The West from a car window

by Richard Harding Davis

THE inhabited part of a ranch, the part of it on which the people who own it live, bears about the same proportion to the rest of the ranch as a light-house does to the ocean around it.

And to an Eastern man it appears almost as lonely. Some light-houses are isolated in the ocean, some stand in bays, and some in harbors; and in the same proportion the ranches in Texas differ in size, from principalities to farms no larger than those around Jersey City. The simile is not altogether exact, as there are small bodies of men constantly leaving the “ranch-house” and wandering about over the range, sleeping wherever night catches them, and in this way different parts of the ranch are inhabited as well as the house itself. It is as if the light-housekeeper sent out a great number of row-boats to look after the floating buoys or to catch fish, and the men in those boats anchored whenever it grew dark, and returned to the light-house variously as best suited their convenience or their previous orders.

But it is the loneliness of the life that will most certainly first impress the visitor from closely built blocks of houses. Those who live on the ranches will tell you that they do not find it lonely, and that they grow so fond of the great breezy pastures about them that they become independent of the rest of mankind, and that a trip to the city once a year to go to the play and to “shop” is all they ask from the big world lying outside of the barb-wire fences. I am speaking now of those ranch-owners only who live on the range, and not of those who hire a foreman, and spend their time and money in the San Antonio Club. They are no more ranchmen than the absentee landlord who lives in his London house is a gentleman farmer.

The largest ranch in the United States, and probably in the world, owned by one person, is in Texas, and belongs to Mrs. Richard King, the widow of Captain Richard King. It lies forty-five miles south of Corpus Christi.

The ladies who come to call on Mrs. King drive from her front gate, over as good a road as any in Central Park, for ten miles before they arrive at her front door, and the butcher and baker and iceman, if such existed, would have to drive thirty miles from the back gate before they reached her kitchen. This ranch is bounded by the Corpus Christi Bay for forty miles, and by barb-wire for three hundred miles more. It covers seven hundred thousand acres in extent, and one hundred thousand head of cattle and three thousand broodmares wander over its different pastures.

THE RANCH-HOUSE OF THE KING RANCH,
THE LARGEST RANGE OWNED BY ONE INDIVIDUAL IN
THE UNITED STATES

This property is under the ruling of Robert J. Kleberg, Mrs. King’s son-in-law, and he has under him a superintendent, or, as the Mexicans call one who holds that office, a major-domo, which is an unusual position for a major-domo, as this major-domo has the charge of three hundred cowboys and twelve hundred ponies reserved for their use. The “Widow’s” ranch, as the Texans call it, is as carefully organized and moves on as conservative business principles as a bank. The cowboys do not ride over its range with both legs at right angles to the saddle and shooting joyfully into the air with both guns at once. Neither do they offer the casual visitor a bucking pony to ride, and then roll around on the prairie with glee when he is shot up into the air and comes down on his collar-bone, they are more likely to bring him as fine a Kentucky thoroughbred as ever wore a blue ribbon around the Madison Square Garden. Neither do they shoot at his feet to see if he can dance. In this way the Eastern man is constantly finding his dearest illusions abruptly dispelled. It is also trying when the cowboys stand up and take off their sombreros when one is leaving their camp. There are cowboys and cowboys, and I am speaking now of those that I saw on the King ranch.

The thing that the wise man from the East cannot at first understand is how the one hundred thousand head of cattle wandering at large over the range are ever collected together. He sees a dozen or more steers here, a bunch of horses there, and a single steer or two a mile off, and even as he looks at them they disappear in the brush, and as far as his chance of finding them again would be, they might as well stand forty miles away at the other end of the ranch. But this is a very simple problem to the ranchman.