The Path to Power

by O profissional

First of the series "The Years of Lyndon Johnson"

2. Part I (The Trap) - The Bunton Strain

ON THE DAY HE WAS BORN, he would say, his white-haired grandfather leaped onto his big black stallion and thundered across the Texas Hill Country, reining in at every farm to shout: "A United States Senator was born this morning!" Nobody in the Hill Country remembers that ride or that shout, but they do remember the baby's relatives saying something else about him, something which to them was more significant. An old aunt, Kate Bunton Keale, said it first, bending over the cradle, and as soon as she said it, everyone saw it was true, and repeated it: "He has the Bunton strain." And to understand Lyndon Johnson it is necessary to understand the Bunton strain, and to understand what happened to it when it was mixed with the Johnson strain—and, most important, to understand what the Hill Country did to those who possessed it.

So strong were its outward marks that pictures of generations of Bunton men might, except for different hair styles and clothing, almost be pictures of the same man—a tall man, always over six feet, with heavily waved coal-black hair and dramatic features: large nose, very large ears, heavy black eyebrows and, underneath the eyebrows, the most striking of all the Bunton physical characteristics, the "Bunton eye." The Bunton skin was milky white—"magnolia white," the Hill Country called it—and out of that whiteness shone eyes so dark a brown that they seemed black, so bright that they glittered, so piercing that they often seemed to be glaring. "When my mother and father came back from seeing the baby and said he had the Bunton eye, I knew exactly what they meant," says Lyndon's cousin Ava. "Because Grandmother Bunton had the Bunton eye. If you talked to her, you never had to wonder if the answer was yes or no. Those eyes told you. Those eyes talked. They spit fire."

If the Bunton eye was famed throughout the Hill Country, so was the Bunton personality. The Bunton temper was fierce and flaring, and the Bunton pride was so strong that some called it arrogance—although a writer describing one of the family notes that the arrogance was softened by a "shadow of sadness running through his features," and pictures of Buntons in middle and old age invariably show men whose mouths are pulled grimly tight and down.

The first Bunton in Texas was a hero, with a personality so striking that a man who met him only casually—encountering him among a group of riders on the great plains south of Bastrop in 1835—never forgot him, and years later would recall: "There were several men in the party, but Mr. Bunton's personality attracted me. [He] had an air of a man of breeding and boldness. While our meeting was casual, he asked me a number of questions [and] I was greatly impressed by his manly bearing." John Wheeler Bunton, a six-foot-four-inch Tennesseean, had come to Texas only that year, but apparently he impressed others as he impressed that rider: when the settlers of the Bastrop area met the next year to elect a delegate to the constitutional convention that would, in defiance of Mexico, create the Republic of Texas, he was elected—at the age of twenty-eight, the same age at which Lyndon Johnson would be elected to Congress. He was one of the signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence and a member of the committee that wrote the constitution of the new Republic. In the war between Texas and Mexico, he was at the first major battle—the three bloody days of house-to-house fighting that began when an old frontiersman, refusing to obey his officer's order to retreat, shouted, "Who will go with old Ben Milam into San Antonio?" and led a wild charge into the city—and he was at the last: in the great charge at the San Jacinto when Sam Houston waved his 800 ragged men forward against the entire Mexican Army (the Texans marched side by side in a single line half a mile long; before them floated a white silk flag bearing a lone star; beside the flag rode Houston on his great white stallion, Saracen; for a while the Texans advanced in silence; then someone shouted, "Remember the Alamo!"). At San Jacinto, a fellow officer wrote, Bunton's "towering form could be seen amidst the thickest of the fight. He penetrated so far into the ranks of the defenders of the breastworks that it is miraculous that he was not killed." According to one account, he was the leader of the seven-man patrol that the next day captured Santa Anna, who was trying to escape in a private's uniform, and brought "the Napoleon of the West" before Houston. Of his deeds as an Indian-fighter, a friend wrote years later: "To the present generation of Texans the name of this honored man is, perhaps, but little known; but in the day long gone by, it was a household word in all the scattered log cabins that dotted the woods and prairies of Texas." Returning to Tennessee after the war to claim his sweetheart, he brought her to Texas—on a wild journey during which their ship was captured by a Mexican man-of-war and they were imprisoned for three months—and was elected to the new Republic's first Congress, where he quickly demonstrated an ability to lead legislators: observers wrote of his "commanding presence" and "eloquent tongue"; among the bills in whose passage he played a prominent role was the one that established the Texas Rangers. He was re-elected, seemed on the road to political prominence—and then, without a word of explanation, abruptly retired from public life forever.

Whatever the reasons for Bunton's retirement from politics, they did not include lack of ambition: ambition—ambition on the grand scale—was, in fact, perhaps the most vivid of all the vivid Bunton characteristics. While some of the men who came to Texas—that vast and empty land—in the mid-nineteenth century were fleeing from the law or from debts, many of the thousands and tens of thousands who chalked GTT ("Gone to Texas") on the doors of their homes in the Southern states were not fleeing from, but searching for something. "Big country … fed big dreams," as one historian put it, and Texas, with its huge tracts of land free for the taking—in 1838, it enacted the first homestead legislation in America (and a man's homestead, the legislation also provided, could never be seized for debt)—fed the biggest dreams of all. And judging from the actions of John Wheeler Bunton and his brothers, no dreams were bigger than theirs.

These were years when the frontier, the edge of settlement in central Texas, was terrible in its isolation, separated as it was by hundreds of miles from the state's more populated areas near the Louisiana and Arkansas borders; families which moved to the edge of settlement in the 1830's and '40s and '50s, says Texas historian T. R. Fehrenbach, "left 19th century civilization far behind." And because central Texas was the hunting ground of the Apaches and the fierce Penetaka Comanches, masters of human torture, it was, in Fehrenbach's words, "a genuine frontier of war." Men who went—and took their families—to the edge of settlement had to be driven, or lured, by big dreams indeed. Each farmer who did so, Fehrenbach says, did so "yearning for his own small kingdom, willing to suffer hardships beyond counting while he carved it out with his own hands." The Buntons went to the very edge. John Wheeler Bunton, the hero, came from a wealthy family in Tennessee but wanted something more and went west to Texas, then after the war with Mexico moved west within Texas, and then west again. His first homestead was on the plains below Brenham, when those plains were the edge of the frontier. About 1840, despite the hammerblows of the Apaches and Penetakas, the frontier edged west to the Colorado River; Bunton about 1840 moved beyond the Colorado, settling near Bastrop. During the 1850's, settlers pushed about fifty miles farther west, to the 98th meridian, where the plains ended and the Texas Hill Country (a highland known to geologists as the "Edwards Plateau") began, and along that meridian, Fehrenbach says, for two decades, "the frontier wavered, now forward, now back, locked in bitter battle"; during 1858 and 1859, two of the "bloodiest years in Texas history," the dead of that frontier would be numbered in the hundreds; in the isolated log cabins that dotted the hills, settlers huddled in fear during the nights of the full moon, the "Comanche moon." But during the 1850's, near the 98th meridian, in the plains at the edge of the Hill Country, John Bunton built not a cabin but a graceful two-story plantation house with three verandas, surrounded by cotton fields and pastures in which grazed not only sheep and cattle but the finest Tennessee thoroughbreds, and staffed with Negro slaves dressed in black trousers and white waistcoats—the great plantation of which he had dreamed. And although Indians still roamed the area (twice his wife, in his absence, scared off threatening bands with a rifle), when a log-cabin church was founded in nearby Mountain City in 1857, the Buntons would arrive at it on Sundays in an elegant sulky driven by an elderly retainer named Uncle Ranch. The Bunton plantation (named Rancho Ram-bouillet after a French breed of sheep John was trying to raise there) may have been the westernmost cotton plantation—and plantation house—on such a scale in all Texas.

West and west and west again, pursuing a big dream—John was not the only Bunton who took that course. So did the three brothers who followed him to Texas, one of whom, Robert Holmes Bunton—"a large impressive man, standing six feet and three inches in height and weighing about two hundred and sixty pounds … with fair skin, coal-black hair and piercing eyes"—was Lyndon Johnson's great-grandfather.

Very little is known about Robert Bunton. He first moved from Tennessee to Kentucky, where he became a "substantial planter." Nevertheless, in 1858, at the age of forty, he moved to Texas, near Bastrop; and then he, too, moved west, to Lockhart, in the plains just below the Hill Country. He fought in the Lost Cause (as did his sons and six grandsons, all of whom, a family historian noted, were over six feet tall), enlisting as a private and within a year being promoted twice, to sergeant and lieutenant. After the war, he raised cattle and sent them up the Chisholm Trail to Abilene—huge herds raised on a huge ranch, for with the profits of each drive he bought more land.

