The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 67, July 1963 - April, 1964 Page: 59
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Notes and Documents
marshal of some wild and woolly town-and to be pictured as a
hero in books and on television seven or eight decades later-
was to have more notches on his gun than any other of the bad
boys who reached the town two jumps ahead of a posse. That
John Wesley Hardin was not made marshal of any of the shoot-
'em-up towns in which he lived briefly was not for the lack of
notches on his gun. He was just too busy adding to the number
to serve in that capacity.
The young gunman was never a resident of Comanche. With
his wife Jane and their baby daughter Molly he had made several
visits to relatives there in 1873. When he came there in April,
1874, bringing his friend Jim Taylor with him, it was the second
time he had been in the town since the first of the year. His wife
and baby were already in Comanche, having come there with
Joe Hardin and Alec Barrickman when they returned from a
visit to John Wesley at his cow camp in Gonzales County.
A year earlier Hardin had been drawn into the Sutton-Taylor
feud, in which nine men had been killed in one night in Cuero,
the center of the feud. Hardin had tried to keep out of the feud.
When drawn into it, he immediately became leader of the Taylor
faction, a place left vacant by the murder of Pitkin Taylor, the
father of Jim and Billy Taylor, by members of the Sutton gang.
On May 5, 1873, Hardin and Taylor killed badman-cowboy Jack
Helm who, with Bill Sutton, led the Sutton faction. In April,
1874, shortly before Hardin and Taylor came to Comanche,
Sutton had been shot to death by Jim and Billy Taylor, as had
Gabe Slaughter, a stranger who was so unfortunate as to have
been with Sutton at the time he was killed.
Sutton and Slaughter were killed while Joe Hardin and Alec
Barrickman were visiting John Wesley at his cow camp. Though
neither they nor John Wesley fired any of the shots that took
the lives of the men, all three had a hand in their murder. Jim
Taylor had sworn to kill Sutton, and John Wesley wanted him
killed. But Sutton, averse to being a target for the gunman
buddies, had been keeping out of their way.
In early March or April, 1874, Sutton started a herd of cattle
up the Chisholm Trail. Sutton himself was to go from Indianola,
Texas, to New Orleans by the steamer Clinton, and then on to
Kansas by train to meet his trail crew when they arrived there.
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 67, July 1963 - April, 1964, periodical, 1964; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101197/m1/79/?q=%221777%22: accessed July 16, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting Texas State Historical Association.