The Last Empire
A rootless steamboat captain carved the King Ranch out of the frontier more than a century ago. Today Captain King’s descendants, rooted in the land he conquered, struggle to hold his legacy together.
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An Uncertain Future
The changes since the death of Bob Kleberg are subtle but significant. The current management’s objective is an agricultural operation designed to be self-sufficient and to produce a profit (which it did last year), as if the oil money did not exist. The ranch raises cotton and milo on 37,400 acres of the Santa Gertrudis and the Laureles, tended by an array of machinery that would rival the Russian tank corps. The milo is processed at the ranch’s own feed mill over on the Santa Gertrudis and used in its huge feedlot. The farms were put in a year or so before Bob’s death. “We’d just cross our fingers and hope that he wouldn’t see them,” Tio recalls. “I’ve got a hunch he knew what we were doing but had just decided not to say anything, to give us a shot at it, even though he knew we knew he hated farming.”
The largest piece of Bob’s Australian empire, the almost-four-million-acre leasehold at Brunette Downs, was recently sold to an Australian syndicate. As a result, the ranch now runs about 4.3 million acres overseas, compared to 8.6 million in 1978. The rest of the foreign operations are barely to moderately profitable, but the family decided that the tremendous effort required to complete Bob Kleberg’s plans for the Australian outback was simply not worth the candle. Very quietly, the new management of the ranch has announced the beginning of an era of limits, of pulling the fences back to what they can manage and afford. It is a vision far less expensive than Bob’s, but it is one they believe they can handle.
It is too soon to tell whether they are right. They have already crossed some major hurdles: buying out B and Bobby, distributing the oil and gas royalties, selling off the largest foreign operation, reinstituting farming. On the surface, the ranch appears to be headed for greener pastures. But the future may bring some thorny problems. One family member sill with the ranch put it this way: “Sure, we’re better off individually now that the oil money is coming out to us, but what about the ranch? What happens if we have a truly severe drouth, or if the bottom falls out of the cattle market? The oil money was the ranch’s cushion, and it also gave it the capital to experiment and be innovative. That’s how we’ve kept it going. Without the oil money I’m not at all sure we’ll be so successful.”
And although the family now seems unified, time may work against them. Jim Clement is not in the best of health, and no one knows how the ranch will be run when he and John Armstrong lay down the reins. Every twenty years since the thirties — first with the Atwoods, then the Easts, and recently B and Bobby — the family has had to confront itself and its individual and collective ambitions before moving on. A decade from now, that confrontation will likely occur again. Everyone in the family seems very happy with Tio as the boss of the Texas ranches, but they also have grown too fond of their own roles to want anyone, at least for the present, to run the ranch single-handedly, the way Bob Kleberg did. And so a new era has begun, one of collective leadership, not as responsive, decisive, or visionary as one man could be, but more representative of the family.
The people most prominent in that collective leadership are bullish on the ranch, but they are not without their doubts. “It’s not at all a foregone conclusion that we’ll make it,” Tio Kleberg mused. “There’s a lot working against a place like this.” And there is. The modern world heads the list. It is hardly hospitable to a frontier institution with a paternalistic system, an aristocracy joined by tradition to loyal vaqueros who spring from the same piece of earth. The modern world lures those vaqueros off the land and into the cities; it also tempts the family, seduces them away from the ranch with the endless possibilities for the use of their inheritance. “If the next generation is content to live off their income,” John Armstrong says, “then we’ve lost it.”
On the other hand, there’s also a lot working for a place like this. The ranch has been through hard times before; ranchers expect that. The younger generation, although largely untested, could produce the visionaries and leaders the ranch’s destiny will require. The family itself is the ranch’s greatest resource: one of the children perched precariously on his first horse could be the next Bob Kleberg. History also is an ally. The ranch may survive into the next century because it survived into this one. No generation of the family wants to be the one that stood by and let the King Ranch fail. And at the core of that history is one simple, constant, endlessly repeated fact-on this day, as on every day, there is work to be done.
The Cattle Are Waiting
It is almost two o’clock at Norias, and the day’s roundup is half over. Tio and Lavoyger make one last ride through the herd, checking to see if any barren cows or yearling calves have been missed. Then the whole crew breaks for lunch. In a grove of mesquite and ebony trees some canvas has been stretched over rough wooden tables. A side of beef, slaughtered that morning, hangs over a limb. The other half gives off the pungent smell of barbecue as it cooks over an open fire. The tables are suddenly laden with plates of ribs and sausage and sliced tenderloin, bowls of rice and beans, and platters of thin camp bread to be washed down with sweet tea.
