I'm in San Antonio, you?
When we moved here in '66, it was a quiet little town. The guys I went to school with often smelled of animal as they had to do their chores before school. The high school I went to had kept horses next to it!
When I went into the trades the folks there had a real ingenuity that I admired. They reground flat bladed screwdrivers on belt sanders, made their own pry bars out of thin car springs, made choppers for brush out of the same thing, and it seemed all of them could gas weld with bailing wire. To me these guys could make anything out of nothing. I saw more brush choppers made from car springs than I could count. Heated in the farrier's pit (it had a hand cranked bellows) and pounded out on a piece of railroad tie, those things never broke when notching or cutting a hard fence post, busting up mesquite, agarita and all the other woody stuff down here. They didn't hold their edge perfectly and no doubt some were better than others, but there were an awful lot of them under the seats of the ranch and farm trucks. The same tool was used often used cutting off the necessary parts of an animal when hunting that required a large knife.
And the file knives... there were a couple of makers in surrounding towns that made excellent hunting knives out of files. My friends couldn't get the heat treat right, but these guys from the surrounding towns made them and actually SOLD a few every year. They weren't the works of art we see on this forum, but the good ones were really great utility knives that held a heckuva edge. I remember those guys carefully grinding off every bit if evidence it was a file and then carefully fitting live oak, mesquite, or Bois d' Arc (bodark! or osage orange) handles on them. A few of my friends bought them from makers in New Branfels and Uvalde and used the daylights out of them hunting. They probably still have them.
Robert
