A Cowboy Yarn

Ben Thompson was a precocious child.

But then, Texas in the 1850’s was a place that accelerated the development of young men.

When he was 16, our boy Ben wounded another youth during a quarrel, and served a short jail term after paying a fine.

Several years later, he tried his hand as a printer’s typesetter in New Orleans, but found the gambling houses more attractive than an honest day’s work.

Bouncing from place to place, always chasing fortune on the quick, Ben wound up in the Confederate Army, where his career as a soldier was largely undistinguished, save for his penchant for fighting and quarreling with his brothers in arms.

With each fight he got more proficient, more aggressive, and more heartless.

Soon it was all he knew, and he became a mercenary in the Mexican army, where he gained significant renown.

In the early 1870’s, Ben found himself in Ellsworth, Kansas, where his brother had taken up professional gambling.

Ben joined the operation, and the two brothers did well for a couple of years until the local Sherriff intervened in a gambling dispute and angered the brothers Thompson.

Ben’s brother shot the Sherriff dead, and in an effort to help his brother, Ben recruited a large group of Texas cowboys to intimidate the townsfolk long enough for his brother to make his getaway.

Herds of Texas longhorn were now moving up the Chisholm Trail to the railheads of Kansas; by 1873 more than 600,000 steer were in the pens of Abilene.

Returning drovers reported to Ben the town was wide open and a gambler's mecca.

By June Thompson had left the railroad, and arrived in Abilene with enough money to buy a fortnight's lodging and breakfast.

Gambling houses, saloons, and brothels were open day and night, poker and monte games went on continuously with fortunes sliding across the tables.

Ben pawned his six-shooter and sat in the first poker game he could find; when it ended several hours later he had won $2,583.

Another Austin gambler who arrived in Abilene about the same time was Phil Coe, a tall, slender, mild-mannered man who had served on the railroad with Ben.

Coe had several thousand dollars so they formed a partnership and opened the Bull's Head Saloon, the most notorious gambling house and saloon in Abilene's rowdy history.

Wild Bill Hickok wore the town's tin star; the flamboyant lawman, fresh from Hays City, controlled the wildest of Kansas cow towns with only two deputies and his reputation as the deadliest of gunfighters.

He had the difficult task of keeping the wild Texas cowhands under control while still making sure they spent their money in the town.

The Texans found Wild Bill a formidable figure.

A cowhand who had watched Hickok patrol Abilene's streets recalled:

"He wore a low-crowned, wide black hat and frock coat.

When I came along the street he was standing there with his back to the wall and his thumbs hooked into his red sash.

He stood there and rolled his head from side to side looking at everything and everybody from under his eyebrows-just like a mad old bull.

I decided then and there I didn't want any part of him."'

The Bull's Head was a booming success, patronized by the thousands of Texans who came to Abilene with the herds.

The other saloon owners resented its popularity and the legendary tale is that they conspired with Wild Bill to kill Thompson.

From their first meeting Thompson and Hickok viewed each other with suspicion and hostility.

Even without the Bull's Head as a source of disagreement, they would have been enemies on an open prairie.

Ben hated Yankees and Wild Bill was contemptuous of Texans, particularly Texas gamblers.

City officials demanded that Thompson and Coe change the Bull's Head sign, an exaggerated painting of a longhorn's sexual organ.

When the gamblers ignored their complaint, Hickok marched to the saloon and stood outside with a shotgun while painters made the necessary alterations.

Hickok continued to harass the Bull's Head; a few weeks later he forced the owners to move their faro equipment out of the back room to the front of the saloon.

Ben and Wild Bill never had an actual confrontation, but tension mounted every night when the long-haired Hickok walked down Texas Street to enter the Bull's Head's crowded bar.

Thompson thought his troubles were over when John Wesley Hardin came into town with a herd.

The young Texan's reputation as a killer had reached the cow towns but instead of facing the young gunman with a six-shooter, Hickok wisely sat down with Hardin and, over a bottle of champagne, made him promise not to "embarrass the marshal" during his stay in Abilene.

Hickok had delivered the same “request” to Thompson when he had come to town.

A few nights later Hardin killed a man in a fight and left Texas.

Tiring of Abilene, Ben drifted around Kansas until, in 1877, he hooked up with Bat Masterson’s crew of hired gunmen for the Santa Fe Railroad.

By then,  Ben had gained the reputation as one of the most dangerous gunfighters on the frontier.

Prairie gossip credited him with killing twenty-one men, but coroners' inquests, yellowing newspaper clippings, and his many court appearances total his victims at about eight.

