The Path to Power (6 page)

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,
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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.
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“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.

A
ND 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.