Dog People of Caneyhead
Museum exhibit explores lives of settlers in the Big Thicket since 1850
The Dog People of Caneyhead have been on Ice House Museum Director Susan Kilcrease’s radar for years.
Like many life-long Silsbee residents, she heard the lore of the Dog People. She’d even gone to school with descendants who’d since abandoned the offthe-grid lifestyle of their forebearers, yet never left behind the feisty independent spirit of their clan’s storied past.
But it wasn’t until recently that her knowledge touched her work.
Kilcrease worked 10 months, culminating last weekend, amassing the maps, photographs, stories and other materials that would bring their story to life in one of the museum’s most original exhibits.
Theirs is a history fraught with fierce independence and hard-scrabbled living among the Neches riverbeds and surrounding swamplands that the earliest settlers first encountered after migrating to The Big Thicket in 1850.
The “Dog People” moniker came from the group’s tradition of using dogs — locally-bred curs — to hunt for everything from the food put on the family table to those who posed a threat to their land.
They were people of English, Scottish, Irish and Welsh descent, who’d been driven off their land by wealthier powersthat-be, and migrated to America in the 1700s.
Once in the remote, densely forested and swampy grounds of Southeast Texas from their Carolina landing points, those who would give rise to the Dog People of Caneyhead took hold.
They’d finally come to land that few other people could access, let alone take away.
The settlers lived it, studied it and got to know its intricacies like the back of their own hands.
They set up camp, created homesteads and got down to the business of survival in Southeast Texas’ brutal Big Thicket climate.
Like many of the early Texas settlers, who arrived after postMexican control, Caneyhead settlers eschewed the red-tape of obtaining a formal land grant. They embraced a squatters’ rights mentality.
“It was not uncommon for the people who lived on the riverbottom to never venture into the outside world, and life ticked on while a paperwork trap waited on the inevitable corporations to take advantage of them,” an exhibit board says.
Given their remote location, few came to challenge those rights or even bothered looking for them at all, until the rise of the Civil War.
Most Texas residents were enlisted in the Confederate camp, but Caneyhead’s residents largely didn’t feel the need to fight other people’s battles.
But when thousands of those early migrants (and others similarly inclined) defected from the Confederate ranks, they, too, sought refuge among the bayous and river front communities whose impenetrable climate gave rise to nearly a half-dozen enclaves mapped out amid the exhibits’ displays.
Only when it could be of use to protecting the land did the Caneyhead residents join the fight.
That meant switching sides between fighting with Union soldiers or Confederates, depending on who was knocking on your land’s doorstep any particular day.
Post Civil War, the Dog People had the Big Thicket and river bottom land much to themselves.
Their primary threat came by way of the timber barons — men like John Henry Kirby.
While Kirby is regaled in Silsbee history for putting the region on the map and getting national railway service established to his vast timber empire, to the early Dog People of Caneyhead, he was merely a repeat robber-baron of centuries past.
Kirby’s lawyers challenged settlers’ claims to land as his hunger for new timber land grew.
The Spindletop oil strike of 1901 fueled a different kind of industrial frenzy.
The new settlers it begot were busy staking claims on land and developing communities whose growth exploded in the wake of “the big gusher.”
For the Dog People, that oil strike may as well have taken place in a foreign land.
But it began to hit closer to home decades later when the Works Progress Administration turned its attention to rural Texas.
Among their projects was building a road through the dense thicket into the inhabited enclaves of Caneyhead and Sandy Creek.
When the road was completed in 1942, it connected the Dog People to surrounding towns — their land no longer an inaccessible refuge from the rest of the world.
After learning of the people settled in the region, Texas A&M graduate student Houston Thompson ventured there, eager to know the storied Dog People and their way of life.
When spent hours living among them, earning their trust. And in turn, Thompson uncovered a lifestyle steeped not only in the wilderness of their surroundings, but also a culture equally imbued with remnants of their ancestral past.
