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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Crouched so low that his belly seems to be touching the ground, his mane swirling, the horse drives the cow backward, away from the security of the herd, out into the territory controlled by the vaqueros. The instant the cow is turned away from the herd, one of the vaqueros runs it across the pasture to the new herd. Santa Gertrudis cattle are surprisingly agile and fast, so this process often demands wild rides at full gallop across rugged ground and through mesquite thickets.
After the barren cows are cut, Tio and Lavoyger take a break to talk briefly to their children while Joe Stiles and Tio’s cousin Martín Clement begin cutting out the yearling calves for sale. Since it is summer, children — the Klebergs’, the foremen’s, and the vaqueros’ — are everywhere. The roundup is an important part of their education. The teenage sons of the vaqueros are helping with the round-up, and the cow boss, known as the caporal, watches them closely. The roundup is like a tryout for future jobs as vaqueros, and the young Kineños are eager to show off their skills. The older vaqueros feel responsible for how well the younger ones work. They do not hesitate to take a father aside and speak to him about his son’s mistakes, offering him criticism and encouragement. They fully expect that the father will do his duty and that the son will listen and obey his father. That is how it was done for them, and for their fathers before them. It is the King Ranch way.
The Family
The Klebergs live by the same ethic. They give each other gentle and not so gentle suggestions on child rearing, they criticize errant behavior, they teach vital skills and underscore moral points. The stability of the ranch has allowed the development of the sort of extended family that is rare in America. It is a family that through five generations has had the same purpose — to sustain its ownership of this great tract of earth. On one level the task at hand in this Norias pasture has to do with cattle. On quite another level it has to do with the future of the ranch.
Tio finishes a brief talk with his older son about the way he was handling his horse and then rides back to the herd to watch his wife, Janell, and his younger brother, Scott, cut out the yearling calves. Scott is 22 and is studying range management at Texas A&M; everyone in the family expects great things from him when he comes home to work at the ranch. Precisely because of that, Tio watches him closely. To Tio’s mind Scott is following the yearlings he is cutting about two or three feet farther out of the herd than necessary. “Park him! Park him!” Tio yells. Scott concentrates and on the next calf has already turned back into the herd when the vaquero picks the calf up. Tio smiles, satisfied.
Janell and Martín take a turn next. When they finish they ride over to the lorse trailer. Martín complains about how lard it is to buy cowboy hats for the ranch’s commissaries. ‘‘The folks in discos just keep cornering the market,” he says. Janell’s face is streaked with sweat and dust. Beneath her cowboy hat her blonde hair is a dirty gray.
Janell met Tio at Texas Tech. When she came back to Kingsville with him nine years ago, she felt she was entering a completely different world. No one told her to learn to cut cattle. She did it on her own, to be part of the work of the ranch. She pats her horse and looks out at her children bouncing around on their horses. “What you have to understand if you work for this family,” she says, “is that none of this is yours — not the land, not the houses, not the horses that you grow to love. That’s hard to remember. And it’s hard to teach your children. Like us, they tend to think it’s theirs. It’s not. Everything belongs to the ranch, and the ranch belongs to the family. Keeping the family and the ranch together is more important than any of us.”
The ranch and the family, however, are not always one and the same. The ranch’s story is straightforward enough: it is the progress of a piece of earth from primitive wilderness to productive pastures, an account of will and technology pitted against nature. The family, however, has not enjoyed an easy journey to its current preeminence. To sustain anything through five generations, much less a ranch in a harsh, unyielding country, is to overcome suffering, hardship, and conflicting ambitions — and it is, at times, to overcome success.
There is blood and power in the King Ranch’s history, but there is surprisingly little duplicity, rapaciousness, or greed. The land itself was acquired legally, purchased from presumably willing sellers. Compared to the great fortunes built by devious and ruthless robber barons like the Rockefellers, the Morgans, and the Mellons, the King Ranch is a monument to probity, neighborliness, and hard work.
Part of the story of the King Ranch is how one family conquered and sustained a great ranch, and part is how that family conquered and sustained itself. The past six years of the ranch’s history have been tumultuous, even by its own standards. Both of the men who had run the ranch since 1918 died. And the two most obvious successors left the ranch and filed suit against it. To carry on, the family has had to rejuvenate itself once again. A frontier character named Richard King overcame great challenges to found this empire. The men and women who run it today have perhaps an even harder task. They must hold it together — against all the pressures, from inside and outside the family, to tear it apart.
