When We Were Kings
Once upon a time, their ranch was the grandest, not only in texas but also in the world, captained by visionaries and bound by blood. Those days are over.
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When Captain Richard King, a hell-raising, fistfighting, Rio Grande steamboat pilot from New York City, paid $300 for 15,500 South Texas acres, he knew nothing about cattle. People laughed when he announced that he wanted to own all the land between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande and then control a three-mile-wide strip from Brownsville to Kansas, on which his cattle would be driven to market. But King had a plan: He would get Mexican vaqueros, skilled horsemen who knew exactly what to do with the cattle he was buying for as little as $5 a head, and integrate their methods into a hard-nosed American business operation. He traveled to an impoverished hamlet in Mexico where many vaqueros were known to live. He offered them jobs for life, with homes, education, and basic food provided free—if they and their families would move to his ranch headquarters. The entire village relocated, and these first Kineños helped King get his ranch started. By the 1870’s, King’s outfit, R. King and Company, was sending tens of thousands of cattle north on the trails.
Although Richard King never accumulated all the land he wanted, he owned more than 600,000 acres at his death, which he left to his wife, Henrietta. She was like a character out of Victorian fiction, a thin and severe Presbyterian who for the next forty years would wear widow’s black and tour the ranch twice a year in a black, horse-drawn coach. Soon after Richard’s death, Henrietta asked Robert Kleberg, the husband of her youngest daughter, Alice (the Kings had four children), to run the ranch, a herculean task considering that it was about $500,000 in debt. Kleberg was a Corpus Christi lawyer with little ranching experience, yet he quickly transformed himself into a daring and creative cattleman, introducing scientific methods to the cattle business, digging artesian wells to counter the devastating drought of the early 1890’s (known as the Great Die), and experimenting with various breeds, from English Shorthorns to Herefords, to see which could best survive the unforgiving climate. He continued to buy more cheap land—the family’s guiding philosophy was “Buy land and never sell”—and he persuaded the railroad to build its tracks through the ranch and make a stop there, where he established the town of Kingsville. There was a Kleberg-owned bank and a Kleberg-owned newspaper, and the streets were named after family members. It was, in retrospect, a startling achievement: Civilization had been brought to El Desierto de los Muertos.
In the last years of his life, Kleberg suffered a debilitating stroke that seemed to lock up his mind. Yet the land continued to hold a fierce grip on him. Every afternoon he would shuffle to his car and have a driver take him from one pasture to another. He and Alice had five children, three daughters and two sons. Because the eldest son, Richard, was already in law school when his father became ill, the reins of the ranch were handed in 1918 to the second son, Robert “Bob” Kleberg, Jr., a serious young man with a squeaky voice and an ungraceful demeanor.
It was hard to imagine that this particular Kleberg would become the greatest American cattle baron of the twentieth century. Soon after the 1925 death of Bob’s grandmother, Henrietta King, the barely profitable ranch was saddled with a $3 million inheritance tax. To eliminate at least part of the tax, Bob could simply have sold off some of the land. But he and his four siblings, who had created a corporation to control their spread, splitting the stock equally, had made a quixotic vow: The King Ranch would stay together and remain under family ownership no matter what happened. In fact, like his father and grandfather before him, what Bob wanted was more land.
Bob saved the ranch from foreclosure by negotiating a lease with Humble Oil (which later became Exxon) to begin oil and gas exploration on the property. As part of the deal, Humble gave him a $3.5 million loan, which took care of the tax. And he began accumulating more land—buying nearby properties and trading until the ranch eventually totalled 825,000 acres, divided in four parts. Then Bob Kleberg did something that had not been done anywhere in the world in the previous two hundred years: He created a new breed of cattle. He needed a cow that was as hardy as a Longhorn, able to endure the sun, yet capable of eating just about anything. In the 1930’s, after years of meticulously crossbreeding Brahmans and Shorthorns, he introduced the dark-red Santa Gertrudis. He also began breeding the best quarter horse stallion he had at his stables with fifty English Thoroughbred racing mares until he created what he called the perfect cow pony, which seemed to know instinctively how to cull a cow from the herd. He invented the cattle prod to move the cattle along faster when they were in their pens. To open up more pasture, he invented a plow pulled by a massive, specially designed bulldozer that could clear four acres of brush an hour.
By any calculation, Bob Kleberg’s achievements were colossal. Under his management, the King Ranch became the greatest beef-producing operation in the United States. He became a national celebrity, his exploits featured on the cover of Time. Edna Ferber used Bob and his wife, Helen, the daughter of a Kansas congressman whom Bob had married after a seventeen-day courtship, as models for her novel Giant. Always hungry for more land, Mr. Bob, as he became known among the Kineños, used the King Ranch’s share of the oil royalties to buy huge amounts of land in Australia, Cuba, Europe, and South America, creating a worldwide cattle kingdom. Just to prove he was better than the elitist Kentucky horse breeders, he bought several Thoroughbreds, brought them back to the King Ranch in railroad cars, and started a breeding program that produced a horse named Assault that astounded the world of racing by winning the 1946 Triple Crown.
Bob was spending more and more time away from Texas, so the task of running the home ranches fell to his nephew, Dick Kleberg, the son of Bob’s older brother, Richard. Dick had a bright future as a lawyer—he had done well in his first year at the University of Texas School of Law—but he wanted to return home and serve his family. Denman, the former attorney for the ranch, remembers Dick telling Bob, “If I can be of any use to you, I want to work.” He was a deft roper and a fine horseman, one of the best all-around cowboys on the ranch. And he was a quiet, modest man who never questioned his role as the supporting player to his uncle Bob. The times he spoke at family meetings, he would say that it was up to the family to preserve the ranch’s heritage. It was a message he also passed on to his four children—one of whom was a good-natured boy named Tio, who used to sneak into the Big House to shoot his BB gun at birds that had flown in through the open windows.
AS A TEENAGER IN THE SIXTIES, TIO WORKED WEEKENDS in the cow camps for 50 cents a day. He attended Texas Tech University, married his college sweetheart, an art history major named Janell Gerald, and briefly flirted with the idea of making the Army his career. He became a first lieutenant, stationed in El Paso, and was offered a chance to move up in rank. But in 1971 he returned to the ranch to work as a cowboy and ranch hand.
He arrived just before the start of a new era. Bob Kleberg died in 1974, and Tio’s father, Dick, was too sick with emphysema to take his place. Dick’s cousins B. K. Johnson and Bobby Shelton, half brothers who had worked closely under Bob and Dick, both made a separate presentation at a family board meeting, asking to take over the ranch. They were refused. Times were changing, and the board declared that the ranch no longer needed a domineering Bob Kleberg—like leader. A board member went so far as to tell Johnson, “One dictator in this family is enough.” The brothers announced they were walking away from the ranch forever.
Through the late seventies and into the eighties, the ranch was run by a committee of senior family members led by Jim Clement, an East Coast—trained businessman who had married the daughter of one of Bob Kleberg’s sisters. Young Tio was given the responsibilities for the cattle operations, in large part because no one else in the family was willing to take them on. Despite the ranch’s past glories, its profitability was in the oil and gas underneath the land that had been bringing in at least $20 million annually since the late sixties. After Bob’s death, the sixty or so family stockholders decided they should get a larger share of that money—much larger. They voted to take 75 percent of the royalties, leaving the ranch corporation with the remaining 25 percent. Bob’s Thoroughbred racehorses and his overseas ranches, which were barely profitable, were put on the auction block, with the majority of the eventual proceeds going to the stockholders.
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