The Path to Power by Robert A. Caro Read Free Book Online

underbrush, relentless enemy of grass. The roots of brush are merciless, spreading and seeking out all available moisture, and so are the leaves of brush, which cast on grass the shade that kills it, so if brush and grass are left alone in a field, the grass will be destroyed by the brush. But grass grows much faster than brush, so fire gives grass the head start it needs to survive; after a fire, grass would re-enter the burned-over land first—one good rain and among the ashes would be new green shoots—and by the time the brush arrived, the grass would be thick and strong enough to stand it off.
    Even with the aid of fire, the grass had grown slowly—agonizingly slowly. Some years most of it died, some years all. But in other years, it grew, and after a while it had a base to grow in, for even in the years when most of it died, some residue remained. This base built up gradually until there was, at last, atop the soil a padding to protect the soil from rain and add to the fertility with which it fed the next growth of grass—at first a thin pad and then a thicker one, and finally a lush, diverse carpet in which could grow the big grass, the stirrup-high grass, that dominated the beautiful Hill Country meadows that the first settlers saw. The big grass had big roots; every time fire came to help it—natural fire or Indian-set—it grew back faster. As it got taller, it grew faster still, for it held more and more moisture and thus could survive dry spells better. But even so, it had taken a very long time to grow.
    It had grown so slowly because the soil beneath it was so thin. The Hill Country was limestone country, and while the mineral richness of limestone makes the soil produced by its crumbling very fertile, the hardness of limestone makes it produce that soil slowly. There was only a narrow, thin, layer of soil atop the Hill Country limestone, a layer as fragile as it was fertile, vulnerable to wind and rain—and especially vulnerable because it lay not on level ground but on hillsides: rain running down hillsides washes the soil on those slopes away. The very hills that made the Hill Country so picturesque also made it a country in which it was difficult for soil to hold. The grass of the Hill Country, then, was rich only because it had had centuries in which to build up, centuries in which nothing had disturbed it. It was rich only because it was virgin. And it could be virgin only once.

    T HE H ILL C OUNTRY was a trap baited with water.
    The men toiling toward that country saw the hills as a low line on the horizon. There was another line in the same place, right along those first ridges, in fact, but the men couldn’t see that line. It was invisible. It was a line that would be drawn only on maps, and it wasn’t drawn on any map then, and wouldn’t be for another fifty years. But the line was there—and it would determine their fate.
    There were clues to tell them it was there. Some of the first men to enter the Hill Country noted the remarkable resemblance of a small shrub they found there to the tall walnut trees of the Atlantic coast they had left behind them; even its nuts were similar, except, of course, they were so much smaller—no larger, one early observer wrote, than a musket ball. There was a reason the little shrub resembled the big walnut tree—it
was
the tree, the tall tree shrunken into a small bush. Some of the settlers commented on bushes they found along the streams of the Hill Country, bushes which looked exactly like the mulberry bushes along the streams and rivers in the Old South—except that they were a quarter the size. There were many other trees and shrubs that resembled, in miniature, trees and shrubs in the states from which the settlers had come.
    There were other clues: the way the settlers’ campfires burned so brightly in the Hill Country—because the wood in this new country was so dense and hard; the way the branches of even living trees were so rigid that they