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The Culture|
January 21, 2013

The Boys of the Dipper Ranch

On 50,000 acres that they have mostly to themselves (not including their hounds, mules, horses, cattle, chickens, piglets, and parents), Jasper, Trevor, and Tanner Klein live a life almost untouched by the modern world.

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Texas History|
January 21, 2013

When the Sky Ran Dry

Bad as the current drought is, it has yet to match the most arid spell in Texas history. Nearly two dozen survivors of the fifties drought remember the time it never rained.

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Feature|
January 20, 2013

Gentling Cheatgrass

What does it take to break a wild mustang? Patience, horse sense, experience, and if you’re Teryn Lee Muench, no more than one hundred days.

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Web Exclusive|
January 20, 2013

A Q&A With Sterry Butcher

Sterry Butcher talks about her experience watching Teryn Lee Muench break a wild mustang in less than one hundred days.

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Books|
January 20, 2013

Catcher in the Raw

Forty years after its publication, Horseman, Pass By is still one of Larry McMurtry's finest novels—and as groundbreaking as J. D. Salinger's masterpiece.

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Travel & Outdoors|
January 20, 2013

Little House on the Prairie

Robert E. Lee advised his friend Richard King to build his permanent home at the highest point on the surrounding prairie, a little rise on the banks of Santa Gertrudis Creek. The first building was a tiny adobe jacal built of mud and sticks. The one-story house that replaced it

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Travel & Outdoors|
January 20, 2013

A Family Affair

Richard King and his wife, Henrietta, founded the King Ranch. Their daughter Alice and her husband, Robert Kleberg—shown with their children in the turn-of-the-century photograph at the right—founded the family that sustained it. When Henrietta King died in 1925, the ranch’s 1.2 million acres were divided among her heirs.

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News & Politics|
January 20, 2013

A Lot of Bull

Bob Kleberg had a problem. Brahman cattle from India were tough enough to survive in the South Texas climate, but they were too tough to eat. And fat English cattle like Herefords and Shorthorns suffered the traditional fate of the English in the tropics: they degenerated into a stupor and

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BBQ|
January 20, 2013

Underground Round

On the first Thursday, Friday, and Saturday in August for the past 61 years, thousands have converged on a park on the outskirts of Dalhart for the XIT Rodeo and Reunion, celebrating the history of the XIT Ranch, once the biggest ranch in Texas. (This year’s dates: August 7—9.) In

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Business|
January 20, 2013

The Next Frontier

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.

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Feature|
October 31, 2012

Git Along, Lonesome Ranchers

Cattle ranching in Texas has been endangered almost since its inception. Has the harsh economic reality finally caught up with our most iconic business?

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The Culture|
February 1, 2012

How to Cut for Sign

After a harrowing skirmish with the Comanche in 1860, Charles Goodnight cut for sign to track down warriors who had escaped. That practice, in which a person searches for people or animals by “cutting,” or studying a section of land for clues, may seem like a lost art of the

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The Culture|
August 31, 2011

How to Hitch a Livestock Trailer

Hauling Herefords isn’t like towing a sailboat. A loaded stock trailer can weigh up to 30,000 pounds, and if you hook something that heavy to a bumper, you’ll drive away 
without your back end. “Gooseneck hitches are common in livestock operations,” says Joe Lewis, who has worked at Rosenberg-based Discount

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The Culture|
July 31, 2011

Cowgirl Up

The word probably makes you think of rhinestone-studded jeans, floppy-brimmed hats, and Nashville queens, but “cowgirl” ought to stand for the tough pioneer women who built ranches and went on cattle drives and the hardy rural women who are out there today doing their fair share of the work, usually invisibly,

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The Culture|
June 30, 2011

How to Cut the Herd

When Sam Graves and his 22-year-old bay gelding, Old Hub, beat ten other cowboys to win $150 in the first 
advertised cutting competition, in Haskell in 1898, he could not have imagined how the sport would evolve. Today the National Cutting Horse Association, which hosts the World Championship Futurity, in

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The Culture|
October 31, 2009

Randy Goode, Artificial Inseminator

Goode grew up on a ranch in Damon, where he now runs an artificial insemination business. He travels the country collecting DNA for a U.S. Department of Agriculture research project on mad cow disease.Back in the seventies, my dad learned to artificially inseminate cows by reading a book and using

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The Culture|
September 30, 2009

How to Build a Barbed-Wire Fence

The HISTORYIn 1876 salesman John W. Gates brought barbed wire to Texas when he wagered $1 million that he could build a fence that would capably contain cattle. Some incredulous gambler took the bet. Gates erected a fence in San Antonio’s Military Plaza and shocked a gathered crowd as a

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The Culture|
January 1, 2009

How to Rope a Calf

The RationaleAsk a ranch hand how to tell if someone’s a good cowboy and he’ll say the proof is in his lassoing. The rope has always been “the long arm of the cowboy,” writes Midland native John R. Erickson in Catch Rope. Though roping began on the ranch as a

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Critters|
January 1, 2008

Fred Garza, Tick Rider

Garza was born and raised in Webb County. For the past fifteen years, he has been an inspector with the Cattle Fever Tick Eradication Program, a mounted patrol started by the USDA in 1906.A tick rider patrols the border, the Rio Grande River, on horseback every day. Our job is

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The Culture|
July 31, 2007

How to Brand the Herd

The RationaleWhy make a lasting impression on your cattle? To fend off cattle rustlers, whose pilfering of literal cash cows is hardly a defunct business (ranchers in the Southwest lost $6.2 million in livestock in 2005). “Think of branding as a license plate on your car, a means of identification,”

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True Crime|
April 30, 2006

The Last Rustler

If he was asked what he did for a living, Roddy Dean Pippin would smile and say something about the cattle business. But he didn’t exactly buy and sell cows. He stole them. And right up until he was caught, he was as good as any such thief had ever

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Texas History|
January 1, 2004

Showdown at Waggoner Ranch

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.

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Politics & Policy|
December 1, 2002

The Secret History

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.

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Art|
November 1, 2000

The Searcher

Photographer Kurt Markus spent years tracking down modern working cowboys for his new book, ‘Cowpuncher.’ He corralled the genuine article at several Texas spreads.

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Texana|
May 31, 1999

Hog Wild

They’re a major nuisance in rural Texas— but, boy, do they taste good.

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Business|
July 31, 1998

When We Were Kings

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?

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Texas History|
April 1, 1998

Forget the Alamo

Sorry, T. R. Fehrenbach: the new Texas historians don’t care about Davy Crockett or other old icons. To them, the real heroes are women, blacks, and yes, Mexican Americans.

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The Stand Up Desk|
December 1, 1996

Land Values

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)

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Being Texan|
September 30, 1996

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.

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News & Politics|
June 30, 1996

Bone Dry

From water rationing to stricken crops, the current drought may be as devastating as the one in the early fifties—the time it never rained.

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