The Path to Power by Robert A. Caro

to become, they boasted, “the richest men in Texas.”
    They were descended from a John Johnson. Some family historians say he was “of English descent,” but they don’t know this for certain. The few known facts of his life, and of the life of his son, Jesse, fit the pattern—of migration into newly opened, fertile land, the using up of the land and the move west again—that underlay so much of the westward movement in America; and the Johnsons’ route was the route many followed. Georgia, the most sparsely populated of the original thirteen colonies, wanted settlers, particularly settlers who could shoot, and it was the most generous of the colonies in offering land to Revolutionary War veterans. The first time the name of Lyndon Johnson’s great-great-grandfather, John Johnson, who was a veteran, appears in an official record is in 1795, when he was paying taxes on land in Georgia’s Oglethorpe County; by his death in 1827, he owned land in three other counties as well—but little else.
    As Georgia’s land wore out under repeated cotton crops, men searched for new land on which to plant it, and when, after the War of 1812, Georgia’s western territories were cleared of Indians, settlers poured into them in a “Great Migration.” John’s son, Jesse, who was Lyndon Johnson’s great-grandfather, was part of that migration. He was a “first settler” of Henry County. Few facts are known about Jesse’s life, but from those few it is possible to theorize about big dreams—which, unlike the dreams of the Buntons, ended in failure. For a time, for example, Jesse Johnson appears to have been a respected and prosperous farmer in Henry County. He served as its sheriff from 1822 to 1835, and also as a judge. But by 1838, he was no longer living in Henry County; he and his wife, Lucy, and their ten children, had moved west again—into Alabama. There, in the records of Randolph County, appear again hints of transient success. The 1840 census lists only two persons in the entire county engaged in “commerce”: Jesse and one of his sons. A local historian “guesses” that “they operated a stagecoach line or were in the banking business. They were prosperous.” Jesse owned seventeen slaves. But by 1846, Jesse was GTT—to Lockhart, on the plains near the Hill Country. In the Lockhart courthouse are records showing that in 1850 Jesse Johnson owned 332 acres, 250 head of cattle and 21 horses, and there exists also a will drawn up, in 1854, as if Jesse believed he was leaving a substantial estate to his family. One of its clauses, for example, provides that at his wife’s death, the estate is to be equally divided among his children, excepting the heirs of one who had died, “who I will to have one thousand dollars more than my other heirs.” But the reality was that there was no thousand dollars “more”—or at all. When, after his death in 1856, his sons sold their father’s assets, they didn’t realize enough even to pay theirfather’s debts. In 1858, two of them—Tom, then twenty-two years old, and Samuel Ealy Johnson, Lyndon Johnson’s grandfather, then twenty—headed west into the hills, making their boast.
    T O GO INTO THAT LAND took courage.
    The Spanish and Mexicans had not dared to go. As early as 1730, they had built three presidios, or forts, in the Hill Country. But down from the Great Plains to the north swept the Lipan Apaches—“the terror,” in the words of one early commentator, “of all whites and most Indians.” The presidios lasted one year, then the Spanish pulled out their garrisons and retreated to San Antonio, the city below the Edwards Plateau. In 1757, lured by the Apaches’ protestations that they were now ready to be converted to Christianity—and by Apache hints of fabulously rich silver mines—the Spaniards built a fort and a mission deep within the Hill Country, at San Saba. But the Apaches had only lured the Spaniards north—because pressing down into their