The Life of John Wesley Hardin

By John Wesley Hardin

John Wesley Hardin was the only Wild West outlaw to write his autobiography. This new 2018 edition of his prison-penned memoirs includes an introduction and footnotes by author and translator Damian Stevenson (‘On the Shortness of Life’) which help shed light on this most enigmatic of Old West legends.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Enhanced Media Publishing
• Release date: May 18, 2018
• ISBN: 9781387806928

Book preview

Claims

Introduction

IT WAS CLOSE TO MIDNIGHT in El Paso, Texas on August 19, 1895. The tinny sound of an untuned piano and loud conversation echoed forth from the Acme Saloon. As if in sympathy for its sweltering carousers, a cool breeze rustled across the dusty town and whispered its way through the louvered swing-doors.

A solitary man was sitting at the bar nursing a drink, thumbing over images of President Cleveland, headlines about the Venezuelan Crisis and ads for farming equipment, cure-alls and the local theatre. He shut the gazette and flicked his empty eyes about the place.

He was in his early forties but looked much older. The glare of electricity hurt his eyes. He still wasn’t used to it.

Maybe it was the heat. Or maybe the man was lost in thought, pondering over the extraordinary turns his life had taken. There was a mirror behind the counter, so he should have seen the gun-man approaching. Perhaps those pesky incandescent bulbs blinded him. Whatever the reason, by the time the once deadliest marksman in the Lone Star State had turned to see why the piano had stopped playing and everything had gone quiet, it was too late.

His hand went limp as it pawed feebly for a Colt Lightning pistol tucked in his waistband. He slumped to the ground. The bullet had struck him in the head. As he lay in the sawdust, three more slugs were blasted into him for good measure.

John Wesley Hardin was dead. 

NAMED FOR THE FOUNDER of the Methodist Faith (Englishman John Wesley, 1703-91), John Wesley ‘Wes’ Hardin was the son of preacher James ‘Gip’ Hardin and his wife, Mary Elizabeth Dixson. He was born in northeastern Texas’s Fannin County, in Bonham, one of the oldest cities in the state, named for a hero of the Alamo, and his ancestry traced back to a celebrated Revolutionary War hero, Col. Joseph Hardin from Carolina.

Wes Hardin’s upbringing was as serious as one might expect the son of a preacher’s to be. He had a studious older brother, Joseph, who later founded a school. The family was comfortably middle-class. Wes made efforts at earning an honest living, now and then. He taught at his brother’s school, and a cousin hired him to herd cattle along the Chisholm Trail, for $150 a month.

It was not a desire for lucre that drove Hardin’s criminality. Unique among the pantheon of Wild West legends, James Wesley Hardin was neither a thief nor a lawman.

He was a serial killer. A racist Reconstruction-era psychopath.

RECONSTRUCTION WAS a chaotic, violent time in Texas, a state which had been on the losing side of the War. Ku Klux Klan roamed the hills and everywhere anti-Reconstruction sentiment was rife. There was institutional prejudice in the courts, where tenured white justices could steer juries to biased outcomes. Political upheaval, which saw the elevation of African Americans to positions of authority, fueled the racist anger and resentment of the white populace. Hardin writes about Governor E. J. Davis’s dubious ‘coalition’ government and his bi-racial state police, ‘composed of carpet-baggers, scalawags from the North, with ignorant negroes frequently on the force.’

Cultural bias explains Hardin’s exonerations for the early slaughter of local ‘boogeymen’ – Unionists, ex-slaves and other minority groups. (It didn’t hurt that one of his ‘Uncles,’ the brother-in-law of a blood Uncle, was a judge eager to intervene on his behalf.)

In many ways, Hardin embodied the endemic white hatred from which he sprang. Because he killed ‘undesirables’ and got away with it, he was a folk-hero. In white’s eyes, Wes was a courageous vigilante, a (successful) one-man militia-machine still fighting the North.

But this ‘legitimized,’ unrestrained rage, combined with a penchant for saloon life, would cost the preacher’s son his freedom.

THE ANGER WAS EASILY triggered, whether by losses at the track or gaming tables or the mere sight of an ex-slave, especially an armed one. A homicidal impulse first revealed itself in Hardin’s mid-teens when he pulled a knife during a dispute with a classmate and plunged it through the boy’s chest, severely wounding him.

Where did the murderous wrath come from?

