Richard King

• Born: July 10, 1824
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: April 14, 1885
• Place of death: San Antonio, Texas

American rancher

Born into poverty as the son of Irish immigrants in New York City, King, through determination and an innate sense for innovation, business, and commerce, became one of the wealthiest Americans who ever lived and amassed one of the largest landholdings on Earth, the legendary King Ranch in south Texas.

Sources of wealth: Real estate; ranching

Bequeathal of wealth: Spouse; children

Early Life

Richard King was born in New York City in 1824 and apprenticed to a jeweler there at the age of nine. Next to nothing is known of his parents, not even their names. A little more than a year after beginning his apprenticeship, he stowed away on a riverboat to Mobile, Alabama, where he became a cabin boy. A kindly steamboat captain, Joe Holland, seems to have unofficially adopted the boy, and for less than a year King attended school in New England with Holland’s biological children. This brief period seems to be the only time that King ever received a formal education. King showed great skill at navigation, though, and he eventually became the pilot of a steamboat before he had reached his seventeenth birthday.

Fighting in the American army during the Second Seminole War, King befriended a fellow soldier, Mifflin Kenedy, who would become his primary business partner. After piloting riverboats in Florida and Georgia for a while, in 1847 King responded to an invitation from Kenedy to move to Texas, where Kenedy was now aiding American troops in the Mexican War. Setting up operations on the Rio Grande, King used a transport ship, the Colonel Cross, to move men, ammunition, and goods for General Zachary Taylor. Showing great skill as an inventor, King quickly and expertly devised boats specially adapted to the demands of the narrow and fast-moving waterways of inland south Texas.

First Ventures

After the war was over, King and Mifflin went into partnership in a steamboat company on the Rio Grande. Soon, however, King became more interested in land than in water and began to use funds from his shipping enterprises to purchase property in numerous tracts and parcels throughout the southernmost region of Texas. Not all of King’s early purchases of land were successful: He was once duped into “buying” part of what later became the popular vacation site, Padre Island, from confidence men who had no legitimate title to the property. Chastened by this debacle, King became very cautious in his purchases, relying heavily on the advice of a team of lawyers led by Robert J. Kleberg, who would later marry his daughter Alice and give his name to his former boss’s principal heirs.

In 1854, King married Henrietta Chamberlain, a well-to-do young woman from Brownsville, Texas. She was a source of both wealth and sound advice to King, and with her help and that of Kenedy and Kenedy’s equally aristocratic and perspicacious wife, Petra, King began to establish a Texas rancho of truly kingly proportions.

Mature Wealth

Having already bought a tract of more than fifteen thousand acres near Corpus Christi the year before his marriage, King purchased a nearby land grant known as the Santa Gertrudis de la Garza, consisting of more than fifty thousand acres of grassland. This nexus of properties would evolve into the King Ranch. Initially consisting of more than sixty thousand acres, by the end of King’s life his ranch’s property holdings had increased tenfold. Although the story may be exaggerated somewhat, King supposedly hired an entire town from Mexico, specifically the village of Cruillas in Tamaulipas State, to come and work for him. These villagers became an integral part of the King Ranch and were called Los Kineños, a hybrid coinage of Spanish and English based on King’s surname. Descendants of the first Kineños were still working on the King Ranch in the early twenty-first century.

King did not refuse the amenities that wealth provides. He built a lavish ranch house in the Mexican hacienda style, and he and his family dressed and dined well. In fact, as various critics have pointed out, his way of life was in some ways medieval: a revival of feudalism in the nineteenth century Wild West of the United States, with his workers dependent on his patronage, much as serfs in the Middle Ages had relied on the lords in the manor houses. However, as others have pointed out, the landholder-worker relationship had been long established by Spaniards in Mexico, with the patrones (aristocratic landowners) hiring and overseeing the peones (peasant agricultural workers), who enjoyed their protection and tutelage only as long as their work and behavior were deemed pleasing or satisfactory. In short, this employer-employee relationship, archaic or not, unfair or not, was typical of the era and the region.

King’s business endeavors were interrupted by the Civil War, during which Texas was part of the Confederacy. King, whose ranch was the major center of the cotton trade in Texas during the war, found himself the target of an assassination attempt by Union troops in December, 1863. He happened to be away from home at the time, although his property suffered much damage at the hands of the Union soldiers. In the time-honored tradition of Texans in disgrace, King fled to Mexico after the war to escape arrest and imprisonment. When President Andrew Johnson later granted him a pardon, probably because of his wealth, King returned to Texas and his ranch. At the conclusion of the war, King was worth about $300,000, an astronomical sum for the time, and he and his family owned almost 150,000 acres of ranch land.

Although the social structure of King’s ranch may seem old-fashioned to later generations, he was an innovator in other ways. In fact, many of the traditions that Americans learn about the Old West from popular culture, such as Western films and television series, can be traced to practices that King pioneered. For example, he was one of the first ranchers to promote the arduous cattle drives during which thousands upon thousands of cows were herded to the Midwest and northern regions of the United States for sale during the 1800’s. He fenced in his land and asserted absolute claim to it, thus helping to end a long-standing tradition in which grazing land was considered communal property. He also invested money in what were in his day state-of-the-art technologies, such as railways and production plants for ice, and he lent funding to the Texas Rangers during their early years.

In 1885, King died of stomach cancer in San Antonio at the age of sixty.

Legacy

As befits a legend, Richard King continues to haunt Texas folklore and American popular culture. A longstanding urban legend insists that his specter appears periodically in the room in which he died in the venerable Menger Hotel in San Antonio. His epic story of wealth and power survives in print and film through the success of the novel Giant (1952) by Edna Ferber and in its screen adaptation, released in 1956, which starred Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean. Ferber had spent long periods of time at the King Ranch as part of her research for the novel, and much of the plot is based on King and Kleberg family history. However, King’s greatest legacy continues to be the King Ranch.

Bibliography

Cypher, John. Bob Kleberg and the King Ranch. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. For forty years, Cypher worked on the King Ranch during much of the twentieth century, and he offers many insightful anecdotes about the workings of America’s largest ranch.

Graham, Don. The Kings of Texas. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley, 2003. A scholarly, thorough, and highly readable history of the King family.

Lea, Tom. The King Ranch. Boston: Little, Brown, 1957. Written by a celebrated journalist and artist, this remains the definitive book on King’s family and legacy.

Monday, Jane Clements, and Frances Brannen Vick. Petra’s Legacy. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007. Fascinating account of the lives of King, his wife, his partner Kenedy, and most especially the latter’s endearing, enduring wife, Petra Vela. Scholarly and meticulously researched, but reads like a grand historical novel.

Sanford, William, and Carl Green. Richard King. Berkeley Heights, N.J.: Enslow, 1997. Succinct, colorful biography of King.