Dreamers of big dreams, the Buntons were also, to an extent somewhat unusual among Texas frontier families, interested in ideas and abstractions. John Bunton was one of the founders of the short-lived Philosophical Society of Texas, which was formed in 1837 to explore "topics of interest which our new and rising republic unfolds to the philosopher, the scholar and the man of the world." No such details exist about Robert, but his descendants recall hearing that he had a reputation for being "absolutely truthful" and "an excellent conversationalist, and greatly interested in government and politics." If, in his old age, he found someone at Weinheimer's Store to talk with when he went shopping, he would sit and talk all day and into the night, although, unlike most of those with whom he talked, he preferred to discuss not "practical" politics but theories of government; he was regarded by the other men, says a descendant of one of them, as "an idealist."

Idealists, romantics, dreamers of big dreams though they may have been, there was nonetheless a hard, tough, practical side to the Buntons. Neighbors remember them as canny traders, and remember, too, their favorite saying: "Charity begins at home." And while their dreams were big, in the face of necessity they had the strength to scale them down, to adapt to reality.

The dreams of John Wheeler Bunton proved too big for the land to support: cotton could not be grown profitably enough in central Texas to support a huge, elegant plantation, and the showy French sheep didn't produce enough wool or mutton. But he experimented with new breeds, and although he lost some of the "thousands of acres" Rancho Rambouillet had originally covered, he held on to enough so that he died "leaving a handsome estate" to his son, Desha. Desha drove cattle north and, making money, bought large tracts of land near Austin. When cattle-driving turned unprofitable he had to sell those tracts—but he managed to hold on to what he had started with. He held on to it and turned it into a farm, its hogs (if cattle weren't profitable, the Buntons would raise an animal that was) producing sausage that he sold in Austin, acquiring as he did so a reputation as a hard, shrewd businessman. As late as 1930, Desha's son and daughter were running the same ranch their hero grandfather had left—and the hero's house still stood. ("The Buntons were very proud people," a neighbor recalls. "They had elegant parties in that beautiful yard. They were really striking, the way they looked. Tall and straight. Their ears were big and their noses—and they had those piercing Bunton eyes.") And although during the Depression they were forced to sell off first one piece and then another, they held on grimly to as much as possible—so that as late as 1981, more than a century after its founding, the ranch, reduced to perhaps 200 acres, was still in the family.

Robert Holmes Bunton, Lyndon Johnson's great-grandfather, sent big herds up to Abilene with his sons. Cattle prices began to fall, and from one drive his sons returned all but penniless. Then, together with another brother, Robert mustered up a herd of 1,500 head and sent them up the trail with one of the brother's sons. The young man returned home without a dime, having apparently fallen into the hands of cardsharps in Abilene; Robert, it is related, "said not one word of reproach." But while other men persisted in making drives that grew steadily less profitable, the two Bunton brothers all but stopped raising cattle themselves, and instead rented out their pastures as grazing land for herds from South Texas that were passing through and needed to rest for a few days on the way north. Many of the men who owned those herds made no money from them—but the Buntons did. Robert Bunton made enough so that he was able to retire comfortably, and to give his six children a start in life when they married: money to his daughters—one of whom, Eliza Bunton, was Lyndon Johnson's grandmother—and land to his sons. And the sons made successes of their land—one becoming one of the biggest ranchers in the big ranch country of West Texas.

The Buntons, then, while never as successful as they had dreamed of becoming, were more successful than the run of ranchers in central Texas: in a land in which economic survival was very difficult, they survived. Central Texans often judged their neighbors by whether or not they "left something for their children." The Buntons left something for theirs, and the children made something out of what they were left. It was only when, in Lyndon Johnson's father, the Bunton strain became mixed with the Johnson strain that the Bunton temper and pride, ambition and dreams, and interest in ideas and abstractions brought disaster, for the Johnsons were not only also dreamers, romantics, and idealists, not only had a fierce pride and flaring temper of their own, and physical characteristics which greatly resembled those of the Buntons, they also resembled the Buntons in their passion for ideas and abstractions—without resembling them at all in shrewdness and toughness. They had all the impractical side of the Buntons—and none of the practical side. Big as were the Buntons' dreams, moreover, the Johnsons' dreams were even bigger. Their dreams lured them beyond even that far point to which the Buntons had ventured. The Buntons stopped just before the edge of the Hill Country; the Johnsons pushed forward—into its heart.

And the Hill Country was hard on dreams.

THE HILL COUNTRY was a trap—a trap baited with grass.

To men who had lived in the damp, windless forests of Alabama or East Texas and then had trudged across 250 miles of featureless Texas plains—walking for hours alongside their wagons across the flat land toward a low rise, and then, when they reached the top of the rise, seeing before them just more flatness, until at the top of one rise they saw, in the distance, something different: a low line that, as they toiled toward it, gradually became hills, hills stretching across the entire horizon—to these men the hills were beautiful. From the crest of the first ones they climbed, they could see that this wasn't an isolated line of higher ground, but the beginning of a different kind of country—from that crest, range after range of hills rolled away into the distance. And from every new hill they climbed, the hills stretched away farther; according to these early settlers, every time they thought they were seeing the last range of hills, there would be another crest, and when they climbed it, they would see more ranges ahead, until the hills seemed endless—the Hill Country, they said, was a land of "false horizons." They were, in fact, at the eastern edge of a highland that covered 24,000 square miles.

The air of the highland was drier and clearer than the air on the plains below; it felt clean and cool on the skin. The sky, in that clear air, was a blue so brilliant that one of the early settlers called it a "sapphire sky." Beneath that sky the leaves of Spanish oaks, ancient and huge, and of elms and cedars sparkled in the sun; the leaves of the trees in the hills looked different from the leaves of the scattered trees on the plains below, where the settlers' wagons still stood—a darker, lush green, a green with depths and cool shadows.

Beneath the trees, the Hill Country was carpeted with wildflowers, in the Spring, bluebonnets, buttercups, the gold-and-burgundy Indian paintbrush and the white-flowered wild plum, in Fall, the goldeneye and the gold-enmane and the golden evening primrose. And in the Fall, the sugar maples and sumac blazed red in the valleys.

Springs gushed out of the hillsides, and streams ran through the hills—springs that formed deep, cold holes, streams that raced cool and clear over gravel and sand and white rock, streams lined so thickly with willows and sycamores and tall cypresses that they seemed to be running through a shadowy tunnel of dark leaves. The streams had cut the hills into a thousand shapes: after crossing 250 miles of flat sameness, these men had suddenly found a landscape that was new at every turn.

And the streams, these men discovered, were full of fish. The hills were full of game. There were, to their experienced eyes, all the sign of bear, and you didn't need sign to know about the deer—they were so numerous that when riders crested a hill, a whole herd might leap away in the valley below, white tails flashing. There were other white tails, too: rabbits in abundance. And as the men sat their horses, staring, flocks of wild turkeys strutted in silhouette along the ridges. Honeybees buzzed in the glades, and honey hung in the trees for the taking. Wild mustang grapes, plump and purple, hung down for making wine. Wrote one of the first men to come to the Hill Country: "It is a Paradise."

But most of all, to the men who moved into it first, the Hill Country was beautiful because of its grass.

These first settlers were not Southern aristocrats or "substantial planters"—substantial planters had money to buy good, easily accessible land, and slaves to work it; when they came to Texas, they settled on the rich river bottoms of the coastal plains; by 1850 they had re-created a Southern Plantation economy, complete with mansions, near the Gulf. The men who came to the Hill Country were not from the Plantation South but from the hill and forest sections of the South; they were small farmers, and they were poor. These were the men who had fled the furnishing merchant, who furnished the fanner with supplies and clothing for the year on credit, and the crop lien, which the merchant took on the farmer's cotton to make sure he "paid out" the debt. And they had fled the eroded, gullied, worn-out, used-up land of the Old South that would not let them grow enough cotton or graze enough livestock ever to pay it out. Land was something these men and their families had to live off—and that was why the grass of the Hill Country was what filled their eye. These were the men who had come farther even than the Buntons. Their numbers were small. Thousands of rural Southern families heard the news of San Jacinto in 1836, took one last look at their eroded, exhausted soil, chalked GTT on their gates and headed for a new land and a new start. In 1846, statehood, which had been pushed by the new President, increased the flood of migration; tens of thousands of Southern families painted POLK AND TEXAS on their wagon canvas and headed down the plank roads of the South, through its weary towns—as bystanders cheered—and westward across the Mississippi and the Sabine into Texas. In 1837, the population of Texas was 40,000. In 1847, it was 140,000. By 1860, it would be 600,000. But the flood crested near the Sabine, and flowed south toward the Gulf; most of the newcomers settled in the "piney woods" of East Texas and the coastal plains. Only a shallow stream flowed west across the 250 miles of prairie blacklands. And by the time the stream reached the Edwards Plateau in the center of Texas, at whose edge the Buntons stopped, it was no more than a trickle—and only a very thin trickle indeed climbed up into the hills. Although Austin, almost on the plateau's edge, was the state capital, it was still a frontier town; in 1850, people were still being killed on its outskirts and its population was only 600. Beyond, in the Hill Country, the dreaded Comanches ruled—and during this era the population of the typical Hill Country county is counted not in thousands or in hundreds but in scores. "The cabins became more distant, separated by miles and miles," Fehrenbach has written, "and the settlements significantly were no longer called towns, but forts. If the lights in the [eastern] Texas forest by the middle of the 19th century were still few, in the middle of the state, … the lights … were swallowed in vastness." Trying to explain why men, often with their families, would trade civilization for terror, Fehrenbach notes that this was the part of Texas in which dreams seemed nearest to realization. "A man could see far and smell winds that coursed down from Canada across a thousand miles of plains. There was an apparently endless, rolling vista north and west and south. The small woodchopper, with an axe and a couple of brawny sons, could catch a scent of landed empire and dream of possibilities to come." There were many reasons bound up with these—but whatever the reasons, whatever the dreams or fears that pulled or drove hundreds of thousands of men into Texas, few had made a journey as long or as hard as these men. But when they saw the grass, they felt the journey had been worth it. "Grass knee high!" one wrote home. "Grass as high as my stirrups!" wrote another.

