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Once, when Bob Kleberg was holding forth on what scientific breeding can accomplish, a friend remarked: "But nobody can breed better people." Bob considered the possibilities for a minute, then said: "Don't know. Maybe you could. Nobody's ever tried it."
That was not quite right. Unconsciously, the King Ranch had tried it with its vaqueros. They came from Mexico three generations ago. But it takes a good man to stand up to the tough, exacting work. Those who find it too tough soon leave of their own accord. Hence it is only the best riders, ropers and wranglers who have stayed and perpetuated their kind. Result: today's vaqueros are probably the best, or equal to the best, cowboys in the world. Their pay is low. With keep it amounts to about $150 a month, but the ranch takes care of them in sickness and old age, and they have a feudal loyalty to the ranch. To outsiders, the ranch is a curious mixture of the new Texas of scientific, big-business-minded cattlemen and the old gunfighting days.
King's Kingdom. There was gunplay aplenty in the days of Captain Richard King, the ranch's founder, a dark, curly-headed man with drive, empire-building dreams and merry generosity. Richard King, an Irishman's son, worked as a jeweler's apprentice in Orange County, N.Y., didn't like it and stowed away on a ship. He found seafaring more to his taste, and before many years was running a steamboat on the Rio Grande. During the war with Mexico he laid by a nest egg hauling supplies by boat to General Zachary Taylor's troops. Six years later, on the advice of his great & good friend Robert E. Lee, then a lieutenant colonel of Engineers, Captain King bought 54,000 acres along Santa Gertrudis Creek.
In this sea of grass, Captain King and a steamboating partner, Captain Mifflin Kenedy, launched a modest cattle business. It boomed during the Civil War. They drove cattle and horses to the Confederate troops, and their steamboats, laden with cotton, ran the Union blockade. As money rolled in (at cost plus 10%) they added to their lands, then split up. (The Kenedy Ranch today adjoins the King Ranch.)
Later, Captain King was opposed in a lawsuit by a blond-bearded young lawyer, Robert Justus Kleberg "The First," son of a German émigré. Kleberg won the suit, and King was so impressed that he hired him as his own lawyer. When Captain King died in 1885 at 60, he left his widow, Henrietta, 500,000 acres of land and a $500,000 debt. She asked Bob the First to manage the ranch. Soon he married her youngest daughter Alice.
Robert the First. Kleberg the First put the gaunt ranch back on its feet. To combat drought, which periodically killed off thousands of cattle, in 1893 Kleberg drilled the first artesian well in those parts. He built the first of the concrete water troughs for cattle which are now sprinkled around the ranch. He brought in English Shorthorns and Herefords, the railroad (Missouri Pacific), and founded Kingsville. He built the Santa Gertrudis main house.