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.
(Page 4 of 14)
He also found time to continue his courtship of Henrietta. Doubtless this rough, unlettered riverboat captain was not the sort of man Preacher Chamberlain had had in mind for his daughter. Yet eventually King convinced both father and daughter that he possessed virtues not immediately obvious to civilized folk. In December 1854 King and Henrietta were married. For their honeymoon Captain King took his bride to the Santa Gertrudis, the heart of the frontier, where few Anglo women had been before. They rode in a stagecoach flanked by armed vaqueros, camping out at night under the stars, cooking over open fires. After four days they crossed the creek and Henrietta King saw what her friends in Brownsville called King’s Folly: a cluster of jacales, a stockade, a brass cannon, some mesquite corrals, and her new house — an adobe hut so tiny that she had to hang her pots and pans outside. She would make her home on the Santa Gertrudis for more than seventy years.
The frontier turned the men hard and brittle as caliche, but it had a different effect upon the women. As Walter Prescott Webb, the great historian of the West, wrote: “The Plains — mysterious, desolate, barren, grief-stricken - oppressed the women, drove them to the verge of insanity in many cases.” Henrietta Chamberlain, however, had been raised to overcome hardship with faith. If her husband’s mission was to win the West, hers was to civilize it.
Even in a mud hut Henrietta was a model of propriety, demanding at least the appearance of civilized behavior from the frontiersmen who crossed her threshold. She called her husband “Captain King” all their married life. The embodiment of the triumph of will over circumstance, she was stern and unforgiving of the weaknesses of the flesh. She wrapped herself in her sense of duty as tightly as in her corset, and her husband, whose flesh was so much weaker than hers, struggled mightily to live up to her standards. Even on the frontier they were perfect Victorian types, he the adventurer and she the preacher’s daughter, called on by fate to play their roles in a world whose every reality worked against the stable values she lived by. But if Henrietta King had not been so rigid, it is quite possible that Richard King, and certainly the generations that followed him, would never have won or held their great ranch.
In early 1855, only a few months after King and Henrietta were married, Legs Lewis, King’s partner, was killed by a jealous husband. Lewis’s death meant that King had to work the ranch on his own or lose it. The capital kept coming from the river, but King saw the ranch as his future. “Land and livestock have a way of increasing in value,” he told Mifflin Kenedy. “Cattle and horses, sheep and goats, will reproduce themselves into value. But boats — they have a way of wrecking, decaying, falling apart, decreasing in value and increasing in cost of operation.” To that credo King added a piece of advice from his friend Robert E. Lee, who was stationed in Texas until the Civil War. “Buy land,” Lee had told the young rancher, “and never sell.”
King did just that. He was always enlarging his holdings, and he kept lawyers busy perfecting his titles, making sure his purchases were absolutely legal. He found the best lawyers he could and gave them succinct instructions. “Young man,” he told one years later, “the only thing I want to hear from you is when I can move my fences.” In 1860, after Mexican raiders destroyed Mifflin Kenedy’s ranch near the Rio Grande, King and Kenedy became partners in the Santa Gertrudis. They continued M. Kenedy & Company as their steamboat operation; their new ranching business bore the name R. King & Company.
King tried everything to make the land yield a profit. He dug dams and impounded water. He experimented with sheep. He raised horses and mules for the Army and for distant cities. And he raised Cattle — tough, hefty, bad-tempered Longhorns that were sold to other ranchers as breeding stock or were slaughtered for their hides and tallow. The carcasses were either used to feed his pigs or dumped on the prairie or in the bay. He tried injecting salt into the meat so he could ship it to market and avoid such waste, but it didn’t work. For almost twenty years King spent nothing on fences, feed, or veterinary services. Ranching in those days was simply harvesting the plains. And King was willing to forgo immediate profits in the deep conviction that land, the more the better, would one day pay.
Heroes and Villains
The Civil War did three things for Richard King: it gave him the opportunity to amass a fortune, it put the final touches on his formidable character, and it led to the opening of the great Northern markets for beef that confirmed his faith in ranching and made his name known throughout America. King and Kenedy were staunch Confederates, in sentiment if not in service. The Santa Gertrudis became a major depot for the Southern cotton sent to Europe through the Confederacy’s back door at Matamoros. The two men also got rich selling supplies to the Confederacy, and they made sure they were paid in gold. For them the Civil War was as big a bonanza as the Mexican War.
