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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With those wells Robert Kleberg got his railroad and his town. Uriah Lott lined up the investors and the real estate. The ranch donated land both to provide a right-of-way and to pay the railroad contractors. As the railroad was being laid out, Kleberg lost no time in developing his land. He and the widow King rode out from their ranch house, a lonely sentinel on the prairie 20 miles from the nearest railhead and 45 from Corpus Christi. They stopped at a spot where Richard King had spread his blanket for Henrietta on roundup picnics years before, where Comanches and the wild Longhorn had once held sway. In the distance some cattle grazed, and all around there was no sound except the wind rustling in the hackberry and huisache trees along the creek bottom. Kleberg dismounted first, then helped Mrs. King down. “Here,” he said, according to the family legends, “we will build our town.”
His vision was the same vision that had been transforming the wilderness of America into civilization for almost three hundred years. Before long there were streets, houses, businesses, banks, schools, churches, and people. These were city people — blacksmiths, teachers, salesmen, carpenters, the same sort of people who could be found throughout turn-of- the-century small-town America. Bringing civilization to the banks of the Santa Gertrudis — even in the form of a fairly primitive ranching and railroad town — was among Robert Kleberg’s greatest achievements. To Henrietta King it was the fulfillment of a dream a half-century old. She donated the land for churches and schools out of her own lots, since to have churches in what was once the frontier was the reward for all her hardships and the confirmation of her faith. The town was named Kingsville, after the region’s last real frontiersman, but with its founding the South Texas frontier was no more.
Kleberg didn’t stop with the town. He set aside land for demonstration farming of cotton, vegetables, and citrus. He planted countless species of fruit, from grapefruit to olives and date palms, and found that oranges and grapefruit grew well and bore prolifically. Kleberg’s early experiments created the South Texas citrus industry. He was, at heart, a businessman. He wanted to use the land more than a rancher did, and couldn’t abide just leaving it to be harvested by cattle and horses.
By the time of his death in 1932 the ranch had doubled in size, to more than one million acres. He bought big tracts and small, often during drouths and depressions when prices were low. He bought the Laureles Ranch from the Scots who had bought it from Mifflin Kenedy. He brought in South African grasses to improve his pastures. For years horses had been a major source of income for the ranch; as many as 12,000 a year were sold to the Army, and to cities, businesses, and individuals all over America. Kleberg bred Clydesdale and Percheron horses, and business remained brisk until the automobile made draft horses obsolete.
One of the difficulties facing ranchers at the turn of the century was mesquite, which as a result of large-scale horse operations had spread like a weed across valuable grassland. (Horses ate the mesquite beans, which were warmed to incubation in their digestive tracts and then nourished to rapid growth by their manure.) Kleberg worked out the first rudimentary way to plow up mesquite and clear choked pastures.
The two biggest problems with the ranch, however, were water and cattle. Kleberg alleviated the water problem with his artesian wells; windmills soon were constructed all around the ranch, each serving its own pasture and allowing even more selective breeding operations. Yet the English breeds that the ranch imported had an unfortunate habit of dying once they got to South Texas. They lost weight, gave birth to stillborn calves, and declined into stupor and death. Through perseverance and a lawyer’s patient accumulation of evidence, Robert Kleberg discovered that the cattle were suffering from a disease spread by ticks that came to be called Texas fever. For almost two decades he worked to develop techniques to eradicate it. He built the first cattle dipping vat and initiated other preventive programs, almost single-handedly bringing the disease under control.
The Price Of Inheritance
The widow King, though frail, survived her husband by forty years. When Robert Kleberg and Alice King were married in 1886 Henrietta King accompanied them on their honeymoon. This sharing of their postnuptial rite established a pattern that continued until her death in 1925. Mrs. King’s bedroom in the old frame ranch house was directly across the hall from theirs. When that house burned in 1912 the custom of close family living carried over to the grand hacienda, known as the Big House, that looms over the Santa Gertrudis to this day.
