(Signed) H. S. Brown
The Life of John Wesley Hardin as Written by Himself
“I was at a terrible disadvantage in my trial. I went before the court on a charge of murder without a witness. The cowardly mob had either killed them or run them out of the county. I went to trial in a town in which three years before my own brother and cousins had met an awful death at the hands of a mob. Who of my readers would like to be tried under these circumstances?”
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“When we got to Fort Worth, the people turned out like a Fourth of July picnic, and I had to get out of the wagon and shake hands for an hour before my guard could get me through the crowd.”
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“I knew there were a heap of Judases and Benedict Arnolds in the world and had had a lifelong experience with the meaning of the word treachery. I believed, however, that in jail even a coward was a brave man.”
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“In 1885 I conceived the idea of studying law.…”
The Daily Democratic Statesman
(AUSTIN, TEXAS)
AUGUST 25, 1877
MORE GLORY FOR THE ADJUTANT GENERAL AND THE STATE TROOPS
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WESLEY HARDIN ARRESTED AT PENSACOLA, FLORIDA
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A DESPERATE FIGHT
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ONE OF HIS CONFEDERATES KILLED AND THE OTHER TWO, WITH HARDIN, ARRESTED
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General Steele and the efficient State Troops under him have for some time been quietly working for the arrest of the notorious and desperate John Wesley Hardin, the terror of the Southwest, and the glorious news of his arrest at Pensacola, Florida, is announced by dispatch to the Adjutant General from Lt. J. B. Armstrong, who left this city on this mission, accompanied by Private Duncan, on the eighteenth instant. The arrest of this notorious character with two of his men and the killing of another adds new laurels to the achieved honors of the State Troops…. The following is a copy of the dispatch received by Gen. Steele yesterday morning:
WHITING, Alabama, August 23.
Gn. Wm. Steele, Austin:
Arrested John Wesley Hardin at Pensacola, Florida, this afternoon. He had three men with him, and we had some lively shooting. One of their number was killed, and the others were captured. Hardin fought desperately, but we closed in and took him by main strength, and then hurried aboard this train, which was just starting for this place. We are now waiting for a train to get away on. This is Hardin’s home, and his friends are trying to rally men to release him. I have some good citizens with me, and I will make it interesting.
J. B. Armstrong
Lieut. State Troops
John wired me in Dallas saying he’d been put in charge of running down John Wesley Hardin and wanted my help. General Steele had authorized him to appoint me a “special Ranger” for the job. I sent a telegram right back saying I’d do it and he could expect me in Austin on the morning train. After making a reservation, I went to my boardinghouse and packed a bag, then went to Sally McGuire’s to celebrate with a Duncan Special. A Duncan Special was one girl to mount up on and another to lay on her back behind me with her face between my legs, doing whatever interesting things she could think of with her mouth and fingers while I rode her partner. Then they’d switch off and we’d do it some more. That particular night cost me a pretty penny, since we went at it till almost dawn. I just did make the train, looking like something the cat dragged aboard, and mighty aware of my reek of stale jissum and whorehouse perfume.
John met me at the station and gave a grinning snort at the smell of me. We went straight to the Red Rock saloon so he could fill me in. He was heavyset and going bald in front. The more hair he lost off his head, the thicker he grew his walrus mustache. He was a damn fine peace officer, quick and fearless. We’d worked together several times before, and he knew I was the best detective in Texas. I’d say I was the best in the country but it might sound like bragging. He also knew I’d jump at the chance to help him hunt Hardin. It wasn’t every day a man got the chance to get on the state payroll just to try and collect half of a four-thousand-dollar arrest reward.
He said he had a tip that Hardin was in Florida. I said I’d heard that rumor like everybody else, but Florida was a long way off and a damn big place to go searching just on account of hearsay. But John thought it was more than a rumor. He said that a year ago the Pinkertons had got a tip he was in Jacksonville and sent two men down to check it out. Three months later their rotted remains were found in a riverside warehouse. They’d both been shot. “Anybody might of killed them,” John said, “but I got a feeling it was our man.” He had a hunch Hardin was still in Florida, though he likely wouldn’t have stayed in Jacksonville. I put good store in John’s hunches, and even more in my own—and my hunch was he was right.
Family, I told him—family was the way to find him. A man on the dodge might never get in touch with his friends or his partners, but if he had family or other close kin, that’s who he’d contact if he contacted anybody at all. And Hardin had plenty of kin.
John had naturally thought of that. Hardin’s wife and child were said to be with him, wherever he was, but for weeks now John had had a man watching Hardin’s mother’s house up in North Texas, near Paris, where the family had moved after leaving Comanche. Preacher Hardin had died just a few months before, but there’d been no sign of Wes Hardin at the funeral. John’s man in Paris was bribing the postmaster to keep close track of the Hardins’ mail, but nothing had come from or been sent to Florida, and all the senders and recipients could be accounted for. None of them was Wes or Jane Hardin using a false name. John had other men spying on Hardin’s East Texas kinfolk, but they hadn’t turned up anything either. I said I didn’t think they ever would, not through Hardin’s people. But what, I asked him, about hers?
We went down to the Sandies and snooped around on the sly. We learned that Neal Bowen, Jane’s father, had a country store for sale in Coon Hollow, and we came up with a plan. I’ll be the first to admit we were damn lucky in the way it worked out—but like the man said, I’d rather be lucky than good. While John laid low in Cuero, I went to Neal Bowen and introduced myself as Hal Croves from Austin and said I was looking to buy a store. We hit it off pretty well, and he naturally invited me to live in his house for as long as it took me to inventory the store and study his ledgers and make up my mind to buy the place or not.
It didn’t take long to learn his mail routine. He’d stop in at the post office in the mornings, read his letters at home before dinner, then store them in a trunk in the parlor. I checked in that trunk every day whenever I had the chance. There were bundles of correspondence in there, and it took me a week of peeking through them before I’d had a look at them all. There was nothing in there from Wes or Jane Hardin, nothing that even hinted at their whereabouts.
And then, just when I’d stretched the sham of taking inventory and examining books about as far as I could, Bowen received a letter from his son Brown, who’d written it from an Alabama backwater called Polland. Brown was still wanted in Texas for a murder he’d committed years earlier, but he didn’t interest me at all except as a possible lead to his brother-in-law. His letter was mostly about some property he owned in the Sandies that he wanted his daddy to sell for him. He hadn’t been faring well and was in need of money. It was a self-pitying letter, and I read it with a growing irritation until I reached its last lines. “My sister has just born a baby girl,” he wrote, “and they have called her Callie. She joins me in sending our love.”