by Jesse Sublett
The Last Gunfighter by Richard Marohn
Creative Publishing, $29.95 hard
John Wesley Hardin, Texas’ most notorious gunfighter, had star quality. While
still a teenager, he earned the respect of noted gunslingers like Bill Longley,
Ben Thompson, Jeff Milton, and Wild Bill Hickok. When he was finally captured
and brought back to Texas in chains, common folks flocked to meet his train.
Women swooned, and his legend grew. Hardin was the son of a Methodist preacher
and was, in fact, named after the founder of the Methodist church. But instead
of saving souls, John Wesley Hardin sent them on to meet their Maker, via
bullet train express. By his own account, Hardin killed more than 40 men.
On August 19, 100 years ago, Hardin was murdered in the Acme Saloon in El
Paso, Texas. His life, death, and legend have meant different things to
different people over the years. For me, Hardin’s saga is the fantastic,
fascinating tale of a terrible man who did terrible things, a mixed-up kid who
yearned to be understood, but would always remain a mystery, even to himself.
Crossing over the Trinity River on a beautiful Saturday morning last June,
deep in the heart of Hardin’s old stomping grounds in East Texas, I wondered
what kind of Dantesque visions swirled in his nightmares, what posse of
personal demons breathed down his back on the trails he spattered with blood.
Hardin’s career as a killer and folk hero began in these piney woods in 1868,
when he was 15 years old.
Hardin’s first victim was a former slave and sometime playmate of Hardin’s
named Mage. It seems that Mage, who was older and physically intimidating, was
sore about losing a wrestling match with Hardin and his cousin. According to
Hardin, Mage swore revenge and later attacked him as he was riding through the
woods. After warning Mage to leave him alone, Hardin shot Mage until the man
fell, mortally wounded. Hardin rode home to tell his father what he had done.
This was the Reconstruction era. The economy was devastated. The presence of a
federal army of occupation – not to mention some 180,000 formerly enslaved
African Americans – made many Texans nervous and resentful. Acts of terrorism
by white vigilance committees accelerated the cycle of repression and
rebelliousness. Against this bleak, chaotic backdrop, Reverend James Hardin saw
little chance of a fair hearing for his son. He told John Wesley to go into
hiding until things blew over.
During those fugitive years, Hardin went on to kill more blacks, federal
soldiers, and state police (many of whom were also African Americans). And he
became a hero in the eyes of many like-minded Texans. Over the long haul,
though, the majority of Hardin’s victims were whites and Mexicans, and he
killed them neither for political reasons nor to escape being captured but to
solve personal disagreements – on the cattle trails, in blood feuds, in
the gambling halls and, at least once, at a circus! Almost everywhere Hardin
went, he found a reason to kill someone. So what was John Wesley Hardin? A
product of his times or a cold-blooded killer?
According to Richard Marohn, the author of a new biography of
Hardin called The Last Gunfighter, the answer lies somewhere in between.
Marohn, a professor of psychiatry at Northwestern University Medical School,
says that Texas’ most notorious gunfighter suffered from a narcissistic
behavior disorder. His violent deeds were the actions of an exhibitionist who
had extreme difficulty regulating his self-esteem.
Marohn’s insights into the root causes of Hardin’s violence make
The Last Gunfighter truly unique in the field of western biography. The
book does have its shortcomings – the footnotes are a mess, some of the
excerpted material should have been better qualified, and once in awhile,
Marohn’s usually journeyman prose strays into corny melodrama. But it is an
essential addition to any western history collection. John Wesley Hardin left a
trail of words as well as blood, and according to Marohn, that trail tells us
an awful lot about what made him tick. Letters Hardin wrote while imprisoned in
Huntsville (from 1878 to 1894) and his autobiography, written after his
release, provide a gold mine of insight, information, and strangeness. Above
and beyond the psycho-biographical aspect, The Last Gunfighter is the
most complete and clear-headed biography of Hardin ever written. Despite the
problematic footnotes, bibliographic references provide information for any
researcher. Last but not least, the book is enlivened with over 100 photos
(some never before published), maps, illustrations, and diagrams of many of
Hardin’s gunfights.
There are only a handful of titles in the field of western outlaw
autobiographies, and The Life of John Wesley Hardin, as Written by
Himself (published posthumously, in 1896) is as unique as its author.
Here’s a sample: I looked around and saw Jack Helms advancing on Jim Taylor
with a large knife in his hands. Some one hollered, `Shoot the d-d scoundrel.’
It appeared to me that Helms was the scoundrel, so I grabbed my shotgun and
fired at Capt. Jack Helms as he was closing with Jim Taylor. I then threw my
gun on the Helms crowd and told them not to draw a gun, and made one fellow put
up his pistol. In the meantime, Jim Taylor had shot Helms repeatedly in the
head, so thus did the leader of the vigilant committee, the sheriff of DeWitt,
the terror of the country, whose name was a horror to all law-abiding citizens,
meet his death.
