Thank you for the question. With most good stock woods such as walnut, maple, myrtle, and birch have several things in common. ( I am not saying that all these woods will make pretty stocks just that they have the charistics for a strong stock.)
First lets look at density, the dencer, ( read as heavy), a piece of wood,( lets say claro walnut) is the stronger it will usually be. Good figure does not mean weak but as the figure gets fancier the more important it is to really anilise the grain structure. The majority of stocks broken due to recoil are because of poor grain lay out or poor inletting. I am not aware of any of the stocks I have made splitting or brakeing from recoil or for any other reason.
Years ago only the dencer woods such as Bastogne walnut and such were used for the hard kicking rifles, however today thanks to such things as glass bedding we have much more leway. Glass bedding is not an excuse for poor inletting but it does help to prevent the wood from compressing from recoil and resulting in the common cracked grip behind the rear guard screw. Proper grain should run from as far back in the butt as possable and up through the forearm. When you are looking for a blank and you are told that it is a very nice blank for a light recoiling rifle, RUN AWAY! That is like some one telling you that bald tires are fine for a slow car. Grain lay out is critical for any stock blank, if not right it is fire wood.
When building a hard kicking rifle I would use either hidden cross bolts or the usual double cross bolts and would deffinately glass bed the rifle. When doing the glass bedding job I would like to have about 1/4" of the stuff behind the recoil lug and a cross bolt behind that. The other cross bolt would be in front of the trigger and behind the magizine. I will try to post a picture showing this. For some reason I can not get my site to show up and the pictures are there. If you want to try you can or I will later, the site is http://www.customguns.us/ I got the picture this morning. This picture shows the location for the cross bolts on an P-14 Enfield.