History Lesson 
Sarita's Secret
Once the seat of a famous ranching empire, this sleepy town has kept hidden for eighty years the answer to one of South Texas's greatest riddles: Is Ray Fernandez, the descendant of a Mexican maid, the heir to the gigantic Kenedy fortune?
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In the years after the war, the Tejanos and their land grants were the focus of a bloody and brutal conflict that continued to rage over the disputed land between the rivers, which became known as the Nueces Strip. Raiders from both sides of the border burned, murdered, and pillaged at will. Texas Rangers, sent to restore order, were viewed by the Tejanos as mercenaries in the employ of the big Anglo ranchers. At a fair in Corpus Christi in 1852, Kenedy and King and others discussed what they saw as the chance of a lifetime: They could buy abandoned or vulnerable land grants in the Nueces Strip for a fraction of their worth. In 1868, after King and Kenedy dissolved their partnership, Kenedy bought the Los Laureles grant, north of Baffin Bay, and made ranching history by enclosing 131,000 acres, making it the first fenced ranch of any size west of the Mississippi. In 1882 he sold Los Laureles to a Scottish syndicate (which later sold it to King) for $1.1 million, money he used to purchase more land grants, including La Parra, the site of the future ranch headquarters.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, as the railroad moved south, the Kenedy ranch prospered beyond all expectations. Mifflin Kenedy had once used his political connections to stop a railroad, lest it hurt his steamship business, but his son Don Gregorio helped found the St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexico Railway, which later was acquired by the Missouri Pacific. Don Gregorio and others began buying land rights along the proposed path of the railroad. Small towns sprung up along the tracks—Skidmore, Alice, Robstown, Bishop, Kingsville, Riviera. Theodore Koch, a promoter from Minnesota, founded the tiny community of Riviera Beach on Baffin Bay, an inlet of the Laguna Madre that separates the northern part of the Kenedy Ranch from the King Ranch. Koch built a resort hotel, a wide boulevard with flowers and tropical trees, and a dance hall and pavilion that extended over the water. All that is left of his dream are the cypress pilings of the old pavilion at Riviera Beach, a few feet out into the bay.
When the tracks finally reached the Kenedy ranch, in 1905, Don Gregorio donated land for the right-of-way and chartered a town, which he named for his daughter, Sarita. He lived in the four-bedroom plantation-style ranch house Mifflin had built, on the highest point on this relentlessly flat coastal plain, a sand dune 37 feet above sea level. But in 1918 he hitched the house to teams of oxen and mules and moved it two hundred yards to the east. Then, on the dune, he began construction of La Casa Grande, the "Great House." He built a wharf on Baffin Bay and had material shipped from New Orleans. The Spanish Revivalstyle estate had eighteen-inch reinforced concrete walls and ten bedrooms. A Gatling gun was mounted in a watchtower above the second floor for protection against Mexican bandits, and an escape tunnel was concealed within a walk-in safe in Don Gregorio's office. He and Marie Stella had a suite of rooms at the south end of the second floor. Sarita and her husband, Arthur East, had a suite on the opposite side of the house. Johnny and his wife, Elena, lived in Mifflin's old house east of La Casa Grande. The Kenedys divided their time between the mansion in Corpus Christi and the ranch.
The Kenedys took care of their Mexican workers, known as Kenedeños, in the patrón style, providing housing and medical care and seeing that their children were educated. The Kenedeños, particularly the vaqueros, whose ancestors had pioneered the cattle business in the New World, taught the Kenedys how to ranch. About three hundred Kenedeños were needed to run a spread that huge: cowboys, wranglers, fence menders, groundskeepers, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, butlers, chauffeurs, cooks, maids. In the early twenties, one of the maids was Maria Rowland, a pretty teenager of Cherokee and Spanish descent. Her family was from Kingsville, but she lived on the ranch. In the era of the patróns, it would not have been surprising for a liaison to have taken place. Many a wealthy South Texas rancher took a mestizo mistress and stashed her in a casa chica, a small house convenient to the rancher's needs.
