In the nineteenth century, Texas’s advancing western frontier was the site of one of America’s longest conflicts between white settlers and native peoples. The Texas Hill Country functioned as a kind of borderland within the larger borderland of Texas itself, a vast and fluid area where, during the Civil War, the slaveholding South and the nominally free-labor West collided. As in many borderlands, Nicholas Roland argues, the Hill Country was marked by violence, as one set of peoples, states, and systems eventually displaced others.

In this painstakingly researched book, Roland analyzes patterns of violence in the Texas Hill Country to examine the cultural and political priorities of white settlers and their interaction with the century-defining process of national integration and state-building in the Civil War era. He traces the role of violence in the region from the eve of the Civil War, through secession and the Indian wars, and into Reconstruction. Revealing a bitter history of warfare, criminality, divided communities, political violence, vengeance killings, and economic struggle, Roland positions the Texas Hill Country as emblematic of the Southwest of its time.

Introduction
Chapter One. The Texas Hill Country on the Eve of the Civil War
Chapter Two. The Hill Country in Antebellum Politics and the Secession Crisis
Chapter Three. From Secession to the Nueces River
Chapter Four. Indians, Inflation, and Bushwhackers
Chapter Five. Civil War and Political Violence
Chapter Six. Reconciliation and the Incorporation of the Texas Frontier
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Appendix A. Indian Raiding Deaths during the Civil War
Appendix B. Casualties of Civil War Violence, 1862–1865
Appendix C. Indian Raiding Deaths after the Civil War
Notes
Index