The Last Empire
A rootless steamboat captain carved the King Ranch out of the frontier more than a century ago. Today Captain King’s descendants, rooted in the land he conquered, struggle to hold his legacy together.
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Bob Kleberg took over the ranch during World War I and gave it up as the last troops left Viet Nam; he came in with the Model T and went out after the final Apollo mission to the moon. “It’s not hard to see why he might have seemed intolerant of suggestions from the younger members of the family,” his daughter Helenita, says. “After all, even if they were fifty years old, he had been running the ranch since before they were born.”
In the last years of his life he took his grandchildren on tours of the foreign ranches. They rode horseback all day and spent a good many evenings around the campfire. Bob Kleberg wanted more than anything to give his grandchildren a sense of who they were, wanted them to see the vastness of what their family had wrought. And he had decided to charge them with a weighty responsibility, just as Captain King, on his deathbed, had made his family swear never to sell a foot of the old Santa Gertrudis. One night, as the campfire nickered, he gave them their mission: “Do what you can with the ranch,” he said, “but, above all, keep the family together.” In 1974, scarcely a month after he had been working cattle on horseback, he died.
The Hard Worker
Though Bob Kleberg transformed the ranch, he did not have the same effect on the family. As Bob grew beyond the ranch, many members of the family found him increasingly remote. The man who most influenced the family was not Bob but his nephew Dick, Richard’s son. Dick was not the brilliant rancher Bob was. He did not seek new empires or command the center stage or extend the frontiers of ranching. He dedicated himself instead to husbanding what his forebears had built. Some members of the family were most inspired by Bob’s vision and dominating presence; others believed in Dick’s loyalty and sense of teamwork. Dick’s proteges, and not Bob’s, would end up running the ranch.
Dick was born out on the Laureles Division in 1916. Even before his father died in 1955, he had become his uncle’s right-hand man. Dick was the first person Bob thought he could trust with the ranch, and he laid the weight of its responsibility on Dick’s shoulders while he embarked on the worldwide expansion that occupied the last twenty years of his life.
There was never any doubt that Bob Kleberg was the boss, but it was Dick who kept the ranch going. He worked long hours every day, sweating, sunburned, choking with allergies. He chain-smoked and drank rivers of coffee and, like many of the men in the family, too much whiskey. He worked the ranch’s 825,000 acres as if he were the only hand on a family farm — no detail escaped him, no job was too small to take him out to the ranch. He never took a vacation with his family. Like Richard Kleberg, Sr., Dick subordinated himself to Bob.
Richard had been content to let his younger brother. Bob, have the attention, the acclaim, and the power. And he did that because he knew Bob was better at running the ranch than he was. That pride in putting personal ambition and fame aside for the best interests of the family sustained Dick also and won him the hearts of his own family and of the vaqueros, who loved him, perhaps more than any other Kleberg before or since. They loved him in the vigor of his youth for his humor and his cowboy skills; and they loved him later, when he lay helpless with emphysema, with instinctive empathy for his suffering.
For in the end Dick Kleberg’s body was not up to the burden he placed upon it. Living and working at the pace set by Bob Kleberg could not have helped his health. And South Texas is one of the most hostile climates known to man. Its heat is .more enervating than Death Valley’s. The air is heavy with humidity, laden with dust, filled with pollen. Almost all of the Klebergs are fair. with delicate skin that burns easily and is prone to cancer. They are plagued with allergies and asthma. They cough, wheeze, and sneeze, and they broil in the inescapable sun.
For Dick Kleberg the dust, the pollen, and the cigarettes were too much. He developed emphysema and his lungs began to fill with fluid. At first he was only a step or two slower than in his prime. But then there came hours at a time when he could not even go outside. A man who hated to be indoors, he was confined to his room, battling the disease that was smothering him. And then the hours became days, and the walls of his room became his world.
When Bob Kleberg died, Dick should at last have been able to turn the daily grind of the ranch over to one of his cousins or sons and enjoy the status on which Bob had thrived. But his body would not let him. Several times he went into the intensive care unit at Spohn Hospital in Corpus Christi, and his family was told he was dying. But he rallied, returned home, and tried to work, only to become an invalid again. In the late spring of 1979 his favorite horse died, a mare named Anita Chica. “It was like an omen,” a member of the family recalled. A few weeks later Dick Kleberg, 62 years old, was dead.
