| Summary: | "John Wesley Hardin kills men just to see them kick. On one occasion he charged the town of Cuero all alone with a yell of "rats to your holes." Such a shutting up of shops had not been seen since the panic. He is said to have killed thirty men & is a dead shot."--Texas Ranger Pidge, Austin Daily Democrat Statesman. Thus spoke one lawman about John Wesley Hardin, easily the most feared & fearless of all the gunfighters in the West. Nobody knows the exact number of his victims - perhaps as few as twenty or as many as fifty. In his way of thinking, Hardin never shot a man who did not deserve it. Seeking to gain insight into Hardin's homicidal mind, Leon Metz describes how Hardin's bloody career began in post-Civil War Central Texas, when lawlessness & killings were commonplace, & traces his life of violence until his capture & imprisonment in 1878. After his pardon in 1895 he wrote an autobiography, but did not live to see it published. Within a few months of his release, John Selman gunned him down in an El Paso saloon. "Readers seeking a solid understanding of Hardin in a fast-paced writing style that is both informative & enlightening will want to avail themselves of John Wesley Hardin: Dark Angel of Texas."--WILD WEST. LEON C. METZ is the author of fourteen books about the West, among them John Selman, Gunfighter; Pat Garret; & Dallas Stoudenmire, all published by the University of Oklahoma Press.
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