The shot came from behind, close enough that the powder burned. John Wesley Hardin had been leaning over a dice table in the Acme Saloon in El Paso, his last words still hanging in the smoky air—”four sixes to beat”—when John Selman Sr. , a 56-year-old former outlaw turned lawman, stepped through the door, walked up behind him, and put a bullet through his head. Hardin crumpled to the floor, and Selman fired three more times into the fallen man.

That was how the most notorious gunman of the Texas frontier died on the night of August 19, 1895, at the age of 42. But the path that led him to that saloon floor had been long, violent, and tangled with contradiction, stretching back to a boyhood in the piney woods of East Texas. John Wesley Hardin was born in 1853 near Bonham, Texas, the second surviving son among ten children. His father, James Gibson Hardin, was a Methodist preacher who gave his son the name of the movement’s founder; his mother, Mary Elizabeth Dixon, he later described in his autobiography as blonde, highly educated, and charitable by nature.

The family moved in 1859 to Sumpter in Trinity County, where the elder Hardin established and taught at the school his children attended. When the Civil War broke out, he served as a captain in the Confederate army, and in 1862, at the age of nine, young John tried to run away from home to join him in the fight. He did not get far. The family had political connections reaching back to North Carolina—a relative named Colonel Joseph Hardin had served in Congress, and the family tree included Congressman Benjamin Hardin and a Revolutionary War colonel from Virginia.

But those distinguished roots did little to steady the boy. In 1867, while studying at his father’s school, Hardin was accused by a fellow student named Charles Slater of having scrawled offensive drawings on the schoolhouse wall targeting a girl in their class. Hardin denied it and said Slater was the real culprit. The argument escalated until Slater attacked him with a knife.

Hardin, defending himself, turned the weapon on his attacker and nearly killed him. He was almost expelled. In November 1868, when he was fifteen, Hardin accepted a wrestling challenge from a former slave of his uncle, a man named Mage—Major Holshousen—and won. According to Hardin’s own account, Mage ambushed him the next day, shouting and swinging a stick.

Hardin drew his pistol and fired five times. He wrote that he then rode for help for the wounded man, but Mage died three days later. His father, Hardin claimed, believed the boy would not get a fair trial in the Union-occupied state, where more than a third of the police were former slaves, and ordered him to go into hiding. Within weeks, the authorities located him and sent three Union soldiers to make the arrest.

Ignoring the warnings of his older brother Joseph, Hardin confronted his pursuers at a creek crossing. He claimed he shot two white men with a rifle and killed a Black man with his pistol. The bodies, he said, were hidden by locals in a creek bed about a hundred yards from the ambush site. By the fall of 1868, Hardin was boasting that he had killed four men and taken only a wound to his arm.

Knowing that going home meant certain arrest, the teenage fugitive fell in with a man named Frank Polk in the Pisgah area of Navarro County, Texas. Polk had already killed a man named Tom Brady and had drawn the attention of soldiers sent from Corsicana. Hardin slipped away, but the soldiers captured Polk and jailed him. During his time in Pisgah, Hardin briefly took up work as a schoolteacher.

He claimed he shot a man in the eye to win a bottle of whiskey in a bet. He also told a story about encountering a group of soldiers with his cousin, S. Dixon, and maintaining that both of them killed a man in that fight. There were further claims that Hardin killed a Black man in Leon County.

On January 5, 1870, in Towash Hill, Texas, Hardin was playing cards against a man named Benjamin Bradley. Hardin won nearly every round, and Bradley grew furious, threatening to cut out Hardin’s liver if he won again. Bradley drew a knife and a pistol. Hardin said he was unarmed and asked to leave, but later that night Bradley came looking for him.

Bradley fired a shot and missed. Hardin drew both pistols and fired. One bullet struck Bradley in the head, the other in the chest. Dozens of witnesses watched the fight.

