No one person could completely embody the Texas Hill Country experience. But of the thousands living here today, it’s hard to imagine one who comes closer to that ideal than Bob Ramsey, who lives on a beautiful ranch near the boundary of Kerr and Real counties. In his ninety years, he has been personally involved with much of the Hill Country’s history. He knows the land well, and he knows the people, the plants and the animals who give the land its unique character. Fortunately for all of us coming along behind him, he has written two wonderful books that give a unique glimpse into the soul of the Texas Hill Country: As Texas as it Gets (1999), and More Texas Tales (2002).

Bob Ramsey was born in 1918 to Reynolds Allen Ramsey, a former San Antonio boy employed as a typewriter salesman in Waycross, Georgia, and June Burdett Ramsey, the college-educated daughter of a doctor from Lenoir City, Tennessee. The couple had exchanged their “civilized” life for a ranch in Real County just a few years before, and Bob’s childhood home was a small 1850s-era Ranger’s cabin built from logs and rough lumber.

Bob’s dad had displayed an adventurous streak when he was very young; he and some friends snuck close to the fenced compound at Fort Sam Houston where the famous Apache chief, Geronimo, was held prisoner. Geronimo spotted the boys, and asked them to get him some tobacco. Bob’s dad rode his bicycle six miles to town, used his savings to buy some, then came back alone and threw the tobacco over the fence to the legendary Indian.

When Bob was just four, his father went in partnership with a businessman from Dallas to buy 10,000 acres along the West Frio River, and it was there that many of Bob’s earliest adventures occurred. They, like many other Hill Country ranchers, raised sheep, Angora goats and Hereford cattle in the rocky wilderness.

One day in 1925, while Bob was at school in San Antonio, two men came to the West Fr ...

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