John Wesley Hardin
"They say I killed six or seven men for snoring. Well, it ain't true. I only killed one man for snoring."
John Wesley Hardin is an interesting dude. Every time you read contemporary accounts of people talking about this Old West Texan, they're always like, "Oh, he's so nice, such a gentleman, always very polite," etc., and they tell all these glowing stories about this dude working as a lawyer in El Paso and a Sunday School Teacher, and tell stories of how he was such a charming, wonderful person and just a true asset to the community. Then, of course, when you read accounts of his life, basically every other sentence is like, "But then then two town Marshals tried to arrest Hardin while he was drunkenly playing cards with a half-dozen hookers he was banging, so he shot those guys, bashed the bartender in the face with a handle of whiskey, killed two other unrelated people on the way out of town, and then fled off into the wilderness where he murdered six guys because he didn't like the way they'd constructed their campfire."
Reading Hardin's autobiography is kind of a mix between the two. To hear him tell the story, this guy couldn't take a leak in the forest without some rando pulling a pistol on him and needing to be smoked in self-defense. Despite being the most prolific killer and the most terrifying gunslinger in the history of the Old West – a dude so hardcore and iconic that both Johnny Cash AND Bob Dylan wrote songs about him – John Wesley Hardin adamantly argued that of the 30+ men he shot dead with his six-shooters, he "Never killed anyone who didn't need killin'".
In his defense, considering the fact that 1880s Texas was basically just a low-tech prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road, he might not have even been wrong.
Born May 26, 1853, in Bonham, Texas, John Wesley Hardin was the son of a Methodist preacher and schoolteacher. At age nine he tried to run away from home to join the Confederate Army, and at age 14 some kid in his school wrote a nasty thing about a girl in their class on the side of a barn so Hardin fucking shanked that kid with a knife and almost killed him. A year later, at age 15, Hardin killed his first person – he'd beaten an adult in a wrestling match, then (according to him at least), that guy came back the next day and started shit with Hardin, so naturally Hardin had to pull a Walker Colt and smoke the dude. Hardin ran off into hiding in the Texas wilderness, but didn't get far before a posse of U.S. Army soldiers caught up to him. According to Hardin, "I waylaid them, as I had no mercy on men whom I knew only wanted to get my body to torture and kill. 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."
The ensuing battle left four Union soldiers bleeding out on the ground. At least one of them died from their wounds.
Thus began the long and storied gunfighting career of John Wesley Hardin that for the most part just reads like a long, unrelated list of people he sent to the hospital for a variety of reasons. And while you can debate where a lot of these shootings fall on the scale of Self-Defense to Mass Murder, you really can't argue the fact that this dude was a bad motherfucker and that he'd just as soon put a bullet in your face as ask you the time.
I mean, hell, this dude literally once killed a guy for snoring too loud. That is a true story.
Hardin stood about 5'9" tall and weighed around 160, and his body was covered in scars from the various wounds he sustained at different times in his career. He was nice, charming, handsome, friendly, and polite to everyone he wasn't in the process of murdering, but he also loved gambling, whiskey, hookers, and fighting and had a biiiiiit of a temper and was kind of prone to flying off into a murderous rampage and quick-drawing his six-shooters at a moment's notice. He almost always had at least two guns on him, preferring to wear them in custom cross-draw holsters he had sewn into his vest. He'd practice quick-drawing them every day, a skill that served him well, since the vast majority of his gunfights weren't typically those High Noon Showdowns you see in Clint Eastwood movies and were far more often situations like, "Oh shit, the poker dealer just tried to Han Solo me under the table, I'd better McClunkey his ass."
So, here we go. In Towash, Texas, Hardin smoked a dude who got mad that he kept losing to Hardin at cards. In Limestone he shot a guy in an argument at the circus. In Kosse he convinced a hooker to leave town with him, and then capped her pimp when that guy copped an attitude about it. At some point in his adventures he happened to cap the Marshal of the town of Waco, so two guys eventually showed up to arrest Hardin and bring him back to Waco for trial. They beat Hardin up, took his guns, tied him to a horse, and started to drag him back to Texas, but this fucking guy still somehow managed to disarm one of the dudes, kill him with his own gun, escape, then gun down three posse members who came to re-capture him.
