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Early-day
Texans and Comanches were not always trying to kill each other, it just seemed
like it.
The Republic of Texas, and later the U.S. government, did execute
a few peace treaties with the Indians, but the problem was more complicated than
something a mere signature could fix. A well-meaning chief might agree to lasting
peace, but in a culture built largely on raiding, bravery in battle and the number
of horses a man owned, not every ambitious young man in his tribe was likely to
go along with a written agreement of non-hostility. And not every Comanche headman,
either.
One Comanche who did put his sign on a piece of paper and lived
up to it was a Penateka chief named Katemoczy, who often camped
along the San Saba River in the northwest corner of what would become Mason County.
German immigrant John Meusebach worked out that treaty with the Comanches in 1846
and it held. Because of that document, German settlers in the Hill
Country, while not immune from Indian depredations, fared better than many
other frontier Texans.
As Mason County began to settle up, some held the
chief in high-enough esteem to name one of their towns in his honor, though it
was an afterthought. When settler Andrew Jackson Coots built a cabin in the area
in the latter 1870s, people started calling the community that developed around
Cootsville.
Dr. William F. Cowan and his wife moved to the area
in 1879. Whether it was the doctor’s idea or one of his two sons, the place came
to be called Katemcy
in misspelled honor of Chief Katemoczy. One of the doctor’s sons, Alfred R. Cowan,
donated land for the Katemcy
town site around 1880. Four years later, he became Katemcy’s
first post master. |
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Mason
County Texas 1907 Postal map showing Katemcy
(Above
"S" in "MASON")
Courtesy Texas General Land Office |
One
of seventeen post office towns in Mason County, Katemcy
flourished until the mid-1920s. In its peak years, it had two drug stores, two
general stores, two blacksmith shops, a barber shop, a business described as a
“chili shack,” three churches and a school with three teachers.
“We have
two churches, and preaching every Sunday,” someone from Katemcy
wrote for the Mason County News in January 1887, “but we are liable to
accidents here as elsewhere and want some good doctor [Dr. Cowan was getting up
in years and no longer practicing medicine] who will not charge unreasonable for
his services to come and make his home among us.” In addition to a doctor, the
town needed a “general merchandise business” that would “sell goods at a living
price and buy our corn, cotton and coon skins.”
Half of the letter was
taken up with a plea for improved transportation.
“We want,” the writer
continued, “and will have a public road to Mason
or move our trade to Brady or
Brownwood.”
In fact,
on the day this correspondent put words to paper, January 14, the able bodied
men of the community had worked on the road from Katemcy
to Mason, a distance
of twelve miles. Still, more improvements were needed. (This was long before pavement,
of course.) The letter writer said a petition would be presented to the county
commissioner’s court “for a public road of the third class and we want to see
Mason co-operate with us.”
Indeed, the writer continued, Mason
needed a good road as badly as Katemcy.
Then the writer made his most prescient point of all: “If we do not get the roads
now while the country is new, it will cost money to get them later....”
For
a time, the forerunner of Highway 87 from San
Antonio to San
Angelo passed through Katemcy,
bringing with it just enough out-of-town business to keep the economy alive. But
when state engineers relocated the highway about a mile to the west, the impact
on Katemcy proved severe
and the town began a slow decline to just shy of ghost-town status.
One
thing that has lasted, however, is a historical marker put up in 1967 at the site
of what for years had been the smallest piece of state-owned land in Texas.
Intended for use as a mini-state park, the tract eventually went back to private
ownership. Katemcy, meanwhile,
has been virtually forgotten along with an Indian chief who preferred peace to
war.
© Mike
Cox - February 20, 2013 column
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