Preface

Preface
I
grew up in Northeast Texas on the Red River. The bottom land is good
for farming, ranching, hunting, and fishing. There are rolling hills with
hardwood hollers, tall pines, creeks with switch cane, swamps and
marshes with cat tails, and mud that will suck you in (quicksand). There
are thickets along the river bank and along the creeks too thick and full of
briars and thorns to walk through. There are hay meadows, wheat, corn,
and cotton fields. It’s old country along the Red River. The Mighty Red
River with sandbars, steep banks, and an undertow that will drown you,
and it has drowned many a good people. Mostly young people who thought
they were strong enough to swim it.
These are the true stories about some of the people who lived along
this big river and the country side that is part of this region. My grandfather and grandmother grew up and raised 10 children here on the Red
River in a little town called Chicota. At any given time in history, Chicota
had nothing more than a post office and between one and three small
stores. Most of the time it was just one store. A store in those parts could
consist of candy, cokes, minnows and worms for fishing, bread, and
lunch meat.
There is more to these stories than just huntin’ and fishin’, although
that is a great portion. There is mostly humor, funny stories (with a little
dark humor), a dash of tragedy, some love lost and found, some lost souls
and some reborn, some good Godly folks to the Devil himself. Throw in a
monster or two, a good fight, a feud, and some good friends. How could
you go wrong with true stories like these? The truth is always stranger than
fiction and much more interesting. Take into consideration that this happened in the south, especially in Texas……then you have got to love it!
Some names have been changed to protect the innocent and to keep me
from getting shot. I am not politically correct and some of these stories may
offend you. I just write it like it happened and how it was said. I did not
know that there were so many strange and interesting people in this area
until I moved away. This is my tribute to them and the area I grew up loving.
If you’re headed into the Chicota bottom north toward the river you are
traveling down a gravel road called Boggy Bend. If we had a lot of rain you
will pass by a swamp on both sides of the road we called the Bone Yard
Slash*. Backwaters from the Red River formed a swamp full of black mucky
water, oak and hickory trees, cat tails, and the normal swamp like atmosphere. When the waters would recede, the Slash would be dotted with holes
of water left behind. These holes would contain gar fish, buffalo fish, needle
nose gar, alligator gar, all sorts of turtles, snakes, and anything else you can
imagine.
In the heat of the summer when it would be dry and the ground would
crack open in the slash there would be hundreds of bones. Fish skeletons,
cow skulls, and bones dug up by varmints like coyotes and bob cats and
pulled into this thicket that is sometimes a swamp. From the gravel road
you can see some of this, but to get the full effect you would need to wander
around in it at different stages of the seasons.
Me and my friends hunted coon in the winter, wading in knee to waist
deep water and mud hoping to find a beaver dam to climb up on to get out
of the frigid swamp. We squirrel hunted in the spring when everything was
turning green, the snakes were beginning to crawl, and the water was still
high. We would shoot snakes and fish that were left behind in the holes of
water as the river receded in the summer time.
In the heat of summer during those dog days when it was too hot to do
anything during the mid-day sun, we would walk around the slash and kick
the dry bones of fish, cows, and anything else unlucky enough to die in the
swamp. It was a bone yard. Everyone around Chicota knew it as The Bone
Yard Slash.