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!