The Pistoleer: A Novel of John Wesley Hardin

surveillance of the state troops. Scott Cooley was arrested and died in a spasm of rage and chagrin. Bill Longley sweats and sweats in the Giddings jail. Ham White, the famous stage coach robber, makes cigars for life in the West Virginia penitentiary. Jim Taylor, of the Taylor gang of desperadoes, was killed when resisting arrest at San Sabas last Thursday. His pal Hoy was killed under like circumstances the day before. Both fell before the guns of the state troops. Bill Taylor, brother of Jim, breathes hard and is nervous to the last degree, with three of the Sutton gang here in the Travis County jail…. Wesley Hardin, the most reckless murderer ever known in Texas, is committed to our jail. He has killed, so the story goes, twenty-five or thirty white men, besides Mexicans and Negroes.

… Between Bell and Coryell counties there is a tree of death. Beneath one great, sturdy, bended branch there have been suspended, a prey to eagles and carrion birds, like the sons of Rizpeh, seven admirable devils thus “cast out” of Texas. In Lee County, within a few months, twelve or fourteen scoundrels have been remorselessly hanged by the people and danced on nothing into eternity…. But the facts we state show that the end of desperadoism and lawlessness has come, and all the terrible facts recited tell the bloody-handed, cowardly villains who still wear pistols and knives girt about their bodies that this of Texas is no longer a healthful atmosphere. They should migrate. The people are surfeited with devilish deeds, juries are now doing their duty, and sure and swift justice is meted out. The frontier of Texas is no longer a proper place of refuge for continental knavery. Mexico must be its receptacle, and fortunate for Texas will be the day when the use of the pistol and the knife is more rigorously punished here than in Massachusetts.

In all my days as a Ranger we never put a prisoner under heavier guard than we did Hardin when we transferred him to Comanche for trial that hot September. The two biggest rumors were that his gang would try to free him on the road to Comanche—and that a huge vigilante mob had sworn to string him up before he ever set foot in court. Our whole outfit—Ranger Company 35, under Lieutenant N. O. Reynolds, as good a lawman as I ever knew—was assigned to escort Hardin to trial and repel rescuers and lynchers both, whoever came at us. We put him in irons from neck to ankles and propped him on the seat of a barred prison wagon. Half the company rode in front of it and half brought up the rear. We had a chuck wagon too, and an arms and ammunition wagon, and a remuda as big as you’d see in most cattle outfits. In addition to regulation sidearms and carbines, each of us was carrying extra saddle revolvers and a shotgun with buckshot loads. I mean we were ready for war.

At every town along the way, people came out in droves to have a look at him. No matter how far from the nearest town we might make our camp, they’d show up by the hundreds. Most of them would stand well away from the wagon and talk about him like he was some sort of wild animal exhibit, but the gawking didn’t seem to bother him much. I guess he’d gotten used to it by then. Some would tell him good luck, and he’d say thank you very much, always real polite. Plenty wanted to shake his hand, and he never refused. One old fella pressed right up to the bars of the prison wagon and said, “Why, son, there ain’t a bit of bad in your face. Your life has been misrepresented to me.” At another place, a real pretty red-haired gal said to him, “I wouldn’t have missed seeing you for anything— not even for one hundred dollars.” Hardin winked at her and said, “I hope you think it’s worth it, pretty thing.” She said, “Oh, my, yes! Now I can tell everybody I have seen the notorious John Wesley Hardin and he is so handsome!” Hardin laughed and said, “Yes, well, my wife thinks so.”

We didn’t have any real trouble on that trip. Things didn’t get truly tense until we arrived in Comanche. We had so much chain on Hardin he couldn’t even stand up, never mind walk. It took six strong men to lift him out of the wagon and carry him bodily into the jail. There was a huge crowd of spectators, of course—some calling out encouragement and some calling him a lowdown killer who deserved nothing but a rope. There were plenty of cussing matches and now and then a fistfight broke out. Our scout brought word that a mob of two hundred vigilantes, most of them from Brown County, was camped just on the other side of town, ready to ride in and take Hardin out and lynch him.

