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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So immense were these cattle drives that the spillover from them was enough to stock ranches from Oklahoma to Montana. Yet the very success of the cattle kingdom spelled its doom. More and more cattle were raised in the Midwest, making it less profitable to ship cattle there from South Texas. Hardiness on the trail became less important and demand for better cuts of meat grew; the Longhorn was on its way out.
To raise better cattle the rancher needed fences so he could control his stock. King and Kenedy were among the first to fence their holdings, using cypress and pine from Louisiana. By the late 1860s King had built a fence more than five hundred miles long completely around the Santa Gertrudis. To ride around it on horseback took ten days. The end of the open range meant that the rancher had to become an agricultural businessman, concerned less with winning the wilderness than with repairing his fences and keeping track of the breeding progress of his stock. Captain King brought in fine English Durhams in the early 1870s, beginning a breeding program that has continued for a century. Looking for better means of transport, King and Kenedy helped found a railroad from Corpus to Laredo that passed within twenty miles of the Santa Gertrudis headquarters. The railroad arrived in 1881. Four years inter the trail drives came to an end.
A Frontier Relic
Life on the ranch became steadily more civilized. There was a cook and a Virginia governess for the three girls. Mrs. King saw that the five children all went away to proper Presbyterian schools. King often visited them when he was in St. Louis disposing of his herds. He was a striking figure, with his limp from an old river injury, his beard stretching down to the second button on his shirt, his pants rumpled, his boots always scuffed. He chided his daughters for being ashamed of his rough appearance — and then gave them expensive gifts in the manner of a father who had spent more time on his empire than on his family. Once he even gave his wife a pair of diamond earrings, which she, totally in character, did not wear until a local jeweler had painted them with black enamel so they would not appear ostentatious. Of the two boys, Robert Lee was far more interested in the ranch. In 1883 Richard, Jr., married a Missouri girl and transformed La Puerta de Agua Dulce Ranch, north of the Santa Gertrudis, into a farming and cattle operation along Midwestern lines.
A few months before his brother’s marriage Robert Lee died of pneumonia at the age of nineteen. The death of the boy in whom Captain King had placed such hope destroyed his faith in the future. He looked around his great empire and could take no solace from it. He wrote his wife, “I am tired of this business, as I at all times have made a mess of everything I have undertaken . . . and now I want to quit the Rancho business and will do so.” Over the years his friend Kenedy had come to similar despair and had already sold the Laureles to a group of Scotsmen. King went so far as to show the Santa Gertrudis to some European buyers, but the sale never went through.
King was the great cattle baron of Texas, the master of the plains, owner now of 600,000 acres, 40,000 head of cattle, 6000 horses and twice that many sheep and pigs. But his heir was dead, and his very successes were changing the frontier world he loved. King eventually had to hire an Irishman to have fistfights with when he was in the mood, so quiet had Texas become. His benders with Rose Bud Whiskey became more extreme, his trips to Brownsville and other places more frequent. To inaugurate the railroad from Corpus Christ! to Laredo, for example, he traveled west in a private car filled with dignitaries. Along the way he spiked the lemonade, and the whole party — the leading citizens of South Texas — ended up marching through Laredo behind a big bass drum, singing at the top of their lungs and challenging all comers to a fight.
King remained a rough frontiersman, a natural leader, violent, passionate, and unpredictable. A more sensitive, gentleman could not have driven out the Indians, dominated outlaws and bandits, inspired vaqueros and cowboys, and won the frontier without any of the supports of civilization. “I have to make ‘em think I’m a man-eater,” he used to say. “If I don’t they’ll kill me.”
The Pioneers Farewell
Even though he despaired over Robert Lee’s death, King managed r-o find a worthy successor, a man much different from himself. His only surviving son, Richard, Jr., was not by temperament a rancher. Two of his daughters had moved away, not always on the best of terms with their demanding mother. But the youngest daughter, Alice, had stayed home, helping her mother keep a God-fearing house. In 1881 King had met a young lawyer in Corpus Christi named Robert Justus Kleberg, who was on the opposite side in one of King’s many lawsuits. Kleberg had carried the day, and on the night of his victory he received a visit from the stern rancher whose hard eyes had followed him throughout the trial. Captain King had a proposition for Kleberg. He wanted him to take on some of the ranch’s voluminous legal business.
