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different: a low line that, as they toiled toward it, gradually became hills, hills stretching across the entire horizon—to these men the hills were beautiful. From the crest of the first ones they climbed, they could see that this wasn’t an isolated line of higher ground, but the beginning of a different kind of country—from that crest, range after range of hills rolled away into the distance. And from every new hill they climbed, the hills stretched away farther; according to these early settlers, every time they thought they were seeing the last range of hills, there would be another crest, and when they climbed it, they would see more ranges ahead, until the hills seemed endless—the Hill Country, they said, was a land of “false horizons.” They were, in fact, at the eastern edge of a highland that covered 24,000 square miles.
    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 elmsand 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