DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it — and some stories, once the marker puts them into words, don't need a single thing added to hit you square in the chest. Christmas Eve, 1876, out on the Texas Hill Country range in what is now Kimble County. A sixteen-year-old boy named Isaac Kountz was herding sheep.
Herding sheep for his father, Dr. E. K.
Kountz, on a day when most folks were thinking about the next morning's celebration. Isaac was thinking about the flock. And then the Indians came.
Right there on that spot — the very spot this marker stands — Isaac Kountz was killed. Christmas Eve. Sixteen years old.
Now, his brother Sebastian was out there too. Sebastian was eleven, and somehow — don't ask the marker to explain how, because it doesn't, and maybe that's the mercy of it — Sebastian escaped. Two boys.
One came home. In the aftermath, a posse and Texas Rangers took up the chase and pushed the Indians all the way to the Guadalupe River. Isaac Kountz was buried in Junction Cemetery.
The marker went up in 1967, ninety-one years later, but the place remembered long before anybody put a word to stone. Some spots just hold what happened to them. This is one of those spots.
What the marker says
Killed on this spot by Indians on Christmas Eve, 1876. He was 16 years old, and herding sheep for his father, Dr. E. K. Kountz. A brother, Sebastian, age 11, escaped. a posse and Texas Rangers chased the Indians to the Guadalupe River. Young Kountz was buried in Junction Cemetery. (1967)