John Wesley Hardin, The Deadliest Gunslinger in The Southwest
Hardin’s violent trail of blood, law, and legend still echoes in Concordia Cemetery — where history and myth refuse to rest.
From a teenage fugitive to an infamous outlaw, lawyer, and El Paso saloon gambler
Early Life and First Bloodshed (1853–1868)
John Wesley Hardin was born in Bonham, Texas on May 26, 1853, the son of a Methodist preacher. Raised in the tumultuous Reconstruction-era South, Hardin developed deep Confederate sympathies and a fierce temper. At age 15, he killed his first man – a formerly enslaved person named Mage Holshousen – after a wrestling match turned violent. Hardin later claimed he shot Holshousen in self-defense, insisting he fled because “to be tried at that time for the killing of a Negro meant certain death at the hands of a court backed by Northern bayonets.” His flight turned him into a teenage fugitive, and Union soldiers were sent to apprehend him. Hardin ambushed the soldiers at a creek crossing and claimed to have killed at least one of them during the fray. This bloody episode set the tone for Hardin’s life – he would spend the next decade on the run, leaving a trail of deadly encounters across Texas.
Gunsmoke and Notoriety on the Frontier (1868–1877)
For several years, Hardin drifted through Texas working as a schoolteacher, cowboy, and gambler – and getting into lethal scrapes at every turn. By his own account, he killed several men during these years, often in gambling disputes or gunfights. In January 1870, for example, he shot a man dead in Kosse, Texas, later coolly writing that he “pulled my pistol and fired…the ball struck him between the eyes and he fell over, a dead robber.” Hardin’s most infamous confrontation came during a cattle drive on the Chisholm Trail in 1871. Passing through Abilene, Kansas, Hardin crossed paths with Wild Bill Hickok and earned a lasting legend: one night, a man was found shot dead in Hardin’s hotel – allegedly for snoring too loudly. The incident earned Hardin a reputation as the gunman “so mean, he once shot a man for snoring,” a story that cemented his notoriety. Hardin fled Abilene ahead of Hickok’s justice, remarking later that he “never killed anyone who didn’t deserve to be killed”– a grim motto often attributed to him in frontier lore. Back in Texas, Hardin became embroiled in the vicious Sutton–Taylor feud and other local conflicts. On May 26, 1874 – his 21st birthday – Hardin got into a shootout with Deputy Sheriff Charles Webb in Comanche, Texas, killing the lawman.
This bold murder of a peace officer was a turning point: Texas authorities, now fed up with Hardin’s deadly career, put a $4,000 bounty on his head. Pursued by posses and Texas Rangers, Hardin fled with his family. Over the next three years, he reportedly killed several more pursuers while eluding capture. By mid-1877, Hardin was one of the most wanted outlaws in Texas – blamed in newspaper accounts for 27 killings, though he boasted of a higher count. (At his trial he claimed he had killed 42 men, a total historians consider inflated.)
This ferrotype photograph is a mirror image of Hardin., Public domain image – Wikimedia Commons
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Capture and Prison Years (1877–1894)
Hardin’s outlaw run finally ended on August 23, 1877, aboard a train in Pensacola, Florida. Texas Ranger John B. Armstrong, acting on a tip, confronted Hardin on the train. The gunslinger tried to draw his revolver, but it snagged in his suspenders, giving the Rangers an opening to club him unconscious.
One of Hardin’s armed companions was shot dead by Ranger Armstrong during the fracas. Hardin – then 24 years old – was hauled back to Texas in chains. In September 1878, he was convicted of murdering Deputy Webb and sentenced to 25 years in the Texas state. The young killer arrived at Huntsville Prison with a fearsome reputation, but incarceration seemed to mellow him.
During 17 years behind bars, Hardin read voraciously, studied law, and even served as the superintendent of the prison Sunday School. He also began writing an autobiography, eager to tell his side of the story (albeit with considerable embellishment). By 1894, Hardin had earned a pardon for good behavior and was released after serving about half of his sentence.
Upon regaining his freedom, the 41-year-old Hardin tried to reinvent himself. He reunited with his surviving children in Gonzales County, Texas – his first wife, Jane, had died while he was in prison. In January 1895, Hardin even remarried, taking 15-year-old Carolyn “Callie” Lewis as his bride. The marriage proved short-lived. Hardin had obtained a and seemed more interested in restarting life as an attorney than settling down on a farm. Within months he left his new wife and set out for the booming West Texas town of El Paso, seeking a fresh start as a lawyer – and perhaps drawn by the city’s thriving saloons and frontier opportunities.
