John Wesley Hardin was a gambler, cattle drover and gunman whose name was attached to more killings than any other man in Texas in the decade after the Civil War. What a court proved is much narrower. A Comanche County jury convicted him of second-degree murder for shooting Charles Webb, a Brown County deputy sheriff, on May 26, 1874, his twenty-first birthday. The conviction was affirmed on appeal, and in 1878 he was sentenced to 25 years. In 1892, while still in prison, he pleaded guilty to manslaughter for killing a man named J. B. Morgan in Cuero in 1873. Those are the only two killings for which he was ever convicted.
Everything else rests on attribution. Some killings were reported in newspapers when they happened; some are recorded by peace officer memorials and later historians; many are known only because Hardin described them in The Life of John Wesley Hardin, a manuscript he wrote in prison and which was published in 1896, the year after his death. Historians agree that he killed at least 20 people. Beyond that the numbers diverge sharply, and the autobiography, which presents almost every killing as self-defense or as resistance to an occupying government, cannot be taken at its word.
Hardin was pardoned in 1894, admitted to the bar, and shot dead in an El Paso saloon in August 1895 by a constable named John Selman.
Hardin was born on May 26, 1853, at Bonham in Fannin County, Texas, the second of eight children of James Gibson Hardin and Elizabeth Cartwright Dixon Hardin, according to the finding aid of his papers at the Wittliff Collections of Texas State University. His father was a Methodist circuit-riding preacher who named the boy after the founder of Methodism; he also taught school and later practiced law. The family moved often. They lived at Moscow in Polk County from 1855, then at Sumpter in Trinity County from 1859, where the elder Hardin ran a school. In 1861 he passed the bar and moved the family to Livingston in Polk County. After the war, in 1865, they returned to Sumpter.
Leon Metz, writing in the Handbook of Texas, dates the start of Hardin's violent record to 1867, when as a schoolboy he stabbed another youth in a quarrel. He was then about 14.
The setting matters to every account of Hardin's early life. Texas was under federal military authority from 1867, and after 1870 Governor Edmund J. Davis, a Republican, governed with a new statewide force, the Texas State Police. The Handbook of Texas entry on the State Police records that a committee of the 1868 to 1869 constitutional convention counted 939 murders in the state between 1865 and 1868, of which 373 were killings of Black Texans by white men. The State Police, created in July 1870, was never larger than about 200 men. Its members were Black, Hispanic and white, and included former Union and Confederate soldiers. The force was unpopular with many white Texans because it employed Black officers and answered to Davis. The legislature abolished it in April 1873. The Handbook notes that older histories called it corrupt and partisan, and that more recent research has found that charge largely unsupported, while acknowledging serious misconduct by some officers, Captain Jack Helm among them.
Several of the men Hardin is said to have killed were freedmen, Union soldiers or State Police officers, including Black officers. Hardin's own book describes those encounters in openly racial and partisan terms and casts himself as a defender of the defeated South.
In the fall of 1868, when he was 15, Hardin shot a Black man in Polk County. The Handbook of Texas describes it as the result of "a chance meeting and an argument." The Wittliff Collections identify the man as a former slave.
Most of the detail comes from Hardin himself. In his autobiography he names the man as Mage, says Mage had been enslaved by a relative of his uncle's wife, and says the two had quarreled after Hardin and a cousin beat him in a wrestling match. Hardin wrote that the next day Mage confronted him on the road with a stick and that he shot him several times, and that Mage died some days later, in November 1868. No independent account of the encounter has been published, so the claim that Mage was the aggressor is Hardin's alone. What is not in dispute is that a 15-year-old boy shot an unarmed or lightly armed freedman and was not brought to trial for it. Hardin wrote that his father told him to hide because, in his view, a white youth could not get a fair trial for killing a Black man before the courts of the time.
Hardin then went into hiding. In the autobiography he claims that three United States soldiers came to arrest him near his brother's place, about 25 miles north of Sumpter, and that he ambushed them at a creek crossing in the fall of 1868, killing two white soldiers with a shotgun and a Black soldier with a pistol, and that local people helped bury the bodies in the creek bed and dispose of their belongings. He also claims that in 1869 he and a cousin, Simp Dixon, killed two more soldiers in the Richland bottom.
Historians treat these claims cautiously. Metz, in the Handbook, writes that Hardin "claimed to have killed three Union soldiers," and then, without that qualifier, that "within a year, he killed another soldier at Richard Bottom." The Wittliff guide likewise says Hardin "later claimed" the three soldiers and that the bodies were hidden. By Hardin's own count, he wrote, he had "killed four men" by the end of 1868, before his sixteenth birthday. No army record or contemporary report of the deaths is known, and the killings of the soldiers remain claims rather than established facts.
