The Biggest Ranches
From the fabled King to the formidable 06, the twenty most storied spreads in Texas.
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THE EAST FAMILY IS ONE OF THE MOST INTERESTING ranching clans in the state, but they won’t talk to the press. And public information about them and their holdings is scarce—strangely so, given their connection to the well-examined King Ranch. What little we do know comes from books like Tom Lea’s two-volume 1957 classic, The King Ranch. According to Lea, Tom T. East—described only as a local rancher—married Alice Kleberg, the granddaughter of King Ranch founder Richard King, in 1915. The newlyweds went to live on East’s San Antonio Viejo Ranch about 75 miles from the King Ranch. When the Easts fell on hard times, they sold their 77,000 acres to the Kings. (Not long after, the King Ranch’s first producing oil well was found on the San Antonio Viejo.) In 1935, when Alice Kleberg’s estate was settled following her death, title to the San Antonio Viejo was trans-ferred back to the Easts.
Today the East Family Ranches are owned by the Easts’ surviving son, Robert, and Evelyn East, the widow of his late brother. Robert owns the San Antonio Viejo, the Casa Verde, and the San Pablo; Evelyn owns the Santa Fe.
La Escalera
LOCATION Brewster, Pecos, and Reeves counties
ACRES 272,000
PRIMARY USE cow-calf
FOUNDED 1884
LIKE THE LEGENDARY BUT NOW DEFUNCT XIT RANCH, La Escalera was born of Texas’ desire to have a grand statehouse. Originally given to the GC&SF Railway in exchange for money and materials used to the build the Capitol, La Escalera was bought in 1884 by Edwin Giddings of Colorado. Actually, the property was called the Elsinore back then, or the E L for short. The name changed in 1992 when San Antonio contractor Gerald Lyda, Sr., bought the property from Douglas Giddings, Edwin’s grandson. Lyda, who had just transferred the title to his 360,000-acre Ladder Ranch in New Mexico to Ted Turner and Jane Fonda, christened the new ranch La Escalera (Spanish for “ladder”). Keeping the name in some form was more pragmatic than sentimental: Lyda had five thousand calves already carrying the Ladder brand. “To keep from rebranding them, I went to Spanish,” he says.
Lyda has added 38,000 acres to La Escalera since he bought it, bringing the total up to 226,000 acres. He also owns the 46,000-acre Lake Ranch in Reeves County, which is run by his son Gene.
Reynolds Family Ranches
LOCATION Culberson, Dallam, Hartley, and Jeff Davis counties
ACRES 250,000
PRIMARY USE cow-calf
FOUNDED 1884
ONE OF THE FIRST PERMANENT RANCHERS in the Davis Mountains area, Barber Watkins Reynolds moved his family from Arizona to Texas in 1845, eventually settling on the Clear Fork of the Brazos River just east of Fort Griffin. His choice was excellent economically and socially: His cattle business thrived, and five of his children married the children of his neighbor, friend, and sometime business partner Joe Beck Matthews.
Reynolds’ two eldest sons, George and William, were in the cattle business for sixteen years before they founded the Reynolds Cattle Company in 1884. (As trail drivers, they participated in the ride that became the basis for Lonesome Dove.) Their holdings consisted of the Long X Ranch—once 250,000 acres, it is now 150,000, parts having been sold to actor Tommy Lee Jones and Emmett McCoy (see page 123)—and the 100,000-acre Rita Blanca, which was carved out of the old XIT. Passed down from generation to generation, that land has been divvied up into four parcels, each of which is owned by a descendant of George or William.
A. S. Gage Ranch
LOCATION Brewster and Presidio counties
ACRES 190,000
PRIMARY USE cow-calf
FOUNDED 1883
ALFRED S. GAGE WAS BORN IN VERMONT IN 1860, moved to Dallas at age eighteen, and four years later, took a job with his brother Edward, a Dartmouth College graduate who had started a land business. But within a year, he got restless and went to work as a cowboy on a ranch in Archer County. After Edward died in 1892, his company was reorganized and renamed the Alpine Cattle Company, and 32-year-old Alfred returned to be its general manager. In 1913 he bought out the other stockholders, merged Alpine’s 170,000 acres with more than 230,000 that he owned, and created the A. S. Gage Ranch.