The tall grass of the Hill Country stretched as far as the eye could see, covering valleys and hillsides alike. It was so high that a man couldn't see the roots or the bottoms of the big oaks; their dark trunks seemed to be rising out of a rippling, pale green sea. There was almost no brush, and few small trees—only the big oaks and the grass, as if the Hill Country were a landscaped park. But a park wasn't what these men thought of when they saw the grass of the Hill Country. To these men the grass was proof that their dreams would come true. In country where grass grew like that, cotton would surely grow tall, and cattle fat—and men rich. In country where grass grew like that, they thought, anything would grow.

How could they know about the grass?

THE GRASS HAD GROWN not over a season but over centuries. It wouldn't have grown at all had it not been for fire—prairie fires set by lightning and driven by wind across tens of thousands of acres, and fires set by Indians to stampede game into their ambushes or over cliffs—for fire clears the land of underbrush, relentless enemy of grass. The roots of brush are merciless, spreading and seeking out all available moisture, and so are the leaves of brush, which cast on grass the shade that kills it, so if brush and grass are left alone in a field, the grass will be destroyed by the brush. But grass grows much faster than brush, so fire gives grass the head start it needs to survive; after a fire, grass would re-enter the burned-over land first—one good rain and among the ashes would be new green shoots—and by the time the brush arrived, the grass would be thick and strong enough to stand it off.

Even with the aid of fire, the grass had grown slowly—agonizingly slowly. Some years most of it died, some years all. But in other years, it grew, and after a while it had a base to grow in, for even in the years when most of it died, some residue remained. This base built up gradually until there was, at last, atop the soil a padding to protect the soil from rain and add to the fertility with which it fed the next growth of grass—at first a thin pad and then a thicker one, and finally a lush, diverse carpet in which could grow the big grass, the stirrup-high grass, that dominated the beautiful Hill Country meadows that the first settlers saw. The big grass had big roots; every time fire came to help it—natural fire or Indian-set—it grew back faster. As it got taller, it grew faster still, for it held more and more moisture and thus could survive dry spells better. But even so, it had taken a very long time to grow.

It had grown so slowly because the soil beneath it was so thin. The Hill Country was limestone country, and while the mineral richness of limestone makes the soil produced by its crumbling very fertile, the hardness of limestone makes it produce that soil slowly. There was only a narrow, thin, layer of soil atop the Hill Country limestone, a layer as fragile as it was fertile, vulnerable to wind and rain—and especially vulnerable because it lay not on level ground but on hillsides: rain running down hillsides washes the soil on those slopes away. The very hills that made the Hill Country so picturesque also made it a country in which it was difficult for soil to hold. The grass of the Hill Country, then, was rich only because it had had centuries in which to build up, centuries in which nothing had disturbed it. It was rich only because it was virgin. And it could be virgin only once.

THE HILL COUNTRY was a trap baited with water.

The men toiling toward that country saw the hills as a low line on the horizon. There was another line in the same place, right along those first ridges, in fact, but the men couldn't see that line. It was invisible. It was a line that would be drawn only on maps, and it wasn't drawn on any map then, and wouldn't be for another fifty years. But the line was there—and it would determine their fate.

There were clues to tell them it was there. Some of the first men to enter the Hill Country noted the remarkable resemblance of a small shrub they found there to the tall walnut trees of the Atlantic coast they had left behind them; even its nuts were similar, except, of course, they were so much smaller—no larger, one early observer wrote, than a musket ball. There was a reason the little shrub resembled the big walnut tree—it was the tree, the tall tree shrunken into a small bush. Some of the settlers commented on bushes they found along the streams of the Hill Country, bushes which looked exactly like the mulberry bushes along the streams and rivers in the Old South—except that they were a quarter the size. There were many other trees and shrubs that resembled, in miniature, trees and shrubs in the states from which the settlers had come.

There were other clues: the way the settlers' campfires burned so brightly in the Hill Country—because the wood in this new country was so dense and hard; the way the branches of even living trees were so rigid that they snapped at a touch; the stiffness and smallness of the leaves—even the somber darkness of their green, the darkness that added so much to the beauty of the Hill Country. And in the fields of the Hill Country there was, all but hidden in the tall grass, a rather large amount of a plant whose presence was surprising in such a lush, rich land: cactus. There were plenty of clues—plenty of warnings—to tell the settlers the line was there, but none of the settlers understood them.

The line was an "isohyet" (from the Greek: isos, equal; hyetos, rain)—a line drawn on a map so that all points along it have equal rainfall. This particular isohyet showed the westernmost limits in the United States along which the annual rainfall averages thirty inches; and a rainfall of thirty inches, when combined with two other factors—rate of evaporation (very high in the Hill Country), and seasonal distribution of rainfall (very uneven in the Hill Country, since most of it comes in spring or autumn thunder-showers)—is the bare minimum needed to grow crops successfully. Even this amount of rainfall, "especially with its irregular seasonal distribution," is, the United States Department of Agriculture would later state, "too low" for that purpose. East of that line, in other words, farmers could prosper; west of it, they couldn't. And when, in the twentieth century, meteorologists began charting isohyets, they would draw the crucial thirty-inch isohyet along the 98th meridian—almost exactly the border of the Hill Country. At the very moment in which settlers entered that country in pursuit of their dream, they unknowingly crossed a line which made the realization of that dream impossible. And since rainfall diminishes quite rapidly westward, with every step they took into the Hill Country, the dream became more impossible still.

Agricultural experts would later understand the line's significance. There is a "well-defined division" between the fertile east and the arid western regions of Texas, one expert would write in 1905: "An average line of change can be traced across the state … approximately where the annual rainfall diminishes to below 30 inches, or near the 98th meridian." That line, another expert could say in 1921, runs down the entire United States: "the United States may be divided into an eastern half and a western half, characterized, broadly speaking, one by a sufficient and the other by an insufficient amount of rainfall for the successful production of crops by ordinary farming methods." Historians, too, would come to understand it. One would sum up the Hill Country simply as "west of 98, west of thirty inches of rain." The Western historian Walter Prescott Webb says that the line amounts to "an institutional fault" (comparable to a geological fault) at which "the ways of life and living changed." But this understanding would come later—much later. At the time the Hill Country was being settled, there was no understanding at all—not of the climatic conditions and certainly not of their consequences. "When people first crossed this line," as Webb states, "they did not immediately realize the imperceptible change that had taken place in their environment, nor, more is the tragedy, did they foresee the full consequences which that change was to bring in their own characters and in their modes of life." This lack of understanding was demonstrated during the years leading up to the Civil War, when North and South argued over whether or not to prohibit slavery in areas that included western Texas and New Mexico. "In all this sound and fury," as Fehrenbach points out, "there was no real understanding that slavery, based on cotton agriculture, had reached its natural limits. It had no future west of the 98th meridian; where the [Edwards Plateau] began in Texas, the rainfall, and the plantation system of the 19th-century South, abruptly ended. From the middle of the state, on a line almost even with Austin, the rainfall dribbled away from 30 inches annually to 15 or less across the vast plateaus. The farm line halted in crippled agony."

The trap was baited by man as well as by nature. The government of Texas, eager to encourage immigration to strengthen the Indian-riddled frontier, plastered the South with billboards proclaiming Texas advantages, and was joined in boosterism by the state's press. In an overstatement that nonetheless has some truth in it, Fehrenbach writes that "There was almost a conspiracy to conceal the fact that in the West there was little water and rain. … Official pressure even caused regions where rainfall was fifteen inches annually to be described as 'less humid' in reports and geography books. The term 'arid' was angrily avoided." Boosterism was just as strong in the Hill Country: George Wilkins Kendall, who began sheep-ranching there in 1857, was soon trying to sell off land in Blanco County by firing off enthusiastic letters to the New Orleans Picayune exhorting others to follow his example. "Those who failed in the venture," notes a Hill Country resident, "were called 'Kendall's victims.'"

