By the summer of 1877, John Wesley Hardin had been running for nearly a decade. He was twenty-four years old, wanted for murders across Texas, and traveling under the name John W. Swain. On the night of August 24th, he boarded a train in Pensacola, Florida, unaware that the men who had been hunting him for months had finally closed the distance.

Texas Rangers and local authorities moved through the cars, and when they reached him, Hardin reached for the . 44 Colt cap-and-ball pistol tucked into his waistband. The weapon caught in his suspenders. Before he could free it, the officers knocked him unconscious.

When he came to, he was in custody, and the life he had built on the run was over. Hardin was born in 1853 near Bonham, Texas, to James Gibson Gip Hardin, a Methodist preacher and circuit rider, and Mary Elizabeth Dixon. He was named for John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist denomination, and in his autobiography he later described his mother as “blonde, highly cultured, while charity predominated in her disposition. ” The family moved in 1859 to Sumter, Trinity County, Texas, where his father established a school that the Hardin children attended.

John Wesley was the second surviving son of ten children. The family was politically prominent and deeply Southern: his great-grandfather had been a North Carolina provincial congressman, relatives had served in Congress and the Continental Army, and two of his kin had been opposing generals in the Civil War. When the war broke out, his father was elected a Confederate captain. In 1862, at the age of nine, Hardin tried to run away from home to join the Confederate Army.

The violence that would define his life began early. In 1867, while attending his father’s school, a student named Charles Slaughter accused him of writing insulting graffiti about a girl in the class. Hardin denied it and claimed Slaughter was the author. Slaughter came at him with a knife; Hardin stabbed him with his own knife, nearly killing him, and was almost expelled.

In November 1868, at fifteen, Hardin challenged Mage Holshausen, a former slave of his uncle’s, to a wrestling match. Hardin won. The next day, according to Hardin’s account, Mage ambushed him as he rode past, shouting and waving a stick. Hardin drew his revolver and shot him five times.

He claimed he rode to get help for the wounded man, but Mage died three days later. Hardin’s father, believing his son would not receive a fair hearing in a Union-occupied state where more than a third of the state police were former slaves, ordered him into hiding. Weeks later, authorities discovered his location, and three Union soldiers were sent to arrest him. Despite a warning from his older brother Joseph, Hardin chose to confront them.

At a creek crossing, he later claimed, he killed two white men with a shotgun and a Black man with a pistol. “I waylaid them as I had no mercy on men whom I knew only wanted to get my body to torture and kill,” he wrote. “It was war to the knife for me and I brought it on by opening the fight with a double-barreled shotgun and ended it with a cap and ball six-shooter. Thus it was by the fall of 1868 I had killed four men and was myself wounded in the arm.

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He could not go home. As a fugitive, he took up with outlaw Frank Polk in the Pisgah area of Navarro County, Texas. Soldiers from Corsicana were pursuing Polk for the killing of a man named Tom Brady, and when the detachment caught up, Hardin escaped while Polk was captured and jailed. Hardin briefly taught school in Pisgah.

He claimed that while there he shot a man’s eye out to win a bottle of whiskey in a bet, that he and his cousin Simp Dickson each killed a soldier in an encounter with a group of them, and that he killed a Black man in Leon County. On January 5th, 1870, Hardin was playing cards in Towash, Hill County, Texas, with a man named Benjamin Bradley. Hardin was winning nearly every hand, and Bradley grew angry, threatening to cut out Hardin’s liver if he won again. Bradley drew a knife and a six-shooter.

Hardin said he was unarmed and excused himself, but later that night Bradley came looking for him. Bradley fired first and missed. Hardin drew both his pistols and returned fire, one shot striking Bradley in the head, the other in the chest. Dozens of witnesses saw the fight, and from them there came a good record of how Hardin used his guns.

His holsters were sewn into his vest so the butts of his pistols pointed inward across his chest, and he crossed his arms to draw. He practiced the movement every day. In this period Hardin admitted to killing two men in Hill County, and on January 20th he claimed he killed another in a gunfight after an argument at a circus in Horn Hill. Less than a week later, in Kosse, Texas, he was accompanying a prostitute home when her pimp accosted them and demanded money.

