The Johnson-Sims Feud: Romeo and Juliet, West Texas Style (review)

Prolific western historian Bill O’Neal’s latest work chronicles the events of a bloody two-and-a-half year family feud in West Texas ranch country and paints a vivid picture of the society that birthed what he terms the last blood feud in Texas. Returning to a story he first heard while researching The Bloody Legacy of Pink Higgins: A Half-Century of Violence in Texas (Eakin Press, 1999), O’Neal explores the fighting between the Johnson and Sims families, which took place between 1916 and 1918, putting it in the context of earlier Texas feuds such as Regulator- Moderator War (1840–44), the Hoo Doo War (1874–1902), and the Jaybird- Woodpecker War (1889). According to the author, the nineteenth-century style gunfighting continued into the twentieth century in Scurry County because “West Texans continued to embrace the values and attitudes of the frontier” and could not control the “violent impulses of the pioneers.”(9)

O’Neal uses exhaustive genealogical research to flesh out the lives of the Johnson and Sims families, both of whom settled vast ranches in Scurry and Kent Counties. Borrowing from the work of historian T. R. Fehrenbach, he describes these “pioneers” in romantic terms as men irresistibly pulled to new lands and who created a distinctive way of life as they tamed the frontier. This glorification of the rancher and the emphasis on a “Wild” West filled with well-armed gunslingers might grate on historians who favor a more nuanced view.

Trouble came for the family patriarchs, Billy Johnson and Dave Sims, after their children Gladys Johnson, who was fourteen at the time, and Ed Sims married in 1905. Their tumultuous relationship was marked by infidelity on both sides, and their subsequent contentious divorce in 1916 embittered both families and set the stage for bloodshed. Battling over custody rights of their two daughters, Gladys Johnson Sims shot, but failed to kill, her ex-husband in the middle of busy downtown Snyder. Her brother Sidney, witnessing her attempt, grabbed a shotgun and finished Ed off. This murder incited a lengthy feud that claimed the lives of three more people and strained the local justice system.

Combining the use of newspaper accounts and court documents with personal interviews, O’Neal painstakingly outlines the killings and gives the reader a sense of place. He devotes several pages each to the early history of towns like Post, Clairemont, and Snyder, paying close attention to both the architecture and the people who built their lives there. At times, however, his story gets sidelined when he includes interesting, yet irrelevant, details. The author gives extensive backgrounds on even the most peripheral participants in the saga. This penchant for minutiae is especially evident in the last chapter entitled “Aftermath and Redemption.” For example, he devotes an entire paragraph to movie star Richard Arlen, who happened to share a train ride with the victim’s daughter years after the events in question. Indeed, some of the lengthy dénouement of the book, which provides exhaustive postscripts about each Johnson and Sims clan member, reads more like a family history than a work of scholarship.

For the most part, however, his meticulous research adds depth to the history of the people and places of West Texas. His descriptions are aided by the extensive illustrations included in the book. These photographs of both the main players and also the locations they inhabited humanize a story that might otherwise read too much like an overwrought soap opera. Overall, the work provides both a readable guide to anyone interested in the lives of early West Texas cattle ranchers and an absorbing tale of passion, violence, and retribution.