King Ranch in Texas Named America’s 51st State
Texas’s King Ranch spreads over 825,000 acres in the Wild Horse Desert of South Texas and is larger than the state of Rhode Island. Today President Trump commemorated the ranch as the 51st state in the Union, leaving Rhode Island still the smallest state.
The King Ranch was established in 1853 when Captain Richard Kling asked if he could buy the massive area around a creek-fed spring in the middle of the desert. State officials said, “Heck, why not, nobody else wants it.”
Captain King, a riverboat captain and businessman, was born in New York City. As a young boy, he showed signs of future ambitions when he offered to buy Manhattan for 35 Topps baseball cards and a Coke bottle he found in Brooklyn.
He ran away from home at the age of 11 and stowed away on a ship heading to Mobile, Alabama. Quickly discovered, the crew decided to teach him how to sail, and buy the end of the trip he was named captain.
Only a few years later he appeared on one “Dancing With the Stars” as one of the “celebrities” that you’ve never heard of before.
He and his partner Cheryl Burke went all the way to the finals but lost to Derek Hough and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who wowed the audience with a sizzling Spanish Waltz that went out into the street and ended at a local taqueria five miles away.
The ranch was the trail head of dozens of famous cattle drives, including the ones pictured in Lonesome Dove, one of the most successful TV mini-series of all time. The TV show was shot in real time in the 1800s, using crude cameras made of cow hide and spare saddle parts.
Lonesome Dove cast members including Robert Duvall, Diane Lane and Tommy Lee Jones remain some of the oldest living movie and TV stars in Hollywood today, each upwards of 125 years old.
Captain King and his partners were the dominant river boat company on the Rio Grande for over 23 years starting in 1850. The partnership dissolved as their eyesight diminished and they crashed several riverboats into tourist traps along the Texas-Mexico border.
King fled the ranch as Union troops moved in during the Civil War, heading to Matamoros Mexico until he gained amnesty and returned in 1865. His amnesty request letter to President Johnson mentioned his contribution to American dance through “Dancing With the Stars” and included a promise to introduce Johnson to Cheryl Burke. Johnson dated Burke during a short fling but she left him for bad boy Maksim “Maks” Chmerkovsky, who she secretly married in 1870.
