The Real Yellowstone, Part I: war, corruption, and 1,000,000 acres
How to build an empire amidst instability and ethnic strife
In 1835, age 11, Richard King was a stowaway orphan. By his death in 1885, he was the richest man in Texas and the owner of the largest ranch in America.
Aspiring nobility of the present age have much to learn from his story. We live in a time of civilizational decline and the return of war to the West. Our task is to create structures and communities that survive, and indeed thrive, in this time of collapse.
Conflict - as terrible as it is - breeds opportunity. The suffocating strictures of an established system are weakened, and along the fault lines, capital and resources that were once tightly grasped by the old guard become attainable by men of will. King’s story delivers us a masterclass in the navigation of such a space.
The story of King Ranch has much to tell us about Texas and America, reaching deep into the heart of intertwined desires of land, ownership, and destiny. Here is the pulse of the national epic of cattle and cowboys, ranchers and horses, a vast fortune created out of the oldest source of wealth there is, land and cattle. Here, too, is a sometimes unstable ecology of two distinct peoples, white and brown, living in unequal partnership on a plot of the contested earth where notions of ownership and inheritance are both distinct and intertwined. For to contemplate King Ranch is to do nothing less than ask ourselves, Who owns history, Texas, and memory? To understand King Ranch is to understand the very idea of human will exerted against the forces of nature, time, other claimants, and change. Above all, the story of King Ranch is the story of an American empire.
— Don Graham, Kings of Texas
This will be the first of a two-part series. The first will cover the formation of this empire, and the second will cover its expansion. Be sure to subscribe in order to receive both.
The Desert of the Dead
After the death of his parents, King ran away from home. He was discovered stowed away on a boat heading south from New York, and was adopted into the crew and trained in navigation. He took to his training and became a steamboat pilot in his own right by the age of sixteen, operating in Texas.
This profession was how he grew his initial wealth. In particular, after service navigating treacherous border rivers during the Seminole Wars, he formed a boating company that secured a monopoly on military river transport routes around Brownsville, right on the southernmost tip of the state. It was in this region that he forged his dynasty.
It was a grim land: a sparse, dry, unforgiving wilderness. When the Spanish took it from the Coahuiltecan Indians in the sixteenth century, they named it El Desierto de los Muertos - the Desert of the Dead. Mexican settlers under Spanish rule who attempted to civilize the land were constantly raided by Comanches, Lipan Apaches, and other tribes empowered by the advent of horses.
“There was never a country more unfitted by nature to be the home of civilized man, than this region of the lower Rio Grande in Texas. It seems to hate civilization.” [Teresa Vielé] went on, “It seems only to be intended as a home for desperate men, escaped refugees from the law; men who live in the saddle, and on the prairie seek their subsistence; such as give to Texas any bad reputation its population may have.”
Despite this brutality, a pastoral tradition had been established in the region: sprawling Mexican haciendas (neo-feudal plantation estates) had formed, operating on centuries-old land grants by the King of Spain.
Richard King arrived as this legacy system was increasingly challenged by the energy of southward Anglo pushes. Backed by hard power, the Americans asserted competing claims to the land, and the former inhabitants found that Anglo courts rarely ruled in their favor. Indeed, as his wealth grew, King took advantage of this kind of lawfare to increase his own holdings substantially.
The Mexicans responded to their dispossession as might be expected: lightening cross-border raids on Texan lands became common, resulting in the burning of property and the theft of tremendous amounts of livestock.
General Steele of the U.S. Army noted the deep animosity existing between Texans and Mexicans. “There is a considerable element in the country bordering on the Nueces that think the killing of a Mexican no crime,” Steele observed. The Mexican thieves, he added, “think the killing of a Texan something to be proud of.” One Mexican raider told a Texas rancher, in 1874: “Los de Tejas para mi no valen nada, ye me hace muy poco esto”: “Those of Texas mean nothing to me, to me it means very little,” that is, whether he killed one of them or not.
This chaos was the background against which King built his empire. This piece is not intended to tell the comprehensive story of his life, but to extract specific lessons that apply to the establishment of order and prosperity in an unstable environment.
Part I will cover how to recognize opportunity, complete commitment to the task, and survival by whatever means necessary.
Lesson One: Opportunity
We now exist in a stifling time, characterized by brutal competition for resources. Property ownership has never been less viable for the young, and wages continue to stagnate amid the inhuman logic of industrial atrophy and limitless international labor supply.
You might assume, therefore, that there are limited lessons that we can draw from the life of a man that flourished in a land so wild and ungoverned. I would challenge this assumption.
In Richard King’s time, it was not clear to the wider world that there was, in fact, tremendous opportunity in South Texas. This land was described by passers-through as “unappropriated, waste and unpopulated” - and ugly. It was a harsh and dangerous land, searing in the summer and desperately dreary otherwise. The land had not yet been tamed and nurtured, and it was not self-evident that it could be prosperously cultivated.
And this land was not without claimants. By the time King had built enough of a fortune to begin acquiring land, there were established Anglo owners of great swathes of the area, not to mention the dispossessed Mexicans hungry for the return of land they saw as their own. He had no experience in ranching, and no inheritance to build on.
But King was a visionary: he perceived potential value that others could not - but he knew that realizing this value would require committing absolutely. More on this in the next section.