The holsters for Hardin’s pistols were sewn into his vest, with the grips pointing inward across his chest; he crossed his arms to draw, a technique he said was the fastest and one he practiced daily. He eventually admitted to killing two men in Hill County. After Bradley’s death, he claimed that when a group of fifteen men pursued him, he captured two of them, took a rifle, two pistols, a shotgun, and two derringers from the prisoners, then ordered them to rejoin the rest of the party at “Jim Bigs’” and wait for him there. “I reckon they’re still waiting for me,” he said.

Later that month, on January 20, at Horn Hill in Limestone County, he claimed he killed a man in a shootout after a quarrel at a circus. About a week later, in the neighboring town of Kosse, he was walking a woman home when her pimp confronted them and demanded money. Hardin threw the money on the ground, and as the would-be robber bent to collect it, shot him dead. In January 1871, Hardin found himself under arrest, charged with the murder of Linn John Hoffman, the city marshal of Waco, Texas.

He denied any involvement. He was held in a wooden jail in Marshall, Texas, awaiting transfer to Waco for trial. While locked up, he managed to obtain a pistol from another prisoner. Two Texas state policemen, Captain Edward T.

Stakes and an officer named Jim Smalley, were assigned to escort him. According to Hardin’s account, the journey was unusual: he was tied to a saddleness horse, and during a rest stop, he seized his chance when Stakes went to gather feed for the horses. He was left alone with Smalley, who began taunting him and beating the seventeen-year-old prisoner with his pistol butt. Hardin pretended to cry and curled up against the flank of his horse.

Hidden behind the animal, he drew the pistol and shot Smalley dead, then used the horse to escape. Fleeing, he said, he encountered three men named Smith, Jones, and Davis. They initially captured him, but in Bell County, Texas, the three got drunk and neglected their guard. Exploiting their carelessness, Hardin claimed he killed all three with their own firearms and escaped again.

Historical records, including a Texas historical marker, indicate that Hardin sought refuge in the Pilgrim area of Texas during the 1870s. After the Bell County events, he found shelter with relatives, the Clements family, in Gonzales in south Texas. On their suggestion, he took work as a cowboy driving cattle to Kansas, hoping to lose his pursuers in the vast open country beyond Texas. In February 1871, while the herd was being gathered for the trip, a freedman named Bob King tried to cut a cow from the herd.

King ignored Hardin’s instructions and paid the price when Hardin struck him with his pistol. During the same month, Hardin injured three Mexicans in a quarrel over a game of three-card monte: he pistol-whipped one, shot a second in the arm, and hit a third in the lung. That summer, driving cattle up the Chisholm Trail to Abilene, Kansas, Hardin reportedly clashed with Mexican vaqueros and cattle rustlers. Near the end of the drive, tensions boiled over when a Mexican herd approached from behind, making it difficult to keep the two herds apart.

Hardin exchanged words with the man in charge of the other herd. Both were on horseback. Suddenly the Mexican drew his pistol and fired, the bullet passing through Hardin’s hat. Hardin’s own weapon—an old revolver with a loose cylinder—jammed.

He dismounted and managed to fire the gun by holding the cylinder in one hand and pulling the trigger with the other, hitting the Mexican in the thigh. A temporary truce followed, and both parties moved on. But Hardin borrowed a pistol from a friend and went looking for the man. This time he shot him in the head and killed him.

The act touched off a running gun battle between the two factions, with six Mexican cowhands killed; Hardin claimed responsibility for five of them, though later investigations suggested the number might be exaggerated, with records indicating only three Mexican herders killed. On the same cattle drive, Hardin also claimed involvement in two separate incidents in which he killed Indians. The first occurred at the South Canadian River when an Indian tried to shoot an arrow at him. Hardin shot the man and carefully buried the body to avoid retaliation from the man’s tribe.

The second was at Bluff Creek, Kansas, where Indians were attacking the cattle. Hardin confronted one Indian, accused him of stealing his silver bridle, and struck him on the head. Then he drove off a war party by shooting a second Indian who, he said, had killed a beef cow. After arriving in Abilene, Hardin said a dispute broke out in a local restaurant between him, his companion Payne, and a man who harbored anti-Texan feelings.

