3. A Soldier-Killing Spree
After murdering his uncle’s former slave, John Wesley Hardin fled to Sumpter, Texas, with Texas’ Reconstruction Government agents hot on his tail. He became more and more deadly as time went by, and he claimed to have killed three Union soldiers in 1868, when they tried to arrest him. Within a year of that triple homicide, Hardin killed another soldier.
In 1871, the fugitive Hardin decided to try his hand at becoming a cowboy on the Chisholm Trail. He killed seven people en route, including two men in a card game, and an Indian “just for practice“. He killed another three men when he got to Abilene, Kansas. Later that year, he walked up to two black policemen who were looking for him, and shot them both, killing one and wounding the other.
