The Men Who War the Star: The Story of the Texas Rangers (38 page)

Company “A”
Between May 28 and June 12, [18]74, Capt. Jno. R. Waller’s command made over 22 arrests of Cattle Thieves and desperadoes. Turned over to Sheriff of DeWitt County, 7 prisoners (members of John [Wesley] Hardin’s gang) and to Sheriffs of other counties, the remainder of the parties arrested. John Hardin was wounded by Capt. Waller, but made good his escape.

There was no mention of the lynching of Joe Hardin and the Dixon boys, but more than six decades later, in 1937, one of Waller’s Rangers, J. H. Taylor, admitted that “three was mobbed.”
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JOE’S LYNCHING CONVINCED
Wes that the time had come to leave Texas. He fled to Gainesville, Florida, where he assumed the name John Swain and purchased a saloon. His wife, Jane, and infant daughter, Mollie, joined him there, staying as long as he deemed it safe. Then, in early 1875, he sold the saloon and the family moved first to Micanopy, south of Gainesville, then northeast to Jacksonville, near the Georgia line.
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Meanwhile, in January 1875, the Texas legislature authorized Governor Coke to pay a reward of $4,000, a phenomenal sum for that era, for Hardin’s apprehension and “delivery of the body” to the Travis County Jail in Austin. The resolution did not specify whether “the body” need be dead or alive. Although his twenty-second birthday was still four months away, it was estimated Hardin had killed twenty-seven men, and he had the highest price on his head of any fugitive in the history of Texas.
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By 1876, he was so infamous that the adjutant general’s annual
List of Fugitives from Justice,
which normally carried detailed physical descriptions and personal information, simply stated:

Hardin, John. . . . Murder; he is the notorious desperado, John Wesley Hardin.
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Apparently no other description was necessary.

IN THE SPRING
of 1877, Lt. Lee Hall gave Sgt. John B. Armstrong the goahead to apprehend Hardin. The son of a Tennessee physician, Armstrong had arrived in Texas in 1872, at the age of twenty-two. Already he had been wandering four years, after being run out of his hometown in the wake of various scrapes with Reconstruction authorities. In Texas, he joined an Austin militia unit known as the Travis Rifles, and from there moved on to McNelly’s company.
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Describing him, Ranger Napoleon A. Jennings wrote:

He had a singularly mild blue eye, and experience on the frontier has taught me that mild blue eyes usually indicate anything but mildness of disposition. His handsome face was full of character. His carriage was as erect as that of a grenadier and, despite his great size, he was extremely graceful in all his movements. He was a dashing fellow, and always ready to lead a squad of Rangers on any scout that promised to end in a fight.
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Although the official history of the Armstrong family states that the prospect of bringing in Hardin aroused the Ranger’s “sporting blood,” there can be little doubt the hefty reward was a factor as well, because, as Leon Metz notes, in the nineteenth century the opportunity for reward money persuaded many men to go into law enforcement in the frontier West; Rangers frequently chased fugitives across state lines and international boundaries in hopes of collecting the bounty.
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If Armstrong was motivated by financial gain, he nevertheless was the right man for the job. His tenacity in carrying out his assignments had earned him the nickname “McNelly’s Bulldog.” Earlier in the year, in DeWitt County, he had arrested several of the feudists without hesitation.
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HALL AND ARMSTRONG
had no idea where Hardin was, and they decided that the best approach would be to hire a detective. The first man they hired turned up nothing. Then Hall learned that Hardin was supposedly living at an unspecified location in Florida under the alias John Swayne. With that information, the Rangers contacted John Riley (Jack) Duncan of Dallas, a former policeman who had a reputation as the best detective in Texas. Governor Richard Hubbard, who had succeeded Coke, gave Duncan official status by appointing him a special Ranger assigned to work with Armstrong on the Hardin case. They were to track down and capture or kill John Wesley Hardin—it really didn’t matter which.