The Four Months in El Paso (1895)
Hardin arrived in El Paso in early 1895, a notorious ex-con determined to practice law and stake new business ventures. He rented an office in the elegant First National Bank Building at the corner of El Paso and San Antonio Streets – a grand Italianate structure (later nicknamed the Hardin Building). Ever enterprising, Hardin also invested in a local drinking establishment. He became a part-owner of the Wigwam Saloon, a two-story bar and gambling hall on San Antonio Avenue. The Wigwam was one of El Paso’s premier saloons – reportedly the first in town with electric lights – and featured a dance hall, gambling parlor, and upstairs brothel in its heyday. Hardin, who had spent years behind bars, plunged eagerly into El Paso’s nightlife. Surviving tavern ledgers show his bar tab soaring from mere cents to nearly $40 a day – a sign of heavy drinking and hard living in his final months. In fact, when Hardin died he owed over $100 to his own saloon’s account.
Despite professing to go straight, John Wesley Hardin could not escape trouble. He soon took up with a local woman named Beulah M’roz, who was married to a Texas outlaw imprisoned across the border in Mexico. The two began an affair, and Hardin may have seen an opportunity to remove Beulah’s husband from the picture. According to one account, Hardin secretly hired two lawmen – former Ranger Jeff Milton and Deputy U.S. Marshal George Scarborough – to intercept Martin M’roz as he returned from Mexico. In June 1895, Milton and Scarborough indeed ambushed and killed Martin M’roz under murky circumstances, prompting rumors that Hardin had ordered the hit. (Hardin drunkenly boasted of paying the pair for the killing, though he later retracted that statement and the officers were released without charge.)
Around the same time, Hardin also clashed with an El Paso lawman’s family. In mid-August 1895, Constable John Selman Jr. (the son of a well-known local lawman) arrested Beulah M’roz for carrying a pistol in town – a violation of El Paso’s new ordinance against firearms in city limits. Hardin was infuriated at the treatment of his paramour. Witnesses overheard him threatening young Selman, vowing revenge for “bothering his girl.” This confrontation set the stage for Hardin’s final showdown. On the night of August 19, 1895, Hardin was cooling off with drinks and dice at the Acme Saloon (just down the street from the Wigwam). He was reportedly in the midst of a dice game – his last words, by one account, were “Four sixes to beat, Henry” as he tossed the dice – when John Selman Sr. stepped through the door. Selman Sr., a 56-year-old constable and the father of the man Hardin had threatened, walked up behind Hardin without a word and shot him point-blank in the back of the head, killing the gunfighter instantly. Hardin died with his boots on, crumpling to the saloon floor at age 42.
Whether Selman acted out of fear for his son, personal grudge, or a desire to cement his own reputation, no one can say – but local sentiments were firmly on Selman’s side. As Hardin lay dead, Selman emptied three more shots into him, then calmly surrendered to the authorities. He was charged with murder, but many in El Paso viewed it as overdue frontier justice. “An El Paso jury apparently felt that Selman had done the town a favor,” History.com notes – indeed, a coroner’s jury acquitted Selman of wrongdoing in Hardin’s killing. The notorious killer who claimed to have “never killed anyone who didn’t deserve it” had finally met a fate he didn’t see coming. Ironically, John Selman Sr. did not live long to savor his infamy. A few months later, while awaiting a retrial (the formal murder indictment was still pending), Selman got into an argument over a card game in the very same Wigwam Saloon once co-owned by Hardin. On April 6, 1896, U.S. Deputy Marshal George Scarborough shot Selman in a duel behind the Wigwam, mortally wounding him. Selman died the next day, closing the bloody chapter of Hardin’s demise with yet another violent epilogue.
Legacy, Legend, and a Grave that Wouldn’t Stay Quiet
John Wesley Hardin was buried in El Paso’s historic Concordia Cemetery in 1895, but even in death he could not rest in peace without controversy. Hardin’s funeral was paid for by his El Paso girlfriend – a testament to the strange loyalties he inspired – and his grave soon became a local attraction. In 1896, his children published his autobiography, The Life of John Wesley Hardin, using the manuscript he left behind. The book unabashedly painted Hardin as a frontier survivor who only resorted to violence in self-defense, famously insisting that “he had never killed anyone who didn’t need killing.” Such claims did little to soften his infamy. By the turn of the 20th century, Hardin’s name was enshrined in outlaw legend alongside figures like Billy the Kid and Jesse James. To lawmen, he was long “the most dangerous man in Texas;” to others, he became a folk anti-hero – a symbol of the unforgiving justice of the Wild West.
John Wesley Hardin’s grave in the Concordia Cemetary in El Paso, Texas
Hardin’s gravesite in Concordia Cemetery became one of El Paso’s most visited landmarks. Today it is marked by a distinctive marble headstone and protected by a wrought-iron cage, installed in the mid-1990s to deter vandalism and theft. Visitors from around the world stop to peer through the bars and leave mementos – coins, cards, revolver cartridges, whiskey bottles – in honor of the legendary gunslinger. Every August, near the anniversary of Hardin’s death, locals gather for the tongue-in-cheek meeting of the “John Wesley Hardin Secret Society,” complete with Old West reenactments of his last moments. Attendees even act as a jury to debate whether Constable Selman was justified or guilty of murder when he shot Hardin in the back.
