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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After some negotiating with the ranch, B filed suit in federal court in San Antonio in June 1979. He charged that the ranch had told him nothing of the Exxon claim, which he says it was investigating at the same time it was negotiating a settlement with him. He also charged that once the ranch realized how much money might be involved, it changed its negotiating strategy and offered to buy him out for cash, depriving him of any portion of a future settlement from Exxon.
With the exception of a tersely worded response to B’s allegations that denied virtually every charge, the ranch’s testimony has been sealed by the court. The case is still pending; Jim Clement gave his deposition in April. As far as anyone can tell, the ranch’s position is that B was much too closely involved in the ranch not to know about the Exxon claim. In any case, the ranch believes that B forfeited his claim on any future income from the ranch when he sold his stock. That B’s deal did not include a future interest in the Exxon claim while Bobby’s did only showed how different the two deals were. Bobby got assets, B got cash. A deal was a deal. Dick’s sister Alice Meyer, who sold out for cash a year after B did, isn’t suing the ranch over the Exxon claim. Why should B?
In late October 1979, when the statute of limitations on the Exxon claim was about to expire, Bobby Shelton, who still owns 11.2 per cent of the ranch’s royalty income, stepped in and sued the ranch and Exxon. But while B’s suit alleges deception, Bobby’s accuses the ranch of mismanagement. He claims that the ranch has botched the Exxon claim and therefore has failed to fulfill its responsibilities to the royalty owners, who since 1977 have been the family members. His patience with what was, to his mind, the plodding, indecisive, and timid style of the new management was exhausted. If the ranch wasn’t going to get after the Exxon claim, then by God he would!
Through all this heat and smoke the ranch continued to negotiate quietly with Exxon. It rejected a $33 million settlement and proposed instead that Exxon increase the ranch’s royalties on future gas sales from a sixth to a fifth. The ranch basically believes that such matters are nothing that gentlemen can’t solve. After all, Bob Kleberg always insisted on treating the Humble executives with the same trust, deference, and neighborly spirit that the ranch showed its fellow ranchers — and to sue a neighbor would be unthinkable. When Bobby left he agreed that the ranch would handle the Humble lease — and the ranch contends that it is doing so, at its own speed. In fact, this summer the ranch and Exxon compromised on a higher royalty payment, a large step toward settling the Exxon claim. But the value of that settlement is considerably less than B and Bobby contend it should be and will likely not end their suits. Not since the Atwood suits has the ranch had so many legal entanglements.
The Crown Prince In Exile
B Johnson’s Chaparrosa Ranch lies near Uvalde, 160 miles northwest of the King Ranch. It is a rugged, functional, but now drouth-ridden place. Everything B learned from Bob he has put into practice there. Since he left the King Ranch B has devoted his considerable talents and energies to his own affairs. He is on the boards of numerous companies, including AT&T, U.S. Trust, Tenneco, and First City Bancorporation. He is developing the landmark Hyatt Regency Hotel a block away from the Alamo in San Antonio, a stone’s throw from where his grandfather died a century ago.
He is also probably the single most talented breeder of Santa Gertrudis show cattle in the world. Starting from scratch, he has built a string of animals that sweep many major shows. (He has won grand champion at Houston, for example, five years in a row.) In fact, many people believe that B’s cattle would give the King Ranch’s foundation herd a good run for its money if the ranch were to drop its policy of not competing (it feels there are better standards by which to judge good cattle). His Santa Gertrudis auction now rivals the King Ranch’s.
B still has a strong sense of belonging to the King Ranch family. In 964 he and his wife, Patsy, began an annual summer camp, a tradition that, more than any single thing, could keep that family together. “The thirteen of us in my generation were all close,” he recalls, “but the next generation just didn’t know each other. Bob’s wife, Helen, had done more than anyone to sustain the family. When she died in 1963 there was a vacuum. So we started a summer camp to bring the next generation together and make the traditions of the ranch real. Tio’s generation, the ones taking over the ranch now, were our first campers, and today they’re running the camp themselves. If you ask them where they first learned how strong their family really is, they’ll tell you it was at summer camp.”
