our history: MARY COUTS BURNETT
Keeping Up
With Couts
By MEL W RHODES
24
Couts Family —
Of Tragedies, Lawsuits and Lockups of
Mary Couts Burnett’s Pioneering Family
Born in July of 1856 in the Antebellum South, Mary
Couts never really cared for life on the frontier. A
native of Arkansas, she arrived with her family in
North Texas in 1858. The country she grew up in
was often awash with Indian activity; scalps, live-
stock and children were taken. It must have been
a scary place for a little girl to live. But she did not
come from timid stock.
Her father and mother, James Robertson “JR”
and Martha Hardin Couts, who had married and
farmed a short time in Arkansas, crossed the Red
River into Texas at the mouth of Mill Creek in Red
River County. They’d packed their wagon with all
their worldly goods and set out to find a new life
and home on the Texas frontier. Stopping for a time
in Kaufman County, JR Couts scouted out counties
as far west as Comanche, surveying the wide-open
country on horseback, finally deciding on a spot
along the Brazos River in Palo Pinto County, 160
acres opposite the mouth of Palo Pinto Creek.
The Couts family raised cattle and horses until
forced to move on by hostile Indians. They next
alighted in Weatherford to the east, a market town
precariously perched on the western edge of the
wild frontier.
In Weatherford, JR Couts turned his hand to bank-
ing, eventually becoming president of Citizens
National Bank and one of the county’s wealthiest
citizens.
Mary, raised in Weatherford, was the first of
five daughters born to the Couts, who also had a
son who survived childhood; three other little boys
did not, dying under the age of three — one three
years old, one two years old and another one.
They all died of typhoid pneumonia in 1856 within
a few weeks of each other. The surviving son —