John Wesley Hardin

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.

James Carlos Blake’s The Pistoleer is a historical novel centred on Hardin and presents his violent life through multiple voices. He also appears in western fiction and screen portrayals that helped create the mythology of the fastest and deadliest gunman. Responsible treatments distinguish documented killings from Hardin’s self-promoting autobiography and the exaggerations of later legend.

In Larry McMurtry’s Streets of Laredo, 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.