The King Ranch: 825,000 Acres of Texas

I once heard someone say that Corpus Christi is a big town surrounded by a whole lot of nothing. If you check a map, you’ll see that most of the space between Corpus Christi and Brownsville, which are about 170 miles apart, is taken up by the King Ranch. This ranch is the largest in the Western Hemisphere, covering 825,000 acres, making it bigger than the country of Luxembourg.

We drove to Kingsville and took a tour today. At first, the ranch looks like any other cattle ranch, but it’s actually a big company with business interests around the world and its main office in Houston. The Texas ranch is divided into four areas: Santa Gertrudis, Laureles, Encino, and Norias. We visited the Santa Gertrudis Division, which is the ranch’s original name and where it all started. The ranch also developed the Santa Gertrudis breed of cattle, officially recognized in 1940 and now found worldwide. There’s a herd of longhorn cattle on the ranch, kept for historical reasons. Besides cattle, the ranch has a top-notch quarter horse program that produced the Triple Crown winner Assault.

During the tour, we drove by the main house and the workers' village. Each division has a self sustaining work force community. An interesting fact is that after the War with Mexico, Robert E. Lee, a friend of Mr. King, helped select the best spot for the main house. The best tactical location for the house was chosen, protected by a creek gully. The house, which you cannot tour, is still used for family events and considered the ranch's ancestral home.

An interesting fact most of the first ranch workers came from Mexico. "In one notable case, King traveled to the village of Cruillas, Tamaulipas, Mexico, in the early months of 1854 (the village having been decimated by a severe drought) and purchased the village's entire cattle population. But shortly after leaving the village, King realized that by solving the village's short-term problem, by providing needed income to survive the drought, he had created a longer-term one by removing its source of future income. King thus returned to Cruillas and offered the villagers the opportunity to work for him in exchange for food, shelter, and income. Many of the villagers accepted the King's offer and relocated to Texas. As the ranch grew, these workers came to be called kineños, or King's men." The ranch’s brand is known worldwide, and its property now covers over a million acres, including a turf farm in Florida. There’s even a special King Ranch edition of a Ford truck.

After we toured the King Ranch, we stopped by the town’s museum. The museum celebrates the King family, the ranch’s cowboys, and its famous brand. The Famous wave "W" is a brand developed because it has no intersections in the writing. These intersections can cause infections because they burn deeper into the tissue. The museum's photo collection depicts the 1940s. If you're in South Texas, you must see the King Ranch.