Texas being Texas, the state also has some of the largest ranches in the world. No trace remains of White’s ranch, but Texas today has more ranches and more cattle than any other state. Following the Texas Revolution, White and his cowhands drove cattle to buyers in New Orleans, more than 300 miles to the east. White not only pioneered cattle-raising in Southeast Texas, he developed what would stand for many years as the industry’s prime business model-trailing cattle from the ranch where they were raised to market. One visitor to White’s ranch in the 1840s described the stock as “pure Spanish breed” (longhorns). From an initial stock of only a dozen cattle, White grew his herd to some 10,000 head. James Taylor LaBlanc-a Louisianan who Texanized his last name to White-founded the first Anglo-owned cattle ranch in Texas in 1828 near Anahuac in present-day Chambers County. With the closing of the missions, private ranching developed as Texas attracted more settlers. Three decades later, Texas still a Spanish province, a ranch connected to one of the Goliad missions had 50,000 head of cattle. By 1756, the fortress-like ranch had 700 head of cattle, nearly 2,000 sheep, and a remuda of more than 100 horses. Named Rancho de las Cabras (Ranch of the Goats), the new ranch did not represent any desire for expansion or efficiency on the part of the Spanish friars, but came as a response to complaints from San Antonio residents who grew tired of mission cattle trampling their crops. Spanish ranchos along the Rio Grande and stock-raising operations along the San Antonio and Guadalupe rivers, which supplied beef to the missions in San Antonio and Goliad, constituted the beginning of the American cattle industry.Īlso in the early 1750s, one of the San Antonio missions, San Francisco de la Espada, established a ranch about 30 miles away near present-day Floresville in Wilson County. Blas Maria de la Garza Falcon established the Rancho Carnestolendas in 1752 on the Rio Grande where the future town of Rio Grande City would rise nearly a century later. Ranching already had a strong foothold in Texas even before Perez began raising stock along the Medina. One of the oldest ranches in Texas, the land Perez described that long ago summer day would stay in the same family well into the 1990s. Perez acquired his first league in 1794 and the other four in 1808. On these pasture lands there is some large stock both branded and unbranded, which I consider part of the property.” The veteran Indian fighter also owned “all the horses and mules marked with my brand. “On this ,” the will further recorded, “there is a stone house and wooden corrals. A Spanish unit of measurement, a league amounted to 4,428.4 acres. Manuel María de Salcedo for his service in the Spanish military. Perez possessed four leagues of land on one side of the river and another league on the opposite side awarded to him by Gov. The document the 59-year-old Perez signed included a declaration that he owned a substantial amount of property along the Medina River in what is now southern Bexar County.Ĭol. On July 16, 1820, Canary Island immigrant Juan Ignacio Perez sat before the proper officials in the Spanish city of San Antonio de Bexar and executed his last will and testament.
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