Means of Ascent (31 page)

I
N ALL THE VAST
and empty
Hill Country, there was no more deserted area than the seventy miles of rolling hills and towering limestone cliffs between Brady and Junction, about eighty miles west of Johnson City. Only a few widely scattered ranch houses dotted that area; for long stretches, after night fell, not a single light marked a human presence. Beginning in the year 1904, however, there was one light. It was the
light of a campfire. Each night it was in a different location, for it marked the camp of a wagon traveling each week back and forth between Brady and Junction. Lying in the little circle of flickering light cast by the fire was a single person: a slender teenage boy. He would be lying beside the fire on his stomach, reading a book.

The boy was the son of impoverished parents. He was determined to be something more, and his determination had led him to haul freight between Junction and Brady. Older men, deterred by the loneliness of five nights alone each week in the trackless hills and by the seven dangerous, often impassable, streams that would have to be forded on each trip, had refused even to try to do that. But the boy had tried, and had succeeded. The little freight line was beginning to
pay. Yet he was determined to be something more. He wanted a profession, and had written away to a correspondence school for textbooks on bookkeeping. And at night, he would be studying them, in the little circle of light from his campfire.

The boy was
Coke Robert Stevenson. And if that scene—the single circle of light in the dark and empty hills; the boy within that circle, studying to get ahead; the courage and ambition which had brought the boy out into the emptiness—symbolizes the legend of the West, so, indeed,
Coke Stevenson’s whole life was the raw material out of which that legend is made.

His father was an itinerant schoolteacher who would travel with his family—Coke, born in 1888, was the oldest of eight children—to remote communities on the Texas frontier and offer to hold a “term of school,” usually about three months, for thirty dollars a month. Coke, named after Governor
Richard Coke, a Confederate veteran who in 1873 wrested the government of Texas from the hated Carpetbaggers and Reconstruction, got
his only schooling in his father’s classes; in his entire life, he had twenty-two months of formal education.

The Stevensons’ poverty had forced Coke to go to work at the age of ten, building fences and digging irrigation ditches on nearby ranches for a dollar a week. By the time he was twelve, he was a cowhand on a ranch; at fourteen, while his father and mother homesteaded in Kimble County, deep in the Hill Country, the slender, dark-haired, serious-faced boy was herding steers in the fierce winds that whipped across the rugged mesas of the Continental Divide, in New
Mexico. By that time, he wanted a ranch of his own, wanted one desperately. Asked in later years what his early ambitions had been, he replied: “
I never had any doubt. I wanted to be a rancher.” His mother noticed that out of every pay he received, no matter how small it was, her son was careful to save something.

When Coke was sixteen, his father opened a small general store in Junction, a little town in Kimble County wedged between high, green hills on the banks of the Llano River. Stocking the store was a problem; it was as hard to bring manufactured goods into the Hill Country, cut off from the rest of Texas not only by its hills and its vast distances but by the lack of roads and railroads, as it was for Hill Country farmers and ranchers to get their
produce out of the Hill Country to market. A railroad had that very year pushed a line as far as Brady, some seventy miles away, but the Brady-Junction “road” was no more than a rough, rocky trail winding over the steep, jagged hills; in rainy spells it turned into a ribbon of mud. And rain made the seven swift Hill Country streams between Brady and Junction swell and race, and fording them could be dangerous even for a man on horseback; the thought of bringing a loaded
wagon across all seven of them twice on each round trip was daunting. Men saw only danger in that trip; for Hill Country farmers and ranchers, one writer said, “
the task of bringing in supplies and getting the fruits of their labor to market was an arduous one even when the roads were at their best. It was more than man and beast could stand when conditions were at their worst.” But while Coke Stevenson saw the danger, he saw something else as well. Years later he would
tell a friend: “
I saw opportunity.” With his savings he bought a wagon and six horses.

To induce merchants to use his “freight line,” he knew, he would
have to maintain a regular schedule. He announced he would make a round trip every week, even though that meant logging more than twenty miles a day.

