The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 88, July 1984 - April, 1985 Page: 224

Southwestern Historical Quarterly

sophisticated works that increasingly provide us with new insights into
this fascinating relationship.
Robin W. Doughty's new book, Wildlife and Man in Texas, is of
this genre. By academic definition, Doughty is a geographer, but his
work is more in the stream of environmental history than in that of
geography or biology. Doughty has done us an invaluable service by
tracing the human attitudes toward, and the treatment of, wildlife in
Texas since the beginning of Anglo settlement through the environ-
mental awareness of the past two decades. The book is a survey, in
most respects a solid one, which relies in its early sections on travelers'
accounts to study attitudes towards endemic wild animals. The second
half of the work makes use of state and federal documents to tell the
story of protection and conservation, and of environmental changes
resulting from extinctions, habitat loss, and the disturbing introduc-
tion of more than thirty-five exotic species into the state. The book is
strong on fisheries and good in the frequent comparisons of Texas to
other states. There is a highly useful table on predator eradication;
one wishes for a similar one on extinct species.
The book has some weak areas one could wish were better handled.
Latin nomenclature, which would have added precision, is not used.
The documents make for a bias toward Central Texas, and there is a
problem throughout in the attempt to generalize West Texas into a
"Mountain Zone." Doughty largely ignores the Spanish period, and
only mentions, without resolving, the role of Texas sportsmen in game
protection. Nor does he do much with the localism and private lands
issues, which have so frustrated centralized wildlife management and
have made Texas a national leader in developing the idea of the
hunting lease, in which wildlife becomes a cash crop.
These unresolved topics only point the way for remaining research.
They do not detract from Doughty's accomplishment: a readable and
sound survey of one hundred and fifty years of the use and abuse of
wildlife in Texas.
Texas Tech University DAN L. FLORES
z830 Citizens of Texas. By Gifford White. (Austin: Eakin Press, 1983.
Pp. x+282. Preface, maps, illustrations, index. $24.95.)
The book 1830 Citizens of Texas, by Gifford White, fills a need of
long standing by people who do research in early Texas history. It
reproduces all the major public lists of persons living in Texas during
the year 1830. The book is more than a regular census in that White

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