Colorado County , Texas, has a troubled past. The gun violence that wracked the county for decades had its immediate roots in the turmoil of the Reconstruction era. This situation was compounded by the fact that Colorado County is truly where the Old South meshed with the Old West since the physical geography of the county enabled both a slave-based plantation culture and, subsequently, large-scale cattle operations. The rapid rise of the latter, which also occurred during the Reconstruction era, created fresh sources of wealth, power, and influence. This, in turn, became a new arena for friction and bloodshed: in cinematic terms, a fusion, as it were, of D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation and Howard Hawk’s Red River.
Two family names have come to be associated with the murder and mayhem that plagued the county for decades after the end of the Civil War: the Townsends and the Staffords. Their stories, however, cannot be separated from the larger picture that included habituation of generations of young men to violence and the evolution of a code of honor that tolerated and encouraged private justice. In I’ll Die Before I Run, C.L. Sonnichsen wrote, “In Texas the folk law of the frontier was reinforced by the unwritten laws of the South and produced a habit of self-redress more deeply ingrained perhaps, than anywhere else in the country. The grievances and abuses of the bad days after the Civil War gave extraordinary scope for the application of the old ways and dealing justice.” The troubles in Colorado County offer an almost perfect case study for Sonnichsen’s observation.
There was, however, an important corollary to the Southern code of family honor strongly evident in the troubles in Colorado County, namely the determination to achieve status on the part of prominent families and the resolve to hold on to it, once obtained, by whatever means necessary. Elected office was one of the paths to status since political power often translated into monetary gain and social prestige. The sheriff’s office, especially, was a very powerful institution in nineteenth century Texas, with little outside control to check excesses. Control of the sheriff’s office, therefore, often became a focal point of conflict.
In those areas that had large black populations, such as Colorado County, the key to obtaining and holding on to political power for thirty years after the South’s defeat was the black vote, a volatile issue that fueled many of the fabled Texas feuds of the times, such as The Jayhawk/Woodpecker feud in neighboring Ft Bend County. But although they all emerged from the same fire, so to speak, each grew into something distinctive.
This book neither catalogs nor examines all the violence of the period; rather, it concentrates on those individual acts of private justice associated with the Stafford and Townsend families. During the same time frame the county also experienced a string of mob-inspired lynchings; of communal eruptions of white on black violence that continued to plague the county for decades. These are mentioned in the course of the narrative and form a disturbing background to the primary focus of the book.
The Colorado County story represent the last of the major Texas feuds that has not received book length treatment, at least, book length treatment that aspires to be unbiased. This then, is the tale of the Staffords and Townsend families, and how their aspirations for wealth and status during Reconstruction (and thereafter) brought them into conflict with one another, and then, in the case of the Townsends, brought them into conflict with themselves.
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