Ten Texas Feuds

Historians of the Frontier and American West

by C.L. Sonnichsen, Dale L. Walker (Foreword)

For twenty years, grassroots historian C. L. Sonnichsen went door to door through the backcountry of east and south-central Texas to coax tales from reluctant informants and peruse county documents on the colorful feuds that bloodied the state's early history. From these human explosions emerged legendary gangs such as the Regulators, Moderators, Hoodoos, Heel Flies, and Boots. Personal vengeance righted intolerable wrongs and settled unbearable grievances. Sonnichsen notes, "The men who fought these battles were mostly pretty good people," but they harshly stamped their otherwise normal lives with bloody vengeance. Dale L. Walker, Sonnichsen's biographer, sketches the author's life, historical craft, and publishing and teaching career.

Genres: History

260 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2000

About the author

CHARLES LELAND SONNICHSEN
Ph.D. (in English Literature, 1931) at Harvard University

Taught at University at Texas in El Paso for 41 years.

You may read more about this author at
http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/on...

Reviews

[Christine Jeffords · Rating 5 out of 5]

"A summer cold," sings an old TV ad, "is a different animal, an ugly animal..." So is a Texas feud. In fact, to most of us a "feud" probably means hillbillies sniping at each other from the brush, but to Texans it can mean conflicts that elsewhere would be called range wars, vigilante actions, ethnic friction, political or economic rivalry, and, of course, family disagreements. In Texas, they're all feuds. Beginning with the Regulator-Moderator feud (the vigilante kind), which occurred in the early 1840's and was the first of the great Texas feuds, Sonnichsen goes on to examine the El Paso Salt War (both ethnic and economic), a feud between Germans (some of them ranchers) and "Americans" (ditto), a Reconstruction-era feud that smacked of both politics and vigilantism, and seven others, including one that climaxed in the early 20th Century. He shows how and why each one started and introduces you to the principal people involved, and explains how, more than once, the combatants got off without any major trouble from the law. If you like this book, you should also read the same author's "I'll Die Before I'll Run," which mentions some of the same feuds but goes into detail on other ones that the first doesn't.

[Fredrick Danysh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not to be outdone by Kentucky or Tennessee, Texas has had numerous bloody feuds, the Taylor-Sutton being one of the most famous.

[Francisco · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first book in English.