The Cedar Choppers

Ken Roberts recounts his first encounter with cedar choppers in this thoughtful and entertaining account. At the low-water bridge below Tom Miller Dam, west of downtown Austin, Roberts met three boys from a different place and culture who were selling fish. Their appearance was striking - hard-tanned, skinny, and dirty - and their offer to buy a stringer of bluegills was curtly refused by Roberts's friend. This encounter sparked Roberts' curiosity about the cedar choppers and their way of life. Based on oral history interviews with several generations of these migrants, Roberts weaves together a lively and gritty story of those who settled on the west side of the Balcones Fault in the mid-nineteenth century. Their lifestyle was marked by hunting, trapping, moonshining, and later, cutting and selling cedar fence posts and charcoal. As Austin grew into a major metropolitan area, the cedar choppers' way of life came into direct confrontation with the gentrified urban population east of the Balcones Fault. Roberts' book provides an informative answer to the question of who these people were and how they lived on the edge of nothing.