According to some accounts, Hardin may have been traumatized as a child during the War, when renegade Union soldiers attacked his maternal uncle’s brother’s family. The uncle’s wife and daughter were raped, murdered and their house burned down. It is unclear whether little Wes witnessed this brutal act or just knew of it. His psychotic explosive anger disorder could thus be partly attributable to post-traumatic stress.

But he surely wasn’t the only traumatized child to grow up to wear a six-shooter. No, it wasn’t his psychosis, nor was it his circumstances that made Wes different from every other angry gunslinger in the West. What set him apart was extraordinary marksmanship.

He had lightning-fast accuracy with a Colt .44, a percussion cap-fired instrument. This was years before the Colt Organization produced their revolutionary ‘Peacemaker’ .45 with its metal cartridges. The typical cowboy was not as proficient with firearms as popular culture would have us believe. Few distinguished themselves under pressure. Those who lived long enough to become legends were blessed with uncanny skills. They could shoot someone between the eyes from the back of a galloping horse. Riding skills were just as critical as accuracy. Hardin had a reputation for being an excellent horseman as well as a crack-shot.  

His autobiography doesn’t tell us how he developed pinpoint accuracy but does reference long walks in the woods as a boy, stalking birds and coons with a Winchester. Hardin says he began carrying a pistol when he was eight.

IN HIS RUSTLING DAYS along the Chisholm Trail, Hardin claims to have killed eight men, all in self-defense, a mix of Mexican vaqueros, cattle-thieves and Indians. He was never charged with any of these alleged crimes.

The Chisolm Trail led to Abilene, Kansas, a hedonist’s paradise. In Hardin’s words:

I have seen many fast towns, but I think Abilene beat them all. The town was filled with sporting men and women, gamblers, cowboys, desperadoes and the like. It was well supplied with bar-rooms, hotels, barber shops and gambling houses, and everything was open.

-  John Wesley Hardin, The Life of John Wesley Hardin.

IN ABILENE STEERS FROM Texas were fattened, slaughtered and shipped east in ice on the Kansas Pacific Rail. Hardin arrived in town at the end of his cattle-drive to find a new marshal had just been installed, fellow fast-draw Bill Heycox, known to history as James Butler ‘Wild Bill’ Hickock.

Hardin was accused of disturbing the peace after shooting up a saloon during a gambling binge. Summoned, Marshal Hickock confronted the young hot-head and was able to talk him (and a hostile crowd) down with some kind words, calling Wes ‘Little Arkansas’ and persuading him to go for a drink to get acquainted - and cool off.

BETWEEN MURDER CHARGES, Wes relied on a broad network of family, friends and supportive strangers to evade capture. This grid helped hide and feed him in the early days when he was the local folk-hero. The trouble for Wes began when he turned his .44 away from ex-slaves and Reconstructionists, and started blasting law officers. Murdering police – white police - meant there would be no racist judge (or jury) to protect him.

Hardin brought a lot of unwanted attention after his high-profile ‘execution,’ as he saw it, of Jack Helm, leader of the pro-Reconstruction Sutton faction of the longstanding Sutton-Taylor feud, which Hardin had joined (with the Taylors). When Helm made an aggressive move towards Jim Taylor, Hardin intervened and shot dead the man who had been a huge nuisance to Hardin and his racist friends for years. In his book, Hardin claims that he received many letters in prison from grateful widows of Helm’s victims.

His slaying of deputy sheriff Charles Webb in the town of Comanche on May 26, 1874, ironically in self-defense, was the last straw for the Texas legislature. Hardin’s capture was now the priority of a law enforcement body which nobody could evade: the Texas Rangers.

The storied state police unit was a roaming paramilitary group who did Pinkerton-style detective work and had famously foiled many high-profile plots. Their plan to catch Hardin was simple and effective: imprison or kill everyone in his network until the outlaw had nowhere left to turn.

A growing mob of anti-Hardin supporters joined the posse and hurried things along. The Rangers arrested Hardin’s brother Joe and his two cousins, Bud and Tom Dixson in July 1874. Then the mob broke into the jail and hanged all three of them.

On January 20, 1875, Governor Hubbard announced a bounty of $4,000 for the apprehension of John Wesley Hardin.

The brutal determination of the Rangers forced Wes out of Gonzales County, the state and beyond, sending him on the lam far beyond his comfort zone, all the way to Florida.

Eventually, a letter home from Hardin was intercepted by the Rangers who gleaned his whereabouts. Wes was apprehended on a train in Pensacola, Florida by Ranger John B. Armstrong, on August 24, 1877.

