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John Selman kills John Wesley Hardin
On this day in 1895, Constable John Selman killed the notorious John
Wesley Hardin in a gunfight at El Paso's Acme Saloon. Hardin was born in
1853 in Bonham and revealed a violent personality at an early age. In 1867
he stabbed another youth in a schoolyard squabble, and at age fifteen he
shot and killed a black man during an argument. In the fall of 1868 he
claimed to have killed three Union soldiers, and within a year another
soldier. He killed at least ten others as he made his way up the Chisholm
Trail, and then four more upon returning to Gonzales County. After Texas
Rangers captured him in Pensacola, Florida, in 1877, he was tried for
murder, convicted, and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. While in
prison he studied law, and after being pardoned in 1894 he was admitted to
the bar and practiced law in Gonzales County and then in El Paso. In the
latter city he took as a lover the wife of one of his clients, and when
the husband found out about the affair, Hardin hired a number of law
officials to kill him. Selman, an Arkansas native born in 1839, was one of
the hired killers, and may have killed Hardin because Hardin had not paid
him. Selman was tried for Hardin's murder but released when the trial
ended in a hung jury; he died, aptly enough, in a gunfight in 1896. Hardin
and Selman are both buried in El Paso's Concordia Cemetery.
- Links to Related Handbook of Texas Online Articles
- HARDIN, JOHN WESLEY
- SELMAN, JOHN
- TEXAS RANGERS
- CONSTABLE
- EL PASO, TX
- Other Texas Day by Day Articles for This Date
- Pioneer Methodist missionary enters Texas (1837)
- Apaches bury the hatchet (1749)
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