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

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.

    B UT 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 grim-ness, 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