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.
AND 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.
Then the brush came.
Fire had held it back—fires set by lightning and Indians—fire and grass. But now the Indians were gone, and when lightning started a prairie fire, men hurried to put it out, not understanding that it was a friend and not a foe. And what was left of the grass wasn’t the tall, strong bluestem and Indian grass but shorter, delicate strains.
So the brush began to move up out of the ravines and off the rocky cliff-faces to which it had been confined. It began to creep into the meadows: small, low, dense shrubs and bushes and stunted trees, catclaw and prickly pear and Spanish dagger, shrub oak and juniper—and mesquite, mesquite with its lacy leaves so delicate in the sun, and, hidden in the earth, its monstrous, voracious taproot that reached and reached through thin soil, searching for more and more water and nourishment. Finally, even cedar came, cedar that can grow in the driest, thinnest soil, cedar whose fierce, aggressive roots are strong enough to rip through rock to find moisture, and which therefore can grow where there is no soil—cedar that grows so fast that it seems to gobble up the ground. The brush came first in long tentacles pushing hesitantly forward into a grassy meadow, and then in a thin line, and then the line becoming thicker, solid, so that sometimes a rancher could see a mass of rough, ragged, thorny brush moving implacably toward the delicate green of a grassy meadow and then, in huge bites, devouring it. Or there would be a meadow that a rancher was sure was safe—no brush anywhere near it, a perfect place for his cattle if only the grass would come back—and one morning he would suddenly notice one shrub pushing up in it, and even if he pulled it up, its seeds would already be thrown, and the next year there would be a dozen bushes in its place.
The early settlers in the Hill Country couldn’t believe how fast the brush spread. In the early days, it seemed to cowboys that, from one year to the next, whole sections of land changed; one year, they would be riding untrammeled across open meadows; the next year, in the same meadows, their horses had to step cautiously through scrub a foot or two high; the next year, the scrub was up to a rider’s shins as he sat his horse—they called these scrub jungles “shinnery”—and horses couldn’t get through it any more. When white men first came into the Hill Country, there was little cedar there. Twenty years later, cedar covered whole areas of the country as far as the eye could see; by 1904, a single cedar brake reaching northwest from Austin covered 500 square miles—and was growing, faster and faster, every year. And every acre of brush meant an acre less of grass.
AT FIRST, it didn’t seem to matter so much, because in about 1870 cotton began to be raised in the Hill Country and for a few years it prospered, the Hill Country earth producing a bale or more per acre. A Hill Country historian writes, “That king cash crop was … being sowed wherever there was enough dirt to sprout a seed, … wherever their mules could tug a plow, whether in the valleys, in the slopes, or atop the hills.”
But cotton was worse for this country than cattle, which, through their manure, put back into the soil between thirty and forty percent of the nutrients their grazing removed from it. Cotton put back nothing, and as each crop fed upon the soil, the soil grew poorer, thinner, more powdery. Cattle ate the grass down, but at least left the roots underneath. The steel blades of the plows used in cotton-planting ripped through the roots and killed them. Moreover, cotton was a seasonal crop, and, not knowing the science of crop rotation and continuous cover—no one knew it, of course, until the 1880’s—the Hill Country farmers didn’t plant anything in their cotton fields after harvest, which meant that for months of each year, including the entire winter, the land lay naked and defenseless, no roots within it to strengthen it, no grass atop it to shield it.