But when the first settlers came to the Hill Country, no one was calling them "victims," least of all themselves. If someone had told them the truth, in fact, they might not have listened. For the trap was baited well. Who, entering this land after a rainy April, when "the springs are flowing, the streams are rushing, the live oaks spread green canopies, and the field flowers wave in widespread beauty," would believe it was not in a "less humid" but an "arid" zone? Moreover, as to the adequacy of rainfall, the evidence of the settlers' own eyes was often misleading, for one aspect of the trap was especially convincing—and especially cruel. Meteorologists would later conclude that rainfall over the entire Edwards Plateau is characterized by the most irregular and dramatic cycles. Even modern meteorology cannot fathom their mysteries; in the 1950's, during a searing, parching dry spell that lasted for seven consecutive years, the United States Weather Bureau would confess that it had been unable to find any logical rhythm in Hill Country weather; "just when the cycle seems sure enough for planning, nature makes one of her erratic moves in the other direction." Rain can be plentiful in the Hill Country not just for one year, but for two or three—or more—in a row. Men, even cautious men, therefore could arrive during a wet cycle and conclude—and write home confidently—that rainfall was adequate, even abundant. And when, suddenly, the cycle shifted—and the shift could be very sudden; during the 1950's, it rained forty-one inches one year, eleven the next—who could blame these men for being sure that the dry spell was an aberration; that it would surely rain the next year—or the next? It had to, they felt; there was plenty of rain in the Hill Country—hadn't they seen it with their own eyes?

The first settlers did not realize they were crossing a significant line. They came into the new land blithely. After all those years in which they had feared their fate was poverty, they saw at last the glimmerings of a new hope. But in reality, from the moment they first decided to settle in this new land, their fate was sealed. Dreaming of cotton and cattle kingdoms, or merely of lush fields of corn and wheat, they went back for their families and brought them in, not knowing that they were bringing them into a land which would adequately support neither cattle nor cotton—nor even corn or wheat. Fleeing the crop lien and the furnishing merchant, hundreds of thousands of Southerners came to Texas. Of all those hundreds of thousands, few had come as far as these men who came to the Hill Country. And they had come too far.

THE BUNTONS HAD STOPPED just before the Hill Country. The Johnsons had headed into it, to become, they boasted, "the richest men in Texas."

They were descended from a John Johnson. Some family historians say he was "of English descent," but they don't know this for certain. The few known facts of his life, and of the life of his son, Jesse, fit the pattern—of migration into newly opened, fertile land, the using up of the land and the move west again—that underlay so much of the westward movement in America; and the Johnsons' route was the route many followed. Georgia, the most sparsely populated of the original thirteen colonies, wanted settlers, particularly settlers who could shoot, and it was the most generous of the colonies in offering land to Revolutionary War veterans. The first time the name of Lyndon Johnson's great-great-grandfather, John Johnson, who was a veteran, appears in an official record is in 1795, when he was paying taxes on land in Georgia's Oglethorpe County; by his death in 1827, he owned land in three other counties as well—but little else.

As Georgia's land wore out under repeated cotton crops, men searched for new land on which to plant it, and when, after the War of 1812, Georgia's western territories were cleared of Indians, settlers poured into them in a "Great Migration." John's son, Jesse, who was Lyndon Johnson's great-grandfather, was part of that migration. He was a "first settler" of Henry County. Few facts are known about Jesse's life, but from those few it is possible to theorize about big dreams—which, unlike the dreams of the Buntons, ended in failure. For a time, for example, Jesse Johnson appears to have been a respected and prosperous farmer in Henry County. He served as its sheriff from 1822 to 1835, and also as a judge. But by 1838, he was no longer living in Henry County; he and his wife, Lucy, and their ten children, had moved west again—into Alabama. There, in the records of Randolph County, appear again hints of transient success. The 1840 census lists only two persons in the entire county engaged in "commerce": Jesse and one of his sons. A local historian "guesses" that "they operated a stagecoach line or were in the banking business. They were prosperous." Jesse owned seventeen slaves. But by 1846, Jesse was GTT—to Lockhart, on the plains near the Hill Country. In the Lockhart courthouse are records showing that in 1850 Jesse Johnson owned 332 acres, 250 head of cattle and 21 horses, and there exists also a will drawn up, in 1854, as if Jesse believed he was leaving a substantial estate to his family. One of its clauses, for example, provides that at his wife's death, the estate is to be equally divided among his children, excepting the heirs of one who had died, "who I will to have one thousand dollars more than my other heirs." But the reality was that there was no thousand dollars "more"—or at all. When, after his death in 1856, his sons sold their father's assets, they didn't realize enough even to pay their father's debts. In 1858, two of them—Tom, then twenty-two years old, and Samuel Ealy Johnson, Lyndon Johnson's grandfather, then twenty—headed west into the hills, making their boast.

TO GO INTO THAT LAND took courage.

The Spanish and Mexicans had not dared to go. As early as 1730, they had built three presidios, or forts, in the Hill Country. But down from the Great Plains to the north swept the Lipan Apaches—"the terror," in the words of one early commentator, "of all whites and most Indians." The presidios lasted one year, then the Spanish pulled out their garrisons and retreated to San Antonio, the city below the Edwards Plateau. In 1757, lured by the Apaches' protestations that they were now ready to be converted to Christianity—and by Apache hints of fabulously rich silver mines—the Spaniards built a fort and a mission deep within the Hill Country, at San Saba. But the Apaches had only lured the Spaniards north—because pressing down into their territory were the Comanches, who rode to war with their faces painted black and whom even the Apaches feared; they had decided to let their two foes fight each other. The Spaniards believed that Comanche territory was far to the north; not knowing the Comanches, they didn't know that the only limit to the range of a Comanche war party was light for it to ride by or grass for its horses to feed on—and that when the grass was tall and the moon was full, Comanche warriors could range a thousand miles. On the morning of March 16, 1758, there was a shout outside the San Sabá mission walls; priests and soldiers looked out—and there, in barbaric splendor, wearing buffalo horns and eagle plumes, stood 2,000 Comanche braves.

When word of the San Sabá massacre reached San Antonio, the Spaniards sent out a punitive expedition—600 men armed with two field guns and a long supply train, the greatest Spanish expedition ever mounted in Texas. Its commander chased the Comanches all the way to the Red River—and then he caught them. He lost his cannon, all his supplies, and was lucky to get back to San Antonio with the remnants of his force—and thereafter the Hill Country, and all central Texas, was Comanchería, a fastness into which Spanish soldiers would not venture even in company strength. It wasn't until half a century later—in 1807—that the next attempt would be made to penetrate the Hill Country: a walled Spanish town, complete with houses and cattle, was built on a bluff near the present site of San Marcos. That lasted four years; when, during the 1820's, settlers from young Stephen Austin's colony in South Texas began to push up the Lower Colorado River, the only traces of the town were some remnants of cattle running with the buffalo. In 1839, the dashing President-elect of the three-year-old Republic of Texas, Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, hunting buffalo on the edge of the Hill Country, looked out to the beautiful hills and exclaimed: "This should be the seat of future empire!" The capital of the new Republic, Austin, was founded the next year on the spot where Lamar had stood. But Austin was still in Comanche country; from the surrounding hills, parties of mounted Penetaka Comanches watched the settlement being built; it wasn't until the 1850's that the town's slow, steady growth, combined with the success of the Republic's "ranging forces," forced the Indians to retreat.

Where they retreated to was the Hill Country. This was their stronghold. Writes a Texas historian: "They lived along the clear streams in the wooded valleys, venturing out to raid the white settlements, and ambushing any who were hardy enough to follow them into the hills."

But men followed them. Even as Austin was being built, pushing beyond it—into this country which Spanish soldiers wouldn't enter even in force—were men who entered it alone, or with their wives and children. As early as the 1840's, there were cabins in the Hill Country.

After Texas became one of the united states—in 1846—border defense became a federal responsibility, and the United States Army established a north-south line of forts in Texas about seventy-five miles deep in the Hill Country. But these forts were scattered, and their garrisons were tiny. They were ill-equipped with horses—at the time the forts were built, the Army did not even have a formal cavalry branch, and some of the first troops sent out to fight the fleet Comanches were infantry mounted on mules. For some years, moreover, they were not permitted to pursue Indians; they could fight only if attacked—which made them all but useless against the hit-and-run Indian raiders. But they did provide a little encouragement for settlement, and a little encouragement was all these men needed. Behind the fort line, Americans crept slowly up the valleys of the Hill Country. By 1853, there were thirty-six families along the Blanco River, and thirty-four along the Pedernales.

