Review of "Harder than Hardscrabble, Oral Recollections of the Farming Life from the Edge of the Texas Hill Country", edited by Thad Sitton Jean picked this up at the UofT Press annual sale this past (2007) June. A recommended event; we make most of them and pick up 10 or so books each time. Wish I had time to read all of them. The book is an outgrowth of a government mandated history preservation project (The Fort Hood Oral History Project) and deals with life in the area that is now Ft Hood in the time before Ft Hood was "taken". Survivors that were children in the 1910 to 1942 period were interviewed (about the year 2000) and the interviews compiled into "Just Like Yesterday, Recollections of Life on the Fort Hood Lands" by Dase, Freeman, Bugsley, Blake, and Sitton. The Hardscrabble book represents a small fraction of the material in the larger work. The title is almost certainly from "Hardscrabble" by John Graves. ANYTHING by John Graves is recommended reading. Relatively small interview snippets are sorted by topic and snippets from several interviewees are presented under each of many topics. Examples: cash crops, home remedies, social events, subsistent crops, churches. All aspects of rural life in that period are presented. I was quite taken with the book. I hadn't give much though to the origin of Ft Hood and had assumed that the land was un-populated. Not so, it was fairly heavily populated. There were many small communities with churches, cotton gins, schools, and stores. Cotton was the cash crop of the era. While Fort Hood seems like a poor area for the growing of cotton, it was widely grown there. The book details life in these small communities. It tells us how people lived, what they produced, where they shopped, how they traveled, how they recreated, all the details. Here are two of the more striking anecdotes: Cotton crops were typically sold at the local gin just after the ginning. During the period, cotton prices ranged from a few cents a pound up to nearly fifty cents a pound. At the gin, the farmer had the choice of selling the cotton to whoever might be willing to buy it or he could take it home and sell it later. It is related that one farmer, at a time of high prices, refused the going rate of about $.40 and took his cotton home to wait for higher prices. He sold that cotton next year for less than $.10. When the lands of Fort Hood were "taken", there were several suicides. One guy sat on his front porch sharpening his pocket knife all morning awaiting the arrival of the government movers. When they arrived, he cut his own throat. And died. Several others killed themselves more privately. I have two connections that makes the book of interest to me. My mothers father, E. H. Moores, was a cotton farmer in that time; he had about 400 acres in the Red River valley a few miles north of Texarkana. I always heard of the ups and downs of the cotton farming business, but not much detail. Overall, my grandfather was a successful farmer, but I haven't been told much of the trying times. Hardscrabble tells me of the years when cotton could break you. And the years when it could make you rich. Well, semi-rich. Here is a side story. My grandfather always sold his cotton to G. Ross Perot, father of H. Ross Perot. GR Perot was a cotton broker; he bought from farmers and sold to mills (I guess). Maybe warehousing for a year or more. He was well regarded in the community. HR Perot's parents were buried in State Line Cemetery, just on the Arkansas side in Texarkana. I am well familiar with the cemetery as I have several relatives there. The Perot plot was by far the most extravagant in the cemetery. On my most recent trip to Texarkana in 2006, I was talking to a cousin who is involved with the maintenance of the cemetery and I mentioned the Perot plot. "OH! Didn't you hear? Ross got mad at us and moved them to Dallas." The story is that he took monuments and all and re-buried his parents in Dallas. I look forward to again visiting the Perot plot at Stateline. The second connection is through my father's father, W. E. McKemie. My grandfather McKemie had a more volatile financial life than my grandfather Moores. He is said to have made good money at times and to have been broke at other times. It seems the depression was a trying time. Coming out of the depression, he was able to buy about 200 acres near Corley in western Bowie County. He and his family built a house on the land while they were living in rented houses in Texarkana. As far as I know, he did not farm the land, but probably had dreams of farming it. Just after Pearl Harbor, at the same time Fort Hood was "taken", two big government facilities were put in west of Texarkana Just as at Fort Hood, my grandfather's land was "taken". I don't know what he was paid for the land and house. All stories are that payments were nominal. I do know that since that time my grandfather McKemie never owned any other land. There was talk that the land would be returned to the owners after the government was through with it. With both the Fort Hood and Bowie County "takings", there was relatively little resistance due to patriotism. Yet another diversion on cotton. Some years ago, I visited an old family home in Nevada County Arkansas; my great grandfather and great great grandfathers McKemie lived there from the 1870s until 1890s. I met some McKamie cousins still living in the area and was able to learn something of the farming there. These days, it is timber land; all pines, no row crops, only a some gardens. I was told that it is all old cotton land; rolling sandy ground, seemingly not well suited to cotton.