Sun, snakes, cattle, and Ford trucks have been part of King Ranch for decades

It took Robert Silguero a few minutes to find a video on his phone. It shows Silguero, a fifth-generation Kineño as the local cowboys are called, astride his horse out on the range. Suddenly, with a lightning flick of the wrist, he whips his lasso at a movement in the brush and the just-visible tail of a rattler goes limp. “A 7-footer,” he says proudly. Per the local custom, he took the snake and hung it on a fence belly-up as an offering to the rain gods. Amid a withering, months-long drought, King Ranch’s cowboys are willing to do just about anything to undam the heavens.

Around these parts, which is about 45 minutes southwest of Corpus Christi, Texas, it’s a rare mile on a highway that you don’t pass half a dozen Ford trucks coming the other way. Some of them bear a chrome “Running W” logo, indicating that they are deluxe King Ranch Editions, an ultra-plus trim level for the Expedition SUV and F-Series pickups. But King Ranch is more than just a Dearborn marketing concoction. It is a real place, situated on a tropical plain abutting the Gulf Coast and paved with oceans of Bermuda and blue-stem grass, cultivated cotton and sorghum fields, sand dunes, watering holes, and dense thickets of gnarled mesquite, prickly agave, and flowering fiddlewood. It is owned by a real family and inhabited by real people and real animals who for generations have eked out a codependent existence under a brutally indifferent sky.

Indeed, the King had been a working ranch for 147 years before Ford came calling in 2000 with an idea to partner up on an F-150 trimmed in saddle leather from the ranch’s sprawling herds. As we discovered in Harrel’s Pharmacy in downtown Kingsville, the relationship goes even further back. Framed on the wall by the lunch counter is a Ford ad from 1949. It reads: “‘With some 50,000 head of cattle on approximately 900,000 acres to look after, the ’49 Ford is a welcome addition to the Ford family. I can drive mine all day without fatigue,’ says Mr. Richard M. Kleberg, Jr. of Kingsville, Texas.”

Coincidentally, the vintage Ford F-1 that was brought down from San Antonio by its owner, Hagerty member Ben Sanchez, to be our photo prop, is also from 1949. Its skinny bias-ply tires, rudimentary gauges, and flathead 100-hp V-8 with a three-speed represent accurately what Ford pickups used to be, before they became plush four-door family liners. Back then, pickups were driven almost exclusively by ranchers, farmers, road builders, and other tradespeople needing basic, sturdy workhorses. Computer screens, massaging seats, radar cruise control, and even air conditioning would have all seemed like science-fiction stuff, yet today, a fleet of fuel-injected, semiconductor-stuffed descendants of Sanchez’s ’49 still work the ranch, screens and all.

At 825,000 acres divided into four divisions all in the vicinity of the quiet burg of Kingsville, King Ranch is the largest such ranch in the United States. Vice president and general manager Heath Grigg was quick to apologize for the desiccated state of the landscape when we arrived. “You’re not seeing us at our best,” he said as the relentless sun peeked through early March clouds that offered intermittent shade but no rain.

The economics are simple: When it rains, nature provides an abundance of free food in the form of green pastures. When it doesn’t, the ranch has to feed its stock an expensive kibble of protein and grains called “range cubes.” Drought sparks a bitter cycle: As costs go up, the beef supply shrinks, propelling beef prices upward, which eventually causes consumers to look for cheaper alternatives. Especially for the most profitable U.S. Department of Agriculture–rated Prime and Choice varieties that King Ranch prefers to supply. The cowboys like to say that every dry day is “one day closer to rain.”

Meanwhile, where 50,000 head of cattle once roamed in fenced pastures that seem to stretch to the horizon, the herd has in recent years been thinned down to about 32,000, mainly of the Santa Cruz and Santa Gertrudis varieties that King Ranch calls its own. Developed through selective breeding, the cattle better endure the high temperatures and humidity of the climate while still producing the beautifully marbled meat that chefs crave.

