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on to it and turned it into a farm, its hogs (if cattle weren’t profitable, the Buntons would raise an animal that was) producing sausage that he sold in Austin, acquiring as he did so a reputation as a hard, shrewd businessman. As late as 1930, Desha’s son and daughter were running the same ranch their hero grandfather had left—and the hero’s house still stood. (“The Buntons were very proud people,” a neighbor recalls. “They had elegant parties in that beautiful yard. They were really striking, the way they looked. Tall and straight. Their ears were big and their noses—and they had those piercing Bunton eyes.”) And although during the Depression they were forced to sell off first one piece and then another, they held on grimly to as much as possible—so that as late as 1981, more than a century after its founding, the ranch, reduced to perhaps 200 acres, was still in the family.
    Robert Holmes Bunton, Lyndon Johnson’s great-grandfather, sent big herds up to Abilene with his sons. Cattle prices began to fall, and from one drive his sons returned all but penniless. Then, together with another brother, Robert mustered up a herd of 1,500 head and sent them up the trail with one of the brother’s sons. The young man returned home without a dime, having apparently fallen into the hands of cardsharps in Abilene; Robert, it is related, “said not one word of reproach.” But while other men persisted in making drives that grew steadily less profitable, the two Bunton brothers all but stopped raising cattle themselves, and instead rented out their pastures as grazing land for herds from South Texas that were passing through and needed to rest for a few days on the way north. Many of the men who owned those herds made no money from them—but the Buntons did. Robert Bunton made enough so that he was able to retire comfortably, and to give his six children a start in life when they married: money to his daughters—one of whom, Eliza Bunton, was Lyndon Johnson’s grandmother—and land to his sons. And the sons made successes of their land—one becoming one of the biggest ranchers in the big ranch country of West Texas.
    The Buntons, then, while never as successful as they had dreamed of becoming, were more successful than the run of ranchers in central Texas: in a land in which economic survival was very difficult, they survived. Central Texans often judged their neighbors by whether or not they “left something for their children.” The Buntons left something for theirs, and the children made something out of what they were left. It was only when, in Lyndon Johnson’s father, the Bunton strain became mixed with the Johnson strain that the Bunton temper and pride, ambition and dreams, and interest in ideas and abstractions brought disaster, for the Johnsons were not only also dreamers, romantics, and idealists, not only had a fierce pride and flaring temper of their own, and physical characteristics which greatly resembled those of the Buntons, they also resembled the Buntons in their passion for ideas and abstractions—without resembling them at all in shrewdness and toughness. They had all the impractical side of the Buntons—and none of the practical side. Big as were the Buntons’ dreams, moreover, the Johnsons’ dreams were even bigger. Their dreams lured them beyond even that far point to which the Buntons had ventured. The Buntons stopped just before the edge of the Hill Country; the Johnsons pushed forward—into its heart.
    And the Hill Country was hard on dreams.
    T HE H ILL C OUNTRY was a trap—a trap baited with grass.
    To men who had lived in the damp, windless forests of Alabama or East Texas and then had trudged across 250 miles of featureless Texas plains—walking for hours alongside their wagons across the flat land toward a low rise, and then, when they reached the top of the rise, seeing before them just more flatness, until at the top of one rise they saw, in the distance, something