John Wesley Hardin

The case

On 26 May 1874 John Wesley Hardin was celebrating his twenty-first birthday with friends in a saloon at Comanche, Texas, when Charles Webb, a deputy sheriff from neighbouring Brown County, walked in. Hardin asked him whether he had come to arrest him. Webb said no, and Hardin invited him in for a drink. Within moments Webb was dead on the floor. Hardin said Webb had drawn first; it was reported at the time that Webb was reaching for an arrest warrant. Either way, it was the killing that finally brought Texas down on him.

Hardin was born near Bonham, Texas, in 1853, the son of a Methodist preacher and schoolteacher who named him after the founder of his church. By his own account he killed for the first time at fifteen, in November 1868, shooting a former slave of his uncle's named Maje Holshousen after a quarrel that followed a wrestling match. He said he then ambushed and killed three soldiers sent to arrest him. Much of what is known of his early life comes from the autobiography he wrote in prison, which historians treat with caution: it exaggerates, omits and occasionally contradicts the record.

The record is grim enough. Hardin drifted through Reconstruction Texas as a gambler, cattle drover and fugitive, killing a Texas State Police officer named Smalley in January 1871 and, that October, killing one special policeman and wounding another in Gonzales. On a cattle drive to Abilene, Kansas, in August 1871 he fired through a hotel wall at a snoring man in the next room, killing him, and climbed out of a window to escape. Back in south Texas he married Jane Bowen and was drawn into the Sutton-Taylor feud on the Taylor side; in 1873 he killed a deputy, J. B. Morgan, and with Jim Taylor shot dead the former state police captain and DeWitt County sheriff Jack Helm, who had led the Sutton faction.

After Webb's death a mob in Comanche hanged Hardin's brother Joe and two cousins who had been arrested on other warrants. Hardin fled east with his wife and child and lived in Alabama and Florida under the name Swain. The Texas legislature authorised a $4,000 reward. An undercover Texas Ranger, Jack Duncan, intercepted a family letter that gave away the alias, and on 24 August 1877 Rangers and local officers boarded a train at Pensacola where Hardin was sitting. He tried to draw, but his pistol caught in his suspenders and he was knocked unconscious. Ranger John B. Armstrong shot dead one of his companions who had drawn a gun.

Hardin was tried at Comanche for Webb's murder, convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to twenty-five years in the penitentiary at Huntsville. He tried repeatedly to escape, then settled. He read theology, ran the prison Sunday school and studied law. His wife Jane died in 1892 while he was still inside. In February 1894 he was released after serving about sixteen years, received a full pardon in March and passed the Texas bar examination that July.

Freedom did not suit him. A brief marriage to a fifteen-year-old girl in early 1895 collapsed almost at once, and he moved to El Paso, where he drank, gambled and quarrelled. He fell out with the policeman John Selman Jr. over the arrest of a woman he was involved with, and then with Selman's father, Constable John Selman, a former outlaw himself. On the night of 19 August 1895 Hardin was standing at the bar of the Acme Saloon shaking dice when the elder Selman came in and shot him in the back of the head, then fired again as he lay on the floor. Hardin was forty-two. He was buried the next day in Concordia Cemetery.