John M. Larn presented himself as one of the more respectable men on the Texas frontier. He owned a ranch, married into a powerful family, and in April 1876, he was sworn in as sheriff of Shackelford County. Behind that façade, he was robbing his neighbors blind and burying anyone who got close enough to prove it.
Riding beside him through it all was the notorious John Selman, the same man who would later kill John Wesley Hardin. By the summer of 1878, Larn’s double life caught up with him. In the early morning hours of June 24, vigilantes opened fire on him while he lay chained to the floor of the very jail he once ran. He was twenty-nine years old.
Larn’s early life remains largely a mystery. He was probably born in Alabama around 1849. According to historian Leon Metz, Larn came out of Mobile, drifted into Colorado, and murdered a cattleman who objected to his borrowing a horse without asking. A couple of months later, he reportedly shot the sheriff who tried to arrest him.
Hard evidence for these killings is thin, and some versions place the second shooting near Santa Fe instead. His past is mostly a question mark until he reached Texas. In 1870, a twenty-one-year-old Larn was working as a cowboy near Fort Griffin. The following year, a local rancher named Bill Hayes hired him as trail boss for a large herd bound for Trinidad, Colorado.
Most of what is known about that drive comes from a young cowboy named Henry Comstock, who wrote about it years later. It was not a peaceful trip. Larn allegedly shot three Mexicans and dumped their bodies in the Pecos River to feed the catfish. The outfit stole livestock, had a standoff with soldiers who wanted to inspect the herd, and fought among themselves.
Larn’s second-in-command, a self-described desperado named Bill Bush, killed one of his fellow cowboys over a minor disagreement. After they arrived in Colorado, Bush reportedly killed the sheriff of Las Animas County. Despite his habits, Larn maintained an appearance of respectability. He married the daughter of a wealthy rancher, Joe Matthews, who gave him around five hundred head of cattle as a wedding gift.
Larn used them to start his own ranch on the Clear Fork of the Brazos, about seven miles outside Fort Griffin. The land had once been the site of Camp Cooper, a military post from the 1850s briefly commanded by Robert E. Lee. Larn built his house using stones from the old camp, and the house still stands today.
Around this time, Larn began palling around with John Selman. Like Larn, Selman was a natural-born killer with no fear of taking what was not his. The two teamed up to rob Bill Hayes, the same man who had hired Larn for the Colorado drive. Hayes had been struggling to sell his cattle up in Trinidad, so before heading back to Texas for branding season, he gave Larn power of attorney over his remaining stock at Fort Griffin.
Instead of watching over his neighbor’s cattle, Larn and Selman simply changed the brands and moved the herd to Larn’s ranch. Hayes was furious when he returned and discovered what happened. He and his brother John put together another herd, and when it came time to trail them north, they struck Larn’s ranch and stole back their original cattle. Larn obtained a warrant for Hayes’s arrest from a local constable named Riley Carter.
He and Selman then organized a posse of their own, including more than a dozen buffalo soldiers, and rode off in pursuit. They caught up with the herd in December 1873 at a place known as Bush Knob in Throckmorton County. What followed was a massacre. Lieutenant Turner’s official report stated that when the four men in camp spotted the posse, they reached for their weapons and began firing.
In the answering rifle barrage, two were killed instantly, and the other two were shot as they tried to escape. Larn’s posse also killed four additional cowboys tending the herd later that night, again claiming they had tried to escape. Eight men total died, including Bill Hayes. An officer at Fort Griffin later explained it away by saying stock theft was so common that it was virtually impossible to get a jury to rule against rustlers, so they handled it themselves.
Larn and Selman faced no consequences. They joined an outfit known as the Tin Hat Brigade, a vigilante committee made up of some of the most respectable men in the area, including a judge. By the end of 1876, a newspaper out of Austin claimed they had already lynched at least eleven men. It was largely due to his association with the Tin Hats that Larn got elected sheriff of Shackelford County.
His time in office was marked by more of the same. A man named Bryant, who ran a few head of cattle with Larn, was killed by one of Larn’s ranch hands. Suspicion arose that it was done to get his stock. Since Bryant had no friends or relatives willing to investigate, Larn added the animals to his own herd and considered the matter closed.
In 1877, Larn hired a pair of stone masons to build a rock fence at his ranch. When it came time to pay them, he had them shot and dumped in the river. Their bodies turned up a few days later floating in the Clear Fork, but the local coroner, a member of the Tin Hat Brigade, refused to rule their deaths as murder. As sheriff, Larn was said to have been effective, though few particulars survive.
People were still shot and hanged, but that was mostly the work of the vigilantes. On at least one occasion, Larn handed a pair of prisoners over to his fellow vigilantes, and both men were found hanging from a tree the next morning. He also made Selman one of his deputies, though whether Selman held an official position is debated. The two spent considerable time at Larn’s ranch, often joined by hard-bitten gunmen like Billy Bland and Charlie Reed, both members of the Tin Hat Brigade.
