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is necessary to understand the Bunton strain, and to understand what happened to it when it was mixed with the Johnson strain—and, most important, to understand what the Hill Country did to those who possessed it.
    So strong were its outward marks that pictures of generations of Bunton men might, except for different hair styles and clothing, almost be pictures of the same man—a tall man, always over six feet, with heavily waved coal-black hair and dramatic features: large nose, very large ears, heavy black eyebrows and, underneath the eyebrows, the most striking of all the Bunton physical characteristics, the “Bunton eye.” The Bunton skin was milky white—“magnolia white,” the Hill Country called it—and out of that whiteness shone eyes so dark a brown that they seemed black, so bright that they glittered, so piercing that they often seemed to be glaring. “When my mother and father came back from seeing the baby and said he had the Bunton eye, I knew exactly what they meant,” says Lyndon’s cousin Ava. “Because Grandmother Bunton had the Bunton eye. If you talked to her, you never had to wonder if the answer was yes or no. Those eyes told you. Those eyes talked. They spit fire.”
    If the Bunton eye was famed throughout the Hill Country, so was the Bunton personality. The Bunton temper was fierce and flaring, and the Bunton pride was so strong that some called it arrogance—although a writer describing one of the family notes that the arrogance was softened by a“shadow of sadness running through his features,” and pictures of Buntons in middle and old age invariably show men whose mouths are pulled grimly tight and down.
    The first Bunton in Texas was a hero, with a personality so striking that a man who met him only casually—encountering him among a group of riders on the great plains south of Bastrop in 1835—never forgot him, and years later would recall: “There were several men in the party, but Mr. Bunton’s personality attracted me. [He] had an air of a man of breeding and boldness. While our meeting was casual, he asked me a number of questions [and] I was greatly impressed by his manly bearing.” John Wheeler Bunton, a six-foot-four-inch Tennesseean, had come to Texas only that year, but apparently he impressed others as he impressed that rider: when the settlers of the Bastrop area met the next year to elect a delegate to the constitutional convention that would, in defiance of Mexico, create the Republic of Texas, he was elected—at the age of twenty-eight, the same age at which Lyndon Johnson would be elected to Congress. He was one of the signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence and a member of the committee that wrote the constitution of the new Republic. In the war between Texas and Mexico, he was at the first major battle—the three bloody days of house-to-house fighting that began when an old frontiersman, refusing to obey his officer’s order to retreat, shouted, “Who will go with old Ben Milam into San Antonio?” and led a wild charge into the city—and he was at the last: in the great charge at the San Jacinto when Sam Houston waved his 800 ragged men forward against the entire Mexican Army (the Texans marched side by side in a single line half a mile long; before them floated a white silk flag bearing a lone star; beside the flag rode Houston on his great white stallion, Saracen; for a while the Texans advanced in silence; then someone shouted, “Remember the Alamo!”). At San Jacinto, a fellow officer wrote, Bunton’s “towering form could be seen amidst the thickest of the fight. He penetrated so far into the ranks of the defenders of the breastworks that it is miraculous that he was not killed.” According to one account, he was the leader of the seven-man patrol that the next day captured Santa Anna, who was trying to escape in a private’s uniform, and brought “the Napoleon of the West” before Houston. Of his deeds as an Indian-fighter, a