In January 1869 his father sent him to Navarro County, where relatives lived, and he taught school for a term near Pisgah. According to the Wittliff Collections he soon left teaching for gambling and horse racing. The guide records that in December 1869 he killed a man named Jim Bradly after a card game; Hardin's own book spells the name Bradly and describes a quarrel at a poker game at Towash in Hill County, which other accounts date to January 1870 and give the victim's first name as Benjamin. Hardin says Bradly threatened him and fired first. That version is his own. Some secondary sources say Hill County indicted Hardin for the killing in 1873 but never tried him.
By January 1871 Hardin was under arrest. The Officer Down Memorial Page, a national memorial database for law officers killed on duty, records that he was arrested at Longview on a horse-theft charge and for the January 6, 1871, killing of Laben J. Hoffman, the city marshal of Waco. Hardin denied any part in Hoffman's death, and he was never tried for it.
While being taken to Waco for trial, Hardin escaped and killed one of his guards. According to the memorial record, State Police Lieutenant E. T. Stakes, Private Jim Smalley and a volunteer, L. B. Anderson, were escorting him and camped for the night in Freestone County. Hardin had been searched, but he had a pistol hidden under his arm on a string. While Stakes and Anderson were gathering wood, Hardin shot and killed Smalley and escaped. The governor offered a reward of $1,100. Hardin was never tried for the killing.
Hardin's autobiography tells substantially the same story, naming his guards as Captain Stokes and Jim Smolly and saying Smalley was reaching for his pistol when he fired. He was 17. The memorial notes that "accounts as to what happen vary"; the core facts, that a State Police private was shot dead by his prisoner, are not disputed.
In 1871 Hardin went to Gonzales County, where his father's sister had married into the Clements family. His cousins, among them Mannen (or Manning), Joe and Gip Clements, persuaded him to help drive cattle up the Chisholm Trail to Abilene, Kansas. The Handbook says flatly that "he killed seven people en route and three in Abilene." The Wittliff guide lists among those killed on the drive an Indian who shot at him with an arrow and five Mexican herders he had argued with over crowding the herds. Both descriptions follow Hardin's own book, which describes those fights in detail and says that he personally killed five of the six Mexicans who died. According to secondary accounts, a Kansas newspaper at the time reported three herders killed in that fight, a smaller number than Hardin claimed.
Hardin also wrote that after a Mexican man named Bideno shot dead a trail boss named Billy Coran near Abilene, local cattlemen had him appointed a deputy and that he tracked Bideno south and shot him in a restaurant when Bideno drew a pistol. That story too comes from Hardin.
In Abilene Hardin met the city marshal, "Wild Bill" Hickok. The Handbook says Hardin "allegedly" backed Hickok down and that Hickok "may have" given him the nickname "Little Arkansas." The Wittliff guide says that when Mannen Clements was jailed for killing two of his own cowboys, Hardin arranged with Hickok for his cousin's escape. Each of those details rests largely on Hardin's own account.
The Abilene killing best documented at the time is the death of Charles Couger. True West magazine, drawing on Metz's research, reports that on August 7, 1871, Couger was sitting on his bed in the American House hotel reading a newspaper when four shots were fired through the board partition from the next room. One struck and killed him. The Abilene Chronicle of August 10 named the suspected shooter as "Wesley Clements, alias 'Arkansas,'" and said he had escaped. Hardin was sharing the adjoining room with his cousin Gip Clements. In his autobiography Hardin does not admit the killing, and Gip Clements denied the story, current by 1877, that Hardin had shot a man for snoring. Metz suggested that Hardin and Clements fired through the wall to stop the noise and probably meant to frighten rather than kill. Hardin left Abilene that night, fearing arrest by Hickok, according to the Wittliff guide.
Back in Gonzales County, Hardin "got into difficulty with Governor Edmund J. Davis's State Police," in the Handbook's words. One officer killed in that period was Green Paramore, a Special Police officer. The Officer Down Memorial Page lists him as shot and killed on October 6, 1871, and gives no other detail. Hardin himself names him. In the autobiography he says two Black State Police officers, Green Paramore and a Gonzales blacksmith named John Lackey, came to arrest him at a store in southern Gonzales County; that he pretended to surrender his pistols and fired; that Paramore was killed; and that Lackey was wounded but escaped. Hardin dates it to September 1871 and says that afterward his allies threatened violence against Black residents of Gonzales who had gathered in protest.
