It was wonderful news—but when he said he wanted me to leave ahead of him while he took care of closing his office and paying off a few bills and such, I felt a shiver run through me. He wanted me to go up there right away and check into a hotel and start looking around town for a nice office for him. I said I wanted to wait so we could leave together, but he said no, we’d do it the way he said. We nearly got into an argument about it, but I caught myself in time to avoid it. All right, I said, we’d do it his way.
On Sunday morning I left El Paso on the train for Santa Fe. I’d had a sleepless night and was red-eyed and jumpy. The passing landscape glared so whitely it hurt to look out at it. The air lunging through the open windows was as hot as desperate breath and didn’t do a thing but swirl dust through the coach. Still, I was so tired the rocking car lulled me into a sweaty, fitful sleep.
Just before we reached Las Cruces I dreamt about Wesley. I saw him standing at a long brightly lighted bar in a dim saloon, tossing dice and laughing. Then a shadowy figure came up behind him and pointed a long accusing finger at the back of his head….
The loud bang of a coach window woke me with a start, my throat tight and pulsing wildly—and the train whistle shrieked like the devil in grief.
The El Paso Daily Herald,
20 AUGUST 1895
… This morning early a Herald reporter started after the facts and found John Selman, the man who fired the fatal shots, and his statement was as follows:
“I met Wes Hardin last evening close to the Acme Saloon. When we met, Hardin said, ‘You’ve got a son that is a bastardly, cowardly, s__ of a b__.’
“I said: ‘Which one?’
“Hardin said: ‘John, the one that is on the police force. He pulled my woman when I was absent and robbed her of $50, which they would not have done if I had been there.’
“I said: ‘Hardin, no man can talk about my children like that without fighting, you cowardly, s__ of a b__.’”
“Hardin said: ‘I am unarmed.’
“I said: ‘Go and get your gun. I am armed.’
“Then he said: ‘I’ll go and get a gun and when I meet you I’ll meet you smoking and make you pull like a wolf around the block.’
“Hardin then went into the saloon and began shaking dice with Henry Brown.… I sat down on a beer keg in front of the Acme Saloon and waited for Hardin to come out. I insisted on the police force keeping out of the trouble because it was a personal matter between Hardin and myself. Hardin had insulted me personally.
“About 11 o’clock Mr. E. L. Shackleford came along and said: ‘Come on and take a drink but don’t get drunk.’ Shackleford led me into the saloon by the arm. Hardin and Brown were shaking dice at the end of the bar next to the door. While we were drinking I noticed that Hardin watched me very closely as we went in. When he thought my eye was off him he made a break for his gun in his hip pocket and I immediately pulled my gun and began shooting. I shot him in the head first as I had been informed that he wore a steel breast plate. As I was about to shoot a second time someone ran against me and I think I missed him, but the other two shots were at his body and I think I hit him both times. My son then ran in and caught me by the arm and said: ‘He is dead. Don’t shoot anymore.’
“I was not drunk at the time, but was crazy mad at the way he had insulted me.
“My son and myself came out of the saloon together and when Justice Howe came I gave my statement to him. My wife was very weak and was prostrated when I got home. I was accompanied home by Deputy Sheriff J. C. Jones. I was not placed in jail, but considered myself under arrest. I am willing to stand any investigation over the matter. I am sorry I had to kill Hardin, but he had threatened mine and my son’s life several times and I felt it had come to that point where either I or he had to die.”
(Signed) John Selman
I arrived in El Paso on the nineteenth of August, a hot Monday evening I shall never forget.
After asking the depot agent for directions to the Herndon Lodging House, I plunged into the tumult of the streets. The city was raucous with rumbling and clanging streetcars, clattering wagons, clopping hooves, barking dogs, the bray and snort of livestock, with shouting and whistling and laughter, with the cries of newshawks, with music blaring from every saloon—piano and hurdy-gurdy, banjo and guitar, and lustily, badly sung songs.
The sun was almost touching the mountain looming over the town, but the air was still thick with heat and dust. It was pungent with horse droppings and the peppery aromas of Mexican cooking, with the smells of creosote and whiskey and human waste. Old women in black rebozos, their faces as dry and cracked as desert earth, hunkered on the sidewalks with their bony hands extended for alms. Through the open door of a shadowy saloon came a great crash of glass, followed by several resounding smacks, a heavy thump, and an explosive chorus of loud laughter. Four boys on a corner were laughing as well, and poking jackknives into the malodorously bloated carcass of a large black dog, raising a horde of fat green flies with every whooping stab.
It was, as Fox had told me it would be, one tough town.
I refer to Richard Kyle Fox, publisher of The Police Gazette, the most popular periodical of our day. Its specialty was sports, but its larger appeal was rooted in its zealous reportage of sex and violence. Every week the shocking-pink pages of the Gazette presented a plethora of crime, scandal, bizarre spectacle, madness, and death. Gazette readers feasted on each new issue like scavengers alighting on fresh carrion. “I give the American working man what he wants in a newspaper,” Fox often boasted, “the real stuff of life!” And I, who in my youth had been a serious poet with dreams of capturing the light of the stars in my verse, had now been in his employ for over six years. Indeed, I was one of his star reporters. So veers life.
I was in El Paso to try to gain an interview with John Wesley Hardin, the infamous mankiller. Fox had only recently heard about him and had become instantly enthusiastic about the subject. He was a man of sequential obsessions, and his obsession of the moment was the Wild West. He thought an interview with Hardin would be perfect for the Gazette. “It’s a splendid tough tale, this Hardin fella’s, full of life’s hard truths,” Fox said to me in the New York office. “Old West killer does a big stretch in the pen and then, on being set free after many cruel years, takes up the mantle of the man of law. He follows the straight and narrow, he does, but then stumbles and falls to the evil wayside once again, for the leopard can’t change his spots after all, can he now? I hear he robs saloons at his whim, that he shot a man dead in a fight over a woman. I hear he’s a fearsome drunk and most of his fellow citizens want to see him dead, they are so frightened of him. Well, I want to know the details, Sammy lad—as will our readers. Go and get those details, my boy, and write them up for us in your particularly enthralling style, hey?”
That was how I came to be on the loud streets of El Paso on that sultry evening of August 19, 1895.
At the Herndon I was told by the landlady—one Mrs. Williams—that Mr. Hardin was not in and she did not know where he was. “Go poking through the saloons and I guess you’ll sure find him,” she said. Her sneer couched on her face like a bad-tempered cat.
The nearest saloon, The Show, was across the street and just around the corner. As I quaffed my first stein, I made known that I was a Police Gazette reporter interested in Hardin, and the barkeep began talking my ear off, as I’d expected he would. The Gazette was venerated in every tavern in America, even in such remote outposts as El Paso. The Show wasn’t yet busy at that early evening hour, and a handful of other gents soon gathered around me at the bar, taking exception to some of the boniface’s assertions and delivering their own opinions about the city’s most famous resident. Among the things I found out was that Hardin’s chief antagonist in town was a constable named John Selman, who carried a formidable reputation of his own as a man to be reckoned with.