Most interesting persons from the Old West?

[CountryGent]

So, I've been enjoying the "old west vignettes" they have on In Range TV. It got me to thinking about the many colorful persons that took part in that time and place of the 19th century American west. Curious about other folks here who found this the history interesting. Who would you pick? Be it a frontiersman, explorer, religious figure, inventor, business person, statesman, soldier, criminal, lady of the evening, gambler, lawman, etc.

Thanks for sharing.

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[crossbow5]

Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, George Armstrong Custer and the 7th cavalry.

 

[dcfranzen]

Two or three names come to mind right away. They would be Frederic Sackrider Remington, the artist who specialized in the Old West. Also, 19th-century artist, Charles M. Russell, who created thousands of paintings of the West. Then there is Will Rogers, the humorist and social commentator who is often quoted today.

 

[Member 18201]

Porter Rockwell ( if there is any unbiased biography )
John Wesley Powell

 

[ZigZagZeke]

Being a houndsman and a lover of solitude, I'd choose Ben 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.[1] 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.

Personal life
Lilly 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 to east 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:

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 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 Cooper's Deerslayer in woodcraft, in hardihood, in simplicity–and also in loquacity.

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."[2] In his convictions, Ben Lilly did not smoke nor drink alcohol or coffee, facts that set him apart 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 feline 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 catahoula and coonhound breeds. In 1908, he crossed into Mexico, Chihuahua, and then took to the Sierra Madre mountains, in western Coahuila, where he hunted grizzly and became the source of local tales, notably the one of him pursuing a menacing large grizzly that sported a white star and terrorized locals of Camino Real. A description of a grizzly hunt while in Coahuila, Mexico, narrated personally by him remains:

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 Sanborn.

He crossed back into US and settled in Gila Wilderness, New Mexico, 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 Apache National Forest in Arizona, living near Cliftonand earning $75 a month. Between 1916 and 1920 he was employed full-time by the U.S. Biological Survey. 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 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Museum of Natural History, Washington D.C., through the care of his friend, Ned Hollister. Those specimens included mountain lions, brown and black bears, deer, otter, and rare animals like the Mexican gray wolf or ivory-billed woodpecker. The most famous of these specimens went to the Smithsonian Institution, and was a record grizzly hunted in north-east 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 Oklahoma oil tycoon W. H. McFadden on his memorable hunt through the Rocky Mountains, 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 apex predators to the brink of extinction, an act contrary to modern standards of both ethical hunting and wildlife conservation. The numbers of animals killed by Ben Lilly in his exploits are disputed, but it is estimated that he killed between 600 and 1000 mountain lions 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:

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

He was known many times to fight and dispatch in hand-to-hand combat bear and cougars using a self-made custom Bowie knife, more precisely a double edged S-shaped large Arkansas toothpick dagger, named "The Lilly Knife". For the rest he was an accomplished marksman and used Winchester lever-action rifles, a .30-30 for cougars and a .33 Winchester (.33 WCF) caliber for bears. He died at eighty, on December 17, 1936, on a ranch in Pleasanton, near Silver City, New Mexico and is buried in the historic Memory Lane Cemetery in Silver City.[3] 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.

Peculiarities, humor and quotes
In one well known account, his wife sent him to shoot a chicken-hawk 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!"

Quotes from Benjamin Vernon Lilly are sometimes shocking by today's standards, many completed with Southern humor:

Anyone can kill a deer but it takes a man to kill a varmint.

by varmints he meant bears, mountain lions, and wolves.

Property is a handicap to man.

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.

Ben Lily to a rogue bear, prior to dispatching him with a Bowie knife:

You are condemned, you black devil, I kill you in the name of the law!

Another time, he said:

My reputation is bigger than I am. It is like my shadow when I stand in front of the sun in late evening.

 

[Carbon]

John Muir, Ezra Meeker is a local popular figure for pierce co WA.

 

[crossbow5]

Wild Bill Hickok, Buffalo Bill Cody, Billy The Kid, Pawnee Bill, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Geronimo, General George Crook.

 

[User 1234]

Roy Bean. Not honorable, but interesting.

 

[mrblond]

Two or three names come to mind right away. They would be Frederic Sackrider Remington, the artist who specialized in the Old West. Also, 19th-century artist, Charles M. Russell, who created thousands of paintings of the West. Then there is Will Rogers, the humorist and social commentator who is often quoted today.

