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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 thanthe 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 theysaw 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?
    T HE 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