The meanest man in Gonzales history: One of Wild West’s most famous outlaws called Gonzales home

FIRST IN A SERIES

While people have good reason to fear some of the criminals lurking in Gonzales County these days, it’s interesting to note that none of our modern-day thugs can begin to approach Gonzales’ most famous criminal ever.
John Wesley Hardin called Gonzales home for several years during the Reconstruction era in Texas, and is widely known among historians as one of the meanest outlaws ever to wield a Colt .45 — it is said he once shot a man whose snoring disturbed him. He is credited with more than two dozen killings — but also earned a reputation for personal magnetism that labeled him a “gentleman,” and even practiced law in Gonzales for a time shortly before his death in El Paso in 1896.
Hardin “had star quality,” notes biographer Richard Marohn in his The Last Gunfighter, one of dozens of biographies on Hardin. “While still a teenager, he earned the respect of noted gunslingers like Bill Longley, Ben Thompson, Jeff Milton and Wild Bill Hickock. When he was finally captured and brought back to Texas in chains, common folks flocked to meet his train. Women swooned, and his legend grew.”
Like so many of the most notorious criminals of history, Hardin is alternately demonized and idolized as a hero.
Hardin himself claimed to have been a man of the people in his autobiography, The Life of John Wesley Hardin in His Own Words:
“When we reached Gonzales they had me shackled and chained to a horse, and the people there denounced such brutal treatment, saying I had done more for the peace of the country than any other man in it.”
He was a man with relatively little formal education but, like so many of his time, amazingly articulate — articulate enough, in fact, to have written his own autobiography and to have historians pouring through more than 300 of his personal letters to family and associates.
At the same time, Hardin was a virulent racist who wrote that he had “helped make it a thing of the past for a negro to hold office” in Gonzales County. His first shooting victim is believed to have been a black man when Hardin was just 15 years old. He boldly claimed to have slain five Mexican cowboys for crowding his herd, as well as a Comanche Indian who’d fired an arrow at him.
He was a notorious drinker and gambler, and the more he drank, the meaner he got.
At the same time, Hardin was known as a powerful speaker, a dedicated family man whose first wife remained loyal to him despite his violent record, and as a competent attorney who at one point was almost elected sheriff of Gonzales — but, like many criminals and politicians alike, he blamed other people and his political beliefs for his crimes.
“Thus unwillingly, I became a fugitive,” Hardin wrote, “not from justice be it known, but from the injustice and misrule of the people who had subjugated the South.”
His death heralded the end of an era in Texas: the lawlessness of the Reconstruction Era and the Wild West was giving way  to modern times.
As the Cuero Record  noted in its obituary of Hardin on Jan. 23, 1896: “Hardin was as typical a Texas desperado of the earliest type as was ever portrayed in the dime novel ... It was almost sure death for anyone who was in front of his gun when Hardin drew the bead.”

Next in the Series: Wes Hardin’s Criminal Career