On the night of August 19, 1895, a man who had spent nearly two decades building a reputation as one of the most dangerous outlaws in the American West walked into the Acme Saloon in El Paso, Texas. John Wesley Hardin had been out of prison for just over a year, and he had come to the border town to start over as a lawyer. His last words that evening were reportedly about a roll of dice: four sixes to beat. Just before midnight, John Selman Sr.
, a former outlaw turned lawman, entered the saloon, approached Hardin from behind, and fired a bullet into his head. Three more shots followed as Hardin lay on the floor. By the next day, the man who claimed to have killed more than forty men was buried in El Paso’s Concordia Cemetery. Hardin’s path to that saloon floor began in 1853, near Bonham, Texas, where he was born to a Methodist preacher and his wife.
He was named after the founder of Methodism, John Wesley. The family moved to Sumpter, Texas, in 1859, where his father established a school. Hardin grew up in a southern family with political connections and a proud lineage. When the Civil War broke out, his father served as a captain in the Confederate army.
Hardin claimed his first killing came at age fifteen, in November 1868, after he defeated a former slave named Major Holshousen in a wrestling match. According to Hardin, Major ambushed him the next day, and Hardin shot him five times. He fled rather than face trial, believing he could not get a fair hearing in a state occupied by Union forces. Within a short time, he claimed to have killed three soldiers sent to capture him.
By the fall of 1868, he boasted that he had already disposed of four men. For the next several years, Hardin drifted through Texas and beyond, accumulating a body count that is difficult to verify. He worked briefly as a teacher, claimed to have shot a man through the eye to win a whiskey bet, and found himself in a series of card games that turned deadly. On January 5, 1870, in Towash, Texas, he was playing cards with a man named Benjamin Bradley, who grew angry after losing nearly every hand and threatened to cut out Hardin’s liver.
Bradley drew a knife and a pistol. Hardin claimed he was unarmed and asked to leave, but later that night Bradley came looking for him. When Bradley fired and missed, Hardin drew his revolvers and killed him with two shots. He had a distinctive method of carrying his pistols: they were sewn into his vest, with the butts facing inward across his chest, and he practiced drawing them by crossing his arms.
He admitted to killing two other men in Hill County around the same time. In January 1871, Hardin was arrested for the murder of a Waco city marshal, a crime he denied. While being transported to stand trial, he overpowered the lawmen escorting him, killed at least one of them, and escaped. He found refuge with relatives in Gonzales, Texas, and took work driving cattle up the Chisholm Trail to Kansas, hoping to lose his pursuers in the open range.
He quickly clashed with a freedman named Bob King, whom he beat with his pistol for disobeying orders, and wounded three Mexicans in a dispute over a card game called three-card monte. The cattle drive itself became another chapter in Hardin’s violent legend. On the trail to Abilene, Kansas, he tangled with a Mexican drover who shot through Hardin’s hat. Hardin’s pistol malfunctioned, its cylinder loose, but he managed to fire by holding the cylinder in one hand and pulling the trigger with the other, wounding his opponent in the thigh.
After a temporary truce, Hardin borrowed a pistol, found the man, and shot him in the head. The incident triggered a gun battle that resulted in the deaths of several Mexican cowboys; Hardin claimed five, though records suggest three. During the same drive, he said he killed two Indians in separate encounters. The gunfighter who would become his most famous counterpart was waiting for him in Abilene.
Wild Bill Hickok, the town marshal, had ordered the removal of a lewd sign from a saloon owned by Ben Thompson and Phil Coe. Thompson, furious, tried to incite Hardin, then living under the alias Wesley Clements and known locally as Little Arkansas, to kill Hickok. Hardin refused, asking Thompson why he did not kill the man himself. Later that night, Hickok confronted Hardin about carrying weapons.
Hardin surrendered his pistols, then theatrically spun them and briefly pointed them at the marshal before backing down. Hickok advised him to avoid trouble. Months later, Hickok granted him the rare privilege of carrying pistols inside town. On August 6, 1871, Hardin was staying at the American House hotel in Abilene with his cousin Gip Clements and a friend named Charles Couger.