In the same passage Hardin claims that a posse from Austin came for him later that month and that he killed three of its members. The story rests on his book; no other source is known to support it.
Hardin married Jane Bowen on February 29, 1872, in Gonzales County. They had three children: Mary Elizabeth (Mollie), born February 6, 1873; John Wesley Jr., born August 3, 1875; and a daughter, Callie, later called Jennie, born July 15, 1877.
The Handbook says Hardin "added at least four names to his death list" before surrendering to the sheriff of Cherokee County in September 1872. The Wittliff guide records that in August 1872 he was badly wounded when Phil Sublett, who had lost money to him gambling, shot him in a saloon at Trinity City, and that after he gave himself up he was sent to Gonzales County, where Sheriff W. E. Jones held warrants for him. He broke out of the Gonzales County jail in October 1872 with help from Mannen Clements. Twenty-two years later Hardin would accuse Jones of having helped him escape.
The first of Hardin's two convictions arose from a killing in Cuero, the seat of DeWitt County. The Wittliff guide says that in April 1873 he killed J. B. Morgan in a Cuero barroom, and calls it one of the two killings for which he was later convicted; its index gives the year as 1872, and other secondary accounts give July 1873. Hardin's own version is that Morgan demanded that he buy him champagne after a poker game, was restrained by friends when he tried to draw a pistol, then followed him outside, asked whether he was armed and started to draw again, and that Hardin shot him once. Hardin said that he left town unmolested, that a coroner held an inquest he never learned the result of, and that years later he was indicted for the killing. Little is known about Morgan himself. Some secondary accounts describe him as a DeWitt County deputy, a description that remains unconfirmed.
In 1873 Hardin joined one side of the longest feud in Texas history. The Handbook of Texas entry by C. L. Sonnichsen describes the Sutton-Taylor feud as growing out of the disorder after the Civil War, with the Taylor family and their kin on one side and, on the other, a party that formed around the State Police and took its name from William E. Sutton, a DeWitt County deputy sheriff. Hardin was related to the Taylors by marriage, and the Wittliff guide describes him as a leader of the Taylor faction.
Jack Helm was one of the most powerful men on the Sutton side. Born in Missouri in the late 1830s and raised in Lamar County, Texas, he had served in a Confederate cavalry company, from which he deserted in 1862, and in that year took part in a vigilante group that hanged five men for Union sympathies, according to the Handbook. In 1869 he led special officers against the Taylor party; the Galveston News reported that they killed 21 people in two months. He was elected sheriff of DeWitt County and became one of four captains of the State Police in 1870. After his men arrested two Taylor in-laws, Henry and Will Kelly, on a trivial charge and shot them dead in August 1870, the outcry forced Governor Davis to suspend and then dismiss him, though he remained sheriff. By 1873 he had moved to Albuquerque, a small settlement in Wilson County, and patented a device for killing cotton worms. He was married to Margaret Virginia Crawford.
The Handbook records that Jim Taylor and Hardin shot and killed Helm at his blacksmith shop on July 18, 1873, and that he was buried in McCracken Cemetery in Wilson County. Hardin's autobiography says Helm advanced on Jim Taylor with a knife, that Hardin fired a shotgun at him, and that Taylor shot him repeatedly in the head. Neither man was tried for Helm's death. Hardin's book dates the killing to May 17, 1873, which conflicts with the Handbook.
The feud continued. In March 1874 Jim and Bill Taylor shot William Sutton and his companion Gabriel Slaughter as Sutton boarded a steamer at Indianola. The Wittliff guide says Hardin and his older brother Joseph "aided" the Taylors in that killing; the Handbook entry on the feud names only the Taylors as the shooters. Hardin was not charged.
After the Sutton killing Hardin assembled a herd for another drive and went to Comanche County, where his parents and brother Joe now lived. On May 26, 1874, his birthday, he won money and stock at a horse race and spent the afternoon in the town's saloons.
Charles Webb was a deputy sheriff of neighboring Brown County. A Texas Historical Commission marker erected in Brownwood in 2012 records that he had served as a Texas Ranger in Brown and San Saba counties and that he had been appointed deputy in 1874 with orders to go after what the marker calls the Hardin-Taylor gang, which was operating in the southern parts of Comanche and Brown counties. Witnesses at the trial described him, in the words of the appeals court, as "a quiet, peaceable man, and a brave and efficient officer," and said he was a stranger to Hardin. He is buried in the Masonic section of Greenleaf Cemetery in Brownwood, and his name is on the Texas Peace Officers' Memorial in Austin. Neither of Hardin's two main biographers found a photograph of him, according to a 2001 review of their books.
