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The Notorious Men of the Wild West

Khalid Elhassan December 4, 2019 32 min

39. Piling Up the Bodies…

With Texas’ Reconstruction government hot on his tail, John Wesley Hardin fled to Sumpter, Texas. He claimed to have killed three Union soldiers there 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.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.