Texas Flag
Authentic Person
King of the Open Range

From Steamboat Captain to Ranching Titan: Richard King’s Legacy Matches the Size of His Empire

by Mike Carlisle

Richard King, the man destined to become the greatest cattle rancher in Texas by establishing what would become known as the King Ranch, was born on July 10th, 1824, in New York City. Richard King certainly did not have an easy start to his life according to his article “King Ranch: a Texas dynasty” by author Pat Decker.

Richard King was an orphan from New York who remembered little of his early life. His parents were Irish immigrants and died when he was five. Where did they come from and when did they arrive? What were their names? These amount to missing chapters in the life of Texas’ greatest cattle rancher, according to Murphy Givens, in “The orphan becomes the King of Texas.”

Although King was born in New York City, according to a sworn deposition in 1870, Tom Lea, in his two-volume history, “The King Ranch,” said King’s family probably moved to Orange County after Richard’s birth.

After four years with his aunt, she apprenticed Richard to a jeweler in 1833. Along with the apprenticeship, came the responsibly for babysitting the children of the jeweler. King decided his babysitting days were over.

Stowaway to Steam Captain

In 1835, when King was 11, he stowed away on board a ship called the Desdemona. King was hidden on board the ship but found after only four days and marched before the captain. He told the captain he ran away because he didn’t like babysitting the kids of the jeweler. He earned his passage working as a cabin boy.

The captain found work for King with Capt. Hugh Monroe on an Alabama steamboat in Mobile.  After working for two years for Monroe, King started working for Capt. Joe Holland on the Alabama River, from Montgomery to Mobile. Tom Lea in “The King Ranch” wrote that Capt. Joe Holland “sent this exceptional cub all the way to Connecticut to live with members of his family to go to school.” King was in Connecticut for about eight months.

King disliked the classroom as much as babysitting kids. He returned from Connecticut to the only family he knew in the steamboat classrooms. The Alabama river educated King: he became a captain in 1840 at age 16.

During the Seminole wars of 1841, King served on an Army steamboat in Florida. There, King met Mifflin Kenedy, starting a life-long friendship. King later joined with Kenedy on the Rio Grande in 1847.

Opposites Attract

In 1850, after Captain King fought his war surplus steamboat up the river, through snags and mud bars, he was ready to berth. But alas, The Whiteville, an old houseboat, was docked in his way. King landed his boat and began ranting around the waterfront. Responding to the commotion, a young lady emerged from the boat and put King in his place, according to Givens “An unlikely pair: Preacher’s daughter married Richard King.” Her name was Henrietta Chamberlain. Her father, Hiram Chamberlain, was a Presbyterian missionary from New England who had answered the call to become the first Protestant minister on the Rio Grande.

Lone Star Fair Corpus

In the spring of 1852, Richard King answered an invitation from the founder of Corpus Christi, Henry Lawrence Kinney. Kinney invited King to the Lone Star World’s Fair. King had run his steamboats up and down the Rio Grande for five years and was ready to see Corpus. During his trip, Tom Lea explained he saw miles of sand flats and seas of grass north of today’s Raymondville. King took in the virgin state of the southern tip of the Great Plains before fences, towns and railroads. The plains and natural habitat of grasses for wandering animals captivated King.

When King got to Corpus a friend of his, a Texas Ranger named Gideon K. Legs Lewis, proposed that they establish a partnership to operate a cow camp on the plains. King would supply the capital, and Lewis would guard and work the place.

Creating A Kingdom

King first purchased a Spanish land grant called the Rincón de Santa Gertrudis, 15,500 acres where Santa Gertrudis Creek empties into Baffin Bay, near the town of Kingsville today. King purchased the land in 1853 for $300, or a little less than two cents an acre. The next year he bought a larger Spanish grant, 53,000 acres due west of his first one, running ten miles along Santa Gertrudis Creek. Although he paid $1800, or a bit over three cents an acre, he was told he overpaid in “The Last Empire.”

Captain King worked over two decades to overcome the Indians and raiding armies of Mexican cattle bandits. “When We Were Kings” attributes the fact King knew nothing about cattle as a huge asset. He was open to inventing his own methods.

Richard King was the first to grasp the distinctions between ranching cattle and raising cattle. While Anglo settlers raised cattle and saw Mexicans as a barrier to be pushed aside, not a culture to learn, King was different. King knew nothing about ranching, but he looked across the Rio Grande and hired Mexican vaqueros who did. Vaqueros were already trained for the job and even trained King. The drought in Mexico supplied cheap cattle to King at five dollars a head. A steamboat captain who knew nothing about ranching had started a cattle kingdom.

Buy Land and Never Sell

The drought of the 1850s dried up the Rio Grande and slowed the river business. King had time to stock the ranch and supervise the construction of a dam that was the first major capital improvement between Corpus and Brownsville.

Captain King also found time to court Henrietta. Undoubtedly a rough riverboat captain was not who Preacher Chamberlain had in mind for his daughter. However, King eventually convinced both the father and daughter of his hidden virtues, Givens wrote in “An unlikely pair: Preacher’s daughter married Richard King.” In December 1854 King and Henrietta were married. Captain King took his bride to the Santa Gertrudis for their honeymoon. Henrietta fell in love with the heart of the frontier, where she would spend seventy years.

