Opening a Road

In the southeast corner of Texas, along the Gulf of Mexico, lie the King and Kenedy ranches, which in their heyday were bigger than the little feudal domains of Europe.* Eighty-seven years ago, two Rio Grande riverboat captains, Richard King and Mifflin Kenedy, working as partners, founded what was to become the biggest fenced ranch in the U. S. Visitors said that it was 100 miles from Captain King's front gate to the front door of his ranch house. They also said that, when the partners split up, the documents were less like contracts than like treaties between two ' neighboring countries. In time the King family became allied with the vigorous and aggressive Klebergs, the Atwoods, the Armstrongs, and the great landowners of south Texas--a hearty, traveled, prosperous and sophisticated people, who might be called landed aristocrats if they had not had much in common with common working ranchers.

In time, also, settlements coagulated around the ranches. Corpus Christi grew to 57,000; the Rio Grande Valley, desolate and sandy in Grandpa King's day, bloomed under irrigation; oil towns fed wealth to the cities along the Gulf. But through all Texas' titanic changes, the 1,500 miles of wire fence still surrounded the fiat coastal plains and brush land of the King and Kenedy ranches. The Hug-the-Coast Highway from Houston through Corpus Christi cut straight across country--until it came to the fence at the Kenedy County line. Then it detoured 23 miles west, 46 miles south. 23 east again before it could go on. For 20 years citizens beefed to the Legislature, but Kenedy County remained closed to highway builders. In 1936, somewhere inside the King Ranch's enormous borders, when Luther and John Blanton disappeared and were never heard of again, charges were made that they had been shot by King Ranch henchmen for poaching.

Three years ago the Kenedys and Klebergs agreed to let the road go through. Last week it was opened. Typically Texan was the celebration. Caravans arrived from San Antonio. Houston, Orange, Corpus Christi. Louisiana, Mexico and the Valley. There were 1,500 Boy Scouts on hand. In most of the Valley towns there were free lunches. Army bands. Variously they had a rodeo, a wild-animal act, performing elephants, sound trucks. A song. Along the Bay, was written for the occasion. There was a special Christmas vespers service.

The new road is valuable--it links ten deepwater harbors in Texas--but all this enthusiasm was not evoked merely because 46 miles of highway had been moved 23 miles nearer the water. Texans celebrated because they now had a right of way through land previously barred to Texans.

The country through which the road passes is not spectacular. Flat and brushy, lying near the unpredictable Gulf, it could easily be overlooked by a traveler, its latent wealth unsuspected. Texans say that if it lay in Europe it would be called the Desolate Plains, or something equally melodramatic, and travelers would shun it, just as the pleasant fir woods of Germany are known as the Black Forest, the abode of witches and evil spirits. But, being in Texas, it is irrigated, scraped over, dug into with an energetic, hopeful, optimistic curiosity. As a result the land produces oil, grapefruit, spinach, oranges, carrots, cantaloupes, tomatoes, turkeys, cattle, and is proudly called by the natives the garden spot of the universe.

* The King Ranch alone spread over 1,250,000 acres. The biggest ranch in U. S. history, the XIT,which in the 1880s grazed 160,000 head of cattle, was almost half the size of Belgium.

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