Perhaps the only mis-step the Marshals made was parading Hardin in an open carriage as they hauled him home. Already well-known, the charismatic outlaw was met by cheering crowds at every whistle-stop. Men lunged to shake his hand and women threw themselves at him.

The legend was born.

HARDIN WAS TRIED FOR the murder of Charles Webb and sentenced to Huntsville Prison for 25 years on June 5, 1878.

Founded in 1849, the Texas State penitentiary at Huntsville is the oldest Lone Star state prison still in operation today. During the Civil War, captured Union POW’s made items for Confederate forces at the prison factory.

Hardin’s early escape efforts may have been inspired by the earlier successful escape by prolific horse-thief James M. Riley, also known as ‘Doc’ Middleton, in 1874.

But Wes had no such luck. After several failed plots, he was made to wear heavy iron restraints at all times. He says he found relief from the shackles over the years by replacing a cuff bolt with a wooden peg, allowing him to slip a leg free now and then.

FOLLOWING IMAGE: HUNTSVILLE’S yard in the 1870s. This shot of chain-gang prisoners clad in horizontal-stripes and laboring in shackles supports Hardin’s description of life inside Huntsville.

DURING HIS PRISON TERM, Hardin missed 1881’s Gunfight at the OK Corral, the rise and fall of ‘Billy the Kid,’ the debut of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show and pretty much everything else that was happening in the rapidly vanishing Old West of which he was once so prominent a part. 

Wes eventually gave up the fight for freedom and adapted to prison life. Using it as an opportunity to better himself, he hit the books; first theology, then the law. He really liked the law.

On February 17, 1894, Hardin was pardoned and released after serving sixteen years of his sentence. A few months later, he passed the Texas state bar exam and officially made the transition from outlaw to lawyer. John Hardin, attorney, was determined to remain on the right side of the law.

Ironically, it was as a lawyer that Hardin was summoned from his home in Gonzales to El Paso, in 1895. He went there to meet a potential client.

WHO WAS JOHN SELMAN, the man who murdered Hardin in El Paso’s Acme Saloon that hot dusty night on August 19th, 1895? Eyewitness and official (police, coroner) accounts differ on who Selman was and his motivation (see Appendix, ‘The Death of Hardin’) but there is consensus that Selman was a lawman who wanted to kill Hardin to gain fame or revenge and that Hardin wasn’t given the chance to defend himself.

Selman was tried for murder. It was a hung jury and Selman didn’t live long enough to be re-tried, dying at the hands of a gunslinger himself, just a year after he blasted Hardin.

In a final irony, Hardin and his killer are linked together not only in the history books, but also forever in eternity: Hardin is buried at the Concordia Cemetery in El Paso, Texas, and Selman is interred just a few feet away.

Sources

♣The Life of John Wesley Hardin by John Wesley Hardin, 1896.

♦Encyclopedia of the American West, Robert M. Utley, Gen. Ed. (Wings Books, 1997).

♥Encyclopedia of the American West, Ed. Charles Phillips, Alan Axelrod (Simon and Schuster, 1996).

♠The New Encyclopedia of the American West, Ed. Howard R. Lamar (Yale University Press, revised edition, 1998).

♣Dictionary of the American West, Winfred Blevins (Facts on File, 1993).

♦Six Years With the Texas Rangers: 1875-1881 by James B. Gillett, 1921.

♥A Texas Ranger by N. A. (Napoleon Augustus) Jennings, 1899.

The Life of John Wesley Hardin

I WAS BORN IN BONHAM, Fannin county, Texas, on the 26th of May 1853.

My father, J. G. Hardin, was a Methodist preacher and circuit rider♣. My mother, Elizabeth Hardin, was a blonde, highly cultured and charity predominated in her disposition. She made my father a model wife and helpmate. My father continued to travel his circuit as a preacher until 1869, when he moved and located near Moscow, in Polk county, on account of bad health. In the same year he moved again, this time to Sumpter, in Trinity county, where he taught school. He organized and established an academy, to which institution he sent my elder brother, Joe C. Hardin, and myself. In the meantime my father was studying law, and in 1861 was admitted to the bar.

♣A circuit rider was a Methodist preacher in a rural community who attended to members of his church on horseback, conducting ad hoc prayer meetings and sermons.

THE WAR BETWEEN THE States had broken out at this time and while my father had voted against secession, yet, when his State seceded, he went with his State and immediately organized a company to fight and, if need be, to die for Southern rights. He was elected captain of this company, but resigned at the solicitation of the best citizens, Capt. Ballinger♠ being elected to the command. So my father stayed at home because, as said the foremost men of the community, "You can be of more