During the cattle drive, a Mexican herd crowded Hardin’s animals from behind. Hardin needed to lay low, but he proved incapable of keeping his hot temper under control for long. Hardin was eager to get out of Texas-a few days earlier, he had murdered a Texas state police guard who was transferring him to Waco for a trial. In 1871, when Hardin was 18 years old, a Texas rancher hired the young gunman as trail boss for a cattle drive up the Chisholm Trail to Abilene. The outlaw may have been exaggerating, though historians have positively confirmed about half that number. By the time he finally went to prison in 1878, Hardin claimed to have killed 44 men.
A year later, he shot a Black man to death after the two tangled in a wrestling match.
When he was 14, he nearly killed another boy in a fight over a girl, stabbing his victim twice with a knife. Hardin revealed a tendency toward violent rages at an early age. John Wesley Hardin, one of the deadliest men in the history of the Old West, arrives in Abilene, Kansas, where he briefly becomes friends with Marshal Wild Bill Hickok.