They took receipts and soon had a large carpetbag full, and in such a shape that there is no doubt in my mind that a good many beeves were paid for twice, and some of them several times. …
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.
“THE 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.
THEY 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.
NOT ONLY THE JOHNSONS 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,
she would bring out [the purse], holding the egg-and-butter money carefully saved for the purchase of a new black silk dress, and count out the exact amount needed by the child temporarily financially embarrassed. Sometimes the purse was left empty, but she eagerly assured the recipient of … her own lack of present need. … All references to the handsome clothes and the elegant furniture of more prosperous days were casual, never complaining nor regretful.
Sam had lost none of the Johnson temper. Once, when his son George “belittled the scriptures, his father … knocked him across the room.” And he had lost none of the Johnson interest in topics beyond the state of the weather. The Austin paper was still delivered every other day; every other day he would spur his horse, Old Reb, into the Pedernales to ford it to the mailbox on the far side; he would sit in Weinheimer’s Store in Stonewall all evening discussing politics and government. In later years, it is recalled, he would often sit on his front porch, reading his Bible or his newspaper, chatting with passersby—or just sitting, an aging man with a snowy beard and a thick mane of white hair, gazing in the evening out over the Pedernales landscape that was dotted here and there with a few lonely cows wandering through hills that had once been covered with great herds.
*Fehrenbach says that “There was never to be a single case of a white woman being taken by Southern Plains Indians without rape.”
*“I am the hero of our camp,” wrote one of the Johnsons’ cowboys, Horace M. Hall, in 1871. “Riding out with Mrs. Johnson some 8 miles in advance of the train, … I shot a deer.”
2
The People’s Party
DURING SAM JOHNSON’S thirty years back on the Pedernales, there was one brief interruption in this round of life. During a two-or three-week campaign in 1892, he talked about his theories of government not just at Weinheimer’s Store but at barbecues and public “speakings”—as the Populist Party candidate for the State Legislature. Although he lost, by almost a two-to-one margin, Populist candidates for statewide office carried the district, and the Hill Country as a whole.
This was fitting. All through the South and West, a belief had been rising among men who felt themselves trapped by forces beyond their control, a belief that, faced by forces too big for them to fight, they needed help in fighting them. This feeling had been rising—slowly but steadily—since the Civil War. Farmers would sweat and slave over their land, and sow and plow and pick a crop, and then, when they brought the crop to market, they would find that because of prices in the East, or prices in Europe, or railroad freighting charges, or grain-elevator storage charges, their crop wasn’t worth what they had thought it was worth—they would find, often, that what they might receive for the old crop wasn’t enough even to buy seed for a new one, and that, when they tried to borrow money to buy the seed, interest rates were so high that they knew even before they began to plant the new crop that it couldn’t possibly pay out. If the 1870’s and ’80’s and ’90’s were a desperate time for farmers, nowhere were times more desperate than in the Hill Country. In other areas, farmers might believe that railroads were fleecing them; the Hill Country didn’t have railroads—because laying tracks through hills was too expensive in a sparsely populated district—and the cost of getting crops to market by wagon (crops that often spoiled because of the length of the trip) ate up farmers’ profits. In other areas, farmers might groan under interest rates; in the Hill Country, rates were a moot point; its banks, as poor as their depositors (cash on hand in the Johnson City Bank in 1890: $1,945), had little money to lend at any rate. In other areas, farmers felt the price for their crops was too low; in the Hill Country, the problem was trying to get crops to grow at all. And it was in the Hill Country that America’s great agrarian revolt began. In 1877, a handful of impoverished farmers gathered at a tiny cabin in Lampasas County, Texas, about fifty miles north of Johnson City, and founded the Farmers Alliance, which became the National Farmers Alliance and Industrial Union, and then the People’s Party (the “Populists”)—the party which was the greatest mass popular movement in America’s history.
Out of the letters mailed to the Alliance journal, the Southern Mercury, from those scattered farmhouses along the Pedernales River glares bitterness and resentment.
“Our lot is cast here in a rough portion of the land where but a small per cent of the land is tillable, hence farmers are thinly settled,” wrote J. D. Cady of Blanco County’s New Chapel Alliance. “We number only abo
ut eight male members in good standing. But if we do live away up here on the Pedernales River, amid rocks, cliffs and waterfalls, cedars and wild oaks, we are not varments, but have hearts just like men.”
The letters were written by men and women who seldom wrote letters. “I will try to scratch a few lines to the brethern,” said sixty-year-old Larkin Landrum of Blanco. “If I could spell good enough so I could interest them I would like to write, but I never got to go to school in my life, nor learned my letters till I was 35 years old. If I knew that I could do the Alliance cause any good I would like to try. … If this is printed and I can read it, I will write once more; for if I can read it I know other people can, who have been to school and worn shoes.” They wrote out of a sense of injustice at the way farmers were fleeced by merchants (“Now, Mister Laboring Man, don’t buy anything you can do without till you get out of debt, and then not buy till you have the money to pay for it, for when you buy on time you pay from forty to 100% more than you should”)—by, it sometimes seemed, everyone who wasn’t a farmer: “I see someone put in a piece about professional men. Let me have a say about him. … The lawyer, for instance, will pay you $1 for a load of wood and charge you from $5 to $20 for a little writing. Study about this and see if there is any justice in it. I don’t speak of the lawyer alone, but all who do not work. I am an Alliance man. Yes, and I am not ashamed to own it.” They wrote out of desperation. “I see so many letters from the brotherhood in different parts of the state all aglow with the good news of prosperous condition of the Alliance that it grieves me to chronicle the sad condition of this section,” said James Blevin of Dripping Springs. “We are worse than lukewarm, we are cold, almost to heart, and unless we can get a remedy soon, we are gone. … Without a remedy, all is lost that we hoped for.” And they wrote because the Alliance gave them hope, because it was a hand—the only hand—held out to help the people of the Hill Country. In their isolation, its newspaper gave them a sense of brotherhood. “I consider myself related to all who correspond to the generous old Mercury. … Remember the Mercury,” wrote Minnie M. Crider. “If we help the Mercury, it will help us to throw off this yoke of bondage and be free people,” wrote Minnie’s sister Sarah. The famed Alliance lecturers, who crisscrossed the South and West, spreading the word, brought them hope. The farmers pleaded with the Alliance to send more of them to the Hill Country: “Brethern, in sending out lecturers, please remember our isolated corner, and send us in time of need.” When none arrived, they were all too ready to feel the slight. “As we live way down here, we are in the dark a good deal in regard to the business of our noble order. … We are afraid you have never learned that we have a real cute alliance here. … We had an ‘encampment’ and honestly expected the presence of a ‘Big Gun’ with it, but, no we were sadly left, as usual. …” But when a lecturer did make the journey, hope was rekindled and these poorest of farmers scraped together their dues, or as much of them as they could. “We are in a drouth-stricken district and find it hard work to keep the wolf from our doors,” wrote Mrs. Emma Eppes of Blanco County. “But we have a prospect for good crops this season. … some have paid up while others have been found wanting the means, but all will pay just as soon as possible.”
The Path to Power Page 7