Henry Chappell - Horses to Ride, Cattle to Cut: The San Antonio Viejo Ranch of Texas

From "Getting Dry and Need Rain Bad"

Though its fortunes waned during the tumultous decade following the U.S. war with Mexico, the community at San Antonio Viejo remained largely intact, maintaining continuity with traditional Spanish-Mexican culture of the rancho. Yet, the upheaval of the revolution and war, and the uncertainty of the Bourland Commission's adjudication, would soon seem transient compared to the changes about to be wrought by newly freed economic forces, especially raw capitalism.

In 1852, those forces appeared incarnate seventy-five miles north of San Antonio Wells, in Nueces County, where a Corpus Christi businessman and part-time Texas Ranger named Gideon "Legs" Lewis and his new partner, a young riverboat captain named Richard King, established a rough cow camp above a spring feeding Santa Gertrudis Creek.

From "Llanos Mestenos"

Late spring and early summer, especially along roads in the northern two-thirds of the ranch, Inca doves flush two and three at a time before vehicles, dozens per mile. Crested caracaras, those versatile predator-scavengers, totem birds of the Wild Horse Desert, seem forever in view, perched in the tops of the largest trees, on fence posts, or cruising for prey and carrion. In good years, when rain comes at the right times, in the right amounts, bobwhite quail densities may exceed a bird per acre on parts of the San Antonio Viejo. In spring and summer, you'll catch one or two quail at a time along the roads, dusting or stuffing their crops with grit. They'll dash for cover, perhaps to a nest or to continue courting. From April through July, from sunup until dark, there's no place on the ranch out of earshot of the cock's mating call. During years of abundance, water lots attract bobwhite coveys as well as mourning doves and white-winged doves. There, ground frequently disturbed by livestock and vehicles bursts forth in seed-producing forbs - sunflower, pigweed, ragweed, and others - given the slightest rainfall and rest.

Horses to Ride, Cattle to Cut: The San Antonio Viejo Ranch of Texas

Badlands Design and Production (2016)

ISBN 978-0-9840630-3-1 - $75.00 (hardcover)

Click to order

In the vast Wildhorse Desert of South Texas lies one of the most storied ranches in the Lone Star State, yet one of the most isolated and remote. The 150,000-acre San Antonio Viejo, carved out of borderland thornscrub and amassed from Spanish land-grant tracts over more than a century, embodies an extraordinary ecosystem and a rich human history known by few.

Alternatively stark and lush, desolate and teeming with life, the San Antonio Viejo is a landscape like no other. State Photographer of Texas Wyman Meinzer explored the ranch for three years, in all seasons and weathers, to reveal its story in images from sweeping panoramas, to astonishing wildlife shots, to illuminating moments in the lives of working cowboys and their herds.

Henry Chappell likewise weaves the ranch's complex story with a historian's attention to detail, a novelist's flair, and an outdoorsman's keen undertanding of the natural world. His essays dig deep into the geological origns of this terrain, the earliest and later peoples occupied it, and the forces of nations and famalies who struggled for it.

Horses to Ride, Cattle to Cut: The San Antonio Viejo Ranch of Texas stands as a tribute to all those whose stories have intertwined in a singular place of loyalty and legend.