Caldwell County MO Archives History .....KAUTZ FAMILY IN CALDWELL COUNTY 
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File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by:
Karen Walker khw4@yahoo.com September 1, 2008, 4:49 pm

THE KAUTZ FAMILY IN CALDWELL COUNTY
	Narrator:  Worth Kautz of Wichita, Kansas

     The Jacob Kautz family came to Caldwell County in 1859 from Illinois to 
which they had come from Indiana.  They settled in what was known as Grand 
River township now New York township in the Pleasant Ridge district.  They 
came in a slow ox-wagon.  The settlers who came here in the fifties had a much 
harder time than those who came in the sixties, for every year of pioneering 
advanced conditions of living in a new country.  There were three sons; 
George, Ross and Worth; six daughters; Laura (Dodge), Emily (Lemon), Hannah 
(Lambert), Margaret (Noel), Annetta (Houghton), and Mollie (Spivey).
     When they came here they all lived in a covered wagon till the house was 
finished; and since there was not yet sleeping room inside for the boys, they 
slept that winter out doors in the covered wagon.  In those days of 1859-60, 
the Kautz house has been mentioned by old-timers as one of two houses to be 
seen for twelve miles south of Hamilton.
     When the Civil War was about to break out and it became likely that the 
oldest boy George would be expected to go to war, he went back to Illinois to 
enlist with boys whom he had known before they moved to Missouri.
     Those first few years were hard ones.  They had to find the right crops 
for the new soil and they had to subdue the soil.  They had to provide for the 
family needs and they had very little money to spend.  They rarely ate store 
victuals for most of their food came off the place.  They had little white 
bread mostly corn-bread.  Worth was the youngest son and he went with his 
mother on her trips to gather berries (gooseberries, strawberries, 
blackberries, elderberries); to gather herbs for medicine since doctors were 
costly and far away.  He used to hunt bee trees for by the old law of the land 
the finder of a bee tree had the honey, no matter where the tree.  He and his 
father and brothers shot or trapped wild game and kept them for winter meat.  
He told of hunting deer with Al Pemberton of the neighborhood.
     The Kautz and the Houghton family intermarried.  Annetta Kautz married 
Ira Houghton.  Mary Houghton married George Kautz and Sophia Houghton married 
Ross Kautz.
     Interviewed  November 1933.


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