The Secret History
Did Richard King, in collusion with Robert J. Kleberg, cheat his partner's heirs out of a piece of the King Ranch back in 1883? The Texas Supreme Court will soon decide whether this little-known but serious dispute can go to trial. Has the past come back to haunt the state's most storied spread?
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THE LONG-FORGOTTEN FAMILY WAS that of Major William Warren Chapman and his wife, Helen Blair Chapman. Major Chapman had died in 1859, his widow in 1881. What claim had they on the living? The answer lay in a trove of old letters that their heirs had preserved. Although it's probable that none of the descendants ever read the letters in their entirety, if at all, they kept turning up, first in the keeping of one branch of the family, then another. Finally they were placed in the hands of someone who would read them, Edward Caleb Coker, a great-great-grandson of the Chapmans'. Ed Coker, an urbane Southerner in his fifties with a law degree from Duke University, came into possession of the family letters back in 1986, when three boxes weighing a total of 165 pounds arrived at his home in Jacksonville, Florida, sent by an uncle who lived in California.
They were a "grand mess," Coker says. Randomly, he reached into one of the boxes and pulled out a letter. Dated June 1851, it had been written by Helen Chapman from Puebla, in central Mexico. Coker didn't know much about Helen Chapman, except that a portrait of her husband had hung in his mother's house when he was a child growing up in Clemson, South Carolina.
The letter from Mexico turned out to hold special interest for Coker. A couple of years earlier, in 1984, he had taken his eldest daughter on a vacation to Mexico City, where they had stayed at the Hotel Majestic, an old colonial establishment in the heart of the city with a rooftop restaurant that afforded a grand view of the Zócalo below. As he read the letter describing Helen's last night in Mexico City, he was drawn into her world. She spoke of attending a concert at the National Palace and of meeting the president of Mexico. Tired, she returned to her hotel and went up on the roof to take one last look at the city. Coker felt a thrill of recognition when he realized that it was the same hotel where he and his daughter had stayed more than a century later.
As Coker continued to read through the letters, his interest increased and he became aware that the ones written from Matamoros-Brownsville between 1848 and 1852 contained the most compelling information, the most interesting portraits of people, and the richest details about the lives of Major Chapman and his wife, all sketched in vivid prose.
Major Chapman was a graduate of West Point, a veteran of the Second Seminole War in Florida, and a staff officer who had served in the Mexican War under both General Zachary Taylor and General John Wool. Brevetted for bravery at the Battle of Buena Vista, after the war he was appointed collector of revenue for Matamoros and quartermaster of Fort Brown and the nearby ports at Brazos Santiago and Point Isabel (now Port Isabel). Helen Chapman was a well-educated, observant, and forward-thinking woman who sent back long missives to her mother in Westfield, Massachusetts.
The Chapmans seemed to know everybody who came through Brownsville: Robert E. Lee, who was stationed in Texas at various times in the 1850's; Charles Stillman, the prime mover and shaker in early Brownsville; and many other local luminaries, such as Reverend Hiram Chamberlain and his family, including the eldest daughter, Henrietta, who would marry Richard King in 1854 and preside over the ranch upon King's death, in 1885. Major Chapman also knew Richard King though, oddly, Helen did not.
In time, Coker approached the University of Texas Press to see if it had any interest in gathering the letters into a book. It sent him to Don Carleton, the director of UT-Austin's Barker Texas History Center (now the Center for American History), who became an enthusiastic supporter of the project. By late 1989, Coker had completed a draft ready to be sent out for peer review, a standard practice whereby academic presses seek the expertise of scholars to evaluate a prospective manuscript. Peer review can kill a book, or it can make one better.
The peer reviewer was also enthusiastic about the project, stating that the Chapman letters "provide a marvelous view of nineteenth-century Texas and army life." The reviewer had one main complaint, however: The book seemed to end too abruptly, with the 1852 departure of the Chapmans from Brownsville to their new posting in Corpus Christi. What was the rest of the story? The reviewer suggested that "a brief 4-5 page epilogue, discussing the Chapmans' later experiences and the reasons for emphasizing only the Brownsville years, would be in order."