Mrs. King presided at the dinner table and was quite free with advice on how the young couple should raise their five children. They never had a life of their own until they themselves were near death; that was the price they paid for their inheritance. For decades the King Ranch was known as “the widow’s ranch,” and Mrs. King, dressed always in black, set the tone for it. Twice a year she toured the ranch in her heavy black Rockaway stagecoach, and she was, in fact if not always in practice, the boss of the place. She gave Robert Kleberg authority and respect, but she never stepped entirely aside. A woman of unflagging charity and Christian determination, she still expected to receive her due as pioneer, founder, and owner. At times she no doubt made the Klebergs’ lives utterly miserable.
But Mrs. King’s fussy presence was only a minor source of misery compared with the South Texas climate. It was no more fit for proper Victorians than the steamy plains of India were. The vaquero men and women wore light cottons. The Kleberg men suffered under wool trousers, high boots, stiff collars, suspenders, and wool coats. The women were gussied up in layers of chemises, petticoats, whalebone corsets, and heavy cloth from head to foot. Dressed like that, simply to survive a South Texas August was a triumph. Mrs. King would not allow the men to dine at her table in shirt-sleeves, no matter how hot the day. And so they would sit through dinner, sweating profusely. If the windows were opened the wind would cover the plates with dust. If it was a bit cooler the mosquitoes would descend in clouds. Even so, after dinner the family members would entertain each other, putting on skits, telling stories, reading aloud, and singing songs, always closing with Mrs. King’s favorite, “Rock of Ages.”
The new generation, the Klebergs’ two boys and three girls, grew up on the ranch in spirit even though they spent the school year in Corpus Christi. Their father delighted in sending a stagecoach drawn by magnificent white horses to meet them at the train stop. The horses whisked them away on what must have been a heady ride across twenty miles of prairie to the threshold of the ranch house. When the railroad finally came to Kingsville the railroad manager sent a special engine and caboose every Friday to take the children from Corpus Christi out to the ranch.
Alice King Kleberg, for her part, stayed in her mother’s shadow and deferred to her husband, a model of self-denial. But she harbored in her heart a warm spot for her father’s flamboyance. Her first son, Richard Mifflin Kleberg, was her favorite. He was dashing, talented, and athletic. He mastered languages, golf, the guitar, and the piano, all with ease. He was a natural diplomat with a flair for dramatic gestures and could deliver moving speeches in Spanish, German, and English. He would sit with his mother for hours, playing his guitar and singing songs.
But Robert Kleberg, while he admired his elder son’s talents, placed his faith in Robert Kleberg, Jr., his second son. Bob had to work harder for what he got. Shorter than Richard, he was also less athletic and graceful. He had a terrible ear for languages and music and a soft, squeaky voice unsuited to public speaking. He liked books but did not take to schools. He pulled his share of pranks, but in contrast to Richard he was a serious and earnest young man, just the sort to inspire confidence in his father and the widow King.
Richard Kleberg, as befitted his talents, became the ranch’s emissary to the world at large. He looked after its interests in Congress from 1932 to 1944 (and gave a young Texan named Lyndon Johnson his first job in Washington). He was something of a legend there. He often drove up to the Capitol in a stripped-down King Ranch hunting car like the one Buick made for him, trimmed in sterling silver, with compartments for guns, ammunition, and liquor.
Bob, however, was given the responsibility of the ranch. Captain King himself had skipped over the most obvious heir in favor of a man better suited to the task. That tradition, more than anything else, enabled the family to sustain itself when an aristocracy that gave everything to the firstborn would have failed. And no one proved that tradition’s worth more eloquently than Bob Kleberg.
In The Captain’S Image
One hundred years, almost to the day, after Richard King established his first cow camp on the Santa Gertrudis, Bob Kleberg stood on a rise in Queensland and gazed out on the vast red-din sweep of the Australian outback. The country was raw desert, worked desultorily by a few settlers and aborigines whose occasional travels sent whirlwinds of dust across the steppes. But Bob Kleberg saw in that Australian wilderness precisely what his grandfather had seen in the grassy, godforsaken Wild Horse Desert of South Texas: he saw the makings of an empire. By the time he finally satisfied that vision he had added 8 million acres of Australian land on long-term leases to the 825,000 or so his family owned in Texas.
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