The XIT Ranch: Three Million Acres for a Capitol

In eighteen seventy-nine the Texas state legislature made a decision that could only have been made in Texas. The state needed a new capitol building in Austin. The old one had burned, and there was no money in the treasury to pay for a replacement. The legislature's solution was to offer the only asset Texas held in abundance: land. The legislature appropriated three million acres of raw Panhandle territory, the largest individual block of land Texas controlled, as payment to whoever would contract to build the capitol.

A syndicate of investors from Illinois, led by a pair of brothers named Charles and John Farwell, accepted the bargain. They organized what became known as the Capitol Syndicate, recruited British investors to provide operating capital, and began cattle operations on the land in eighteen eighty-five. They branded their cattle XIT, which is sometimes said to stand for Ten in Texas, a reference to the ranch spreading across ten Panhandle counties, though this origin is disputed. The brand was chosen primarily because it was almost impossible to alter with a running iron, the cattle thief's tool.

At its height the XIT Ranch held somewhere between one hundred twenty-five thousand and one hundred fifty thousand head of cattle. It stretched for two hundred miles along the New Mexico border, from twenty to thirty miles wide. A six-strand barbed wire fence enclosing it required the cutting and hauling of hundreds of miles of posts across treeless plains. The XIT was, for a brief period, the largest fenced ranch in the world.

The British investors eventually wanted their money back. Cattle prices fell. The syndicate began selling the land in parcels around the turn of the century. The last piece sold in nineteen sixty-three. The capitol the XIT built still stands in Austin. It remains the largest state capitol building in the United States by total space.