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

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."