The Neches River defines the Texas Forest Country perhaps better than any single natural landmark in the region. Its waters and verdant bottomland hardwoods and pine forests have provided food shelter and other essentials for Native Americans and then later European Americans for hundreds, and maybe thousands, of years.
The Neches originates at an elevation of 545 feet, a short stone's throw from Interstate 20, east of Colfax in Van Zandt County. The originating springs come out of the ground as a cool trickle about 6 inches wide. As the water flows down the sandy hillside, it is joined by numerous other seeps and springs. By the time it reaches the bottom of the hill, the water has become a respectable spring-fed creek.
Photo contributed by Richard Donovan |
Richard Donovan holds a copy of his recent book, 'Paddling the Wild Neches,' at a book-signing ceremony.
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Lufkin Daily News file photo |
Canoeists begin their trek in the Neches River Rendezvous in June 2005 near state Highway 103 west. More than 300 participants made the 10-mile trip down the river.
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From its origins on the sandy hillside, the Neches flows some 416 crooked miles through the very heart of the Texas Forest Country. Before it deposits its cargo of rich nutrients into the bays and estuaries along the Gulf Coast, it twists and turns beneath the overarching limbs of seemingly endless expanses of towering pines and hardwood trees. These great forests are being cleared at an everincreasing rate, but their early abundance helped sustain generations of both Native Americans and early European settlers.
The Indian population in the Neches Valley reached its peak sometime after the arrival of the Caddos in about A.D. 780. It is estimated that there were thousands of Caddos hunting and farming the Neches Valley in 1542 when the tattered remnants of Hernando de Soto's expedition staggered into East Texas, looking for a route to Mexico. The first Spaniards were greeted with the word Tejas, meaning friend, and they concluded this was what the natives called themselves. Thereafter the land east of the Trinity River was known as Tejas, later evolving into Texas.
The first European settlement in the province of Tejas, the Spanish mission San Francisco de los Tejas, was built in 1690 near the mouth of San Pedro Creek, where it empties into the Neches River not far today's community of Weches.
The Spanish gave the Neches its name as they did most of the other rivers and streams in the state. They took the name from the Caddo Tejas Indians, who called it Nachawi, their name for the bois d'arc trees — which is French for "wood of the bow;" (Texans pronounce it "Bo-Dark) — that grew along its banks. The Caddos used wood split from these trees to make their excellent hunting bows. It was also highly prized by other Indian tribes, and the Caddos used it effectively in their bartering.
The Spanish made several efforts to establish a permanent colony among the Neches Caddo, but all attempts failed. Then in 1779, Antonio Gil Y' Barbo led a group of settlers back to the area that is now Nacogdoches. Dissention and turmoil had forced them to abandon their colony three years earlier, but upon their return they reestablished a settlement that today lays claim to being the oldest town in Texas.
Twenty years after the successful founding of Nacogdoches, tribes of other Native American nations began drifting into and settling in the Caddo lands. These new immigrant tribes included Choctaw, Kickapoo, Shawnee and Cherokee. Of these newcomers, the Cherokee composed the overwhelming majority. These Indians lived here in relative peace for about 35 years, until Mirabeau B. Lamar was elected the second president of the Republic of Texas. Among Lamar's first priorities as president was to purge all Indians from the "settled areas" of the young nation to make way for new Anglo settlers.
The first Cherokees began arriving in Texas as early as 1807, and additional bands continued to arrive through 1820. Tribal leaders received permission from Spanish officials to settle on the land, but bureaucratic bungling and slow communications with Europe prevented title transfer before the Mexicans revolted and overthrew their Spanish masters. The Cherokees then petitioned the Mexican government, but before the Mexicans could grant title to the land, fate dealt the Indians another setback. On Oct. 2, 1835, approximately 230 miles to the southwest of where state Highway 21 crosses the Neches, a detachment of Mexican soldiers attempted to take a small cannon from a "Texican" community called Gonzales. Again the Cherokees would see their hopes for a homeland in Texas dashed by a revolution.
The Texicans, hoping to keep the Indians neutral in the war with Mexico, sent Sam Houston, John Forbes and John Cameron to negotiate with the Cherokees. In February of 1836, a treaty was signed giving title to the lands between the Angelina and Sabine rivers and northwest of the old San Antonio Road (El Camino Real) to the Cherokees and their associated groups. Unfortunately for the Cherokees, the war with Mexico was brief. Following the defeat of Santa Anna at San Jacinto, the Texas Senate saw little value in ratifying the treaty. In December 1837, despite Houston's strong objection, the treaty was declared null and void. The rescinding of the treaty and incursions of settlers into Indian lands provoked bitter resentments that led to several uprisings in 1838.