Hardin threw money on the ground and shot the man as he bent to pick it up. In January 1871, Hardin was arrested for the murder of Waco City Marshal Laban John Hoffman, a crime he denied committing. Held in a log jail in Marshall awaiting transfer to Waco for trial, he bought a revolver 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, they tied him onto a horse without a saddle for the trip. While making camp, Stakes went to procure fodder for the horses, leaving the seventeen-year-old prisoner alone with Smalley, who began to taunt and beat him with the butt of a pistol. Hardin feigned crying and huddled against his pony’s flank.

Hidden by the animal, he pulled out the gun, fatally shot Smalley, and rode off. He claimed that while on the run, he was arrested by three men named Smith, Jones, and Davis. In Bell County, Texas, he killed all three with their own guns after they became drunk and careless, and escaped again. On July 4th, 1871, a trail boss named William Corran was killed on the Cottonwood Trail, forty miles south of Abilene, by an unnamed Mexican who fled south and was subsequently killed by two cowboys in a Sumner County, Kansas, restaurant on July 20th.

Hardin not only admitted involvement in shooting the Mexican outlaw but claimed he had been deputized as a law officer and received a reward from Texas cattlemen for helping kill the man. His most famous encounter came in Abilene, Kansas, that summer. The Bull’s Head Tavern was a partnership between ex-lawman Ben Thompson and gambler Phil Coe, and to promote it they painted a striking image of a bull with a prominently erect penis on the side of the building. Local citizens complained to the town marshal, the legendary Wild Bill Hickok.

Hickok asked them to remove it; when they refused, he altered the painting himself. The move infuriated Thompson, who tried to provoke his new acquaintance, John Wesley Hardin, then using the alias Wesley Clements and known to the townspeople as “Little Arkansas. ” “He’s a damn Yankee, picks on rebels, especially Texans, to kill,” Thompson said. Hardin seems to have had respect for Hickok.

“If Bill needs killing, why don’t you kill him yourself? ” he replied. That evening, Hickok confronted Hardin and told him he was wearing guns in violation of town ordinance, ordering him to hand them over. Hardin reached down, picked his revolvers up from the holsters, and offered them to Hickok butts forward, then swiftly rolled the guns over in his hands until Wild Bill was staring into their muzzles.

Both men backed down. Hickok, unaware that Hardin was a wanted man, advised him to avoid trouble while in Abilene. The two met again in August 1871, when Hardin was on a cattle drive. This time Hickok allowed him to carry his pistols into town, something he had never permitted others to do.

Hardin, still using his alias, relished the association. He alleged that when his cousin Mannen Clements was jailed for killing two cowhands in July 1871, Hickok, at Hardin’s request, arranged his escape. On the night of August 6th, 1871, Hardin, his cousin Gip Clements, and a rancher friend named Charles Cougar took rooms at the American House Hotel after an evening of gambling. Clements and Hardin shared one room; Cougar was in the adjacent one.

All three had been drinking heavily. Sometime in the evening, Hardin was disturbed by loud snoring from Cougar’s room. He shouted several times for the man to roll over. When there was no response, he drunkenly fired several bullets through the shared wall.

One of them struck Cougar in the heart while he lay in his bed, killing him instantly. Hardin may not have intended to kill Cougar, but he had violated an ordinance against firing a gun within the city limits. Half-clothed and still inebriated, he and Clements scrambled out a second-story window onto the hotel roof. Hardin watched Hickok arrive with four policemen.

“Now, I believed,” Hardin later wrote, “that if Wild Bill found me in a defenseless condition, he would take no explanation, but would kill me to add to his reputation. ”

A newspaper reported: “A man was killed in his bed at a hotel in Abilene Monday night by a desperado called Arkansas. The murderer escaped. This was his sixth murder.

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Hardin leapt from the roof into the street and hid in a haystack for the rest of the night. He stole a horse and rode to a remote cow camp thirty-five miles outside of Abilene. According to his account, he ambushed lawman Tom Carson and two other deputies at the camp, but did not kill them; instead he forced them to strip off their clothing and walk back to Abilene. The next day he left for Texas, never to return.

