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| John Wesley Hardin was so mean that he once shot a man just for snoring |
John Wesley Hardin was a mean, ornery, old cuss. The
story is that he once shot a man just for snoring.
An
article published in The Times
(Washington, DC) said Hardin was staying at a hotel in Nogales. “He was annoyed
by a heavy snorer in the next room. Without making an effort to caution the
sleeper, he put his ear to the thin board partition until he got the exact
position of his snoring neighbor’s head. Then he fired one .45 caliber bullet
through the wall. The snoring stopped. The corpse was found the next morning,
shot through the brain.”
In
later years Hardin said, “They tell lots
of lies about me. They say I killed five or six men for snoring. Well, it ain’t true! I only killed one man for snoring.”
Talk
about a mean son-of-a-bitch.
Hardin’s
autobiography, published shortly after his death, contains a laundry list of
murders committed by the gunfighter. He took credit for killing 42 men. A more
accurate number is thought to be somewhere between 20 and 25.
His
first “near murder” happened at school when he was 14. Another student, Charles
Sloter, accused Hardin of writing “doggerel” on the blackboard about a girl
named Sal. Then he grabbed a seat next to Hardin, slugged him in the shoulder,
and pulled out a knife. Sloter quickly learned he picked the wrong kid to mess with. Hardin “stabbed him twice, almost
fatally in the breast.” There was talk about locking him up or hanging him. Eventually, Hardin got off, but trouble seemed to follow the teen.
He
killed his first man that same year. The victim, a black man named “Mage,” was a former slave of his
uncle, Major Holshousen. Hardin shot Mage five times
and hightailed it off to his father’s house to tell him what happened. His
father told him to keep out of sight until things blew over. He didn’t think a
Southern boy could get a fair trial in post-Civil War Texas. Hardin got word that
three Union soldiers were hot on his trail. He could have surrendered. He could
have made a run for it. Instead, he
waylaid and killed the three soldiers,
and buried them where no one would find them. At age fifteen, Wes Hardin had
four notches in his gun.
His
next kill was a gambler named Benjamin Bradley (mistakenly called Jim Bradly in
his autobiography). “Bradley...tried to cut me off, getting in front of me with
a pistol in one hand and a Bowie knife in the other,” wrote Hardin. “He
commenced to fire on me, firing once,
then snapping and then firing again. By
this time, we were within five or six feet of each other, and I fired with a Remington .45 at his heart and right
after that at his head.”
In his autobiography, John Wesley Hardin took credit for killing 42 men. A more
accurate number is thought to be between 20 and 25.
In January
1870, Hardin killed a circus employee at Horn Hill. Not long after that, he went to see a girl in Kosse. While he
was visiting her, her sweetheart came to the door and threatened to kill him
unless he gave him $100. Hardin lured the man to the stables with the promise
of more money he had stashed in his saddlebags. The man demanded the money he
had on him first. Hardin dropped some of it on the floor. When “he stooped down
to pick it up, and as he was
straightening up, I pulled my pistol and fired. The ball struck him between the
eyes, and he fell over, a dead robber.” Hardin picked up his money and
hightailed it out of there.
In
his autobiography, Hardin claimed he got the drop on Wild Bill Hickok when he
was marshal of Abilene, but the odds are that never happened. When he was
rolling ten pins (bowling), Hardin said, Wild Bill came in and asked him to
take off his guns. Hardin refused. The two men walked outside to settle the
matter. Bill “pulled his pistol and said: Take those pistols off. I arrest
you.” Hardin turned the situation around and drew down on Wild Bill.
“I
told him to put his pistol up,” Hardin said. Then, “I cursed him for being a
long-haired scoundrel that would shoot a boy with his back to him.” But instead
of exchanging gunfire, they shared words. After that, they had a drink and were the best of friends.
As
I said before, it’s all pure horse hockey. Just another incidence of Hardin
blowing hot air.
Hardin and his gang
met up at a saloon in Comanche, Texas, on May 26, 1874, to celebrate his 21st
birthday. That trip turned out to be the beginning of the end for John Wesley
Hardin. Charlie Webb, a Brown County Deputy Sheriff, entered the saloon. Hardin
asked if he was there to arrest him. Webb said he wasn’t, so Hardin invited the
deputy to have a drink. That’s when all hell busted loose. Someone hollered out
a warning. Hardin wheeled around just in time to see Charles Webb about to draw
his pistol. “He was in the act of presenting it when I jumped to one side, drew
my pistol, and fired...My aim was good,
and a bullet hole in the left cheek did the work. He fell against the wall, and
as he fell, he fired a second shot, which went into the air.” After that, two
of Hardin’s friends, Jim Taylor and Bud Dixon, “pulled their pistols and fired
on him [Webb] as he was falling, not knowing that I had killed him.”