Kleberg accepted the offer and asked when he should start. “Right now,” King said, and the two left for the ranch on a buckboard in the middle of the night. There Alice served coffee and cakes and then went back to bed, after getting a quick look at the man who would become her husband, the father of her five children, and, with her, the next link in the lineage of the King Ranch.
It wasn’t just Robert Lee’s death and the end of the frontier that was destroying Richard King. Something else was, too — stomach cancer. Alice and her mother both tried to care for him, but by 1885 King’s rugged body could battle the disease no longer. His hair and beard had turned gray; his complexion was ashen. When he left the Santa Gertrudis to see his doctor in San Antonio, everyone knew he would not be back. The man who had conquered the West had to be helped to his stagecoach. His last instructions to his manager were ‘‘Don’t let a foot of the dear old Santa Gertrudis get away from us.” At the Menger Hotel in San Antonio, next door to the Alamo, he died at dusk on April l4. He was sixty years old.
Big Boots To Fill
Shortly after her husband’s death, Henrietta King, to whom he left everything he owned, gave her daughter’s fiancé a mission: to run the ranch. It was not the best of times for a young lawyer of 31 to become a rancher. Cattle prices had fallen disastrously, from $40 a head to $5. The trail drives and the profits they had brought were over. Drouth gripped the prairie and would not let loose for almost a decade. King’s relentless land buying had put the ranch deeply in debt. One of Robert Kleberg’s first tasks as manager of the Santa Gertrudis was to disobey Robert E. Lee’s advice: he sold land, about 20,000 acres of it. Those odd pieces here and there went to cancel several debts, one of which had even dragged the widow King into court with a collection suit.
Robert Kleberg was not of the pioneer stock that had moved into Texas from the South. His family had come directly from Germany in 1834 and had begun life in America as new to it as the first settlers in New England. His father was a lawyer and his mother was from a family of educated and distinguished Prussian aristocrats. They brought to Texas its first piano, as well as fine paintings, engravings, books, and music. Robert Kleberg received his law degree from the University of Virginia, then returned to Texas to practice. Possessed of a Prussian rationality and a stolid determination, Kleberg also had a bit of gemütlichkeit; he drank his share of beer and would even sing popular songs in public if called upon at weddings and other occasions. But what he brought most to the ranch was a strong sense of family, an unshakable belief in education, and a determination to plan for future generations.
It took a while for Kleberg to adapt to the ranching end of his new life. He was, after all, a lawyer and something of a scholar, a far cry from the larger-than-life character whose boots he had to fill. He spoke no Spanish at first, a distinct handicap in a kingdom whose subjects conversed in that tongue. He was only a passable horseman. He preferred to travel in a buckboard, dressed in his woolen suit and his tie like a proper city lawyer, ignoring by a supreme effort of will the stupefying South Texas heat. But if he felt doubts about his new role, his firm sense of duty kept him going. He threw himself into ranching as vigorously as he had into the study of law, and he soon put his own stamp on the greatest ranch in the West.
In the year after Richard King died, Robert Kleberg took another step that tied him to his new destiny forever. In a small and private wedding ceremony he married Alice King. The only guests from outside the family were Mifflin Kenedy and another of Captain King’s partners, Uriah Lott. One represented the young couple’s past, the other its future. Kenedy had been Richard King’s lifelong friend and partner. Lott, on the other hand, was a man of the new West. He was a railroad builder, a speculator on a grand scale, a man who recognized the benefits — and profits — that would come from opening up South Texas. Mifflin Kenedy had brought Richard King to the frontier; Uriah Lott would help his descendants bring the frontier to an end.
The new master of the King Ranch was eager to see Uriah Lott put to use. Like Lott, Kleberg saw the vast expanse of South Texas not as the open range but as the site of towns, farms, schools, and cities. He saw it civilized. The key to connecting South Texas to the rest of the world was a railroad from Corpus Christi to Brownsville, and the key to getting that railroad was finding water. Kleberg tried everything from prayers to dynamite. Finally he found a company in the Midwest with new drilling equipment that could penetrate far deeper than he had ever been able to drill. He ordered it at once and in 1899 set to work.
One rainy morning a vaquero appeared at the ranch house, breathless with his news. The new drill had struck water! Kleberg leaped into his buckboard and, whipping his horse, charged across the prairie. He stood at the well — water streaming down his face, his clothes soaked and muddy — and he cried. “The men,” he recalled, “wondered why I cried when we finally saw what we had all been praying for. But I knew that once a definite source of water was available I could induce railroad construction, which in turn could lead to the development of South Texas.”
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