Means of Ascent

by Robert A. Caro

  To induce merchants to use his “freight line,” he knew, he would have to maintain a regular schedule. He announced he would make a round trip every week, even though that meant logging more than twenty miles a day.

  Six-horse teams were generally driven from a seat on the wagon, but the old trail-drivers with whom Coke had bunked in his ranch jobs had told the boy how such teams had been driven in the early days on the frontier, and that was how he drove his: sitting among them. By riding the wheel horse, the one on the left in the team closest to the wagon, he could spur him on, and could reach the one beside him, too, with a kick; he used the whip on the other four. It was harder to sit a saddle all day than to sit on a wagon seat, but you could control the horses better, and get the most out of them.

  The trip was as hard as men had foreseen. It would be many years before Coke Stevenson could bring himself to talk about the months during which, every day, “you had to make twenty miles a day” over those rocks and ruts with little chance that, should a wheel or an axle break or any of a thousand other possible mishaps occur on those “seldom traveled trails,” someone would come along to help. When, decades later, he did talk about those months, men who knew the Hill Country and who could picture the difficulties he had surmounted would look at him with awe. He would unload his freight in Brady, fall asleep exhausted in the wagonyard, and be up before dawn the next morning to load up again and head out on the road back. When it rained out on the trail, he slept underneath the wagon; when it rained for several days, he would be wet through for several days. When the wagon mired in the mud, there was no one but him and the horses to get it out; “once I got stuck so bad in a mudhole that I was there eleven days,” he would recall. The rain kept falling; at night he was so wet and cold that he burrowed into the load of freight for warmth. But, as a friend was to write, “rare was the occasion when he did not maintain his schedule, and the confidence of his customers grew with each successfully completed trip.” And opportunity had, indeed, been there. Carrying “anything from a bolt of linen to a windmill,” he earned enough to buy a second wagon, which he hitched behind the first, and he filled that with goods too. He began to make money; forty dollars a month, he would later recall.

  But a freight line was not what he had always wanted, and by this time Coke Stevenson had decided there were better ways of getting what he wanted. He wrote away for the textbooks, and each night on the trail, after he had cooked dinner and rubbed down the horses (one of his brothers was to recall how Coke “treasured those six horses; they were all he had”), he would build up the campfire and lie on his stomach in the circle of its light and teach himself bookkeeping. During those evenings the teenage boy’s only companions in the dark hills would be the horses and the books; a friend to whom, years later, Coke Stevenson talked about his experiences described them as “evenings of loneliness.”

  After two years of freighting, when he was eighteen, the opportunity for which he had been hoping appeared. Two brothers from England opened a bank in Junction. When he applied for a job, however, what he got instead was an insult. “The president,” Stevenson would recall, “laughed at the idea of a freighter being a bookkeeper, but said that, since no Negroes were in the town, he could use a janitor” to sweep the floor and clean out the cuspidors. Men who knew Coke Stevenson in later years knew how quick a temper he had. But they also knew that he never showed it. As long as it was in a bank, the janitor’s job might “work up to something” better than freighting, he felt. Although it paid only half the forty dollars a month he had been earning, he took it. Some months later, the bookkeeper became ill and the president asked Coke if he could keep the books for a while. After he showed that he could, he was made bookkeeper, and then, at the age of twenty, cashier.

  But he was still not earning enough money to buy a ranch—and by this time he had found the ranch he wanted, the ranch of his dreams.

  One day, following the canyon of the South Llano River through the hills southwest of Junction, Stevenson had come to its low, broad, shimmering falls. Beyond them, framed against the canyon’s limestone walls, a herd of deer grazed in a riverbank meadow until his horse was almost among them, and then leaped gracefully away, white tails flashing. As he watched, Stevenson was to recall, a flock of wild turkeys strutted out of one of the groves of spreading, sparkling-leaved live oaks that dotted the bank. In the river’s clear, rushing water, tall herons and cranes stood like statues.

