Wes Hardin, the homicidal Texas gunslinger and Confederate crusader, was hardly a typical American hero. Yet Johnny Cash venerated him in two songs, most famously “Hardin Wouldn’t Run.” Bob Dylan named an entire album after Hardin (though, strangely, misspelled his name) and characterized him in song as a “friend of the poor.” Back in the 1950s, Rock Hudson played him sympathetically in the movie The Lawless Breed as a man who fell into a life of crime due to hard luck and the death of the girl he loved.
Now comes Bryan Burrough’s new book, The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild, to end the scrubbing of Hardin’s life of crime, along with those of many other murdering cattle rustlers, cheating saloon gamblers, and quick-draw vigilantes.