One hundred years after Hardin’s death, however, a very real showdown played out over his remains. In August 1995 – the centennial of the shooting – some of Hardin’s descendants from south Texas arrived in El Paso armed with a state permit to exhume his body. Their plan was to rebury Hardin in Nixon, Texas, where he had lived with his first wife Jane, reuniting the couple in death. But El Paso was not about to surrender its most famous (or infamous) adopted son. When the would-be exhumers showed up at Concordia Cemetery, they found the grave defended by members of the Concordia Heritage Association and a posse of Old West reenactors with black-powder rifles. “It looked a little like the showdown at the OK Corral,” said El Paso historian Leon Metz of that surreal morning, as the modern-day cowboys stood guard around Hardin’s grave. The raiders from Nixon were served with a swift court injunction blocking any disinterment. What followed was a two-year legal battle between Hardin’s relatives and the city of El Paso – a battle as contentious in the courtroom as any gunfight. The family argued Hardin should rest in his home soil (“Wes Hardin lived here, married here and had his children here,” their spokesperson said), while El Paso’s advocates countered that the tiny town of Nixon mainly “needs Hardin as a tourist attraction.” In the end, the Texas courts sided with El Paso. The judgment decreed that John Wesley Hardin’s body would stay in Concordia, where it had lain for a century. To ensure that verdict, the local caretakers literally cemented their victory – burying Hardin’s coffin under several feet of concrete to prevent any future grave-robbing attempts. Hardin’s elaborate grave and Texas State Historical Marker now stand not far from the very spot he fell, and it appears that is where this notorious gunslinger will remain for good.
More than 130 years after John Wesley Hardin’s violent death, his story continues to fascinate and repel in equal measure. He has been called America’s deadliest gunfighter, credited with killing over two or three dozen men (though the true toll will never be known). Yet Hardin also paradoxically reinvented himself as a lawyer, and he is said to have often argued that every man he shot “needed killing.” In life and in legend, Hardin embodied the unforgiving ethos of the Old West. As the Concordia Cemetery plaque notes, he “bragged of more than 30 killings, yet claimed to have slain only in self-defense.” That contradiction sums up John Wesley Hardin’s legacy as a folk figure: was he a cold-blooded murderer or a hard-edged survivor of harsh times? Perhaps he was both. In the dusty El Paso graveyard where Hardin, his killer John Selman, and even the husband of the woman they fought over (Martin M’roz) all lie buried within yards of each other, one can almost imagine their restless spirits still debating matters of justice and vengeance. John Wesley Hardin lived and died by the gun, but his name and story live on – a lasting chapter in the history and myth of the American West.
Sources
- Hardin’s early life, first killing, and self-defense claims: Spartacus Educational – John Wesley Hardinspartacus-educational.comspartacus-educational.com; The History Reader (Tom Clavin)thehistoryreader.com.
- Hardin’s exploits as a fugitive gunman and “man-killer” reputation: The History Reader – Hardin in Abileneen.wikipedia.orgcaselaw.findlaw.com; FindLaw case notes (Billings v. Concordia Heritage)caselaw.findlaw.com.
- Capture by Texas Rangers and sentencing: Wikipedia – John Wesley Hardinen.wikipedia.org; Spartacus Educationalspartacus-educational.com.
- Prison years and post-release life changes: Spartacus Educationalspartacus-educational.comspartacus-educational.com.
- Hardin’s arrival in El Paso, business interests, and personal entanglements: Video transcript (Elevate El Paso)【0†1:45-1:54】【0†1:48-1:57】; US Ghost Adventures – Wigwam Saloonusghostadventures.comusghostadventures.com; Texas Highways – “Western Specters”texashighways.comtexashighways.com; Spartacus Educationalspartacus-educational.com.
- The confrontation with the Selmans and Hardin’s death at the Acme Saloon: History.com – “John Wesley Hardin killed in Texas”history.comhistory.com; Texas Highwaystexashighways.com.
- Aftermath of Hardin’s killing (Selman’s fate and burial details): History.comhistory.com; US Ghost Adventures – Wigwam Saloonusghostadventures.com; Grunge.com – Fight Over Hardin’s Remainsgrunge.com.
- Hardin’s gravesite, legacy, and 1995 exhumation controversy: Texas Highwaystexashighways.comtexashighways.com; Grunge.comgrunge.comgrunge.com; FindLaw (Billings v. Concordia)caselaw.findlaw.com.
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