Six-horse teams were generally driven from a seat on the wagon, but the old trail-drivers with whom Coke had bunked in his ranch jobs had told the boy how such teams had been driven in the early days on the frontier, and that was how he drove his: sitting among them. By riding the wheel horse, the one on the left in the team closest to the wagon, he could spur him on, and could reach the one beside him, too, with a kick; he used the whip on the other four. It was harder
to sit a saddle all day than to sit on a wagon seat, but you could control the horses better, and get the most out of them.

The trip was as hard as men had foreseen. It would be many years before Coke Stevenson could bring himself to talk about the months during which, every day, “you had to make twenty miles a day” over those rocks and ruts with little chance that, should a wheel or an axle break or any of a thousand other possible mishaps occur on those “
seldom traveled trails,” someone would come along to help. When, decades later, he did
talk about those months, men who knew the Hill Country and who could picture the difficulties he had surmounted would look at him with awe. He would unload his freight in Brady, fall asleep exhausted in the wagonyard, and be up before dawn the next morning to load up again and head out on the road back. When it rained out on the trail, he slept underneath the wagon; when it rained for several days, he would be wet through for several days. When the wagon mired in the mud, there was
no one but him and the horses to get it out; “once I got stuck so bad in a mudhole that I was there eleven days,” he would recall. The rain kept falling; at night he was so wet and cold that he burrowed into the load of freight for warmth. But, as a friend was to write, “
rare was the occasion when he did not maintain his schedule, and the confidence of his customers grew with each successfully completed trip.” And opportunity had, indeed, been there.
Carrying “
anything from a bolt of linen to a windmill,” he earned enough to buy a second wagon, which he hitched behind the first, and he filled that with goods too. He began to make money; forty dollars a month, he would later recall.

But a freight line was not what he had always wanted, and by this time Coke Stevenson had decided there were better ways of getting what he wanted. He wrote away for the textbooks, and each night on the trail, after he had cooked dinner and rubbed down the horses (one of his brothers was to recall how Coke “treasured those six horses; they were all he had”), he would build up the campfire and lie on his stomach in the circle of its light and teach himself
bookkeeping. During those evenings the teenage boy’s only companions in the dark hills would be the horses and
the books; a friend to whom, years later, Coke Stevenson talked about his experiences described them as “
evenings of loneliness.”

After two years of freighting, when he was eighteen, the opportunity for which he had been hoping appeared. Two brothers from England opened a bank in Junction. When he applied for a job, however, what he got instead was an insult. “
The president,” Stevenson would recall, “laughed at the idea of a freighter being a bookkeeper, but said that, since no Negroes were in the town, he could use a janitor” to sweep the floor and clean out the
cuspidors. Men who knew Coke Stevenson in later years knew how quick a temper he had. But they also knew that he never showed it. As long as it was in a bank, the janitor’s job might “
work up to something” better than freighting, he felt. Although it paid only half the forty dollars a month he had been earning, he took it. Some months later, the bookkeeper became ill and the president asked Coke if he could keep the books for a while. After he
showed that he could, he was made bookkeeper, and then, at the age of twenty, cashier.

But he was still not earning enough money to buy a ranch—and by this time he had found the ranch he wanted, the ranch of his dreams.

One day, following the canyon of the South Llano River through the hills southwest of Junction, Stevenson had come to its low, broad, shimmering falls. Beyond them, framed against the canyon’s limestone walls, a herd of deer grazed in a riverbank meadow until his horse was almost among them, and then leaped gracefully away, white tails flashing. As he watched, Stevenson was to recall, a flock of wild turkeys strutted out of one of the groves of spreading,
sparkling-leaved live oaks that dotted the bank. In the river’s clear, rushing water, tall herons and cranes stood like statues.

