DUANE
Get the App
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm gonna give it to you straight. Picture yourself standing out here in Blanco County, on the very ground where two brothers once set something enormous in motion. This headquarters site, right here, was the launching point.
In the 1870s, J. T. and Sam Ealy Johnson were pushing thousands of cattle north, up the trails toward Kansas and other shipping and market points. Thousands of cattle, season after season, from this very spot.
They weren't small operators, either. To the west, out at Williamson's Creek, and southeast at Deer Creek, the Johnsons had gathering and processing pens spread across the land. They were moving pieces on a board that stretched across multiple counties.
In fact, the marker puts it plainly: the Johnson brothers ran the largest individual trail driving outfit in Blanco County and six nearby counties. Six. Several herds of twenty-five hundred to three thousand head, sent north each season.
You do the imagining on what that looked like, all those cattle rolling out from this ground. Now, J. T. was the elder of the two brothers, and Sam Ealy was the younger.
Sam Ealy Johnson. Remember that name. Because history has a way of echoing forward through the years in ways nobody on a cattle drive could quite predict.
Sam Ealy Johnson, the man who ran those herds north from this headquarters, is known to history as the grandfather of the thirty-sixth president of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson. From this Texas ground, those trail drives started. And something else started here too.
What the marker says
From this headquarters site in the 1870s, the brothers J. T. and Sam Ealy Johnson started thousands of cattle up trails to Kansas and other shipping or market points. To the west, at Williamson's Creek, and at Deer Creek (southeast) the Johnsons had gathering and processing pens. They had largest individual trail driving outfit in Blanco and six nearby counties, sending north several herds of 2,500 to 3,000 each season. Sam Ealy, the younger Johnson brother, is known to history as grandfather of 36th president of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson. (1969)