Before John Wesley Hardin reformed and took up honest work as a gunfighter, he was a lawyer.
Born in Bonham, Fannin County, Texas, Hardin claimed to have killed 42 men when he went to prison in 1878.
James G. Hardin, a Methodist preacher, and Elizabeth Hardin were John’s parents, and was he described as being “blond, highly cultured, and charity predominated in her disposition”
In 1925, Hardin’s autobiography was published posthumously by historian, and journalist J. Marvin Hunter.
John Wesley Hardin has also been portrayed in the 1951 film The Texas Rangers by by John Dehner.
In 2002, the bullet that killed Hardin in the Acme saloon shootout in El Paso sold for $80,000 at Greg Martin’s auction house in San Francisco, California.