  Splashing across a ford, he spurred his horse up the far bluff, and came out onto broad, rolling upland pastures. Large swatches were covered with cedar, but cedar could be cleared away, if a man was willing to put in the necessary effort. And while in most of the Hill Country the beauty of the landscape was a trap, concealing from would-be ranchers the aridity of the climate, this was one of the few spots on the vast Edwards Plateau in which water would not be a problem. Two miles or so down river was a hundred-foot bluff, and from its face, from under a thick outcropping of rock, a sheet of water almost a hundred yards wide cascaded to the river below. This was called the “Seven Hundred Springs,” because although subsequent exploration would reveal that the cascade came from a single spring, the rivulets pouring down the face of the rock gave the illusion of coming from many. Pushing through the cedar brakes in the pastures atop the bluff, Stevenson found hidden among them one stream after another, all clear and cold enough so that he knew them to be spring-fed, a source of abundant water. In later years, reporters traveling to that spot to interview Stevenson would marvel at its beauty. The river, one wrote, is “as pretty a stream as you could conjure up in your dreams.” Twenty-year-old Coke Stevenson determined in the instant that it would be the site of his house, and the land around it his ranch. He wrote away for more books.

  This time they were law books. He studied them at night, this young man with so little formal education, after the bank closed, in the office of a Junction attorney, using the attorney’s books as well; during the almost five years that he was studying, townspeople grew accustomed to seeing the light burn late in the attorney’s office; sometimes, they said, it burned all night. During the nights, too, he built a home in town, for himself and his bride, Fay Wright, the ebullient, charming daughter of the local doctor. He built it with his own hands, working by the light of a lantern, using the lumber from two old frame houses that he tore down so that he would not have to spend the money he was saving to buy his ranch. In September, 1913, Stevenson rode out of the Hill Country to San Antonio to take, and pass, the examination for his law degree. Early in 1914, he received his first substantial legal fee. With that and his savings, he bought his ranch—520 acres at the falls of the South Llano—for eight dollars an acre.

  In that year, however, his life took a turning he hadn’t planned.

  It was due to a number of qualities that he possessed.

  Some were physical. Coke Stevenson was tall—a little more than an inch over six feet—and strong; slender, but wiry, and with broad shoulders and big hands. He held himself very erect, and had a slow, careful, deliberate way of looking around him from the doorway before he stepped into a room—like, in the words of Texas historian T. R. Fehrenbach, an old gunfighter squinting “carefully down both sides of the street, evaluating the men, the weather, the lay of the land, before emerging into the sun—the famous, careful, Southwestern stare.” He was very quiet. He had, a reporter says, “the original poker face.” Although his friends say he had a “wonderful sense of humor,” only his friends knew it. He seldom laughed out loud, “but you’d suddenly look at him, and see those big shoulders shaking, and know Coke was enjoying the joke more than anyone.” On serious matters “Coke kept his own counsel, he was slow to speak,” another friend says. When he did speak, it was in the low, slow, Texas cowboy drawl, and each word seemed carefully chosen. And when he spoke, other traits emerged, including one that even opponents define as “sincerity.” He quickly earned a reputation as an outstanding courtroom advocate. “Coke would never say a
word that he didn’t believe, and that shone through,” a fellow attorney says. “When he spoke to a jury, the jury believed him.” So did people outside the courtroom. Coke Stevenson didn’t talk much, but when he talked, men listened. The tall young attorney in cowboy boots and ill-fitting suits was, without meaning to be, a leader of men. Nineteen fourteen, the year in which Stevenson bought his ranch, was a year in which Kimble County ranchers, always on the verge of financial disaster because of the thin, poor soil, the difficulty of getting goods in and out to market, and the recurring Hill Country droughts, were pushed to the very brink by a new menace: livestock thieves. It was suspected that the rustlers’ leader was the son of the county’s most prominent, and popular, family. Capturing him red-handed might mean gunplay; prosecuting him would mean antagonizing his family. Solving the rustling problem would be a dangerous yet delicate job; the County Commissioners asked Stevenson to do it—as the new county attorney.

  Stevenson had never considered holding public office, he was to recall: he accepted the appointment only on condition that he could resign it as soon as the crisis was over.

  Enlisting the help of Frank Hamer, already famous as perhaps the toughest of the Texas Rangers, Stevenson “lay out” with Hamer in the hills night after night waiting for the rustlers, captured them, and found that their leader was indeed the young man who had been suspected.

  The capture turned out to be the easy part of the job. At the time, Stevenson was to recall, he had little concept of public life. Receiving a crash course in the subject now, he didn’t like it at all.