The fight left Payne wounded in the arm and the opponent shot in the mouth by Hardin. Hardin left Abilene quickly and took refuge along the Cottonwood Trail. On July 4, 1871, a trail boss from Texas named William Cohron was killed on the Cottonwood Trail, 40 miles south of Abilene. The culprit, an unidentified Mexican, fled south but was confronted and killed by two cowboys in a restaurant in Sumner County, Kansas, on July 20.

Hardin not only admitted involvement in the shooting of the Mexican outlaw but claimed he had been appointed a deputy sheriff for his help in capturing the notorious criminal John Doe, and said he received a reward from a Texas cattleman. In Abilene, there was a saloon called the Bulls Head, a partnership between former lawman Ben Thompson and gambler Phil Coe. It displayed a provocative sign: a painting of a bull with prominent erect genitalia. Townspeople, offended, complained to the town marshal, Wild Bill Hickok.

Thompson and Coe resisted his demand to remove the artwork, so Hickok took the matter into his own hands. Enraged, Thompson tried to provoke his new acquaintance, Hardin, telling him, “He’s a damned Yankee. He oppresses rebels, especially Texans, to kill them. ” But Hardin—who was working under the assumed name Wesley Clements and known locally as “Little Arkansas”—showed surprising respect for Hickok.

When Thompson urged him to act against the marshal, Hardin replied, “If Bill is worth killing, why don’t you kill him yourself? ”

Later that night, Hickok confronted Hardin, pointing out that he was violating the town ordinance by carrying weapons. He ordered Hardin to hand over his guns. Hardin complied, but dramatically.

He bent down, drew his pistols from their holsters, and handed them to Wild Bill butt-first, then swiftly reversed them in his hands, and suddenly Hickok found himself looking directly down the barrels. The two men stepped back from the brink. Hickok, unaware that Hardin was wanted by the law, advised him to avoid trouble in Abilene. Their paths crossed again in August 1871, during another cattle drive.

Surprisingly, Hickok allowed Hardin to carry his pistols inside town—a privilege rarely granted to others. Hardin, still using his alias, was fascinated by Wild Bill and enjoyed being on close terms with such a famous gunman. In a remarkable turn, Hardin claimed that Hickok, at his request, arranged the escape of his cousin Manon Clements, who had been jailed for killing two herders, Joe and Dolph Shadden, in July 1871. Shortly afterward, on August 6, 1871, Hardin, accompanied by his cousin Gip Clements and his friend, cattleman Charles Couger, checked into the American House hotel after a night of gambling.

Clements and Hardin shared one room; Couger was next door. All three had been drinking heavily. During the night, Hardin grew annoyed at Couger’s loud snoring and first tried to wake him by shouting. Frustrated at getting no response, the drunk Hardin recklessly fired several shots through the dividing wall, ostensibly to wake Couger.

Tragically, one bullet struck Couger in the heart, killing him instantly. Though Hardin may not have intended to kill Couger, his actions violated a town ordinance prohibiting firing guns within city limits. Half-dressed and still drunk, Hardin and Clements scrambled out a second-floor window onto the hotel roof, just as Wild Bill Hickok and four policemen arrived at the scene. Hardin later wrote that he believed if Wild Bill found him in a state where he could not defend himself, Hickok would not listen to any explanation but would kill him to enhance his own reputation.

A newspaper reported that a man was killed in his bed at the Abilene hotel on Monday evening by an outlaw called “Arkansas,” who escaped, and that this was his sixth murder. The paper gave the date as Monday evening, which would have been August 7, 1871, not August 6. Trying to escape arrest, Hardin jumped from the roof into the street below and hid in a haystack for the rest of the night, then stole a horse and rode to a cowboy camp 35 miles outside town. According to Hardin, he ambushed lawman Tom Carson and two other deputies at the cattle camp.

He claimed he did not kill them but forced them to strip off all their clothes and walk back to Abilene. The next day he left for Texas, vowing never to return. The incident earned Hardin a reputation as a man so hardened he had once shot a man for snoring. In later years, perhaps stung by the exaggerations that surrounded his deeds, he touched on the incident lightly, complaining, “They tell lots of lies about me.

