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friend wrote years later: “To the present generation of Texans the name of this honored man is, perhaps, but little known; but in the day long gone by, it was a household word in all the scattered log cabins that dotted the woods and prairies of Texas.” Returning to Tennessee after the war to claim his sweetheart, he brought her to Texas—on a wild journey during which their ship was captured by a Mexican man-of-war and they were imprisoned for three months—and was elected to the new Republic’s first Congress, where he quickly demonstrated an ability to lead legislators: observers wrote of his “commanding presence” and “eloquent tongue”; among the bills in whose passage he played a prominent role was the one that established the TexasRangers. He was re-elected, seemed on the road to political prominence—and then, without a word of explanation, abruptly retired from public life forever.
    Whatever the reasons for Bunton’s retirement from politics, they did not include lack of ambition: ambition—ambition on the grand scale—was, in fact, perhaps the most vivid of all the vivid Bunton characteristics. While some of the men who came to Texas—that vast and empty land—in the mid-nineteenth century were fleeing from the law or from debts, many of the thousands and tens of thousands who chalked GTT (“Gone to Texas”) on the doors of their homes in the Southern states were not fleeing from, but searching for something. “Big country … fed big dreams,” as one historian put it, and Texas, with its huge tracts of land free for the taking—in 1838, it enacted the first homestead legislation in America (and a man’s homestead, the legislation also provided, could never be seized for debt)—fed the biggest dreams of all. And judging from the actions of John Wheeler Bunton and his brothers, no dreams were bigger than theirs.
    These were years when the frontier, the edge of settlement in central Texas, was terrible in its isolation, separated as it was by hundreds of miles from the state’s more populated areas near the Louisiana and Arkansas borders; families which moved to the edge of settlement in the 1830’s and ’40s and ’50s, says Texas historian T. R. Fehrenbach, “left 19th century civilization far behind.” And because central Texas was the hunting ground of the Apaches and the fierce Penetaka Comanches, masters of human torture, it was, in Fehrenbach’s words, “a genuine frontier of war.” Men who went—and took their families—to the edge of settlement had to be driven, or lured, by big dreams indeed. Each farmer who did so, Fehrenbach says, did so “yearning for his own small kingdom, willing to suffer hardships beyond counting while he carved it out with his own hands.” The Buntons went to the
very
edge. John Wheeler Bunton, the hero, came from a wealthy family in Tennessee but wanted something more and went west to Texas, then after the war with Mexico moved west within Texas, and then west again. His first homestead was on the plains below Brenham, when those plains were the edge of the frontier. About 1840, despite the hammerblows of the Apaches and Penetakas, the frontier edged west to the Colorado River; Bunton about 1840 moved beyond the Colorado, settling near Bastrop. During the 1850’s, settlers pushed about fifty miles farther west, to the 98th meridian, where the plains ended and the Texas Hill Country (a highland known to geologists as the “Edwards Plateau”) began, and along that meridian, Fehrenbach says, for two decades, “the frontier wavered, now forward, now back, locked in bitter battle”; during 1858 and 1859, two of the “bloodiest years in Texas history,” the dead of that frontier would be numbered in the hundreds; in the isolated log cabins that dotted the hills, settlers huddled in fear during the nights of the full moon, the “Comanche moon.” But during the 1850’s, near the 98th meridian, in the plains at the edge of the Hill Country, John