As the 18th century wound down in the Ohio Valley and south into the hardwoods of “Kaintuck” and Tennessee, bears were so plentiful they were vermin. Davy Crockett had probably not “kilt him a b’ar when he was only three” before running off at 13 to make his way at sea. But after re-thinking that fancy in Baltimore and returning to his father’s tavern on Tennessee’s Nolichucky River, he regularly followed his hounds and “delighted most in bear hunting.” In 1803, he bought a .48-bore rifle and named it after his sister Betsy. A decade later, when he entered the Creek Wars, his tally on local bears had run so high that he allowed they were becoming hard to find.

Crockett served three terms in Congress but preferred rural life. In 1821, a flood claimed his mill and distillery. Moving to the Obion River’s unsettled south fork, he found more bears. On two short hunts with a friend and his son, he claimed a bag of 32. One year his reported take was 105. Known for his tall tales, Davy may have embellished the numbers — or not. He probably excluded stricken bears lost in the canebrakes (grass jungles). The .40-caliber flintlock presented him by the State Assembly in 1822 became in legend Old Betsy. A fitting tribute to a hunter.

Six years after Crockett fell at the Alamo in 1836, Robert Bobo was born in Mississippi. Service as a Confederate soldier occupied him for most of the Civil War. Walking home, he found most of the county flooded. He canoed to a patch of “almost impenetrable forest and canebrake, where wild beasts flourished …” to start over.

A keen hunter, Bobo trained his Redbones and Walkers by leading a tame bear through that tract. In an 1887 Forest and Stream article, Bobo declared that in 1869, after renting out his arable ground for farming, he had lived “in the swamp” with hunting friends, supplied by hired help “for three months at a time.” Their collective bag during those days: 304 bears. “One season,” he wrote, “I killed 150 [and] lost only two runs.” His biggest bear, shot at night in a corn field, was too heavy for four men to hoist onto a wagon. They retrieved the 711-pound beast by roping it to an axle. Robert Bobo died in 1902, leaving a 2,000-acre estate he had discovered from a canoe.

Growing Up in the South

Meanwhile, Alabama-born Ben Vernon Lilly was eluding an education. Not long after his birth in 1856, he moved with his parents to Kemper Country, Mississippi. His father Albert was a blacksmith and taught Ben the trade. The youngster also grew to embrace the family’s strong Christian faith. But sent to a military academy in Jackson, Mississippi, he ran away. His mother surely despaired, as she had graduated from Mississippi’s Nicholson Female College, later teaching astronomy there. Ben’s six siblings included a pipe organist and a college professor.

Evidently little was heard from Lilly for a decade after he fled academia. Then, blacksmithing in Memphis, Tennessee, he chanced to meet his namesake and uncle, Vernon Lilly, who offered to employ the strapping 23-year-old on his prosperous Louisiana cotton farm. A year later Vernon died, heir-less. He left the farm to Ben, who coaxed crops from the Morehouse Parish earth and hunted bears. When one of them got surly, Lilly killed it with his hand-forged knife. Of signature double-edged design, Lilly knives were prized by the friends and employers to whom he gave them. Ben was also renowned for his physical prowess. It was claimed he could plow running behind the horse, jump out of a barrel without touching its sides and backpack 125 pounds of hides.

Married Life

In 1880, he married Lelia Buckley, reported to have mental challenges. The death of their infant son did nothing to cement the union. Nor did Ben’s wanderings. It’s unlikely that when Lelia sent him out to shoot a chicken hawk one morning he returned two years later; but 300 tilled acres could hardly contain Ben. He preferred prowling the canebrakes to kill waterfowl, deer and alligators for market. While bears and lions (panthers) best entertained him and his hounds, these predators had been hunted hard in the Deep South and were becoming scarce.

By 1887, Ben had all but left the farm to hunt, camping with his dogs, a pony and a servant. The years distanced him from normal life, if not from legend. Lilly was said to make a meal of a roasted ear of corn or, denied that, go three days without food. He might bathe in snow, sole his boots with tire scraps, sleep on the earth or in a tree. But he had a quiet appealing manner in company, and he adored children. He was well-versed in scripture and didn’t work or hunt on Sundays. A teetotaler, he abstained from alcohol, even coffee.

After the Lillys’ inevitable divorce, Lelia wound up in an asylum. Ben wed Mary Sisson in 1891, and the couple moved to Mer Rouge, Louisiana. There Ben took a turn trading cattle and timber. But his heart was in the bush. Within a decade he was off to Tensas Parish, leaving all his property save his rifles and dogs to Mary and their children: two daughters and son.

Fortune favored him, as he soon met Ned Hollister, a naturalist collecting wildlife specimens for the Bureau of Biological Survey. Hollister taught Lilly how to preserve birds and mammals, bound for the U.S. National Museum in Washington, D.C. (later, the Smithsonian Institute). The inveterate woodsman took readily to the work. He would prove a valuable asset for the Bureau, procuring nearly 200 specimens between 1904 and 1920. That tally included three grizzlies, four ocelots, seven red wolves, more than 40 lions and a great many deer and black bears. Leaving Louisiana in 1906, he collected in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and Mexico as well. Lilly apparently tarried many months in the Big Thicket of East Texas — prairie, marsh and forest that would become an 80,000-acre preserve.

Lilly, the Lone Wolf

While notorious for his solitary ways, he camped there with others of like temperament, notably, by some accounts, the Hooks brothers and Ben Brackin, a hunter who claimed a career total of 300 bears. Lilly sent home most of the money that came his way through predator bounties, game sales and his work for the Bureau. Moving west, he supplemented his income with contract hunting for ranchers and the U.S. Forest Service. As a government hunter, he was credited with killing 55 lions. Some estimates place his lifetime tally of these cats well up in the hundreds.