This was the very edge of the frontier. These families had left civilization as far behind as safety. Their homes were log cabins—generally small and shabby cabins, too. Shocked travelers found conditions in Texas rougher and more primitive than in other states. One traveler "just from the 'States,'" directed to a certain home in the Blanco Valley, thought as he neared it that it "must be one of the outhouses." Inside, however, he found eight people living—in a single room fourteen by sixteen feet. (Outhouses were, as a matter of fact, not common in the Hill Country; said Frederick Law Olmsted, who traveled through it in 1857: "It would appear that water-closets are of recent introduction in Texas"; he told of staying at one house where "there was no other water-closet than the back of a bush or the broad prairie.") The home of the ordinary Hill Country family, often set in a fire-blackened clearing still dotted with tree stumps, was a "dog-run"—two separate rooms or cabins connected under a continuous roof, with an open corridor left between for ventilation; the dog-run acquired its name, Fehrenbach notes, "from its most popular use, and the corridor was hardly the most sanitary of spots." The walls of these cabins, visitors complained, were so full of holes that they did little to keep the wind out; Rutherford Hayes wrote that he slept in one through whose walls a cat could be hurled "at random." The cabins were surrounded with tools, plows, pigs and hungry hounds. There were few amenities: "This life," Fehrenbach says, "was hardy, dirty, terribly monotonous, lonely, and damagingly narrow. … Few of the Americans who later eulogized it would care to relive it." The only thing plentiful was terror. This frontier was, for forty years, "a frontier of continual war." Indian wars raged for decades in many states, Fehrenbach notes, "but there was a difference to the Anglo frontier in Texas that colored the whole struggle, that embued it with virulent bitterness rare in any time or place. The Anglo frontier in Texas was not a frontier of traders, trappers and soldiers, as in most other states. It was a frontier of farming families, with women and small children, encroaching and colliding with a long-ranging, barbaric, war-making race."

Remington paintings—lines of mounted men charging on horseback—came to life on that frontier. The first battle in which Texas Rangers were armed with the new Colt revolver which was to equalize warfare with the Comanches—previously, one of these savage Cossacks of the Plains could charge 300 yards and shoot twenty arrows in the time it took a frontiersman to reload his single-shot rifle—took place, in 1842, on the Pedernales; Captain Jack Hays' Rangers routed the Comanches, whose war chief said: "I will never again fight Jack Hays, who has a shot for every finger on his hand." As late as 1849, at least 149 white men, women and children—the figures are incomplete—were killed on the Texas frontier. During a two-year period a decade later, hundreds died.

And those who died were luckier than those who were captured. The Comanches were masters of human torture for its own sake; many Hill Country families saw with their own eyes—and the rest heard about—the results of Comanche raids: women impaled on fenceposts and burned; men staked out to die under the blazing sun with eyelids removed, or with burning coals heaped on their genitals. Many women captured by the Comanches were raped,* and afterward they might be scalped but left alive—so the Comanches could hold red-hot tomahawks against their naked skulls. For the Hill Country, the full moon—"the Comanche moon"—meant terror. Recalling her girlhood, one pioneer woman remembered how "people were always on the alert and watching for the red men. If we children went to the spring to get a bucket of water, we watched all the time to see if an Indian came out of the brush or from behind a tree. We lived in constant dread and fear. … If the dogs barked we thought of Indians at once. … My mother said she had suffered a thousand deaths at that place." One night, she recalled, her father saw a light in a nearby valley and, leaving her mother, her brother and her alone, went to investigate. He didn't come back for a long time, and then the three of them heard the footsteps of several men approaching—and sixty years later, she still remembered how they waited to see who would open the door, and what their fate would be. Fortunately, it was her father with some white men who had been camped in the valley, but sixty years later she could still remember "the agonizing fear we had." And she adds a poignant note: "Why men would take their families out in such danger, I can't understand."

Nonetheless, whatever the terrors of the land, white men, believing in its promise of wealth, came to claim it. In 1858, there were enough—perhaps a thousand—people along the Blanco and Pedernales rivers and their tributary streams to form a county (Blanco County, after the white Hill Country limestone), and to build a church and a school (in which, along a wall, lay long logs the length of the building, to hold the shutters in place in case of Indian attack). And for two men who came to Blanco County in 1858, young Tom and Sam Johnson, it appeared for a while as if the promise would be fulfilled.

When, after the Civil War, in which both brothers fought (Private Sam Johnson had a horse shot from under him at the Battle of Pleasant Hill; under fire, he carried a wounded companion from the battlefield), they returned to the Hill Country, they found that their small herd of cattle had multiplied—as had the cattle left to run wild by other men; before the war, with prices low and markets and transportation uncertain, cattle had not been valuable. The hills were swarming with steers—longhorns unbranded and free for the taking; Texas law made unbranded stock public property.

And now, suddenly, cattle were very valuable. Giant cities were rising in the North, cities hungry for meat. And there was, all at once, a means of getting the meat to the cities—the railroads pushing west.

In 1867, the rails reached Abilene, Kansas, and about that same year, lured by rumors of high prices—the price of a cow in Texas was still only three or four dollars—the first drives began to head out of the Hill Country: east to Austin to get out of the hills and then north up the Chisholm Trail, across the Red River and up to the boomtown railhead on the Kansas plains. The men who drove those first herds must have wondered—as on their journey of over a thousand miles they battled stampedes, outlaws, Indians and hysterical Kansas mobs afraid the cattle were carrying "Texas fever"—if the trip would be worth it. But when they reached Abilene they stopped wondering. The price of a longhorn there in 1867 was between forty and fifty dollars. Men who had left penniless returned to the Hill Country carrying pouches of gold. Forty dollars for four-dollar steers! Forty dollars for steers you could get for nothing! All you needed was land rich in grass and water to graze your herds on, and the Hill Country had all the grass and water a man could want. They rounded up the cows in the hills, and brought more in from the southern plains—huge herds of them—to graze on that rich Hill Country grass.

The Johnson brothers were among those first trail drivers. In 1867, they bought a ranch on the Pedernales; by 1869, their corrals stretched along the river for miles; by 1870, they were, one of their riders said, the "largest individual trail drivers operating in Blanco, Gillespie, Llano, Hays, Comal and Kendall Counties"; during that year, they drove 7,000 longhorns north on the Chisholm Trail to Abilene. Tom led the last drive; "on his return from Kansas," one of his cowboys recalled, "his saddlebags were full of gold coins." Sitting at a table in the brothers' ramshackle ranchhouse, he "placed the saddlebags and a Colt's revolver on the table, and counted out the money—$100,000."

Riding beside Sam on those drives was his wife. She was Eliza Bunton, the daughter of Robert Holmes Bunton, the successful Lockhart rancher, and she had the Bunton looks (a relative described her as "tall, with patrician bearing, high-bred features, raven hair, piercing black eyes, and magnolia-white skin") and the Bunton pride ("She loved to talk of her" hero uncle, John Wheeler Bunton, and of other ancestors, a cousin who had been Governor of Kentucky, for example, and a brother who was fighting with the Texas Rangers; "she admonished her children to be worthy of their glorious heritage"). Sam, a dashing, gallant, handsome young man with black hair and the soft blue-gray eyes, shaded by long eyelashes, that were characteristic of the Johnsons, married her following the successful drive in 1867 and brought her to the ranchhouse on the Pedernales—but she refused to stay there.

Describing those early cattle drives, one historian writes of "the months of grinding, 18-hour days in the saddle, the misery of rainstorms and endless dust clouds, the fright of Indian or cattle rustler attack, the sheer terror of a night stampede when lightning sparked across the plains." Few women rode on those early drives. But Eliza rode (one historian says she was the only Hill Country wife who did)—not only rode but, astride a fleet Kentucky-bred mare that her father had given her, rode out ahead of the herd to scout.* "Gently reared," wrote an historian of Eliza Bunton Johnson, "she took to the frontier life like the heroine she was."

It was still the era when the full moon brought terror to the Hill Country—it was the worst of the era, in fact, for just the year before, while the families in the lonely cabins in the hills raged helplessly at the government in faraway Washington that didn't understand (or understood all too well, some said: however unfounded, suspicion existed in the Hill Country that Washington was deliberately trying to punish the ex-Rebs), the government had withdrawn the troops from its forts. In July, 1869, it brought terror to Eliza. A young couple who lived not far from the Johnsons was caught and killed by Comanches; the man who found them could tell that the woman had been scalped while still alive. Sam was one of the men who rode out on the Indians' trail—and while he was gone, and Eliza, alone except for her baby daughter, Mary, was drawing water from a spring near her cabin, she saw Comanches riding toward her through the woods. The Indians hadn't noticed her yet; running to her cabin, she snatched up the baby, and crawled down into the root cellar. She closed the trapdoor, and then stuck a stick through a crack in it, and inched a braided rug over the trapdoor so that it couldn't be seen. As she heard the Indians approaching, she tied a diaper over Mary's mouth—published accounts say it was an "extra diaper," but that is a cleaned-up story: it was the dirty diaper the baby had been wearing—to keep her from making a sound. The Indians burst into the cabin, and as she crouched in the dark, Eliza heard them smashing the wedding gifts she and Sam had brought from Lockhart. Then they went outside and she heard them stealing horses from the corral and riding away. She didn't come out of the cellar until, after dark, Sam came home.

But 1869 was the last year of heavy Comanche raids. Far north of the Hill Country, in the Comanche homeland, white men were decimating the buffalo, which was food, clothing and shelter to the Indians, and thus were forcing them to move onto reservations or starve. Not for some years would the Hill Country be finally freed from the fear of the Comanche moon—the last Indian raid in Blanco County took place in 1875—but beginning in 1870, the raids became noticeably fewer, and finally faded away. The Johnson brothers—and the other men, and women, who had settled the land—had won it.

