A good read on Western History; one mans story

[CDNRatMan]

  While awaiting Part II of the fascinating story of  Benjamin Vernon Lilly Legend we can converse on the topic of riding to your village or is it a town now in January........if that El Nino guy is kind to us we just might......

[Hoggy]

CNR......and QNS@L, HBR, VIA and finally Panama Canal Railway.

Let me know when you're coming. I have my sights set on the TO show as well.
You're a Northerner so I expect you'll be riding down in January?

[CDNRatMan]

   Ah so your one of "them", ONR, CPR or CNR........lol.......

I'll make a point of getting down your way one weekend this coming summer, talked tonight with one of riding friends and we are planning to go to TO for the International Bike Show in Jan.

[Hoggy]

Close Ratman. I'm down in Lagoon City. I spend my time between the boat, the bike and the lawnmower. And I spent a lot of years pulling trains into your town.

[CDNRatMan]

   Hoggy:
Sorry 49 going to ask Hoggy if he lives near the Cement people in Brechin...........

[Hoggy]

He lived a pretty dangerous life.....eating corn meal and sugar.

[49Reo]

....when I can find it.......

[CDNRatMan]

  and part II is when.....

[greenbarn]

Very interesting, 49.  Can't wait to hear more.

[49Reo]

The Benjamin Vernon Lilly Legend
Part #1

"Anybody can kill a deer. It takes a man to kill a varmint."
The varmints Ben Lilly was talking about were mountain lions, wolves and, most especially, bears. Lilly filled a void between Davy Crockett and the more modern-day outdoorsman.

Ben Lilly's first vocation was blacksmithing. He enjoyed making his Lilly knives and knew how to temper steel. Nevertheless, he inherited a farm and tried to become a farmer. Neighbors reported seeing Lilly running behind his plow horse, tearing furrows in the earth at full gallop, laughing and guiding the plow handles. Soon afterwards, he killed his first black bear with a knife. It was an event that set him on his hunting career.

When asked about this feat he told the inquirer, "Always stab the bear on the side away from you and it'll jab its head that way. Just keep stabbing the bear on opposite sides, and it'll never have time to concentrate on you."

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.

His running skill was unequalled. He once bet a local athlete he could outrun him around a baseball diamond, and Lilly would run on all fours. Lilly crossed home plate with the challenged loser still halfway back to third base.

Lilly was 5'9" tall and around 180 pounds and known for the strength and stamina that stayed with him until old age. He could sink his hooks into a 500-pound cotton bale, heft it onto his back and carry it off. One of his favorite tricks was to walk into the blacksmith shop, grab the anvil by the horn with one hand, lift it straight out in front of him, then grab it two-handed and pitch it over his shoulder. Lilly always wore a beard. He said he was a big boy the first time he saw a man with a clean-shaven face, and it scared him terribly. He thought the man was dead. Never wanting to scare anyone, he vowed to always wear a beard. Ben Lilly worked hard, lived hard and played hard; but he was a gentle and soft-spoken man. The only luxury he permitted himself was an occasional cinnamon stick. Although he liked to travel light, he always carried candy when he knew children were up the trail.

His mobility required that he travel light. His standard equipment consisted of a tin can for cooking, matches, an axe, the big Lilly knife for sticking and a smaller one for skinning, a blowing horn for calling the dogs and to serve as a drinking cup, dog chains, cartridges, and of course his rifle.

As for food, he only carried some dried corn or corn meal and a little sack of sugar. He seldom ate while trailing anyway and once the kill was made he would feast on whatever critter he had run to ground. He was particularly fond of mountain lion and believed, as did the Apache, that the well-muscled meat of the neck would convey the cat's strength and agility to the hunter.

He became a predator-control. He had pursued the large predators with a passion throughout his life, but now he was getting paid for it. Financially, Ben Lilly did quite well for his time. He made a small fortune exterminating cattle killing animals. The bounty was usually high and he was good at his work. The government was subsidizing hunters to exterminate the cattle killers and ranchers were also paying the hunters bonuses for their efforts.
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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 refused to work on Sundays. Even on a hot track, at the stroke of midnight he shut business down. If his dogs treed a mountain lion on Saturday night, they would have to stay with the cat until Monday morning. His mixed packs mostly consisted of Southern catahoula curs and coonhound breeds.

Nobody really knows, but estimates are that Lilly killed between 600 and 1000 mountain lions and over 500 bears in his lifetime. These numbers and his story demonstrate his indestructible will to hunt. That, together with his love for the chase, made him the most successful hunter of his era.

He lived to be 80 years old.