Death And Death In The Bottoms

As Uncle Hugh used to say, “Civilized people stay out of all the best places.”

As King Cotton greedily devoured the blackland prairie of East Texas, there remained, as there have been in most parts of America, some places that defied taming.

Like the breaks of the Panhandle, the Bottoms of East Texas remained wild and, for the careless or uninitiated, dangerous places.

The Texas lands first settled by the Hulens and Overtons were like an island of prairie rising out of two vast swamplands, or river bottoms.

To the north, Red River Bottoms geographically split Texas from “Indian Territory.”

Until I was “a good-sized kid,” as our elders would say, I knew Oklahoma by that common and original title.

Barely twenty miles distant as the crow flies, it was a world away: a world of snakes, man-sized catfish and gar, quicksand, and outlaws.

To the south, Cuthand Creek slashed across the miles of cotton rows as it gouged its way wider and wider until it was swallowed by the vast and legendary Sulphur Bottom, more than a hundred miles of seeping flow, clogged by debris “rafts,” miles-long log jams packed so tight by the seasonal flooding that the dense forests simply grew over them. It was a pick-up sticks of leg-breaking, rotting ground with decay that nourished an astonishing variety of wild and intriguingly dangerous things from blood thirsty insects to sleek and soulless felines. The open sloughs and channels were a muddy soup of alligators, cottonmouths and prehistoric survivors like the gaspergou and jackfish.

The Red was haunted by timber rattlers and even coral snakes. It had more than its share of ‘gators and other big predators, but the river had been a highway since Captain Shreve blew up the raft below Shreveport long before the War Between the States, opening the river to navigation.

Red River was wild, but friendly.

Sort of like our Uncle Hugh.

Maybe there was a bad side, but it was an easy side to live with once you learned to stay off of it.

But nothing good came out of Sulphur Bottom, so the Sunday School teachers would say.

No one traversed the Sulphur, or wanted to.

The Red could serve up goods for a dozen Texas and Oklahoma settlements.

The Sulphur went nowhere. It just seeped out of countless seasonally dry Northeast Texas creeks, then oozed into the Red just across the Louisiana line.

We never heard of Bigfoot, the current talk of the Bottoms since “The Legend of Boggy Creek” hit the B-house movie screens. The real Fouk Monster was dreamed up by a group of Arkansas-Louisiana Bottom dwellers who hoped it would frighten away a group of black families who moved into the area.

Not all monsters live in the Bottoms.

Some haunt the heart of hate.

Our monsters were real: panthers we heard scream in the still night distance, bears that would rob a litter from the hog pens of families struggling in the thin soil too close to the Bottoms.

But even more frightening was the unknown.

A mud-caked horse or mule would wander back home after its rider was days overdue. The trail would simply lead into the Bottom and die there.

Quicksand and gator holes could swallow up horse and rider. Wild hogs the size of ponies foraged omnivorously. Red wolves and coyotes prowled the trail of misfortune, leaving barely enough to keep a buzzard alive.

Cattle, horses, dogs and men would somehow disappear into the Bottoms.

It was good for two things: squirrel hunting and whiskey.

At its widest part, the Sulphur runs parallel to Cuthand and White Oak Bottoms. Rather than the four or five-mile traverse, the Bottoms spread out more than twenty miles across. Only two paved highways cross it even now, and compared to the early part of the last century, the bottoms are tame as a city park.

It was an ideal place to cook whiskey.

There is still a community on the White Oak known as Sugar Hill, named after the wagon load of sugar and yeast once delivered weekly to the little grocery store there.

Several times our Cuthand squirrel hunts would be cut short when my dad or granddad would catch the scent of woodsmoke and boiling mash on the heavy fall air.

The Bottoms were no place to come across a still.

These were enterprises of men unafraid of all the teeth and toxins with which nature chose to arm herself. They did business surrounded by places most people dread.

And they were the most dangerous creatures in the Bottoms.

Them old boys fought wars in those Bottoms, killed over territories, customers, deals.

Somehow I never blamed them.

There was a well-known family named Belcher, well-known among the thirsty, that is, living in Cuthand Bottom.

They were honest in their dealings and quick in their judgment. They did not suffer fools lightly.

One of the Belchers was killed by a bootlegger (A bootlegger sells whiskey; a whiskey cook is an artist. The Belchers were artists with an easily offended aesthetic sense.) The killer propped the body against an oak tree and cut off one ear “so I’d know him in hell.”

The bootlegger was sent to prison to be paroled after a few years.

Shortly thereafter they found him in the middle of the road gut shot with a 12-gauge load of tacks.

The sheriff was just beginning his investigation when the wizened old justice of the peace showed up and declared the death a suicide.

Suicide? His middle opened up like a drugstore on Sunday?

“He killed a Belcher and come back to Cuthand Bottom,” the old man said. “That was suicide.”

To a certain way of thinking, it was merely justice delayed.

That body could have been dragged a couple of hundred yards and no one would have known about it but the hogs and the buzzards. Instead, he was laid out for all to see.

And know.

Now, justice was served.

Such is the product of prohibition.

The only difference between the Daniels of Tennessee and the Belchers of Cuthand Bottom is that Lynchburg possesses a more enlightened electorate.

The “dry county” has killed more people than smallpox.

Make chewing gum illegal and there’ll be a dozen Chiclet-related killings the first week.

We seem never to learn that there are places on this earth where humankind is not welcome. We can either leave those places to God’s palate or destroy them in our own image.

Texas plans to build a series of lakes along Sulphur Bottom, flooding the last few miles of unconquered freedom to water lawns in Dallas and run Ski-doos around in circles over the graves of wild things that will never again scream in the night and disturb our dreamless sleep.

And all we need be afraid of is ourselves.