King Ranch Trivia

More stuff we learned on the tour of the Ranch.

On the left is a picture of a swinging gate. During the 20's and 30's they opened up the ranch to oil exploration by what is now Exxon. They had the ranch carved up into many small pastures and were doing selective breeding in an effort to develop the Santa Gertrudis strain of cattle.
The oil guys were constantly having to open and close gates and complained about it. They were told that they could not let the cattle comingle or it would mess up the breeding program.. The oil guys brought in a engineer and he resolved the problem with this swinging gate. All you do is bump it with your vehicle and it will pivot open then pivot closed after you went through automatically. You have to do this with some care as if you hit it too hard the other side will sing around and take out your tail lights. Another problem lately is if you hit it too hard you deploy your air bags! These gates are in use all around Texas but they started here on the King Ranch.

Another interesting side note about the fencing of the pastures. They do not use barbed wire! It seems that they have a fly that gets into the wounds caused by the barbed wire and lays its eggs. When the eggs hatch the laurve eat on the flesh of the animal and kill it. Not a good thing if you want to raise cattle and horses.

Also, they only use one half of the ranch for true ranching. The other half is used for hunting. They charge hunters to come in and hunt exotic game animals.

If you are not too bored yet, here is more! The event that really made them take off in the early part of the last centry was water. It is very dry generally and they heard of a deep well drilling device up in Nebraska. They brought it in and drilled down to 300 feet and hit an artesian well. Since cattle aren't stupid and would only graze out to no more than a half days walk to water they had been restricted on their size. Now they were in possesion of water they doubled the size of the ranch by buying out their neighbors at low prices and drilled about 500 wells on the property. You can imagine how this changed the economics of their ranching compared to their neighbors!

King Ranch

On the left is some of the heavy tools that they pulled around with D-9 Cats to try to recover the land from the mesquite trees. When the ranch was founded there were no trees, the cattle that they purchased down in Mexico brought the seeds for the trees up in their stomachs and they dropped them on the new grass. The mesquite tree roots go down as much as 50 feet! If they don't stay after it the trees will completely take over the land in 7 short years!

This is the King Ranch main house. It is 32,000 square feet, 17 Bedrooms and 19 Bathrooms! This replaces the original one that burned down in the early 1930's. It is now used mainly as a hotel for the 150 family stockholders that come to visit.







Here our driver and tour guide "Dusty" is calling for someone to come and get us as we are stranded!







Below is what they call a "Chuckwagon" that was used on the ranch for many years. Started out being pulled by mules and later converted to tractor pulling. The name for these wagons comes from Charles Goodnight who was one of the original drovers of cattle to the markets up north. He rigged it up to feed the many cowhands on the trail and they called it "Chuck's" wagon and the name stuck.



This is the commisary at the ranch headquarters. It is one of the original buildings on the ranch. The cowboys were fed here and they kept supplies in the basement. Also they sold to travelers from the Matamoras road neaby that ran from Corpus Cristi to Matamoras. This was real wild country in the early 1850's and there were lots of Mexican bandits and outlaws in the vast country along this road. You did not travel unless you were in a well armed group. At the top of the commisary you can see the lookout position that was always staffed with at least two riflemen!

King Ranch

We stopped off at the historic King Ranch in Kingsville, TX while on our way from Port Aransas to Mission, TX.

The King Ranch was started by an Irish orphan lad who had no formal education. He ran away from an apprenticeship to a jeweller when he was
11 years old and stowed away on a ship. They did not find him for 4 days and
since they were too far out to take him back they had him work to pay his way.

Later he used his knowledge of ships and boating to start a riverboat company with a partner over in Brownsville, TX and plied the Rio Grande River up to Laredo and back. It proved to be quite prosperous and another man talked him
into buying up some old Spanish land grants between Matamoros, Mexico and Corpus Cristi, TX. Several years later that partner was killed by a jealous husband and Capt King became the sole proprietor of the ranch.

