From what I saw it looks like most public hunting land is located in East Texas and down by the gulf coast region. I saw this from the texas public hunting locator map on arcgis.com. I wonder why there's so much private land in texas compared to public when texas Is a huge state. Heck, Alaska is the biggest state and there's way more places to hunt on public land than in all of Texas. I've never hunted Texas before but I'm from Michigan where there's so many places to hunt. Even a lot of the local parks allow hunting. I'm sure there is great hunting here but I'm sure myself and many others wish there was more access to public land to hunt instead of having to pay to hunt private ranches.https://www.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?webmap=7f4ba89f73174bbb8a7ca625c0258d99

Texas was an independent country and never owned by the federal government as a territory, so any federal land was bought after that. Compared to say Nevada where you have vast wastelands kept by the government for nuclear testing and such.

When TX was a nation by itself it had very little cash money. So TX paid for things by granting deeds to the open land. By the time it joined the rest of the USA virtually all the land had been deeded out. Once the land was transferred to private ownership it was nearly impossible to make it publicly held again. Of the southwestern states TX had a different path to statehood and now has less public land to show for it.

But, I am up in Amarillo and we have quite a bit of public land up this way and I hunt it every year.

The last statistic I saw was 96% of the land in Texas is privately owned.

still over 2 million acres of public land not counting hundreds of miles coastal tidal areas.

Welcome to Texas, it’s not like anywhere else.

I’ve hunted most of my life and never on Texas public land. But, there several public places around my place in Montague County. And, I’ve hunted a lot of public land in Western states without issues for elk, antelope and mule deer.

Get in shape and get away from the easy places that have a lot of hunters.

I thank God for that nearly every day.

Yep but unfortunately our great state is changing and not for the betterment.

I agree and it is sad to see. I have a special place in my heart for TX!

No surprise that something I learned from hunting public land in East Texas for many years is that people keep it to themselves about the big deer they take and where they take them.

Yep, we are in the middle of what can only be called a migration from all directions; mostly North and South.