On the night of January 17, 1877, Reed and Bland rode into Fort Griffin and started shooting the place up. The drunken duo eventually stepped inside the Bee Hive Saloon, where one of Larn’s deputies, Bill Kruger, came to confront them. Kruger was a holdover from the previous sheriff and an alleged member of the Tin Hat Brigade. Joining him was a local attorney named Jeffries.
Kruger and Jeffries stepped inside with drawn guns. Bland, standing in the door between the saloon and the dance hall, turned and fired when he saw Kruger facing him. The bullet wounded the deputy, and the saloon exploded with gunfire. When the smoke cleared, innocent bystanders lay dead.
Dan Barron, a young lawyer recently married, lay sprawled on the floor with a hole in his forehead. Lieutenant Myers, recently of the 10th Cavalry, sat in a chair, shot and dying. Billy Bland was down, rolling in agony, his eyes already glazing over. Jeffries survived with a gaping hole in his lungs, as did Kruger, who was wounded only once.
Reed escaped during the chaos and fled. Sheriff Larn showed little concern over his deputy being wounded. He was mostly angry over his friend Bland getting killed. He resigned as sheriff in protest and terminated his association with the Tin Hat Brigade.
The ordeal caused a schism among the vigilantes. Larn felt Kruger had broken an unwritten rule by gunning down a fellow Tin Hat, but not everyone agreed. Larn and Selman had also become increasingly bold in their rustling, the very thing the vigilantes were supposed to be preventing. Tensions grew so tense that Larn and his buddies stopped sleeping at the ranch, camping out in the hills instead.
In an effort to ease things, delegates from the Tin Hat Brigade rode out with an offer: if Larn and his compadres would stop their drinking and blatant rustling, the vigilantes would leave them be. As a consolation, they saw to it that Larn and Selman were appointed deputy inspectors of hides for the county, and Larn got a contract to supply beef to the soldiers at Fort Griffin. He did not stop rustling. If anything, he ramped it up.
Larn and Selman took to riding at night, terrorizing smaller spreads and running off their stock. Newspapers reported that homesteaders were too scared to work their crops. When one man tried to stand up to Larn, he went missing. The Texas Rangers were called in, and in February 1878 they located six stolen cow hides dumped in the river behind Larn’s house.
He faced no real consequences. He and Selman were simply instructed to surrender themselves, and instead they rode to Albany and began threatening witnesses. Only the Rangers were willing to speak out, and since it was not the Rangers who had lost the cattle, Larn and Selman walked free. Ranger Captain G.
W. Campbell was so infuriated he wrote to his commander, complaining the entire county was rigged. According to him, roughly eighty locals were vigilantes who would never move against one of their own. But the vigilantes intercepted the letter, and a local judge wrote his own note to the governor, making Campbell out to be a slanderer.
By May 1878, Campbell was relieved of his command. Larn and Selman kept getting bolder. They went to war with nearly everyone, including former buddies in the Tin Hats. In June 1878, Larn ambushed a well-known rancher named Treadwell, a man widely believed to have exposed his rustling.
Larn took a long shot, missed Treadwell, but killed his horse. That was the final straw. A contingent of area ranchers visited Larn’s father-in-law, Joe Matthews, and begged him to do something. Matthews tried but eventually threw up his hands.
The local law, which had been content to look the other way, suddenly decided Larn and Selman were a problem. The man sent to arrest Larn was his old deputy, Bill Kruger, who had taken over as sheriff after Larn resigned. Kruger’s posse consisted mostly of Larn’s in-laws. They waited until Larn came out to milk his cow the next morning and arrested him.
Accounts differ on whether Larn was armed. Some claim he handed over his gun willingly, others say he begged to go back inside for a pistol to fight it out, and at least one story has him threatening to kill every man in the posse as soon as he made bail. In the end, he simply asked that his wife and son be allowed to ride with the posse, hoping they would be less inclined to lynch him with his family present. It worked, and they made it to Albany without issue.
Larn was shackled by a blacksmith and chained to the floor of the little shack that passed for a jail. His wife Mary made plans to go to Fort Griffin and fetch a lawyer, though there was little a lawyer could have accomplished. Nobody planned on Larn having his day in court. That was not what the Tin Hat Brigade was known for.
Later that night, around midnight, vigilantes came. Initially they planned to snatch Larn out of the jail and string him up outside, but he was chained to the floor. Rather than cut the chains, they aimed their rifles through the window and opened fire. In the early morning hours of June 24, 1878, the former sheriff John Larn fell dead, still chained to the floor of the same jail he used to run.
One of his guards later stated Larn was game to the very end, smiling at the vigilantes and taking it without flinching as they shot him to pieces. Mary, hearing the shots from the hotel across the street, likely knew exactly what they meant. She took her husband home the following day and buried him on the ranch, next to their infant son. Selman, meanwhile, got away.
Warned of his impending arrest by a prostitute called Hurricane Minnie, he fled. He terrorized New Mexico for a while, leading a gang known as Selman’s Scouts, before eventually pinning on a badge in El Paso. On August 19, 1895, he stepped up behind John Wesley Hardin and shot him in the back of the head. Less than a year later, Selman himself was gunned down by a Deputy U.
S. Marshal named George Scarborough, about a block away from where he killed Hardin.