Showdown at Waggoner Ranch
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In the Roaring Twenties, Electra Waggoner was the most infamous socialite in Texas. Shortly before she ended her eighteen-year marriage to A.B., she purchased another magnificent home on Preston Road in Highland Park and named it Shadowlawn. Waggoner biographer Roze McCoy Porter writes that Electra spent $90,000 remodeling the one-year-old mansion and another $55,000 on draperies. One closet was filled with fur coats, another with 350 pairs of shoes, and yet a third with the latest gowns from Paris and New York—and she was said never to wear one more than once. She hosted parties of celebrities, movie stars, and barons of capitalism, including the daughter of J. P. Morgan. At one dinner party, two Texans pulled six-guns from their dinner jackets and shot up the ceiling. All-night parties that started at Shadowlawn sometimes ended up on the ranch, after a trip by private railroad car, so that Eastern dandies could be treated to the sights of cowboys branding and castrating calves.
Electra died in 1925 at the age of 43, her life and much of her fortune spent on extravagance. She left an enduring reputation and two children from the first of her three marriages: Tom Waggoner Wharton, who died of syphilis at age 25, eight-times married but childless, and A. B. “Buster” Wharton Jr., a polo player, playboy, and famous drunk who died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1963. You can still see Buster’s polo fields across the road from the big house Electra had built, next to his landing strip, and the skeet- and trap-shooting range where he and his guests gunned down live pigeons. Buster too had multiple spouses (four, to be exact), but his only heir was A. B. Wharton III, known as Bucky. Now 56, Bucky is one of the protagonists in the battle over the future of the ranch.
E. Paul was a dapper, dashing Hollywood-style cowboy, with a mustache and mischievous eyes. Joe Roberson, who was the estate’s auditor for many years, describes him this way: “Big belt buckle, expensive boots, a bottle of whiskey.” E. Paul had a good eye for horses—he bought Poco Bueno, the great cutting horse sire—and loved to be seen as the ultimate cattle baron, but a retired Waggoner Ranch foreman named G. L. Proctor told me, “He wasn’t much of a rider. I never saw him on horseback except during a parade.” E. Paul was a famous charmer, though his wife, Helen, perhaps saw his romanticism through more practical eyes. When Judge Tom Neely, who is in charge of the current lawsuit to break up the ranch, was a young attorney in a previous round of Waggoner lawsuits during the sixties, he and other lawyers found some of E. Paul’s letters to Helen. They were mailed while she was socializing in New York with her daughter, named after E. Paul’s sister, Electra, and known as Electra II. “He went on and on about how heartbroken he was and how much he missed them, but he didn’t write them. The letters were typed by his secretary,” Neely told me. “In one, he wished Electra happy birthday and said, ‘I bought you a $2,500 bond.’”
The second Electra was, like her namesake, a globe-hopping socialite (she was once linked romantically to Cary Grant by Hollywood gossip columnist Louella Parsons), but she also was an acclaimed artist, who knew all the celebrities of her day and sculpted busts of many of them. There is a photograph of her in the Red River Valley Museum, near Vernon College, along with a large collection of her work: busts of Will Rogers, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Bob Hope, Knute Rockne, Amon Carter, John Nance Garner. She was strikingly pretty, with a long, sensitive face and dark, sparkling eyes. Her best-known work is the statue of Will Rogers on horseback at the entrance to the Will Rogers Memorial Coliseum, in Fort Worth.
Electra II married twice, the second time for keeps to John Biggs, a Texan who worked for International Paper Company, in New York, in 1943. Neither of her parents came to the wedding; biographer Porter reports that E. Paul and Helen were having marital problems. Biggs’s brother-in-law was the president of General Motors, and he later named a Buick model for Electra. John and Electra had two daughters—a third Electra and Helen. It would be Helen’s husband, Gene Willingham, who would one day become Bucky Wharton’s main opponent in the struggle over the Waggoner Ranch.
IT’S A PERFECT OCTOBER MORNING, cool and crisp, and the ranch spreads out in every direction, 25 miles north to south, 30 miles east to west. We could drive the 60 miles from Bull Run Pasture, on the northeast corner, where the 10th Cavalry camped in 1871, to the David Camp, on the southwest corner, and never venture outside the Waggoner fence. Jim Hughes, a longtime attorney for the Waggoner estate who was being groomed to become a trustee before the feud cost him the opportunity, slows down as a dozen or more wild turkeys scamper across the highway and disappear into thick stands of mesquite. Before the day is done, we’ll spot hundreds of deer and numerous herds of feral hogs, fifty or sixty in a bunch, wee piglets scurrying to keep up. We see a bunch of javelinas too, and a bobcat as big as a mountain lion. After the first freeze, 120,000 geese will land on Santa Rosa Lake and feast on winter wheat fields. Much of the ranch is covered with mesquite, cedar, and prickly pear, and when the sun softens late in the evening, the dull green of the vegetation and the deep red of the soil give the ranch the pastel serenity of a Mexican village.