To gain such power and independence we must find radical new domains of opportunity. Perhaps these will materialize in cracks as society declines, but perhaps we must be radically bold in exploring lands that others will not: Africa, remote South America, and so forth.
Equally, it is necessary to understand opportunity not just in King’s chosen path of ranching, but in all domains. In a time in which the foundations of our world order may radically realign, the very logic of our environments may profoundly change, and we should be constantly re-evaluating our assumptions about what is and is not viable.
One advantage that our intellectual sphere has - and must capitalize on - is that we attempt to perceive the world as it is, in a realist mode unobscured by modern mythology. This gives us the ability to anticipate openings before others that have not peered beyond the veil. We can and must be first movers.
Lesson Two: Commit
Richard King was one of the first Anglos to move deep into the wilderness to live on his land in the Wild Horse Desert. Most wealthy ranch owners of the time were absentee landlords, hiring seasonal hands to do their work.
For King, this meant initially living in truly spartan conditions, in a hut of sticks and mud. But this commitment was a recognition of the herculean effort that would be necessary for a man with no ranching background to tame a previously untamable land. He judged it acceptable to forgo all luxury to realize this vision.
Enduring this barrenness gave King very real skin in the game, a powerful motivation for progress that pampered men lacked. It gave him an intimate knowledge of his lands. His constant presence meant that he could depart from the legacy business model of the absentee ranchers, who relied on temporary workers, and allowed him to bring workers and their families to live permanently on the ranch alongside him.
The depth of the resulting relationship fostered an incredible loyalty that would prove essential in surviving the tumultuous times that followed.
The system bred mutual respect and loyalty. Together the Anglo hacendado and the Mexican vaqueros and their families would create a world of their own. The people of Cruillas soon became known as Kineños, King’s people… In creating his own world, feudal in organization, King in some fundamental way was fulfilling the destiny of his patronym.
Distance from hardship makes men soft and vulnerable to future challenges. King survived because of his rejection of an unnatural state of peace, by throwing himself into necessary suffering.
When opportunity arises, we must not be limited in our ability to capitalize by our inability or unwillingness to endure the necessary conditions - whatever they may be. We must begin hardening ourselves now in anticipation of what is to come.
Lesson Three: Survive
We knew which place was most blessed, most powerful, most protected from the winds of change, from the vicissitudes of the economic forces that buffeted the rest of us. That was King Ranch, the biggest ranch in the biggest state in the union.
Threats were everywhere in that land of sudden death. It was heartbreak country. King took the security of his family into his own hands, never assuming that the law and the government would cover for him in that time of chaos. This proved to be a wise decision.
The Nueces strip was one of the most dangerous in the state, and King had his whole family living on it, his wife and his children. They traveled nowhere without protection. All men carried firearms. Even his wife - a preacher’s daughter - was conversant with the necessary tactics, insisting to her guards: “See that the pistols can at any instant be slipped from the holsters and drawn up; the sword and sword case into full view.”
King was ambushed several times on that road - particularly as his status grew and the amount of money he had to transport between ranch and town increased.
King was always well armed and prepared to shoot if he had to. When a reporter asked him in 1875 why he still carried an old double barreled shotgun instead of a new repeating Winchester rifle, King replied, “Because I’m a businessman, not a sportsman.” The answer - direct, pragmatic, humorous, tough - was vintage King. He deliberately projected an image of toughness, for any sign of weakness could be fatal. He told one acquaintance, “I have to make ’em think I’m a man-eater. If I don’t they’ll kill me.” He kept a close eye on every animal he owned, on every man who approached King Ranch, friend or foe.
King developed his ranch into a fortress that could withstand a small-scale invasion. He built his main house on an elevated rise of ground that could surveil the surrounding area, as well as an accompanying stockade and blockhouse equipped with cannons he took from his boats. Eventually he would build up an arsenal of eighty stands of Henry repeating rifles and hundreds of boxes of shells, and vaqueros trained to use them.
A series of eminent gunmen were hired to patrol the property: Captain Legs Lewis of the Texas Mounted Volunteers, Texas Ranger Rip Ford, and hero of the Mexican War Captain James Richardson - a fighter noted for his bravery and skill in fighting Indians. Rip Ford was impressed by the men of the ranch: “The men who held it were of no ordinary mold. They had gone to stay. It was no easy matter to scare them.”
This investment in men and firepower proved prudent many times over, and allowed the ranch to survive events like the Cortina War, when Juan Nepomuceno Cortina (the ‘Red Robber of the Rio Grande’) led a guerrilla army into nearby Brownsville, intending to return ranchlands to Mexican ownership, and declaring “Mueran los gringos… Our personal enemies shall not possess our lands until they have fattened it with their own gore.”
What should we take from this? Respect the law, but don’t trust it to save you when conditions are degraded. Have a realistic - not idealistic - understanding of the state of security in your environment. Do not be naive. Understand the law for what it is - a statement of intention by the government - not failure-proof guarantee. Where vulnerabilities exist, understand that it is your duty to respond to them. Think proactively, expand your protection, and always be on the lookout.
This concludes Part I. Part II will be just as exciting - if you’d like to see it, please leave a like below.
Sic transit imperium,
Johann