The fullest record of what happened is the opinion of the Texas Court of Appeals in Hardin v. State (1878), which summarized the trial testimony. James Carnes Jr., the first witness for the state, said he was standing by Jack Wright's saloon, near the northeast corner of the public square, late in the afternoon when Webb came around the corner. Hardin, standing nearby, said to a companion, "There comes that d__d Brown County sheriff, now." Hardin stopped Webb, asked if he was the Brown County sheriff, and when Webb said he was the deputy, asked whether he had papers for him. Webb said he did not know him. Hardin answered, "I am that d__d desperado, John Wesley Hardin, as people call me; now you know me." Webb said he had no papers for him. Hardin accused him of saying that the Comanche County sheriff, John Carnes, had not done his duty; Webb denied it. When a lawyer called Webb over, Hardin told Webb he could not walk away. Webb stepped back, said he was not afraid of him, drew his pistol and fired as soon as it cleared the holster. Hardin, Jim Taylor and Bud Dixon, a cousin of Hardin's, all fired at Webb from three sides. Webb fell inside the saloon, firing once more as he went down. Another witness, Henry Carnes, said all the men fired at almost the same instant and that "if there was any difference, Webb fired first." Webb was hit in the head, through the abdomen and in the hand.
Two other witnesses supplied what the prosecution called a conspiracy. William Cunningham testified that a few days earlier, at a ranch west of town owned by a family named Waldrip, Hardin, his brother Joe and six cousins heard Mrs. Waldrip complain that Webb had arrested her son and mistreated her, and that Joe Hardin replied, "We will get away with him for you when we get him to the right place." G. W. Talbot, a livery stable keeper, testified that just before the shooting Hardin told Taylor, "You knew I was expecting a difficulty," and, seeing Webb walk up the square, said, "Did you ever see anything coming up finer in your life?" Hardin and Taylor rode out of town immediately afterward.
Hardin's account in his autobiography is entirely different. He wrote that Webb drew first and shot him in the side, that his own single shot killed Webb, that Taylor and Dixon fired only as Webb was falling, and that the meeting was a plot by Webb and others to kill him and collect a reward on Taylor. He said that he offered to surrender to Sheriff Carnes, his friend, but that an armed crowd overpowered the sheriff, and he fled.
The marker in Brownwood, based on local history, says witnesses stated that Hardin drew first. The trial testimony summarized by the appeals court is more mixed on the first shot, but the court found that the evidence showed a killing "without provocation" and "in pursuance of" a conspiracy formed days earlier.
What followed in Comanche cost Hardin's family dearly. The Handbook entry on Comanche County records that local people resented his escape and that a mob of 300 residents of Brown and Comanche counties stormed the county jail where Joe Hardin and two of Hardin's associates were held, and lynched all three. The Wittliff guide identifies the other two as cousins. Joe Hardin, born January 5, 1850, was a lawyer in Comanche and left a widow and two young children, according to the Wittliff index and Hardin's book. Hardin wrote that the cousins were Tom and Bud Dixon and that on the following day another group shot dead two more of his relatives, Ham Anderson and Aleck Barrickman. Those further details are from his account.
In DeWitt County, in June 1874, three cowboys who had been hired to drive one of Hardin's herds, Kute Tuggle, Jim White and Scrap Taylor, were arrested in Hamilton for cattle theft, returned to Clinton, and taken from the courthouse and hanged on the night of June 20. The Handbook's feud entry says they were "probably innocent."
Hardin left Texas. Under the name J. H. Swain, borrowed, according to the Wittliff index, from a Brenham marshal who had helped him get out of the state, he settled among his wife's relatives in Florida and later in Pollard, Alabama, just across the state line. Bills addressed to J. H. Swain at Jacksonville survive in his papers. The Handbook says that in Florida and Alabama he added "one certain and five possible names" to his list of killings; none was the subject of a charge. His book claims, among other things, a fight near the Florida and Georgia line in which two Pinkerton agents were killed; no independent confirmation of it is known.
In 1874 Governor Richard Coke revived the Texas Rangers and formed a Special Force under Leander H. McNelly, whose first duty was to end the Sutton-Taylor feud. In 1877 John B. Armstrong, a lieutenant in that force, asked to be assigned to find Hardin, according to the Handbook. A Dallas detective, John Riley (Jack) Duncan, went undercover among Jane Hardin's relatives in Gonzales County. The Wittliff guide records that Jane's brother Brown Bowen, himself a fugitive in Alabama, gave away the family's location in a letter home that passed on his sister's love.
