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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But he stayed, laboring through the hottest part of the day, commanding the world from the wheel of his steamboat, ignoring the custom of taking a siesta, dripping sweat onto his ledgers, drinking the Rio Grande water that killed many of his contemporaries. Water wasn’t all he drank, of course. The most prevalent and important frontier institution was not the church or the school, but the bar. Bars were the setting for business deals, social meetings, the political schemings that permeated border life. In such a bar Richard King celebrated his 26th birthday. Spying a stranger, he walked over to offer him a drink. His greeting — first recorded in Tom Lea’s two-volume history of the King Ranch’s first century* - summed up his world: “People who come to Texas these days,” King said, presumably with a smile, “are preachers or fugitives from justice or sons of bitches. Which one of those fits you?”
One sweltering day in 1850 Captain King had wrestled his war surplus steamboat up the river, past snags and mud bars, fighting the wind, and he was ready for a few drinks. But an old steamboat was docked in his customary berth. Fuming, King brought his boat in and began stamping and cussing around the waterfront. As he ranted about the effrontery of putting a rat-infested scow in his berth, a young lady of seventeen emerged from the boat and, with some indignation, put King in his place.
Her name was Henrietta Chamberlain, and her father was a widower, a Presbyterian missionary from New England who had answered the call to become the first Protestant minister on the Rio Grande, rich waters for the fishing of lost souls. Richard King, who had seldom seen the inside of a church, became an eager, if not wholly sincere, participant in the Reverend Mr. Chamberlain’s pioneer Presbyterian church. And if his attention strayed from the preacher’s Calvinist pronouncements to his comely daughter in the choir, who could blame him? Anglo women were scarce on the border. They were therefore highly prized, fought over, cherished, and treated with a formal gentility that was as much a part of the frontier as its spontaneous violence. For Captain King, the preacher’s sweet daughter was everything he himself was not. Against competition from every unmarried man on the border, he set out to win her. As the courtship progressed he also began exploring the land beyond the muddy river that was his home.
The Rancho
In the spring of 1852 Richard King took a trip. Henry Lawrence Kinney, the imaginative frontier smuggler and rogue who had founded Corpus Christi, had decided to boost the town’s fortunes with a world’s fair. King had been running his steamboats up and down the Rio Grande for five years and was eager to see Corpus and the country on the way. What he saw were miles of sand flats and then, north of what is now Raymondville, a vast and trackless sea of grass sprinkled with little copses of hackberry, oak, and occasionally, mesquite. This was the southern tip of the Great Plains in its virgin state, before it had been despoiled by fences, by towns and railroads, by the invasion of mesquite and huisache brush.
The plains were the natural habitat of wandering animals that fed upon its grasses. To the Indians, that meant buffalo. To the Mexicans and then the Americans, that meant cattle — tough, rawboned Spanish cattle called Longhorns that need almost no care. Because there was so little water the cattle roamed over great spaces. The men who tended them were therefore spread thin and, like the cattle, had to fend for themselves. They had to be mobile, tough, and willing to live out on the plains alone.
When King got to Corpus a friend of his, a Texas Ranger named Legs Lewis, proposed that they establish a partnership to operate a cow camp on the plains. King would supply the capital; Lewis would work the place and, above all, guard it. That was the theory, but King would quickly become more involved than would an absentee investor. They chose as their headquarters a little rise on the banks of Santa Gertrudis Creek, the site of an old Mexican rancho about 45 miles west Corpus Christi. King had camped there on his journey north.
While Lewis tended to the building of some jacales (rough huts made of sticks and adobe), King set out to buy the land from its Mexican owners, who after the Mexican War had found themselves in possession of a worthless desert in another country. His first purchase was a Spanish land grant called the Rincón de Santa Gertrudis, 15,500 acres where Santa Gertrudis Creek empties into Baffin Bay, where the town of Kingsville now stands. King purchased the land in 1853 for $300, or a little less than 2 cents an acre. The next year he bought a larger Spanish grant, 53,000 acres due west of his first one, running ten miles along Santa Gertrudis Creek. He paid $1800 for it, or a little over 3 cents an acre. At that time the Great Plains were still known as the Great American Desert. Many of King’s business associates told him that even at those prices he had been taken, that the land he had bought would never be worth anything. But King had other ideas.
