Amager Bryghus – John Wesley Hardin

Amager Bryghus – John Wesley Hardin: Son of a Methodist preacher, born in Texas in 1853 and one of the Old West’s most feared killers: a cold-blooded outlaw who once killed a man just for snoring. Already at the age of 15, Hardin got into an argument with a black man, which resulted in his first killing. When the Union Army sent soldiers to catch him, he killed them too – all three of them. Already a fugitive and now even more so, Hardin had a posse of 15 lawmen trailing him. In spite of this, and amidst another killing or five, he managed to settle long enough under an alias to marry Jenny Bowen and produce a son and two daughters. Finally, however, the law caught up with him, and he was arrested by Texas Rangers in Pensacola, Florida in 1877. Sentenced to 25 years in jail, but pardoned in 1894, Hardin studied law and even set up his own law practice. But taking a client’s wife as his lover got him into trouble again – and eventually his luck ran out in 1895 when he encountered a bullet from Constable John Selman’s gun. In popular history John Hardin has often been described as more of a victim than a sinner: a gentleman outlaw, simply caught up in circumstances beyond his control. But the tally of notches found on his pistol after his death tells a very different and very bloody story of him being an extremely dangerous acquaintance.