AND THEN THEY BEGAN to find out about the land.

All the time they had been winning the fight with the Comanches, they had, without knowing it, been engaged in another fight—a fight in which courage didn't count, a fight which they couldn't win. From the first day on which huge herds of cattle had been brought in to graze on that lush Hill Country grass, the trap had been closing around them. And now, with the Indians gone, and settlement increasing—and the size of the herds increasing, too, year by year—it began to close faster.

The grass the cattle were eating was the grass that had been holding that thin Hill Country soil in place and shielding it from the beating rain. The cattle ate the grass—and then there was no longer anything holding or shielding the soil.

In that arid climate, grass grew slowly, and as fast as it grew, new herds of cattle ate it. They ate it closer and closer to the ground, ate it right down into the matted turf—the soil's last protection. Then rain came—the heavy, pounding Hill Country thunderstorms. The soil lay naked beneath the pounding, of the rain—this soil which lay so precariously on steep hillsides.

The soil began to wash away.

It washed faster and faster; the Hill Country storms had always been fierce, but the grass had not only shielded the soil from the rain but had caught the rain and fed it out slowly, gently, down the hillsides into the streams. Now, with less grass to hold it, the rain ran off faster and faster, eating into the soil, cutting gullies into it.

And there was so little soil. From one Spring to the next, landscape changed. One year, a rancher would be looking contentedly at hills covered with grass—green, lush. The next Spring, he would keep waiting for those hills to turn green, but they stayed brown—little grass, and that parched, and bare soil showing through. And the next, he would suddenly realize that there was white on them, white visible through the brown—chalky white, limestone white: the bare rock was showing through. Not only was the grass gone, in many places so was the soil in which new grass could grow. Flash floods roared down the gullies now (men called them "gully-washers" or "stump-jumpers"); they raced down the sheer, slippery limestone hard enough to rip away even tree stumps and carried the soil away faster and faster. Sometimes it happened almost before a man's eyes; one afternoon, there would be soil on a hill, soil in which he hoped that next year at least grass would grow and he could graze stock there; then a thunderstorm, and the next morning when he looked at the hill he would see a hill of bare white rock. The steep hills went first, of course, but even shallower slopes washed fairly soon—it all happened so fast. That rock was the reality of the Hill Country. It had taken centuries to disguise it with grass, but it took only a very few years for that disguise to be ripped away. Even on the shallowest slopes, on which grass remained, in a very short time the richness of the land was gone.

Then the brush came.

Fire had held it back—fires set by lightning and Indians—fire and grass. But now the Indians were gone, and when lightning started a prairie fire, men hurried to put it out, not understanding that it was a friend and not a foe. And what was left of the grass wasn't the tall, strong bluestem and Indian grass but shorter, delicate strains.

So the brush began to move up out of the ravines and off the rocky cliff-faces to which it had been confined. It began to creep into the meadows: small, low, dense shrubs and bushes and stunted trees, catclaw and prickly pear and Spanish dagger, shrub oak and juniper—and mesquite, mesquite with its lacy leaves so delicate in the sun, and, hidden in the earth, its monstrous, voracious taproot that reached and reached through thin soil, searching for more and more water and nourishment. Finally, even cedar came, cedar that can grow in the driest, thinnest soil, cedar whose fierce, aggressive roots are strong enough to rip through rock to find moisture, and which therefore can grow where there is no soil—cedar that grows so fast that it seems to gobble up the ground. The brush came first in long tentacles pushing hesitantly forward into a grassy meadow, and then in a thin line, and then the line becoming thicker, solid, so that sometimes a rancher could see a mass of rough, ragged, thorny brush moving implacably toward the delicate green of a grassy meadow and then, in huge bites, devouring it. Or there would be a meadow that a rancher was sure was safe—no brush anywhere near it, a perfect place for his cattle if only the grass would come back—and one morning he would suddenly notice one shrub pushing up in it, and even if he pulled it up, its seeds would already be thrown, and the next year there would be a dozen bushes in its place.

The early settlers in the Hill Country couldn't believe how fast the brush spread. In the early days, it seemed to cowboys that, from one year to the next, whole sections of land changed; one year, they would be riding untrammeled across open meadows; the next year, in the same meadows, their horses had to step cautiously through scrub a foot or two high; the next year, the scrub was up to a rider's shins as he sat his horse—they called these scrub jungles "shinnery"—and horses couldn't get through it any more. When white men first came into the Hill Country, there was little cedar there. Twenty years later, cedar covered whole areas of the country as far as the eye could see; by 1904, a single cedar brake reaching northwest from Austin covered 500 square miles—and was growing, faster and faster, every year. And every acre of brush meant an acre less of grass.

AT FIRST, it didn't seem to matter so much, because in about 1870 cotton began to be raised in the Hill Country and for a few years it prospered, the Hill Country earth producing a bale or more per acre. A Hill Country historian writes, "That king cash crop was … being sowed wherever there was enough dirt to sprout a seed, … wherever their mules could tug a plow, whether in the valleys, in the slopes, or atop the hills."

But cotton was worse for this country than cattle, which, through their manure, put back into the soil between thirty and forty percent of the nutrients their grazing removed from it. Cotton put back nothing, and as each crop fed upon the soil, the soil grew poorer, thinner, more powdery. Cattle ate the grass down, but at least left the roots underneath. The steel blades of the plows used in cotton-planting ripped through the roots and killed them. Moreover, cotton was a seasonal crop, and, not knowing the science of crop rotation and continuous cover—no one knew it, of course, until the 1880's—the Hill Country farmers didn't plant anything in their cotton fields after harvest, which meant that for months of each year, including the entire winter, the land lay naked and defenseless, no roots within it to strengthen it, no grass atop it to shield it.

Inevitably, drought came. The land burned beneath the blazing Hill Country sun, what was left of its nutrients scorching away, what was left of the roots within it starving and shriveling. Winds—those continual Hill Country breezes that help make the climate so delightful, and the winter northers that come sweeping down off the Great Plains—blew the soil away in swirls of dust, blew it, as one bitter Hill Country farmer put it, into "the next county, the next region, the next state." And when the heavy, hammering rains came, they washed the soil away, down the steep hillsides and along the furrows of the cotton fields (which the farmers all too often cut up and down the slope instead of across it) into the creeks and rivers, cutting gullies in the ground that the next rain would make even deeper, so that the rain would run down that land even faster. Water poured down the hillsides and into the creeks in a torrent, and flash floods roared down the creeks' slick limestone beds, sweeping away the fertile land on their banks that was the only truly fertile land in the Hill Country. The rivers rose, and, when they receded, sucked more of the fertile soil back down with them, to run down the Pedernales to the Colorado, down the Colorado to the Gulf. And all the time, in the places too steep for mules to pull a plow, men, remembering the trail drives and the pouches of gold, persisted in grazing cattle, who kept "eating down the grass as fast as it could grow and faster, leaving nude soil in those places, too, to blow and wash away."

It had taken centuries to create the richness of the Hill Country. In two decades or three after man came into it, the richness was gone. In the early 1870's, the first few years of cotton-planting there, an acre produced a bale or more of cotton; by 1890, it took more than three acres to produce that bale; by 1900, it took eleven acres.

The Hill Country had been a beautiful trap. It was still beautiful—even more beautiful, perhaps, because woods covered so much more of it now, and there were still the river-carved landscapes, the dry climate, the clear blue sky—but it was possible now to see the jaws of the trap. No longer, in fact, was it even necessary to look beneath the surface of the country to see the jaws. On tens of thousands of acres the reality was visible right on the surface. These acres—hundreds of square miles of the Hill Country—had once been thickly covered with grass. Now they were covered with what from a distance appeared to be debris. Up close, it became apparent that the debris was actually rocks—from small, whitish pebbles to stones the size of fists—that littered entire meadows. A farmer might think when he first saw them that these rocks were lying on top of the soil, but if he tried to clear away a portion of the field and dig down, he found that there was no soil—none at all, or at most an inch or two—beneath those rocks. Those rocks were the soil—they were the topmost layer of the limestone of which the Hill Country was formed. The Hill Country was down to reality now—and the reality was rock. It was a land of stone, that fact was plain now, and the implications of that fact had become clear. The men who had come into the Hill Country had hoped to grow rich from the land, or at least to make a living from it. But there were only two ways farmers or ranchers can make a living from land: plow it or graze cattle on it. And if either of those things was done to this land, the land would blow or wash away.