At the time of his death in 1928, Alfred still owned those 400,000 acres, and they were split evenly between his daughters, Dorothy Gage Forker and Roxana Gage Catto. Forker’s half has been subdivided numerous times, but Catto’s half remained intact and is now owned by her daughters, Roxana Catto Hayne and Joan Negley Kelleher, the wife of Southwest Airlines CEO Herb Kelleher.
JA Ranch
LOCATION Gray County
ACRES 190,000
PRIMARY USE cow-calf
FOUNDED 1876
THAT THE JA SURVIVED EVEN ITS FIRST YEAR is surprising when you consider the odd couple who started it: rancher extraordinaire Charles Goodnight, whose claims to fame include inventing the chuck wagon and co-founding the Goodnight-Loving Trail, and John George Adair, an urbane Irish aristocrat who, legend has it, wore silk pajamas—even while camping. Despite their differences, their partnership arrangement—Goodnight ran the ranch, Adair put up the money—produced one of Texas’ most beautiful and well-run spreads, the King Ranch of the Panhandle. It was also one of the largest—at one point the JA encompassed some 1,300,000 acres—but over time chunks were sold off.
In 1887, after feuding with the Texas Legislature over various things, Goodnight decided he was “sick of land and men” and asked Adair’s widow, Lady Cornelia Ritchie Adair, to buy him out. She did and then promptly gave the ranch to her son by her first marriage, James W. “Jack” Ritchie. When he died, he passed it on to his son, M.H.W. “Monte” Ritchie, who owns it today. Now 87, the U.K. native lives in Amarillo but still visits the JA every week.
Clayton Williams Ranches
LOCATION Borden, Brewster, Jeff Davis, Pecos, and Presidio counties
ACRES 183,000
PRIMARY USE cow-calf, yearling
FOUNDED 1974
SAY WHAT YOU WILL ABOUT CLAYTON WILLIAMS, the Republican candidate for governor in 1990, but the man adores his ranches. “I don’t have the heritage of the Four Sixes,” he says, “but I have a love of the land, and I’ve managed to buy it with profits made somewhere else.”
Indeed he has. Almost as soon as Williams made his fortune in the oil patch, he started buying property. The 66-year-old, who is the president and CEO of Midland-based Clayton Williams Energy, bought his first ranch, the 26,880-acre Henderson Cove Ranch in Alpine, in 1975. (He renamed it the Happy Cove “because we’ve spent a lot of happy days there.”) Since then, he has acquired three more ranches, including his biggest ranch, the 78,000-acre West Pyle in Pecos County, in 1993. He also recently purchased 10,000 acres of farmland in Fort Stockton that used to belong to his father.
For Williams and his wife, Modesta, who comes from an old ranching family, ranching is best described as a moneymaking hobby—though as with all hobbies, there are non-monetary benefits as well, or at least he hopes. “We tried to raise our kids there in summertime to teach them how to work,” he says. “They learned how to work—and also to drink beer, I’m afraid.”
Tule Ranch
LOCATION Armstrong and Briscoe counties
ACRES 175,000
PRIMARY USE cow-calf, yearling and stocker cattle, wheat
FOUNDED 1883
THE LAND THAT BECAME THE TULE RANCH—named for the Tule Canyon, which runs through it—was purchased in 1883 by Charles Goodnight and John George Adair. It was bought by Mattie Hedgecoke in the thirties at a time when chunks of the JA Ranch were being sold off (see page 121). Hedgecoke, in turn, sold 27,000 acres to D. M. Cogdell, Sr., in 1953, and Cogdell acquired a few more acres each year until his death in 1964. Those acres were inherited by his sons, Billy and D. M. Junior, who themselves acquired a few acres each year. In 1994 Billy bought out his brother’s half of the Tule and is now its sole owner.
Killam Family Ranches
LOCATION Duval and Webb counties
ACRES 170,000
PRIMARY USE cow-calf, yearling and stocker cattle, oil and gas
FOUNDED 1927
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