Means of Ascent (32 page)

Stevenson had never considered holding public office, he was to recall: he accepted the appointment only on condition that he could resign it as soon as the crisis was over.

Enlisting the help of
Frank Hamer, already famous as perhaps the toughest of the Texas Rangers, Stevenson “lay out” with Hamer in the hills night after night waiting for the rustlers, captured them, and found that their leader was indeed the young man who had been suspected.

The capture turned out to be the easy part of the job. At the time, Stevenson was to recall, he had little concept of public life. Receiving a crash course in the subject now, he didn’t like it at all.

Claiming he wasn’t guilty, the young man’s family said that the new county attorney had arrested him only to make a name for himself with a sensational case; other Kimble residents felt that even if the young man
was
guilty, he should have been let off with a warning because of his family’s contributions to the county. During the months the case dragged on, Stevenson’s reaction to the criticism was dramatic: he refused to reply to it
by a single word. And when the case ended—with the young man convicted and in jail—Stevenson without a word went back to the hills with Hamer, to “lay out” again to trap the rest of the rustlers. Soon the news was out: Kimble was a good county for rustlers to avoid. But as Stevenson was leaving his first public office, he was given a second, for Kimble had another problem now—one even more serious than rustling.

It was Stevenson’s own fault that he was given this new position. During the previous year, 1917, the trail to Sonora, the only route from Junction to the west, had washed out, becoming, as one chronicler put it, a “quagmire” so “hopeless that even a single horse had difficulty getting through.” Trying to repair the trail, Junction’s citizens had organized a work party along the lines of a barn-raising, with every man bringing
his own pick and shovel. But little progress was being made because the men were being given no direction—until, in his quiet, slow-speaking way, Coke Stevenson began giving it.

As he made suggestions, the crowd of boisterous men quieted, and listened to them, and followed them. Stevenson had the men return to their ranches to get wagons, and then had them fan out with the wagons, each carrying a team of men, across the hills to bring back the largest boulders they could find. The boulders were rolled into the mud, and when they sank from sight, more were brought until they rose above the surface. Then smaller rocks were
added until the trail was restored. The ranchers thought the job was done, but Stevenson suggested that maybe it wasn’t. As long as they had put in so much work already, he said, maybe the trail should be smoothed out, made more like a real road. He had the men take their wagons to nearby streams, bring back gravel from the stream beds, and spread and level it over the rocks.

Now, in January, 1918, the road situation throughout Kimble County had become more critical. Much of the rest of Texas was being linked together, by roads and rail, but the Hill Country was almost as isolated as ever. Laying tracks through hills was too expensive in a sparsely populated district, so railroads generally shunned the Hill Country. Most of America was entering the Automobile Age; a State Highway Department had been established in Texas, and construction of
paved roads was under way in other sections of the state. But with a few exceptions (the most notable was the
Fredericksburg-Austin highway being built in that very year because of the heroic efforts of the Representative from that area, Lyndon Johnson’s father, Sam Ealy Johnson), Hill Country roads were as rudimentary as ever. Without rail connections to the rest of the state, trucks or wagons were the only means for the area’s ranchers and farmers
to get their produce to market, and because of the condition of the roads, their produce was often spoiled by the time it got there. With more and more roads being built elsewhere in the state, the competitive position of ranchers throughout the vast, isolated Texas Hill Country was steadily worsening, even before the terrible drought of 1916 and 1917. Nowhere was the situation more critical than in Kimble County. There were two hundred motor vehicles in Kimble in 1918, but in all
that huge county, larger than the state of Rhode Island, there was not a foot of paved road; moreover, as a Hill Country chronicler wrote, “No semblance of a system of roads connected them with the outside world.” One evening in January, Junction’s elder citizens met in the bank; “This group of men had recognized that Junction and Kimble County had reached an important milestone; that it either must go forward or be lost in the shuffle of progress.”
Their only hope was “to give the county some modern roads and to provide access to the markets of the state.” They decided to pass a $150,000 bond issue to finance road construction, but they knew the work wouldn’t get done unless someone “took hold of the job and got it started on the right track.” Coke Stevenson wasn’t even at the meeting at the bank; he
had had enough of public service. But if it wasn’t
for him, everyone knew, there would still be no road to Sonora. The young lawyer was sitting at home with his wife, reading in front of a fire, when, late in the evening, the phone rang, and he was summoned to the bank, where he was asked to accept the nomination
for
County Judge, the county’s chief administrative officer. At first he flatly refused, but so serious was the situation that, finally, feeling he had no choice, he accepted,
on two conditions: that under no circumstances would he be asked to accept a second two-year term, and that he would not have to campaign. His friends did the campaigning, and he won easily.

