Preserving Home and Revising History: Legacies of the King Ranch of Texas

Founded in 1853, the King Ranch, with 825,000 acres (1289 square miles), remains one of the largest ranches in the United States. Dozens of novels, histories, coffee-table photo essays, memoirs, and animal husbandry texts take the King Ranch as their subject, offering complex and conflicting portraits of this exemplary expression of white power through more than 150 years of U.S. and borderlands history. This essay places the varied discourses about the King Ranch into conversation--the social, economic, representational, and environmental heritages of this ranch kingdom along with the King Ranch's official histories and website. This analysis of the King Ranch and the stories about it reveals the inadequacies of generalizations about such rangeland empires, as it considers the messiness of the intersection of myth, metaphor, and actual land use. By bringing the tools of cultural geography, environmental, literary, and cultural studies together, along with methods usually outside the purview of the field, such as ranch management and range science, all under the rubric of "Place Studies," the essay shows what an alternative direction in American Studies might look like