THE JOHNSON BROTHERS appear not to have recognized the trap—not to have recognized the reality of the Hill Country. Their grandiose dreams were nourished and protected by the nature of their occupation. "The terms used to describe the cattle explosion were always kingdom or empire, never the cattle business or the cattle industry," Fehrenbach points out. Its grandeur—the herds that stretched as far as the eye could see; the endless drives across the immense, empty land; the shower of golden eagles—fed big dreams, and in Abilene the brothers had met, or at least heard about, men who had proved that such dreams could come true, men who had started out as cattle-drivers but had become much more—John Chisum, Charles Goodnight, Richard King, the Rio Grande steamboat captain who had gone into cattle-driving not so long before they did and was now becoming a king indeed, with a ranch that, men whispered, covered more than a million acres ("The sun's done riz, and the sun's done set, And I ain't off'n the King Ranch yet"). The Johnson brothers weren't content to be merely cattle-drivers. Land in the Hill Country, which for so long had been free, was beginning to be bought up now, and the Johnson boys, while continuing to graze most of their cattle on land still vacant, bought a lot of it: 640 acres in Blanco County to add to the 320 they had started with, and then 1,280 acres more; 170 acres in Hays County and then 533 more—they bought both these tracts in 1870, plunking down in payment $10,925 in gold coins; and then far bigger ranches, unsurveyed and still measured in leagues, in Gillespie County. The most valuable real estate in the Hill Country was in its leading "city," Fredericksburg—the Johnsons bought real estate in Fredericksburg. They even bought a large, valuable tract in south Austin. They "made a market for almost everything: corn, bacon, labor, and cow ponies," John Speer writes—labor because the Johnsons needed all the men the Hill Country could supply for their drives north. By 1871, the Johnson brothers weren't merely the largest trail-drivers in the Hill Country; they were probably the largest landowners, too. To help them run things, they brought in three nephews—Jesse, John and James Johnson—and a cousin, Richard; soon Sam and Tom bought a busy mill, the Action Mill in Fredericksburg, and started making plans to open a store.

The Johnsons were building an empire up in the hills.

BUT THE LAND WAS DOMINANT, and while the Hill Country may have seemed a place of free range and free grass, in the Hill Country nothing was free. Success—or even survival—in so hard a land demanded a price that was hard to pay. It required an end to everything not germane to the task at hand. It required an end to illusions, to dreams, to flights into the imagination—to all the escapes from reality that comfort men—for in a land so merciless, the faintest romantic tinge to a view of life might result not just in hardship but in doom. Principles, noble purposes, high aims—these were luxuries that would not be tolerated in a land of rock. Only material considerations counted; the spiritual and intellectual did not; the only art that mattered in the Hill Country was the art of the possible. Success in such a land required not a partial but a total sacrifice of idealism; it required not merely pragmatism but a pragmatism almost terrifying in its absolutely uncompromising starkness. It required a willingness to face the hills head-on in all their grim-ness, to come to terms with their unyielding reality with a realism just as unyielding—a willingness, in other words, not only to accept sacrifices but to be as cruel and hard and ruthless as this cruel and hard and ruthless land. Fehrenbach, writing about Texas as a whole but in words that apply with particular force to the Hill Country, says that because of the "harshness" of the "pressing realities" of the land,

Inner convictions, developed in more rarified civilizations, could not stand unless they were practical. … The man who held to a preconceived attitude toward Indians, and could not learn the Comanche reality, often saw his family killed; or he himself died in his own homestead's ashes. A little-noted but obvious fact of the Texas frontier was that some men lived and some families prospered on the edge of Comanchería, while many others failed. And chance was not the major determining factor. Eternal vigilance, eternal hardness, was the price of success. … A Charles Goodnight could move early onto the far edge of nowhere, and hold his new range against all comers. Some men could not.

The Johnsons could not. They were, in fact, particularly unsuited to such a land, and not just because they were, in the sense that mattered in the Hill Country, unrealistic—as, in failing to understand the reality of the land, they grazed their herds on the same meadows every year. Noting that "the best-adapted Westerner was keenly intelligent and observant but at the same time highly unintellectual," Fehrenbach points out that "Table talk, as writer after American writer has recorded, was of crops and cattle, markets and weather, never some remote realm of ideas." Table talk at the Johnsons' was quite often of ideas. Sam Johnson, who had nine children, encouraged them to discuss "serious issues" at the table for the same reason he encouraged them to play whist, a relative recalls: "He encouraged his children to engage in games that required them to think." After dinner, he would often have them engage in impromptu debates. Two of his three sons became teachers: one attended the University of Michigan—possibly the first Hill Country boy to travel out of Texas for an education. Sam was interested not just in politics but in government; at a time when few people in the Hill Country got newspapers—and when those who did, got them, by freight wagon, a week or two late—he subscribed to an Austin daily and arranged to have it delivered every other day to Weinheimer's General Store in the nearby town of Stonewall—even though he had to ford the Pedernales to pick it up. His politics, moreover, were less practical than idealistic. One of his key beliefs was in a "tenant purchase program" that would enable tenant farmers to buy their farms: men, he said, should not have to work land they did not own; when asked for details of the program, he was a little vague. Every available description of Samuel Ealy Johnson emphasizes his interest in philosophy and theology, not just in the Fundamentalist religion of the Hill Country but in deeper religious questions. He was a Baptist, but once a minister of a sect called the Christadelphians stopped at the Johnson house, and Sam welcomed the opportunity to debate with him. All through dinner and into the evening, they discussed the Bible. Because the minister raised questions he couldn't answer, Sam arranged for him to debate the local Baptist preacher. And because Sam felt that the Christadelphian had won the debate, he changed his membership to that church.

The Johnsons were dreamers. There was a streak of romanticism in them—of extravagance, a gift for the grandiose gesture. When Sam married Eliza, Tom gave his brother's bride a carriage with trappings of silver and, to pull it, a matched span of magnificent Kentucky-born thoroughbreds, named Sam Bass and Coreen—a gift not only unheard of in the Hill Country but, in that country, incredibly expensive.

The Johnsons were impractical. Eliza, a Bunton, was not; she was known for the shrewd bargaining with which she sold her eggs, and for repeating the family saying: "Charity begins at home." But her husband and his brother, lulled, no doubt, by the sweep and grandeur of the cattle business, and by the ease with which money was made in it, acted as if they couldn't be bothered with mundane details—as if, for example, haggling and bargaining were beneath them. When Tom returned from Abilene in 1870 with the $100,000 in twenty-dollar gold double eagles, the men—many of them German businessmen from Fredericksburg, businessmen whose penuriousness is legendary in Texas—who had given the Johnsons their cattle on credit came in to be paid. The Johnsons took receipts for the money they paid out, but not in a very orderly way. Relates Speer:

They took receipts and soon had a large carpetbag full, and in such a shape that there is no doubt in my mind that a good many beeves were paid for twice, and some of them several times. …

As Fehrenbach points out, for all the romance of the Cattle Kingdom, the men who became its barons—the Goodnights and Chisums and Kings—were, above all else, businessmen. The Johnson brothers were not. When they had finished paying for the beeves, they had made many people in the Hill Country happy, Speer notes; "$20 gold pieces were about as plentiful as 50-cent pieces are now." But while the Johnsons still had a lot of money left—it was the following month that they paid the $10,000 in gold for the Hays County land—they had less than they had expected to—and not enough when measured against their dreams.

They were guilty of wishful thinking. "Cowmen in whom wishful thinking was … dominant," Fehrenbach says, could not survive. Sam Johnson was, a relative says, "a man of great optimism," and his brother apparently shared the trait. Every trail drive was in a way a gamble, a gamble that while you were on the trail, you wouldn't lose your herd to floods or Indians or disease; a gamble that when you reached trail's end, prices would still be high. Eventually, a gambler will lose at least some rolls of the dice—in terms of poker, for the Johnson boys loved to play poker, at least some hands. A prudent, practical gambler keeps a reserve to tide him over the inevitable runs of bad luck. The Johnsons were not prudent and practical. They had gambled in 1867 and 1868 and 1869 and 1870, and had won each time, and they seemed to think they could not lose, for they kept nothing back as a hedge against disaster. No matter how successful they were, they bet everything they had made on the next year's drive. Each year, the poker-playing Johnsons shoved into the pot their whole pile.

After they had finished paying out the gold pieces in 1870, they spent those remaining on land. They owned that land free and clear—but only for a few months, for they wanted more land, much more, and to get it, they mortgaged to the hilt what they already owned. To get cattle for the 1871 drives, they bought as many head on credit as they could, promising as usual to pay for them on their return, and then borrowed $10,000 from eight Fredericksburg Germans, giving the Action Mill as collateral, to buy more. The brothers had taken 7,000 head north to Abilene in 1870, their biggest year up to that time; in 1871, they assembled in the milling corrals along the Pedernales several times 7,000—one of their drivers, Horace Hall, was to say that "The Johnson boys have brought up 25 herds this season, the smallest of which was 1500." They had assembled a fortune on the hoof. They had bet everything they owned and everything they could borrow on another successful year.

And in the Hill Country, that was a bad bet to make.

"THE YEAR 1871 set in cold, sleety and disagreeable," Speer recounts. There had been only mild winters in the Hill Country since the Civil War, but now howling northers swept down from the Great Plains one after another. Solid ice three inches thick covered the hills. Cattle died.

