John Wesley Hardin: Texas Gunfighter

By Lee Floren

THE TRUE STORY OF THE BOY KILLER, JOHN WESLEY HARDIN, ACE OF THE FAST-GUN CROWD….MURDERER OF FORTY MEN….

LIVING AND DYING WESTERN STYLE was paced by the fast-gun gentry, and John Wesley Hardin was the most prominent pace-setter among them. No gun in Texas was so deadly; no gunfighter so young. And yet many said he was a smart, friendly man, fighting on the side of Right...against the cruel and corrupt Carpetbaggers who overran his beloved Lone Star State...

Hardin, criminal or saint, was fearless...and fast. He survived the blazing guns of other killers, countless Ranger roundups, the bloody Taylor-Sutton Feud, lynching parties and stalks by Pinkerton detectives. He outwitted his guards at the prison in Huntsville who tried to break him via the inhuman and ingenious “Water-house Torture.” He even survived his own reputation....In middle-age John Wesley Hardin became a lawyer and was admitted to the Texas Bar.

But could he survive his own nature’s dark side?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Borodino Books
• Release date: Dec 5, 2018
• ISBN: 9781789126570

Lee Floren

Lee Floren (1910-1995) was an American writer who, under various pseudonyms, published some 300 novels in a variety of genres, including western, Gothic, juvenile, detective, and biographical novels and novelettes, as well as case study books on medical and psychological subjects. He also contributed around 1,000 short stories and articles, also under various pseudonyms, to popular publications. Floren wrote under the names Brett Austin, R. V. Donald, Lisa Fanchon, Claudia Hall, Wade Hamilton, Matt Harding, Matthew Whitman Harding, Felix Lee Horton, Mark Kirby, Grace Lang, Marguerite Nelson, Lew Smith, Maria Sandra Sterling, Lee Thomas, Len Turner, Will Watson and Dave Wilson. He was born on March 22, 1910, in Hinsdale, Montana and received his B.A. degree from Santa Barbara State College (now the University of California, Santa Barbara). He was awarded his teaching certificate by the Occidental College in Los Angeles, California, and received his M.A. degree from Texas Western College (now University of Texas in El Paso) in 1964. Floren taught woodshop and science in California between 1942-1945, before becoming a freelance writer in 1945. He won the Colt 44 Award in 1979 for his novel The Rawhide Men.

Book preview

This edition is published by BORODINO BOOKS – www.pp-publishing.com

To join our mailing list for new titles or for issues with our books – [e-mail]

Or on Facebook

Text originally published in 1962 under the same title.

© Borodino Books 2018, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

JOHN WESLEY HARDIN, TEXAS GUNFIGHTER

BY

LEE FLOREN

John Wesley Hardin as he looked the day he pulled the road agent spin on Marshall Wild Bill Hickok in Abilene, Kansas, the day he made the most famous marshal of all trailtowns back water.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

Chapter One 5

Chapter Two 9

Chapter Three 13

Chapter Four 17

Chapter Five 24

Chapter Six 28

Chapter Seven 31

Chapter Eight 35

Chapter Nine 39

Chapter Ten 43

Chapter Eleven 48

Chapter Twelve 52

Chapter Thirteen 55

Chapter Fourteen 60

Chapter Fifteen 63

Chapter Sixteen 66

Chapter Seventeen 70

Chapter Eighteen 72

Chapter Nineteen 75

Chapter Twenty 80

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 85

Chapter One

THE TWO YOUTHS wrestled savagely, bare feet digging the red soil of East Texas. One was black. The other was white. The Negro, who would be dead in a few hours, was named Mage.

His opponent was John Wesley Hardin, destined to become Texas’ most deadly gunfighter.

Wes Hardin was sixteen. Mage was eighteen; he outweighed Wes Hardin by some twenty pounds. Yet the smaller youth was tough as rawhide and refused to go down. His boast was that nobody had ever put him on his back.

The bout had started out as a friendly wrestling match. Mage, who prided himself on his strength, had called Wes Hardin’s boast. It took place in a cane-field on the farm of Wes Hardin’s uncle, where Wes was visiting.

Get ‘im, Mage!

The words came from the lips of a bent-over, old Negro. Four years ago—before the Civil War ended—he would not have dared to encourage a member of his race against a white man.

Cane-cutters had gathered around, wicked cane-knives in hands. Some of them were poor white men and they glared at the old Negro, but said nothing.

Suddenly Wes Hardin’s fingernails scraped skin from Mage’s jaw, bringing blood. Mage raised his hand to his chin, saw the blood on it, and red hell exploded in him.

You drawed my blood! I’ll kill you, Hardin!

Head down, Mage went in, fists working. This was too much for the watching workers. This was a wrestling match no longer; it was a fistfight. So men moved in and broke the youths apart.

I’m still goin’ kill you, Hardin!

You won’t kill me! I’ll kill you first!

Blood hot, they started for each other again, but this time the foreman, a white man, stepped between them.

Mage, you go back to cuttin’ cane! Hardin, you go to the house, and go right now! Savvy?