They say I killed six or seven men for snoring. Well, that’s not true. I only killed one man for snoring. ” In his contradictory 1896 autobiography, Hardin omitted the snoring story entirely, gave the wrong date—July 7 instead of August 6—and claimed the shooting was self-defense against a man who attacked him with a knife and tried to steal his trousers.

After his escape, Hardin claimed involvement in numerous shootouts. On October 6, 1871, he faced two Texas special policemen and two freedmen, killing Green Paramore and wounding John Lackey. After that, a party of Black men from Austin pursued him for Paramore’s killing, but according to Hardin, they backed off after he ambushed them and killed three. In May 1872, about 45 miles outside Corpus Christi, Texas, Hardin encountered two Mexicans who were following him; he shot one off his horse while the other fled.

On June 19, 1872, he was involved in a shootout in Willis, Texas, and on July 26, 1872, he shot Texas state policeman Sunny Spights in the arm with a derringer at Hemp Hill, Texas. In early 1872, Hardin was in south-central Texas around Gonzales County. During this period, he married Jane Bowen and formed a close relationship with her brother, Robert Bowen, who was involved in cattle rustling. He also renewed ties with cousins aligned with the Taylor family, a local clan locked in a long-running feud with the Sutton faction.

On August 7, 1872, Hardin was shot with a rifle during a gambling dispute at Gates Saloon in Trinity, Texas. The shooter was Phil Sublett, who had lost money to Hardin at poker. Two bullets pierced Hardin’s kidney, casting doubt on his survival. While recovering, he considered a more settled life.

He surrendered himself to Sheriff Reagan—brother of John Henninger Reagan—of Cherokee County, Texas, and was accidentally shot in his right knee by a nervous deputy. From his sickbed, Hardin handed over his weapons and asked to be tried for his past crimes to start fresh. But when he learned how many murders Reagan intended to charge him with, he quickly changed his mind. A relative smuggled in a hacksaw, and Hardin escaped after sawing through the bars of the jail window.

Despite a guard of six men, he got out of the Gonzales County jail, and the authorities posted a $100 reward for his capture. On May 15, 1873, Jim Cox and Jake Christman fell victim to the Taylor faction at Tomlinson Creek. Though recovered from the wounds he suffered in the Sublett attack, Hardin neither confirmed nor denied reports that he was involved in the killings that led to Cox’s and Christman’s deaths. “Since I never admitted that case, I won’t have much to say right now,” he said.

Hardin’s main fame in the Sutton-Taylor feud came from his role in killing two lawmen known as Sutton allies. On July 18, 1873, in Cuero, Texas, Hardin fatally shot Deputy Sheriff J. B. Morgan, a known Sutton ally serving under County Sheriff Jack Helm, then the leader of the Sutton forces.

Later that same day, Hardin confronted Helm and killed him in the town square of Albuquerque, Texas. He fled again in June 1873. He played a role in helping his brother-in-law Joshua Bowen escape from the Gonzales County jail, where Bowen was held on an 1872 murder charge. Hardin was also alleged to have been involved in the killing of Thomas Holderman during that jailbreak.

On March 11, 1874, tensions in the Sutton-Taylor feud escalated when Jim and Bill Taylor shot Billy Sutton and Gabriel Slater on the deck of a steamboat at Indianola, Texas. Tired of the feud, the two men planned to leave the area for good, and Hardin openly acknowledged his and his brother Joseph’s involvement alongside both Taylors in the fatal shootings. After a brief visit to Florida, where he claimed involvement in three incidents against Black men, Hardin met up with his wife Jane and their young daughter, moving with them under the assumed name “Swain,” celebrating his twenty-first birthday on May 26, 1874. Hardin and his gang gathered at a saloon in Comanche, Texas.

