THE RISE OF AN EMPIRE
The character of the land itself has fundamentally shaped both history and enterprise on the King Ranch. Property boundaries are artificial; much more relevant to all who live on the land---humans, plants and animals ---are the ecological zones dictated by geography and climate. The larger the spread, the more this becomes true, and the King Ranch is a premier example: Its four Texas divisions located between Corpus Christi and Brownsville cover some 825,000 acres, more ground than the state of Rhode Island.
The climate is humid subtropical becoming more arid inland and supporting a variety of ecological zones. A large part of this ground was once an ocean of rippling grass, broken by streamlets and patches of parched scrubland, known as the “Mustang Desert.”
This installment will focus on the King Ranch contribution to animal breeding---how horse and cattle populations were changed by the people who took possession of this very large chunk of land during the mid-19th century and who continue to maintain stewardship of it today. Yet it is impossible to tell this story without considering many families, not just the Kings, who lived and labored across this large swath of South Texas.
NOT JUST LIVESTOCK
Domestic animal strains with unique and desirable characteristics do not usually arise spontaneously. Even when “sports” emerge, unless they pop up within a well-run breeding program they will persist for only a generation or two before random mating causes the population to sink back into a more or less uniform average physical type. Producing useful kinds of cattle and horses takes people who know how to channel superior individuals into the breeding population while eliminating inferior ones. They must also have money, numerous broodmares, large managed acreage and, above all, persistence---sometimes keeping at it over more than one human generation ---until the desired type is “fixed,” that is to say, reliably self-propagating.
Despite its vastness, the King Ranch stands out not so much for size as for enterprise. Beginning with Richard King and his partners and wife Henrietta in the 1850s, seven generations of committed, intelligent and hard-working people have made the ranch into what it is today---a successful multinational agricultural corporation employing more than 100,000 people and invested in producing commodities, including oranges, alfalfa, turf sod, cotton and milo as well as cattle and horses. Oil and gas production have provided important financial underpinning since the 1930s.
Like other ranches on the Great Plains, the King Ranch started as a cattle operation that needed skillful cowhands riding good-minded, durable horses. Since its founding, both cattle and horses have evolved: The King Ranch was instrumental in producing not only the “sorrel” strain of Quarter Horse but the first new breed of beef cattle in the United States, the Santa Gertrudis. The King Ranch is also the birthplace of Texas game conservation, and its primary focus today is stewardship of the land viewed as an ecosystem, not merely as a cattle ranch or a moneymaking agricultural conglomerate.
Today’s buzzword is “sustainability,” but already in the 1940s famed ecologist Aldo Leopold could declare that the King Ranch represented “one of the best jobs of wildlife restoration on the continent.” It needed restoration because unregulated and often careless hunting had seriously depleted game animals and birds that had originally been abundant in South Texas.
Captain Richard King founded the ranch, but it was a younger relative by marriage, Caesar Kleberg, who became recognized by the Texas Legislature as “the father of Texas wildlife conservation.” During the teens of the last century, he began by enforcing strict hunting rules. He oversaw the restoration of white-tailed deer, turkey and bobwhite quail, and in 1924, he released rare and wily Nilgai ante-lope from southern Asia on the Texas range. In the 1930s, Caesar convinced his nephew Bob Kleberg, Jr., to hire Val Lehmann as one of the first wildlife biologists to work for a private ranch. Lehmann observed King Ranch had “the desire to do everything possible to increase wildlife as long as practices did not interfere with normal livestock operations.”
Caesar Kleberg passed away in 1946, in his will creating a foundation for wildlife conservation which today is part of Texas A&M University.
Despite its vastness, the King Ranch stands out