John Wesley Hardin

He was tried for the Brown County deputy's murder in 1878 and sentenced to 25 years in prison, but only served 16 years before being pardoned in 1894. While in prison he had studied law, and after his release he was admitted to the Texas bar.

In 1877 he was captured in Pensacola, FL, by Texas Rangers (during his stay in Florida he was suspected of at least one and probably five more murders).

In 1874 he murdered a sheriff's deputy in Brown County, TX. The deputy was well liked, and it roused the fury of the locals, who formed a lynch mob. The mob actually lynched three men for the murder, none of whom had anything to do with it but all of whom were related to Hardin, which is why they were hanged; by this time Hardin had managed to flee to Florida (his wife and parents remained safe in protective custody).

Gunfighter John Wesley Hardin was one of the most notorious killers to come out of the Old West (while staying overnight at a hotel, he was awakened by the snoring of a man in the next room; Hardin reached over, grabbed his pistol and fired a shot through the wall, killing the man). He was a Southerner who harbored a deep hatred of blacks; the first man he is known to have killed, when he was 15, was black, and while fleeing the law for that murder he shot and killed at least one, and possibly four, Union soldiers, most of them black, who were attempting to arrest him. Hardin later got a job herding cattle on the Chisholm Trail, but the combination of his white-hot temper, a quick draw and the prodigious amounts of alcohol he regularly imbibed resulted in his killing at least seven men along the way; when the herd arrived in Abilene, KS, he got into more gunfights, resulting in three more deaths. He returned to Texas soon afterwards, got married and settled down to raise a family (he had three children), but he soon reverted to his old ways, adding four more murders to his total, before being captured by a county sheriff. Although jailed, he soon broke out and was on the run again. His hatred of Northerners in general and blacks in particular caused him to become involved in a political battle between pro- and anti-Reconstruction forces in Texas (he naturally took the side of the latter) in 1873 and he killed a former State Police officer who led the pro-Reconstruction forces.