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David Smith writes:
Here some of what Leon Metz has to say in his Forward to "John Wesley Hardin, Dark Angel of Texas" as published by University of Oklahoma Press (ISBN 0-8061-2995-6):
John Wesley Hardin was a killer. The tools of his trade were six-shooters and shotguns. He was an expert, a professional with weapons. He spent his youth practicing with firearms. His career was, and would be, repeatedly interspersed with amazed comments by friends and strangers, outlaws and lawmen, regarding his astonishing dexterity with revolvers, how he spun them on his finger, performed various rolls, flips and other tricky, magical, near impossible exhibitions.
Killing people, putting all of that natural skill to use, was inherent in John Wesley Hardin. So he killed many men, perhaps as few as twenty or as many as fifty. Nobody knows the exact figure, but had he not killed, John Wesley Hardin would be just a name among a legion of names of Old West drifters and ne'er- do-wells. They briefly stormed across the pages of history and left no tracks. But he killed---that is what he did, why he is remembered---and you have to wonder about a man who killed so massively, so methodically and so remorselessly.
You have to think of that grand Christian name of his, John Wesley, after the eighteenth century English divine who became the father of Methodism. You have to think of the boy, John Wesley Hardin, being raised in a staunch religious tradition, steeped in Christian virtues, who became a sort of wrathful Old Testament figure, a dark angel slaying enemies, real and perceived.
You have to wonder about the wicked brew of ideas and ideals that bathed and shaped the mind of the boy, Hardin. He had a fierce fire and brimstone religiosity; a rigid code of family loyalty and that indelible sense of honor that was part and parcel of the lives of Southerners, rich and poor. And you have to mix the brew with the awful period of Hardin's youth--those bloody times when the South lay beaten down, filled with hate and praying for vengeance. You realize that the Civil War song, "Oh, I'm a Good Old Rebel," reflected accurately the mind of a youngster like Wes Hardin.
Oh, I'm a good ol' rebel, now that's just what I am,
For this fair land of Freedom, I do not care a damn,
I'm glad I fit against it, I only wish we'd won,
And I don't want no pardon for anything I've done.
I hates the constitution, this great Republic, too,
I hates the Freedman's Bureau and uniforms of blue,
I hates the nasty eagle with all its brags and fuss,
The lyin' thievin' Yankees I hates them worse and worse.
Three hundred thousand Yankees is still in Southern dust,
We got three hundred thousand before they conquered us;
They died of Southern fever and Southern steel and shot,
I wish there was three million instead of what we got.
And the refrain, above all:
I don't want no pardon for what I was and am,
I won't be reconstructed and I don't care a damn.
I have lived most of my adult life in the town where Wes Hardin was killed. I have visited his grave at Concordia Cemetery, and have taken countless visitors there. As I stood gazing at earth so barren that only artificial flowers bloom, I have repeatedly asked myself, "What kind of man was he?" To family and friends, and much of today's world, he was a good man compelled to do bad deeds. To others, the easy smile and friendly handshake were simply masks obscuring evil so malevolent as to be unbelievable.
The man's appeal remains magical. After the turn of the century, the classic writer O'Henry used Hardin as the real life model for his Cisco Kid in "The Caballero's Way." Cisco was the Hardin type of desperado, "killing for the love of it---because he was quick-tempered---to avoid arrest---for his own amusement---any reason that came to his mind would suffice."
By the way, Metz lives in El Paso.
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