On August 23, 1877, Armstrong, Duncan, Escambia County Sheriff William H. Hutchinson and nine deputies stopped Hardin on a train at the Louisville and Nashville freight depot in Pensacola as he and several companions set out for Pollard, according to the Florida state historical marker placed at the site in 2014. The marker says Hardin tried to draw a revolver and was overpowered, and that one of his companions was shot dead while trying to escape. The Handbook's Armstrong entry says Armstrong killed that man and knocked Hardin unconscious with a blow from his pistol; the Florida marker credits the fatal shot to Deputy Martin Sullivan. Hardin's own book says the dead man was Jim Man, 19, and that he was shot by Armstrong and others as he jumped from a car window. The railroad superintendent, William D. Chipley, supplied a special train and information on Hardin's whereabouts, the marker says.
Two days later, writing to his wife from Decatur, Alabama, Hardin blamed her brother Brown for his capture and hinted that he might escape, according to the Wittliff guide. He was returned to Texas and held in the jail at Austin.
Hardin and Jim Taylor had been jointly indicted for Webb's murder by a Comanche County grand jury on October 31, 1874. On September 25, 1877, a second indictment was returned against them for the same killing, and Hardin alone was tried on it at the September term of the district court, before Judge J. R. Fleming. Rangers guarded him throughout. His lawyers, by his own account, were S. H. Renick of Waco, T. L. Nugent of Stephenville and a Comanche lawyer named Adams.
The state's case, as summarized on appeal, rested on eyewitnesses to the shooting, on Hardin's boast to Webb, which six witnesses repeated, on the testimony about the gathering at the Waldrip ranch and Talbot's account of the moments before, and on evidence that Hardin fled immediately afterward. The judge instructed the jury that men acting together are each responsible for a killing, whether or not their own shots took effect, and that the state had to prove any conspiracy beyond a reasonable doubt. The jury acquitted Hardin of first-degree murder and found him guilty of murder in the second degree, fixing his punishment at 25 years in the penitentiary.
Hardin later wrote that he could not get a fair trial in the town where his brother had been lynched, that his witnesses had been killed or driven away, that the judge was biased, and that six jurors had been involved in his brother's death. He insisted that he had shot Webb only to save his own life. Those are his claims; the appeals court addressed only the points raised in the record.
On October 6, 1877, he was taken back to Austin to wait for the appeal. In the same jail was his brother-in-law Brown Bowen, condemned for the 1872 murder of Thomas Haldeman. The Wittliff guide records that the Bowen family asked Hardin to take the blame for Haldeman's death, that Hardin refused and maintained his innocence, and that Bowen, hanged on May 17, 1878, accused Hardin to the last. Hardin was never charged with Haldeman's murder.
The Texas Court of Appeals heard the case in its Austin term of 1878. Hardin's lawyer argued that the second indictment was void because the first was still pending; that the judge had handled the questioning of jurors improperly; that the instructions on conspiracy were wrong; that evidence of his flight should have been excluded; and that the indictment did not properly allege where and when Webb died, because it said Webb "did instantly die" rather than "did then and there instantly die."
Judge White, writing for the court, rejected each point. The first indictment had been dismissed as defective; the jury procedure was proper; the conspiracy instructions were a correct statement of the law; evidence of flight was admissible, and an earlier case limiting it was overruled. On the wording of the indictment, the court held that "then and there" already governed the sentence and would have added nothing. Reviewing the evidence, the court concluded that Webb had been killed without provocation and as part of a plan agreed days before. The judgment was affirmed. The Wittliff guide records that Hardin learned in June 1878 that his conviction had been upheld. The case, John W. Hardin v. The State, is reported at 4 Texas Court of Appeals 355.
On September 16, 1878, Rangers took Hardin back to Comanche, and on September 28, 1878, he was formally sentenced to 25 years. He entered the state penitentiary at Huntsville on October 5, 1878, as convict number 7109.
For the first years Hardin tried repeatedly to escape and was punished each time, according to the Wittliff guide, which draws on letters he smuggled out through a sympathetic guard. In 1880 he lost his letter-writing privileges after a planned escape with Mannen Clements was discovered. By 1881 he wrote to Jane that he had given up escape and hoped for early release through good conduct or a pardon. He became secretary of the prison debating society, joined a moral and Christian society, worked in the boot and tailor shops, became superintendent of the prison Sunday school, and studied theology and then law. An old gunshot wound from 1872 became infected in 1883 and kept him ill for much of two years.
