The Path to Power Page 4

  The air of the highland was drier and clearer than the air on the plains below; it felt clean and cool on the skin. The sky, in that clear air, was a blue so brilliant that one of the early settlers called it a “sapphire sky.” Beneath that sky the leaves of Spanish oaks, ancient and huge, and of elms and cedars sparkled in the sun; the leaves of the trees in the hills looked different from the leaves of the scattered trees on the plains below, where the settlers’ wagons still stood—a darker, lush green, a green with depths and cool shadows.

  Beneath the trees, the Hill Country was carpeted with wildflowers, in the Spring, bluebonnets, buttercups, the gold-and-burgundy Indian paintbrush and the white-flowered wild plum, in Fall, the goldeneye and the gold-enmane and the golden evening primrose. And in the Fall, the sugar maples and sumac blazed red in the valleys.

  Springs gushed out of the hillsides, and streams ran through the hills—springs that formed deep, cold holes, streams that raced cool and clear over gravel and sand and white rock, streams lined so thickly with willows and sycamores and tall cypresses that they seemed to be running through a shadowy tunnel of dark leaves. The streams had cut the hills into a thousand shapes: after crossing 250 miles of flat sameness, these men had suddenly found a landscape that was new at every turn.

  And the streams, these men discovered, were full of fish. The hills were full of game. There were, to their experienced eyes, all the sign of bear, and you didn’t need sign to know about the deer—they were so numerous that when riders crested a hill, a whole herd might leap away in the valley below, white tails flashing. There were other white tails, too: rabbits in abundance. And as the men sat their horses, staring, flocks of wild turkeys strutted in silhouette along the ridges. Honeybees buzzed in the glades, and honey hung in the trees for the taking. Wild mustang grapes, plump and purple, hung down for making wine. Wrote one of the first men to come to the Hill Country: “It is a Paradise.”

  But most of all, to the men who moved into it first, the Hill Country was beautiful because of its grass.

  These first settlers were not Southern aristocrats or “substantial planters”—substantial planters had money to buy good, easily accessible land, and slaves to work it; when they came to Texas, they settled on the rich river bottoms of the coastal plains; by 1850 they had re-created a Southern Plantation economy, complete with mansions, near the Gulf. The men who came to the Hill Country were not from the Plantation South but from the hill and forest sections of the South; they were small farmers, and they were poor. These were the men who had fled the furnishing merchant, who furnished the fanner with supplies and clothing for the year on credit, and the crop lien, which the merchant took on the farmer’s cotton to make sure he “paid out” the debt. And they had fled the eroded, gullied, worn-out, used-up land of the Old South that would not let them grow enough cotton or graze enough livestock ever to pay it out. Land was something these men and their families had to live off—and that was why the grass of the Hill Country was what filled their eye. These were the men who had come farther even than the Buntons. Their numbers were small. Thousands of rural Southern families heard the news of San Jacinto in 1836, took one last look at their eroded, exhausted soil, chalked GTT on their gates and headed for a new land and a new start. In 1846, statehood, which had been pushed by the new President, increased the flood of migration; tens of thousands of Southern families painted POLK AND TEXAS on their wagon canvas and headed down the plank roads of the South, through its weary towns—as bystanders cheered—and westward across the Mississippi and the Sabine into Texas. In 1837, the population of Texas was 40,000. In 1847, it was 140,000. By 1860, it would be 600,000. But the flood crested near the Sabine, and flowed south toward the Gulf; most of the newcomers settled in the “piney woods” of East Texas and the coastal plains. Only a shallow stream flowed west across the 250 miles of prairie blacklands. And by the time the stream reached the Edwards Plateau in the center of Texas, at whose edge the Buntons stopped, it was no more than a trickle—and only a very thin trickle indeed climbed up into the hills. Although Austin, almost on the plateau’s edge, was the state capital, it was still a frontier town; in 1850, people were still being killed on its outskirts and its population was only 600. Beyond, in the Hill Country, the dreaded Comanches ruled—and during this era the population of the typical Hill Country county is counted not in thousands or in hundreds but in scores. “The cabins became more distant, separated by miles and miles,” Fehrenbach has written, “and the settlements significantly were no longer called towns, but forts. If the lights in the [eastern] Texas forest by the middle of the 19th century were still few, in the middle of the state, … the lights … were swallowed in vastness.” Trying to explain why men, often with their families, would trade civilization for terror, Fehrenbach notes that this was the part of Texas in which dreams seemed nearest to realization. “A man could see far and smell winds that coursed down from Canada across a thousand miles of plains. There was an apparently endless, rolling vista north and west and south. The small woodchopper, with an axe and a couple of brawny sons, could catch a scent of landed empire and dream of possibilities to come.” There were many reasons bound up with these—but whatever the reasons, whatever the dreams or fears that pulled or drove hundreds of thousands of men into Texas, few had made a journey as long or as hard as these men. But when they saw the grass, they felt the journey had been worth it. “Grass knee high!” one wrote home. “Grass as high as my stirrups!” wrote another.

