Christian County - Its First Hundred Years

Christian County
Its First Hundred Years

Spokane - Highlandville and Vicinity

ONE OF

Christian County's most colorful pioneers had a background far different from the drab and uneventful existence in the hills of other southern states that led many settlers to seek new homes in the Ozark mountains. A gay and happy girlhood in her native Austria led to Katie Schetz' marriage at 22 to a young musician, William Heidie, who soon became conductor of one of the biggest musical organizations in Vienna, the nation's capital. Archduke Maximilian, sponsored by his brother, Emperor Francis Joseph of Austria, and Napoleon III of France, was then in 1864, about to embark on his ill fated attempt to capture Mexico and establish himself as emperor of a French puppet government there. Maximilian engaged the young conductor to serve as bandmaster on this expedition.

Bandmaster Heidie and his young bride arrived on the American continent with the royal party and .became a part of the gay court life in Mexico City in 1864. A warm friendship developed between Katie and her empress, Charlotte, the bride of Maximilian, a friendship that was to endure until Charlotte's death in an isolated castle near Brussels, Belgium, in the 1920's. Maximilian's Mexican reign lasted slightly less than three years. The government was already weakened by revolutions in both the north and south when the United States, at the close of the Civil War, warned Napoleon that he had violated the Monroe Doctrine by sending foreign troops onto American soil and that their presence would no longer be tolerated. The French troops were withdrawn and Maximilian was captured and executed by the revolutionists. Charlotte, who had gone to Europe to seek aid for her husband's government was said to have suffered a mental break-

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