Showdown at Waggoner Ranch
It’s second only to the King Ranch in size, and second to none in its history of drink, divorce, and dissension. For years, its two feuding clans have agreed on only one thing: They want to break up their vast eight-hundred-square-mile spread and close this chapter of Texas history.
FOR MORE THAN A CENTURY THE 520,000-acre Waggoner Ranch has been an inseparable part of the culture and fabric of the Red River country west of Wichita Falls—and of Texas itself. It is the nation’s biggest ranch within the confines of a single fence, a spread so vast that it extends across six counties and covers more than eight hundred square miles. On the map of Texas it appears as a great emptiness south of Vernon, occupied only by the thin strip of U.S. 183/283. From the highway, its pastures seem timeless and impregnable. And so they were, for a hundred years and more. Then, twelve years ago, the two branches of the Waggoner family that control the W. T. Waggoner estate, which in turn controls the ranch, locked themselves in a lawsuit no one can win. One side wants the ranch divided equally but otherwise left intact. The other wants to sell the ranch and divide the assets. It seems inconceivable that they can’t agree on a compromise. Both families are already fabulously wealthy, though the wealth is in the land rather than their pockets. But selling the ranch—or, worse still, permitting the court to liquidate it—would cost both sides dearly in taxes and prestige. Why do they fight on?
The answer lies in the rich and rowdy heritage of the Waggoner clan. Bickering and backstabbing have been a way of life in the family. It is as much a part of the legacy as horses, cattle, oil, opulent mansions, divorces, and drunken sprees. By all rights the Waggoner Ranch ought to be the equal of the King Ranch in Texas lore. Both ranches once covered more than a million acres. Both were famous for breeding, the King Ranch for Santa Gertrudis cattle, the Waggoner Ranch for cutting horses. But the difference is that the cattle barons of the King Ranch led private, almost secretive lives, running their empire themselves and living on the land, while the Waggoners turned their ranch over to professionals, moved away, and pursued flamboyance. As a consequence, the King Ranch scions moved comfortably in elite Texas social, political, and business circles, while the Waggoners never achieved the same degree of prominence. So it was the King Ranch whose legend was set down for posterity by the distinguished Texas author Tom Lea, while the Waggoners’ escapades were left to be recorded by the English author John Bainbridge—a few passages in his 1960 book called The Super-Americans, about the excesses of Texas’s oil millionaires. Yet the Waggoner Ranch has outlasted its South Texas rival in one respect: It is still under the direct control of its founding family.
But for how much longer? That’s what folks in Vernon, Electra, Seymour, and other towns near the Waggoner Ranch are asking as they watch one of Texas’s greatest ranching empires teeter on the brink of disintegration. It’s like watching the death of a huge and magnificent animal: People can’t bear to look, yet they’re powerless to turn away. All during the spring and summer of 2003, they talked of little else. How could things have spun so wildly out of control?
NORTHWEST TEXAS WAS OPEN RANGE in the 1850’s, when Dan Waggoner and his fifteen-year-old black slave trailed 242 Longhorn cattle and 6 horses to Wise County. Hostile Comanches and Kiowas, plus a few foolhardy nesters trying to scratch out a living, occupied this endless stretch of grassland. The mesquite trees that now dominate the land arrived later, their seeds transported in cow droppings as herds from South Texas passed through on their way to railheads in Kansas. Waggoner, a widower, and his young son, William Thomas, settled on Catlett Creek, near present-day Decatur. As the frontier pushed westward, he expanded his herd and bought more land, in Clay and Wichita counties. In 1869 Dan made seventeen-year-old W.T. a full partner, gave him $12, a group of drovers, and fifty hard-used saddle horses, and sent him to Abilene, Kansas, with a herd of five thousand steers. They wintered the herd that year in Clay County and the following spring drove it to market, netting a profit of $55,000. That became the seed money for the Waggoner empire. By the 1880’s, the Waggoners’ Victorian mansion, El Castile, was the most prominent structure in Decatur. (It still is, except for the magnificent Wise County courthouse.) In addition to land and cattle, the family owned five banks, three cottonseed mills, and a coal company.
As their cattle business grew, the ranch needed more grazing land, especially as barbed wire began to close in the open range. Dan and W.T. began courting Quanah Parker, the Comanche chief, with their eyes on the Big Pasture, a huge block of Indian land just across the Red River in what would eventually become Oklahoma. Quanah saw his alliance with the Waggoners and other cattle barons as a way to better the lives of his people—and his own to boot. As Parker biographer Bill Neeley has noted, ethics and morality played no part of this business arrangement. Quanah delivered the land to the Waggoners and other cattle barons—at one time, Waggoner and son leased 650,000 acres for an annual payment of $30,000—and the cattle barons made Quanah rich and famous. They built him a grand home on West Cache Creek, the only permanent structure between Fort Sill and the Texas border, and the chief decorated the roof of his “Comanche White House” with fourteen stars, symbolizing his generalship in battle. They plied him with extravagant gifts: engraved pearl-handled revolvers, diamond stick pins, junkets to Fort Worth, Dallas, and Washington, D.C. They almost killed him with kindness, literally. On a Dan Waggoner-financed trip to Fort Worth, Chief Yellow Bear was asphyxiated and Quanah nearly was when the Indians blew out the gas lamp in their hotel room before retiring.
