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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An Artist Of Genetics
Bob Kleberg not only saved the ranch, he also transformed it. Like Henry Ford, with whom he had a great deal in common, he loved to tinker. Were the mesquite thickets getting worse? He invented a root plow driven by a massive bulldozer that could clear four acres an hour. Were the native grasses thin and unnourishing? He developed his own grasses, some of which are now used around the world. Was the grass deficient in nutrients? He devised a phosphorus supplement that made cattle healthier. Was it difficult to move cattle into pens? He invented the cattle prod, based on the design for a fly electrocutor he was experimenting with. The list goes on and on. But his most inventive work was in breeding.
By World War I the Longhorn, like the buffalo, had vanished from the frontier. But the English breeds that replaced it suffered mightily in the South Texas heat. Most of the year they ran a fever just from standing in the sun. Their skin was too tight to allow much evaporation and too thin to resist screwworms, ticks, and other insects. They gained weight poorly when fed just grass, yet grass was what the King Ranch had in abundance. With the help of his brother, Richard, Bob Kleberg set out to invent his own cow. He brought in Brahmans and crossed them with his English Shorthorns, patiently working down through generations of cattle, until one day a bull calf was born that seemed different. He was so good-natured and playful that they called him Monkey.
Monkey was what Bob Kleberg had been looking for, and from Monkey he engineered a whole new race of cattle. To breed out undesirable characteristics, he repeatedly mated Monkey to a hand-picked selection of other crossbreeds, then to the best offspring from those matings and to their offspring. He would look at young bulls and heifers and announce that they would “nick well together” — would produce calves that would continue the progress toward his goal: an animal that would thrive on heat and grass and would repel insects, an animal that had the hardiness of the Brahman and the temperament and marketable beef of the fat and docile English cattle.
His invention was the world’s first new breed of beef cattle in more than a century, and in 1940 (thanks largely to Richard Kleberg’s skilled lobbying in Washington) it was officially named the first American breed. Bob Kleberg called the new breed the Santa Gertrudis, after the little creek that marked the spot of King’s first rancho. The breed reflects Bob’s practical genius, but it also confirms his artistic sense. It is an animal of beauty-deep russet in color, long and well proportioned. Like great art, the Santa Gertrudis appears simple but could only be recreated from scratch with incredible difficulty and a great deal of luck. Technically, it is three-eighths Brahman and five-eighths Shorthorn, but as one geneticist puts it, “You could cross Shorthorns and Brahmans all your life and not come up with a Santa Gertrudis.”
Bob Kleberg’s artistry in genetics wasn’t limited to beef cattle. His father had crossed quarter horses with thoroughbreds and standard breeds, but their descendants were too clumsy for ranch work. Bob set about to create a ranch horse that would be, in his words, “a joy to ride.” The quarter horse he developed, known as the Old Sorrel (from the stallion that was the equine counterpart of Monkey), is a deep red like the Santa Gertrudis. Ringling Bros. bought King Ranch quarter horses for their circus acts, and when the American Quarter Horse Association was founded, a King Ranch stallion, Wimpy, was given the first number in the stud book. In the late thirties Bob devoted the same interest to thoroughbreds, breeding racehorses that won the Kentucky Derby twice and, with Assault, the Triple Crown. In each case he pushed out into the forefront of the geneticist’s art and science.
Outside the Fences
Bob Kleberg was the first leader of the King Ranch born and bred to ranching. He did not share his father’s interest in development and growth; if anything, the town of Kingsville — his father’s personal creation — was an irritant to him. Still, he did not warn to let Kingsville leave the ranch’s paternal control. The family was proud of the land and money it donated for schools, churches, and social work, not to mention the leadership of generations of ranch women in charitable causes throughout South Texas. Bob Kleberg was squarely in that tradition. He saw himself as a patrón; in that role he donated buildings and money for schools but fought any effort to let the school board tax the ranch to pay for the same improvements.
The arrival of a naval air station, Humble, and then the Celanese Chemical Company, combined with the social upheavals that began in earnest after World War II, changed forever the ranch’s relationship to Robert Kleberg’s town. Like a son who had grown to manhood, Kingsville wanted independence from its parents. First Richard Kleberg was defeated for Congress. Then, in the late forties, Kingsville voted in an anti-ranch school board. But today the town and the ranch coexist comfortably. The ranch pays about $336,000 in taxes, less than either Celanese or Humble. The streets bear the names of the family, and the ranch still owns the newspaper, the largest bank, a lumberyard and a boot and saddle shop. But Kingsville and its 29,000 people have grown beyond the ranch, just as the ranch, in its worldwide activities, has grown beyond Kingsville.
