Heritage, Volume 11, Number 1, Winter 1993 Page: 13
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CarefuidCy carvedfrom the horn of a cow or steer, the biowuing horn was a
long- range communication device. Its sound carried for miles...farther than a
man couid shout and... farther than the bark of a cur or the bay of afoxhound.n its larger, anthropological
meaning, social history is best defined as
the study of "past culture" - the study of
the complex patternings of everyday life
among members of some society at some
point in its past. Evidence about that
vanished lifeway survives into the present
in the forms of documents, physical objects,
and (so long as the rememberers
remain) human memories. Oral history
is a research method for eliciting and
preserving the historical evidence embodied
in the memories of living men
and women. As such, it is often a useful
adjunct and supplement to the work of
the archival historian or the historical
archaeologist.
Sometimes, however, especially in research
studies of past social life among
groups who wrote few memoirs and kept
few records, oral history literally salvages
the past from oblivion. And in this salvage
process, one of the social historian's guiding
dictums goes something like this: Never
assume any historical detail is small and
unimportant. Past cultures are system-like,
and something that seems trivial in the
beginning may turn out to be connected to
many important matters and critical to a
whole way of life.
Consider, for example, the cultural significance
of the "blowing horn" among the
free-range stockmen of southeastern Texas.
Until stock laws required the fencing of
hogs and cattle in the early 1950s, many
rural people in Polk, Tyler, Shelby, Sabine,
Jasper, Newton, and Hardin counties followed
the old southern practice of letting
their livestock run free to forage for themselves
in river bottoms and pine uplands.
During the free-range era, there were no
fences except those around cultivated fields
- fences designed to "fence 'em out." No
matter who actually owned the land, by
long-established custom everything outside
the fenced fields was "open range," a
wooded commons in which hogs, cattle,
stockmen, hunters, fishermen, and others
were free to trespass and go about their
respective businesses.It was within this social and environmental
context that the blowing horn had
its uses and cultural meanings. When the
first settlers came to this part of Texas, more
often than not from Alabama and Mississippi,
they brought with them the customs
of the southern free range and certain basic
tools of the stockman's and woodsman's
trade. These included, among other things,
the rifle, ax, black-mouthed cur stock dog,
and the blowing horn. Carefully carved
from the horn of a cow or steer, the blowing
horn was a long-range communication device
for use in the big woods. Its sound
carried for miles across the still bottoms,
much farther than a man could shout and
even farther than the bark of a cur or the bay
of a foxhound. Persons used their blowing
horns to call dogs and to communicate with
other people across great distances. They
were a valued tool of the hunting and herding
life.
Not every man could make a good blowing
horn, and the best of them were handed
down across the generations as valued family
possessions. In 1992,90-year-old Hinkle
Shillings of Shelby County still had his
grandfather's horn, engraved with a date of
1857 by its South Carolina maker and with
the likeness of Hinkle's champion foxhound,
Kirby Stride, dated 1941. It is a small blowing
horn, with a clear, piercing, tenor sound.
Hinkle stood on a stump with this horn to
win the horn blowing contest at the Texas
state foxhound meet every year from 1934
to 1956, retiring only after he "lost his
natural teeth."
In 1992, Aubrey Cole of Jasper County
also owned a famous horn. This one had
been found in the Neches River bottom
west of Kirbyville by Aubrey's 104-year-old
father, Providence Walter Cole, when he
was a young man. Evidently lost in the
woods for many years, it carried the name of
John Jackson, a hunter and ferryboat operator
old-timers remembered from during the
Civil War. Walter covered it with skin from
the leg of a deer and used it for many decades
before passing it on to his son. This horn,
too, has a pure tone and great carryingpower, as Aubrey remembered from his
childhood.
We lived four miles from an outside slough
on the Neches River, and one evening my
mother and I was at home, I was real
small, and she said, "Listen, son. I hear
your daddy a-blowing his horn for the
dogs. And he was a-standing on the creek
bridge, and he was four miles from our
house. Course, the wind was just right,
but he had a blowing horn. He really had
a blowing horn.
As in this instance, the most basic use
of the blowing horn was in hunting, and
its most important use in hunting was to
call dogs. Across miles of woods, sloughs,
and creek bottoms only the faint, far sound
of the blowing horn could reach out to
bring a family's valued stock dogs or foxhounds
back home. Dogs were important
to rural southeastern Texans to a degree
hard for a researcher to credit untilover
and over again - he hears the way
their voices change when they talk about
them. Dogs were a basic tool of the trade
for working stock and for hunting in the
big woods, as former Hardin County judge,
stockman, and bear hunter A.L. Bevil
explained.
Folks in this country had to have dogs and
had to have vicious dogs. A good cur dog,
properly trained, was worth just about
whatever you had to pay for him, for you
used your dog every day for everything.
A man used his dog to pen his cattle; he
used his dog to pen his hogs; he used his
dog to protect him at night; and he used
him to hunt. He was used for hogs, bear,
deer, cattle, panther, everything.
To call his dogs the hunter or stockman
used short, rapid blasts of the horn. This
"bugling" or "tooting" was quite different
from the rest of the horn language, which
was used to communicate hunter to hunter.
Long blasts on the horn were always intended
for human communication, and
the uniform language used throughout
southeastern Texas was explained by
Aubrey Cole.
When you was hunting in the woods in the
HERITAGE * WINTER 1993 13113lkhD1~4~lWOAllR:~
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Texas Historical Foundation. Heritage, Volume 11, Number 1, Winter 1993, periodical, Winter 1993; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth45415/m1/13/: accessed April 19, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas Historical Foundation.