Inevitably, drought came. The land burned beneath the blazing Hill Country sun, what was left of its nutrients scorching away, what was left of the roots within it starving and shriveling. Winds—those continual Hill Country breezes that help make the climate so delightful, and the winter northers that come sweeping down off the Great Plains—blew the soil away in swirls of dust, blew it, as one bitter Hill Country farmer put it, into “the next county, the next region, the next state.” And when the heavy, hammering rains came, they washed the soil away, down the steep hillsides and along the furrows of the cotton fields (which the farmers all too often cut up and down the slope instead of across it) into the creeks and rivers, cutting gullies in the ground that the next rain would make even deeper, so that the rain would run down that land even faster. Water poured down the hillsides and into the creeks in a torrent, and flash floods roared down the creeks’ slick limestone beds, sweeping away the fertile land
on their banks that was the only truly fertile land in the Hill Country. The rivers rose, and, when they receded, sucked more of the fertile soil back down with them, to run down the Pedernales to the Colorado, down the Colorado to the Gulf. And all the time, in the places too steep for mules to pull a plow, men, remembering the trail drives and the pouches of gold, persisted in grazing cattle, who kept “eating down the grass as fast as it could grow and faster, leaving nude soil in those places, too, to blow and wash away.”
It had taken centuries to create the richness of the Hill Country. In two decades or three after man came into it, the richness was gone. In the early 1870’s, the first few years of cotton-planting there, an acre produced a bale or more of cotton; by 1890, it took more than three acres to produce that bale; by 1900, it took eleven acres.
The Hill Country had been a beautiful trap. It was still beautiful—even more beautiful, perhaps, because woods covered so much more of it now, and there were still the river-carved landscapes, the dry climate, the clear blue sky—but it was possible now to see the jaws of the trap. No longer, in fact, was it even necessary to look beneath the surface of the country to see the jaws. On tens of thousands of acres the reality was visible right on the surface. These acres—hundreds of square miles of the Hill Country—had once been thickly covered with grass. Now they were covered with what from a distance appeared to be debris. Up close, it became apparent that the debris was actually rocks—from small, whitish pebbles to stones the size of fists—that littered entire meadows. A farmer might think when he first saw them that these rocks were lying on top of the soil, but if he tried to clear away a portion of the field and dig down, he found that there was no soil—none at all, or at most an inch or two—beneath those rocks. Those rocks were the soil—they were the topmost layer of the limestone of which the Hill Country was formed. The Hill Country was down to reality now—and the reality was rock. It was a land of stone, that fact was plain now, and the implications of that fact had become clear. The men who had come into the Hill Country had hoped to grow rich from the land, or at least to make a living from it. But there were only two ways farmers or ranchers can make a living from land: plow it or graze cattle on it. And if either of those things was done to this land, the land would blow or wash away.
THE JOHNSON BROTHERS appear not to have recognized the trap—not to have recognized the reality of the Hill Country. Their grandiose dreams were nourished and protected by the nature of their occupation. “The terms used to describe the cattle explosion were always kingdom or empire, never the cattle business or the cattle industry,” Fehrenbach points out. Its grandeur—the herds that stretched as far as the eye could see; the endless drives across the immense, empty land; the shower of golden eagles—fed big dreams, and in Abilene the brothers had met, or at least heard about, men who had proved that such dreams could come true, men who had started out as cattle-drivers but had become much more—John Chisum, Charles Goodnight, Richard King, the Rio Grande steamboat captain who had gone into cattle-driving not so long before they did and was now becoming a king indeed, with a ranch that, men whispered, covered more than a million acres (“The sun’s done riz, and the sun’s done set, And I ain’t off’n the King Ranch yet”). The Johnson brothers weren’t content to be merely cattle-drivers. Land in the Hill Country, which for so long had been free, was beginning to be bought up now, and the Johnson boys, while continuing to graze most of their cattle on land still vacant, bought a lot of it: 640 acres in Blanco County to add to the 320 they had started with, and then 1,280 acres more; 170 acres in Hays County and then 533 more—they bought both these tracts in 1870, plunking down in payment $10,925 in gold coins; and then far bigger ranches, unsurveyed and still measured in leagues, in Gillespie County. The most valuable real estate in the Hill Country was in its leading “city,” Fredericksburg—the Johnsons bought real estate in Fredericksburg. They even bought a large, valuable tract in south Austin. They “made a market for almost everything: corn, bacon, labor, and cow ponies,” John Speer writes—labor because the Johnsons needed all the men the Hill Country could supply for their drives north. By 1871, the Johnson brothers weren’t merely the largest trail-drivers in the Hill Country; they were probably the largest landowners, too. To help them run things, they brought in three nephews—Jesse, John and James Johnson—and a cousin, Richard; soon Sam and Tom bought a busy mill, the Action Mill in Fredericksburg, and started making plans to open a store.
