Big as All Outdoors

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Every Texan knows the tales of Pecos Bill, the mythical great-granddad of all cowboys. Pecos Bill was born in Texas (naturally, say Texans) and raised by coyotes. Rattlesnakes hid when they heard him coming, because Pecos Bill's bite might poison them. He used mountain lions for saddle horses, invented centipedes and tarantulas for pets.

Once, on a bet, Pecos Bill mounted an Oklahoma cyclone and rode it across three states, flattening out mountains and uprooting forests, thus making the flat Texas Panhandle. Aside from such playful interludes, Pecos Bill spent most of his time on "Widow Maker," a horse only Pecos Bill could ride (it threw his bride, Slue-Foot Sue, as high as the moon), tending his fabled range.

This week Cattleman Robert Justus Kleberg Jr. (pronounced Clayberg) was riding a range as fabled as Pecos Bill's. The liege lord of all the King ranches and all the King ranchers was winding up the great fall roundup on his many pastures. With his hard-riding vaqueros, amid the dust and acrid smell of burning flesh, Bob Kleberg threaded his horse in & out of the milling hundreds of cherry-red cows and their calves. Lean-faced, gimlet-eyed, with the brim of his Stetson hat upswept in King Ranch fashion, Bob Kleberg told his vaqueros with swift gestures and quick Spanish phrases which cattle to "cut out" for branding. As a calf high-tailed it for the mesquite brush, the nimble cow ponies always outran it; a vaquero's lasso snaked out and around its neck, brought it thudding to the ground. While the calf still kicked in a cloud of dust, the vaqueros knelt down, swiftly branded it with the King Ranch's "running W," inoculated it against disease (blackleg), castrated it. Even as the calf scrambled to its feet, bawling with fear and pain, the lariat of Bob Kleberg or a vaquero had already tripped another calf to be branded.

In a busy week of hard, sweaty riding and roping, Bob Kleberg and his men round up as many as 1,400 calves, and mark another 3,500 steers, calves and cows for the dinner tables of the U.S. Already this year the King Ranch has sent 19,110 cattle to market, enough to supply half the people of the U.S. with a hamburger. This feat, worthy of Pecos Bill, is old stuff to Bob Kleberg.

Fabled Wonders. To King ranchers, big Texas talk is no bigger than the facts of their cattle kingdom: the biggest beef-producing ranch in the world. Some King-size statistics:

P: The 976,000 acres in the ranch's four divisions make it bigger than Rhode Island. Between the northern and southern points of the ranch there is a month's difference in the seasons.

P: The ranch cars, some specially built for cross-country driving (they have 100 trucks and autos), have to carry compasses to keep from getting lost on the vast range lands.

P: The ranch has 1,500 miles of fence; in a straight line, the fence would reach from New York to Fargo, N.Dak.

P: The 390 producing oil wells, which are operated by Humble Oil & Refining Co., have so far paid royalties of $3,250,000. They are but the first dribbles out of what may prove to be a new major Texas pool.

P: The 75 artesian wells and 225 windmills supply enough water daily for a city of 23,000.

P: Thousands of deer, quail, ducks, wild turkeys and antelope roam what is probably the nation's biggest wildlife preserve.

P: Kingsville, built to service the ranch, now has 15,000 people and a King Ranch-controlled bank, newspaper, lumberyard, store and dairy.

There are 2,900 fast-starting, nimble "quarter horses" and 82 race horses in the ranch's stable. The ranch's Assault has won $623,370 to date, third biggest winner in racing history.

Fabled Prices. Despite the size of the King Ranch and its meat production, the nation focused anxious eyes last week on Bob Kleberg and his fellow U.S. cattlemen. This year they will send to slaughter an estimated record 36 million head of cattle. This tremendous movement of cattle from the ranges and feed lots has tended recently to force down the sky-high prices of meat in spite of the voracious demand. But now that the seasonal period of plenty is about over, what is the outlook for prices and supply? It is dark--if present demand continues.