JOHNNY WASN'T THE MOST DYNAMIC Kenedy, but he had the most fun. He had an eye for the ladies and a weakness for the grape. His drunken benders frequently included his neighbors, King Ranch boss Bob Kleberg Jr. and Major Tom Armstrong. The three ranching scions hunted, partied, played poker, and caroused together. In the Kenedy County courthouse, at Sarita, there is a faded photograph of the trio, strapping men all, taken at La Parra Ranch in 1930, after a well-oiled hunting trip. In their book about the Kenedy family, If You Love Me You Will Do My Will, authors Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth give an example of Johnny's "boyhood prodigality" that so dismayed his parents. While he was a student at Texas A&M, Johnny read about polygamy among the Mormons. "Mistaking a religion-based practice for promiscuity," they wrote, "he and a pal took a train out to Salt Lake City to sample this imagined lotus land of unfettered carnality." Don Gregorio had to send the Pinkertons to fetch him home.
Sarita tolerated and probably enjoyed their rowdy behavior. She was a cowgirl all the way, able to ride, shoot, and drink whiskey as well as any man. After Don Gregorio died, in 1931, Sarita rather than Johnny or Arthur East took charge of the ranch. Her brother loved the ranch but not ranching, and her husband didn't mix well with the other men; he spent most of his time alone at Sarita's San Pablo Ranch, near Hebbronville, adjacent to a ranch owned by his nephew Tom East Jr. Fluent in Spanish, Sarita was comfortable around the families of her vaqueros and sensitive to their needs. She was a devout Catholic, same as her mother and grandmother, but she was the only Kenedy woman seen by the Kenedeños as a true patrona.
"She was a very beautiful lady with a very big heart," Rafael Cuellar told me one rainy afternoon as we sat in the cab of his pickup. "You could see her everywhere, drinking coffee with the people, eating tortillas. She made sure nobody suffered needlessly." The 66-year-old Cuellar has lived in the town of Sarita all his life. His grandfather came to the ranch as a vaquero in the 1800's, at age sixteen, and his father achieved the rank of corporal, boss of a crew of vaqueros. A retired three-term sheriff of Kenedy County, Cuellar lives east of the tracks in a small house that Sarita gave to his father; in her will, Sarita deeded ranch-owned houses to all the cowboys who had worked for her for at least 25 years. Elena bequeathed a permanent fund that supplies all the citizens of Sarita free water and sewage services, but she is not remembered as fondly as her sister-in-law. "Elena was a fine lady, but different," Cuellar told me. "Some people help because they think they have to, and others help because they enjoy helping. You know what I mean?" I asked Cuellar what he thought about exhuming Johnny's body and testing it for DNA, as Ray Fernandez wants to do. To my surprise, he showed me a newspaper clipping taped to the underside of the sun visor of his pickup. It had a photograph of John Kenedy Jr. next to a photograph of Ray Fernandez. "See?" he told me. "They look alike."
The vaquero way of life is dying. There is still livestock to be worked, primarily on land leased from the foundation by the family of Tom East Jr., but the number of cattle pales in comparison with Don Gregorio's time. The foundation and the trust own all of the land except for the relatively small parcel given to the Oblate fathers, and they lease it to various corporations who in turn sublease parts of it for hunting and birdwatching. The surviving Kenedeños live in dozens of small houses on both sides of the tracks, on Sarita's narrow, mostly paved streets. Some are retired; others, like 86-year-old José Salazar, who started work here in the early thirties, still ride every morning. Their yards tend to be neat and orderly; some are fenced and many display the flags of Texas and the United States.
In June the range was surprisingly green and lush, thanks to near-record rains. Vast waist-high pastures of native grasses, growing much as they did centuries ago, stretched as far as the eye could see, interspersed with patches of oak and mesquite. The best place to view La Parra is from the tower that sits atop La Casa Grande. I climbed up there one afternoon with Father Francis Kelly Nemeck, the director of Lebh Shomea House of Prayer. The soft-spoken 68-year-old priest wore a cowboy hat, a short-sleeve sport shirt, and sneakers. Entrance to the former ranch house is normally restricted to those approved for silent meditation by Father Kelly or one of the nuns who assist him, but it was closed for repairs, and we were alone except for a few workmen. A stiff sea breeze blew in from Baffin Bay, which appeared as a gray-blue sliver on the eastern horizon. From this magnificent perch the world seemed bucolic and peaceful. An alley of tropical palms led to the back of the house, where wild turkeys, javelinas, rabbits, and roadrunners wandered about like pets on the manicured grounds.
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