No Hope for Heaven, No Fear of Hell: The Stafford-Townsend Feud of Colorado County, 1871–1911. The Texas Local Series. By James C. Kearney, Bill Stein, and James Smallwood

Abstract

This book’s main title is taken from the headstone of a former Columbus, Texas, city marshal—obviously an atheist—who checked on his stone, got a shave, put on a new suit, and chloroformed himself. But what this zany epitaph has to do with the feud described in the book is mysterious, the featured mode of violent death being homicide, not suicide. The feud in question dates to 1871 when a Townsend was killed by a posse seeking his arrest. The family had the shooter brought to court, but the testimony of Robert Stafford got him exonerated. Over the next two decades resentments between the two clans simmered. Robert Stafford became a wealthy cattle king, “one of the largest, if not the largest, stockman in Texas” (p. 46). For their part, the Townsends gained political control of Colorado County by capturing the locally powerful sheriff’s office. By 1890 Robert Stafford sought to break the Townsend hold on the sheriff’s office apparently to protect his son, a violent ne’er-do-well, from prosecution. But in July 1890 two members of the extended Townsend clan gunned down both Robert and his brother John. The Staffords, their leader gone, retired from the fray, but the feud continued as a quarrel among Townsend factions, particularly, but not exclusively, between the Hope and Reece families. By then youthful intermarriages had so mixed bloodlines that, as one frantic mother discovered, her two sons were fighting on opposite sides in a lethal skirmish in downtown Columbus.