The Path to Power by Robert A. Caro

has recorded, was of crops and cattle, markets and weather, never some remote realm of ideas.” Table talk at the Johnsons’was quite often of ideas. Sam Johnson, who had nine children, encouraged them to discuss “serious issues” at the table for the same reason he encouraged them to play whist, a relative recalls: “He encouraged his children to engage in games that required them to think.” After dinner, he would often have them engage in impromptu debates. Two of his three sons became teachers: one attended the University of Michigan—possibly the first Hill Country boy to travel out of Texas for an education. Sam was interested not just in politics but in government; at a time when few people in the Hill Country got newspapers—and when those who did, got them, by freight wagon, a week or two late—he subscribed to an Austin daily and arranged to have it delivered every other day to Weinheimer’s General Store in the nearby town of Stonewall—even though he had to ford the Pedernales to pick it up. His politics, moreover, were less practical than idealistic. One of his key beliefs was in a “tenant purchase program” that would enable tenant farmers to buy their farms: men, he said, should not have to work land they did not own; when asked for details of the program, he was a little vague. Every available description of Samuel Ealy Johnson emphasizes his interest in philosophy and theology, not just in the Fundamentalist religion of the Hill Country but in deeper religious questions. He was a Baptist, but once a minister of a sect called the Christadelphians stopped at the Johnson house, and Sam welcomed the opportunity to debate with him. All through dinner and into the evening, they discussed the Bible. Because the minister raised questions he couldn’t answer, Sam arranged for him to debate the local Baptist preacher. And because Sam felt that the Christadelphian had won the debate, he changed his membership to that church.
    The Johnsons were dreamers. There was a streak of romanticism in them—of extravagance, a gift for the grandiose gesture. When Sam married Eliza, Tom gave his brother’s bride a carriage with trappings of silver and, to pull it, a matched span of magnificent Kentucky-born thoroughbreds, named Sam Bass and Coreen—a gift not only unheard of in the Hill Country but, in that country, incredibly expensive.
    The Johnsons were impractical. Eliza, a Bunton, was not; she was known for the shrewd bargaining with which she sold her eggs, and for repeating the family saying: “Charity begins at home.” But her husband and his brother, lulled, no doubt, by the sweep and grandeur of the cattle business, and by the ease with which money was made in it, acted as if they couldn’t be bothered with mundane details—as if, for example, haggling and bargaining were beneath them. When Tom returned from Abilene in 1870 with the $100,000 in twenty-dollar gold double eagles, the men—many of them German businessmen from Fredericksburg, businessmen whose penuriousness is legendary in Texas—who had given the Johnsons their cattle on credit came in to be paid. The Johnsons took receipts for the money they paid out, but not in a very orderly way. Relates Speer:
    They took receipts and soon had a large carpetbag full, and in such a shape that there is no doubt in my mind that a good many beeves were paid for twice, and some of them several times. …
    As Fehrenbach points out, for all the romance of the Cattle Kingdom, the men who became its barons—the Goodnights and Chisums and Kings—were, above all else, businessmen. The Johnson brothers were not. When they had finished paying for the beeves, they had made many people in the Hill Country happy, Speer notes; “$20 gold pieces were about as plentiful as 50-cent pieces are now.” But while the Johnsons still had a lot of money left—it was the following month that they paid the $10,000 in gold for the Hays County land—they had less than they