John Wesley Hardin

1853–1895

John Wesley Hardin was a Texas gunfighter and outlaw who claimed to have killed more than forty men, though many of his stories cannot be verified. He fought, gambled and fled across the post-Civil War South before Texas Rangers captured him in 1877.

During a long prison sentence he studied law, and after release he practised as an attorney in El Paso. He was shot and killed by John Selman in 1895. John Wesley Hardin was born in Bonham and died in El Paso.

Hourly History’s John Wesley Hardin examines the Texas gunman whose violent life unfolded during Reconstruction and the cattle-driving era. In Larry McMurtry’s Streets of Laredo, A railway company hires him to pursue Joey Garza, a young Mexican marksman whose attacks on trains have made him both feared and difficult to locate. Call’s pursuit draws Pea Eye Parker, Lorena and Garza’s mother Maria into separate journeys across Texas and the borderlands. Encounters with John Wesley Hardin, Judge Roy Bean and Charles Goodnight place the fictional chase inside a frontier whose legendary figures are ageing, dying or becoming part of history.

Series

Historical novels and book series featuring John Wesley Hardin (1 series)

Lonesome Dove in Order

by Larry McMurtry 4 books 4.7(49,123)

The Lonesome Dove quartet follows Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call from their first service as young Texas Rangers to old age at the closing of the nineteenth-century frontier. Dead Man’s Walk and Comanche Moon trace their early experiences during the Republic of Texas, the Santa Fe expedition and…