The Last Empire
The King Ranch saga: how one family conquered, tamed, loved, toiled on, and fought over a great piece of Texas.
The King Ranch saga: how one family conquered, tamed, loved, toiled on, and fought over a great piece of Texas.
How has the state’s most storied ranch managed to survive and thrive in the twenty-first century? By operating in a way that its founder, Captain Richard King, would scarcely recognize.
Did Richard King cheat his partner's heirs out of a chunk of the King Ranch nearly 120 years ago? He may have—and if the Texas Supreme Court permits Chapman v. King Ranch, Inc., to go to trial, the past could come back to haunt the state's most storied spread.
For the first time in its history, the world-famous King Ranch is being run by someone other than a descendant of its founder. Can the mythic institution survive a changing of the guard?