It was common knowledge that the Hardins were a close-knit clan, as were Wes Hardin’s in-laws, the Bowens of Gonzales County. Wherever Wes was, Jane and the children were probably nearby. And Jane’s brother, Joshua Robert Bowen, who for some unknown reason had the nickname Brown, was on the run with a $500 price on his head. Chances were that he was with Wes and Jane, and between the two families, someone would keep in touch with the folks back home. On that premise, Jack Duncan wandered down to Gonzales County posing as a man named Williams who, although supposedly a merchant, was himself in trouble with the law. There he became friendly with Neill Bowen, Hardin’s father-in-law, and discussed buying Bowen’s store.
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All the hunches paid off. Duncan’s involvement with the store allowed him to intercept a letter from Brown Bowen to his father, Neill, sent from Pollard, Alabama. In that letter, Jane sent her love. The return address was to J. H. Swain, close enough to John Swayne, the alias they had been given.

Duncan’s next problem was to arrange his own sudden disappearance from Gonzales County without arousing suspicion. He sent a wire to Armstrong stating, “Come and get your horse.” About a day later, the Rangers arrived and arrested “Mr. Williams,” the fugitive merchant, who was placed in irons, loaded into a wagon, and taken to Cuero in DeWitt County. Soon he and Armstrong were on the train to Austin to meet with Governor Hubbard over extradition. After arranging for warrants to be forwarded for both John Wesley Hardin and John Swain, Duncan and Armstrong took the train to Montgomery, Alabama, arriving on June 20, 1877. From there, Duncan wandered down to Pollard, this time posing as a transient, and learned that John Swain was in Pensacola, Florida, gambling. He also learned that William D. Chipley, superintendent of the Pensacola Railroad, had had an altercation with a drunken Brown Bowen in the Pensacola terminal in an earlier trip to that city, and that Bowen had threatened to kill him.

After exchanging telegrams with Armstrong and Duncan, Chipley took the train to meet them in Alabama. Because the Texas warrants had not arrived, the superintendent was accompanied by a Pensacola judge and Escambia County, Florida, sheriff William Henry Hutchinson. The Florida authorities obtained Armstrong’s assurances that Bowen would be arrested as well, even though he was not with Hardin in Pensacola at the time. While Chipley had no particular love for Hardin, he vehemently hated Bowen and did not want him wandering around after Hardin was arrested.

With Hardin gambling in Pensacola, the group agreed to wait until he prepared to return to Alabama, and take him on the train in the Pensacola station. On August 23, Hardin and three friends, Shep Hardy, Neal Campbell, and Jim Mann, boarded the train. Sheriff Hutchinson already had placed about twenty deputized citizens in and around the station. Then he, Deputy A. J. Perdue, Armstrong, and Duncan got on the train and found Hardin and his friends relaxing in the smoking car. Hutchinson and Perdue apparently had no idea of the identity of the suspect, only that he was wanted in Texas.

There are many versions of what happened next. The best-known is that on seeing Armstrong’s Colt’s revolver with the classic Ranger seven-and-a-half-inch barrel, Hardin shouted, “Texas, by God!” and went for his own gun, but it caught in his suspenders. Hardin himself claimed that Hutchinson and Perdue came in and said, “Surrender! Hold up your hands,” to which he shouted, “Robbers! Protect me!” and went for his gun, and a struggle ensued. Whatever the case, a melee erupted with Hardin, Hutchinson, and Perdue rolling around in the aisle, kicking, cursing, and shouting, until Armstrong came into the car and ended it by bringing his revolver crashing down on Hardin’s head.

Meanwhile, young Jim Mann, who had done nothing illegal, panicked. Not understanding what was happening, he went for his gun and fired a couple of wild shots before he was killed by Deputy Martin Sullivan. The train pulled out of the station, and during the trip north, Armstrong informed Hutchinson and Perdue that J. H. Swain was, in fact, John Wesley Hardin. According to Hardin, the two Florida lawmen received $500 each for assisting the Rangers.
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Hardin arrived in Austin on August 28 and was lodged in Travis County Jail. A series of legal battles ensued, with Hardin contending that because the Texas warrants had never arrived, there were no warrants in Florida and there had not been a proper extradition—he had been kidnapped. In modern times he would be upheld, but in 1877 he was not.