  The tall grass of the Hill Country stretched as far as the eye could see, covering valleys and hillsides alike. It was so high that a man couldn’t see the roots or the bottoms of the big oaks; their dark trunks seemed to be rising out of a rippling, pale green sea. There was almost no brush, and few small trees—only the big oaks and the grass, as if the Hill Country were a landscaped park. But a park wasn’t what these men thought of when they saw the grass of the Hill Country. To these men the grass was proof that their dreams would come true. In country where grass grew like that, cotton would surely grow tall, and cattle fat—and men rich. In country where grass grew like that, they thought, anything would grow.

  How could they know about the grass?

  THE GRASS HAD GROWN not over a season but over centuries. It wouldn’t have grown at all had it not been for fire—prairie fires set by lightning and driven by wind across tens of thousands of acres, and fires set by Indians to stampede game into their ambushes or over cliffs—for fire clears the land of underbrush, relentless enemy of grass. The roots of brush are merciless, spreading and seeking out all available moisture, and so are the leaves of brush, which cast on grass the shade that kills it, so if brush and grass are left alone in a field, the grass will be destroyed by the brush. But grass grows much faster than brush, so fire gives grass the head start it needs to survive; after a fire, grass would re-enter the burned-over land first—one good rain and among the ashes would be new green shoots—and by the time the brush arrived, the grass would be thick and strong enough to stand it off.

  Even with the aid of fire, the grass had grown slowly—agonizingly slowly. Some years most of it died, some years all. But in other years, it grew, and after a while it had a base to grow in, for even in the years when most of it died, some residue remained. This base built up gradually until there was, at last, atop the soil a padding to protect the soil from rain and add to the fertility with which it fed the next growth of grass—at first a thin pad and then a thicker one, and finally a lush, diverse carpet in which could grow the big grass, the stirrup-high grass, that dominated the beautiful Hill Country meadows that the first settlers saw. The big grass had big roots; every time fire came to help it—natural fire or Indian-set—it grew back faster. As it got taller, it grew faster still, for it held more and more moisture and thus could survive dry spells better. But even so, it had taken a very long time to grow.

  It had grown so slowly because the soil beneath it was so thin. The Hill Country was limestone country, and while
the mineral richness of limestone makes the soil produced by its crumbling very fertile, the hardness of limestone makes it produce that soil slowly. There was only a narrow, thin, layer of soil atop the Hill Country limestone, a layer as fragile as it was fertile, vulnerable to wind and rain—and especially vulnerable because it lay not on level ground but on hillsides: rain running down hillsides washes the soil on those slopes away. The very hills that made the Hill Country so picturesque also made it a country in which it was difficult for soil to hold. The grass of the Hill Country, then, was rich only because it had had centuries in which to build up, centuries in which nothing had disturbed it. It was rich only because it was virgin. And it could be virgin only once.

  THE HILL COUNTRY was a trap baited with water.

  The men toiling toward that country saw the hills as a low line on the horizon. There was another line in the same place, right along those first ridges, in fact, but the men couldn’t see that line. It was invisible. It was a line that would be drawn only on maps, and it wasn’t drawn on any map then, and wouldn’t be for another fifty years. But the line was there—and it would determine their fate.

  There were clues to tell them it was there. Some of the first men to enter the Hill Country noted the remarkable resemblance of a small shrub they found there to the tall walnut trees of the Atlantic coast they had left behind them; even its nuts were similar, except, of course, they were so much smaller—no larger, one early observer wrote, than a musket ball. There was a reason the little shrub resembled the big walnut tree—it was the tree, the tall tree shrunken into a small bush. Some of the settlers commented on bushes they found along the streams of the Hill Country, bushes which looked exactly like the mulberry bushes along the streams and rivers in the Old South—except that they were a quarter the size. There were many other trees and shrubs that resembled, in miniature, trees and shrubs in the states from which the settlers had come.

  There were other clues: the way the settlers’ campfires burned so brightly in the Hill Country—because the wood in this new country was so dense and hard; the way the branches of even living trees were so rigid that they snapped at a touch; the stiffness and smallness of the leaves—even the somber darkness of their green, the darkness that added so much to the beauty of the Hill Country. And in the fields of the Hill Country there was, all but hidden in the tall grass, a rather large amount of a plant whose presence was surprising in such a lush, rich land: cactus. There were plenty of clues—plenty of warnings—to tell the settlers the line was there, but none of the settlers understood them.

  The line was an “isohyet” (from the Greek: isos, equal; hyetos, rain)—a line drawn on a map so that all points along it have equal rainfall. This particular isohyet showed the westernmost limits in the United States along which the annual rainfall averages thirty inches; and a rainfall of thirty inches, when combined with two other factors—rate of evaporation (very high in the Hill Country), and seasonal distribution of rainfall (very uneven in the Hill Country, since most of it comes in spring or autumn thunder-showers)—is the bare minimum needed to grow crops successfully. Even this amount of rainfall, “especially with its irregular seasonal distribution,” is, the United States Department of Agriculture would later state, “too low” for that purpose. East of that line, in other words, farmers could prosper; west of it, they couldn’t. And when, in the twentieth century, meteorologists began charting isohyets, they would draw the crucial thirty-inch isohyet along the 98th meridian—almost exactly the border of the Hill Country. At the very moment in which settlers entered that country in pursuit of their dream, they unknowingly crossed a line which made the realization of that dream impossible. And since rainfall diminishes quite rapidly westward, with every step they took into the Hill Country, the dream became more impossible still.