One thing you don’t see on the ranch is windmills. There are none to be seen, because there is not a drop of groundwater. The Wichita River, the two branches of Beaver Creek, countless small streams and tributaries, and dozens of stock tanks supply the ranch’s water. “W.T. discovered oil while trying to drill for water,” Hughes tells me. “They say he was as mad as a nest of hornets. What the hell could he do with oil! He ended up using it for cattle dip, and the well became Electra’s city dump.”
Near the entrance to Zacaweista, once the home of the first Electra, we stop at the grave of Poco Bueno. A granite tombstone, set in the center of a small, neatly trimmed pasture, marks the grave of the greatest cutting horse of all time. “They buried him standing up,” Hughes informs me. “Or so people say.”
Hughes grew up in Vernon and has been hunting and fishing on the ranch since high school. He knows the ranch, its cast of characters, and its skeletons and stories as well as any outsider. The history of the land and the Waggoner family is so entwined with myth and legend that nobody can untangle the truth. The ranch’s famous reverse triple-D brand, for example, supposedly got that way when a blacksmith inadvertently read W.T.’s hand-drawn design upside down.
Passing under a granite arch, we head down a long, paved driveway to Zacaweista, an Indian word meaning “good grass.” It’s the name of both the ranch headquarters and the sprawling rock-and-wood home that Electra built in 1910. The house sits on high ground, mostly hidden by oak and pecan trees and a fieldstone wall. It’s now the home of Electra’s grandson, Bucky Wharton, his wife, Joline, and their two children.
The headquarters at Zacaweista is a small, self-contained village built around a park that the cowboys call “the square.” In its center lies the grave of Tony Hazelwood, a legendary Waggoner cowboy and longtime foreman, who died in 1965. No Waggoner is buried on the ranch, only this one cowboy and a few early settlers in unmarked graves. Bucky’s home sits on one side of the square. On the other three sides are a number of buildings constructed of identical reddish-brown stone, quarried on the eastern part of the ranch. They include a bunkhouse for single cowboys, more homes for the foreman and senior cowboys, a cookhouse, several maintenance sheds, and a truck barn. One of the most interesting properties at Zacaweista is the gothic stone barn where Buster Wharton bred his polo ponies.
Though there are more than two thousand miles of road inside the ranch, there are hardly any road signs or navigational landmarks. “You get in here far enough, it just swallows you up,” Hughes tells me. After a hard rain, this endless maze of graded red clay becomes a network of quagmires. But there has been no substantial rain for days now, and we kick up a trail of dark red dust as we head toward Santa Rosa, the area that E. Paul inherited and where his daughter, the second Electra, grew up. It’s now the residence of Gene and Helen Willingham. The Willingham house is a low, ranch-style brick structure, set behind a wall of trees. On a slight rise behind this house is a much grander two-story Spanish-style villa with a red tile roof, a swimming pool, and a formal garden.
“That’s where Electra Waggoner Biggs lived and where she kept her studio,” Hughes tells me. It’s been vacant ever since. Though it’s a nicer house, the Willinghams have never moved up there. Perhaps they are afraid of ghosts.
BUCKY WHARTON DIDN’T THINK OF THE RANCH as his heritage until he was in high school at Culver Military Academy, in Indiana. He had grown up in Albuquerque, where his mother, the third of Buster Wharton’s four wives, had moved after their divorce, when Bucky was two. As a boy, Bucky visited the ranch at Christmas and during the summer, but he was never close to his father and knew nothing about cattle or oil. “Growing up, the ranch didn’t seem like a big deal,” Bucky told me. “I just knew that life there was a lot different from life in Albuquerque.” In 1963, when Bucky was fifteen, Buster Wharton died, leaving a will that gave his share of the Waggoner estate to his widow and his shotguns to Bucky. But Bucky’s mother was not about to give up her son’s inheritance without a fight. “I think there were twenty-five or twenty-seven attorneys involved,” he recalled. “I remember my mother taking me to Fort Worth to talk to her attorney.” Ahead was a legal battle over whether Buster had the right to dispose of property that Electra, his mother, had left in trust to him and his bloodline. As it turned out, he didn’t.