The richness of the land had been going. There had been a warning on July 7, 1869: a flood that, Speer said, "did great damage to farms along the creeks and branches." A stagecoach was swept away in the Blanco River; several passengers were drowned. A mill was washed off the banks and found two miles downstream, hanging in a tree. Speer had lived in the Hill Country for ten years; this was "the first overflow," he said. "The Blanco was higher than it had ever been before." He displays a light-hearted attitude: "It was really grand to stand off at a safe distance and see the Blanco on a grand tear." But the second overflow came the very next year. Speer didn't laugh this time; he called it "terrible." People began to wonder; "all the old inhabitants were hunted up and interviewed, but not one of them had ever seen anything like it," Speer wrote. And no one understood its significance. Nonetheless, in 1871, the meadows along the Pedernales were no longer so thick with grass to make cattle fat. Spring came, but rain didn't—the Hill Country had had half a dozen wet years; now it had drought. The Johnsons' cattle were thin when they set out on the long trail.

When the first of the Johnson herds reached the Red River ford that they always used, they found other herds lined up before them for miles. And when they finally got to Abilene, they saw, "for miles around the chief shipping points, the stock herded awaiting a chance to sell or ship. From any knoll could be seen thousands of sleek beeves, their branching horns glistening in the sunlight." Over twice as many cattle as in any previous year—a million longhorns—were driven north from Texas in 1871, and they glutted the market. There was, moreover, a recession in the Northeast, and an end to a railroad rate war which had previously benefited the cattlemen. Prices plummeted. In hopes that prices would rise, and that their thin beeves would fatten, the Johnsons bought Northern corn and kept their herds off the market, but prices only fell further. "Half the cattle brought from Texas [in 1871] remained unsold and had to be wintered … on the plains of Kansas," Webb states. The Johnsons might have wanted to winter their stock in Kansas, but they couldn't; their $10,000 note fell due on December 15. About November 15, selling at the very bottom of the market, they headed home.

The trip home was bleak. Winter had come early that year; "the winds cut a fellow through and through," Horace Hall wrote his mother. Arriving at the Arkansas River, they had a long delay because there were so many other wagons ahead of them waiting for the ferry. Their reception at home was even bleaker, for they were returning to a country that had been depending on them, a country whose prosperity was tied up with theirs. Moreover, in order to make even a token payment on the $10,000 note and keep the mill, they had to default on many of their smaller debts, "which," Speer says, "was a great loss to the people and destroyed confidence. Some were disposed to say, and no doubt believe, hard things about [Tom] Johnson, but in justice … I will say that while he prospered no one condemned him." The Johnsons' arrogance—their inability to excuse and explain, to plead for time—made the situation worse. Mortgages were foreclosed, lawsuits begun—the brothers lost the land in Austin, the land in Fredericksburg, the land in Gillespie County measured in leagues, most of the land in Blanco County. And then, after struggling to make a few more token payments on the $10,000 debt, they could make no more—and they lost the mill anyway. They had been building an empire; a single disastrous year, and it was gone.

THEY WERE REDUCED to frantic maneuverings. To avoid a court-ordered sale of a tract of land to satisfy a debt, they hurriedly sold it to one of their nephews, James Polk Johnson. On another occasion, a creditor secured a court order to have another tract auctioned by the Blanco County sheriff on the steps of the county courthouse; however, there were only two bidders and the land was sold for a fraction of its value—to a man who promptly sold it right back to the Johnsons.

Trying to recoup, the brothers put together another—much smaller—herd in 1872. (Some indication of the distrust in which they were now held is a condition of the credit extended: a lawyer, one "Mr. Louis of Fredericksburg," had to be taken along on the drive.) But the drought in 1872 was terrible. The blazing Hill Country sun seared the grass brown and then burned the soil beneath—it was so thin now—all the way through. Creeks dried up; the Pedernales ran sluggish and low. So intense was the heat that branding and other round-up activities had to be halted; on July 22, Horace Hall wrote his mother that "It has been so hot that we can do nothing working with the stock for the flies blow wherever blood is drawn." That Summer the Comanches raided, killing or kidnapping several persons, and running off between 250 and 300 horses which the Johnsons had been preparing to drive north and sell, a considerable loss since a good cow pony was then worth eighty dollars. The precise results of the 1872 drive are not known, but late in that year another lawsuit was filed against the Johnsons, and in 1873 the last of their land in Blanco County was sold by the sheriff on the courthouse steps—this time without any maneuvering. In 1871, Tom Johnson had paid taxes in Blanco County on property worth $16,000; in 1872, on property worth $6,000; in 1873, on property worth $180. He is not listed on any tax roll in 1874 or 1875 or 1876; no detail of his life is available. In 1877, he drowned in the Brazos River in Bosque County; no detail of his death exists, either. In the meantime, Sam, whose property in Blanco had been assessed at $15,000 in 1871, had moved out of Blanco, away from the Pedernales, down to Lockhart on the plains near his father-in-law, Robert Holmes Bunton, and then, after a short stay there, to a small farm near Buda, on a low ridge just on the edge of the Hill Country. This farm appears—the records are unclear—to have been purchased by his wife, with money given her by her father.

Sam and Eliza Johnson lived on this farm for fourteen years, raising nine children, trying to live on a reduced scale, running a few score cattle, planting about a hundred acres of the farm in cotton, corn and wheat. But the trap had closed. "About this time," Speer writes, "it began to be said, 'the range is broken, played out,' and we must now depend on farming." But the land was no longer so good for farming, either; there were good years mixed with the bad, but the trend was inexorable. The Buda farm had once yielded a bale of cotton per acre; by 1879, four acres were needed to produce that bale. And by 1879, a bale of cotton wasn't worth nearly as much money as it had been when Sam and Eliza first moved to the farm: 18 cents per pound in 1871, cotton was selling for 10 cents in 1879. In 1879, Sam Johnson sold his crops for $560—five hundred dollars for a year's work, for a man who had ridden the trail with pouches of gold! (Of the $560, he had to pay a hired hand $200 for help in harvesting.)

The Hill Country, meanwhile, was up to its old tricks. 1881 was a good year, and as for 1882, well, that was a year, Speer writes, that reminded him that "some years Texas floats in grease"—"this was emphatically a greasy year. Grass was fine, fruit and most kinds of grain good, and cotton—well, cotton just outdid itself." 1883 was a good year, too—and three good years in a row made men hope. In 1884, Sam and Eliza began selling off parts of their Buda farm to get money to move back to their beloved "mountains." They couldn't raise enough; there was only one thing left to sell—and they sold it, or rather Sam's wife did. Eliza Bunton Johnson, who had kept for twenty years the silver-mounted carriage that had been her wedding present, sold it, and the matched team of Sam Bass and Coreen that she loved, and with the money made a down payment on a 433-acre farm on the Pedernales, near the ranch she and her husband had owned when they were young. They moved there in 1887—just in time for the terrible drought of 1888, the worst drought that anyone in the Hill Country could remember.

NOT ONLY THE JOHNSONS had been young when they moved away from the Pedernales. So had the land. When they moved back, it was still fairly good for farming, by Hill Country standards, but its primal richness was gone. As for grazing, it now took several acres to support a single cow. The Johnsons arrived back on the Pedernales poor, and lived there almost thirty years—during which they grew poorer.

There are glimpses of their life—photographs of a home that was little more than a shanty, or, rather, two shanties connected: a "dog-run" with a sagging roof and a sagging porch surrounded by a yard, fenced with barbed wire, that was only dirt spotted with tufts of grass and weeds; a daughter's recollection of a long sideboard with a marble top, a Bunton heirloom, stored in the smokehouse because there was no room in the home. Eliza, it is said, kept her egg-and-butter money in an old purse in "the depths of the big zinc trunk, which held her treasures and her meeting clothes." When one of her children needed money,

she would bring out [the purse], holding the egg-and-butter money carefully saved for the purchase of a new black silk dress, and count out the exact amount needed by the child temporarily financially embarrassed. Sometimes the purse was left empty, but she eagerly assured the recipient of … her own lack of present need. … All references to the handsome clothes and the elegant furniture of more prosperous days were casual, never complaining nor regretful.

Sam had lost none of the Johnson temper. Once, when his son George "belittled the scriptures, his father … knocked him across the room." And he had lost none of the Johnson interest in topics beyond the state of the weather. The Austin paper was still delivered every other day; every other day he would spur his horse, Old Reb, into the Pedernales to ford it to the mailbox on the far side; he would sit in Weinheimer's Store in Stonewall all evening discussing politics and government. In later years, it is recalled, he would often sit on his front porch, reading his Bible or his newspaper, chatting with passersby—or just sitting, an aging man with a snowy beard and a thick mane of white hair, gazing in the evening out over the Pedernales landscape that was dotted here and there with a few lonely cows wandering through hills that had once been covered with great herds.

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*Fehrenbach says that "There was never to be a single case of a white woman being taken by Southern Plains Indians without rape."

*"I am the hero of our camp," wrote one of the Johnsons' cowboys, Horace M. Hall, in 1871. "Riding out with Mrs. Johnson some 8 miles in advance of the train, … I shot a deer."