Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters So...how bout Charles Askins, Jr.?

There's a big difference between rumor and admitted/confessed fact. Putting credence in rumors is sewing farts to a moonbeam.

Historically, gunmen of the old West didn't kill all that many people. For example, historians agree that Hickok probably killed half a dozen men, Billy the Kid perhaps 8 or 10, and Bill Langley probably fewer than 5, despite the wild claims of dozens of corpses littering the landscape at the hands of these men. The rumors of murders done were rooted in the fanciful dime novels of the day, and propagated by envious souls who had nothing better to do than tell tall tales. Langley was hanged, and both Hickok and William Bonney were shot to death. Most gunmen died violent deaths, of course.

Langley is known to have had numerous bad actors roaming Texas claiming to be him, and his "rumored" tally of murders was inflated three or four times higher than the actual number of murders he committed. Such imposture is thought to have inflated the death tally of other gunmen, too, including Wes Hardin.

It is entirely possible that Wyatt Earp committed vengeance killings after his brothers were shot in Tombstone, but the killings he admitted to were all within the loose limits of his authority as a lawman. Rumors, schmumors.

It is worth noting that like Askins Jr, the most prolific murderer of the American West, John Wesley Hardin, confessed to the killings of 40-odd men. Some folks scoff at that number, but at least one of his biographers, a noted Western scholar whose name escapes me at the moment, believes the number was actually higher than his 42 or 43 claimed kills. Hardin was not a sworn peace officer, but his role in the Taylor-Sutton war/feud was arguably as righteous and as lawful as the killings committed by the Sutton Regulators... the difference between outlaw and lawman in Reconstruction Texas was largely a matter of who your allegiance was to. In other words, there were some great similarities between Askins and Hardin.

Hardin admitted to his homicidal tally, as did Askins. Hardin believed in taking every advantage in a gunfight, including back-shooting and ambush, as did Askins.

Wyatt Earp never admitted to those things. I'm not saying he was as pure as the driven snow, but I think it's hard to say he was in the same class of killer as Charlie Askins Jr. Hardin was, but not Earp.