Ben Lilly
Benjamin Vernon Lilly, Ben Lilly | |
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Born | Winter of 1856 trapper, mountain man, hunting guide, writer, blacksmith , houndsman, predator control agent, pioneer, rancher. |
Title | Ol' Lilly, Old Man Lilly |
Spouse(s) | Lelia Lilly, Mary Lilly |
Benjamin Vernon Lilly or Ben Lilly (1856 – December 17, 1936), nicknamed Ol' Lilly, was a notorious
Personal life
Lilly was born in the winter of 1856 in Wilcox County, Alabama of parents from North Carolina. His family moved from Alabama to
I never met any other man so indifferent to fatigue and hardship. The morning he joined us in camp, he had come on foot through the thick woods, followed by his two dogs, and had neither eaten nor drunk for twenty-four hours; for he did not like to drink the swamp water. It had rained hard throughout the night and he had no shelter, no rubber coat, nothing but the clothes he was wearing and the ground was too wet for him to lie on, so he perched in a crooked tree in the beating rain, much as if he had been a wild turkey. He equaled
Cooper's Deerslayer in woodcraft, in hardihood, in simplicity–and also in loquacity.
Lilly was 5'9" tall and around 180 lbs, and known for the strength and stamina that stayed with him until old age, "spare, full bearded, with mild, gentle eyes and a frame of steel and whipcord."
Old man Sanborn set me on him. They was grizzlies, four of them, and I tracked them down by myself and killed them. They was desert bears, light colored with a stripe down their back, but desert or mountain they didn't get away and I killed the four of them, brought their skins back to Sanborn.
He crossed back into US and settled in Gila Wilderness, New Mexico, and starting in 1911 was employed by the government and local cattle ranchers for killing predators, earning the most money in his lifetime. He is credited with killing the last wild grizzly in the vast Gila Wilderness. In 1912 he was registered as hunter and trapper for the
Here lies Crook, a bear and lion dog that helped kill 210 bear and 426 lion since 1914 (n.n. 11 years period), owned by B. V. Lilly ...
He was known many times to fight and dispatch in hand-to-hand combat bear and cougars using a self-made custom Bowie knife, more precisely a double edged S-shaped large Arkansas toothpick dagger, named "The Lilly Knife". For the rest he was an accomplished marksman and used Winchester lever-action rifles, a
Peculiarities, humor and quotes
In one well known account, his wife sent him to shoot a chicken-hawk that was bothering the birds around their home. Then he went missing for almost two years, and upon his return, when asked what happened, he gave the laconic answer: "That hawk just kept flying!"
Quotes from Benjamin Vernon Lilly are sometimes shocking by today's standards, many completed with Southern humor:
Anyone can kill a deer but it takes a man to kill a varmint.
by varmints he meant bears, mountain lions, and wolves.
Property is a handicap to man.
I never saw a man with his face shaved clean until I was a big boy. When I saw him I thought he was a dead man ... walking about, and I was mighty scared.
Ben Lilly to a rogue bear, prior to dispatching him with a Bowie knife:
You are condemned, you black devil, I kill you in the name of the law!
Another time, he said:
My reputation is bigger than I am. It is like my shadow when I stand in front of the sun in late evening.
Gallery
Bibliography
Books
- The Ben Lilly Legend, by J. Frank Dobbie, 1997, 5th printing. Publisher: University Of Texas Press, TX, USA. ISBN 0292707282
- Tales From The Big Thicket, by Francis E. Ebernethy. University Of North Texas Press, TX, USA. ISBN 1-57441-142-X
- Hunting American Lions, by Dr. ISBN 0-944383-25-4
- Hunting American Bears, by Dr. Frank C. Hibben. Publisher: High-Lonesome Books, 1997, Silver City, NM, USA. ISBN 0944383378
- The Bear Hunter's Century. Profiles From The Golden Age Of Bear Hunting, by Paul Schullery, 1988, 2nd printing. Publisher: Stackpole, Harrisburg, PA, USA. ISBN 081170209X
- Man And Bear, Adventures in the Wild, by Jack Samson
Articles
- Ben Lilly: Bears, Blades & Contradictions, by Jesse Wolf Hardin
- Ben Lilly and the Last Of Bears, by Dan C. Johnson
References
- ^ The Ben Lilly Legend, by J. Frank Dobie
- ^ Theodore Roosevelt
- ^ History of Memory Lane Cemetery, Silver City, NM
External links
- Africa Hunting: Painting of Ben Lilly by Herbert Dunton
- "July 15, 2012: Segment 5 Ben Lilly". Louis Redden's Backroads Classics. Archived from the original on November 5, 2013. Retrieved October 31, 2013.