One-Man Bear War: Ab Carter’s 182-Bear Hunt in the Big Thicket

The story of Ab Carter is a reminder that in frontier Texas, bear hunting was livelihood and warfare as much as sport. In the dense swampy forest of the Big Thicket, a man who had hunted bears from boyhood set out to clear his country of them entirely, and the record he compiled stands as one of the more punishing feats in the region’s hunting history. If you want to understand what pushed a man to that kind of campaign, you need to understand the ground he worked and the animals he was up against.

Why a man declared war on the bears

Ab Carter was a Texas frontiersman who lived in a log cabin with a little clearing around it, in a country where hunting and trapping had sustained people for well over a century. The men of the Big Thicket were descendants, quiet ones, of the settlers who wrested Texas from the Indians and Mexicans, and living off the land meant protecting what you raised.

The trouble was the hogs. Free-ranging hogs, called piney-woods rooters, were a staple of the subsistence economy, and the bears learned to hunt them. They started on weanling pigs, then moved up to shoats, and finally took grown hogs. The animals got so efficient that they drove hogs from the woods, pinning them near the cabins, and eventually they began raiding the yards around the cabins themselves.

Faced with losing his stock, Carter resolved to wipe out every bear in his corner of the country for good. His one-man bear war began in 1883, and in the fall of 1884 he took it up in earnest — fall because the insufferable summer heat of the Big Thicket made hunting unworkable before then.

The country that made the hunt so hard

The Big Thicket is a weird, mysterious, swampy forest in southeast Texas, close to the Louisiana line. It carries no commanding peak, awesome gorge, or topographical feature of distinction, yet it has long held the reputation as Texas’s last true frontier — more so than the mountains of the west. Historically it was the densest forest region in the state, and a 1936 biological survey defined it as over 3,350,000 acres covering 14 counties.

This is terrain that swallows people. Many thousands of scattered acres have never been trodden by man, and the cover was thick enough that law officers seldom bothered to pursue criminals who hid there, knowing they would eventually come out on their own. A bank robber who took refuge in the Thicket did exactly that. For a bear hunter, that density worked entirely in the quarry’s favor.

How the bears fought back on their own ground

The bears of the Big Thicket did not behave like the game Carter might have expected. They would not tree except on rare occasions, instead running deeper into the jungles and swamps. On the run they stopped occasionally to attack the dogs before bolting again when they caught the man scent. And unlike bears in colder country, these did not hibernate in winter, which meant the campaign could run as long as a hunter could stand it.

Carter went in with dogs built for the work. Leading his pack were two strike dogs named Watch and Range — redbone crossed with Airedale, able to follow a trail hard and hold their own in a fight. That combination mattered in a country where an animal would run for miles rather than climb a tree.

The charge Carter did not expect

Black bears rarely show aggression toward humans and typically run from men, which is exactly why one encounter stuck with Carter. During his campaign, a big hog came at him with a bear having stripped most of the hide from its back. When Carter intervened, the bear charged him — behavior he considered unusual for a black bear.

He handled it the way a muzzle-loader hunter had to: up close and with one shot to spare. Firing from nearly point-blank range, Carter drove the ball through the bear’s neck and broke it, dropping the animal in its tracks. Over two seasons of this kind of close, dangerous work in nearly impenetrable cover, Carter killed 182 bears.

The neighbor who nearly died the same way

Carter was not the only man in that country at war with bears. John Reisinger lived a short distance to the east of him, and his story shows how badly these encounters could go when a man was caught without a gun. A bear had attacked one of Reisinger’s hogs and was eating it without even killing it first. Reisinger rushed the bear with no gun in his hands, and the animal charged him instead of running.

What followed left him crippled for life. The bear seized his foot and clamped down, shattering the bones, then caught and crushed his second foot as well. Reisinger climbed a sweet-gum sapling too small for the bear to climb, gripping it one-handed and with his knees as his broken feet hung useless below him. Near the sapling stood a large dead sycamore stump, and the bear climbed it, shaking the sapling and swiping at his legs.

Reisinger got out his hunting knife and stabbed at the bear while hanging there. The thrust hit the sticking spot in the bear’s neck — the same place a hunter sticks a deer to drain its blood. The animal’s grip failed and it slid down after grabbing his foot, then climbed back, but the wound told. It slid down the stump and wobbled away with blood spurting from its neck. Only after it left could Reisinger ease down the sapling and crawl home. He survived but was a cripple the rest of his life. People who discussed it afterward generally concluded that particular bear must have been crazy.

Where the bears went, and whether they come back

The combined pressure of men like Carter and Reisinger, plus more than a century of heavy hunting, told on the population. Black bears were hunted heavily in the Big Thicket for generations before being wiped out of southeast Texas by the 1950s. The region was once famous for its black bears; today it is not.

The door is not fully closed. Local residents occasionally report sightings, and black bears have not established a permanent population in the area. The National Park Service reports that regional resource managers see a good chance the bears will eventually re-establish, with animals potentially arriving from the Louisiana subspecies or from Ozark region populations.

Much of the ground Carter worked is now protected. The National Park Service created the Big Thicket National Preserve in 1974, UNESCO recognizes it as a biosphere reserve, and nearly 60 of the 181 mammal species in Texas have been verified there.

Reading the record for what it is

Carter’s tally came out of a specific set of pressures: subsistence hogs, bears that had learned to raid them, and cover so thick that treeing a bear was a rare event. The full account, published as “One-Man Bear War” in the February 1954 issue of Outdoor Life, is worth tracking down if you want the detail. The lessons that carry forward are plainer. Bears that get rewarded for raiding livestock escalate, and a black bear that charges rather than runs is a bear doing something it should not. If you hunt or range stock in bear country, that is the behavior worth watching for, and the history of the Big Thicket is a long record of what happens when it is ignored.

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