The Burial Of the Dead
It rained most of the morning, a rancher’s dream. In Santa Gertrudis Creek the narrow channel, scarcely a trickle, swelled slowly out toward the muddy banks. Along the wire-mesh fences lantanas, horsemint, and ebony were beginning to bloom. The ranch’s 563 employees — foremen, vaqueros, cooks, blacksmiths, farmers, secretaries, heavy-equipment men, veterinarians, accountants, maids, stableboys, pilots — had gathered on the banks of the Santa Gertrudis. A festive tent had been erected for a family wedding scheduled the next day, but the crowds now converging on the King Ranch headquarters were there for a more solemn purpose. They were there to bury Dick Kleberg. The accidental conjunction of wedding and funeral seemed appropriate for such a cohesive family: one generation was passing, another was beginning. As the rain was bringing new life to the dry prairie, so the wedding would also bring new life to the ranch.
The memorial service convened in the courtyard of Dick’s house, a rambling contemporary-style building laid out like one of the ranch’s cow camp shelters. It nestles in a live oak grove next to the Big House. The gentle, steady rain had turned the grass green and rich. Across Santa Gertrudis Creek cattle grazed; inside the courtyard mariachis played the music of the border. The children perched on folding chairs, the girls in Easter dresses, the boys in neatly pressed suits. In the crowd were ranchers, Houston lawyers, South American diplomats. New York bankers; on the outskirts stood the ranch executives and foremen. Beyond them, hats in hand, the Kineños stood awkwardly but proudly in their Sunday best.
From behind the house emerged a procession of fourteen Kineños, each in khaki, each mounted on a rusty red King Ranch quarter horse. They lined up behind the swimming pool, their hats held over their hearts. In the center of this honor guard pranced a restless quarter horse without a rider, a yellow poncho draped over its saddle. The saddle was Dick’s, made in the King Ranch saddle shop. Tied over it on either side were his boots. The sunlight flickering through the clouds reflected off the mother-of-pearl inlays in the handmade spurs.
A plaintive trumpet solo signaled the beginning of the service. The rain had stopped, but the wind blew drops of water from the mesquite and live oak trees down onto the crowd. A young Episcopal priest spoke of how Dick had “loved the land, had felt the promise of it, had worked it and suffered on it.” Then the Kineños’ priest gave a eulogy in Spanish. He talked about how the ranch people were workers and the Klebergs were patrones but in death ail were equal. The ranch workers, he added, addressing the family, had shared the family’s joys and laughter and today shared their sorrow and their tears.
The mariachis played a polka, and the mounted Kineños turned their horses and filed away, holding their hats to their sides in respect. The mourners began breaking up into smaller groups to tell stories far into the night about Dick, about the ranch, and about the other members of its family, like a Greek chorus telling tales of the deaths of kings. The family had been given much by the chance of birth-fame, riches, a vast ranch. But the funeral of Dick Kleberg was, above all, a reminder that they had also been given a ration of suffering.
Two Brothers
In the five years between the deaths of Bob and Dick Kleberg the family endured more tumult, change, and confrontation than it had seen since the ranch partition in the thirties, if then. With Dick ill, the two most obvious heirs to the ranch were Dick’s cousins B Johnson and Robert Shelton. They were the sons of Bob Kleberg’s star-crossed younger sister, Sarah. Sarah was one of the new breed of ranch women who were not content to stay primly indoors. She was most at home on the ranch, and when she married in 1928 she chose a young cowboy named Henry Belton Johnson. Before their first child, B, was two, his father was dead of a brain tumor. Sarah remarried the next year, this time to a Kingsville physician named Joseph Shelton. They had one son, Robert Richard, who was six years younger than his half-brother. In 1939 Dr. Shelton died, and in 1942 Sarah herself was killed in an automobile accident. Her two orphaned sons went to live with their grandmother Alice King Kleberg on the ranch. When she died in 1944 at the age of 82, they moved in with their uncle Bob.
Bob and Helen Kleberg raised B and Bobby like the sons they never had. Their daughter, Helenita, grew up with the two boys in that odd combination of wealth and simplicity typical of the ranch. They each had their own Kineño servant, their own horses, their own cowboy suits, their own guns; they knew the significance of who they were. Yet they worked the roundups with the young Kineños, played with them, rode with them.
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