The Path to Power (5 page)

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.

T
HE
B
UNTONS 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.

T
O 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.