Bat Masterson, who probably was a witness to more gunfights and killings during his lawman's career in Dodge City than any man in the West, recalled Thompson's skill with a six-shooter:

"Thompson in the first place, possessed a much higher order of intelligence than the average man killer of his time.

He was absolutely without fear and his nerves were those of the finest metal.

He shot at an adversary with the same precision and deliberation that he shot at a target.

A past master in the use of a pistol, his aim was as true as his nerves were strong and steady.”

Thompson's reputation as a gunfighter had become so widespread that the editor of the New York Sun sent a reporter to Texas to ask Thompson to describe his gunfighter's technique:

"I always make it a rule to let the other fellow fire first.

If a man wants to fight, I argue the question with him and try to show him how foolish it would be.

If he can't be dissuaded, why, then the fun begins but I always let him have first crack.

Then when I fire, you see, I have the verdict of self-defense on my side.

I know that he is pretty certain in his hurry, to miss. I never do.”

In the fall of 1879, Ben Thompson, gunfighter, killer, and gambler, ran for city marshal of Austin.

His campaign circular was simple and direct.

He challenged any man to prove he had ever been dishonest or had ignored the pleas "of the defenseless, timid and weak to protect them from the aggressions and wrongs of the over bearing and strong."

The Robin Hood image failed to enchant the majority of Austin's citizens and he was defeated.

However, at the next election he was elected, by more than two hundred votes.

Curiously, Ben was an excellent police officer.

White, black, or Mexican complainants or prisoners were treated alike.

The crime rate fell and records reveal there wasn't a murder or burglary within the town's limits during his term.

In the summer of 1882 Ben resigned after killing an old enemy, Jack Harris, a well-known Texas gambler and owner of San Antonio's Vaudeville Theatre, probably the best-known nightclub on the frontier.

Its patrons were mostly wealthy cattlemen who not only played for high stakes but also came to see the Irish and German comedy teams, magicians, gymnasts, and the theatre's celebrated high-kicking chorus line.

Ben and Harris had their confrontation at the latter's theatre on July 11, 1882, after an argument over the value of the diamonds Thompson had received as part of his payment in the Colorado railroad "war."

Harris, hearing Thompson was gunning for him, prepared himself with a double-barrel shotgun.

It was twilight when Ben approached the gambling hall and a screen stood between the entrance and the interior of the place.

The theatre's band was blaring on the outside balcony as Ben peered through the blinds and saw Harris cradling his shotgun.

There was an exchange of profanity and Harris swung around to fire but Ben, always fast on the draw, got off the first shot, then fired two more into Harris's body as the dying man vainly tried to pull the trigger of his shotgun.

Ben Thompson was soft spoken, courteous, impulsively generous, and fiercely loyal to his friends.

Confrontation completely changed his personality.

Angered, he became arrogant, belligerent, and ready to fight.

Danger turned him into a calculating, nerveless killer.

There was an inevitability about his death.

He died as he lived, by the gun.

The shootings took place on March 11, 1884, in San Antonio.

Thompson had vowed never again to enter the Vaudville Theatre where he had killed Jack Harris .... "it would be my graveyard," .... he was quoted as saying.

But somehow Ben allowed King Fisher (who has blustered his way into the folklore of the West as a handsome, dashing gunfighter, idolized by every young cowhand who made the trip north with the herds) to persuade him to go to the combined theatre, gambling hall, and saloon.

He knew he had many enemies in the city and had been told that Joe Foster, Harris's partner, had warned the police there would be trouble if Thompson entered his place.

To this day controversy surrounds the death of Ben Thompson and King Fisher.

There are two versions: testimony taken before the coroner's jury on the morning of the double killing and eyewitness statements obtained by reporters for the Austin Statesmen, which indicated both gunfighters had been ambushed and killed.

In Austin, Thompson's friends and admirers, who had given him a triumphal welcome following his acquittal from the Harris shooting, gave him a monumental farewell.

Crowds overflowed the church and the line of mourners stretched for blocks, straining to catch a last glimpse of one of the most feared gunfighters in the west.

Several of the many carriages were filled with weeping orphans.

It wasn't known until the funeral that Ben Thompson, the man killer, had been providing for their clothes and food since he had been a soldier.

In an early note to the orphanage, he said it was "his duty as a gentleman".

Like today, in the 1870's, you just never knew what you never knew.

 

“Those who do not understand the nature of sin and virtue are attached to duality; they wander around deluded.” ---- Sri Guru Granth Sahib

 

“I think it was a brutal time filled with people who were strangely sophisticated and uncivilized. There was a dichotomy between sophistication and viciousness.” ----  Bruno Heller