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Buntonbuilt not a cabin but a graceful two-story plantation house with three verandas, surrounded by cotton fields and pastures in which grazed not only sheep and cattle but the finest Tennessee thoroughbreds, and staffed with Negro slaves dressed in black trousers and white waistcoats—the great plantation of which he had dreamed. And although Indians still roamed the area (twice his wife, in his absence, scared off threatening bands with a rifle), when a log-cabin church was founded in nearby Mountain City in 1857, the Buntons would arrive at it on Sundays in an elegant sulky driven by an elderly retainer named Uncle Ranch. The Bunton plantation (named Rancho Ram-bouillet after a French breed of sheep John was trying to raise there) may have been the westernmost cotton plantation—and plantation house—on such a scale in all Texas.
    West and west and west again, pursuing a big dream—John was not the only Bunton who took that course. So did the three brothers who followed him to Texas, one of whom, Robert Holmes Bunton—“a large impressive man, standing six feet and three inches in height and weighing about two hundred and sixty pounds … with fair skin, coal-black hair and piercing eyes”—was Lyndon Johnson’s great-grandfather.
    Very little is known about Robert Bunton. He first moved from Tennessee to Kentucky, where he became a “substantial planter.” Nevertheless, in 1858, at the age of forty, he moved to Texas, near Bastrop; and then he, too, moved west, to Lockhart, in the plains just below the Hill Country. He fought in the Lost Cause (as did his sons and six grandsons, all of whom, a family historian noted, were over six feet tall), enlisting as a private and within a year being promoted twice, to sergeant and lieutenant. After the war, he raised cattle and sent them up the Chisholm Trail to Abilene—huge herds raised on a huge ranch, for with the profits of each drive he bought more land.
    Dreamers of big dreams, the Buntons were also, to an extent somewhat unusual among Texas frontier families, interested in ideas and abstractions. John Bunton was one of the founders of the short-lived Philosophical Society of Texas, which was formed in 1837 to explore “topics of interest which our new and rising republic unfolds to the philosopher, the scholar and the man of the world.” No such details exist about Robert, but his descendants recall hearing that he had a reputation for being “absolutely truthful” and “an excellent conversationalist, and greatly interested in government and politics.” If, in his old age, he found someone at Weinheimer’s Store to talk with when he went shopping, he would sit and talk all day and into the night, although, unlike most of those with whom he talked, he preferred to discuss not “practical” politics but theories of government; he was regarded by the other men, says a descendant of one of them, as “an idealist.”
    Idealists, romantics, dreamers of big dreams though they may have been, there was nonetheless a hard, tough, practical side to the Buntons.Neighbors remember them as canny traders, and remember, too, their favorite saying: “Charity begins at home.” And while their dreams were big, in the face of necessity they had the strength to scale them down, to adapt to reality.
    The dreams of John Wheeler Bunton proved too big for the land to support: cotton could not be grown profitably enough in central Texas to support a huge, elegant plantation, and the showy French sheep didn’t produce enough wool or mutton. But he experimented with new breeds, and although he lost some of the “thousands of acres” Rancho Rambouillet had originally covered, he held on to enough so that he died “leaving a handsome estate” to his son, Desha. Desha drove cattle north and, making money, bought large tracts of land near Austin. When cattle-driving turned unprofitable he had to sell those tracts—but he managed to hold on to what he had started with. He held