John Wesley "Wes" Hardin--cowboy, gambler, legendary gunfighter, Texan sympathetic to the southern cause--left us a literate, vibrant, action packed, and spellbinding picture of the post Civil War Reconstruction era in Texas and the feuds and gun battles in which he fought. As proficient with a pen as with a Colt, Hardin's description of "a course of life which, when once entered on, few live to reach their majority," as he put it, so vividly transports us back to those days of the West we almost feel part of the action and the gun battles. Sometimes heroic in deed, sometimes notorious and bloodthirsty, always demonstrating great courage and objectivity, Hardin's autobiography is unique in Western literature as the only self portrait of a real gunfighter. If planning to make your reputation as a gunfighter, Hardin offers this admonition: "True, it is almost as bad to kill as to be killed. It drove my father to an early grave; it almost distracted my mother; it killed my brother Joe and my cousins Tom and William.... I do say, however, that the man who does not exercise the first law of nature—that of self preservation — is not worthy of living and breathing the breath of life."