From Mammoth Bones to a City of Johnsons, Everything's Bigger in Texas!

Austin → Waco → Johnson City → Austin
305.0 mi (490.9 km)

More 2018 Adventures

Howdy ho, everyone!

It was another long overnight bus ride up from Brownsville, but I arrived safe and sound in Austin to reconnect with my pal, Mack, and hit the road to see two more far-flung national park sites in the Lone Star State! After another stop-off at Buc-ee’s for a beaverly breakfast, we reached our first stop: Waco Mammoth National Monument!

From the visitor center, a guided tour took us on a short walk to a huge, enclosed, sterilized viewing room where we could view these ancient fossils from a platform. Somewhere between 65,000 and 72,000 years ago, the Bosque River flooded and trapped a whole herd of mammoths and a bunch of other local animals. While the woolly mammoths get all the publicity, these Columbian mammoths were a lot larger (13 feet at the shoulder!) and much more mysterious. We don’t really know for sure what their hair situation looked like!

The mammoths at this site are in different strata, which means they died at different times. The main attraction is Quincy the huge bull mammoth, who was found next to the bones of a calf, whether by chance or by design. Quincy’s skull has also been crushed under the foot of another mammoth. Was it an accident, or was it revenge?! There are so many more layers to dig up and more puzzles to piece together here!

Waco Mammoth National Monument is tiny, so we didn’t spend a whole lot of time there. We also had a long way to drive to our second destination. So we drove west through the hills and the pouring rain, snacking on cheddar and jalapeño popcorn from Buc-ee’s to Johnson City, the seat of Blanco County and the home base of several very important Johnsons!

Here, in the 1870s, J.T. and Sam Ealy Johnson set up a ranch and tended a herd of up to 3,000 cows! Sam Johnson served in the Confederate Army starting in 1861, then returned to the ranch to drive cattle all the way up into Kansas and even Montana! He had a son who was also named Sam, who had another son who would go on to become the president of the United States!

The 1,570-acre ranch where Lyndon Baines Johnson was born, raised, and educated is now a national historical park! As the clouds built ominously overhead, we motored in for a grand tour of this sweeping estate!

Appropriately placed at the entrance of the park is the old school house where Mr. Johnson had his early education. I hadn’t realized that the 36th president had gotten his start as an elementary school teacher in 1928 and put so much importance on education that he made it a central pillar of his presidency! He even signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act right outside this school alongside the teacher who taught him here: Kate Deadrich Loney!

From the entrance, we drove around a grand loop of the ranch, where the descendants of the Johnson family cows continue to graze. President Johnson continued his family tradition of cattle ranching and kept two herds here at the ranch: one to sell for beef and one of prize-winning Herefords to show off and breed! This ranch gave the president both the image of an all-American cowboy and a shrewd businessman, which made him popular among a wide range of voters!

President Johnson spent a lot of time here at the ranch when he could get away from the pressures of the office and back home to his family. In fact, he had an airstrip installed on his property, which he could access by a small JetStar plane if he needed to get to or from Washington DC quickly!

Because he spent so much time here, the Johnson home came to be known as the Texas White House! This was the Johnson family home all the way until Mrs. Lady Bird passed away on July 11, 2007, and from then on, it has belonged to the National Park Service, who give tours of the place. It was a little strange for their kids to see their old home pass into the public domain, but they’re very glad at how well it’s being cared for.

The rain started at the end of our grounds tour, so we headed back inside to reflect on the mammoth accomplishments of this Texan president: overhauling education, boosting voting and civil rights, the first moon landing, and expanding access to medical care! It was truly astonishing how much he was able to accomplish in his term and a half, and we owe a lot of the comforts of the present to his educated pushes in the past!

The rain continued to fall on us, which meant it was time to wrap up this Texan trip. Mack and I headed back to Austin, where it was much too rainy to enjoy watching the bats of the famed Bat Bridge. So instead, we enjoyed dinner and a screening of Crazy Rich Asians at the Alamo Drafthouse, accompanied by a really neat history of Asian-Americans in cinema! My time here in east Texas has been super informative, and despite the heat and humidity, I think I’ll be back some day.

Moseyin’ off!