Boggy Slough: A Forest, a Family, and a Foundation for Land Conservation by Jonathan K. Gerland

Abstract

Reviewed by: Boggy Slough: A Forest, a Family, and a Foundation for Land Conservation by Jonathan K. Gerland Kenna Lang Archer Boggy Slough: A Forest, a Family, and a Foundation for Land Conservation. By Jonathan K. Gerland. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2022. Pp. x, 360. $45.00, ISBN 978-1-62349-995-2.) Jonathan K. Gerland’s Boggy Slough: A Forest, a Family, and a Foundation for Land Conservation is a popular history that combines the beautiful production of a coffee-table book with the methodology and theory of a more traditional history. The book explores the eponymous Boggy Slough Conservation Area, a 19,055-acre tract of hardwood and pine forest in East Texas. Gerland considers the broader economic and social history of the region—discussing land use among the Hasinai Caddo, detailing early efforts at settlement by Europeans and Americans, and deconstructing the productionist mind-set that shaped the region during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To this framework he adds a natural history that gives tangible form to the landscape using detailed taxonomic references and well-chosen photographs. This interdisciplinary approach works very well. After establishing the broader historical context in chapters 1 and 2, Gerland zeroes in on Thomas Lewis Latane Temple, whose descendants shaped the development of the land from the late nineteenth century to the creation of the conservation area in 2013. Subsequent chapters detail the [End Page 170] Temples’ work with the Southern Pine Lumber Company and identify the forces that shaped their holdings over the course of a century, with a special focus on railroads, ranching, game management, and the challenges of the Great Depression. The final two chapters examine the personalities that shaped Boggy Slough and the processes that ultimately created the conservation area. The book’s topical organization (for example, a chapter on enclosure is followed by a chapter on game management, and then another on land sales) creates occasional issues with repetition, and the narrative does jump around chronologically, but these are minor issues. Gerland’s story flows well, and the book never gets lost in proverbial meanderings. Gerland does not ground this book in a single, overriding argument. Instead, his goal is to describe the history of land use in Boggy Slough while also highlighting enduring connections between the land and the Temple family. He accomplishes these aims by centering “the inseparability of Boggy Slough’s natural and social history” (p. 27). For example, Gerland states more than once that the people living on and working in Boggy Slough shaped the land and were also shaped by the land. This is a basic idea but an important one, and it is a foundational framework for the field of environmental history. Gerland also engages this idea of “inseparability” by articulating sophisticated historical theories. For example, he discusses the power of names and what it means socially and culturally for different groups to name the land or to see their names stripped from the landscape. Gerland has made a valuable contribution to the environmental history of Texas with Boggy Slough. Some readers may feel overwhelmed by the amount of detail in the interior chapters, but the book is well written and well researched, and the content never becomes inaccessible. Indeed, Gerland moves easily between scientific and historical analysis and writes as competently about scientific processes as he does about economic structures. Moreover, the photographs, many of them taken by Gerland himself, add dimension to the portrayal of bottomland forests and the individuals who have shaped the region. Gerland has done credit to Boggy Slough with this compelling portrait. Kenna Lang Archer Angelo State University Copyright © 2023 The Southern Historical Association