Kings of Texas The 150-Year Saga of an American Ranching Empire [Hardcover]

Praise for KINGS OF TEXAS

Kings of Texas is a fresh and very welcome history of the great King Ranch. It's concise but thorough, crisply written, meticulous, and very readable. It should find a wide audience.
-Larry McMurtry, author of Sin Killer and the Pulitzer Prize--winning Lonesome Dove

This book is about the King Ranch, but it is about much more than that. A compelling chronicle of war, peace, love, betrayal, birth, and death in the region where the Texas-Mexico border blurs in the haze of the Wild Horse Desert, it is also an intriguing detective story with links to the present-and a first-rate read.
-H.W. Brands, author of The Age of Gold and the bestselling Pulitzer Prize finalist The First American

* Full of myth and misunderstanding, there's a Texas for everyone... Graham writes about Texas recognizing the wide-open country that we love, while at the same time putting longitude and latitude in proper perspective... Kings of Texas is a pleasure to read. (Austin American Statesman)

  is the right man for the task of chronicling this Jonesian expanse of archetypal Texana...a pleasure to read . (Austin American-Statesman, January 19, 2003)

My mother grew up in Texas in the 1930s and recalls driving with her father for hours past seemingly endless miles of King Ranch Property. Covering 850,000 acres even today, a spread as big as the state of Rhode Island, the King Ranch has been an icon of Texas ranching culture since the 19th century. For six generations, descendants of founder Richard King ran the ranch and its various enterprises until Stephen Kleberg was voted out as ranch manager by the corporate board in 1998. The changing face of the King Ranch from family-run enterprise to corporate entity captures attention precisely because so many ranches and farms have already gone this rou te in the West, and here is the largest of them all following in their footsteps. Graham (literature, Unil##