  Agricultural experts would later understand the line’s significance. There is a “well-defined division” between the fertile east and the arid western regions of Texas, one expert would write in 1905: “An average line of change can be traced across the state … approximately where the annual rainfall diminishes to below 30 inches, or near the 98th meridian.” That line, another expert could say in 1921, runs down the entire United States: “the United States may be divided into an eastern half and a western half, characterized, broadly speaking, one by a sufficient and the other by an insufficient amount of rainfall for the successful production of crops by ordinary farming methods.” Historians, too, would come to understand it. One would sum up the Hill Country simply as “west of 98, west of thirty inches of rain.” The Western historian Walter Prescott Webb says that the line amounts to “an institutional fault” (comparable to a geological fault) at which “the ways of life and living changed.” But this understanding would come later—much later. At the time the Hill Country was being settled, there was no understanding at all—not of the climatic conditions and certainly not of their consequences. “When people first crossed this line,” as Webb states, “they did not immediately realize the imperceptible change that had taken place in their environment, nor, more is the tragedy, did they foresee the full consequences which that change was to bring in their own characters and in their modes of life.” This lack of understanding was demonstrated during the years leading up to the Civil War, when North and South argued over whether or not to prohibit slavery in areas that included western Texas and New Mexico. “In all this sound and fury,” as Fehrenbach points out, “there was no real understanding that slavery, based on cotton agriculture, had reached its natural limits. It had no future west of the 98th meridian; where the [Edwards Plateau] began in Texas, the rainfall, and the plantation system of the 19th-century South, abruptly ended. From the middle of the state, on a line almost even with Austin, the rainfall dribbled away from 30 inches annually to 15 or less across the vast plateaus. The farm line halted in crippled agony.”

  The trap was baited by man as well as by nature. The government of Texas, eager to encourage immigration to strengthen the Indian-riddled frontier, plastered the South with billboards proclaiming Texas advantages, and was joined in boosterism by the state’s press. In an overstatement that nonetheless has some truth in it, Fehrenbach writes that “There was almost a conspiracy to conceal the fact that in the West there was little water and rain. … Official pressure even caused regions where rainfall was fifteen inches annually to be described as ‘less humid’ in reports and geography books. The term ‘arid’ was angrily avoided.” Boosterism was just as strong in the Hill Country: George Wilkins Kendall, who began sheep-ranching there in 1857, was soon trying to sell off land in Blanco County by firing off enthusiastic letters to the New Orleans Picayune exhorting others to follow his example. “Those who failed in the venture,” notes a Hill Country resident, “were called ‘Kendall’s victims.’”

  But when the first settlers came to the Hill Country, no one was calling them “victims,” least of all themselves. If someone had told them the truth, in fact, they might not have listened. For the trap was baited well. Who, entering this land after a rainy April, when “the springs are flowing, the streams are rushing, the live oaks spread green canopies, and the field flowers wave in widespread beauty,” would believe it was not in a “less humid” but an “arid” zone? Moreover, as to the adequacy of rainfall, the evidence of the settlers’ own eyes was often misleading, for one aspect of the trap was especially convincing—and especially cruel. Meteorologists would later conclude that rainfall over the entire Edwards Plateau is characterized by the most irregular and dramatic cycles. Even modern meteorology cannot fathom their mysteries; in the 1950’s, during a searing, parching dry spell that lasted for seven consecutive years, the United States Weather Bureau would confess that it had been unable to find any logical rhythm in Hill Country weather; “just when the cycle seems sure enough for planning, nature makes one of her erratic moves in the other direction.” Rain can be plentiful in the Hill Country not just for one year, but for two or three—or more—in a row. Men, e
ven cautious men, therefore could arrive during a wet cycle and conclude—and write home confidently—that rainfall was adequate, even abundant. And when, suddenly, the cycle shifted—and the shift could be very sudden; during the 1950’s, it rained forty-one inches one year, eleven the next—who could blame these men for being sure that the dry spell was an aberration; that it would surely rain the next year—or the next? It had to, they felt; there was plenty of rain in the Hill Country—hadn’t they seen it with their own eyes?

  The first settlers did not realize they were crossing a significant line. They came into the new land blithely. After all those years in which they had feared their fate was poverty, they saw at last the glimmerings of a new hope. But in reality, from the moment they first decided to settle in this new land, their fate was sealed. Dreaming of cotton and cattle kingdoms, or merely of lush fields of corn and wheat, they went back for their families and brought them in, not knowing that they were bringing them into a land which would adequately support neither cattle nor cotton—nor even corn or wheat. Fleeing the crop lien and the furnishing merchant, hundreds of thousands of Southerners came to Texas. Of all those hundreds of thousands, few had come as far as these men who came to the Hill Country. And they had come too far.