New Mexico rancher Bela Birmingham recalled meeting him one evening. Late in a day pushing stock to winter pastures, the Birmingham wranglers started a campfire to cook supper. Then a hound gave voice. Soon Ben Lilly’s wiry profile emerged in the dusk. He was trailing a lion, he said, but since it was Saturday evening, he’d have to leave the cat until Monday. Well-provisioned, the wranglers offered him a steak. He wolfed three, and half a dozen biscuits. “Haven’t eaten in a couple of days,” he apologized. The next morning, he rose early, cut a hole in the ice of a nearby pond and, in long underwear, bathed. Lilly left at dawn Monday. Later that day the horsemen encountered him again. He had killed two lions. When Bela mentioned he had lost his watch somewhere along the trail that day, Lilly offered to back-track, find the watch and meet him at the ranch. Ben and the watch were waiting for Birmingham that evening.

Presidential Meeting

U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt was on a 1907 hunting trip when he met Lilly. He appeared in the Tensas Bayou camp one morning, recalled Roosevelt, after a long trek “on foot through thick woods, followed by his two dogs. [He] had neither eaten nor drunk for 24 hours; for he did not like to drink the swamp water. It had rained hard [all that] night, and he had no shelter, no rubber coat, nothing but the clothes he was wearing. The ground was [wet], so he perched in a crooked tree in the beating rain, much as if he had been a wild turkey. But he was not in the least tired [on arrival]; although he slept an hour after breakfast, it was chiefly because he had nothing else to do, [as] it was Sunday…”.

This was the President’s second bear hunt in the South. His 1902 adventure had ended awkwardly when an attendant roped a bear that had sought refuge in a lake and hauled it ashore for Roosevelt to kill. He refused to shoot the animal. A Washington Post cartoon by Cliff Berryman depicted a small, cowering bear and the stalwart President demurring. So emerged the “Teddy Bear.”

Roosevelt was impressed by Lilly, who accompanied the 1907 expedition as a guide. “[He was] a spare, full-bearded man with mild, gentle blue eyes and a frame of steel and whipcord. I never met any other man so indifferent to fatigue and hardship. He equaled Cooper’s Deerslayer in woodcraft [and in] simplicity … also in loquacity.”

Armed for Bears (and Lions)

Lilly favored two Winchester lever rifles: a Model 1894 in .30-30. for black bears and lions and a Model 1886 in .33 Winchester for grizzlies. He admitted once to a friend that he had lost his beloved ’86 after propping it behind a boulder in a cave while hunting with the .30-30. The hiding place was reached through an obscure crevice. Left unclear: whether the rifle had been stolen or the access forgotten.

But Lilly was never without his knife. On April snow in 1913, the 56-year-old hunter cut a fresh grizzly track in Arizona’s White Mountains. Traveling light, a single hound tied off at his waist, he trailed the animal for three days. Closing, he spotted it periodically and fired from distance. While his shots took no immediate effect, the drifts were speckled with blood when the bear erupted in a burst of fury 15 feet away. Lilly’s first bullet centered its chest, checking the charge. “My second shot [struck] under the eye, about 3 feet away. He fell against my side. I was bogged in snow waist deep.” Twisting about to fire one more shot through the ribs, Ben pulled his 18-inch knife and “drove it for the heart. That finished him.”

In 1921, Oklahoma oil tycoon W.H. McFadden engaged Lilly to find a big grizzly for him. In June, Ben cut a promising track near Taos, New Mexico. He followed it north, McFadden’s well-outfitted party in tow. The hunt lasted months, Ben keeping to his Spartan ways as the bear drew them along the Rocky Mountain chain. It proved an odyssey for which McFadden was ill-prepared. Business imperatives drew him off the trail at key junctures. Late that fall, hibernation in mind, the grizzly looped south in Colorado. On the cusp of winter, Lilly, 64, left the expedition. Surely, few bears dogged by this hunter fared so well!

Lilly seemed to relish the privations of wilderness life, often sparing himself nearly every comfort denied his quarry. Routinely he carried neither tent nor sleeping bag, making do with a blanket, perhaps a length of canvas. On cold nights he’d build a fire; as the mercury fell further, he’d scoop out the coals and lie in the depression or make his bed between two fires. He was seldom sick.

He expected much of his hounds and treated them well, feeding them at kills before he scrounged his own lunch or supper. Once offered $300 for a hound with promising traits, he dismissed the sum as far shy of the $1,000 he’d consider. But Lilly had no use for a dog that didn’t meet his standards on the trail. When the offending beast was beyond redemption, he would bring it in front of the pack, explain out loud its failings and shoot it.

Unlike his contemporary, William H. Wright, an avid hunter who came to admire and study bears and urge their protection, Lilly ever considered them predators to be pursued and killed. He viewed them as worthy quarry, not as a resource. In that, he was a man of his time, untouched by the impending shift of public opinion toward a conservation ethic.

Decline and Death

Age eventually took a toll on Lilly’s health. His stomach troubles, warned a physician, might be mitigated by trimming the meat in his diet, which comprised little else. Pneumonia accompanied mental decline. Persuaded by a friend to share a room on his ranch, he soon needed full-time care; but neither his daughters nor a sister volunteered. Sent to a county farm for indigents near Silver City, New Mexico, he deteriorated rapidly. On December 17, 1936, just shy of his 80th birthday, Ben Lilly died.

“Every man and woman ought to get out and be alone with the elements every day, even if only for five minutes,” Lilly once declared. “I can’t think at all except when I’m out.”