said, “Oh! Well, he’s not who I thought he was.” The
man then left. Mary Couts- Barradel was suddenly a
young widow. But one moves on.
“She liked to go into Fort Worth and party,”
Murdock said. “They [the Couts] were a little more
well-to-do [by that time]. That’s where she met and
married Burk Burnett.”
In her mid-30s, Mary married Samuel Burk Burnett
in 1892 in Weatherford, the couple afterwards settling
in Fort Worth. It’s probably safe to say Mary learned to
rue the day she hitched up with the rugged rancher.
Samuel Burk Burnett (1849-1922) came to Texas with
his family as a boy in the late 1850s. Jerry and Nancy
Burnett built their home in Denton County on the
banks of Denton Creek. Burk learned the ins-and-outs
of the cattle business watching his father carve out his
spread over the course of a decade. He received scant
schooling, but what he lacked in formal education he
more than made up for in common sense and practical
knowledge, becoming one of the wealthiest ranchers in
the Lone Star State. In 1871, he began building one of
the largest cattle empires in the state — the Four Sixes
Ranch (6666). He eventually owned ranches in not
only Texas but Oklahoma and Mexico as well, running
upwards of 20,000 head of cattle under the 6666
brand. Burk Burnett, a robust individualist, was a self-
made man of means by the time he met Mary.
Mary Couts (Barradel) was wife number two for
Burnett. He’d married Ruth B. Lloyd in 1869 and had
fathered three children. The marriage ended in divorce,
but two of the Burnett children lived to adulthood —
daughter Ann and son Thomas L. Decades later after
Mary’s marriage to Burk Burnett, Thomas’s daughter,
Burk’s granddaughter, would become a problem for
Mary.
It seems Burk Burnett doted on young Anne Valliant
Burnett, and Mary, the step-grandmother, resented the
uncommonly close relationship. Tragedy struck again
when, in 1917, Mary and Burk’s only son, Samuel Burk
Burnett Jr., died in their Fort Worth home. “I think he
died on his 21st birthday, or something; it was tragic.
I think she pretty much fell apart after that,” said
Murdock.
By 1920, Mary’s marriage had deteriorated to
the point that she was confiding in friends that her
husband planned to kill her. As might be expected,
when this got back to Burk, the wealthy and powerful
pillar of the community had her declared insane and
confined to a house in Weatherford. “And from what I
understand, he hired people to keep her there and take
care of her,” Murdock explained. “He had people hired
to go to the store, cook for her, take care of her. She
wasn’t allowed out. And it was basically just down the
street [Lamar] from our house, where her sister lived
at the time. So I’m hoping her sister went to see her;
I’m hoping somebody went to see her. I don’t know.”
(Murdock currently lives in the house Mary’s sister
Susan lived in during the period of Mary’s confine-
ment.)
Mary remained under “house arrest” until the day
Samuel Burnett