360:, from Mexico to Canada. For some reason, Lilly left the party in Idaho and did not finish the trip to Canada. For fifteen years, from 1911 to 1926 between Ben's fifty-fifth and seventieth years, he reached his goal of hunting every day of the year, except Sundays. By hunting all bears and cougars, Benjamin Vernon Lilly held the personal belief that he was in a sacred mission for the extermination of "malefic creatures" and spared no effort in doing so. He was no doubt, one of the most destructive individuals contributing to the reduction of North American
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244:". He did no pursue his blacksmith career for long; but later he used these skills to fashion his hunting knives and traps. In Louisiana, he discovered his passion for big-game hunting after killing a black bear with a knife, and started relentlessly pursuing hunting as a career for the rest of his life. At first, he was making an income selling bear meat and wild honey. Then he moved to east Texas, in the
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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
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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." In his convictions, Ben Lilly did not smoke nor drink alcohol or coffee, facts that set him apart
204:. He was not a conservationist but made important contributions of fauna specimens and naturalistic observations to American institutions and museums. He was a contradictory character and his exploits have been consistently exaggerated to folktale proportions, and most records are oral, bona-fide,
236:, at twelve, he was sent by his parents to a military academy in Jackson, Mississippi, but ran away. His whereabouts were not known to his family for a long time, until his uncle, Vernon Lilly, by chance discovered him running a blacksmith shop in Memphis, TN. His uncle, a "planter" from
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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
308:, 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
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and is buried in the historic Memory Lane
Cemetery in Silver City. His modest tombstone bears the epitaph: "Lover of the Great Outdoors". In 1947 the last people who knew him erected a bronze plaque to his memory, on Bear Creek, Pinos Altos, New Mexico.
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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
348:, and was a record grizzly hunted in northeast Arizona. On occasion, he captured mountain lion cubs and raised them to full maturity, not as pets, but to observe their habits. In 1921, Ben acted as guide for
240:, offered Lilly a job, and he accepted. After his uncle's death, he inherited the cotton farm, and there, in 1880, he married his first wife, Lelia, whom he not so affectionately referred to as "daughter of
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and lived for three years around 1904–1907 in the hunting camp of Ben Hook, with whom he partnered. In 1907, he guided
President Theodore Roosevelt, as chief huntsman, in a big game hunting expedition in
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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!"
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from the rest of his contemporaries. He was, however, fond of eating bear and particularly cougar meat, which, he believed, in a similar fashion to syncretic Native
American ideas, would give him
324:. The ties with the agency started in 1904, when at 50 years old, he began sending specimens of the animals he hunted and trapped to the collections of U.S. Biological Survey, today's
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in his lifetime. An epitaph that Ben Lilly wrote on the box in which he buried one of his most prized hounds in 1925, near
Sapillo Creek, New Mexico, read:
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The Bear Hunter's
Century. Profiles From The Golden Age Of Bear Hunting, by Paul Schullery, 1988, 2nd printing. Publisher: Stackpole, Harrisburg, PA, USA.
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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.
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powers. He was one of the most accomplished houndsmen at the time in North
America, and was strict but fond of his packs of hounds, mostly Southern
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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 ...
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spirit and an ardent
Christian, he is described as an unfathomable Southern wild character. He was a stern practitioner of
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dagger, named "The Lilly Knife". For the rest he was an accomplished marksman and used
Winchester lever-action rifles, a
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when he was young and he spent most of his childhood there, being raised as a devout
Christian. After the end of the
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Quotes from Benjamin Vernon Lilly are sometimes shocking by today's standards, many completed with Southern humor:
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He was known many times to fight and dispatch in hand-to-hand combat bear and cougars using a self-made custom
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The Ben Lilly Legend, by J. Frank Dobbie, 1997, 5th printing. Publisher: University Of Texas Press, TX, USA.
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Hunting American Bears, by Dr. Frank C. Hibben. Publisher: High-Lonesome Books, 1997, Silver City, NM, USA.
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My reputation is bigger than I am. It is like my shadow when I stand in front of the sun in late evening.
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in the history of North American hunting and also the last active mountain man of the historical
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Tales From The Big Thicket, by Francis E. Ebernethy. University Of North Texas Press, TX, USA.
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to the brink of extinction, an act contrary to modern standards of both ethical hunting and
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400:(.33 WCF) caliber for bears. He died at eighty, on December 17, 1936, on a ranch in
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and earning $ 75 a month. Between 1916 and 1920 he was employed full-time by the
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breeds. In 1908, he crossed into Mexico, to Chihuahua, and then took to the
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Ben Lilly to a rogue bear, prior to dispatching him with a Bowie knife:
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You are condemned, you black devil, I kill you in the name of the law!
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Ben Lilly: Bears, Blades & Contradictions, by Jesse Wolf Hardin
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Anyone can kill a deer but it takes a man to kill a varmint.
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Africa Hunting: Painting of Ben Lilly by Herbert Dunton
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In one well known account, his wife sent him to shoot a
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Man And Bear, Adventures in the Wild, by Jack Samson
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568:Ben Lilly and the Last Of Bears, by Dan C. Johnson
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509:Hunting American Lions, by Dr.
413:Peculiarities, humor and quotes
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382:Bowie knife
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289:Camino Real
246:Big Thicket
230:Mississippi
154:black bears
66:Nationality
653:Categories
574:References
543:081170209X
531:0944383378
491:0292707282
402:Pleasanton
328:, and the
306:New Mexico
97:blacksmith
628:Ben Lilly
277:coonhound
273:catahoula
206:Americana
186:folktales
178:Chihuahua
172:and from
166:Louisiana
130:Ol' Lilly
126:Ben Lilly
112:Spouse(s)
69:American
556:Articles
434:varmints
350:Oklahoma
296:Sanborn.
285:Coahuila
466:Gallery
404:, near
394:cougars
318:Clifton
314:Arizona
182:Durango
170:Arizona
150:cougars
146:grizzly
89:trapper
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396:and a
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269:feline
260:Cooper
478:Books
174:Idaho
104:Title
642:2013
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