It’s the nation’s biggest spread within the confines of a single fence—more than eight hundred square miles extending across six counties. So it’s fitting that the family feud over its future is big too. And mythic.
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.
Out of uniform, in his own words, Texas icon Nolan Ryan on baseball, ranching, values, and his love for his native state.
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?
After thieves stole his daughter’s horse, deputy U.S. marshal Parnell McNamara didn’t make a federal case out of it. Instead, he rounded up a group of old-style lawmen and lit out after them.
Battles over the river’s precious waters are pulling in everyone from pecan growers in Central Texas to shrimpers in Matagorda Bay, not to mention thirsty cities like San Antonio and Corpus Christi. Who will be left high and dry?
THANKS TO PAUL BURKA AND photographer Andrew Yates for capturing the story of the Stoners [“Home on the Range,” by Paul Burka, October 1996] with compassion and respect. As a 57-year-old ranch wife trying to keep my ranch going with my son (the fifth generation farmer-rancher on our land)
Home on the Range All over Texas, small ranchers are giving up and moving to the city. But the Stoner family of Uvalde is as determined as ever to hold on to its land—and its way of life.
John L. Guldemann scorns claims that Longhorns damage the natural area.
Without these funky watering holes, where would we—much less our cattle and sheep—be today?
Tastes in livestock are as whimsical as tastes in fashion. This year petite is in.
“When the cowboys on the 06 ranch talked about losing a way of life, they often pointed to their neighbor, Clayton Williams, as an example of what they meant. He was a millionaire and an oilman, and he represented everything they hated.”
You may have played on one when you were a kid, but it’s no fun for cows.
These days it seems every five-acre ranchette flaunts a gate worthy of the XIT.
Once you let a goat in your life, you can never get it out.
In today‘s tame, tame West, the cowboy seldom rides a horse and never carries a gun, but the cattle business is bigger than ever.
Old Glory is a long way from Madison Avenue, and Bigun Bradley probably knew it.