Their fortunes were not made without risk. The Nueces Strip crawled with draft dodgers, bands of guerrillas, Mexican raiders, French agents from the emperor Maximilian in Mexico, and Comanches. The Union Army raided the Santa Gertrudis in 1863, aiming to put the rebel cotton depot out of action. King himself slipped away, but his faithful Mexican retainer, Francisco Alvarado, was shot dead at the feet of the pregnant Mrs. King as he opened the door.
Tom Lea valiantly defends King’s leaving his wife to the mercy of the Union raiders. Yet King’s decision to make money from the war rather than fight in it makes his character suspect, and allowing his servant to be slain in his place does not bring glory to the King name either. But to see him as simply a war profiteer running out on his family to save his own skin would be too harsh. To have stayed and fought would have been suicidal, and to have fled with his wife into the prairie could have endangered both her and the baby. There was no easy decision.
After the raid the Kings abandoned the ranch. Just two months later, Henrietta King gave birth to their second son, whom she named Robert Lee King. Her husband was not present for the birth. He had again gone underground, and he spent the rest of the war keeping Confederate supplies moving past the Union cavalry. Although he was scarcely forty, he became known as “the old captain,” a remorseless, driven frontier figure. After Appomattox, King crossed the river into Mexico with his gold and prepared to move all his operations south of the border. But he was pardoned by the Union and went back to rebuild his ranch.
It was no easy task. The Reconstruction Administration disbanded the Texas Rangers and all but ceded the Nueces Strip to the Mexican bandits, who renewed their raids on the hated gringos with brutal intensity. The next ten years were filled with both opportunity and danger. One of the great booms of American history was just beginning—the cattle drives. But the raids drove many of King’s neighbors out of business, and his whole empire was threatened. He lost thousands of cattle during these cattle wars. It seemed, in fact, as if the Mexicans were about to win back the land south of the Nueces that they had lost in the Mexican War.
The leading raider was a rogue named Cheno Cortina, an upper-class border character who had fought the Americans in the Mexican War and then lost his family’s land in and around Brownsville. Cortina, red-haired, green-eyed, charismatic, cruel, and thoroughly opportunistic, kept the border in upheaval for almost twenty years. He liked to say, “The sight of a gringo makes me think of eating little kids.” Cortina became King’s greatest nemesis. “The gringos are raising cattle for me,” he would boast. The raids got so bad, and King himself became such a prominent target, that he was ambushed on his way to meet with the American commission investigating the raids, and a young German riding with him was killed. In desperation, King went so far as to join the Republican party in the vain hope that he could get help from the Reconstruction Administration, which seemed quite happy to see the former Confederates suffer.
Finally, in 1875, at the end of Reconstruction, the Texas Rangers were reassembled. In one encounter a group of Rangers fought a pitched battle with a dozen cattle raiders who were driving a large herd of King Ranch cattle. The Rangers killed every raider and dumped the bodies in the square at Brownsville as a sign that times had changed. It set the tone for the bitter role the Rangers played on the border, but it worked. The raids slacked off, and when Porfirio Díaz seized power in Mexico in 1876 (with King’s help) he made sure that they ended. King’s empire was saved.
The Cattle Kingdom
In 1870, after a few years of amicable negotiations, Richard King and Mifflin Kenedy dissolved their partnership in R. King & Company. Kenedy bought the neighboring Laureles Ranch from Charles Stillman, who had retired to New York (where he founded, among other institutions, the National City Bank). The steamship business was winding down as the river silted up and competition from a border railroad started to eat away at profits. Both Kenedy and King began devoting most of their time to their own ranches.
Having assembled almost 200,000 acres in the area of the Santa Gertrudis, King turned his attention to buying up the huge San Juan de Carrecitos grant. The grant covered 350,000 acres sixty miles south of the Santa Gertrudis and contained an old water hole called El Sauz, where King had camped countless times on his journeys to and from Brownsville. This land was not as rich as the Santa Gertrudis, but its sandy soil still supported native grasses in addition to sacahuiste, which cattle could eat in a drouth. King gave his lawyers standing orders to buy up rights and titles to the San Juan de Carrecitos grant whenever they could.
After the Civil War the United States embarked on a period of furious industrial expansion. Railroads pushed across the continent. Huge empires of steel and oil were built. And to the cities of the North and East came millions of immigrants from Europe and rural America. These new city dwellers needed meat. That demand found its supply in the Nueces Strip, where hundreds of thousands of cattle, untended during the war, were available for as little as $5 a head. The trick was to get the $5 steer to the $40 market. For a few years the men who could do that reaped enormous profits. King sent more than 100,000 cattle north on the cattle trails during the 1870s. By the most conservative estimate, his profit over the decade was well over $1 million. One year, when he sent 30,000 head, he made close to $400,000.
My Library