Wes Hardin grabbed up his shoes and ran to his uncle’s house, a quarter of a mile away. His blood boiled. Nobody—black or white—could threaten to kill John Wesley Hardin!

He had his old .44 caliber pistol in his room. He himself had made a holster for it out of rawhide. He himself had sewed on the cartridge loops back at his home, a few miles northwest.

His uncle was sitting reading in the living room when Wes ran by. Seeing something was wrong, he followed the boy to his room, and caught Wes pulling out the .44 and gunbelt from the dresser drawer.

Wait a minute, boy! What’s the trouble?

Wes gasped out his story. Mage had threatened his life! And no man—black or white—could talk to him that way. By sheer strength, his uncle wrested the weapon and belt from him.

Watch that temper of your’s, nephew! Mage was mad, nothin’ more. He’ll take it out on the cane. He didn’t mean what he said! You’re not takin’ your gun out there!

But—

You kill that black man and they’ll hang you, Wes. Ten years ago it would have been different—but since then, Texas lost the War. You just stay here in your room and forgit about it!

Wes knew his uncle was right. Now that the War was over things were entirely different in Texas, and not to the Texans’ liking. Now the carpetbaggers ruled Texas. Even Negroes, slaves but a few years before, wore the hated uniforms of the newly-appointed state police. And that was a hard pill for the proud Texans to swallow.

Texans had picked up their rifles, at the start of the War, and fought for the South, and they had lost. They had come back home, some blind, some wounded, and what had they found? The carpetbagger was in power—the hated Northerner.

Negroes now sat on juries determining the fate of white Texans. Some Negroes were even judges. During the four years of bloody battles Texas wives and mothers and aged men had tried to keep the huge ranches running. They had failed. Now Texas cattle—unbranded and uncastrated—roamed the deep Texas brush, wild as deer and twice as rugged. The whole picture was such. Topsy-turvy.

Tomorrow mornin’, bright and early, you saddle Ol’ Blue and head home, Wes. You got too much temper, boy. And if you stay around here you’ll only bring down the state police on me.

You mean you’re scared?

Not afraid. Jus’ sensible.

Wes stayed in his room the rest of the day. He was a visitor at his uncle’s house, and therefore his uncle was boss. The Hardin clan was very large. Wes had so many cousins he couldn’t count them. The clan was what counted. The clan had to stay together, one solid unit. For if the clan fell, then the individual fell, too. Some of these cousins—in the hectic years to come—would die for him. And he, in turn, would kill on their behalf.

Next morning he was up at daybreak. His uncle put the .44 and belt in one of his saddlebags. And leave it there, he said sternly. But, once out of sight, Wes unbuckled the saddlebag, took out his old gun, and strapped it around his waist.

He was about two miles from his uncle’s ranch when Mage came out of the brush along a creek. He carried a club. And his face was filled with rage.

I said I’d kill you, Hardin! An’ by God, I’ll do it!

Historians often wonder why Mage carried a club instead of a shotgun, rifle or pistol. Probably he was so poor he could not afford a sidearm. And evidently he’d not been able to borrow a weapon.

He came at Wes with the club. He swung it savagely. It thudded across Wes below his neck. Had it hit him in the back of the head it would have crushed his skull.

The blow knocked Wes from saddle. He landed dazed on the ground. Mage came after him, club raised. Wes got his .44 into action. The roar hammered through the brush. Mage staggered back, blood streaming from his chest, the club dropping from his fingers.

He went down on his side, moaning softly. Wes, terrified now, waited no longer. He got on his horse and road at a gallop for home. If Mage lived, he had a chance—but a slim one. But if Mage died....

Old Blue was rather fagged when Wes threw himself out of saddle in front of his family shack. He gasped out his story to his father, a Methodist minister, his two younger sisters and his younger brother staring at him with fear in their young eyes.

His mother—a gentle, Christian woman—collapsed in the old handmade rocker, sobbing with her hands over her head.

His father was a self-educated man (later he was admitted to the Texas bar as a practicing lawyer) and the most clear-headed of this hot-tempered clan.

You don’t know whether or not you killed Mage, I take it?

I never stuck around, Pa. I just got on Old Blue and left—

I see....

What’ll I do, Pa?

There is only one thing to do. We’ll have to get you out of here until we find out whether Mage is alive or dead. But if he dies, you really are in danger.

The Hardins had some close friends named Morgan back in the brush a few miles. Wes would ride to the Morgans’ and hide out. He was given strict orders not to go around his older brother, Joe, who was teaching school a few miles away at Logallis Prairie. Joe was also studying law.

Don’t get Joe involved in this, his father ordered.

Reverend Hardin would check on Mage’s condition. Then he would get word to his son at the Morgans." So, still riding Old Blue, Wes Hardin headed back into the thick Texas brush.

Four days later one of his cousins, Manning Clements, rode into the Morgan yard. Mage just died this morning, he said.

Wes stared at him.

"And the state police are after you. Three of them—a white man and two darkies. They know where you are, Wes. You’d