In early 1855, only a few months after King and Henrietta were married, partner Legs Lewis was killed. Now King had to work the ranch on his own. River capital was still flowing, William Broyles wrote in “The Last Empire”, but King viewed the ranch as his future. “Land and livestock have a way of increasing in value,” he told Mifflin Kenedy. “Cattle and horses, sheep and goats, will reproduce themselves into value. But boats, they have a way of wrecking, decaying, falling apart, decreasing in value and increasing in cost of operation.” King followed advice from his friend Robert E. Lee, stationed in Texas. “Buy land, and never sell.”

Civil War

The Civil War brought Richard King great prosperity. King and Kenedy were Confederates and amassed fortunes before and after the Civil War wrote Givens in “King’s fortune was made during the Civil War.” The King Ranch became a major depot for the Southern cotton sent to Europe through Matamoros. The two men made sure payments were in gold for supplies to the Confederacy. Tom Lea figured $900,000 in gold represent a portion of the proceeds from the cotton contract.

When the Civil War broke out, King and Kenedy had 20,000 head of cattle. King longhorns fed the Confederacy. Cotton was hauled down the Cotton Road to Mexico through the King Ranch. Murphy Givens wrote in “King made a fortune hustling cotton during the Civil War,” having the cattle that the soldiers wanted, King and his then partner Kenedy became a part of the Cotton Road. Not actually a road but a trail marked by tufts of cotton that crossed Texas. King was uniquely capable of succeeding in this contract. At Brownsville, King and Kenedy steamboats under Mexican registry flying Mexican flags, ferried the cotton to ships at the mouth of the Rio Grande. The two made a fortune hustling Confederate cotton.

After the 1863 Union raids, the Kings abandoned the ranch. Just two months later, Henrietta King gave birth to their second son, whom she named Robert Lee King. King was away in Mexico looking for his stolen cattle. King crossed the river into Mexico with his gold and prepared to move all his operations south of the border.

After his friend Robert E. Lee surrendered to end the war, King and Kenedy asked for and received pardons. Three years after the war, King had returned and they divided their ranch holdings, amicably, with Kenedy buying the Laureles. Both men remained close friends, and allies.

Navigating lawless times and cattle raids were hard. Between 1866 and 1869, King reported the loss of 34,000 cattle to rustlers and hide peelers. King Ranch kept lookouts atop a 75-foot watch tower. The four Dahlgren boat howitzers on the ranch were always primed to fire.

After the Civil War, the northern and eastern cities had millions of immigrants from Europe and rural America that needed meat. Richard King had the supply to meet that demand, but hundreds of thousands of $5 steers needed to get to the $40 market. King sent thousands of cattle north via cattle trails during the 1870s, profiting over a million dollars conservatively wrote Tom Lea.

Buy More Land

After amassing almost 200,000 acres of Santa Gertrudis, King turned his attention to buying the 350,000-acre San Juan de Carrecitos grant. The land had sandy soil for native grasses and sacahuiste to support cattle during a drought.

Closing the Open Range

King and Kenedy were among the first to build fences for raising better quality cattle. Over five hundred miles of fence by the late 1860s surrounded Santa Gertrudis, a ten-day ride on horseback. Switching from open range and trail drives brought the need for better transport. King and Kenedy worked to bring a railroad from Corpus to Laredo that passed within twenty miles of the Santa Gertrudis headquarters in 1881. Trail drives came to an end four years later.

Grieving his son Robert Lee’s death and the end of the frontier affected Richard King, but stomach cancer was killing him. By 1885 he could battle the disease no longer. When he left the Santa Gertrudis to see his doctor in San Antonio, King’s last instructions to his manager were ‘‘Don’t let a foot of the dear old Santa Gertrudis get away from us” wrote Tom Lea.

On April 14, 1885, Richard King died in the Menger Hotel in San Antonio, He was 61. At his death, he owned 614,000 acres, and a debt of approximately $500,000. His fortune gained in gold during the war had been spent on fencing, land and more land. He never forgot Robert E. Lee’s advice: Buy land and never sell.

Los Kineños

The Los Kineños story begins after Captain Richard King bought the first tract of land along the Santa Gertrudis creek. King needed livestock and he traveled 240 miles south to a ranching community in Northern Mexico suffering from the severe drought of the 1850s.

Captain King bought all the cattle from the people of Cruillas, Tamaulipas, to survive the drought. As Captain King started driving the cattle northward, he quickly realized he could help the townspeople. King returned to Cruillas and offered to move the people of the town to his ranch in exchange for food, shelter and pay to work on the ranch. Most of the townspeople chose to move to the King Ranch in 1854. The people became known as Los Kineños or “King’s people.”

Los Kineños were expert cowboys when it came to working with livestock and horses. They chose to stay at King Ranch and have worked there for seven generations. Today, their descendants still work on the King Ranch and there is a longstanding tradition of respect for Los Kineños in Southern Texas.

Bringing you the true tales of Texas’ rich history and its people keeping it alive throughout each of the historic heritage trail regions. Become an Authentic Texan and dig into that great heritage with a subscription today!

© 2024 Authentic Texas Magazine. All Rights Reserved. Authentic Texas is published by Texas Heritage Trails LLC which is owned and operated by five nonprofit heritage trail organizations.