Pat Dunn ranched on Padre Island for 50 years

(This column is combined from three columns that originally ran in the Caller-Times on Sept. 28, Oct. 5, and Oct. 12, 2005.)

Patrick F. Dunn’s domain was an island empire of sand, cattle and 112 miles of Gulf beaches. For more than half a century, from 1879 until 1929, he developed Padre Island into a unique cattle ranch. His cattle fed on sedge grass, waded in the surf and knelt to drink from seep tanks dug in the sand. Dunn’s ranch house and corrals were made of bone-white driftwood and his ranch hands became dedicated beachcombers.

Dunn received a letter from someone in England whose name was followed by several titles. In his reply Dunn added D.P.I. after his name, which he said stood for “Duke of Padre Island.”

Dunn grew up on a farm five miles from Corpus Christi on the way to Nuecestown. His father Thomas died when Pat was seven, during the Civil War. “We had just loaded our wagon with cotton when my father passed on. My mother (Catherine Hickey Dunn) decided to haul the cotton to Brownsville herself. She took me along. We never got further than Santa Rosa when the war ended.”

In the drought year of 1879, when Pat was 21, he moved the family cattle to Padre Island, where he had acquired grazing rights. He called the island the greatest cattle ranch in the world.

Dunn wasn’t the first to graze cattle on the island. Padre Nicolas Balli and his nephew ran cattle on the south end of the island from 1806 to 1844. Then came John Singer, whose brother Merritt invented the sewing machine, who built his own ranch. The Singer family departed at the beginning of the Civil War.  

In 1880, Dunn bought 400 cows at $8 a head from D.C. Rachal at White Point. Dunn’s hands trailed the cattle from White Point to Flour Bluff, where they forded the Laguna Madre near Pita Island. In the next few years Dunn established what he called “El Rancho de Don Patricio,” one of the most unusual ranches in the world. It was his private island, off-limits to anyone without his written permission to go on it.

Dunn built four stations with corrals and holding pens a day’s ride apart down the island. Number one was Owl’s Mott, two was called Novillo station, three was at Black Hill, and four was at Green Hill. During roundups Dunn’s hands moved cattle up from the southern end of the island. They used traps and cutting chutes to reduce the need of roping, which Dunn thought cruel.

The island cattle grew fat from sedge grass supplemented by sand crabs and fish washed up on the beach. Their hides showed tar blotches from lying on the beaches. They drank from trench-like water tanks dug down in the sand. The tanks were shored up with ship hatch covers and salvaged lumber. The cattle would kneel to drink.

In 1884 Dunn married Clara Jones, a widow, and adopted her daughter. The Dunns moved down the island to the old Curry Settlement. They had a small house at the Settlement; some of the Curry family members still lived there. In 1890, Dunn moved the family to Corpus Christi and built a spacious home on South Broadway. But Dunn spent his days on the island, except when he served in the Legislature and lived in Austin during legislative sessions.

In 1907 Dunn built a two-story house facing east on Packery Channel. The unpainted house was built of driftwood and furnished with door hinges from ship refrigerators, chairs from a wrecked steamer; a wooden cask with Japanese letters served as a washbasin, and whisky barrels were used to catch rainwater.

Dunn said the house was two-story because the lumber that washed up was too long and he didn’t have a saw to cut it. “I just set the timbers upright and they were high enough for a two-story house. If I had had a saw, I would have built a one-story house.”

Some of Dunn’s tall tales may have been partly true. He said that one Christmas one of his hands picked up oranges and lemons that had washed up on the beach. Dunn sent him back to look for a coconut. “He went down to the beach and came back a few minutes later with some coconuts. We had some of the finest ambrosia you ever tasted.” Dunn said that at another time they were craving sausage and, as if by order, they found a sausage grinder on the beach. They rounded up a wild pig and made pork sausage with sage.

After the 1916 hurricane destroyed the two-story ranch house on Packery Channel, Dunn built a one-story house a mile and a half away. He didn’t live there long. In 1926, he sold El Rancho de Don Patricio to Col. Sam Robertson, who planned to develop the island into a tourist resort, envisioning another Miami Beach. Dunn retained grazing rights for his cattle and mineral rights. Dunn moved into town and stayed at the Nueces Hotel.

Col. Robertson built the Don Patricio Causeway, which opened up the island to visitors, but the Depression undermined his great plans for the island.

Pat Dunn regretted selling out. It wasn’t the livelihood that he missed but the way of life, the sense of being apart from the world. He had possessed Padre Island more completely, more profoundly, than anyone else in the long history of the island. It was his island ranch, his secluded paradise, and he lost it. Gone forever.

“If the Lord would give me back the island,” he said, “and wash out a channel in Corpus Christi Pass 30 feet deep, and put devil fish and other monsters in it to keep out the tourists, I’d be satisfied.” He told a reporter, “I want to find another island, one no one can reach.”

Patrick F. Dunn, the Duke of Padre Island, died of a heart attack on March 25, 1937, in his room at the Nueces Hotel. He was 79.