Ben Lilly

Benjamin Vernon Lilly, Ben Lilly
Born	Winter of 1856 Wilcox County, Alabama
Died	Dec 17, 1936 Silver City, New Mexico
Nationality	American
Occupation	Big game hunter, 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 big game hunter, houndsman and mountain man of the late American Old West. He remains famous for hunting down large numbers of grizzly, cougars and black bears. A mix between a transcendentalist spirit and an ardent Christian, he is described as an unfathomable Southern wild character. He was a stern practitioner of simple living and outdoor freedom, roamed and hunted from Louisiana to Arizona and from Idaho to as far south as Chihuahua and Durango, Mexico, and was a subject of American folktales. He guided oiler W. H. McFadden and President Theodore Roosevelt in hunting expeditions, whom he intrigued and who wrote about him. He was arguably the most prolific hunter of apex predators in the history of North American hunting and also the last active mountain man of the historical American Southwest. 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, Americana transcripts.

He was born in the winter of 1856 in Wilcox County, Alabama of parents from North Carolina. His family moved from Alabama to Kemper County, Mississippi when he was young and spent most his childhood there, being raised as a devout Christian. After the end of the American Civil War, at twelve, he was sent by his parents to a military academy in Jackson, Mississippi, but he ran away. Lilly’s 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 Morehouse Parish, Louisiana, 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 Sodom and Gomorrah”. He also worked as a blacksmith but did not pursue this career for long; later he used these skills to fashion his hunting knives and traps. There, 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 east to Texas, in the Big Thicket 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 Tensas Bayou, Louisiana. Roosevelt wrote about Ben Lilly:

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