17. John Wesley Hardin’s Killing Spree
John Wesley Hardin fled to Sumpter, Texas, where claimed to have killed three Union soldiers in 1868 when they tried to arrest him. As he put it: “I waylaid them, as I had no mercy on men whom I knew only wanted to get my body to torture and kill. It was war to the knife for me, and I brought it on by opening the fight with a double-barreled shotgun and ended it with a cap and ball six-shooter. Thus it was by the fall of 1868 I had killed four men and was myself wounded in the arm“.
Within a year of that triple homicide, he killed another soldier. In 1871, the fugitive Hardin decided to try his hand at becoming a cowboy on the Chisholm Trail. He killed seven people en route, including two men in a card game, and an Indian “just for practice“. He killed another three men when he got to Abilene, Kansas. Later that year, he walked up to two black policemen who were looking for him, and shot them both, killing one and wounding the other. He was well on his way to becoming the deadliest outlaw of the Old West.