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Rath City was a frontier town which existed for less than five years and is presently a ghost town. The town was located on the Double Mountain Fork of the Brazos River fourteen miles northwest of Hamlin in southern Stonewall County, Texas, United States.
[edit] History
The town was founded in 1876. Its original establishment was meant to capitalize on the buffalo trade and it was Stonewall County's first settlement. In 1877 the town housed a store, two saloons, a dance hall, and a few tents and dugouts. The towns namesake was Charles Rath whose store, built in 1875, was the structure the village grew around. A declining buffalo population ended the settlement and it was abandoned in 1880.[1]
[edit] Rath City and Native Americans
In Feb. 1877, after buffalo hunter Marshall Sewell was killed by Native Americans, Rath City became a rallying point for over 300 frontiersmen. A group of 45 men left Rath City in pursuit of a Comanche war party led by Black Horse, in a campaign known as the Buffalo Hunters' War or Staked Plains War. The men pursued the Comanche to a site in present-day Lubbock. A battle ensued on March 18, 1877 at Yellow House Canyon, its results were inconclusive. The hunters returned to Rath City and thus ended one of the last Indian campaigns on the southern plains.[2]
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