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Synopsis:Sometime in the early 1870's John Wesley Hardin, the West's most deadly gunslinger, paid a visit to Greentree, Wyoming Territory. There in an upstairs hotel room he was shot in the head. He fell through a window to the alley below and before his assailant could make sure he was dead, a pretty girl came along and rescued him. He couldn't remember his name or where he was, but in one of his pockets he found a letter postmarked in Texas and addressed to someone named Hard-. The last part of the name was obscured. He and the girl speculated about that, and she decided to call him Slim Hardon. Thus begins a time in the famous outlaw's life when he knew nothing at all about himself. In time he learned that he was fast with a gun and knew more about horses than he did about cattle. But from the clothes he was wearing he figured he might be a gambler or perhaps a bounty hunter (In an inside pocket of his coat he found a poster of Bill Longley, a gunslinger from Texas). The girl, heir to one of the largest ranches on the Wind River Range, took a shine to him, and because of her he found himself in a range war...and head over heels in love.
A Louis L'Amour buff read Hard to Kill and couldn't stop laughing about it for a week and eight days, said it was the best thing he had read since Louie passed on. When pressed with a hogleg, he added words like funny as heck and got inny more? [Author's note: I didn't find it quite that funny. That good, yes, and funny, yes, but I think Brother Will got carried away.]
Photo by Sharon Goforth Hardendorf Phares. | 
I wanted to write a Western that had humor, romance, all the old Western conventions--but little or no graphic language or scenes. I grew up on a small cattle ranch in Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, and I know the difference between the real West and the Hollywood West. Here is my first attempt.
This story is set in one of the most beautiful places in the West. Like Louie L'Amour, I base my stories on real places that have history: All of my descriptions in this book are as realistic as I could get them. The Wind River Country of western Wyoming is my idea of a 'cowboy kingdom'.
If you like this book, check out Oklahoma Pioneer!, a true story about my parents pioneering across Oklahoma from 1907, when it became a state, to 1929, when the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression began. Another biography that I published in 2007 about a Western badman was Hookey Miller; And the Last Days of the Old West. Check it out. I grew up hearing wild stories about Old Hookey Miller, the man with a hook for a right hand. For a time he was a bartender at the Corner Saloon, just four miles from where I was born and grew up. |