Captain Richard King might have picked a more hospitable place for his ranch, but it undoubtedly made sense at the time. Apparently restless as a jewelry apprentice in New York City, King was just 10 when he stole away in 1834 on a steamship bound for Mobile, Alabama. His captain took a shine to him and taught him the ways of the water, and at 21, he joined up to pilot steamers ferrying troops and supplies down the Rio Grande for the Mexican-American War. After the peace, King ran a thriving steamboat business, eventually branching out into land and cattle. He and a partner bought an old 15,500-acre Spanish land grant in 1853 called the Rincón de Santa Gertrudis. The price for this wild land of thickets and snakes was $300 (nobody quite knows the origin of the ranch’s Running W logo, but one theory is that it’s a rattlesnake). A year later, he snapped up another 53,000 acres for $1800, and about 60 other land purchases later, the King Ranch became more or less what it is today.

The Mexican herders who came with their families to work for King called themselves Los Kineños, the King’s People. They formed the wellspring of what today is a community of 300 residents living on the ranch, of whom 160 are employees, many of them multigenerational. Though Captain King had four children, it was only his daughter, Alice Gertrudis King, who bore any children. In 1886, she married Robert Justus Kleberg from a family of locally prominent German immigrants. Thus, while it is still called the King Ranch, it is the Kleberg family who has run it for more than a century. They are the closest thing South Texas has to royalty, which is why you can drive King Avenue through Kingsville out to the gates of King Ranch in Kleberg County.

The flathead V-8 in the old F-1 burbled lazily as the truck picked its way across one of the ranch’s 32,000-acre pastures, perfectly at home amid the cow patties and dried-up mudholes. Its rudimentary suspension, a half-step up from a prairie schooner’s with its four sets of leaf springs carrying two solid axles, can take plenty of punishment. But the driver on the small, cramped bench feels every impact. The fact that Ford touted this ½-ton truck as having a “Million Dollar Cab” with its “Spiralounge Floating Seat,” “Feather-Foot Braking,” and “Airplane-Style Shocks” seems quaintly hilarious. Sanchez, who admits that he isn’t as svelte as he used to be, installed a small hot rod–style steering wheel just so he could fit behind the wheel.

Trucks weren’t large back then and they didn’t weigh nearly as much as they do today. Nor were they able to carry as much. The “Bonus Built” Ford F-1, as Ford called it in the ads, was able to haul 1480 pounds in its bed, for a gross weight rating of 4700 pounds. Today’s bottom basement F-150 with a 2.7- liter turbo V-6 carries 1775 pounds and can tow 8400. Numbers matter on a ranch. So does four-wheel drive, though despite the fact that Ford had built Army jeeps during the war, it would take the company another decade to offer the feature as factory equipment on its pickups.

Still, the “master of a thousand-and-one light delivery jobs,” as Ford dubbed the new F-1 when it debuted in 1948, had some clever features to help endear it to the ranch hands. As with Ford and Chevy pickups since the ’30s, the sides of the steel cargo box were rolled over into a loop at the top, both to make the bed sides more rigid but also so that items such as sod bags won’t snag but simply slide over into the bed. The bed came standard with holes for stakes, and monotube gas shocks, though not new (wartime jeeps had them), were still novel in 1948.

Even so, the most valuable piece of equipment on a ranch in 1948 wasn’t a truck but a horse, a fact we were surprised to learn is still true in 2026. The King Ranch employs 34 cowboys, and the goal is to have four horses for each cowboy to account for rest, feeding, and illness. Between roundups for deworming, vaccination, branding, pasture rotation, shipping to feed lots, and other purposes, the cattle are regularly on the move during their 18-month lives at the ranch.

Why not use cheap dirt bikes or ATVs? “Horses don’t cause fires,” explained Silguero, and they also have brains, which, when tamed and trained, provide the cowboys what in car industry terms might be called Level V self-driving automation. The range is rough, full of mounds and snakes and hidden holes. A horse can pick its way up a trail while the rider looks elsewhere, not possible with a motorized machine.

Hence the ranch is an American Quarter Horse breeding operation, because it’s cheaper to make at home these compact, agile sprinters than it is to buy them. It costs about $20,000 to $25,000 to breed a horse, what with insemination and vet bills, but that might be half the purchase price of a decent ranch horse. The process is agonizingly slow, however, and not every foal is suitable for range work. A tick-borne disease decimated the ranch’s horse herd 15 years ago and it’s still recovering, said San Antonio veterinarian Ben Espy as he inserted his arm into a mare’s rectum all the way up to his shoulder.