Over the many years since its founding it has become known for several things; they came up with the Santa Gerturdis line of cattle (Named after the original land grant name and the original ranch name.), later in the 1960's they came up with a leaner breed of cattle called Santa Cruz, in an effort to breed a better horse to work the large ranch they came up with the Quarter Horse and had the number one registered quarter horse!, and later they got into horse racing and had one triple crown winner Alladar and one that missed by a wisker. They also have a lot of oil and gas production on the property.

The ranch today has 850,000 acres, 60,000 cattle, and 300 quarter horses. This is down from its one time size of 1,000,000 acres. The ranch headquarters are at a place that a friend of Kings from the Army stationed in Brownsville picked out while visiting the ranch about 1856. The friends name was Col Robert E. Lee.

We took the tour of the Ranch in a small 20 passenger bus. It was very interesting but the bus broke down about 3/4 of the way through the tour and we had to call for assistance!

The rig behind the car seems to be a relatively new one with three slide outs. For the life of me, I cannot comprehend driving it out here and staying in it on the beach. The sand that will get in will be a nightmare to clean up. On the other hand they will have an experience to talk about. 

We drove for some distance and never ran out of an area where there were campers along the beach. They are all set up with solar panels, extra water cans, etc. Wasn't curious enough to drive far enough to find where they ended. Many of them were sitting out in their chairs reading books and relaxing. They seemed quite content.

They allow traffic on the beach to the south. This beach runs for 60 miles without interuption. You have to turn around and come back out the same way you go in as there is no bridge at the southern end. Driving is not too bad as the sand is packed up close to the water. Higher up the beach it is quite loose and soft. 

There were about 40 campers of all types dry camping at the camground right on the edge of the beach. They can stay 30 days and pay about 4 dollars per day if they are golden pass holders. If they leave for 48 hours then they can come back for another 30 day stay! 

Today we had a special trip to the Padre Island National Seashore. This is located on the island just to the south of here. There were cattle grazed upon this island from 1810 until 1973 when the National Park Service bought it. It has recovered quite well from the grazing and looks completely healed. 

This fish was interested in Barbara's shoe! 

This exhibit held a lot of the larger fish including this shark!

Some examples of the colorful fish they have on exibit at the Aquarium.

We had a wonderful visit at the Texas State Aquarium! Here are just a few of the fish they had.

This will give you an idea of the display of aircraft they had on the ship. 

Neal hiding the keys to the Lexington from Barbara! 

Here Barbara is on the bridge of the Lexington. (She is having problems finding the keys to start it!) 

This is the USS Lexington, an aircraft carrier from WWII that fought with destinction in many of the battles of the Pacific War. She served until the 1970's as a training carrier stationed in the Gulf of Mexico and served Pensacola and Corpus Christi Naval Air Stations. We have gone to many of these exibits around the country and this was one of the very best. They let you go through many areas of the ship that others don't allow you to enter. 

In order to leave Mustang Island from Port Aransas to the north you have to take a ferry across the inland waterway. Kind of fun but time consuming! We went this way to go to see the USS Lexington.

Some folks wanted to see the view of the ocean from the cliffs of the Tulum ruins on the coast of Yucatan that I keep talking about. The water is very clear and as beautiful as any in the world. The beach sands are just super.

This will give you a feel for how close Gulf Waters resort is to the beach. 

This is a picture of the beach here at Mustang Island. They camp out on the beach and do a lot of surf fishing. 

After Denny and Judie left to head back west we went south to Mustang Island near Corpus Christi, TX. The site that they gave us is just super, good landscaping and views. 

Just a few of the many trophies mounted on the walls of the YO ranch headquarters.  

More exotics. These are from Egypt. 

We arrived on the ranch about 5 hours after this fella was born. Everyone on the ranch was excited and rushing in to see him. 

A couple of males fighting for the right to the females on YO ranch.