The Pistoleer: A Novel of John Wesley Hardin

“About 11 o’clock Mr. E. L. Shackleford came along and said: ‘Come on and take a drink but don’t get drunk.’ Shackleford led me into the saloon by the arm. Hardin and Brown were shaking dice at the end of the bar next to the door. While we were drinking I noticed that Hardin watched me very closely as we went in. When he thought my eye was off him he made a break for his gun in his hip pocket and I immediately pulled my gun and began shooting. I shot him in the head first as I had been informed that he wore a steel breast plate. As I was about to shoot a second time someone ran against me and I think I missed him, but the other two shots were at his body and I think I hit him both times. My son then ran in and caught me by the arm and said: ‘He is dead. Don’t shoot anymore.’

“I was not drunk at the time, but was crazy mad at the way he had insulted me.

“My son and myself came out of the saloon together and when Justice Howe came I gave my statement to him. My wife was very weak and was prostrated when I got home. I was accompanied home by Deputy Sheriff J. C. Jones. I was not placed in jail, but considered myself under arrest. I am willing to stand any investigation over the matter. I am sorry I had to kill Hardin, but he had threatened mine and my son’s life several times and I felt it had come to that point where either I or he had to die.”

(Signed) John Selman

I arrived in El Paso on the nineteenth of August, a hot Monday evening I shall never forget.

After asking the depot agent for directions to the Herndon Lodging House, I plunged into the tumult of the streets. The city was raucous with rumbling and clanging streetcars, clattering wagons, clopping hooves, barking dogs, the bray and snort of livestock, with shouting and whistling and laughter, with the cries of newshawks, with music blaring from every saloon—piano and hurdy-gurdy, banjo and guitar, and lustily, badly sung songs.

The sun was almost touching the mountain looming over the town, but the air was still thick with heat and dust. It was pungent with horse droppings and the peppery aromas of Mexican cooking, with the smells of creosote and whiskey and human waste. Old women in black rebozos, their faces as dry and cracked as desert earth, hunkered on the sidewalks with their bony hands extended for alms. Through the open door of a shadowy saloon came a great crash of glass, followed by several resounding smacks, a heavy thump, and an explosive chorus of loud laughter. Four boys on a corner were laughing as well, and poking jackknives into the malodorously bloated carcass of a large black dog, raising a horde of fat green flies with every whooping stab.

It was, as Fox had told me it would be, one tough town.

I refer to Richard Kyle Fox, publisher of The Police Gazette, the most popular periodical of our day. Its specialty was sports, but its larger appeal was rooted in its zealous reportage of sex and violence. Every week the shocking-pink pages of the Gazette presented a plethora of crime, scandal, bizarre spectacle, madness, and death. Gazette readers feasted on each new issue like scavengers alighting on fresh carrion. “I give the American working man what he wants in a newspaper,” Fox often boasted, “the real stuff of life!” And I, who in my youth had been a serious poet with dreams of capturing the light of the stars in my verse, had now been in his employ for over six years. Indeed, I was one of his star reporters. So veers life.

I was in El Paso to try to gain an interview with John Wesley Hardin, the infamous mankiller. Fox had only recently heard about him and had become instantly enthusiastic about the subject. He was a man of sequential obsessions, and his obsession of the moment was the Wild West. He thought an interview with Hardin would be perfect for the Gazette. “It’s a splendid tough tale, this Hardin fella’s, full of life’s hard truths,” Fox said to me in the New York office. “Old West killer does a big stretch in the pen and then, on being set free after many cruel years, takes up the mantle of the man of law. He follows the straight and narrow, he does, but then stumbles and falls to the evil wayside once again, for the leopard can’t change his spots after all, can he now? I hear he robs saloons at his whim, that he shot a man dead in a fight over a woman. I hear he’s a fearsome drunk and most of his fellow citizens want to see him dead, they are so frightened of him. Well, I want to know the details, Sammy lad—as will our readers. Go and get those details, my boy, and write them up for us in your particularly enthralling style, hey?”