And the U.S. meat supply is faced with a still greater threat--an invasion of the dread foot & mouth disease.* The worst outbreak (1914-16) forced the U.S. to slaughter and burn or bury (in quicklime) 175,000 U.S. animals before it was licked. The next time the battle may not be won--even at such cost. Said Dr. M. R. Clarkson, Department of Agriculture scientist: "If the disease ever gets across the Rio Grande, it would cost the U.S. at least $1 billion a year. It will affect all parts of the livestock industry, and it would be almost impossible to check."

The Department of Agriculture has already spent $35 million on a slaughter program in Mexico and failed to wipe out the disease (TIME, Dec. 8). Now, because of the rebellion of Mexican campesinos, who could not understand why their cattle should be given up to slaughter, the killing has been stopped (except animals actually infected) in favor of quarantine and vaccination of all Mexican cattle. But Bob Kleberg storms that neither of these methods has ever proved effective unless accompanied by slaughter and burial.

Like a general pinpointing a breakthrough of the enemy on battle maps, Kleberg has traced the progress of the disease northward. At week's end, the epidemic was only 300 miles away from his southernmost fences. Cried Bob Kleberg: "This thing has to be stopped even if it is necessary to spend $1 billion in Mexico. I'm in favor of replacing every slaughtered work animal with a free mule or ox, and sending Mexicans the cattle to restock their ranges. It would be cheap at the price."

Wyoming Lace. If one man could be the final expert on cattle raising, Bob Kleberg, at 51, would probably be it. He has a restless, all-consuming curiosity about cattle that is never satisfied. He has given his life to the job of running the King Ranch. As he says: "I have to. The bigger a thing is, the easier it is to lose!" On the ranch, he is awakened at 6 a.m. by the traditional King Ranch "good morning"--a cup of coffee brought to his bed. By 7 a.m. he has talked by phone to the foremen of the ranch's various divisions. By 9 a.m. he is usually charging over the prairie in his stripped-down Ford hunting car to whichever herd is being "worked" (rounded up, branded, culled for shipment, etc.) that day.

There, he dons his white leather "Wyoming lace" (chaps), climbs on a horse and pitches in. Better than anyone else on the ranch, Bob knows when a steer is as fat as it will get and should be shipped, or when a cow has begun to fail as a calf-producer and should be slaughtered. He picks the calves to be saved for breeding, marks the ones to be sold. The shipping and branding is a year-round job, with fall the busiest time. Kleberg stays on a horse "because I can make more money on a horse." His slim, attractive wife, Helen, who often rides the range with him, usually adds: "Also, he'd rather be on a horse."

So would their only child, Helen, 20. Yellow-haired and attractive, "Helenita" can cut out a cow as fast as a vaquero, and spends all the time she can doing it. To her it's "like baseball every day."

At noon on the range, Bob Kleberg and the vaqueros sit down in a range shack, where a freshly killed calf has been barbecued, or gather at the chuck wagon for smoke-tanged frijoles, slabs of pork, biting hot wild peppers, bread baked in dutch ovens over wood coals, coffee and molasses (eaten with the meat).

The Master Breeder. By evening he is usually back in his ranch house at the Santa Gertrudis Ranch, the headquarters of the four divisions that make up the King Ranch. His house is no palace. Compared to the luxury of the swimming pool, the ten-car garage and the $350,000 towered and turreted main house of the Santa Gertrudis hacienda, the Kleberg's home is tiny (seven rooms). For privacy's sake they prefer it to the enormous main house, which they use as a guest house.

Before dinner, Bob Kleberg, slicked up in his whipcord pants but still wearing fancy high-heeled boots, likes to stride up & down the living room with a bourbon old-fashioned in his hand and give his expert opinion on everything from horses, cattle, politics, bourbon to how high the hawk flies. By means of a telephone on a 30-ft. extension, he is able to sandwich in long-distance business calls as he walks.

The 25-room main house is usually filled with guests (samples: Lord & Lady Halifax, Standard Oil's Eugene Holman, Nelson Rockefeller, Mrs. Will Rogers) or with business visitors. A steady stream of agronomists, geneticists, and breeders from all over the world come to see at first hand (and are fed and boarded with traditional Texan hospitality) the work of Master Cattleman and Breeder Kleberg.