During his two years as County Judge, other qualities in Coke Stevenson became apparent. One was an unusual ability to persuade men to sacrifice for the common weal. Although $150,000 was more than the county’s taxpayers could afford, it wasn’t enough for the job. And Stevenson felt that none of it should be spent on right-of-way; the land, he said, should be donated, since its owners would benefit from the road. This proposal had been broached
before, and rejected. Now, at a number of public meetings, Stevenson spoke of how individuals should cooperate for the public good. The right-of-way was donated. By the end of the two years, Junction was linked by road with every other major town in the county. And it was being linked with the outside world. Rivalry had for years existed between Junction and Kerrville, a town in neighboring Kerr County, which lay between Kimble and San Antonio. But Stevenson persuaded Kerr’s
Commissioners to co-sponsor a joint mass meeting of the two counties at which Stevenson argued that Kerr should build a road that would meet Kimble’s at the border and link the two county seats. When he had finished speaking, in his slow, quiet way, Kerr agreed to do so. The agreement meant that Kimble would have a passable road most of the way to San Antonio.

To build the roads, the man who had taught himself law taught himself engineering. Kimble’s hills were laced with small streams and steep slopes. Building elevated bridges was prohibitively expensive, so roads would have to dip down to the streams, crossing them on roadbeds laid just above water level, and up again. Stevenson knew nothing about engineering and little about mathematics. But he cut miniature car wheels out of cardboard, figured the ratio with the
Model T wheel, traveling at twenty-five miles per hour, the standard of the day, and tested the miniature wheels on various concave surfaces to determine the proper “roll” of the dips. It was, one writer was to say, “
testimony of the character of the road he built” that the
Junction-Kerrville Road, the first piece of improved highway in all the immense distances between San Antonio and El Paso, was still in use more than twenty years
later.

By the end of his two-year term, Coke Stevenson’s fame had spread
through the Hill Country, and a delegation called on him to ask him to run for Congress. Slow and thoughtful though he generally was, he answered this request quickly. “
My public life,” he was to recall in later years, “came about by accident. I did not deliberately set about entering public life. On the contrary, each time I held an
office, it was for the purpose of getting a particular job completed.” The jobs—rustler-hunting and road-building—were over, and, he said, so was his time in “public life.” In 1920, he returned to his law practice. During the next eight years, the reputation of this self-taught lawyer continued to spread; from all across the vast
Edwards Plateau men traveled to Junction in the hope that Coke Stevenson would represent them in
cases ranging from intricate land-title suits to murder. He would never defend a man charged with livestock theft, cardinal crime of the Old West, and he would never accept a client, no matter how large the offered fee, in whose innocence he did not believe. Yet the docket for a single court term at Junction lists “C. R. Stevenson” as defense attorney in twenty-seven out of thirty-two cases. His reputation spread further; attorneys and judges from Houston and Dallas and
San Antonio returned from Hill Country courts to tell their colleagues that in a little town in the middle of nowhere they had just watched what one of them called “
one of the greatest trial lawyers in the history of Texas.” Sometimes he would try a case in a big city, and courtroom observers realized that that assessment was correct. Judge
A. B. Martin of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals said that Stevenson was “the
best all-round lawyer” he had ever seen. Although he refused proffered partnerships in big-city law firms as quickly as he had refused a congressional seat—he just didn’t want to leave the Hill Country, Stevenson would say—he soon was reportedly being asked to try more lawsuits than any attorney in Texas. Before the end of his career, one writer reported, he had “written land marks” in law books and the legal reports of the state:
monuments of a wholly self-educated attorney that attorneys from great law schools studied. Together with friends, he founded many small businesses in Junction—a hardware store, a title-abstract company, the first Ford automobile agency in the area; on Friday and Saturday nights, he ran the first motion-picture show in Junction, operating the projector himself—not that any of these businesses, in the cash-poor Hill Country, generated much cash profit. He was one of the
organizers of a new bank—the First National Bank of Junction—and became its president. At the time he did so, the
Junction State Bank, at which he had started as a janitor, asked him to continue as its attorney even though he was now president of a competing bank; as one biographer put it, this “stands as
a sincere tribute to the respect in which Stevenson was held by his fellow townsmen”; Coke Stevenson, it was
said, was so honest that he could represent the two competing institutions at once. But Stevenson
didn’t spend most of his time in town; he spent it at the ranch, and whatever money he made—from the law practice, from the hardware store, from the bank—he put into that ranch. He purchased a second five hundred acres, and then a thousand more, and then another thousand; by 1928, he owned more than six thousand acres of the beautiful,
spring-watered property he had come upon so long before.

