A few weeks later George and I received notification of our father’s death in Houston. He’d been a college- educated man, a district manager for the railroad, and his will provided George and me with two thousand dollars each. And just that simply, my life changed forever. By the time Wes got back from visiting his family in Comanche, I was on my way to enroll in college in Houston. Eventually, I became an attorney-at-law and today I have a thriving practice in Galveston. George had planned to use his inheritance to buy a small ranch, but he never did. Just a few months after I left the Sandies, he was murdered by Sutton Regulators.
Comanche was a small community less than twenty years old on the edge of the West Texas frontier. The town square was built around a stone courthouse and shaded with live oaks. The nearest rail tracks were a hundred miles away. The roads were difficult. Except for an occasional cattle crew passing by, the place had few visitors.
I’d spent the previous six years reporting and editing for a San Antonio newspaper, but a whiskey habit as relentless as a bulldog finally got me fired. I was also in pressing financial circumstances at the time—
By that time his brother Joe had been a resident of the town for three years. His first child—Dora Dean Belle Hardin—had been born there, and his second, Joe Hardin, Jr., was soon to be. He practiced law and sold real estate, served as the town postmaster, belonged to the Masons, and was a member of the Friends of Temperance. But although he was generally popular and admired, he did not lack for a strong core of critics. It was rumored that he was in league with corrupt agents of the state land office in Austin who were getting rich from the sale of worthless titles to unclaimed Texas land grants. Further, a stockman in neighboring Brown County had recently claimed he’d been defrauded by Joe Hardin in a cattle deal. Joe simply ignored all such mean talk and carried on in his usual gregarious fashion.
The Reverend and Mrs. Hardin and all the rest of their brood now lived in Comanche, as well. So too did John Wesley’s Anderson and Dixon cousins.
Wesley had first visited Comanche in January, and Sheriff John Carnes had been apprehensive about it. But when Joe introduced him to his famous brother on the gallery of Jack Wright’s saloon, Sheriff John was much relieved to find that he was a personable young man who wished only to enjoy a short stay with his family before returning to his cattle business in Gonzales. For his part, Sheriff John assured him that state warrants were of no consequence in Comanche, which preferred to tend to its own legal business and let the rest of the counties tend to theirs. Wesley said that was an enlightened judicial attitude if ever he heard one and offered to buy Sheriff John a drink. I bellied up next to them at the bar and Sheriff John introduced me. Wesley gave me a sharp look. He said he’d been the victim of many a false newspaper story and had come to distrust all pen pushers. I said I didn’t blame him a bit. “I don’t trust a damn one of them myself,” I told him, which was the truth. That got a laugh out of him and he stood me to a drink. Thus did we become acquaintances.
His wife Jane and daughter Molly came with him on that first visit. So did a cousin named Gip Clements and a rough-hewn little man named Dr. Brosius, who had recently hired on as his cattle crew foreman. Toward the end of January they all returned to the Sandies, and a few weeks later Joe went to visit him.
Before we saw either of them again, we got the news that Jim and Billy Taylor had murdered Bill Sutton in broad daylight at the Indianola docks. Billy Taylor had been arrested shortly thereafter and was locked up in the Galveston jail. Jim Taylor was said to be hiding out at John Wesley’s cow camp in the Sandies. Rumor had it that both Joe and Wesley had been involved in the killing, although not directly. Supposedly, the Taylors had learned of Bill Sutton’s intention to take a steamer to New Orleans, but their informant had not known the exact date of his departure, and so Wesley had prevailed upon Joe—the only one among them not known to Bill Sutton—to go to Indianola to try to get that information. Joe, the rumor had it, was successful. He sent this information to Wesley, who relayed it to the Taylors, who boarded Sutton’s steamer as it was about to leave the dock and shot him two dozen times in front of a terrified crowd.
It was nothing new to hear such tales about Wesley Hardin, the notorious mankiller and ally of the Taylors. But
When Joe returned from the Sandies, he brought Jane and Molly back with him. Over coffee and honey biscuits in the Coop Cafe, he informed me that Wesley had already dispatched one herd north in charge of his cousin Joe Clements, and was busy rounding up another. While the crew finished with the branding, Wesley would come to Comanche for another visit, and then, when Doc Brosius brought the herd up to Hamilton, a little town southeast of us, Wesley would join the crew for the drive to Wichita. Jane and Molly would live at Preacher Hardin’s while Wesley was away.
And so in April Wesley showed up—accompanied by Jim Taylor, who had a five-hundred-dollar price on his head for killing Bill Sutton. It was unlikely anyone in Comanche would try to collect the reward. These were not men to let down their guard. Even in the midst of drunken frolic, they were ever vigilant for danger. Moreover, the entire “Hardin Gang”—as Wesley and his usual entourage of Taylor, the Andersons, and the Dixons had come to be known—would certainly retaliate on the instant if any among them were attacked. Yet I never once saw them bully anyone or present a deliberately menacing aspect. To the contrary, they took special care not to antagonize the townfolk and were generous about buying a round for the house wherever they went. They were popular with the town’s saloon crowd, and they had a friend in Sheriff John, and it certainly behooved them to keep it that way. Wes bought a beautiful racehorse named Rondo from a local breeder and kept busy overseeing the animal’s training.
They hadn’t been in town long, however, before we heard dark rumors that Charles Webb, a Brown County deputy sheriff, was calling John Carnes a coward for his refusal to arrest Wes Hardin and Jim Taylor. He was threatening to come to Comanche and serve state warrants on them himself. I was present in Jack Wright’s saloon when Jim Anderson relayed the rumor to John Wesley and Jim Taylor at the bar. They both laughed. Taylor loudly proclaimed that if Charlie Webb came for them, the only thing he’d succeed in arresting would be his own life.
Toward the end of May, the Hardin brothers began promoting a set of horse races to be held on the twenty- sixth, which would also be Wesley’s twenty-first birthday. Joe drew up a racing flier, had hundreds of copies printed, and hired a dozen men and boys to distribute them throughout Comanche and all the neighboring counties. He also turned a handsome profit on the advertisements placed in the fliers by a goodly number of local businesses. By then, the latest rumor out of Brown County was that Charlie Webb had arrested an entire cattle crew at Turkey Creek and pistol-whipped its ramrod, who he had insisted was none other than Wesley Hardin. When he was told the tale in the Wright saloon, Wesley spat ferociously. “You really
On the day of the races the entire county turned out, as well as a good many visitors from the neighboring regions. The town square was clamorous with people and horses and dogs. The streets were crowded with wagons, and from the moment they opened their doors that morning the saloons did a floodtide business. A huge red banner announcing “Races—May 26” had been stretched across the courthouse facade for several days, and Carl Summers’s string band was strumming and fiddling on a low platform in the courthouse yard. At ten o’clock all the contestants paraded their racers around the square to permit the spectators a close look at them. The betting was loud and furious and kept up as everybody headed out to the track about a mile northeast of town.
Three races had been matched, and the Hardin Gang was represented in each one. Joe’s beautiful chestnut mare, Shiloh, was entered in the first race, Wesley’s Rondo was in the second, and Bud Dixon’s handsome buckskin