  Claiming he wasn’t guilty, the young man’s family said that the new county attorney had arrested him only to make a name for himself with a sensational case; other Kimble residents felt that even if the young man was guilty, he should have been let off with a warning because of his family’s contributions to the county. During the months the case dragged on, Stevenson’s reaction to the criticism was dramatic: he refused to reply to it by a single word. And when the case ended—with the young man convicted and in jail—Stevenson without a word went back to the hills with Hamer, to “lay out” again to trap the rest of the rustlers. Soon the news was out: Kimble was a good county for rustlers to avoid. But as Stevenson was leaving his first public office, he was given a second, for Kimble had another problem now—one even more serious than rustling.

  It was Stevenson’s own fault that he was given this new position. During the previous year, 1917, the trail to Sonora, the only route from Junction to the west, had washed out, becoming, as one chronicler put it, a “quagmire” so “hopeless that even a single horse had difficulty getting through.” Trying to repair the trail, Junction’s citizens had organized a work party along the lines of a barn-raising, with every man bringing his own pick and shovel. But little progress was being made because the men were being given no direction—until, in his quiet, slow-speaking way, Coke Stevenson began giving it.

  As he made suggestions, the crowd of boisterous men quieted, and listened to them, and followed them. Stevenson had the men return to their ranches to get wagons, and then had them fan out with the wagons, each carrying a team of men, across the hills to bring back the largest boulders they could find. The boulders were rolled into the mud, and when they sank from sight, more were brought until they rose above the surface. Then smaller rocks were added until the trail was restored. The ranchers thought the job was done, but Stevenson suggested that maybe it wasn’t. As long as they had put in so much work already, he said, maybe the trail should be smoothed out, made more like a real road. He had the men take their wagons to nearby streams, bring back gravel from the stream beds, and spread and level it over the rocks.

  Now, in January, 1918, the road situation throughout Kimble County had become more critical. Much of the rest of Texas was being linked together, by roads and rail, but the Hill Country was almost as isolated as ever. Laying tracks through hills was too expensive in a sparsely populated district, so railroads generally shunned the Hill Country. Most of America was entering the Automobile Age; a State Highway Department had been established in Texas, and construction of paved roads was under way in other sections of the state. But with a few exceptions (the most notable was the Fredericksburg-Austin highway being built in that very year because of the heroic efforts of the Representative from that area, Lyndon Johnson’s father, Sam Ealy Johnson), Hill Country roads were as rudimentary as ever. Without rail connections to the rest of the state, trucks or wagons were the only means for the area’s ranchers and farmers to get their produce to market, and because of the condition of the roads, their produce was often spoiled by the time it got there. With more and more roads being built elsewhere in the state, the competitive position of ranchers throughout the vast, isolated Texas Hill Country was steadily worsening, even before the terrible drought of 1916 and 1917. Nowhere was the situation more critical than in Kimble County. There were two hundred motor vehicles in Kimble in 1918, but in all that huge county, larger than the state of Rhode Island, there was not a foot of paved road; moreover, as a Hill Country chronicler wrote, “No semblance of a system of roads connected them with the outside world.” One evening in January, Junction’s elder citizens met in the bank; “This group of men had recognized that Junction and Kimble County had reached an important milestone; that it either must go forward or be lost in the shuffle of progress.” Their only hope was “to give the county some modern roads and to provide access to the markets of the state.” They decided to pass a $150,000 bond issue to finance road construction, but they knew the work wouldn’t get done unless someone “took hold of the job and got it started on the right track.” Coke Stevenson wasn’t even at the meeting at the bank; he had had enough of public service. But if it wasn’t for him, everyone knew, there would still be no road to Sonora. The young lawyer was sitting at home with his wife, reading in front of a fire, when, late in the evening, the phone rang, and he was summoned to the bank, where he was asked to accept the nomination for County Judge, the county’s chief administrative officer. At first he flatly refused, but so serious was the situation that, finally, feeling he had no choice, he accepted, on two conditions: that under no circumstances would he be asked to accept a second two-year term, and that he would not have to campaign. His friends did the campaigning, and he won easily.