That was how I came to be on the loud streets of El Paso on that sultry evening of August 19, 1895.

At the Herndon I was told by the landlady—one Mrs. Williams—that Mr. Hardin was not in and she did not know where he was. “Go poking through the saloons and I guess you’ll sure find him,” she said. Her sneer couched on her face like a bad-tempered cat.

The nearest saloon, The Show, was across the street and just around the corner. As I quaffed my first stein, I made known that I was a Police Gazette reporter interested in Hardin, and the barkeep began talking my ear off, as I’d expected he would. The Gazette was venerated in every tavern in America, even in such remote outposts as El Paso. The Show wasn’t yet busy at that early evening hour, and a handful of other gents soon gathered around me at the bar, taking exception to some of the boniface’s assertions and delivering their own opinions about the city’s most famous resident. Among the things I found out was that Hardin’s chief antagonist in town was a constable named John Selman, who carried a formidable reputation of his own as a man to be reckoned with.

The boys at the bar knew as much about John Henry Selman as they did about Wes Hardin, and they regarded him with nearly equal awe—and equal fear. Selman, I learned, had fought for the Confederacy before moving to Texas. The way they’d heard the tale, he got married, fathered a daughter and three sons, and made his daily bread as a dirt farmer for a few years before settling near Fort Griffin and getting into the cattle business with a partner named John Larn. His first turn as a lawman came when Larn was elected sheriff of Shackelford County and appointed Selman as his chief deputy.

One day a band of Comancheros stole a ten-year-old white girl and her six-year-old brother from a farm a few miles west of Fort Griffin, intending to trade them to the Comanches. Selman and two army scouts tracked them for weeks, all the way across West Texas, before finally catching up with them in the Davis Mountains. They returned with the two children alive and seven Comanchero scalps dangling from their saddle horns.

Not a man at the bar doubted the truth of that story, not even those who were no admirers of Selman. “Old John’s done lots of things over the years, I expect,” said a man in a white skimmer, glancing about cautiously to see who might be overhearing, “some of them not altogether legal, if you know what I mean.” Another man chuckled and added, “Hell, some of them not altogether Christian!”

Not long afterward, Selman killed a bad actor called Shorty Collins who was trying to gun down Sheriff Larn. There was a good deal of dispute—then and now—about the cause of the shooting. Some said Collins was in a heat because Larn and Selman had double-crossed him in a cattle rustling scheme. Whatever the case, the story holds that after killing Collins, Selman went hard outlaw for the next few years, that he went to New Mexico and formed a band of rustlers and robbers called the Seven Rivers Gang.

When he next returned to Texas, he was arrested and charged with rustling, but the case never went to court and eventually the charges were dropped. Then his wife became ill and died. He was broke and feeling aimless, so he parceled out his young children among various families and wandered off in search of better fortune. A few months later he showed up in Fort Stockton, debilitated with the smallpox. The fearful citizens wouldn’t have him among them. He was taken to a spot about two miles from town, laid under a canvas cover to protect him from the sun, supplied with a cask of water, and left to his fate. “Old John’s told this story himself more than once, in more than one saloon,” one of my informants told me. “I guess it’s true. He sure enough has the pox scars on his face to prove it.”

According to the story, Selman was saved by a Mexican cattle dealer who was passing by in a wagon on his way back to his ranch. The Mexican’s young daughter was with him, and they put Selman in the wagon and took him along. The daughter tended to Selman every mile of the way. Each evening, when they made camp for the night, she bathed him with lye soap and then fed him a steaming bowl of menudo, a fiery dish of tripe cooked in chile peppers. By the time they crossed the river into Mexico, Selman was fairly well recovered. “John always has said it was the menudo saved his life,” a man at the bar remarked. “He still eats a bowl of it a day.” Several heads nodded sagely. “That stuff’ll cure you or kill you, one,” someone else said.

When they reached her father’s ranch in Chihuahua, Selman and the girl got married. John went to Texas to