After lunch the vaqueros bring the remainder of the herd out of the shade of the mesquite. The ground crew has dug a trench and built a fire of mesquite scraps in it. Branding irons have been stuck into the fire, and their ends are already white-hot. The family members loosen up their ropes and head into the herd to begin gathering the calves. Ed Durham, now 72 years old, ropes the first calf with a motion so simple as to escape the eye, and then drags it over to the fire.
In the next instant, Tio, Lavoyger, Scott, and Martín all have calves on their ropes and are dragging them to the fire. The calves jump around on the ends of the ropes like five-hundred-pound trout. The accuracy of the ropers on horseback is astonishing. They chase a loose calf at full speed through mesquite, twirling their ropes, then throw them deftly around the animal’s hind foot or its head. Everyone is shouting in Spanish.
Some of the ground crew run wildly around the calves, twirling their ropes over their heads and then looping them toward the flailing hind legs of a roped calf. When they succeed they are dragged along the ground, trailing plumes of dust from the heels of their boots, until the calf, now roped both head and foot, can be thrown on its side and secured. The rest of the ground crew then run from calf to calf, applying three different brands — one for the pasture, one for the year, one the Running W of the ranch. Another man notches the ear, another gives a shot, and another paints the ear and the brands with white disinfectant, each in turn leaping over the calf he has just finished and heading for another one. Ropes attached to jumping calves sing through the air, sending the ground crew diving for the earth. The din is deafening. With each brand a puff of smoke sizzles off the calf’s hide. In the air is the smell of burning flesh, the same smell that seemed so appetizing at lunch.
By seven o’clock the calves are branded, and the most dangerous work begins. Very carefully, the men start roping the big bulls whose horns are starting to curl into their skulls and eyes. Then a vaquero with a hacksaw cuts off the horns. Halfway through, the saw turns red with blood. Finally, without warning or fanfare, there are no more cattle to be roped. The vaqueros prepare the herd for spraying with insecticide, and the Klebergs begin dismounting and loading the horses on trailers. Their faces look like those of Welsh coal miners, blackened with dust. Their chaps are damp with sweat. The horses glisten.
The riders walk with the tentative gait of people who have been on horseback for twelve hours, as if walking was an acquired and somewhat unfamiliar accomplishment. Off their horses they look diminished; only when mounted do they assume their full personality and stature. The horses seem to relax too; they let out their urine in steaming streams. The paraphernalia of a cowboy’s work — the spurs, the chaps, the bandannas, the saddles, bridles, and blankets — are stowed away. Like props in a play, they no longer seem real.
Tio takes Mr. San Peppy back to his corral. Today this horse that brings a $3000 stud fee has worked like any cow pony. Tio brings him some hay, and the stallion rolls in the dust of his pen, cleaning himself.
“That was a good day’s work,” Tio says matter-of-factly.
At dinner in the Norias headquarters the talk is dominated by good-natured kidding, particularly at the expense of Tio’s younger brother, Scott. His horse, Show Boy, had spooked and, bucking and kicking, had carried Scott into the mesquite bushes.
“Where’d you get that horse, anyway?” Scott asks Joe Stiles, after he has endured as much teasing as he can.
“Aw, we just keep him around headquarters for the little girls to ride,” Joe says.
“Hey, Scott,” says Martín Clement, getting serious, “why didn’t you help me bring the horses down?”
“I couldn’t,” Scott says. “I had to come down the night before.”
“Well, heck,” Martín says, “I brought the horses down this morning, and I was still out to the herd before you were.”
Scott looks at his plate. This is exactly the sort of open criticism the family is constantly directing at each other. It wasn’t a serious offense, coming to Norias early. But Martín wasn’t going to let it pass. Then Lavoyger, who came late to dinner, has his turn. He looks at Martín and says, “You left.”
“I what?”
“You left. We hadn’t finished spraying the cattle, and you left.”
Now Martín is on the defensive. “I just left when the boss did,” he replies, gesturing at Tio.
“Yeah, I know. The boss left early, too.”
Lavoyger has made his point. And as a group they have made another point: any and all of them are fair game if they relax their standards, even for a minute. These young men are in their twenties or thirties. They are sitting around a table that was dominated, until a year or two ago, by men in their fifties, sixties, and seventies. There are ghosts everywhere: the almost mythic presence of Captain King and Henrietta, the sober determination of Robert Kleberg, the commanding brilliance of Bob Kleberg, and the still-poignant memories of Dick Kleberg. All of those people who came before on this piece of earth shaped the destiny of the young men who now stand in their place. This new generation is the ranch now, they know it, and they are determined to be worthy. There isn’t any drinking, and everyone is in bed well before midnight. In the morning a new herd will be waiting.
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