Free The Path to Power by Robert A. Caro Page A

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 whichthe 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.
    T HE J OHNSON 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