By the turn of the century, settlers were overrunning Indian reservations, and the open range was all but gone. The Big Pasture, however, remained available for grazing and hunting. In one last attempt to keep the range open, W.T. and fellow cattle baron Burk Burnett sent their pet Indian to Washington, D.C., in 1905 to ride in President Theodore Roosevelt’s second inaugural parade—and to invite Roosevelt to go wolf hunting on the Big Pasture. The 1905 hunt was a classic Waggoner production. The party bagged seventeen wolves (some of which were really coyotes), and the president beat a five-foot rattlesnake to death with his quirt. After dinner by the creek, Dan suggested that they all ride into Frederick, Oklahoma, personally setting the pace. Roosevelt remembered later: “We broke into a lope a mile outside the limits, and by the time we struck the main street, the horses were on a run and we tore down like a whirlwind until we reached the train.”
In the meantime, the Waggoners had been buying out small farmers on the Texas side of the river, paying $1 an acre and often less. One story has it that a gunslinger named Jimmie Roberts, originally hired to deal with rustlers, was sent out to make farmers an offer they couldn’t refuse. The farmers probably didn’t need intimidating. A drought in the last part of the nineteenth century made the land where the Waggoner Ranch now sits nearly useless for growing crops. The settlers, most of them German or Czech, moved north of Paradise Creek, which runs just beyond the present northern boundary of the ranch. This land sits atop the Seymour Aquifer, while the ranch itself is bone-dry. One of the striking sights as you leave the ranch is the sudden appearance of enormous green fields of cotton, wheat, and alfalfa. The little village of Lockett, where the descendants of those settlers now live, is wet in another way: It is the nearest spot where citizens of Vernon can buy beer and liquor.
W.T. WAGGONER HAD BUILT A GREAT RANCH, but in 1909 he was 57 years old and thinking about its future. The squabbling that has ensnared the ranch for almost a century began on Christmas Day of that year, when W.T. divided the ranch that he and his dad had founded into four large tracts. He kept the east side of the ranch, called White Face, for himself. The three smaller, 85,000-acre parcels—Zacaweista, Four Corners, and Santa Rosa—were gifts to his three children, Electra, Guy, and E. Paul. W.T. asked his children to draw cards for the three parcels. He secretly wanted his favorite, Electra, to draw Zacaweista, because it was nearest to his homestead. When E. Paul drew Zacaweista instead, W.T. declared a misdeal and had them draw again. Electra prevailed, as usual. The family feud began the moment the old man rigged the game.
The gifts were not entirely altruistic. W.T. hoped that his kids would learn to ranch and develop a sense of responsibility. What he got was just the opposite. The rich and spoiled siblings nearly squandered the family fortune on wild parties, all-night poker games, trips around the world, and divorce settlements. Legend has it that Electra once blew $1 million in a single day at Neiman Marcus. Guy, who eventually settled on another ranch the family owned in New Mexico, married eight times. E. Paul, a whiskey-drinking, poker-playing party animal, stayed married to his wife, Helen, for fifty years, but few people doubted the rumors that he kept mistresses in Mexico and South Texas.
Concerned about the future of the ranch, W.T. reclaimed all land and assets in 1923 and placed them in a so-called Massachusetts trust, a draconian arrangement in which he, as the trustee, controlled everything, including one of the biggest shallow oil fields in the world. Under the terms of the trust, each of the children owned one third of the 100,000 shares in the estate, elected the board of directors of the trust and served on the board themselves, and retained their homesteads. But even as board members, they were powerless to exercise any authority over the ranch, except to elect future trustees. W.T. (and future trustees) would have the sole right to make all management decisions.
Meanwhile, the Waggoner family tree was sprouting more branches. Electra married A.B. Wharton, a Philadelphia blue blood she met while traveling in the Himalayas. After a big wedding in Decatur, the couple honeymooned in Europe and then planned to settle in Philadelphia. But W.T. was determined to keep Electra nearby. He built the newlyweds an eighteen-room mansion in Fort Worth, where he later built a twenty-story office building as the base for his empire. The family made their main homes in the city and returned to the ranch for weekend getaways and holidays. Thistle Hill, as Electra’s mansion was called, stands to this day on the crest of Summit Avenue, near downtown.