The incident earned him a reputation as a man so mean he once shot a man for snoring. In early 1872, Hardin was in south-central Texas around Gonzales County. He married Jane Bowen and became closely associated with her brother, Robert Bowen, a known cattle rustler. He renewed his acquaintance with cousins allied with the Taylor family, who had been feuding with the rival Sutton faction for years.

On August 7th, 1872, Hardin was wounded by a shotgun blast in a gambling dispute at the Gates Saloon in Trinity, Texas. The shooter was Phil Sublett, who had lost money to him in a poker game. While recuperating, Hardin decided he wanted to settle down and surrender to Sheriff Reagan of Cherokee County, the brother of John Heninger Reagan. During the surrender, a nervous deputy accidentally discharged a firearm, striking Hardin in the right knee.

Hardin made a sick-bed surrender, handing over his guns and asking to be tried for his past crimes to clear the slate. But when he learned the extensive list of murder charges Sheriff Reagan intended to bring, he changed his mind. A relative smuggled in a hacksaw, and Hardin escaped by cutting through the bars of a prison window. In November 1872, he escaped from the Gonzales County jail despite a guard of six men.

A one hundred dollar reward was offered for his arrest. The Sutton-Taylor feud gave him new outlets for violence. On May 15th, 1873, Jim Cox and Jake Crisman were killed by the Taylor faction at Tomlinson Creek. Hardin, recovered from the shotgun wounds, admitted there were reports he had led the fights, but would neither confirm nor deny involvement: “As I have never pleaded to that case, I will at this time have little to say.

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His main notoriety in the feud came from his part in killing two lawmen allied with the Suttons. On July 18th, 1873, in Cuero, Texas, Hardin killed DeWitt County Deputy Sheriff J. B. Morgan, who served under County Sheriff Jack Helm, a former captain in the Texas State Police and the leader of the Sutton force.

Later that day, Hardin killed Helm himself in the town square of Albuquerque, Texas. In June 1873, he helped his brother-in-law Joshua Bowen escape from the Gonzales County jail, where Bowen was held on an 1872 murder charge. Hardin was alleged to have been involved in the killing of Thomas Holderman as well. On March 11th, 1874, Jim and Bill Taylor gunned down Billy Sutton and Gabriel Slaughter on a steamboat platform in Indianola, Texas.

Sutton and Slaughter had grown weary of the feud and were planning to leave the area for good. Hardin acknowledged his involvement, along with his brother Joseph and the Taylors. He made a brief visit to Florida, where he claimed to have been involved in three incidents against Black men, then reunited with his wife and young daughter, who had relocated under the assumed name Swain. On May 26th, 1874, his twenty-first birthday, Hardin gathered with his gang at a saloon in Comanche, Texas.

Brown County Deputy Sheriff Charles Webb entered the establishment. Hardin asked Webb if he had come to arrest him. Webb said he had not, and Hardin invited him into the hotel for a drink. As Webb followed him inside, Hardin claimed Webb drew his gun.

One of Hardin’s men shouted a warning, and in the ensuing gunfight, Webb was shot dead. Reports at the time said Webb had been shot while attempting to serve an arrest warrant on one of Hardin’s group. Among those involved were Hardin’s cousin Bud Dixon and Jim Taylor. The death of the popular Webb brought a lynch mob together quickly.

Hardin’s parents and wife were taken into protective custody. His brother Joe and two cousins, brothers Bud and Tom Dixon, were arrested on outstanding warrants. In July 1874, a group of local men broke into the jail and seized the three prisoners. After that, Hardin and Jim Taylor parted ways for good.

Hardin claimed he twice drove off men connected to the feud who came after him, killing a man in each encounter. On November 18th, 1875, Reuben Brown, the former marshal of Cuero and a prominent Sutton, was fatally shot by five men in Cuero. Another man named Tom Freeman and an additional Black man were wounded in the incident. In his autobiography, Hardin made only two references to Brown: one about Brown’s arrest of William Taylor, and one noting Brown had been among the leaders of a Sutton posse that had been out to get him in Gonzales County.

