Ben Lilly: Bears, Blades & Contradictions

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It was in New Mexico , at age fifty-five that Lilly began getting paid for what had heretofore simply been his pleasure. And his obsession. His hunting prowess convinced area ranchers to pool their money into a bounty fund especially for him– representing ranches from the Amimas in the Southern bootheel of the state, north to Quemado and West to Show-Low, Arizona. The Federal government started paying bounties in 1914 on bears that were “proven cattle killers,” but Lilly found that private funders were a lot less particular. They reasoned that so long as there was a single grizz left the calves they depended on for their livelihood would remain in danger, and not a single porch dog would be safe. The sparsity of forage in the Southwest made raising cattle a difficult enough business as it was, and depredations by wolves, lions and bears seemed to force the area ranchers into a war of extermination in defense.

The San Francisco River in New Mexico, photo by Robert Shantz, http://www.rshantz.com/

Gila National Forest in New Mexico .

Bergen Riddle is one of my backwoods neighbors, living as he does a mere ten miles over the hill (as the crow flies). To this day if he hunts his hounds at all he does so on foot, the old way. He’s quick to point out how many bear and lion an outfitter with a pack can take out of the woods annually, driving his dogs down dirt logging roads on the platform of his truck until they cut scent where one of the keynote predators had crossed the road. Then all they have to do is release the pack, pay attention to the signals from the dogs’ radio collars, and then drive as close as possible to where their quarry ends up treed. In comparison, Lilly's record kill of ninety-eight bears in a single year is notable, if not exactly restrained. One has to take into account that the aging huntsman walked his hounds on their hunt for scent, and then walked or ran to catch up with them once they were off and baying on a hot track.

Like the gunfighter John Wesley Hardin, Ben Lilly was a man of distinction and contradiction in a time of compliance and change. When he took refuge in solitude and wildness it was not only from society’s hypocrisy and oppression, but from his own deep personal ambivalence and unresolved issues.

Some hundred and fifty years earlier Daniel Boone suffered a constant itch to move on. As quickly as he’d help settle a new region, subdue the native Indians and make it safe for settlers, he’d start complaining of having no “elbow room” and soon head West again. The “mountain men” trappers of the 1830’s through the 1850’s were often hired by government surveyors and engineers for the railroads, inadvertently inviting in the very crowds and domestic lifestyles that they’d left Albany or St. Louis to avoid. Another, less freer way of living hounded Lilly's tracks even as he was hot on the trail of bears and visions.

Had Lilly been asked to define himself in a single word, it would no doubt have been “hunter.” He hunted for lion and bear, for food and for fun. He hunted for personal resolution and reconciliation, for untamed places and a sense of purpose as well as peace.

It was still fairly early in the 20th Century when a sensitive young man with an artist’s soul, Everett Ruess, disappeared forever on one of his many burro treks out West. His body was never found, leaving us unclear if his death was accidental or a homicide.... or if he simply took off with no intention of coming back. Unlike with Ruess, few tears were shed– when old Ben Lilly passed away in bed. I’m sure he would have rather perished on a hunt, exhausted beyond measure in a Herculean effort to keep up with the pack. Or he might have preferred to have the tables suddenly turned, and find himself the feast– filling both the belly and the heart of some great warrior of a beast.

Towards the end of his life he spent considerable time at the G.O.S. Ranch, but by 1931 he was largely incapable of focus, let alone of hunting. He whiled away his final days on Mary Hines “county farm” on Big Dry Creek, forty miles South of here near the still small town of Pleasanton. Benjamin Lilly passed away on December 17, 1936, telling Ms. Hines “I believe I’ll stay in bed today.” There is certainly something ironic about the man who hated sleeping indoors spending his last hours between the sheets.... that one who courted and encountered so many mortal threats should die with his “boots off” instead. We’re reminded of volatile gunslinger Doc Holiday’s final words as he lay in the Glenwood Springs Sanitarium bed, staring at his stockinged feet: “Well ain’t that funny!”

And even less funny than that, was what they did to old Ben's body.

Frank Dobie quotes Lilly: “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.” He therefore grew up determined “never to scare anybody into thinking I was a corpse.” No one ever saw him without his trademark facial hair, as long and unkempt as any creature’s fur. “Ever since I could grow a beard, I have had one.”

That is, until a witless Silver City undertaker shaved it off.

In some ways we can see the great huntsman was fortunate to die when he did -- before witnessing a Southwest stripped of much of its wildness.... its people weakened by a paucity of challenge, restricted by thousands of laws and regulations, stunted by their reliance on public services, and disempowered by a dependence on food purchased from stores.

Lilly was destined to speak the language of the “Cains of the animal world,” and to join them in a shared way of being as well a fateful contest. In the end it is not someone’s accidents and illnesses that kill them, so surely as his heart’s rips and tears. In the end the man who may have killed more lions, blacks and grizzlies than anyone else in his time, didn’t want to have to live in a world without bears.

Sometimes when I stop writing long enough to step outside, I can hear not only the songs of wind and river but the screams of wildly mating lions, and the bugling of amorous elk. From the compost of Fall come the anxious births of Spring, followed by the sounds of tiny paws and feet on trails well worn. And creating an aural bridge between the dark and the light– death and life– are the beckoning notes of old man Lilly's hunting horn.

© Jesse L. "Wolf" Hardin, 2006

Elk grazing before the mountains, June, 2006, Kathy Weiser.

This image available for photographic prints HERE!

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