In Hardin’s mind, all his actions took on political overtones. “Thus
unwillingly, I became a fugitive,” writes Hardin, “not from justice be it
known, but from the injustice and misrule of the people who had subjugated the
South.” Sure, things were tough for people like Hardin and his family during
the Reconstruction years. But, as Marohn points out, the majority of Texans
found ways to cope instead of kill. Hardin was one of the exceptions. The way
he tells it, there was a good explanation for every one of his fortysomething
killings. Marohn tells us that Hardin’s autobiography was, in essence, an
extension of the many times he rode back home to explain his latest murder to
his parents.
Read Hardin’s autobiography and his letters and things start to add up: the
Biblical references, his terrible fear of being attacked by mobs, the
incredible na�vet� of his doting mother, and the mysterious
synchronicity of the death of his younger brother (which occurred shortly
before Hardin’s first murder). While Hardin was being torn apart from the
inside by personal demons, the peculiar chaos of the frontier became the stage
on which he acted out his inner conflicts.
According to Marohn, Hardin’s many episodes of violence were the result of his
efforts to “put himself back together and to regulate his self-esteem,” as were
his habits of drinking and gambling, which also frequently set the stage for
violence. So where does this gunfighter myth come from, you may ask, and what
prompted Hardin’s tragic downfall? In our interview, Marohn put it this way:
“Early in Hardin’s life, there was cultural support for this kind of
behavior. It was still the Wild West. There were still sides to be taken around
the Union-Confederate issue, in black-white issues, and in family feuds. As
culture and society changed in post-Civil War America and increasingly people
became `civilized,’ and violence became frowned upon, things became more and
more difficult for Hardin.”
It was in Comanche, Texas,
on May 26, 1874, that things really blew up in Hardin’s face. Hardin was
celebrating his 21st birthday when he ran into a deputy sheriff named Charley
Webb and shot him dead. Hardin’s cousins pumped more bullets into Webb’s body
as it slumped against a wall. An angry mob swelled on the street, clamoring for
Hardin’s blood. Shots were fired. Somebody said something about a rope. Hardin
escaped, but some of his friends and relatives weren’t so lucky. All told, five
men were killed by vigilante violence.
Three years and at least a half dozen killings later, the Texas Rangers caught
up with Hardin aboard a train in Florida. In a highly publicized and
controversial trial, Hardin was found guilty of second degree murder in the
killing in Comanche. He served 16 years at Huntsville before being paroled and
released. In early 1896, he received a full pardon from Governor Jim Hogg.
Hardin briefly tried going straight, practicing law and shunning drink. He
moved to wild and woolly El Paso. Bad idea. Toward the end of the 19th century,
as the rest of the state began to mellow and become more civilized, El Paso
just got wilder. It was no place for an aging gunfighter to go straight.
Hardin took up drinking again. He got involved in local intrigues, had an
affair with a notorious prostitute, and held up several saloons after
complaining that their games were fixed. He paced back and forth in his room,
practicing his fast-draw in front of a mirror. He handed out autographed
playing cards he’d shot holes through. He beat up his girlfriend. He broke down
and cried in front of his landlady. He bragged in public that he’d hired a
local lawman to kill someone, then had a retraction printed in the paper,
saying he’d been drunk at the time. Somehow, he also found the time to finish
his autobiography.
Much has been written about this period of Hardin’s life, as a lot of wild
things were going on in El Paso besides the sordid flameout of a haunted
gunman. Consequently, there are many different theories about the events that
led up to his death.
Witnesses say the actual shooting went down like this: Around 11pm the evening
of August 19, 1895, John Wesley Hardin was playing dice with grocer H.S. Brown
in the Acme Saloon in El Paso. A shadow darkened the doorway at Hardin’s back.
The shadow belonged to Constable John Selman, himself a notorious mankiller
with a dark past. The other patrons in the saloon quit talking. The only sounds
came from the two men throwing dice, at 25cents a throw.
“Hoss piss on you,” said Hardin.
“Shake again,” said the grocer.
Selman pointed his six-shooter at the back of Hardin’s head. Four cubes danced
across the felt and came to rest.
“You have four sixes to beat,” Hardin said to the grocer.
Selman pulled the trigger. Hardin spun around to face his killer, a hole
showing at the corner of his left eye – the exit wound of the bullet that had
passed through his brain. Witnesses said Hardin reached for his six-shooter as
he fell to the floor. Selman kept shooting, even as Hardin lay prostrate, his
life fluids rapidly forming a gooey lake on the barroom floor. Selman’s son,
John, Jr., ran into the bar and took his father by the arm and pleaded: “Don’t
shoot him anymore. He’s already dead.”
Hardin’s death came as a huge sigh of relief to many El Pasoans. Journalists
mined the event for its dark humor. Several citizens were quoted as saying
that, aside from being dead, John Wesley Hardin had never looked better. The death of Texas’ most notorious
gunfighter was only one indication that an era had truly passed into history.
When officials found a card on the body with the name of Hardin’s closest
friend, nobody had to saddle up and ride out to deliver the sad news. They
called him on the telephone. n
The Last Gunfighter is available from The Early West, PO Box 9292,
College Station, TX 77842; or by calling 800/245-5841.
This article appears in September 8 • 1995 and September 8 • 1995 (Cover).