The Pistoleer: A Novel of John Wesley Hardin

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.” Hardin answered, “That’d be better than dying like a rat in a cage.” He had a point, you ask me.

I was on guard in the visiting room one time when his wife and children came to visit. His face was bright as a harvest moon, he was so happy to see them. But she looked tired. There were lines in her cheeks and dark circles under her eyes, like she hadn’t slept good in a long time. The children were respectful but standoffish. Hardin tried hard to sound encouraging. He told her to be brave and strong and so forth. She mostly whispered, and it was hard to tell from her face what she might of been saying. I did hear her say, “Of course not—there’s nothing to give up to!” Said it sharp, and for a second he looked at her like she’d cussed him. When they left, he stared at the door like he was looking at something long ago and far away. I know for a fact he wrote her just about every day he was waiting to hear from the appeals court. I guess she probably had a lot of good reasons for not writing him back near as often.

I never did understand the workings of the appeals court—why it could be so fast to rule in some cases and took so damn long in others. Like the difference between the time it took them to decide Hardin’s case and how fast they decided Brown Bowen’s.

Hardin had been in jail for months already when his brother-in-law was finally extradited from Alabama on a warrant for murder in Texas. He was put in a cell not too far from Hardin’s, and it was real clear there was no love lost between them. Whenever they saw each other in the runaround, Wes would damn near snarl at him, and Bowen was always bad-mouthing Hardin to the other prisoners. The way I heard it, they held each other to blame for getting caught by the law.

Bowen was a cocky sonbitch who figured there wasn’t a way in the world he would be convicted. “Ain’t no witnesses,” he said. “It’s my word against a dead man’s.” A few weeks later he got taken to Gonzales for trial, and as it turned out, there had been a witness. A young fella named Mac Billings had seen Bowen commit the murder—he’d shot a passed-out drunk for some reason nobody knew. The jury stepped out of the room for a few minutes and came back with a hanging verdict.

When Bowen was returned to Austin while his case was appealed, he wasn’t near so brash as before. He licked his lips a lot and looked to be in a constant sweat. He spent a whole day talking to his lawyer—and then the two of them announced to reporters that the man who’d really committed the murder Bowen was convicted of was John Wesley Hardin. Bowen claimed he hadn’t said so before because he wanted to protect his sister’s husband—and he hadn’t expected to be found guilty. He said Mac Billings had lied to cover for Hardin.

Neal Bowen, Brown’s father, came to Austin to beg Hardin to confess to the killing and save his son’s neck. Hardin told him he wouldn’t make a false statement—and that a true one wouldn’t help Brown in the least. Bowen stomped out of the jail with a face like a storm cloud. I heard they never talked to each other again.

In early May Brown Bowen’s appeal was denied, and we took him to Gonzales to be hanged. Over three thousand spectators turned out on the appointed day. He once again declared that Hardin was the guilty party, not himself. Then he was hooded and his legs bound together and the trap was triggered. The hangman wasn’t too good at his work, though, because I counted to thirteen-Mississippi before Bowen finally stopped twitching.

I never felt a bit sorry for Brown Bowen, but I couldn’t help thinking how hard things must have been for Jane. Her whole family had come to hate her husband, and they cut all ties with her when she refused to turn her back on him. She went to live with Hardin’s mother.

Four months after Bowen’s hanging, the court denied Hardin’s appeal. In its written opinion, it made reference to “the enormity of the crimes of John Wesley Hardin,” which sounded to me like they’d denied the appeal as much because of who he was as for what he’d done. Reynolds thought the same thing. “The court ain’t sure if he killed Charlie Webb in self-defense or not,” the lieutenant said, “but they know damn well he’s Wes Hardin and has killed plenty others, and that’s enough for them to shut the iron doors on him.”

We took him back to Comanche for formal sentencing, then set out with him and three other prisoners in a wagon once again flanked front and rear with a heavy guard detail. At Fort Worth we put them aboard a train—a prison car with barred windows and double-thick, double-locked doors—and headed for Huntsville. Every station on our route was jammed with gawkers, with people praying for him and people cursing his damned soul. The depot at Palestine was so crowded, people were jostling and shoving each other off the platform. We later heard a young boy lost his foot when he fell on the tracks as we went rumbling by.