John Wesley Hardin

John Wesley Hardin was, by his own boastful and unreliable autobiography, one of the deadliest gunmen of the frontier, claiming more than forty killings across a violent career rooted partly in Reconstruction-era Texas racial and political violence. Convicted of murder in 1878, he spent seventeen years in prison, where he studied law and was eventually pardoned and admitted to the Texas bar. He struggled to rebuild a stable life afterward, drifting into drinking and gambling in El Paso, and was shot in the back of the head by a local lawman, John Selman, in the Acme Saloon in 1895 — a death that echoed, with grim symmetry, the manner in which several of his own victims had reportedly died.