August 1998
Briscoe’s Bounty
Twenty-five years after he took office as governor, Dolph Briscoe still leads Texas in another way: as its largest individual landowner.
DOLPH BRISCOE, JR., SURVEYS the vast ranch country of South Texas from the window of his private plane, pointing out landmarks below in the brasada, the mesquite brush country. After taking off from Uvalde, the headquarters of his far-flung ranching operations, Briscoe’s King Air turboprop had headed south and crossed the Nueces River, a winding ribbon of brilliant blue-green from several thousand feet above. “We’ve just entered the Nueces Strip,” he says, a sense of excitement creeping into his voice. Once the site of some of the bloodiest clashes in frontier history between Texans, Mexicans, and the Comanche — and the birthplace of Texas’ cattle business — the strip of land between the Nueces and the Rio Grande is where Briscoe’s heart lies these days. But it’s not the only piece of land dear to him.
At 75, Briscoe owns a large chunk of the state he governed from 1973 to 1979. He is Texas’ largest individual landowner and one of its last big land and cattle barons: He and his family have about 640,000 acres — about one thousand square miles — spread over ten counties, with scattered holdings stretching from the Rio Grande to the blue hills north of Uvalde to the mountains of West Texas. Of the great Texas ranching empires, only the King Ranch is bigger. Yet at a time when most large ranches have shrunk in size, Briscoe’s total acreage has doubled since the seventies.
“We’re over the Catarina Ranch now,” Briscoe says, peering down at the dusty land with its mottled shades of green and splashes of yellow from the retama, which is in full bloom this warm April day. He can name every stock pond; one is called the Rayburn Tank because Sam Rayburn, the late House Speaker, once caught a mess of huge bass there. The ponds are full, but the land is characteristically dry. “If it can get drier,” Briscoe says with the voice of experience, “it probably will.”
He had met me earlier that morning at his office at the First State Bank in Uvalde, where he’s the chairman (the bank is a subsidiary of the Briscoe Ranch Company). He keeps his ranch headquarters office there, a sort of personal museum filled with memorabilia from a life split between ranching and politics. Fresh from a board meeting, he looked dapper in a dark suit, a starched white shirt with gold cuff links, and a striped silk tie, but he has a rancher’s rugged physique, weather-beaten skin, and an affable manner. Before our trip he had changed into a monogrammed shirt, slacks, cowboy boots, and the rancher’s trademark: a sweat-stained beaver hat.
When we arrive at Catarina, a red Range Rover is parked at the landing strip, and Briscoe drives his wife, Janey Slaughter Briscoe, and me to a shady, grassy oasis rimmed with salt cedars. Lunch awaits us at the cookshack. Not many ranches have a cookshack anymore, and this is a fine one: It has brick walls, big open fireplaces with iron replicas of the Briscoes’ Open Six brand (a crudely drawn 6) hanging above them, an old cookstove, and rows of antlers from white-tailed deer shot at the ranch. We sit at long tables and benches and dine on a hearty lunch of flour tortillas, beef stewed with peppers, pinto beans, and fideo, a traditional South Texas spicy noodle dish. Briscoe ladles a few more spoonfuls of fiery salsa onto his beans as he explains why he employs so few ranch hands: These days most large ranches—including the 100,000-acre Catarina—use helicopters to round up cattle. “Years ago it used to take twelve or fifteen or even eighteen men to work cattle in the brushy pastures here in South Texas,” he says. “It might take two weeks or longer to work a pasture that we can now work in three or four hours. It’s not necessarily cheaper when you add up the helicopter bills, but we can do it a lot quicker.” And with only three to five men.
Briscoe’s father once ran sheep on the land; now it’s all cattle, mostly dark red Santa Gertrudis, the hardy breed developed by the King Ranch. Briscoe likes to work cattle and would prefer to do it on a horse if he had the time. But he leaves the operation of the Catarina and the family’s other cattle concerns in South Texas to his son, Dolph III, who’s called Chip. Unlike some Texas ranching dynasties, whose new generations aren’t interested in the day-to-day business of ranching, the Briscoe ranching legacy seems secure. Briscoe’s daughter Janey and her husband own a ranch in South Texas. Another daughter, Cele, is married to John Carpenter III of Dallas, whose family has cattle operations in North Texas and developed the Las Colinas complex on family ranchland. And Chip’s two sons like ranching. “We’re fortunate,” Briscoe says. “One thing I’ve hated to see is the big ranches broken up and subdivided.”
LAND HAS BEEN IN THE BRISCOES’ blood for generations. Their roots can be traced back to northern England, where they farmed and raised livestock. Their ancestral home for centuries, Crofton Hall, was a large manor in the English countryside. They were wealthy and influential enough that Thomas Gainsborough painted a portrait of a distant relative, Lady Jane Briscoe (a copy hangs at the First State Bank, where Dolph and Janey have their art collection on display). Another relative, physician John Briscoe, came to North America in 1633; his descendants later established Piedmont, a Federal-style family home, in the Shenandoah Valley of West Virginia (PBS newsman Jim Lehrer, a Texan, owns Piedmont today). Eventually, some of the Briscoes migrated farther west. One of them, Andrew Briscoe, for whom Briscoe County in the Panhandle is named, journeyed to what is now Texas in the 1820’s and later bought land from the Mexican government on the Brazos River in Fort Bend County. When the Mexican government attempted to collect custom duties on a sale, he refused to pay and was jailed. He later joined the fight for Texas independence, signed the Texas Declaration of Independence, and served under Sam Houston at the Battle of San Jacinto. Houston appointed him the first judge of Harrisburg County (now Harris County).
Briscoe’s grandfather Judge Lee Adolphus Briscoe farmed in Fort Bend County and ran cattle in what is now western Houston. Under his tutelage, his son Dolph became an adept roper and cattle driver. He even delivered newspapers on horseback for the Houston Post. His father wanted him to study law, but he was more interested in horse-trading. After a stint at the Peacock Military Academy in San Antonio, Dolph stayed in South Texas, running mules and horses and ranching with various partners. He married a second cousin and moved to Uvalde in 1914, where Dolph Junior was born and graduated from high school. “My father said he wanted to find some good land where it didn’t rain too much,” Briscoe says, explaining that cattle often got bogged down in the wet Brazos River bottoms in Fort Bend County. “He found a dry area, all right, but it’s good ranching country.”
Dolph Senior went broke several times in his ranching career. His first real opportunity in the cattle business came in 1923, when he started ranching with Humble Oil founder Ross Sterling, who would serve as Texas’ governor from 1931 to 1933. Dolph Senior helped run Sterling’s Chupadera Ranch, which was along the border, until the Depression wiped them out. He managed to get back on his feet by running a ranch in the mountains in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila and grazing cattle at the original Catarina Ranch, where he had a lease on more than 100,000 acres. “That was back in the days when a grazing lease was five cents an acre and land was five dollars an acre,” Briscoe says. By 1939 Dolph Senior had recovered sufficiently to buy 35,000 acres of the Catarina. As his ranching business prospered, he added to his holdings until he had amassed his own vast ranch, which he named the Catarina (though it’s only a fraction of the original’s size).
