
Gray Ghosts and Red Rangers
American Hilltop Fox Chasing
Thad Sitton(Author)
University of Texas Press
Published on 15. October 2010
Book
Hardback
262 pages
978-0-292-72302-3 (ISBN)
Description
Around a campfire in the woods through long hours of night, men used to gather to listen to the music of hounds' voices as they chased an elusive and seemingly preternatural fox. To the highly trained ears of these backwoods hunters, the hounds told the story of the pursuit like operatic voices chanting a great epic. Although the hunt almost always ended in the escape of the fox-as the hunters hoped it would-the thrill of the chase made the men feel "that they [were] close to something lost and never to be found, just as one can feel something in a great poem or a dream." Gray Ghosts and Red Rangers offers a colorful account of this vanishing American folkway-back-country fox hunting known as "hilltopping," "moonlighting," "fox racing," or "one-gallus fox hunting." Practiced neither for blood sport nor to put food on the table, hilltopping was worlds removed from elite fox hunting where red- and black-coated horsemen thundered across green fields in daylight. Hilltopping was a nocturnal, even mystical pursuit, uniting men across social and racial lines as they gathered to listen to dogs chasing foxes over miles of ground until the sun rose.
Engaged in by thousands of rural and small-town Americans from the 1860s to the 1980s, hilltopping encouraged a quasi-spiritual identification of man with animal that bound its devotees into a "brotherhood of blood and cause" and made them seem almost crazy to outsiders.
Engaged in by thousands of rural and small-town Americans from the 1860s to the 1980s, hilltopping encouraged a quasi-spiritual identification of man with animal that bound its devotees into a "brotherhood of blood and cause" and made them seem almost crazy to outsiders.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Austin, TX
United States
Product notice
With dust jacket
Illustrations
24 b&w photos
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 22 mm
Weight
567 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-292-72302-3 (9780292723023)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Thad Sitton is a historian of anthropological background and training, specializing in studies of rural Texas during the first half of the twentieth century. Three of Sitton's books won the coveted T. R. Fehrenbach Award of the Texas Historical Commission, and his history of freedmen's settlements received a major prize from the Texas Institute of Letters. In 2001, he received the Thomas L. Charlton Lifetime Achievement Award from the Texas Oral History Association.
Content
Acknowledgments Chapter 1. Introduction: Strange Pursuits Chapter 2. Red Fox, Gray Fox, and the American Foxhound Chapter 3. Listening in the Dark Chapter 4. Fox Racing Chapter 5. Coyotes, Deer, and Endgames Epilogue: Thought Foxes Notes Bibliography Index