The ranch is still in his blood. B has acquired — through his purchase of La Puerta de Agua Dulce Ranch from the King family — Captain King’s original brand, the HK, for Henrietta King. His loyalty to the ranch and his family is unwavering. In spite of the separation and the lawsuit that followed it, he will not make a single negative statement about any of them. “They are my family,” he says. “They mean a great deal to me, no matter what happens.”
Something about B, however, is slightly out of scale. In spite of the magnitude and complexity of his projects, he seems somehow to be playing on too small a stage. Perhaps the family did make a mistake, for both his and their sake, when they did not choose him to succeed Bob Kleberg. Yet on his own, away from the family, B is free of the constant compromising and diplomacy that would have been necessary if he’d run the ranch. Most of the time he believes he’s better off.
But one day last winter, flying high over his ranch in one of his airplanes, B Johnson, an immensely successful businessman in his own right, a man of intelligence, personality, and charisma, had the King Ranch on his mind. He unfolded a letter that Will Rogers had written to him when his father died, back when B was only one year old, and read it aloud to a friend. The letter reflects on what the ranch meant, who his parents were, and who B is. When he finished the letter, there were tears in his eyes.
Meanwhile, Back At the Ranch
Despite the squabbles, the oil wealth, and the lawsuits, the family survives, and so does the reality of 825,000 acres of South Texas. From the southernmost fences at Norias, which run right into the Laguna Madre just north of Port Mansfield, to the upper limits of the Laureles, on the outskirts of Corpus Christi 93 miles north, the King Ranch is still a ranch. In dollars, the ranching operations may be dwarfed by the oil income; in acres, the Texas land may be lost in the vastness of the foreign holdings. But here, on land so flat and undistinguished that one can feel instantly disoriented and lost, here is where the heart of the family still lies.
The nuts and bolts of the four home ranching divisions — Santa Gertrudis, Norias, Laureles, and Encino — are now Tio Kleberg’s responsibility as a vice president of the ranch. Tio has worked full time at the ranch since 1971, when he and Janell moved back to Kingsville from El Paso, where Tio had been an Army lieutenant at Fort Bliss. “I went to see Uncle Bob about a job,” Tio recalls, “and he told me I would be working for my dad. All my dad did was look at me and say, ‘Go to work.’ I got four hundred dollars a month and a Chevrolet Bel Air. I threw my saddle in the trunk and headed out to work cattle. We were in a tick quarantine, so we were moving herds all day, every day. We hadn’t even moved into our house, and all our things were still in boxes. I spent my summers on the ranch growing up, so I had a good idea what to do. But it was hard at first, knowing that men who knew a lot more than I did would be watching me. But I couldn’t have been happier. I’ve wanted to be a rancher since I was a kid. I’ve never wanted to do anything else.”
What he wanted to become, he is. Today he drives a Chevrolet Suburban filled with ranching and hunting paraphernalia. He lives and breathes cattle and horses. Even at night and on weekends he is prepared for one of the ranch employees to show up on his doorstep with a problem. If anything goes wrong at the ranch, from a leaky pipe to a sick relative to a hurricane, Tio is off to fix it. Given the complexity and size of the business, much of his time is spent in the office. But like Bob and Dick Kleberg before him, Tio Kleberg is most at home outdoors. He is a determined, magnetic leader who works as hard himself as he expects the ranch’s employees to work. He has developed, of necessity, a good sense of diplomacy. To run the ranching operations of the King Ranch requires different political skills than Bob Kleberg exercised. Bob owned 25 per cent of the ranch. Tio has less than 2 per cent of the stock, so he can’t ride over the family like Bob did. He has to keep them happy.
Tio also has courage. “The traditions of the ranch are great,” Joe Stiles says, “but they’ll kill this place if you let them. Tio’s got the vision and the guts to get rid of the ones that don’t work.” One such tradition was the quarter horse program, which had become the fiefdom of the division foreman, with each foreman controlling his own breeding program. The only problem was that the horses weren’t good enough. When Tio set out to improve the ranch’s horses, he centralized the whole breeding operation and gambled $125,000 to buy Mr. San Peppy and add his blood to the line. There were protests, difficult scenes, and mutterings of discontent, but the management problem was only the half of it. To change a breeding program is a serious risk, since the investment is great and it takes years to see results. The results are coming in now, and Tio has been vindicated: as they were forty years ago, the King Ranch quarter horses are today the envy of the business.
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