The Master Breed. A geneticist once wrote of Kleberg: "He works in the medium of heredity with the steady hand and eye of a man at a lathe turning out a part of a machine." His first great feat was the breeding of the King Ranch's Santa Gertrudis cattle, the only new breed of U.S. cattle that has had any commercial value. Economic necessity mothered the new breed.

Back in 1917, the ranch's cattle--English Shorthorns and Herefords--were doing poorly. They sickened in the blazing Texas sun. Kleberg decided to try Brahman bulls, which thrive on grass feeding and India's killing heat. Other cattlemen shook their heads. Brahmans had not worked out too well for other breeders. But Kleberg bred the Brahmans and Shorthorns together till he evolved what he wanted, a cross-breed bull named Monkey.

Monkey performed so well at siring a new breed that now all the cattle on the ranch are descended from him. The Santa Gertrudis breed, which is now widely sought wherever there is year-round grass feeding, has one great moneymaking virtue: it is hardier and grows heavier on grass feeding than any other.

Then gadget-minded Bob invented a weapon to help him in his never ending battle to keep the mesquite trees from crowding out the grass on the range. This was a "tree dozer," an oversize tractor with a steel hand to snatch out mesquite. He supplemented this with a "rooter plow" that lifted up a strip of land, killed the mesquite roots and dropped it back with the grass undisturbed. He then turned his hand to grass. Bob's father had brought in South African Rhodes grass. Bob took seed from the best plants, and perfected the strain. Later he developed a fine strain of yellow-beard grass. As one cattleman put it: "Bob developed a breed of cattle to grow fat on grass, then developed the grass to make them fat."

Horseplay. With the same sure breeding hand, Bob went to work on the ranch's cow ponies. There were both thoroughbreds and mustangs with--legend has it--a strain of blood from one of Jesse James's fastest horses. The story goes that James stopped at the ranch one day and found his horse so much admired that he gave it to the ranch.

Bob decided to breed the thoroughbreds with quarter horses, a Texas type famed for its speed for a quarter-mile. Bob selected Old Sorrel, a horse with the speed and nimbleness he wanted, and used him as he had Monkey. Colts were carefully culled; only the best were kept on the ranch. (Once, 1,200 mares that didn't come up to Kleberg's standards were driven into Mexico and given away.) Out of this selective evolution came the famed King Ranch quarter horses. Though they are primarily working cow ponies, one of them was good enough recently to sell for $26,500.

This same interest in breeding got Kleberg interested in horse racing. He thought more thoroughbred blood would improve his ranch horses. He came back from the race tracks at Louisville and Saratoga with two carloads of thoroughbreds, and put them to "improving the breed." His horses turned out to have bigger chests and heavier forelegs than Kentucky breeders liked. They also ran faster than Kentuckians liked. The King Ranch's Assault won the triple crown--the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont.

Bob has never quite forgiven himself for losing another King Ranch horse, Stymie. His trainer, Max Hirsch, entered Stymie in a $1,500 claiming race. Wily Horseman Hirsch Jacobs, who had correctly sized up Stymie's potential worth, claimed him. Stymie has since won $816,060 for Jacobs. The cream-and-brown King Ranch racing colors have won all but a few of the nation's major racing classics, including the Santa Anita Derby, the Preakness, the Belmont Stakes, the Saratoga Special, a score of others. Trainer Hirsch summed up what Kleberg was trying to do: "Either Assault or Stymie would make crack cow horses." In the words of a cattleman, "cow horses can start fast, turn on a dime and give you 9-c- change."

Once, when Bob Kleberg was holding forth on what scientific breeding can accomplish, a friend remarked: "But nobody can breed better people." Bob considered the possibilities for a minute, then said: "Don't know. Maybe you could. Nobody's ever tried it."