The Teas Rangers captured John Wesley Hardin on a Florida train in August 1877.
They said his gun caught in his suspenders while he was trying to pull it. Hardin said
they took him by surprise and mauled him.
Now the way Hardin spun that bit of gunplay in his autobiography, Charles Webb was part of a larger plot to assassinate him. When it didn’t work out the way they expected, the crowd ran outside and began to scream, “Hardin has killed Charley Webb; let us hang him.”
Hardin
surrendered to Sheriff John Karnes, but when the mob went crazy, he skedaddled
before they stretched his neck. He bent the truth a little more, saying, “I was
willing to surrender, but the sheriff said he could not protect me; that the
mob was too strong and Charley Webb had been their leader. He advised me to
stay around until the excitement died down and then come in and surrender.”
In
the days after Webb’s murder, hundreds of men hit the trail to search for him.
As the heat picked up, Hardin decided it was time for a fresh start. He made
his way to Gainesville, Florida, and went by the name of John Swain. He moved
around a lot, working as a saloonkeeper, a lumberman, and a cattleman, but
everywhere he went, trouble followed. His autobiography recounts at least eight
to ten murders during this period.
The Texas Rangers captured Hardin on a Florida train
on August 24, 1877. They said Hardin reached for his gun, but it got caught in
his suspenders. Hardin said they took him by surprise and mauled him. Whichever
account is correct, John Wesley Hardin wound up in prison.
After his capture, the Texas Rangers
handed Hardin a pair of unloaded Colts and encouraged him to show his skills.
Ranger James Gillett said Hardin manipulated the guns “with magical precision.”
He was a lightning-fast draw and deadly accurate. Many Wild West aficionados
claim Hardin was the fastest gunfighter out there, maybe even quicker than Wild
Bill, but part of it could have been how he carried his guns. Hardin practiced
his fast draw daily in front of a mirror, and he wore a special calf-skin vest
with built-in holsters. That may have given him an edge. But Hardin’s real
secret weapon was his sleight-of-hand skills. He could manipulate a gun the way
a professional gambler could handle a deck of cards.
His
landlady, Mrs. Wilson, was quoted in the El
Paso Times, published on August 23, 1895. She said Hardin was “quick as a flash; he would have a gun in each hand,
clicking so fast that the clicks sounded like a rattle machine.”
Hardin
was sentenced to 25-years in the
Huntsville Prison. While there, he studied theology and law. On February 17,
1894, he was released from prison after serving 17 years of a 25-year sentence.
On July 21, Hardin passed the bar exam and was licensed to practice law in
Texas.
Not
long after that, he moved to El Paso and
began a brief reign of terror after returning to his old ways—drinking,
gambling, and killing.
The
lead story in the Daily Ardmoreite on
August 20, 1895, read, “John Wesley Hardin killed Monday night at El Paso,
Texas. Died with his boots on in true desperado style.”
He
was shot and killed at the Acme Saloon by John Selman. “At 11 o’clock tonight,
Sellman stalked into the Acme with a friend, and Hardin was standing at the bar
shaking dice with some friends. When he saw Sellman,
he whirled around and threw his hand to his hip pocket. In an instant, Sellman’s gun was out, and a ball went crashing through his
brain, and while he was falling, Sellman
pumped two more balls from his .44 into the man’s body and then walked out and
surrendered himself.”
When
asked why he fired as Hardin was going down, Selman said, “Good gunfighters
like Wes Hardin sometimes shoot after they’re
hit.”
John
Selman deserves a separate entry in the annals of Western history. He was as
notorious as John Wesley Hardin. The Austin
Weekly Statesman said Selman “did not know what fear was, and has killed
not less than 20 outlaws. He was a dead shot and quick as lightning with a
gun.”
Surprisingly,
no one bothered to mention Selman shot Hardin from behind. The bullet entered
through the back of his head and exited
just above the right eye. Things could very well have gone the other way if
Selman had met Hardin face-to-face in an old-fashioned duel.
Selman’s
career took him all over the board. He fought for the Confederacy during the
Civil War, served as a lawman, and in the Lincoln County War, he formed a band known as Selman’s Scouts.
In late 1878, they rustled cattle and horses and murdered several innocent men.
Then, in 1888, he landed in El Paso, working as a professional gambler and
sometimes constable. In 1894, he killed Texas Ranger Bass Outlaw after Bass
killed another Texas Ranger, then turned his guns on Selman.
Ironically,
Selman was shot and killed two years later in a gunfight with U.S. Deputy
Marshal George Scarborough, who was killed in a gunfight not too many years
later.
And
so it goes in the West.
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