DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it — my job's just to make sure you hear every word. Now, some names carry weight the moment you say them out loud. John Wesley Hardin is one of those names.
The marker calls him champion gunfighter in personal combat, and that's a title that doesn't come cheap in Texas. But here's the thing about champions — even the best ones eventually meet justice. And for Hardin, that reckoning came right here in Comanche, in 1874.
That was the year he was brought to justice for the first time, for the murder of Deputy Sheriff Charles Webb. First time. You sit with that phrase a moment.
They put him in prison, and he served fifteen years. Fifteen years. When he came out, John Wesley Hardin did something that might surprise you.
He opened a law office. In El Paso. 1894. A man who'd lived his life on one side of the law setting up shop on the other.
Whatever you make of that, you have to admit — it's a turn nobody saw coming. He didn't get long to see where that road led. In 1895, at the age of forty-two, John Wesley Hardin was killed.
Shot in the back. Champion gunfighter in personal combat. Killed by a shot he never saw.
Comanche, Texas remembers all of it.
What the marker says
Champion gunfighter in personal combat, Hardin was brought to justice for first time for murder of Deputy Sheriff Charles Webb here in Comanche in 1874. Served 15 years in prison. On release, opened law office in El Paso, 1894. Killed at age of 42 when shot in back, 1895. (1966)