The extent of Hardin’s involvement in Brown’s killing remains unclear, he never provided further details. On January 20th, 1875, the Texas legislature authorized Governor Richard B. Hubbard to offer a four thousand dollar reward for Hardin’s arrest. An undercover Texas Ranger named Jack Duncan intercepted a letter sent to Hardin’s father-in-law by his brother-in-law, Joshua Robert Brown Bowen.

The letter revealed that Hardin was hiding at a lumber yard on the Alabama-Florida border, using the name John W. Swain. In his autobiography, Hardin admitted he had adopted the alias from Henry Swain, a Brenham town marshal who had married a cousin of his named Molly Parks. In March 1876, Hardin wounded a man in Florida who had tried to mediate a quarrel between him and another man.

In November 1876, he was arrested briefly in Mobile, Alabama, for having marked cards. In mid-1877, two former slaves of his father’s, Jake Menzell and Robert Borup, tried to capture him in Gainesville, Florida. Hardin killed one and blinded the other. Then came the train in Pensacola.

After his capture, the Rangers arrested two of his companions, and Ranger John B. Armstrong killed a third man, a man named Mann, who had a pistol in his hand. Hardin later claimed he was captured while smoking his pipe and that the pistol Duncan found under his shirt was discovered only after his arrest. He stood trial for the killing of Charles Webb.

On June 5th, 1878, he received a sentence of twenty-five years at Huntsville Prison. In 1879, Hardin and fifty other convicts came within hours of successfully tunneling into the prison armory before they were stopped. He made several escape attempts. On February 14th, 1892, he was convicted of another manslaughter charge related to the earlier shooting of J.

B. Morgan and given a two-year sentence to run concurrently with his existing term. Hardin eventually adapted to prison life. He read theological books, became the superintendent of the prison Sunday school, and took up the study of law.

Health problems plagued him; in 1883, the old shotgun wound from Phil Sublett’s attack became re-infected, leaving him bedridden for nearly two years. He was five feet nine inches tall and 160 pounds, fair-complexioned, with hazel eyes, dark hair, and scars on his right knee, left thigh, right side, hip, elbow, shoulder, and back. In 1892, while he was in prison, his first wife Jane died on November 6th. He composed an autobiography behind bars, a work known for fabricating or greatly embellishing stories about his life, often claiming credit for numerous unverifiable murders.

On February 17th, 1894, Hardin walked out of prison at age forty, having served seventeen years of his sentence. He returned to Gonzales, Texas. On March 16th he was pardoned, and on July 21st he passed the state bar examination and obtained his license to practice law. According to a 1900 newspaper article, shortly after his release he committed negligent homicide when he made a five dollar bet that he could knock a Mexican man off a soapbox on which the man was sunning himself with a single shot.

He won the bet; the man died from the fall, not the gunshot. On January 9th, 1895, Hardin married fifteen-year-old Callie Lewis. The marriage ended quickly, though it was never legally dissolved. He moved to El Paso.

In El Paso, lawman John Selman Jr. arrested Hardin’s acquaintance, the widow Marus, a part-time prostitute, for brandishing a gun in public. Hardin confronted Selman and the two argued. Some accounts say Hardin pistol-whipped the younger man.

Selman’s father, Constable John Selman Sr. , himself a notorious gunman and former outlaw, approached Hardin on the afternoon of August 19th, 1895, and the two exchanged heated words. Later that evening, Hardin visited the Acme Saloon and began a game of dice. His last words were, “Four sixes to beat.

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Shortly before midnight, Selman Sr. entered the saloon, approached Hardin from behind, and fired a fatal shot into his head. As Hardin lay on the floor, Selman Sr. fired three more rounds into him.

The next day, Hardin was buried in Concordia Cemetery in El Paso. Selman Sr. was arrested for murder and testified he acted in self-defense, claiming he saw Hardin reaching for his pistol as he entered the saloon. The jury was unable to reach a verdict, and Selman was released on bail pending retrial.

Before the retrial could be arranged, he was killed in a shootout with U. S. Marshal George Scarborough on April 6th, 1896, during an argument that followed a card game. John Wesley Hardin’s death at the hands of John Selman Sr.

became one of the defining stories of the violent, unpredictable Old West, a reminder of how completely the era’s gunmen and outlaws shaped the territories they roamed.