The Path to Power (8 page)

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:

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.

“T
HE 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.

T
HEY 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.

N
OT ONLY THE
J
OHNSONS
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,