Funny, my Grandmothers family were quite prominent back in the day. she told me when she was a kid, Charlie would visit and one time he carved her a horse out of soap.
Guess great grand dad used to go hunting with Teddy when he was up on a visit.
And great uncle Tom was the marshall who brought the Coward Jack Mcall into Yankton for his date with the hangman. Now, I have tried to look this up but I cant find anything at all so..

 

[Superglide]

Representing the home team........Sitting Bull, Chief Joseph and Black Elk.

And more recent and more local, Sam Hill.

 

[P7M13]

Though not from the 19th Century, Elmer Keith contributed a lot to both Western lore and modern shooting.

 

[Stomper]

I vote Brisco County Jr.

 

[OldTengu]

I vote Brisco County Jr.

I used to love that show.

Honestly, I'd say I'd be interested in most folks from that time period. I'd love to go back and learn from a lot of different types.

 

[Slobray]

Back in the 70's and 80's my Grandpa used to do genealogy and found we had a scoundrel in the family tree, nick named "Devil Abe" (Abraham). This guy was quick to temper and wasn't to be trifled with. He would be my person of interest.

The one story I remember Grandpa telling me, was about the one time Abe showed up to a community dance/gathering a little late. By the time he got there, everyone had already eaten and the women folk had done the washing up. Fortunately, there was still a small amount of beans in the pot when he arrived. The ladies were going to make him a plate, but not wanting to make more work for them, he decided that he would just eat the beans out of the cast iron pot. While he was eating, some (probably drunk) knucklehead, thought it would be a good idea to make derogatory comments about/to Abe, because he was eating from the bean pot. Well, Abe didn't take to kindly to those comments, so he killed said knucklehead with said bean pot. Abe eventually met his end when he was bushwhacked, while driving his buckboard into town.



Ray

 

[thereddog]

I don't know much about Captain Jack, but I for sure think that guy must have had some serious brass balls. He was a badass.

 

[ar addict]

Ben Snipes- Northwest Cattle King

Snipes, Ben, Northwest Cattle King: A Talk by Roscoe Sheller

Roscoe Sheller of Sunnyside gave this talk about Yakima and Ellensburg pioneer Ben Snipes (1835-1906) to an April 1958 meeting of the Spokane Westerners. The talk was published in the Fall 1959 issue

www.historylink.org

Nelson Story- Hero, Scoundrel, Legend

Nelson Story – Hero, scoundrel legend

Of all Bozeman's founding fathers, none left a greater imprint than Nelson Story.

www.bozemandailychronicle.com

Nelson Story - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[thereddog]

I read that one about ben snipes, What a story! It is hard to wrap my head around how different things are in such a short time.

 

[thereddog]

The numbers of animals killed by Ben Lilly in his exploits are disputed, but it is estimated that he killed between 600 and 1000 mountain lions in his lifetime.

Holy smokes that is a lot of cats.

 

[Alexx1401]

In the FWIW department there is this one;

Clay Allison - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I long ago knew a gal well who's maiden name was the same. She often told stories of the man who she claimed was her Great Grandfather. She said the man was very old when he used to bounce her on his knee, some of her earliest memories. He died by the time she was in school. It was years later other relatives told her his real name was Clay although he had always gone by a different one. Family said he wanted out of the life his reputation made him live. So he (according to what she was told) killed some poor guy, ran his face over, put something on him to make it look like Clay, and went on to live to old age. I knew this gal for a long time and this story never surfaced until one day Someone, Time Life IIRC, came out with some books from history. One of them was something along the lines of gun fighters or such and here was a story about Clay Allison. That was when she told us about him. So who knows? In those days doing something like this would certainly not be hard to do and get away with I guess. Every so often when stuff like this comes up I think of that gal who I am sure is long dead now too. Always wondering did this gun fighter really live to be an old man enjoying his great granddaughter?

 

[Andy54Hawken]

Favorites in no particular order :
Sir William Drummond Stewart...
John Wesley Hardin...
George Frederick Ruxton...
Crazy Horse...
William , George and Charlie Bent...
Mariano Medina...
Tom Tobin...
Mitch Boyer...
Lewis Garrard...
Kit Carson...
Yellow Wolf...
George Drouillard...
Curly...
Andy