At a graveside ceremony in South Texas in the spring of 1925, two hundred Mexican-American cowboys, all mounted on quarter horses bearing the running W brand of the King Ranch, formed a single column behind the coffin of the woman they had come to bury. Some had ridden for two days across open brush country to be there. Each man walked his horse in a slow circle around her grave, hat held to his chest, and moved on. When the last had finished, they remounted and rode back into the country they had come from. The woman they had ridden to honor was named Henrietta Maria Chamberlain King. She had never ridden a horse herself.
Richard King had died at the Menger Hotel in San Antonio on April 14, 1885. He had been one of the most famous cattlemen in the American Southwest. The ranch he had built up over the previous thirty-two years on the brush country of South Texas was, at the moment of his death, one of the largest privately owned working cattle operations in the United States. The obituaries the next week...

I am so with you on this hearing. All of us have experienced the loss of family and friends in our circles, and what we’re witnessing is more political theater than real accountability. I see nothing coming out of this.