Riding With A King

Close(ish) to Corpus also lies the wee village of Kingsville, home to the 825,000-acre King Ranch, the largest of its kind in the world.

Former riverboat captain Richard King established the ranch in 1853 on land that others saw as a scrub-covered semidesert.  It also had, however, the only natural spring for hundreds of miles.  Today the ranch is bigger than Rhode Island, a state that the ranch's fences would reach if they were laid end to end.

On the 10-mile tour that we took we saw some of the 60,000 heads of cattle, 400 horses, and dozens of cowboys - many fifth- and sixth-generation descendents of Mexicans who moved to the ranch in the 1860s - that live there.  We also passed the on-ranch school, chapel, baseball field and the lavish main building, all 33,000 square feet of it.