Living Like Kings  

Don Graham gets to the heart of the ranch that’s a Texas icon  

By Stuart Wade  

 

SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN  

TO THE AVERAGE carpetbagger, the King Ranch, the most famous ranch in American history, may amount to little more than regional braggadocio — J.R. Ewing stuff.  

And that just ain’t right.  

Thank the Lord, then, for “Kings of Texas: The 150-Year Saga of an American Ranching Empire”, Don Graham’s winning history of the King Ranch, a Texas icon as vast as Jerry Jones’ ego.  

The affable Graham, whose 1998 collection “Giant Country” ought to be required reading for anyone interested in Texas, is the right man for the task of chronicling this Jonesian expanse of archetypal Texana. (In February, area Barnes & Noble stores will honor the Texas Monthly writer and University of Texas literature professor as author of the month.)  

The King Ranch nicely spans the gap between 21st-century urban Texas reality and 19th-century Lone Star myth. Celebrating its sesquicentennial this year, the 1,300-square-mile chunk of South Texas turf between Brownsville and Corpus Christi surpasses poor little Rhode Island in size.  

Despite that it once also occupied the same mythical space as the Alamo, today the diversified agribusiness is recognized foremost for its recreational hunting and for the leather goods and chicken dishes that also bear its name.  

Originally carved from a Spanish land grant, King Ranch parallels Texas both in size and vitality. After all, it’s neither oil nor cowboys but land — lots of land — that drives Texas, perpetually luring residents and fueling industry.  

At the heart of Graham’s narrative is a contemporary ownership dispute, which lends the book its sensational edge, but at times constrains the author to chronicle some rather tedious legal proceedings. Skillfully, however, Graham weaves a highly entertaining and accessible history of a ranch that has been a going concern from the Civil War to the modern day. He paints a vivid picture of the Texas that was outside the King Ranch fences, then and now.  

Between 1853 and 1885, orphaned ex-steamboat captain Richard King cobbled together 60 land purchases. As the J.R. of his day, King would build an empire of cattle and oil. When a young attorney named Robert Kleberg skillfully handled a lawsuit against the ranch in a minor land dispute, the impressed cattle baron then hired Kleberg as legal counsel — a fateful decision.  

Soon after, Kleberg was managing the ranch’s affairs — and marrying into the King family. At King’s death, it was Kleberg (and later, his son) who would build the King Ranch empire into a  century-old King-Kleberg family dynasty. Savvy oilman and horse-racing tycoon Bob Kleberg Jr. expanded King Ranch’s holdings as far away as Australia, built a second fortune in foreign meat production and even raised the 1947 Triple Crown-winning thoroughbred, Assault.  

Kleberg Jr., drank as hard as he worked; his deathbed request for a vodka tonic was denied. It was 1974. Bob Kleberg had lived to be 75, and although the family would retain control for another 24 years, the golden age of King Ranch was gone.  

In the late 1980s, a series of seemingly unrelated events would threaten the traditional authority of the King Ranch. A trove of letters found by descendants of Richard King’s contemporary, Maj. William Chapman, and his wife, Helen, uncovered what Chapman’s great-great-grandson Ed Coker believes to be a fraud perpetrated against Helen Chapman, one of many litigants in smaller 19th-century land disputes involving King Ranch.  

After Chapman’s 1883 death, Robert Kleberg — already on retainer from Richard King — began handling Helen’s case on behalf of her estate. Kleberg’s dual representation of Chapman and King was a clear conflict of interest, Graham notes.  

William Warren Chapman III v. King Ranch Inc. was filed in Corpus Christi in 1995. The suit charged that the 1883 settlement Robert Kleberg had litigated was a conspiracy between Richard King, Kleberg and others against Helen Chapman. A 1998 lower court ruling in favor of King Ranch was reversed in 2001.  

Although the case is still pending before the Texas Supreme Court, Graham writes, the powers that be at King Ranch Inc. obviously hope it will never go to trial: “They would prefer that history remain as quiet and undisturbed as it was before Coker started poking around in the past, before he summoned forth the ghosts of the major and his wife to once more stake their claim to the most fabled ranch in Texas history.”  

Full of myth and misunderstanding, there’s a Texas for everyone. Like Larry McMurtry, Graham writes about Texas recognizing the wide-open country that we love, while at the same time putting longitude and latitude in proper perspective. That’s why “Kings of Texas” is a pleasure to read.  

 

Austin free-lance writer and frequent Books contributor Stuart Wade’s work has been anthologized in Harper Perennial’s collection “Mirth of a Nation.”