The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  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 to
ld 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 fat
her 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.