Language included phrases adapted from their Anglo roots and songs like the 19th-century English folk ballad “Barbara Allen” were still sung, though the Dog People had no instruments to accompany them.
While the rest of the world had embraced progress, particularly in the form of transportation fueled by the burgeoning oil and gas industry, the Dog People of Caneyhead largely had never seen a train or automobile before the road connecting them to the outside world was built.
With outside access to their land, the government soon demanded that children in the region be educated in public schools located in nearby towns.
Although the residents of Caneyhead had a one-room schoolhouse, it wasn’t in line with current educational standards.
“The children of Caneyhead didn’t really fit in with the kids in Fred, and they also felt like attendance was optional,” Kilcrease said. “But that’s how they were integrated in the rest of the world.”
Though it didn’t lessen the Caneyhead youth’s love of community, it gave them options if the land was ever taken.
And with fresh inroads to the remote community established, the possibility of losing that land was an ever growing reality.
Developers were knocking on their Big Thicket doors as never before, taking advantage of their isolation and lack of education to stake land claims — often simply writing their names on the courthouse deeds before moving in to displace Caneyhead residents, Kilcrease said.
More often than not, the developers were unprepared for the fight that would ensue.
The Dog People of Caneyhead and nearby Sandy Creek had learned to use their land like a weapon, and nobody knew the Neches River, its interlocking creeks and swamps, dangers and hideaways, like them.
When a problem arose with somebody threatening the community or its land, “They ‘fixed it,’” Kilcrease said.
If someone asked why a newcomer was no longer around, there was one simple response, “Oh, he left town.”
Numerous times, Kilcrease said she’s been regaled with tales of the best way to get rid of a body in the Big Thicket — pull out their teeth and feed the rest to the hogs.
Those tactics may have worked on smaller land-grabbers, but industry was a different Big Thicket predator for the Dog People of Caneyhead.
Some chose to fight those claims in court and were met with insurmountable obstacles.
Lawyers for the land-seekers and industry frequently were granted trials in Houston, which meant finding a way to get to court nearly 100 miles away.
It’s a problem that came to a head when residents faced another major battle for their land in the 1970s.
That’s where I.C Eason’s story begins.
Eason’s ancestry dates back to the earliest of Caneyhead’s founders, Rebecca and Jesse Trull. James Eason and Jesse Jane (Trull) Eason were his grandparents.
From them, he inherited his bottom land along the Neches in the Big Thicket, which he described as being “a hundred miles from Houston and a hundred years in the past.”
He’d also inherited the spirit to protect that land, posting signs that read, “POSTED All wildlife members keep off are (or) it will be your ass. Eason Land.”
Eason understood the power of what he’d inherited.
It was his only legacy and the education that had served him best — learning to fish in the Neches River and adjunct bayous where his catch would feed and earn money to provide for his family.
When Silsbee and other cities grew, Eason and fellow residents found ways to profit from citydwellers’ Big Thicket ventures to hunt and fish. They’d spray water along the dirt roads, then collect money to tow the mud-addled vehicles from the riverfront roadways.
The Dog People of Caneyhead couldn’t keep outsiders away entirely, but they could control the narrative.
That story took a far more serious turn in 1971, when big oil, timber and other industry came calling again — the former particularly eager to uncover what reportedly was a big oil resource in the Caneyhead region, Kilcrease said.
In the land where Eason saw a personal paradise — steeped in tradition, freedom and ancestral lore — big industry saw timber, the next big oil strike, a space for more pipelines and miles of overhead power lines.
Eason saw Eden. Industry saw money.
Eason decided to “prove ownership of his land, which, along with most river bottom land, had never had a deed filed on it,” Kilcrease wrote in the exhibit prelude. “All of a sudden he was in a big battle.”
I.C. Eason was the Dog People’s David to big industries’ Goliath, earning him the title “King of the Dog People.”
“I ain’t got nothin’ — what I’ve got I’m sittin’ on it,” Eason said in defense of his land. “This is my whole life. It’s mine, and ain’t nobodys gonna take it away from me, not so long as I draw breath and gun-powder burns.”
