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

snapped at a touch; the stiffness and smallness of the leaves—even the somber darkness of their green, the darkness that added so much to the beauty of the Hill Country. And in the fields of the Hill Country there was, all but hidden in the tall grass, a rather large amount of a plant whose presence was surprising in such a lush, rich land: cactus. There were plenty of clues—plenty of warnings—to tell the settlers the line was there, but none of the settlers understood them.
    The line was an “isohyet” (from the Greek:
isos
, equal;
hyetos
, rain)—a line drawn on a map so that all points along it have equal rainfall. This particular isohyet showed the westernmost limits in the United States along which the annual rainfall averages thirty inches; and a rainfall of thirty inches, when combined with two other factors—rate of evaporation (very high in the Hill Country), and seasonal distribution of rainfall (very uneven in the Hill Country, since most of it comes in spring or autumn thunder-showers)—is the bare minimum needed to grow crops successfully. Even this amount of rainfall, “especially with its irregular seasonal distribution,” is, the United States Department of Agriculture would later state, “too low” for that purpose. East of that line, in other words, farmers could prosper; west of it, they couldn’t. And when, in the twentieth century, meteorologists began charting isohyets, they would draw the crucial thirty-inch isohyet alongthe 98th meridian—almost exactly the border of the Hill Country. At the very moment in which settlers entered that country in pursuit of their dream, they unknowingly crossed a line which made the realization of that dream impossible. And since rainfall diminishes quite rapidly westward, with every step they took into the Hill Country, the dream became more impossible still.
    Agricultural experts would later understand the line’s significance. There is a “well-defined division” between the fertile east and the arid western regions of Texas, one expert would write in 1905: “An average line of change can be traced across the state … approximately where the annual rainfall diminishes to below 30 inches, or near the 98th meridian.” That line, another expert could say in 1921, runs down the entire United States: “the United States may be divided into an eastern half and a western half, characterized, broadly speaking, one by a sufficient and the other by an insufficient amount of rainfall for the successful production of crops by ordinary farming methods.” Historians, too, would come to understand it. One would sum up the Hill Country simply as “west of 98, west of thirty inches of rain.” The Western historian Walter Prescott Webb says that the line amounts to “an institutional fault” (comparable to a geological fault) at which “the ways of life and living changed.” But this understanding would come later—much later. At the time the Hill Country was being settled, there was no understanding at all—not of the climatic conditions and certainly not of their consequences. “When people first crossed this line,” as Webb states, “they did not immediately realize the imperceptible change that had taken place in their environment, nor, more is the tragedy, did they foresee the full consequences which that change was to bring in their own characters and in their modes of life.” This lack of understanding was demonstrated during the years leading up to the Civil War, when North and South argued over whether or not to prohibit slavery in areas that included western Texas and New Mexico. “In all this sound and fury,” as Fehrenbach points out, “there was no real understanding that slavery, based on cotton agriculture, had reached its natural limits. It had no future west of the 98th meridian; where the [Edwards Plateau] began in Texas, the rainfall, and the plantation system of the 19th-century South, abruptly ended. From the middle of the