  During his two years as County Judge, other qualities in Coke Stevenson became apparent. One was an unusual ability to persuade men to sacrifice for the common weal. Although $150,000 was more than the county’s taxpayers could afford, it wasn’t enough for the job. And Stevenson felt that none of it should be spent on right-of-way; the land, he said, should be donated, since its owners would benefit from the road. This proposal had been broached before, and rejected. Now, at a number of public meetings, Stevenson spoke of how individuals should cooperate for the public good. The right-of-way was donated. By the end of the two years, Junction was linked by road with every other major town in the county. And it was being linked with the outside world. Rivalry had for years existed between Junction and Kerrville, a town in neighboring Kerr County, which lay between Kimble and San Antonio. But Stevenson persuaded Kerr’s Commissioners to co-sponsor a joint mass meeting of the two counties at which Stevenson argued that Kerr should build a road that would meet Kimble’s at the border and link the two county seats. When he had finished speaking, in his slow, quiet way, Kerr agreed to do so. The agreement meant that Kimble would have a passable road most of the way to San Antonio.

  To build the roads, the man who had taught himself law taught himself engineering. Kimble’s hills were laced with small streams and steep slopes. Building elevated bridges was prohibitively expensive, so roads would have to dip down to the streams, crossing them on roadbeds laid just above water level, and up again. Stevenson knew nothing about engineering and little about mathematics. But he cut miniature car wheels out of cardboard, figured the ratio with the Model T wheel, traveling at twenty-five miles per hour, the standard of the day, and t
ested the miniature wheels on various concave surfaces to determine the proper “roll” of the dips. It was, one writer was to say, “testimony of the character of the road he built” that the Junction-Kerrville Road, the first piece of improved highway in all the immense distances between San Antonio and El Paso, was still in use more than twenty years later.

  By the end of his two-year term, Coke Stevenson’s fame had spread through the Hill Country, and a delegation called on him to ask him to run for Congress. Slow and thoughtful though he generally was, he answered this request quickly. “My public life,” he was to recall in later years, “came about by accident. I did not deliberately set about entering public life. On the contrary, each time I held an office, it was for the purpose of getting a particular job completed.” The jobs—rustler-hunting and road-building—were over, and, he said, so was his time in “public life.” In 1920, he returned to his law practice. During the next eight years, the reputation of this self-taught lawyer continued to spread; from all across the vast Edwards Plateau men traveled to Junction in the hope that Coke Stevenson would represent them in cases ranging from intricate land-title suits to murder. He would never defend a man charged with livestock theft, cardinal crime of the Old West, and he would never accept a client, no matter how large the offered fee, in whose innocence he did not believe. Yet the docket for a single court term at Junction lists “C. R. Stevenson” as defense attorney in twenty-seven out of thirty-two cases. His reputation spread further; attorneys and judges from Houston and Dallas and San Antonio returned from Hill Country courts to tell their colleagues that in a little town in the middle of nowhere they had just watched what one of them called “one of the greatest trial lawyers in the history of Texas.” Sometimes he would try a case in a big city, and courtroom observers realized that that assessment was correct. Judge A. B. Martin of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals said that Stevenson was “the best all-round lawyer” he had ever seen. Although he refused proffered partnerships in big-city law firms as quickly as he had refused a congressional seat—he just didn’t want to leave the Hill Country, Stevenson would say—he soon was reportedly being asked to try more lawsuits than any attorney in Texas. Before the end of his career, one writer reported, he had “written land marks” in law books and the legal reports of the state: monuments of a wholly self-educated attorney that attorneys from great law schools studied. Together with friends, he founded many small businesses in Junction—a hardware store, a title-abstract company, the first Ford automobile agency in the area; on Friday and Saturday nights, he ran the first motion-picture show in Junction, operating the projector himself—not that any of these businesses, in the cash-poor Hill Country, generated much cash profit. He was one of the organizers of a new bank—the First National Bank of Junction—and became its president. At the time he did so, the Junction State Bank, at which he had started as a janitor, asked him to continue as its attorney even though he was now president of a competing bank; as one biographer put it, this “stands as a sincere tribute to the respect in which Stevenson was held by his fellow townsmen”; Coke Stevenson, it was said, was so honest that he could represent the two competing institutions at once. But Stevenson didn’t spend most of his time in town; he spent it at the ranch, and whatever money he made—from the law practice, from the hardware store, from the bank—he put into that ranch. He purchased a second five hundred acres, and then a thousand more, and then another thousand; by 1928, he owned more than six thousand acres of the beautiful, spring-watered property he had come upon so long before.