Splashing across a ford, he spurred his horse up the far bluff, and came out onto broad, rolling upland pastures. Large swatches were covered with cedar, but cedar could be cleared away, if a man was willing to put in the necessary effort. And while in most of the Hill Country the beauty of the landscape was a trap, concealing from would-be ranchers the
aridity of the climate, this was one of the few spots on the vast
Edwards
Plateau in which water would not be a problem. Two miles or so down river was a hundred-foot bluff, and from its face, from under a thick outcropping of rock, a sheet of water almost a hundred yards wide cascaded to the river below. This was called the “Seven Hundred Springs,” because although subsequent exploration would reveal that the cascade came from a single spring, the rivulets pouring down the face of the rock gave the illusion of coming from many. Pushing
through the cedar brakes in the pastures atop the bluff, Stevenson found hidden among them one stream after another, all clear and cold enough so that he knew them to be spring-fed, a source of abundant water. In later years, reporters traveling
to that spot to interview Stevenson would marvel at its beauty. The river, one wrote, is “
as pretty a stream as you could conjure up in your dreams.” Twenty-year-old Coke Stevenson
determined in the instant that it would be the site of his house, and the land around it his ranch. He wrote away for more books.

This time they were law books. He studied them at night, this young man with so little formal education, after the bank closed, in the office of a Junction attorney, using the attorney’s books as well; during the almost five years that he was studying, townspeople grew accustomed to seeing the light burn late in the attorney’s office; sometimes, they said, it burned all night. During the nights, too, he built a home in town, for himself and his bride, Fay
Wright, the ebullient, charming daughter of the local doctor. He built it with his own hands, working by the light of a lantern, using the lumber from two old frame houses that he tore down so that he would not have to spend the money he was saving to buy his ranch. In September, 1913, Stevenson rode out of the Hill Country to San Antonio to take, and pass, the examination for his law degree. Early in 1914, he received his first substantial legal fee. With that and his savings, he
bought his ranch—520 acres at the falls of the South Llano—for eight dollars an acre.

In that year, however, his life took a turning he
hadn’t
planned.

It was due to a number of qualities that he possessed.

Some were physical. Coke Stevenson was tall—a little more than an inch over six feet—and strong; slender, but wiry, and with broad shoulders and big hands. He held himself very erect, and had a slow, careful, deliberate way of looking around him from the doorway before he stepped into a room—like, in the words of Texas historian
T. R. Fehrenbach, an old gunfighter squinting “carefully down both sides of the street,
evaluating the men, the weather, the lay of the land, before emerging into the sun—
the famous, careful, Southwestern stare.” He was very quiet. He had, a reporter says, “the original poker face.” Although his friends say he had a “wonderful
sense of humor,” only his friends knew it. He seldom laughed out loud, “but you’d suddenly look at him, and see those big shoulders shaking, and know
Coke was enjoying the joke more than anyone.” On serious matters “Coke kept his own counsel, he was
slow to speak,” another friend says. When he did speak, it was in the low, slow, Texas cowboy drawl, and each word seemed carefully chosen. And when he spoke, other traits emerged, including one that even opponents define as “
sincerity.” He quickly earned a reputation as an outstanding courtroom advocate.
“Coke would never say a word that he didn’t believe, and that shone through,” a fellow attorney says. “When he spoke to a jury, the jury believed him.” So did people outside the courtroom. Coke Stevenson didn’t talk much, but when he talked, men listened. The tall young
attorney in cowboy boots and ill-fitting suits was, without meaning to be, a leader of men. Nineteen fourteen, the year in which Stevenson bought his
ranch, was a year in which Kimble County ranchers, always on the verge of financial disaster because of the thin, poor soil, the difficulty of getting goods in and out to market, and the recurring Hill Country droughts, were pushed to the very brink by a new menace: livestock thieves. It was suspected that the rustlers’ leader was the son of the county’s most prominent, and popular, family. Capturing him red-handed might mean gunplay; prosecuting him would mean
antagonizing his family. Solving the rustling problem would be a dangerous yet delicate job; the County Commissioners asked Stevenson to do it—as the new county attorney.