His letters to his wife and children, which are preserved in the Wittliff Collections, mix tender advice on their schooling and manners with long complaints that he had been imprisoned unjustly. In 1890 he wrote that he had endured 13 years of "slavery" in prison after ten years in "tragic battle" with Union soldiers and their supporters. His mother died in 1885. Jane Hardin died on November 6, 1892, while he was still in prison.
In January 1892 Hardin was taken from Huntsville to Cuero to answer the old indictment for the death of J. B. Morgan. The Wittliff guide says he plea bargained a two-year sentence to run concurrently with his 25-year term. Hardin's autobiography says he "entered a plea of guilty to the charge of manslaughter, getting two years." The governor's pardon of 1894 confirms it, describing a sentence of two years for manslaughter in the district court of DeWitt County, dated January 1, 1892. The law firm of Fly and McNeal handled the case and began petitioning for a pardon soon afterward.
With time off for good conduct, Hardin was discharged from the penitentiary on February 17, 1894, after about 15 years and 5 months in custody. On March 16, 1894, Governor James S. Hogg signed a proclamation that recited both convictions, the murder in the second degree in Comanche County and the manslaughter in DeWitt County, noted that Hardin had served out his term and that "good citizens ask it," and granted him "full pardon in both cases," restoring his citizenship and right to vote. The text of the proclamation is printed in the appendix to his autobiography.
He rejoined his children in Gonzales County, passed a law examination and opened a practice in Gonzales. During the 1894 campaign for county sheriff he supported the challenger against W. E. Jones and accused Jones in the newspapers of having helped him escape from jail in 1872. When Jones won, Hardin left Gonzales, first for Karnes County and then for Junction, where his brother Jeff lived. In January 1895 he married Callie Lewis, who was 15; she left him soon afterward.
Early in 1895 Hardin went to Pecos to help a relative, Jim Miller, in a legal fight with the Pecos County sheriff; the case ended in a hung jury, and Hardin moved on to El Paso and opened a law office there, according to the Wittliff guide. He was soon drinking and gambling heavily.
One of his clients was Martin Mroz, a cattle rustler wanted in New Mexico who was being held in Juarez. Hardin began an affair with Mroz's wife, Helen Beulah Mroz. On the night of June 29, 1895, Mroz crossed the Rio Grande into El Paso and was shot dead by Deputy U.S. Marshal George Scarborough, with Jeff Milton and Frank McMahan, according to the Handbook entry on Scarborough; Scarborough was tried and acquitted. Metz's Handbook entry on Hardin adds that Hardin was rumored to have hired the officers, and that Constable John Selman was also involved. Those suspicions were never tested in court.
John Henry Selman, then 55, had his own past. The Handbook describes him as a Confederate deserter who, as a deputy in Shackelford County in the 1870s, had been tied to vigilantes and cattle rustling around Fort Griffin, then fled charges in Texas, lived in Mexico until 1888, and then become an El Paso city constable. In 1894 he had shot and killed a former Ranger, Baz Outlaw, in a brawl.
In the summer of 1895 Selman's son, John Selman Jr., a city policeman, arrested Beulah Mroz. The El Paso Daily Herald reported the next day that she had been tried and convicted of carrying a pistol, that Hardin was angry about the arrest, and that while drinking he had made threats against the young officer.
The El Paso Daily Herald of August 20, 1895, printed Selman's statement and the evidence given at the inquest, and both were reproduced in the appendix to Hardin's book.
Selman said he met Hardin near the Acme Saloon at about 7 o'clock on the evening of August 19 and that Hardin insulted his son and said Selman Jr. had taken $50 from Beulah Mroz. Selman said he told Hardin to get his gun, that Hardin said he was unarmed and would meet him later, and that he then waited outside the saloon. At about 11 o'clock a friend, E. L. Shackelford, led him inside for a drink. Selman said Hardin was watching him, and when Hardin reached for the pistol in his hip pocket, he drew and fired, aiming at the head first because he had heard that Hardin wore a steel breastplate. He said he fired four times, that his son ran in and told him to stop, and that he was sorry he had had to kill Hardin.
The other witnesses did not support Selman's claim that Hardin reached for a weapon. The bartender, Frank Patterson, testified that Hardin was standing at the bar shaking dice with Henry Brown, with his back to the door, when Selman walked in, said something and shot him, and that Hardin made no motion. Brown, a grocer, said Hardin's last words were "Four sixes to beat," spoken to him, and that he did not see Hardin try to draw. Three physicians found that the fatal bullet entered near the base of the skull from behind and came out near the left eye; he was also hit in the right breast and the right arm. Officers took two Colt revolvers from his body. Hardin was 42. He was buried in Concordia Cemetery in El Paso on August 20, 1895.