Espy, whom the cowboys consider the best equine specialist in the region, was giving the horse an ultrasound. Which, because the 1200-pound animal is so thick, can only be done from the inside, with the probe inserted well up the poop chute. King Ranch maintains its own stock of “recips,” or recipient horses. “They’re professional mothers,” Espy explained, meaning horses whose temperament isn’t suited for anything other than breeding, much of it done through in vitro fertilization. “They’re recips for a reason—they’re a**holes,” he quipped, shortly before one of them kicked her steel stall so hard that it sounded like a gunshot.

Head cowboy Lee Roy Montalvo, a seventh-generation Kineño, led four mares into the breeding barn at a time so that Espy could examine their ovaries and see if any had foals aboard. Only one of the mares was pregnant, and Montalvo was disappointed. “This looks easy; it isn’t easy,” he said.

Actually, nothing about working rugged rangeland among thousands of large animals in the South Texas heat looks easy. Silguero, a fifth-generation Kineño who has worked on the ranch since he was 12 and now has two daughters in college, was thrown when he was 17 and lost hearing in one ear. “If you haven’t been bucked off, you’re not riding horses,” he said with a shrug. Espy, the vet, has mucked out horse afterbirth in 110-degree heat and has been kicked hard enough to be sent to the hospital a half-dozen times. “Skin grafts aren’t fun,” he said.

It is a life, however, and nobody we met seemed willing to trade it for a cube and a computer. “Ranching is different every day. I don’t feel like it’s work,” said division manager Bull Alvarez, another fifth-generation Kineño who pulls out a professional Canon camera snapped into a long lens whenever things get slow. When not shooting adorable portraits of his new granddaughter or the coiled rattlesnakes he finds under his truck, Alvarez captures the ranch’s other diverse wildlife, including white-tailed deer, wild turkeys, javelina, Asian nilgai antelope, African waterbuck, raptors, quail, a ridiculous-looking pig-like creature called a peccary, and the 15-foot alligators that prowl the ranch’s ponds and creeks.

In 1912, the Klebergs realized that King Ranch was quickly being depleted of its wildlife and embarked on an aggressive conservation and management program. It proved both a prescient decision and a financially wise one, because today, leasing to private hunting operations is a large and growing segment of the ranch’s revenue. King Ranch is designated a “low-fence” operation, meaning the wildlife have free range to roam, and hunting is via “fair chase” methods, a more traditional way of tracking and bagging, which many hunters prefer to penned hunts, even if the trophies aren’t guaranteed.

The cowboys had warned us that the cattle would lick the ’49 as we parked it in a herd for some shots. Sure enough, the old pickup was shellacked in snot and steer spittle from bumper to bumper. One had even rubbed a Picassoesque circular pattern into the door with its horn. Sanchez just chuckled and mumbled something about claiming it on his Hagerty insurance. Give us a call, Ben.

Cattle ranching, farming, hunting, horse breeding, a saddle shop with five locations in Texas offering high-end Western wear: King Ranch earns its living in the 21st century in an astoundingly diverse variety of ways. And soon it may be more than new Ford trucks that bear the Running W. Plans are being considered to offer King Ranch–branded meat in the grocery store, so you know where your steaks come from, and a wider catalog of King Ranch clothing and accessories, possibly from a national chain of stores.

Unlike so many brands out there today, King Ranch would be one that has a truly authentic core, because in good years and bad years, under spacious skies and starry nights, amid the mesquite and hackberry and bluestem grasses, it all really does happen out there much the same way it has for over a century. Granted, with some modern science to augment the cowboy intuition and experience.

Ford trucks have been there much of the way, evolving with technology but still hauling whatever the horses can’t. Our ’49 was perfectly at home on the biggest of ranges, completing a scene that you can only find in America.

This story first appeared in the America 250 digital issue of Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Join the club to receive our award-winning magazine and enjoy insider access to automotive events, discounts, roadside assistance, and more.

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