I'll Die before I'll Run: The Story of the Great Feuds of Texas

by C.L. Sonnichsen, José Cisneros (illustrator)

The feuds raging in Texas in the nineteenth century bound in acrimony not only families but special-interest groups that, feeling intolerably wronged, sought "extralegal justice" when they believed the law would give them no satisfaction. In I’ll Die Before I’ll Run the prominent historian C. L. Sonnichsen leaves no doubt that bad blood so often turned into bloody feuds in Texas because there the folk law of the frontier was reinforced by the unwritten code of honor of the South, and because everybody in Texas went armed. Although the Regulators and Moderators warred in eastern Texas in the 1840s, the really big feuds were ignited by the Civil War and flamed until late in the century, when the Texas Rangers began to put them out. In rich circumstantial detail Sonnichsen describes the most famous of the conflagrations stretching from the "sorrowful sixties" to the "nervous nineties."

Genres: History

371 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1962

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

[Elisabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, this was an absolutely wild ride.

History books of half a century and more ago seem to provide a much clearer insight into what the West, especially in a social sense, was really like—maybe because the writers were a few generations closer to its people; but more, I think, because they had the ability to write both honestly and calmly about the often mind-bogglingly different motivations and mindsets of an earlier era, instead of putting it all through the rigid filters of modern mindsets and continually and neurotically assuring their readers that We Disapprove of All That Now.

For the most part all Sonnichsen has to do is relate the facts, as far as they are known (admitting candidly where it's impossible to know, since different sides tell different versions of the same story), and the simply stated facts are enough to make a page-turning potboiler. But he also frames it with some thoughtful passages that try to sum up some of the root causes of feuding and vigilantism—a strange and fascinating mix of Southern honor codes and the uniquely American emphasis on self-government. A key thing that I've been coming to grasp about the West is that it was not wild because of the absence of law—sheriffs and judges abound in these accounts—but because the legal machinery was often subservient to the particular code of the citizens operating it.

Comparing these Texas feuds, broadly, to the range wars of movies and fiction, one sees how the latter are often way too simplistic, probably because of a need to have a clearly-defined "good side" and "bad side"—and also a need to make the "good" side vulnerable and near-helpless for dramatic purposes—when real-life feuds were more often between two groups of people extremely similar to each other, and equally well able to handle weapons. Also that real-life shooting affrays were far less formally arranged and elegantly choreographed than they were spontaneous and extremely chaotic. But as far as individual incidents within the feuds go, the astonishing assassinations, bushwhackings, perjuries, vows of vengeance, and unlikely survivals could rival almost anything a dime novelist or screenwriter has dreamed up. The telling difference is how the action is often completely divorced from those 19th-century codes and mindsets when put on the screen or the magazine page.

Sonnichsen is a good writer, with a clean enjoyable prose style and a suitably dry sense of humor. I know I'll be revisiting this one and chewing it over as inspiration for my own fiction in future.

[Cindy Bonner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting read on 19th century feuds in Texas. Most of them were caused by cattle rustling or encroachment on a neighbor's property, or hard feelings left over from the Civil War. I live in the area of the Taylor-Sutton feud and so I found that chapter especially interesting since the place names are all familiar. The history is a little dated, and the language the writer uses is simplistic, but the book was first published in 1951, different times, different expectations. Gives a good overview, a starting point for research, but should not be relied upon entirely without fact-checking some of the data.