In fact, the baby boy that grew up to carve over 30 notches on his gun was actually named after the founder of the Methodist faith. His father was a circuit preacher and his mother was a blue-eyed, blonde-haired cultured daughter of a Navarro County doctor. So why did John Wesley Hardin grow up to be one of the most prolific killers in the Old West?
To understand the man, it certainly helps to understand the tumultuous times that shaped Hardin's life. But tens of thousands of southern boys grew up in the frequently violent cultural upheaval that followed the Civil War, yet never felt justified to take another man’s life. Hardin often said he never killed a man that didn’t need killing. He felt he was sent to judge. Since there often wasn’t a jury and executioner handy, he took care of that, too.
There will probably always be differing opinions about why John Wesley Hardin ended up with over thirty notches on his gun, but all the sources seem to agree on why he lived to a ripe old age (for a gunslinger) of 42 before another very questionable character, Constable John Selman, shot Hardin in the back of the head in the Acme Saloon in El Paso.
John Wesley Hardin was very good at what he did. Unfortunately for those who crossed him, what he often did was kill, apparently for a variety of reasons.
John Wesley Hardin was born May 26, 1853 at Blair Springs on Bois d’Arc Creek in Fannin County, although his father soon relocated the family to Polk County and then Trinity County near the Big Thicket in East Texas. It was here John Wesley learned to handle a gun and a knife in these deep woods. Abraham Lincoln was elected President on 1860. Texas voted to in favor of secession in February of 1861.
Twenty-five percent of East Texans at the time were African Americans, with approximately 200,000 slaves living in the region. Hardin later recalled growing up in “constant association” with African Americans.
Still, Hardin grew up listening to men that despised Lincoln’s vision for a free America. In a telltale sign of things to come, Hardin had difficulty controlling emotions and he was caught scheming with a cousin to run off and fight Yankees. John Wesley Hardin was only 10 years old at the time.
Four years later, he stabbed a kid in a dispute at school.
By 15, Hardin claimed to have killed his first man, a freedman named Major “Mage” Holshousen.
Today, law enforcement would have a place for a young man that shows a propensity for limitless violence. A modern psychologist might describe such a violent teenager’s behavior as psychopathic, a detached predator incapable of relating to the people that crossed him or that just crossed his path on the wrong day. Typically, a psychopath can be extremely cunning, manipulative and yet unremorseful. Other common traits are sexual promiscuity and an inflated sense of self worth.
Psychopathic tendencies are more common in society that most people realize. But this particular mindset that increased the odds of passing on genetics in periods of survival of the fittest may have fitted a lot of cowboys for pine boxes in Hardin’s day.
And not all psychopaths kill. It has been said that less intelligent psychopaths are likely to end up running a prison gang, while a brilliant psychopath may end up running a profitable company.
Was Hardin a racist? Regardless of which plantations “treated their workers like their own,” no form of slavery could exist without the poison of racism. Hardin grew up in an area that practiced human trafficking on a massive scale. Small children often played under the same oak tree, sometimes suckled the same nanny, yet, depending on their ancestry, one felt entitled to the American Dream and another felt the unspeakable misery of watching his or her family sold on the square to the highest bidder.
Racism was rampant. The destruction that came with the Civil War was a defining period in much of the South. The old ways were gone, buried in the carnage. But Texas was spared the massive battlefields that left much of the Confederacy weak and reeling for years after the War Between the States, therefore resistance to this ideal that all men are created equal, as hard as that may be to believe now, was still firmly entrenched in Texas.
Actually, xenophobia may be the root of the paranoia that seemed to be common in the East Texas youth of Hardin’s day – the fear of people that are different from the people you customarily associate with.
The catch phrase might very well be, “You ain’t from around these parts, are you?”
The next four notches on John Wesley Hardin's gun represented Union soldiers that came looking for the wanted gunman around 1868. It was time to get out of Texas and there was money to be made driving cattle up the Chisholm Trail. According to the Handbook of Texas, Hardin headed up the trail in 1871, killing seven people en route and three in Abilene, Kansas. It was in Abilene that Hardin supposedly backed down legendary marshal Wild Bill Hickock, but it is impossible to ascertain hard facts from folk stories and exaggerations. One quote from Wikipedia sums it up nicely.
"They tell lots of lies about me," Hardin complained. "They say I killed six or seven men for snoring. Well, it ain't true; I only killed one man for snoring."
If fact, snoring may have had nothing to with the early-morning casualty at American House Hotel in Abilene, but Hardin evidently had a feeling he would be the next casualty if Hickok caught up with him.
Hardin left Kansas for Texas.
Four more notches were on the gun when Hardin was arrested by the sheriff of Cherokee County in 1872. Hardin escaped jail and aligned with anti-Reconstruction forces in the Sutton-Taylor feud. Jack Helm, a former State Policeman, and Deputy Sheriff Charles Webb of Brown County were Hardin's next two victims.
It was time to leave Texas again. This time Hardin took his wife and went to Florida, but the Texas Rangers tracked him down. A jury in Comanche, Texas sentenced Hardin to 25 years in prison for the murder of Webb.
Ever the paradox, Hardin divided his time in prison between studying the law and plotting escapes. Hardin was pardoned in 1894 and became a practicing attorney in El Paso.
Hardin's demise came at the hands of a man of almost equal notoriety, Constable John Selman. Born in Arkansas, Selman's family had moved to Grayson County in the late 1850s. Selman enlisted in the 22nd Texas Calvary in 1861, but he deserted two years later.
After briefly serving as a Shackelford County Deputy Sheriff, Selman moved to New Mexico where he organized a ruthless gang known as the Selman Scouts. Selman's gang began operating in Texas and he ended up back at the Shackelford County Jail, only this time behind bars, courtesy of the Texas Rangers.
Selman eventually escaped, hid out in Mexico until all charges were dropped, and then moved to El Paso where he found employment as a Constable in 1893.
In 1895, Selman and Hardin had a heated argument.
According to the Handbook of Texas: He (Hardin) took as his lover the wife of one of his clients, Martin Morose, and when Morose found out about the affair, Hardin hired a number of law officials to assassinate him. On August 19, 1895, Constable John Selman,qv one of the hired killers, shot Hardin in the Acme Saloon, possibly because he was not paid for the murder of Morose.
According to Wikipedia, Selman arrested a prostitute girlfriend of John Wesley Hardin. The two men had an argument, after which Hardin went to the Acme Saloon to play dice. Selman walked up behind Hardin and shot the gunman-turned-lawyer three times in the back on August 19, 1895.
Either way, it was an unseemly way to end a life that had begun with so much promise in a little country church in Fannin County.
Selman was soon gunned down in an unrelated altercation and buried in an unmarked grave.
On the other hand, folklore surrounding John Wesley Hardin grew in the decades that followed. Johnny Cash wrote "Hardin Wouldn't Run" about the life of the gunman born just over 159 years ago at Blair Springs on Bois d’Arc Creek.