He also used the time to work on his image. Hardin could be docile when he wanted to be, and part of the reason he had managed to avoid the law so long was a certain personal charm. He also knew the power of newspapers, and began giving interviews. It paid dividends. Although he is known to have killed twenty-seven men, he was tried for only one—the killing of Deputy Sheriff Charles Webb. On September 29, 1877, a Comanche County jury convicted him of second-degree murder and sentenced him to twenty-five years in prison.
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The irony was that Brown Bowen, who was apprehended a short time after Hardin, was hanged in Gonzales for a killing that actually might have been Hardin’s twenty-eighth. At least that’s what Bowen said during and after his trial, and there is evidence that he probably was telling the truth. But people never really liked Bowen, who was mean-tempered and vindictive even under the best circumstances. Quite likely, Brown Bowen was hanged in part because he lacked Hardin’s style and finely tuned sense of public relations.
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TEXAS’S NUMBER TWO
badman, John King Fisher, was perhaps the most eccentric and colorful. Starting off as a small-time thief, he had a natural gift for leadership and lofty ambitions that rapidly made him wealthy. He was more settled than most gunmen, generally confining his operations to south Texas and the Mexican border, where he almost could have been called a prominent citizen. He had a sizable ranch near Carrizo Springs, northwest of Laredo, that became a headquarters for fugitives from the law. Eventually, King Fisher commanded more than a hundred loyal men.
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The ever observant Ranger Jennings, who first met Fisher when the latter was about twenty-five, was probably not exaggerating when he called the badman

the most perfect specimen of a frontier dandy and desperado that I ever saw. He was all, beautifully proportioned, and exceedingly handsome. He wore the finest clothing procurable, but all of it was the picturesque, border, dime novel kind. His broad-brimmed white Mexican
sombrero
was profusely ornamented with gold and silver lace and had a golden snake for a band. His fine buckskin Mexican short jacket was heavily embroidered with gold. His shirt was of the finest and thinnest linen and was worn open at the throat, with a silk handkerchief knotted loosely about the collar.

Fisher’s chaps, Jennings wrote, were made from the skin of a Bengal tiger. He had seen the tiger in a circus and taken a fancy to the skin. His gang had taken over the circus long enough to kill the tiger and take the hide.

Nevertheless, there was substance behind the show. Fisher was a cold-blooded gunman who, by the time he was twenty-six, boasted probably with some accuracy that he had killed a man for every year of his life. According to Jennings, he “was an expert revolver shot, and could handle his six-shooters as well with his left hand as with his right. He was a fine rider, and rode the best horses he could steal in Texas or Mexico.”
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BECAUSE MOST OF
King Fisher’s crimes were against Mexicans, who were not popular in south Texas at the time, and because he retained first-rate legal council, he generally managed to stay one jump ahead of the law.
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In early 1876, however, he pushed too far, because he appeared on the
List of Fugitives from Justice
with the notation “Theft of geldings; committed February,’ 76; indicted April, same year.”
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That attracted the attention of Leander McNelly, whose jurisdiction included Fisher’s domain.

On May 31, McNelly notified Adjutant General Steele from Laredo that he was going after King Fisher. Fisher’s ranch was in Dimmit County, on the upper Nueces River, ninety or so miles to the northwest. The Rangers were armed with new caliber .44-40 Winchester repeating rifles, thirty of which had been sent to them as a token of appreciation by Capt. Richard King. They were a welcome change from the heavy Sharps, and the Rangers were pleased with the new weapon, but McNelly himself may have had mixed emotions. He disliked wasting ammunition, and the Sharps, which had to be reloaded after each shot, encouraged the men to fire accurately and conserve ammunition. A repeating rifle with a full magazine might prompt them to “blaze away.”
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Arriving in Carrizo Springs, McNelly sent a second letter to Steele, in which he described a classic range war:

The country is under a perfect reign of terror from the number and desperate character of the thieves who infest this region. The country is rich in stock, but very sparsely settled, and the opportunities and inducements for anyone to steal are very great.

This county (Dimmit) is unorganized and is attached to Maverick County for judicial purposes. About one-half the white citizens of Eagle Pass [the Maverick County seat] are friends of King Fisher’s gang. The remainder of the citizens there are too much afraid of the desperadoes to give any assistance in even keeping them secure after they have been placed in jail, and they would never think of helping to arrest any of them. On my arrival here, I found the people greatly terrified, and on the eve of deserting their homes and property to save their lives—the homes which for years they had defended against Indians and invading Mexicans alternately, and never once thought of leaving. Some of the oldest and best citizens told me that, in all of their frontier experience, they had never suffered so much as from these American robbers. For weeks past they have not dared to leave their homes for fear of being waylaid and murdered.