All three had been drinking heavily. Hardin became irritated by Couger’s loud snoring and shouted at him to wake up. When he got no response, the intoxicated Hardin fired several shots through the wall. One bullet struck Couger in the heart, killing him.
Hardin and his cousin fled through a second-story window and across the roof, just as Hickok and four deputies arrived. Hardin believed that if Hickok found him unable to defend himself, the famous marshal would kill him to build his own reputation. He jumped from the roof into the street and hid in a haystack, then stole a horse and rode to a cowboy camp thirty-five miles outside town. He claimed he ambushed a lawman and two deputies at the camp, stripped them, and sent them back to Abilene naked.
He rode for Texas the next day and swore he would never return. Years later, when asked about the many exaggerated stories surrounding his life, he complained that people said he had killed six or seven men for snoring. That was not true, he insisted. He had killed only one.
Back in Texas, Hardin married Jane Bowen and became entangled in the Sutton-Taylor feud, a bloody clan conflict that had been raging for years. His major role in the feud came on July 18, 1873, in Cuero, Texas, when he killed a deputy sheriff known to be an ally of the Sutton faction. Later that same day, he confronted and killed Jack Helm, the leader of the Sutton forces. The feud claimed more lives, including those of two brothers killed in March 1874, an act Hardin openly admitted he and his brother had carried out alongside the Taylors.
In May 1874, Hardin was in Comanche, Texas, when Deputy Sheriff Charles Webb entered a bar. Hardin asked if Webb intended to arrest him. Webb said no and accepted a drink, but according to Hardin, Webb then drew his pistol. Webb was killed in the ensuing exchange.
His death was so unpopular that a mob formed, and Hardin’s family members were jailed for their safety. A mob stormed the jail in July 1874 and hanged his brother and two cousins. Hardin and Jim Taylor then parted ways permanently. The killing of Webb had a long tail.
In January 1875, the Texas legislature authorized a reward of four thousand dollars for Hardin’s capture. A Texas Ranger named Jack Duncan, working undercover, intercepted a letter that revealed Hardin was hiding in a lumber yard on the Alabama-Florida border, using the alias John Swain. On August 24, 1877, guards and local authorities confronted Hardin aboard a train in Pensacola, Florida. He tried to draw a Colt .
44 but it caught on his suspenders. The officers knocked him unconscious and arrested two of his companions. John B. Armstrong, the famous Ranger, had to kill another man, named Mann, who brandished a pistol.
Hardin was tried for Webb’s murder and sentenced to twenty-five years in Huntsville prison. A tunnel escape attempt by fifty prisoners in 1879 was foiled, but Hardin settled into prison life. He studied theology, became superintendent of the prison Sunday school, and endured a serious illness brought on by an old gunshot wound. While still incarcerated, he wrote his autobiography, often exaggerating or inventing stories about his life.
He claimed responsibility for numerous killings that cannot be verified. In one passage, he reflected on the first violence he ever witnessed, a stabbing in 1861, and warned his readers: look what wine and passion do to a man; if you want to succeed in life, be moderate and control your passions. After serving seventeen years, Hardin was released on February 17, 1894, at the age of forty. He received a full pardon within weeks and passed the Texas bar exam that summer.
His second life was short. A brief marriage to a fifteen-year-old girl ended quickly, and he moved to El Paso. When a local lawman arrested a woman who occasionally worked as a prostitute, Hardin confronted the man and, by some accounts, struck him with his pistol. The officer’s father, John Selman Sr.
, was furious. In the early hours of August 19, 1895, Selman entered the Acme Saloon and shot Hardin in the head. Hardin was forty-two years old. Selman claimed self-defense, saying he saw Hardin reach for his gun, but the jury could not reach a verdict.
Before he could be retried, Selman himself was killed in a shootout with a federal marshal in April 1896. A century later, in 1995, a legal battle erupted over Hardin’s grave when descendants sought to move his remains to be buried beside his first wife. El Paso residents fought the removal, and the courts ruled that Hardin would remain in El Paso.
His guns and personal effects, including the pistol he was carrying when he died and the bullet that killed him, have since sold at auction for tens of thousands of dollars, cementing the legacy of the man who became one of the most enduring outlaw legends of the Old West.