Born in Mobile, Alabama on March 1, 1849, Larn traveled to Colorado as a teenager where he found work as a ranch hand. However, after an argument with his boss over a horse around 1869, he shot and killed him. Soon he fled to New Mexico, where he killed a local sheriff who he thought was trailing him. Continuing on into to Texas, he settled in Fort Griffin, wherein 1871 he worked as a trail boss for a local rancher named Bill Hays. While on a cattle drive to Trinidad, Colorado, he allegedly killed two Mexicans and a sheepherder. Somewhere along the line, Larn married Mary Jane Matthews from the noted Matthews family and became a well-known citizen of Shackelford County.
