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Gray Ghosts and Red Rangers: American Hilltop Fox Chasing
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.

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Gray Ghosts and Red Rangers: American Hilltop Fox Chasing
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.

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Gray Ghosts and Red Rangers: American Hilltop Fox Chasing

Gray Ghosts and Red Rangers: American Hilltop Fox Chasing

by Thad Sitton
Gray Ghosts and Red Rangers: American Hilltop Fox Chasing
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Gray Ghosts and Red Rangers: American Hilltop Fox Chasing

Gray Ghosts and Red Rangers: American Hilltop Fox Chasing

by Thad Sitton

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780292784789
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Publication date: 05/31/2011
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
File size: 19 MB
Note: This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

  • 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
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Related Subjects

Sports
Hunting & Fishing
Hunting - General & Miscellaneous
Sports
Hunting & Fishing
Hunting - General & Miscellaneous

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