The town then sent a 15-man posse out to arrest Hardin, but J.W. got the drop on them, captured two of the guys, stole their guns, and fled to Kansas, where he got a job working as a cowboy. In 1871 he drove his cattle along the Chisholm Trail, where he ended up putting seven more guys in the ground – two bandits, three Mexican vaqueiros who had been fucking with his herd, and two Comanche warriors who ambushed him along the trail. Hardin arrived in Kansas with a .45-caliber bullet hole in his hat, a bridle rein that had been cut in half by a Comanche arrow, and a big-ass scar on his shoulder from a knife attack, then proceeded to kill three more guys over the next month or so in various arguments or whatnot.
Keep in mind, by the way, that John Wesley Hardin is still seventeen years old at this point in the story.
Somehow, despite murdering like a dozen people or so, Hardin still managed to walk the earth as a free man. Traveling under the rap handle "Lil' Arkansaw", hiding out with relatives, and never sticking around one place for too long, Hardin eventually ended up in Abeline, Kansas – where he actually ended up making friends with the town marshal, a dude named Wild Bill Hickock.
That relationship ended a few weeks later when Hardin went out partying all night at the saloon, came home wasted, and then couldn't sleep because the dude in the next hotel room over was snoring too loud. Hardin shot that guy, drunkenly jumped out the second-story window of the hotel, then fled town in his underwear.
Hardin then settles down, gets married, and has three kids (weird, right?), but, of course, trouble keeps finding a guy like that. First, he took a couple buckshot pellets to the liver in a gunfight over a card game, and then, when Hardin went to turn himself in to deputies, he took a .44 to the knee in the standoff. He was arrested, and put in jail, but when he realized that the cops there knew who he really was and were going to charge him for like a dozen murders, Hardin smuggled in a hacksaw, sawed through the iron bars with it, and escaped jail (even though they'd assigned four guys to guard him). A year later, he shot two cops in Dewitt County, and then a year after that, Hardin's 21st Birthday Party got a little rowdy and Hardin ended up shooting the Sherriff of Brown County, Texas.
Well, Texas had really had enough of John Wesley Hardin at this point, and they posted a $4,000 bounty on his arrest – the biggest bounty the state had ever offered. And, oh, right, and they dispatched the Texas Rangers to go grab him.
That's bad.
I wrote a whole article on Hardin's capture, but, you know, once the Texas Rangers are after you there's really not a hell of a lot you can do about it. They tracked him town on a train in Pensacola, and Ranger John B. Armstrong and his team took Hardin down – Hardin, for his part, made a fight out of it, but he was outnumbered 20 to 1, taken by surprise, and cornered in a train car, so there was only so much he could do about it.
Hardin was sentenced to 25 years in prison for a big string of murders and killings. A year later he got in trouble when the guards discovered that he'd been digging a tunnel from his prison cell and was about six inches away from entering the prison armory.
Hardin served 16 of his 25-year sentence, and while he was in there he became the superintendent of the prison Sunday School, wrote his autobiography, and got a law degree. After his release, he passed the Texas bar and became a lawyer, which probably makes him the deadliest lawyer in American history, but he really hadn't banked on the idea that a lot of people really don't want a convicted mass-murdered working as their defense counsel, so he had a bit of a tough time finding work. His old ways eventually caught up to him, and Hardin got in trouble for beating up a dude in a saloon, sleeping with one of his (married) clients, and pulling a gun on an El Paso deputy because that guy tried to arrest Hardin's girlfriend for waving a gun around in a no-gun-waving-around area of town.
That last argument proved to be the final argument of Hardin's life – Hardin threatened to kill that deputy, so the cop's dad (a well-known gunfighter named John Selman) came into the saloon later that day and shot Hardin through the back of the head, killing him instantly. It's dishonorable, sure, but it was probably also the only way anyone was going to beat Hardin in a gunfight.
Hardin was by far the deadliest gunslinger of the Wild West, having killed somewhere between 11 and 41 people during his gunslinging days. And, while Hardin claimed that he "never killed anyone who didn't need killing", apparently many of the people of El Paso thought similarly of Hardin – John Selman, despite having murdered Hardin in cold-blood in a public place in the middle of the day was acquitted of all crimes by a jury of his peers.
Links:
Books:
Hardin, John Wesley. Gunfighter: The Autobiography of John Wesley Hardin. Creation, 2001.
Parsons, Chuck., Brown, Norman Wayne. A Lawless Breed. University of North Texas Press, 2013.
Parsons, Chuck. John B. Armstrong: Texas Ranger and Pioneer Ranchman. Texas A & M University Press, 2007.