It was the fight of his life — one Eason charged harder than his old hunting dog Ring chasing prey on its best day.
“He fought for that land until the day he died,” Kilcrease said.
It was I.C. Eason’s testimony to officials about the environmental richness of the Big Thicket that helped buttress the move to finally establish The Big Thicket National Preserve in 1974 — protecting 84,550 acres of the region’s deep natural resource from extinction due to the zealous over-logging of the timber barons, Kilcrease noted.
The fight for land continues to this day.
It’s a battle many Caneyhead residents have lost — Google Earth maps reflecting that result in the number of houseboats dotting the Neches River throughout the region.
The staunchest Dog People of today, determined to maintain their legacy, simply moved their homesteads to the river when displaced from their land.
Centuries of fighting landgrabbers has created a different legacy among the Dog People of Caneyhead.
“Multiple generations all the way back to England and Scotland had their land taken away, so that’s why the mistrust (regarding strangers) is so engrained,” Kilcrease said.
Although many descendants of the original Dog People have integrated into the larger social world — going to college, becoming professionals in the workforce, engaging in the community at large and fully owning their land and homes — the mistrust of outsiders remains.
“You don’t walk up on their land — definitely not at night — without ending up on the receiving end of a double-barreled shotgun,” said museum volunteer and Caneyhead resident Mandi Anderson, whose grandparents’ picture is featured in the exhibit’s photo album.
“These people are clannish — you’re lucky you got any pictures of them (for the exhibit),” Bill Milner told Kilcrease after stopping to take in the exhibit opening.
He’s an expert local river man, who’s worked with Kilcrease unearthing multiple lost riverboat vessels and a ship-wreck amid the drought on the Neches River this past summer.
And as a Caneyhead area resident, he’s well-versed in the ongoing mistrust to be encountered when crossing a resident’s land while riverboat history hunting.
But Kilcrease didn’t get merely one or two photos for the Dog People of Caneyhead exhibit, she got many, as well as other items, like a wedding veil worn by a woman in 1968, hand-written recipes and the suitcase used by a resident on her honeymoon.
And when the exhibit opened Friday, Caneyhead’s Dog People of today, including relatives of its most storied resident I.C. Eason, were the first to visit.
Dewayne McGallion and wife Candy were among them.
Dewayne is I.C. Eason’s grandson, who spent his earliest years with I.C. before his death in 1983.
“We stayed on the river most of the time,” McGallion said. “When we got out of school, that’s where we’d go.”
At night, he’d listen to his grandfather talking to friends and family on the river islands or camps on his CB radio.
“I’d be in bed, and I’d hear him at night, calling out ‘Breaker, breaker, 1-9,’” McGallion recalled. “That’s how we communicated.”
Looking around the displays featuring his grandfather’s story and others of the Caneyhead community, whose history was writ large on displays set throughout the museum, McGallion said, “I think it’s pretty nice to get to see your family displayed.”
He’s still a resident of Caneyhead, living on some of his family’s original land.
“I guess that’s where I’ll die,” McGallion said.
His wife Candy shares a similar connection to the land and story of the Dog People of Caneyhead.
Her great-grandfather Doc Eason (also known as Barefoot Eason because he rarely wore shoes) was I.C.’s uncle.
Doc was the son of some of the region’s earliest inhabitants — Columbus (aka Lum) and Lizza Eason.
“I wish my grandmother was here (to see this),” Candy said, as she took photos and videos of the exhibit. “Most of the old stories you don’t hear about anymore, so this is great to have them told.”
The legend of the Dog People is one that may be part of family and local history, but for Candy McGallion and family, it’s a way of life that is very much alive and kicking, right down to the iconic dogs they still use today.
“Most people would think it’s funny, but they took them old dogs everywhere with them. That’s what they hunted with,” she said. “The only dogs still legal for us to use are hog dogs, and when we leave here (the museum), that’s where we’re going — hunting with our dogs.”