John Wesley Hardin — reputedly the deadliest gunfighter of the Old West — who came to El Paso to practice law, and was shot dead over a game of dice in the Acme Saloon in 1895.
El Paso in its wild railroad days drew every kind of hard character, but none harder or more famous than the man in this tale — John Wesley Hardin, reputed to be the deadliest gunfighter in the entire history of the Old West. And his story ends, strangely and violently, right here in El Paso.
Hardin was a Texas legend and a Texas terror. A preacher's son who killed his first man as a teenager, he went on to a body count the legends put at around forty men — take that number with a grain of salt, as these things grow in the telling, but there's no doubt the man was a stone-cold killer, fast and fearless and utterly without mercy, the most feared shootist of his generation. And eventually the law caught up with him, and he was sent to prison for a long stretch. But here's the twist that makes his story so peculiar: in prison, John Wesley Hardin studied law. And when he got out, pardoned, this most notorious gunman in the West came to El Paso, in eighteen ninety-five, and hung out his shingle as — of all things — a lawyer. An attorney. The deadliest gunfighter alive, taking clients and filing papers.
But you can take the man out of the gunfight; you can't always take the gunfight out of the man. Hardin got crosswise with a local lawman family named Selman, hard men themselves. And on the night of August the nineteenth, eighteen ninety-five, John Wesley Hardin was standing at the bar of the Acme Saloon here in El Paso, rolling dice, when old John Selman walked in behind him — and shot him in the back of the head. No duel, no fair fight, no fast draw. The deadliest gunfighter in the West, killed from behind over a game of dice, dead before he hit the floor. They buried him out at Concordia Cemetery, where you can still visit his grave.
There's a lesson in it about how the Wild West really ended — not in some noble high-noon showdown, but shabby and sudden and from behind, in a saloon, in a border town, as the frontier itself was closing down. The man who lived by the gun for forty years, brought down by one shot he never saw coming, in Hell Paso. Roll on.
Photo: Visit El Paso · CC BY 2.0