Sheriff Wilson was plenty worried about a mob action against his jail, and he’d deputized thirty-five local citizens to help repel any attack. His idea was for his men to be inside the jail and the Rangers to guard the outside, but Hardin told Captain Reynolds he didn’t trust the local deputies. “If a mob does attack,” he said, “who’s to say these local boys won’t side with them and let them in? They sure enough let my brother hang. It’d be a whole lot smarter if your men were inside and the sheriff’s men outside, don’t you think?” Reynolds did think so, and that’s how he set up the guard details. It chafed the sheriff that Reynolds put more faith in Hardin than in the Comanche lawmen.

The next day the town was buzzing with a rumor that the vigilantes were about to storm the jail and take Hardin by main force. So Captain Reynolds put out a word of his own: if the jail was attacked, he would not only order his men to shoot to kill but would turn Wes Hardin out of his cell with a loaded pistol in each hand. He truly meant it—and he told Hardin so. Hardin thanked him and said justice in Texas would be a lot better served if it had more lawmen like him working for it. Some citizens were outraged that a Ranger officer would threaten to do such a thing, but I reckon the mob believed him, because they never did attack.

*    *    *

I drew assignment as a courtroom guard, so I got to witness the whole proceeding. I’ve since seen a lot of legal trials, but not many as hostile to the defendant as that one in Comanche. The night before it began, me and some other Rangers took a few drinks in the company of a newspaper editor named Quill, and he told us five men on the jury had taken part in lynching Hardin’s brother Joe three years before. The barkeep, a fella named Wright, said he knew for a fact that the presiding judge had once been hoodwinked by Joe Hardin in a land deal.

The law of the time wouldn’t permit a murder defendant to take the stand on his own behalf, and most of the witnesses who could have testified for Hardin were either dead or on the dodge from the law themselves—or had been run out of Comanche County by the vigilantes. There really wasn’t much Hardin’s lawyers could do to defend him. The only thing he had going for him was the state’s own poor skill at prosecuting him. Because Hardin wasn’t the only one to shoot Charles Webb, the prosecution set out to prove a conspiracy to murder. They claimed that Hardin and Jim Taylor and others decided to murder Webb because he intended to serve state warrants on them. But the prosecution’s own witnesses had to admit that Webb had been the first to shoot—and even though the state claimed he’d done so only when it became obvious that Hardin and his friends were about to gun him down, their argument sounded thin to me.

He was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to twenty-five years with hard labor in the state penitentiary at Huntsville. The judge denied his lawyers’ motion for a new trial, and they immediately filed an appeal with the state Court of Criminal Appeals. He was ordered back to jail in Austin until the appeals court ruled on his case.

We took him back the same way we’d brought him—chained down in the wagon and guarded by all of Company 35. A gang of hard cases trailed us out of Comanche at a distance. The first time we set up camp for the night, some of those jackasses hid out in the trees and kept hollering stuff like “We got you a new necktie right here, Wes!” and “You’re gonna get what your brother got, Hardin you son of a bitch!” Hardin had forty pounds of iron hanging all over him and looked as spooked as you’d expect any man to under such circumstances. Every time Reynolds sent men out to try and catch the night-callers, they’d shut up and move to another part of the woods. Then as soon as our boys got back to camp they’d start up again. Reynolds finally ordered us to fire a few carbine rounds into the trees in the direction the voices came from, but even that didn’t quiet them down for long. It wasn’t only Hardin whose nerves got put on edge that night. The next day they followed us till about noon before finally turning back.

During his first few weeks in the Austin jail he somehow managed to shape a couple of pieces of tin into keys—one for his cell and one to the lock on the runaround, the big barred cage around the cells. Somebody—we always suspected Manning Clements—had slipped him a six-inch piece of hacksaw blade, and every night, after letting himself out of the runaround, he’d go to work cutting on the bars of the jail’s back window. The other prisoners knew what he was doing, of course, since you can’t keep such a thing a secret in a jail, and one of them sold him out to the jailers for an extra ration of supper. When we examined the bars of the back window, we saw that two of them were nearly cut through. Another night of hard sawing with the little bitty blade—we found it hid in his mattress lining—and he’d of been out. After that, we kept a guard posted at the runaround door day and night, and another posted directly under the back window. “I don’t hardly blame you for trying to escape, Wes,” Reynolds told him, “but if you’d got out that window, the jail-yard guards would of shot you down like a dog in the street.”