So Coker set to work again. "The fact of the matter is that I don't know [what happened to the Chapmans], just like I did not know about the Brownsville years until I read the letters," he wrote in a letter to Carleton.
Coker's first epilogue, dated December 29, 1989, added a brief overview of the Chapmans' lives after leaving Brownsville and, later, Texas, including a few sentences about a lawsuit brought against the King Ranch by Helen Chapman in 1879. As Coker dug deeper, he expanded the Chapman-King material in two subsequent revisions of the epilogue. The more he learned about the lives of his ancestors following their departure from Brownsville, the more he came to believe that he had discovered a case of fraud perpetrated against Major Chapman's widow and her descendants. Coker's historical inquiries took him back to the early days of Richard King's venture on the Santa Gertrudis grant.
King liked to partner up, and during his first year at Santa Gertrudis, on November 14, 1853, he formalized his equal partnership in the Rincón with a charming frontier hero and veteran of both the Mier Expedition and the Mexican War named Gideon K. "Legs" Lewis. Lewis had a way with the women, until an irate husband shot him to death in 1855, leaving King in need of a new partner. He turned to his old friend from Brownsville, Major Chapman, who was then stationed in nearby Corpus Christi.
On April 25, 1856, Chapman entered into a partnership with King, receiving from King and his wife, Henrietta, a warranty deed for half of their interest in the Rincón de Santa Gertrudis property, for which, according to his Record Book of Rancho Expenses, he paid King $100. Later that year, on August 1, Chapman, acting on King's behalf, purchased at auction Gideon Lewis' one-half undivided interest in the Rincón. Chapman's share of this purchase left him owning a half-interest in the Rincón de Santa Gertrudis grant, which totaled about fifteen thousand acres.
Shortly after Chapman's second transaction with King, in the summer of 1856, something happened that would forever cloud the circumstances of their business relationship. Nobody is quite sure what it was except that, suddenly faced with the prospect of being reassigned from Corpus Christi to far-distant California, Major Chapman left Texas for postings on the East Coast. The major's hurried farewell to his ranching operation is a story told long after the fact and dependent upon the memories of one man, James Bryden—who had been Chapman's representative on the land and was later a King Ranch herd boss—and two very interested parties, Richard and Henrietta King.
The story is told in the lawsuit brought by Helen Chapman, who sued the King Ranch because she had never received any profits from her Santa Gertrudis holdings nor had Richard King responded to her requests to meet with him. In a sworn written statement in response to written interrogatories, James Bryden said that Major Chapman had come to the rancho that summer and asked him if James J. Richardson, a gunman and Mexican War veteran who worked as a foreman for Richard King, was at home. Bryden said that Chapman told him he wished to see Richardson "on business of importance to Capt King—explaining at the same time the nature of the business he felt so anxious about." Bryden said he fetched Richardson, whereupon Chapman said to Richardson, "I have not the means to justify me in retaining a half interest and request the Capt to release me from my obligation therein—say also that I will write him shortly on this subject." This version of events is presented as fact in Tom Lea's The King Ranch.
In her sworn statement of March 22, 1881, Helen Chapman offered a completely different view of her husband's state of mind and financial circumstances during that period. She said that after they left Texas, her husband had never lost interest in the ranch and that he had continued to receive quarterly reports from his agent, Bryden. She said her husband spoke often of returning to Texas when he left the Army.
The Kings, of course, offered another version of what had happened. They maintained that they had never received any money from Chapman and that there had been a letter from him confirming the conversation with Richardson but that it had been lost.
Helen Chapman did not live to see the resolution of her lawsuit. In April 1883, two years after her death, the district court judge for Nueces County signed a consent judgment reflecting a settlement of the suit. It stated that the Chapman estate owned only the quarter-interest in the Rincón purchased by Major Chapman in April 1856. Helen Chapman had a copy of that deed. As she had said in her interrogatory answers, which proved to be crucial: "The deed given by Richard and Henrietta King was kept with other deeds and titles to real estate, and my husband never gave me any reason to suppose that the transaction had been cancelled."
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