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!