read all the time, especially once deer season winds down. I've read things like Cross Creek, The Yearling, A Land Remembered and also things from Capstick, teddy Roosevelt which eventually got me into reading about hunting in Africa. Authors like Bell, Dennis D Lyell, Stiggand, William Henry Drummond, Sealous you name it, i'll read it. I have a few about hunting here in the U.S. before the buffalo were gone and the same with Africa and how the Ivory trade opened up Africa to the safari. Doe anyone have any suggestions on some good books? I'm always looking for more. Thanks in advance.
Replies
Yes. Tenth Legion by Tom Kelly
“The Old Man and the Boy,” a two book series by Robert Ruark, set in the low country of South Carolina. Ruark created a character, the Old Man, by merging his experiences growing up with his two grandfathers. Mostly camping, fishing, hunting mixed with what they ate. (I gained 10 pounds while reading it.) Ruark was a famous outdoor writer from days gone by. Wrote about hunting Africa after he made enough money writing to hunt there.
"Looking For Long Leaf"...........
Imagine 90 MILLION acres of mature log leaf pines with vast open grasslands under them. That was the SE not all that long ago.
Thanks guys, i'll get on abe books and amazon tonight.
Check "Thrift Books", if you don't mind used. We've a men's book club and have found that they are generally less expensive than almost anyone, especially for books that have been out for some number of years.
They are linked on ebay too......as are other options.
But then I will admit to being principally opposed to using Amazon except as a last resort because of all the tax dollars they extract from cities......and their postal subsidization......they are a giant of corporate welfare.
Thanks bswiv I do not mind used it all that’s why I use abe i’ve been able to find some really great first editions on that site
... as well as millions of acres of bamboo forest.
I simply point that out because its lost on us today that bamboo was a dominant plant in the southeast until the 1800s. We talk a lot about long leaf restoration but I’ve never seen anyone talk about bamboo restoration. Or even oak hammock restoration for that matter. I do recall that Cross Creek talks a lot about hammocks and that Rawlings predicted they would always be around so long as people didn’t see fit to bother them.
I doubt you’ll find much in the fiction about the bamboo forests because they were long gone by the time either most of our SE writers or old timers they used for source material was around. All we have left to remember the canebrakes by is a rattlesnake named for them. I do think A Land Remembered mentions canebrakes. I can’t recall Rawlings ever mentioning them.
I was on a lease in North FL and we had a few bamboo thickets that nothing short of an elephant could go through. I never once thought about them being native.
Never knew it was that much, though have heard the biologist say that it is down from what it was. We've a few spots of it on our place.
Wonder if the exclusion of fire from the inter-phase where it tends to be allows the darn fetter bush and wax myrtle to push it out? Once that stuff gets established in the edge of a wetland it's hard to alter. Partly because when it is dry enough to run a fire in there to get at it it is so day to where the duff catches and then there are smoke issues.
Here’s a good read on the canebrakes:
http://www.rivercane.msstate.edu/research/activities/pdf/canebrakconservation.pdf
There was once millions of acres of them. They were the first habitat to become farmland in the SE because the canebrakes had the richest soil.
The article also points out an interesting observation. Much of the forests in the SE we presumed were “virgin” was actually growth that didn’t start until most of the NAs died out from disease, millions died off between the coming of the Spanish and English colonization. We never saw those Indians. Vast areas they kept cleared for agriculture became 200 years worth of forest growth.
Loved the old man and the boy...
Really enjoyed Totch written by Loren "Totch" Brown about living through the depression in chokoloskee and the ten thousand islands, hunting fishing (And a few run ins with the game warden) and gator "hunting"
Here's a little known gem I recently came across that has some neat historical stories about FL... "Flashbacks; The Story of Central Florida's Past" by Jim Robison and Mark Andrews.
One more really good one if you can find it. Tales of Old Florida (1987) is a compilation of articles about Florida hunting and fishing from various newspapers and journals from about 1870 to 1910. Some are better than others but all are interesting; writing style is of the period. This was when most of the state was frontier, and there are some great stories.
Dan Flores:
American Serengetti
Coyote America
Joe Hutto:
Illumination in the Flatwoods
Steven Rinella:
American Buffalo