Ben Lilly: Bears, Blades & Contradictions by Jesse Wolf Hardin

Ben Lilly: Bears, Blades & Contradictions

Ben may have been a perpetual wanderer, but he was never truly lost. If anything, it was in the thickets and brambles that he was fairly found and claimed. He always traveled with a sense of destination– if only the direction of his baying dogs, or the way the last bear went. While his trail twisted and turned like a meandering river, he was in many ways making a beeline away from the settlements, the crowds, the niceties and responsibilities of domestic life. And likewise, he was always aiming for a place. A place of refuge.... and hopefully, of redemption.

Whether out of love or lust, personal loneliness or accepted convention, Benjamin Lilly tried marriage two different times. But what person’s feast is another’s poison. What fits some men like a glove is to others a straightjacket of habit, chore and constraint.

The Texas Big Thicket

It seems that for Lilly “tying the knot” meant being tightly secured with a rope, trussed-up like a hog. It meant having a fellow’s movements restricted, his natural tendencies and urges subdued, his options limited.

Ben wed his first wife Lelia in Louisiana in the 1880’s, a woman he came to call a “daughter of Gomorrah.” She complained, among other things, that the chores never got done.... and that she needed his attentions. But married or not, he continued to take his cues from the scent on the wind and any tracks found nearby, from the noisy admonitions of migrating waterfowl and the unsated hunger of his soul. He would take off at the drop of a hat, accompanied by a pack of 20 or more dogs. It was the “call of the wild” that beckoned him away, the forest sirens’ irresistible songs.

According to Dobie, one day his wife asked him to go out and shoot a troublesome chicken hawk. A year later he showed back up, and his wife naturally wanted to know what could have possibly happened to him. “That hawk kept a-flyin’,” was all he supposedly said. Long afterwards Mrs. Acklin, proprietor of the general store in San Lorenzo, remembers Lilly doing his best to remain unaffected after receiving a letter from one of his grown kids. “Mother died last week,” it said in part. “She set a place at the table for you every meal meal,” for what had been some 16 years.

As we point out again and again in this book, what made the close of the 19th Century and start of the 20th so interesting were the heightened contrasts, the dramatic twists, the confrontations between the extremes of aesthetics and tastes, values and beliefs. Between urban and rural interests, the incredibly rich and the fundamentally poor. And like the age he matured in, Benjamin Lilly was a man of contradictions. He loved the attentions of children, playing with any little boys he met and calling them “podnah,” and yet he left his own sons to largely raise themselves. Father was usually gone, either somewhere down an unused trail, or else passing through nearby towns amassing a cadre of young fans. While they were adjusting to having no one except their mother to talk to or ask questions of, Ben would be out somewhere telling exciting stories of the great hunt to their neighbors’ wide eyed children.

Lilly's contradictions, like everything else about him, were substantial and profound. He was righteous enough never to work or hunt on Sundays, and yet he was capable of neglecting his family.... and abandoning his wife when she needed him most. “Why can’t we just live in harmony?,” she reportedly asked one morning, as they sat at the deathbed of their young son Dick. Ben responded by saying that there was no longer anything left between them, and then walked out the door for the last time. It was said that Lelia was a little crazy already when he met her, but his years away– and his leaving her at such a traumatic time– was no doubt a major factor in her later spending some thirty years under wraps in a institution for the mentally insane.

Lilly remarried in 1890, to a woman named Mary. As in his first relationship, when it came to his apportioning of attention and time, family came in a distant second. It seemed he preferred the attention and flattery of strangers to the comforts of loved ones and home, and that he preferred the solitude of the chase above all. Eleven years later he had once again moved off, taking his dogs with him, but never going back for his wife and three kids. It wasn’t that he was incapable of loyalty, but his was to the freedom of an unfettered life, with neither rules nor rent. His ultimate fealty was to rugged canyon and wide open spaces, to the baying of hounds and a trail perfumed with mountain lion scent.

Similarly he was a profligate slayer of birds and beasts, and yet in some ways respected nature and its denizens as much as anyone. It is said that “man always kills that which he loves.” While John Muir was helping protect wild landscapes like Yellowstone and Yosemite, Benjamin Lilly was making his life in the wilds: a life chasing bear. For thousands of years our species have filled both the role of both predator and prey His was an ancient imparative.... maintaining intimacy with the natural world by risking life and drawing blood.

Lilly usually wore a huge knife on his belt where it was easiest to grab– the favored harpoon of a graying landlocked Ahab. A product of the passion-soaked South, he joined James Bowie in often preferring a blade over a gun. A favorite way of dispatching a bear on the ground was to get in close and strike deep with the big knife. That way he didn’t have to worry about hitting his dogs with errant bullet, as they run circles around the raging bruin.... and it gave him the opportunity to make things personal.

He fashioned large numbers of “Lilly knives” over the years using any old tool steel he could find, and he was known for giving the smaller ones away as gifts to the many hospitable folks he met on his trips. He forged a special dirk for bear, a massive “Arkansas Toothpick” tempered in panther oil, and featuring a blade with an exaggerated S-curve similar to an Asiatic Kris. He believed its wavy shape contributed to bleeding, and being sharpened fully on both sides he could not only stick it deep into his quarry but also cut in either direction.

Lilly was, nonetheless, a rifleman tried and true. Near as I’ve been able to determine he had no use for either pistols or shotguns. He even used a rifle for taking ducks, carefully shooting their heads off so as not to destroy any meat. He likely carried percussion arms into the woods when he was growing up, and any cartridge gun he could afford as an adult. Sometime around the turn of the century he began carrying a 30-30 for light game, variously reported as a Winchester or Marlin lever action, and he’s been photographed holding a Savage 1899.... but for a long time his preferred caliber for bear was .33 WCF, chambered in the notable Model 1886. There are stories around these parts about a rifle Ben supposedly left behind in a cave, and then was never able to find again. What a treasure that would be to find, even hopelessly rusted shut– not only an artifact of a man’s life, but a piece of a legend.

Lilly may or may not have been quite the incredible marksman that he and others claimed he was, but it’s reasonable to accept his simple assertion: “I never saw a lion that I did not kill or wound.” As a child little Ben perfected his shooting skills not on paper bulls-eyes but on moving targets like buzzards and bats, darting bees and sweet-singing cedar waxwings. On the creatures he and dogs would eat, and those predator species he felt a holy duty to eliminate. To the contemporary reader Lilly's enthusiasm for the kill will no doubt appear insensitive and unnecessary at times.... and admittedly he once confessed to killing eleven deer in a short stretch and leaving them lie. While he feasted on a wide variety of game, apparently the alligators he shot he never bothered to dress or cook.

Perhaps he thought he was already more emotionally armored and detached than he liked, without ingesting the energy of these scaly denizens of the Louisiana bayous. Like both the American Indians who preceded him and his own ancient Celtic ancestors, Lilly believed that “you are what you eat:” that consuming the flesh of a particular animal imparted to the eater not only essential nutrients but also some of its qualities and traits. He thus believed that dining on domestic cattle would dim his senses and slow his pace, whereas suppleness and energy could be expected from any wild meat. Of these there were none he loved more than grilled lion steak, which he felt contributed to both his intrinsic hunter’s instincts and catlike strengths. More than once Ben Lilly affectionately cared for lion cubs he’d orphaned, raising them as pets, and then killing and eating them when they grew up. If he was conflicted, it didn’t show.

Continued Next Page

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