That was not quite right. Unconsciously, the King Ranch had tried it with its vaqueros. They came from Mexico three generations ago. But it takes a good man to stand up to the tough, exacting work. Those who find it too tough soon leave of their own accord. Hence it is only the best riders, ropers and wranglers who have stayed and perpetuated their kind. Result: today's vaqueros are probably the best, or equal to the best, cowboys in the world. Their pay is low. With keep it amounts to about $150 a month, but the ranch takes care of them in sickness and old age, and they have a feudal loyalty to the ranch. To outsiders, the ranch is a curious mixture of the new Texas of scientific, big-business-minded cattlemen and the old gunfighting days.

King's Kingdom. There was gunplay aplenty in the days of Captain Richard King, the ranch's founder, a dark, curly-headed man with drive, empire-building dreams and merry generosity. Richard King, an Irishman's son, worked as a jeweler's apprentice in Orange County, N.Y., didn't like it and stowed away on a ship. He found seafaring more to his taste, and before many years was running a steamboat on the Rio Grande. During the war with Mexico he laid by a nest egg hauling supplies by boat to General Zachary Taylor's troops. Six years later, on the advice of his great & good friend Robert E. Lee, then a lieutenant colonel of Engineers, Captain King bought 54,000 acres along Santa Gertrudis Creek.

In this sea of grass, Captain King and a steamboating partner, Captain Mifflin Kenedy, launched a modest cattle business. It boomed during the Civil War. They drove cattle and horses to the Confederate troops, and their steamboats, laden with cotton, ran the Union blockade. As money rolled in (at cost plus 10%) they added to their lands, then split up. (The Kenedy Ranch today adjoins the King Ranch.)

Later, Captain King was opposed in a lawsuit by a blond-bearded young lawyer, Robert Justus Kleberg "The First," son of a German emigre. Kleberg won the suit, and King was so impressed that he hired him as his own lawyer. When Captain King died in 1885 at 60, he left his widow, Henrietta, 500,000 acres of land and a $500,000 debt. She asked Bob the First to manage the ranch. Soon he married her youngest daughter Alice.

Robert the First. Kleberg the First put the gaunt ranch back on its feet. To combat drought, which periodically killed off thousands of cattle, in 1893 Kleberg drilled the first artesian well in those parts. He built the first of the concrete water troughs for cattle which are now sprinkled around the ranch. He brought in English Shorthorns and Herefords, the railroad (Missouri Pacific), and founded Kingsville. He built the Santa Gertrudis main house.

When Pancho Villa's raiders crossed the border in 1916, the big house prepared for a siege. The Widow King called in all hands one anxious night, gave them guns and posted them at strategic spots. Then she calmly went to bed. The raiders did not come; instead, they besieged the Norias division ranch house to the south. There eight bandits and one King rancher were killed. When other bandits kidnaped a ranch resident the vaqueros nabbed them by following the shells which the peanut-loving bandits had dropped.

When the Widow King died in 1925, at 92, her complex will put the ranch in a trust for ten years. With Bob Kleberg the First ailing (he died seven years after the Widow King), the trustees chose his son and namesake to run the ranch.

Robert the Second. Bob the Second had been preparing for the job since the age of four, when he rode his first horse. He learned to rope, cut out cattle and shoot a pistol with either hand. As a boy, he used to rise before dawn, and with brother Dick and their three sisters ride 25 miles to a roundup. After dark they would ride back. Sometimes Sarah, the youngest girl, would go to sleep and fall off her horse. The others would put her back in the saddle, then wake her up to race the last mile home.

Bob hated to leave the ranch, even to go to high school, and then for two years to the University of Wisconsin College of Agriculture. In 1916 he came home for good to help run the ranch. Ten years later, after a whirlwind 17-day courtship, he married pretty Washington-reared Helen Campbell, daughter of longtime Republican Congressman Philip Pitt Campbell of Kansas.

In 1935, when the ranch trusteeship expired, the property was divided among the heirs.* The Klebergs got 431,000 acres and formed the King Ranch Corp. with Bob as president and manager, and Dick, then a Congressman, as chairman. The stock is held in equal fifths by Bob, Dick, their sisters Henrietta (wife of Celanese Corp. Vice President John A. Larkin), Mrs. Alice East, and the two sons of Sarah (who was killed in an auto accident). By purchase, Bob Kleberg has built the ranch's holdings up to 750,000 acres, leased 140,000 more to the corporation from his own holdings as trustee of his mother's estate plus 20,000 from outside interests in Texas. The corporation has bought and leased 10,500 acres in Pennsylvania for grass fattening of King Ranch cattle.