The Killough massacre, the largest Indian attack that occurred in East Texas, took place in northern Cherokee County and was a direct result of the abrogation of this treaty. On Oct. 5, 1838, just two years after the battle of San Jacinto, the Wood, Killough and Williams families were in the field gathering crops when they were suddenly attacked by a band of Indians. It had been the settlers' practice to always carry their guns to the field, but that day they had left their guns behind. In the mayhem of that afternoon, 18 members of those families were either killed or carried off. Those carried off were never heard from again. Eight others managed to escape on horseback while three women and one baby were saved by a friendly Indian. They were forced to hide by day and walk through the wilderness forest by night to Lacy's Fort, a distance of some 40 miles. The survivors reported that in addition to the Indians, the attackers also included a large number of Mexicans, a black man and a white man with his face painted to look like an Indian.
The atrocities committed by these renegades doomed the Indian presence in Texas. In his first message to the Texas Congress, Lamar called for an exterminating war on Texas Indians, a war that would "admit no compromise and have no termination except their total extinction or expulsion." He specifically addressed the Cherokees, saying they held no legitimate title to the land on which they had lived for almost 40 years. Most Anglos at the time had lived in Texas less than 10 years.
Of all the tribes and nations of Native Americans that have called Texas home, only the combined tribes of the Alabama-Coushatta were allowed to remain. Like the Cherokees, Shawnees, Choctaws and similar tribes, they had been pushed from their native lands by the westward advance of the whites. These peaceful Indians escaped annihilation and expulsion simply because they inhabited the dense forested area known as the Big Thicket. This region of the lower Neches was avoided by early immigrants because of its abundance of sloughs, creeks, oxbow lakes and almost impenetrable vegetation.
The first Anglo settlers appeared along the Neches even before Stephen F. Austin founded his colony on the Brazos River in the early 1820s. They carefully sought out the hills and ridges, or highlands along the outside edges of the forested bottom lands to build their cabins. These first settlers often were "running from something" and quietly disappeared into this land of towering trees. They brought with them a way of life that endured almost unchanged in rural East Texas until the 1960s. The publication "Backwoodsmen: Stockman and Hunters along a Big Thicket River Valley," by Thad Sitton, defines this way of life as a hunter-gatherer, farmer-stockman society. Of these pursuits, farming was allocated the least time and effort. Corn, beans, squash, melons and sweet potatoes — the same foods the Indians raised — were hoed into the ground. The settlers cared little for owning the land; they used it as a "commons," much as the Indians had done.
Free range for livestock and unlimited hunting and fishing were the keys to the settler's survival. Stockmen turned their hogs and cattle loose in the river bottoms, where the animals thrived on switch cane and the abundant mast that fell from hardwoods growing in the rich, seasonally flooded land.
The settlers practiced a southern, forests-adapted tradition of stock raising that was vastly different from that found farther west. When livestock, either hogs or cattle, needed to be caught for castration, marking, branding or doctoring, the stockman turned not to his horse and rope but to his dogs. Trying to drive wild cattle and hogs on horseback as a western cowboy did was impossible through the woods, sloughs, and thickets. It was only with the help of the aggressive, versatile stock dogs that the livestock could be located, bunched and moved, sometimes miles, through tangled vines and thickets into pens for "working" or selling.
The Neches and its surrounding lands remained essentially a wilderness until the late 19th century and the coming of the lumber mills that wiped out Texas's virgin forests. These big mills are too numerous to mention by name, but most resembled the mill located in the ghost town of old Aldridge.
The skeletal remains of this once thriving sawmill can be seen today a few hundred yards from the Neches River in the Angelina National Forest, near Boykin Springs campground. After the "cut out and get out" mills of the northeastern lumber companies had been disassembled and hauled away, many small locally owned "Peckerwood" mills sprang up along the Neches and sawed into cross ties most of the remaining hardwoods along the creeks and branches that flowed into the river.
Richard Donovan is an environmental advocate from Lufkin whose recent causes have centered around maintaining and preserving the Neches River. His book, "Paddling the Wild Neches," is a first-person account of a canoe trip down the Neches River through East Texas.
