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16. Katy Prairie
- Texas A&M University Press
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325 When settlers first crossed “the Prairie,” they found high-standing grasses of bluestem, switchgrass, yellow Indian grass, and eastern grama in a gentle topography of knolls and natural ponds. Legend has it the ponds were wallowed by buffaloes, the great herds once covering the country side. Near where the town of Katy would come to be, high stands of cane covered the banks of Cane Creek on its way to Buffalo Bayou. Rainwater runoff was so slow that early ranching families said the prairie would “bog a snipe down if he was standing on a saddle blanket.”1 Covering over a thousand square miles, the Prairie was bordered to the north by pineywoods from Tomball to Prairie View and to the west by hardwood bottoms of the Brazos River. The south boundary went as far as a meander in the Brazos River at Fulshear Plantation, then west to Bovine Bend, later called Wallis, and once extended to the east to Buffalo and Brays Bayous. It was just “the Prairie” at first, then Houston Prairie, and as communities were established on either side of Cypress Creek, locally it became Hockley-Cypress and Katy-Brookshire Prairies. Finally it was just Katy Prairie, and, according to TPWD biologist David Lobpries, it was once the densest inland wetlands in Texas.2 Hockley-Cypress Prairie In the early 1850s Captain John W. Warren’s stagecoach brought Houston sportsmen to Houseville, later Hockley. Within only a few years wagon wheel ruts were traversed by iron and steel tracks of the Houston and Texas Central Railway. Warren, a former gamekeeper in his native England, opened the Warren Hotel for railroad men and traveling sportsmen. There, he leased hunting dogs katy prairie chapter 16 326 NORTH, WEST, AND EAST and horses and buggies. Evening meals at the boarding house were supplied by the venison, ducks, prairie-chickens, plovers, and snipes harvested on trips afield.3 Twelve-year old-George Ellis lived in the Warren Hotel in 1857 and later became Warren’s son-in-law, a Hockley constable, and proprietor of Hockley Sportsman’s Clubhouse. Opened in the 1880s, Ellis’s “fine hunting-grounds” and Sportsman’s Clubhouse were on the agenda of the sporting wealthy from Houston , Galveston, and Dallas. Ellis once entertained the Earl of Aylesford on a snipe shoot, a railroad company placing a private rail car at his disposal. Hockley was a small town with a big reputation, earning mention in 1883 in Charles Hallock’s prestigious Sportsman’s Directory to the Principal Resorts for Game and Fish in North America.4 Hockley Sportsman’s Clubhouse was a regular destination for the Houston Gun Club. Its members made weekend excursions for pigeon shoots, waterfowl, and the popular prize hunts in which teams competed for the highest kill of wild birds using a point system assigned to different bird species. On one prize hunt, Houston Gun Club and their hosts netted nearly one thousand birds. George Ellis later became sheriff of Harris County and moved to Houston, and he continued to hunt ducks south of town at Morgan’s Point.5 The prairie corridor northwest of Houston was home to several other private clubs in the 1800s, including Hockley’s Lone Star Gun Club, Cypress Gun Club, Cypress Gun and Rifle Club, and the Cypress Top Gun Club in the 1890s. To the southwest, the town of Katy was not yet on any Texas map.6 Katy-Brookshire Prairie Katy, originally called Cane Island, in the 1890s was a small depot town with a little over a hundred residents and two hotels along the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad line. On the route between Galveston and Dallas, Katy became headquarters for sportsmen who arrived on the Katy Flyer to hunt along the banks of Cypress Creek. Looking out the train window at the turn of the century, they saw rice crops begin to replace prairie wetlands and native grasses and watched sweeping prairie fires that still burned in the fall.7 Three generations of Jordan men—Hank, Chester, and Lyle—farmed the Katy Prairie beginning in 1913. Coming from Oklahoma, the Jordans found only a few scattered rice farms, those of the Woods, Longenbaugh, and Stockdick families. Lyle Jordan says, “When Dad came there it was nothing but sod grass, red wolf, buffalo wallows, prairie-chickens, and ducks.”8 Born in 1935, Lyle is a bridge between the Katy Prairie of the past and what it is today. He says that between Katy and downtown...