Selman was charged with murder. His trial ended with a hung jury, and he was released on bond, according to the Handbook. Before he could be tried again, he met George Scarborough outside the Wigwam Saloon in the early hours of April 5, 1896. Scarborough shot him four times, and he died on April 6. Scarborough was acquitted. Selman is buried in an unmarked grave in Concordia Cemetery, not far from Hardin.
Hardin's autobiography, which ends with the beginning of his law studies in prison, was the subject of litigation in the El Paso courts before his children obtained it. It was published in 1896 at Seguin, Texas, by Smith and Moore, with an appendix of his letters, the pardon proclamation and newspaper accounts of his death. The University of Oklahoma Press reissued it in 1961.
His family papers, about 1.5 linear feet of letters, legal exams and photographs, were donated to what is now Texas State University in 1982 by Ernest Spellman, a great-grandson through Hardin's eldest daughter, Mollie. The University of Texas at Austin's Briscoe Center also holds a collection of Hardin papers.
A century after his death his descendants fought over his remains. In July 1995 several great-grandchildren sought to move his body from El Paso and rebury it beside Jane in a perpetual-care cemetery at Nixon, Texas. They obtained a state disinterment permit, but when a funeral director and others arrived in El Paso early on August 27, 1995, they were served with a handwritten order from a local district judge barring removal without court approval. The Concordia Heritage Association, joined by Ernest Spellman, sued and won an injunction. In Billings v. Concordia Heritage Association (1997), the Eighth Court of Appeals at El Paso reversed that injunction because the case had been filed in the wrong county; it did not decide who had the right to the body. The court noted that Hardin had been buried the day after his death in a coffin with a brass plate reading "At Rest." In 2014 Texas Highways magazine described his grave at Concordia, enclosed by a wrought-iron cage the Concordia Heritage Association put up in the mid-1990s against theft and vandalism, and an annual gathering there on the anniversary of his death.
Two historical markers tell parts of the story: one in Brownwood about Charles Webb and his death (Texas Historical Commission, 2012), and one at the site of Hardin's capture in Pensacola (State of Florida, 2014).
Proven in court, and final: the second-degree murder of Deputy Sheriff Charles Webb at Comanche on May 26, 1874 (jury verdict 1877, affirmed 1878), and the manslaughter of J. B. Morgan at Cuero in 1873 (guilty plea, 1892). Hogg's 1894 pardon covered both. The pardon did not set aside the convictions.
The total number of killings is unknown. The Florida marker says Hardin "reportedly" killed 27 men, the figure given in newspapers at the time of his capture, and that he boasted of 40. In 1997 a Texas appeals court repeated that he was "said to have killed 42 men." A 2001 review of the two main biographies reports that Richard Marohn accepted the autobiography's total of 42, while Leon Metz documented 32 victims and estimated that Hardin killed somewhere between 20 and 50, adding that no one knows the true figure. Metz's Handbook entry speaks of "more than thirty notches." Chuck Parsons and Norman Wayne Brown, whose 2013 biography checked the autobiography claim by claim against records, conclude that he "certainly killed twenty men" and that some credited him with 40 or more.
Claims resting mainly or only on Hardin's own autobiography include: that Mage, his first victim, attacked him first; the three soldiers killed in 1868 and two more in 1869; the circumstances of the Bradley killing; the number of Mexican herders killed on the Chisholm Trail (a contemporary Kansas report, cited by later writers, gave a smaller number); the Bideno killing and his claim to have been deputized; the three members of an Austin posse; and the two Pinkerton agents in Florida. Where contemporary records survive, they sometimes contradict him.
Attributed by contemporary or official records but never tried: Private Jim Smalley (1871); Special Police Officer Green Paramore (1871, by Hardin's own admission); Charles Couger in Abilene (1871, named by a local newspaper; Hardin did not admit it, and his cousin denied the snoring story); Sheriff Jack Helm (1873, with Jim Taylor; Hardin says Taylor fired the fatal shots). He was accused of the Waco killing of Marshal Laben Hoffman (1871) and by Brown Bowen of the Haldeman murder (1872); he denied both and was never charged with either. His role in the killing of William Sutton (1874) is described differently by different sources.
Disputed about the Webb killing: who fired first. Hardin said Webb did; some state witnesses said the shots were nearly simultaneous and one said that, if anything, Webb fired first; the Brownwood marker says witnesses stated Hardin drew first; the appeals court found a premeditated killing without provocation.