The Call West
The man who began the King Ranch and one of America’s most durable families had no family ties himself. In 1833, at the age of nine, he was apprenticed to a jeweler in New York City. He never saw his family again and never divulged anything about them, except that they were Irish. The young boy could not abide the close, tedious work of the jeweler’s shop or the rigid medieval bonds of apprenticeship. Even at that age he was drawn toward open spaces. At eleven he stowed away on a sailing ship bound for Mobile, and for the next ten years he worked on steamboats in the rivers and coastal waters of the eastern Gulf of Mexico. The steamboaters were his parents and the frontier was his schoolroom. The boy learned its tough and demanding lessons well, and he grew into a young man with a quick mind and quicker fists.
During the Seminole wars of 1841 he served on an Army steamboat and in Florida met a man who would be his friend and partner for the rest of his life. Mifflin Kenedy was seven years older than King and seemed to have little in common with him. Kenedy was a devout Quaker and a studious, reflective man. His great strength — he could throw a massive anchor overboard by himself, a task that normally required three men — allowed him to remain aloof from the brutish steamboating world where a man could get his eyes gouged out if he forgot to offer his neighbor a drink. Kenedy saw something special in King and took him under his wing.
After Kenedy went to Texas in 1846 he wrote King that the Mexican War had created a boom for steamboaters on the Rio Grande. For Richard King, who had no family, no money, and no roots, that news was enough. He went to Texas. The Rio Grande was in rugged, uncharted country torn by war. Opportunity was there for the taking. The extent of that opportunity, however, could hardly have been apparent to the 22-year-old steamboater as he trudged across the sand at the mouth of the Rio Grande toward the few shanties and hovels — made of sticks and covered with mud and seashells — that had sprung up around the stacks of cargo waiting to be moved inland.
King spent the rest of the war piloting steamboats up and down the Rio Grande for the U.S. Army. When the Mexican War ended in 1848 King bought a surplus steamboat and went into business hauling freight and passengers. A year later he and Kenedy joined a border entrepreneur named Charles Stillman in a shipping company they called M. Kenedy & Cornpany. King provided the muscle and designed new boats for the twisting, shallow, windswept river; Stillman put up the capital; Kenedy contributed the diplomacy and the management. By 1852 they had run their competitors off the Rio Grande. There was a good deal of legitimate freight in their business, but their primary trade was smuggling. A burdensome tariff system imposed by Mexico made smuggling the accepted way of doing things, as it had been in the American colonies before the Revolution.
The conflict between Americans and Mexicans on the border had culminated in more than a decade of war, from the massacres at the Alamo and Goliad in 1836 to the American atrocities during the invasion of Mexico in 1848. A great deal of blood had been shed on both sides. For thirty years after the Mexican War the border seethed with armed bandits, Mexican guerrillas, and raiders. One man’s hero was another man’s villain: the most vicious bandits were honored in Mexico, the most brutal Texas Rangers elevated to sainthood in Texas.
Politics along the Rio Grande were Byzantine — intrigue, revolution, and counterrevolution hung as heavy in the air as the heat. Betrayal was expected, allies untrustworthy, a loyal friend and partner extremely rare. Every decade brought new schemes to make part or all of Mexico a new republic, a protectorate, or even a stale in the United States. King and Kenedy were deeply involved in border intrigues, but it was not until they supported Porfirio Díaz, who would be dictator of Mexico for more than thirty years, that they ever backed a winner. The border was a difficult, complex place. Poised between two cultures, beyond the domination of either, Richard King was right at home.
A Rose Amid Thorns
Life on the border was primitive. Men and animals shared the same drinking water. Outbreaks of cholera and typhoid periodically swept through the river towns, turning them into charnel houses. Dysentery and other debilitating diseases were endemic. Treatment was primitive, anesthesia unknown, and opium the most common medicine. When it rained, the streets became quagmires. When the wind blew, the sand covered food and furniture, coated sweaty bodies in grime, and filled bedclothes with grit. The heat was everywhere, humid and inescapable. Richard King must have lain awake many nights, simmering in his own sweat, tormented by flies and mosquitoes, wondering why he hadn’t followed the forty-niners out to the easy pickings of the California gold fields.
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