On the site, below the falls, that he had picked out for his home years earlier, he now built it, with his own hands. Several years later it burned down, and he built another house. This one had a wing solely for his books. His self-education had progressed from the practicalities of law to its philosophy and theory, and then to government, to history and to biography. In the
Hill Country, where books were so rare—Junction, like Johnson City,
had no library; most families owned only one book: the Bible—he had created a substantial library. He would read at night, but also in the mornings, before daylight. He rose very early every morning, and put on a pot—a battered old graniteware pot—of very strong coffee. Then he would sit down with a book. Friends who stayed at the ranch remember sometimes getting up at four or five in the morning to go to the bathroom, and seeing a lamp burning in the living
room, and in its circle of light, Coke Stevenson reading, his huge, gnarled, powerful hands tenderly holding the book. “He
treats his books like friends,” one man would recall. “None of his books has a turned-down edge” to mark the place; “none has notes on the margin—if notes are needed, he makes them on a piece of paper and inserts them at the place.…”

Fay designed this new house—a sprawling, spacious, two-story structure with three great archways in front, and above them a long terrace. Coke built it—a room at a time as funds were available. (It would take him ten years to complete it.) To implement his wife’s drawings, he sent away for books on architecture and taught himself the rudiments of that profession. The house was somewhat Spanish and romantic in design, and it was built so that it
couldn’t be destroyed. Underneath the bright Indian rugs that covered them, the floors were of concrete; the ceiling and supporting beams were of concrete reinforced with steel; the walls—thick walls—were of concrete and native stone. A visitor said it was so solid that it was “seemingly indestructible”; another compared it to “a fortress.” And it was, in a rough way, very impressive; towering up to the twenty-foot ceiling of the
“
baronial” living room was a huge, “
unbelievable” stone fireplace. It was a stone Fay particularly liked that was found on a ridge some miles from the house; Coke lugged every stone home in a tow sack. Describing the house, the beautiful, clear river near it, the shimmering falls, the herons standing in the river, the beavers splashing nearby, the herds of deer so tame they ate out of Coke’s hand, a writer who was
Coke’s friend would call the Stevenson Ranch “
a Dream
Ranch—the dream of a 10-year-old boy who always knew that he wanted to be a rancher.”

The ranch
was
a fortress, or at least a refuge from the world. Since Coke had refused to build even a rough low-water bridge across the South Llano, the only way of reaching it was by fording the river, which was not infrequently too high to be forded. He refused to have a telephone on the ranch. The closest town was Telegraph, a mile across the river, and that “town” consisted of one building: a store. (The town had no telegraph; it had been
given its name because telegraph poles had been cut from trees near there during the 1850s.)