When he saw Deputy Sheriff Charles Webb of Brown County enter, Hardin asked whether Webb intended to arrest him. Webb said no, and Hardin invited him for a drink. But according to Hardin, Webb drew his pistol, prompting one of Hardin’s men to shout a warning. In the ensuing gunfight, Webb was shot dead.

Reports indicated Webb was killed while trying to serve an arrest warrant on one of Hardin’s associates. Among those implicated in the shooting were Hardin’s cousin Bud Dixon and Jim Taylor. The death of the popular Webb quickly led to the formation of a lynch mob. For their safety, Hardin’s parents and wife were placed under protection, while his brother Joe and his cousins Bud and Tom Dixon were arrested on outstanding warrants.

In July 1874, a local mob broke into the jail and seized Joe and the Dixon brothers. After this grisly event, Hardin and Jim Taylor permanently severed their ties. Hardin maintained he successfully fought off two assassination attempts by individuals connected to the ongoing feud, killing an attacker in each confrontation. On November 18, 1875, a tragedy occurred in Cuero when Reuben Brown, the former sheriff of Cuero, Texas, and a key figure in the Sutton faction, was shot and killed by five men.

Among the casualties was Tom Freeman, an African American, with another individual wounded. In Hardin’s autobiography, he mentioned Brown only twice in passing: that Rob Brown arrested William Taylor, who was later sent for trial to Galveston, Texas, and that Brown was among the Sutton leaders actively pursuing Hardin in Gonzales County. The extent of Hardin’s direct or indirect involvement in Reuben Brown’s death remains unclear, as his life story offers no further details. On January 20, 1875, the Texas legislature authorized Governor Richard B.

Hubbard to offer a $4,000 reward for the capture of John Wesley Hardin. Jack Duncan, a Texas ranger working undercover, intercepted a letter sent to Hardin’s father-in-law from his brother-in-law, Joshua Robert Brown Bowen. The letter revealed that Hardin was hiding in a lumber yard on the Alabama-Florida border, using the alias John or James W. Swain.

Hardin admitted in his autobiography that he adopted the alias from Henry Swain, the city marshal of Brenham, Texas, who had married Hardin’s cousin Molly Parks. In March 1876, Hardin wounded a man in Florida who tried to mediate a dispute between him and another man. By November 1876, in Mobile, Alabama, Hardin faced a brief arrest for possessing marked playing cards. Around mid-1877, two former slaves of Hardin’s father, Jake Mensil and Robert Borup, attempted to capture Hardin in Gainesville, Florida.

Hardin responded by fatally wounding one and blinding the other. On August 24, 1877, rangers and local authorities confronted Hardin aboard a train in Pensacola, Florida. During the confrontation, Hardin tried to draw a Colt 44 but found it caught in his suspenders. The officers knocked him unconscious, arrested two of his companions, and Ranger John B.

Armstrong killed a third man named Mann who was brandishing a pistol. Hardin claimed he was arrested while smoking his pipe, and that Duncan only found his pistol under his shirt after the arrest. John Wesley Hardin was tried for the murder of Webb, and on June 5, 1878, was sentenced to 25 years in Huntsville prison. In 1879, an escape attempt by Hardin and 50 fellow inmates—a tunnel dug toward the prison armory—was foiled.

Despite repeated escape attempts, he remained imprisoned. On February 14, 1892, while in prison, he was convicted of a separate manslaughter charge for the earlier shooting of J. B. Morgan and sentenced to two years, to run concurrently with his original sentence.

Over time, Hardin adjusted to prison life, immersing himself in theological literature and serving as supervisor of the prison’s Sunday school. Despite bouts of ill health aggravated by an inflamed wound from the 1883 Sublett incident that left him bedridden for about two years, he persisted. In 1892, still in prison and described as 5 feet 9 inches tall, 160 pounds, with fair skin, hazel eyes, and dark hair, Hardin suffered the loss of his first wife, Jane, who died on November 6, 1892. During his imprisonment, he wrote his autobiography, gaining wide notoriety for weaving tales of his life, often fabricating or exaggerating stories.

