August 19, 1895
On this day John Wesley Hardin, the Wild West’s poster boy for “gunslinger,” met his match when the father of an El Paso lawman shot him in the head.
In his unfinished autobiography he claims with some pride to have killed 42 men before being sent away for stretch in Huntsville Prison in 1878. While he may have embellished the body count, contemporary newspaper accounts attributed at least 27 deaths to Hardin.
His 17-year stay behind bars did nothing to reform him. Soon after his release in 1894 he was suspected in the deaths of another two men before 
John Seleman, Sr. killed him.
Hardin (right) went astray early. Born May 26, 1853, in Bonham, Texas, the second of 10 children. When his father, a circuit-riding Methodist preacher named him for the eminent churchman and founder of the Methodist Church, John Wesley, he had no way of knowing his son would grow up to be a holy terror.
At the age of nine, Hardin tried to run away to join the Confederate Army and grew up hating African-Americans and northerners. Many of the men Hardin admitted to killing were, in fact, former slaves and Union soldiers, rounded out by a fair number of “Yankee” lawmen, some gamblers and not a few hapless strangers, pedigrees and politics unknown.
While enrolled in the school his father founded, he stabbed a fellow student. The incident was ruled a case of self-defense. Taunted by a youth named Charles Sloter about graffiti on the schoolhouse wall, reportedly Sloter attacked Hardin with a knife. Hardin responded by stabbing back, nearly killing Sloter. It was said he “almost” got expelled over the incident.
He apparently committed his first murder with similar impunity. At 15 he challenged his uncle’s former slave, Mage, to a wrestling match. In Hardin’s telling, he won the contest but the ex-slave waylaid him along the road the following day.
In Hardin’s trademark over-response, he shot Mage five times. His autobiography, claims he summoned help but his victim died three days later.
In another precursor of things to come, Hardin’s father sent his son into hiding, saying a fair trial would be impossible where many members of law enforcement were former Union soldiers. Hardin was warned, possibly by his father, that authorities had discovered his whereabouts. Ambushing his pursuers, he claimed to have killed four of them. “. . .I had no mercy on men whom I knew only wanted to get my body to torture and kill,” he wrote.
He became a permanent fugitive following the shootings and for a time traveled with the outlaw, Frank Polk, in the vicinity of Pisgah, Texas. Polk was eventually captured by soldiers from Corsicana but Hardin escaped. For a time he actually taught school in Pisgah. While there, however, he was alleged to have killed another ex-slave and shot a man’s eye out in a bet over a bottle of whiskey. Apparently the school’s patrons were not amused by Hardin’s extra curricular activities.
Ending his career as a teacher, Hardin was said to have killed a man in a card game in Towash, Texas, two more men in Hill County, Texas, for reasons known only to himself, another in a dispute at a circus and a would-be mugger. Attempting to rob him, Hardin said, he shot the man in the of the head when the alleged robber leaned over to pick up the money Hardin had tossed on the ground.
In the four years between 1871 and 1875, Hardin left a trail of dead lawmen, unfortunate gamblers and ex-slaves and executed a string of daring and murderous escapes. At last the state of Texas sought to reign in the outlaw’s crime spree with a $4,000 reward, amounting to more than $80,000 today.
Run to ground by two Texas Rangers, Hardin escaped by killing one of them. Hoping to outlast the state’s interest in him, he signed on as a drover on a Chisholm Trail cattle drive and claimed he killed an African-American 
rustler, two Mexican vaqueros and a man who allegedly insulted him in a Paris, Texas, cafe.
Sometime between shootouts, 19-year-old Hardin married a young woman named Jane Ann Bowen in 1872. Jane’s father, Neille Foster Bowen (left), was unwittingly instrumental in putting Hardin behind bars.
After fleeing to Florida, Texas Rangers learned his location after intercepting a letter Hardin wrote to father-in-law, Neille. Captured on a 
train in Pensacola by Texas Ranger John B. Armstrong (left), Hardin had already killed two of his father’s ex-slaves who recognized him and attempted to collect the reward.
Charged with killing Brown County, Texas, deputy sheriff Charles Webb, he was finally convicted not of murder but instead of manslaughter and sent to Huntsville Prison for 25 years. After several escape attempts, Hardin settled in to prison life, studied law and was released in 1894, eight years short of his sentence. Amazingly, he was actually granted a pardon later that same year.
In a possible attempt to turn his life around, Hardin married 16-year-old Carolyn “Callie” Lewis (right) in January 1895, passed the Texas Bar and set up shop as a lawyer. Alas, neither his law practice nor his marriage lasted. He and Callie separated in less than six months. He then was charged with “negligent homicide” in the death of a Mexican man and got into a squabble with El Paso lawman, John Seleman, Jr., over the arrest of a saloon girl. It was that last thing that got him killed.
Selman’s father, John Seleman, Sr., (right) a gunfighter himself, shot Hardin in the back of the head while he was gambling in El Paso’s Acme Saloon. Tried for murder, Seleman claimed self-defense, resulting in a hung jury. The defendant, however, didn’t live to be exonerated for killing Hardin. He died in a shoot-out with U.S. Marshal George Scarborough in 1896. Their differences dated back two years when Seleman, Sr. was implicated in the death of Scarborough’s friend, Texas Ranger Bass Outlaw.
If the truth about John Westley’s past deeds was not enough, rumors abounded for some time that Hardin had been involved in a murder-for-hire scheme. Suspected of trying to kill the husband of one of his legal clients turned paramour, the plot was thought by many to have somehow figured in his own death.
Hardin was buried in El Paso, but a century later his great-grandchildren tried to have his body exhumed and moved to Nixon, Texas, to be buried next to first wife Jane. That move was blocked, however, when El Paso 
residents sought to retain the gunfighter’s remains for the posthumous historic and commercial value. And so Hardin is still in El Paso today, advertised as the Old West’s most prolific killer.
But John Wesley Hardin in death may have finally gotten what he managed to escape most of his lifetime. His gravesite sits inside a stone and steel bar enclosure (above) in El Paso’s Concordia Cemetery. It looks for all the world like a prison cell.
Concordia Cemetery, 3700 E Yandell Dr, El Paso, Texas, is the final resting place for a diverse number of Texans, famous and infamous. In addition to gunslingers John Wesley Hardin and John Selman, Sr, the cemetery’s historic graves include Kit Carson’s younger brother, Moses, El Paso’s first mayor, Benjamin S. Dowell, Texas Ranger Ernest St. Leon, Mexican 
revolutionary leader, Pascual Orozco and Florida J. “Lady Flo” Wolfe, African-American rancher and philanthropist.
Winner of the 2008 “Preservation Texas” “Clara Driscoll Award” the cemetery grounds also include the Buffalo Soldier Monument, numbers of Civil War veterans and gravesites of members of El Paso’s early immagrent Chinese community. Open to the public 365 days a year, the hours are 8 to 8 from April to October and 8 to 5, November to March. Go to concordiacemetery.org for more information.
© Text Only – 2018 – Headin’ West LLC – All photos – public domain or fair use