Tight Lip. Bob keeps a tight lip about the ranch's profits. But they can be roughly estimated. The 20 million pounds of beef sold this year should gross between $3,000,000 and $4,000,000. (The ranch sells virtually all its cattle to Swift & Co. to keep from driving down prices by open sales.) Sales of breeding bulls bring in another $150,000 or so. But the expenses are huge, too. Real estate taxes run around $200,000, gasoline and oil take $48,000, land-clearing $120,000. The payroll for the 500 employees is over $400,000. At best guess, the ranch this year should net over $1,000,000 before income taxes.

To make money on cattle, Bob Kleberg runs his feudal domain with the hard fist of a feudal lord. But he has hundreds of miles of fence to mend and mind--and everything within those fences. To outsiders, the feudal fist sometimes seems too hard. There were unpleasant rumbles against the ranch in 1936 when two poachers supposedly disappeared within it. (The Klebergs think that if they really did disappear on their ranch, they might well have got lost and starved to death.) Now, as a good-will gesture, 40 hunters a week are permitted on the ranch during hunting seasons, but they are carefully circumscribed. "You'd be surprised," says Kleberg, "at the damage a couple of fellows with guns can do among cattle."

Poachers are still a prime trouble, now that airplanes have started dropping them and picking them up in remote corners of the ranch. With memories of the old days, when as many as 10,000 cattle a year were rustled from the King Ranch, Bob Kleberg makes no apologies for his tight patrol of his fences. Said he: "Don't think rustling is a thing of the past. We still lose cattle to rustlers every year."

But Bob Kleberg is free of the current problem of cattlemen--the sky-high price of corn for feeding. He is one of the small percentage of U.S. cattlemen who use virtually no grain. He has the vast acreage to grass-feed his cattle the year round, and his 82,000 Santa Gertrudis cattle now give as much beef as the ranch once got from 125,000 of its English breeds. He is planning to increase his herds.

Tight Belts. The majority of U.S. cattle raisers are not so fortunate. Worried by the grain prices--and anxious to cash in on high meat prices--cattlemen have depleted their herds. Breeding stock as well as steers have been slaughtered. Result: the total of U.S. cattle has dropped to 76 million, down 3,000,000 in a year. This has saved grain for Europe, but it will mean much less meat for the U.S. next year. Furthermore, the production of beef, which rises and falls in a regular seven-year cycle, is now on the downgrade and will slide till 1952.

Bob Kleberg thinks Americans can tighten their belts to help feed the world, because: "We eat too much anyway, especially bread. If necessary we can eat more potatoes, rice or other types of starch, to save wheat. At any rate, we should waste less." But he does not think that renewed controls would increase the food supply, because "you don't get more food by restrictions." In the present atmosphere of uncertainty of what the Government intends to do about meat, cattlemen cannot plan ahead. "It takes four years to make a steer," said Kleberg. "That requires some long-range planning."

There is already a reported 30% reduction in the number of cattle going into the Midwest feed lots. By spring, it looked as if Americans, who ate 156 pounds of meat a person last year, would be down to 146. This would still be well above prewar. But it would not be enough for the demand. This week Senator Robert Taft told the U.S. to get ready. By spring the nation may have to ration meat.

* The disease is so contagious, and so feared, that the U.S. will not permit the virus to be brought in even for research. Infected cattle develop mouth sores, lameness; they waste away, often die.

* The Widow King's five children, Lee King (no descendants), Richard King Jr., Mrs. Alice King Kleberg, Mrs. Ella King Welton, and Mrs. Nettie King Atwood are all now dead. The property went to the Klebergs, to Richard King III, who got 150,000 acres, to the Atwoods, who got 131,000 (now being operated by the trustees of the estate), and to the Welton heir, who sold out to Bob Kleberg. Richard King III now operates his ranch independently of the King Ranch Corp.

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