The King Ranch and the Empire Beyond the City

About forty miles southwest of Corpus Christi, just outside a small town called Kingsville, sits the largest ranch in the United States. The King Ranch covers nearly eight hundred and twenty-five thousand acres, larger than the state of Rhode Island. It began with a single purchase in eighteen fifty-three: fifteen thousand five hundred acres of a Spanish land grant called the Rincon de Santa Gertrudis, bought by a former steamboat captain named Richard King for just under three hundred dollars.

King had grown up poor in New York City, run away as a boy to work on ships, and eventually made his way to South Texas where he ran steamboats along the Rio Grande during the Mexican-American War, supplying the American army. He used that capital to buy land. He then bought more land. Over his lifetime he pursued more than sixty land transactions in Kleberg and surrounding counties, adding former Spanish and Mexican land grants, purchases from their heirs, and opportunistic acquisitions in the years after the Civil War. When he died in eighteen eighty-five, the ranch encompassed roughly six hundred thousand acres.

King's operation transformed the economics of South Texas ranching. He introduced systematic cattle breeding, drove more than a hundred thousand head of cattle north to market between eighteen sixty-nine and eighteen eighty-four, and helped establish the working model for large-scale American ranching. After his death, the ranch's breeding programs produced the Santa Gertrudis, the first new breed of beef cattle officially recognized in the United States, developed by crossing Brahman bulls with Shorthorn stock to survive the South Texas heat.

The ranch registered its brand, the Running W, which remains one of the most recognized cattle brands in the world. The Kleberg family, who married into the King line, have managed the ranch since King's death. It is still in operation today.