Disputed about his death: whether Hardin reached for a gun (Selman said he did; the bartender and Brown said he did not), how many shots hit him (Selman said four were fired; the Handbook says three bullets struck him; the physicians described three wounds), and whether money or Hardin's role in the Mroz killing lay behind it. Metz notes in the Handbook that some have argued Selman shot Hardin because he had not been paid for killing Mroz, a theory that has never been proven.
Two judgments of Hardin himself also differ. The University of Oklahoma Press, which reissued his book, calls it "biased" but "remarkably accurate and readable." Later biographers, Parsons and Brown above all, treat it as a mix of truth, half-truth and invention that must be checked against records at every step.
May 26, 1853: born at Bonham, Fannin County, Texas, son of a Methodist preacher.
1855 to 1865: family lives at Moscow (Polk County), Sumpter (Trinity County) and Livingston (Polk County).
1867: stabs a schoolmate in a quarrel.
November 1868: aged 15, shoots a freedman, named in his own account as Mage, in Polk County; goes into hiding.
Fall 1868: claims to have killed three Union soldiers sent to arrest him (his own account).
1869: teaches school near Pisgah, Navarro County; claims more soldiers killed (his own account).
December 1869 or January 1870: kills Jim (or Benjamin) Bradly after a card game, Hill County (attributed).
January 1871: arrested at Longview; accused of killing Waco marshal Laben Hoffman (denied, never tried).
January 1871: kills State Police Private Jim Smalley while being escorted to Waco and escapes (attributed; never tried).
Spring and summer 1871: cattle drive up the Chisholm Trail; claims several killings en route (his own account, partly disputed).
August 7, 1871: Charles Couger is shot dead through a hotel wall in Abilene, Kansas; the local paper names "Wesley Clements, alias Arkansas."
October 6, 1871: Special Police Officer Green Paramore is killed in Gonzales County; Hardin later admits the shooting.
February 29, 1872: marries Jane Bowen.
August 1872: wounded by Phil Sublett at Trinity City.
September and October 1872: surrenders in Cherokee County; breaks out of the Gonzales County jail.
1873: kills J. B. Morgan in Cuero (later convicted of manslaughter).
July 18, 1873: Jack Helm is shot dead by Jim Taylor and Hardin at Albuquerque, Wilson County (never tried).
March 11, 1874: William Sutton is killed at Indianola by the Taylors.
May 26, 1874: Hardin, Jim Taylor and Bud Dixon shoot Deputy Sheriff Charles Webb dead at Comanche.
June 1874: a mob lynches Joe Hardin and two cousins at Comanche; three of Hardin's cowboys are hanged at Clinton on June 20.
October 31, 1874: Hardin and Taylor indicted for Webb's murder.
1875 to 1877: lives in Florida and Alabama as J. H. Swain.
August 23, 1877: captured on a train at Pensacola; a companion, named by Hardin as Jim Man, is shot dead.
September 1877: reindicted (September 25) and tried at Comanche; found guilty of second-degree murder, 25 years.
May 17, 1878: Brown Bowen hanged for the Haldeman murder, blaming Hardin.
1878: Texas Court of Appeals affirms (Hardin v. State, 4 Tex. Ct. App. 355).
September 28, 1878: sentenced to 25 years.
October 5, 1878: enters Huntsville penitentiary as convict 7109.
1879 to 1880: repeated escape attempts.
January 1892: pleads guilty to manslaughter for Morgan's death in DeWitt County; two years, concurrent.
November 6, 1892: Jane Hardin dies.
February 17, 1894: discharged from prison.
March 16, 1894: Governor Hogg grants a full pardon in both cases.
1894: admitted to the bar; practices in Gonzales.
January 1895: marries Callie Lewis, 15; she soon leaves him.
1895: moves to El Paso.
June 29, 1895: Martin Mroz is shot dead by Scarborough and other officers.
August 19, 1895: Constable John Selman shoots Hardin dead in the Acme Saloon, El Paso.
August 20, 1895: buried in Concordia Cemetery, El Paso.
1896: The Life of John Wesley Hardin published at Seguin.
April 5 and 6, 1896: Selman, whose murder trial had ended in a hung jury, is shot by George Scarborough and dies.
1982: Hardin's papers donated to Texas State University.
August 27, 1995: descendants' attempt to move his remains is stopped by court order.
April 25, 1997: Billings v. Concordia Heritage Association decided on venue grounds.
2012: Texas Historical Commission marker for Charlie Webb erected in Brownwood.
2014: Florida historical marker placed at the capture site in Pensacola.