This is a story about Fred the catfish and the old man in the boat who is trying to catch Fred while he swims in the bayous of Louisiana. Enjoy the adventure of Fred and his friend George the frog on a day out in the bayous trying not to get caught by the old man.

This first full-length study of the cattle tick eradication program in the United States offers a new perspective on the fate of the yeomanry in the twentieth-century South during a period when state and federal governments were both increasing and centralizing their authority. As Claire Strom relates the power struggles that complicated efforts to wipe out the Boophilus tick, she explains the motivations and concerns of each group involved, including large- and small-scale cattle farmers, scientists, and officials at all levels of government. In the remote rural South--such as the piney woods of south Georgia and north Florida--resistance to mandatory treatment of cattle was unusually strong and sometimes violent. Cattle often ranged free, and their owners raised them mostly for local use rather than faraway markets. Cattle farmers in such areas, shows Strom, perceived a double threat in tick eradication mandates. In addition to their added costs, eradication schemes, with their top-down imposition of government expertise, were anathema to the yeomanry’s notions of liberty. Strom contextualizes her southern focus within the national scale of the cattle industry, discussing, for instance, the contentious place of cattle drives in American agricultural history. Because Mexico was the primary source of potential tick reinfestation, Strom examines the political and environmental history of the Rio Grande, giving the book a transnational perspective. Debates about the political and economic culture of small farmers have tended to focus on earlier periods in American history. Here Strom shows that pockets of yeoman culture survived into the twentieth century and that these communities had the power to block (if only temporarily) the expansion of the American state.

Whether you camp in a tent or a recreational vehicle (RV), there are campgrounds in U.S. National Forests to satisfy the needs of most campers. The U.S. National Forest Campground Guide, Southern Region, describes 216 developed campgrounds in 33 National Forests located in 14 southern states. Most of the campgrounds were personally visited and researched by the authors of this Guide.There are more than 50 items of information for each campground, narrative descriptions (including authors' anecdotes), maps displaying the relative location of the campgrounds, and quick look-up tables to help in the selection of a campground. In addition, there are sidebars throughout the Guide containing useful information about camping, the forests, things to do, and the authors' experiences.