By Ronald G. Brock
If you’ve never heard of Texas’ Big Thicket, you’re in good company. With a murky border about a hundred miles southeast of Freestone County, this region has long been something of a mystery to even those living just outside it. Spanish missionaries traveling through it in the late 1600s described it as “an impenetrable wilderness.”
It was once the sort of place only a select group of free-thinking individuals dared to venture into. For those who needed to “get out of town,” and not be found, the Thicket was 5,000 square miles of impossibly dense vegetation and swampy environment to get lost in. Naturally, that was exactly the type of people the Thicket drew.
Having been raised in Brazos County, Texas in the shadow of Polk County’s component of Texas’s Big Thicket, I’ve had a chance to meet many members of the populous families and clans that settled the area. My father, Eugene H. Brock, was a fifth generation Thicket resident. The Thicket’s history, culture and lore was woven into my childhood.
Here’s just a glimpse of what I can tell you about the personality types of those who lived there, and the many notable eccentricities – physical and viewpoint – universal to Big Thicket dwellers. There’s much more in my new book, The Thicket’s Prodigy: Reflections of an Improbable Life—From Texas’s Big Thicket to Los Alamos, the Bomb, NASA, and the World Wide Web.
As “get out of town-ers,” people who were attracted to the Big Thicket were often not ones to be trifled with; stories warning about people who lived in the Thicket were numerous.
The settler population, typically composed of Irish, Scot, English and Welsh extraction, inadvertently developed their own society. Within a few generations of marriages among the clans, including among cousins, several identifiable “of the Thicket” characteristics emerged. Sandy colored hair, bony facial features, and speech accents provided a certain uniformity among physical similarities.
And most exhibited a calculated wisdom and sort of toughness; among a few, a certain meanness. One who took meanness to an extreme was John Wesley Hardin. John killed his first man at the age of 15.
The son of a Methodist minister, John had a reputation for a violent disposition and held prejudices against the black population and Yankees. An even more fiery intolerance was reserved for individuals responsible for enforcement of resettlement after the end of the civil war. He wasn’t having any part of forced resettlement or the enforcers who had been sent to the Thicket to see to it. As a result, he found it necessary to kill a few who had arrived bent on correcting Thicket resettlement malfeasance. After leaving for other areas he returned occasionally to the Thicket to visit.
John proceeded to kill over 40 individuals during a career as one of the most competent gunfighters of his time. He was most famous for having killed a man for snoring one night in a boarding house. John died by a bullet to his head while gambling at a card game in El Paso.
Before he died John Wesley Hardin claimed never to have killed a man “who didn’t need it.”
Life in the Thicket wasn’t for everyone—nor is it today. From very early childhood, my father knew he did not want to become a subsistence farmer as had generations of relatives before him, or inherit a position in the family general store. It was his goal to become an educated man. And so he did, bravely overcoming near impossible odds to study leave the Thicket, study engineering and ultimately become
employed by the top-secret laboratory in redesigning the Manhattan Project’s atomic bomb–as I write in The Thicket’s Prodigy.
Had he not done so, I, too, might still be in the Thicket to this day.
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Ron Brock’s career included a role as a Senior Product Manager at Frito Lay where he was responsible for the highly successful launch of Nacho Cheese flavored Doritos brand tortilla chips. Following the conclusion of the introductory marketing campaign he relocated to Phoenix, Arizona, later transitioning into commercial real estate sales. Serendipity struck a few years later when, seeing the potential of Tim Berners-Lee’s newly announced World Wide Web, he discovered an ability to revolutionize commercial real estate. He created the first up-to-the-minute, searchable, accessible database of multifamily properties, then included, and patented, an independent system of classifying real estate property improvements and location. His memoir The Thicket’s Prodigy: The Extraordinary Life of an Improbable Genius, details his life story, including time spent in Los Alamos, New Mexico where his father worked as part of a team redesigning the Manhattan Project’s atomic bomb. Ron, also the author of Gamebreaker: Guide to World Class Selling, resides in Scottsdale, Arizona. Learn more at www.galtmirrin.com
