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Kings of Texas: The 15-Year Saga of an American Ranching Empire
by Don Graham
How the Kings tamed Texas.
A long time ago in “storybook Texas” there was a man named Richard King who took it upon himself to tame the wild frontier.
And tame it he did. At one point King Ranch consisted of a million acres in Texas, and with foreign holdings in South America and Australia that number burgeoned to around 8 million acres.
Like most things these days, the ranch has downsized a bit but it is still an impressive holding, currently consisting of 825,000 acres – an area larger than the state of Rhode Island – that support 60,000 head of cattle and 1,000 quarter horses. The main house is 33,000 square feet with 17 bedrooms and nineteen baths, and the ranch has its own school, built to educate the children of those who work on the ranch.
A former steamboat captain, Richard King started buying up land in untamed Texas in 1853. At his death in 1885, he had assembled over a half-million acres and was the richest man in Texas, having lived advice given by Robert E. Lee: “Buy land; and never sell.” Now, author Don Graham has chronicled King's saga in all its larger-than-life detail in Kings of Texas.
Texas writer John Houghton Allen, who lived in the region at the time, once described the area as “hard country, brush country, mean country, heartbreak country.”
It was an accurate description. This was the true Wild West where the land was unforgiving, where “In its gambling and drinking establishments men soaked themselves in alcohol, played billiards and cards, gambled, fought, and killed each other.” Indian raids were not uncommon, the Comanches “stealing and killing as they pleased.”
King himself seemed an unlikely candidate for success since the record shows, “He had almost no formal education, he came from no known family…he liked to drink and fight, and he had neither money nor prospects.”
What he did have was ambition. When he first set his sights on an empty tract of land north of the Rio Grande, much it of it was a sea of grass “as high as a man almost,” populated only by a vast herd of wild mustangs. The rest was desert featuring “a dry, barren, gravelly soil” that could support only prickly shrubs. In 1853, he purchased 15,500 acres for the princely sum of $300, or about two cents an acre.
He would soon expand rapidly. Retaining a lawyer to handle the details of his numerous land acquisitions, King simply instructed, “Young man, the only thing I want to hear from you is when I can move my fences.”
How King came to buy cattle for the land – and at the same time hire his ranch hands – is a story in and of itself. He went south of the border to Cruillas, Mexico – a “lost little village that had good cattle but no prospects otherwise,” and once there, “King bought the cattle and looked around, saw the village in all its bleak, non-descript meagerness, saw the villagers, good people though poor, and he had an idea. He offered to move the entire village, 100 people in all, from the desert of Tamaulipas to another desert where there was water, at the ranch that he was building at Santa Gertrudis.”
Once he had built on the land and stocked its pastures he paid to protect his assets from Indian raids, first securing the services of the Texas Rangers, and then that of “a gunman noted for his skill and bravery in fighting Indians.” In addition to Indian raids, the ranch had to survive the Mexican uprising known as the Cortina War, the scourges of the Civil War, and notorious cattle rustlers.
Always a target for bandits because he was known to be wealthy, King was always heavily armed when he traveled. Asked in 1875 why he carried a double-barreled shotgun instead of the new Winchester rifle, King replied, “Because I'm a businessman, not a sportsman.”
Justice in those days was swift, and often misplaced, since ad hoc posses oft times found those they interrogated guilty simply by suspicion, their sentence leaving them “kicking at Texas soil with nothing to stand on.”
King's reputation – and that of his cattle and horses – preceded him wherever he went. During one trail drive, King's trail boss had to fire some cowboys for drunkenness but didn't have enough cash to pay their wages. When he went to a local bank to try to borrow the money, he was told he would need to provide some sort of identification, so “He returned to his outfit, and then went back into town and told the banker: ‘Here is a 150 saddle horses branded Running W [the King Ranch brand], chuck wagon, mules and most everything that has that brand on it, and the brand is known from the Rio Grande to Canada, and if that is not enough, I have 5,600 steers out there about three miles, all the same brand.'”
He got the loan.
Today, the King ranch still carries considerable clout, but things have changed. It is now a corporation with offices in Houston, far removed from the day-to-day workings of the ranch, and on the ranch itself, they now use helicopters to roundup cattle, performing in a matter of hours what it used to take cowboys a week to accomplish on horseback.
What remains is the ranch's legacy, and Graham delivers a superbly-written account of the history of not only Richard King and King Ranch, but of the Wild West itself.
Title: Kings of Texas: The 15-Year Saga of an American Ranching Empire
Author: Don Graham
Publisher: Wiley
ISBN: 0471394513
Review written by: Marc Duane Anderson
Reviewer's Rating:9
Reader's Rating: 0
Reader's Votes: 0
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