The Johnsons were building an empire up in the hills.
BUT THE LAND WAS DOMINANT, and while the Hill Country may have seemed a place of free range and free grass, in the Hill Country nothing was free. Success—or even survival—in so hard a land demanded a price that was hard to pay. It required an end to everything not germane to the task at hand. It required an end to illusions, to dreams, to flights into the imagination—to all the escapes from reality that comfort men—for in a land so merciless, the faintest romantic tinge to a view of life might result not just in hardship but in doom. Principles, noble purposes, high aims—these were luxuries that would not be tolerated in a land of rock. Only material considerations counted; the spiritual and intellectual did not; the only art that mattered in the Hill Country was the art of the possible. Success in such a land required not a partial but a total sacrifice of idealism; it required not merely pragmatism but a pragmatism almost terrifying in its absolutely uncompromising starkness. It required a willingness to face the hills head-on in all their grimness, to come to terms with their unyielding reality with a realism just as unyielding—a willingness, in other words, not only to accept sacrifices but to be as cruel and hard and ruthless as this cruel and hard and ruthless land. Fehrenbach, writing about Texas as a whole but in words that apply with particular force to the Hill Country, says that because of the “harshness” of the “pressing realities” of the land,
Inner convictions, developed in more rarified civilizations, could not stand unless they were practical. … The man who held to a preconceived attitude toward Indians, and could not learn the Comanche reality, often saw his family killed; or he himself died in his own homestead’s ashes. A little-noted but obvious fact of the Texas frontier was that some men lived and some families prospered on the edge of Comanchería, while many others failed. And chance was not the major determining factor. Eternal vigilance, eternal hardness, was the price of success. … A Charles Goodnight could move early onto the far edge of nowhere, and hold his new range against all comers. Some men could not.
The Johnsons could not. They were, in fact, particularly unsuited to such a land, and not just because they were, in the sense that mattered in the Hill Country, unrealistic—as, in failing to understand the reality of the land, they grazed their herds on the same meadows every year. Noting that “the best-adapted Westerner was keenly intelligent and observant but at the same time highly unintellectual,” Fehrenbach points out that “Table talk, as writer after American writer has recorded, was of crops and cattle, markets and weather, never some remote realm of ideas.” Table talk at the Johnsons’ was quite often of ideas. Sam Johnson, who had nine children, encouraged them to discuss “serious issues” at the table for the same reason he encouraged them to play whist, a relative recalls: “He encouraged his children to engage in games that required them to think.” After dinner, he would often have them engage in impromptu debates. Two of his three sons became teachers: one attended the University of Michigan—possibly the first Hill Country boy to travel out of Texas for an education. Sam was interested not just in politics but in government; at a time when few people in the Hill Country got newspapers—and when those who did, got them, by freight wagon, a week or two late—he subscribed to an Austin daily and arranged to have it delivered every other day to Weinheimer’s General Store in the nearby town of Stonewall—even though he had to ford the Pedernales to pick it up. His politics, moreover, were less practical than idealistic. One of his key beliefs was in a “tenant purchase program” that would enable tenant fa
rmers to buy their farms: men, he said, should not have to work land they did not own; when asked for details of the program, he was a little vague. Every available description of Samuel Ealy Johnson emphasizes his interest in philosophy and theology, not just in the Fundamentalist religion of the Hill Country but in deeper religious questions. He was a Baptist, but once a minister of a sect called the Christadelphians stopped at the Johnson house, and Sam welcomed the opportunity to debate with him. All through dinner and into the evening, they discussed the Bible. Because the minister raised questions he couldn’t answer, Sam arranged for him to debate the local Baptist preacher. And because Sam felt that the Christadelphian had won the debate, he changed his membership to that church.
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:
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