He claimed responsibility for numerous unverifiable murders, and traced his first exposure to violence to 1861, when he witnessed Turner Evans being stabbed by John Ruff; Evans died of his injuries and Ruff faced prison. Hardin wrote: “Readers, see what wine and passion do to a man. If you want to succeed in life, be temperate and control your passions. If you don’t, the result will be ruin and death.

”

On February 17, 1894, Hardin was released from prison after serving 17 years of his 25-year sentence. At age forty, he returned to Gonzales, Texas. On March 16 of that year he received a pardon, and by July 21 he passed the state bar examination and was licensed to practice law. In an incident reported in a 1900 newspaper article shortly after his release, Hardin was involved in a manslaughter case.

He allegedly bet $5 that he could knock a Mexican man off a soap box, where the man was bathing in the sun, with a single shot. Hardin won the bet, but the man died from the fall, not the bullet. On January 9, 1895, Hardin married a fifteen-year-old girl named Callie Lewis. The marriage ended quickly, though it was never legally dissolved.

Afterward, Hardin moved to El Paso, Texas. An El Paso lawman, John Selman Jr. , arrested Hardin’s acquaintance, the widow Maroz, who sometimes worked as a prostitute, for brandishing a weapon in a public place. Hardin confronted Selman, leading to a heated argument, with some reports claiming Hardin even struck Selman Jr.

with his pistol. The situation escalated when police officer John Selman Sr. , the 56-year-old former outlaw and famed gunman, approached Hardin on the afternoon of August 19, 1895. Tensions flared and the two men exchanged harsh words.

Later that evening, Hardin visited the Acme Saloon and joined a dice game. His last words were, “Four sixes to beat. ” Shortly before midnight, Selman Sr. entered the saloon, approached Hardin from behind, and shot him in the head, killing him.

As Hardin lay on the floor, Selman fired three more shots into him. Hardin was buried the next day in Concordia Cemetery in El Paso. Selman Sr. faced murder charges, claiming self-defense, asserting he saw Hardin reach for his pistol when Selman entered the saloon.

A hung jury led to Selman Sr. ‘s release on bail pending retrial. But before the retrial could take place, Selman Sr. died in a shootout with U.

S. Marshal George Scarborough on April 6, 1896, during a dispute following a card game. A century later, on August 27, 1995, a confrontation occurred between two groups at Hardin’s gravesite. One faction, representing many of Hardin’s descendants, sought to move his remains to Nixon, Texas, to rest beside his first wife, Jane.

The opposing group, made up of El Paso locals, attempted to block the transfer. At the cemetery, the faction associated with Hardin’s descendants presented an exhumation permit, while El Paso residents produced a court order preventing the move. Both sides accused each other of seeking financial gain from the tourism associated with the gravesite. A subsequent legal battle ended with a ruling in favor of keeping Hardin’s remains in El Paso.

The remarkable details of Hardin’s life—whether true or fabricated—made him a legend of the Old West and an icon of American folklore. His autobiography was published posthumously in 1925 by J. Marvin Hunter, the publisher, historian, and journalist from Bandera who founded both Frontier Times magazine and the Frontier Times Museum. Numerous items from Hardin’s personal collection, including his favorite firearms, were meticulously catalogued and sold at auctions to private collectors.

Court records show that at the time of his death, Hardin owned a Colt Lightning revolver and carried an Elgin watch—gifts given in gratitude for his legal defense of Jim Miller during Miller’s trial for killing former Sheriff George “Bud” Frazier. The nickel-plated Colt, caliber 38 with a 2½-inch barrel, hammer, trigger, and blue screws, mother-of-pearl grips, and a hand-engraved backstrap bearing the initials JBM to JW, once sold at auction for $168,000. Another Colt, a Thunderer model, caliber 41, owned and used by Harden in a robbery at the Gem Saloon, fetched $100,000 at the same auction. In 2002, a San Francisco auction house offered three lots of Hardin’s personal effects, including playing cards, calling cards, and a contemporary newspaper report of his death, which sold for $15,250.

The bullet that killed Hardin was also offered at auction, selling for $80,000.