Buying the land was one thing, holding it another. Their cow camp was in the strip of land between the Nueces and the Rio Grande, the most dangerous part of the frontier. Scarcely a dozen years before, the Texas General Land Office map had borne the notation “of this area, nothing is known.” A Texas Ranger who fought in the Nueces Strip described King’s first ranch: “The men who held the cow camp on the Santa Gertrudis were of no ordinary mold. They had come to stay. It was no easy matter to scare them. The Indians still made descents on the country . . . and they had the advantages of numbers and movement. But the brave men who held the ranch had determined to make a ranch on the Santa Gertrudis or leave their bones to tell of their failure.”
Winning the land, first from the Indians, then from the raiding armies of Mexican cattle bandits, would take Captain King more than two decades. The struggle to establish his ranch engaged not only his will and courage but also his greatest quality, a clear-eyed practicality that combined observations from different realms of his experience into something useful. King knew nothing about cattle. That was one of his greatest assets. He didn’t know the accepted way of raising livestock, so he invented his own.
Richard King was the first to grasp the Distinctions — in scale, in spirit, and in Setting — between ranching cattle and raising cattle as a sideline to farming. The Anglo settlers making their way west through the Southern forests often brought cattle, sometimes in large numbers. They rode horseback, after a fashion; they had roundups; they even drove their cattle to market as far away as New Orleans. They had, in short, all the elements of a ranch, but they didn’t have ranches. And most of them saw the Mexicans and their culture as a barrier to be pushed aside, nothing more. They learned no more from them than they did from the Indians.
King was different. He did not establish a Southern cattle farm, worked by slaves. His manner was American, but his model was Mexican. He did not look back east for his inspiration; he looked across the Rio Grande. His first cattle came from border ranches, and so did his first hands, Mexican vaqueros from a long tradition of Spanish cattle ranching that had little in common with Anglo-Saxon farming.
The Spanish relied on three institutions to shape their conquest in the New World: the presidio, or fort; the mission; and the hacienda. The Mexican hacienda and its smaller cousin, the rancho, were self-contained, subsistence operations, inextricably tied up in the system of servitude and patronage that underlay the stability of village life. Richard King saw the merit of the ranching equipment and techniques his vaqueros brought with them — their lassos, their saddles and chaps, their way with cattle — but subsistence was not what he had in mind.
In 1854 King took a momentous step: he journeyed into Mexico and, in a scene out of Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King, persuaded the elders of a dusty village to come back to Texas with him, where he would be their patrón. With the elders came the whole village in an entrada — men, women, and children, donkeys, chickens, and carts loaded with possessions. That entrada was the beginning of a complex, almost feudal network of relationships that exists on the ranch to this day and that sets it apart from the other great ranches of America. Its roots go not only to Plymouth Rock and the Pilgrims but also to Cortez and the conquistadores. On his struggling ranch on the edge of the frontier King forged — by trial and error, courage, determination, and hardheadedness — a synthesis of aristocratic Mexican husbandry and democratic American marketing and business. He was not alone, of course; other men were ranching in Texas, but none with the scale and permanence he envisioned. More than anyone else, the steamboat captain who knew nothing about ranching created the cattle kingdom.
Buy Land and Never Sell
Drouth in the 1850s had dried up the Rio Grande, so business on the river was slow. King spent more and more time on his rancho, stocking it with cattle and horses and supervising the construction of a dam that was the first major capital improvement between Corpus and Brownsville. King’s carefully kept ledger books reveal that in 1854 he spent more than $12,000 on his ranch — forty times what he had paid for the first 15,500 acres.
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