The family, of course, did not drop out of politics. After Richard broke with the New Deal, the Klebergs gradually became strong Republicans. In 1962 John Armstrong, now the ranch’s executive vice president, modernized the Kleberg County Republican party organization and personally helped canvass the whole county. Both Bob Kleberg and his nephews Belton Kleberg “B” Johnson and Dick Kleberg strongly supported Richard Nixon. Dick contributed $100,000 to Nixon’s 1972 campaign. And when Nixon resigned the presidency in 1974, a stunned and very distressed Bob Kleberg — only two months away from death — called one of his relatives to talk for hours about the fate of leaders, about how no man can hold power forever. But in local politics the ranch takes a lower profile. For a number of Chicano activists the ranch is too potent a symbol of how Anglo ranchers one controlled the county’s destiny. Some individual family members still get involve in city and school elections, and the family-owned newspaper is fairly outspoken on local affairs, but no one in either the town or the family believes the ranch calls the shots in Kingsville anymore.
Taxes weren’t the only trappings of civilization that Bob resisted. The boom in the Valley and South Texas, brought on in part by the success of his father’s farming experiments, was attracting too many people, crowding out cattle, eating away at perfectly good ranchland. He ruthlessly set out to stop this encroachment, once calling one of the elder Kleberg’s farming proposals “a damfool idea” to his face. For almost ten years he and Johnny Kenedy, Mifflin Kenedy’s grandson, blocked the completion of Highway 77, the main artery between Corpus Christi and Brownsville, because it would pass through their ranches. His opposition to progress earned the ranch its fame as “the walled kingdom.”
Miles To Go Before He Slept
When Bob Kleberg went to Australia in 1952 he was 56. The ranch he had run since 1918, when he was 22 years old, was doing well. Now, at a time when many men would have looked back on their accomplishments, he was ready for new challenges. He was irascible, magnetic, imperious, opinionated, able to mix with vaqueros and Rockefellers, and quite often absolutely impossible. “I’ve been out with him when he didn’t put head to pillow all night,” recalls John Armstrong. “Then he’d saddle up his horse and work cattle until the sun went down the next day, and never slow down. I never knew when he slept, but I started to notice that he would sleep at the dinner table — sometimes over coffee, sometimes through the main course. And then he’d look up with a start and be ready to go again. When you were with him you were always drinking, laughing, and shooting rabbits. I went with him to South America, and when I came home I had to see my doctor. I was almost twenty-five years younger, but he’d worn me out.”
When he went to the East, to the best boxes at Saratoga, to the suite at the Pierre, to “21,” he arrived as the conquering provincial. During the horse-racing season he customarily dressed in a silk hat and a serape and, thus outfitted, went calling on the Whitneys and the Vanderbilts. There was always something fabulous about him, almost as if he had just ridden up to the Pierre Hotel surrounded by mounted and armed Kineños.
What Bob saw, he saw clearly; what Bob wanted done, he got done. He was not plagued by self-doubts or hampered by lack of confidence. He did as he pleased all his life. He knew his own mind, and he knew who he was. Faced with a world in which paperwork, bureaucrats, and “experts” assumed more importance every day, he became less and less patient with dissent, incompetence, and routine. A lifelong friend casually refers to him as “the old dictator.” He wanted things done his way. “When he said ‘frog,’ “ one crusty South Texas rancher and oilman recalls, “everybody jumped.”
Instinct was as important to Bob Kleberg as organization. The management tools used in sedentary pursuits like insurance and steel manufacturing were to be tolerated but certainly not encouraged. When he went to Venezuela to look into buying a ranch with his partner there, he was presented with a wealth of statistics, charts, and cost-benefit analyses. He brushed them all aside, looked around at the land, opened a bottle, and made the deal. After all, his partner in Venezuela was a man he trusted, a rancher. That bond of respect was worth more than any economic analysis.
The partner, Gustavo de los Reyes, had owned a ranch in Cuba neighboring Bob Kleberg’s first foreign venture. After Castro came to power in 1959, de los Reyes was imprisoned and the King Ranch’s property and cattle were expropriated. (For years afterward there were reports of Santa Gertrudis herds in Russia, the older cattle still bearing the ranch’s Running W brand.) Kleberg had promised de los Reyes he would set him up anywhere in the world when he got out of prison, and he kept the promise.
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