by H. H. Knibbs
Pistol in hand, Ben walked rapidly, with long, wheeling, zigzag steps to the doorway. He mounted the platform, and his profile was silhouetted in the blue twilight: thick hair, bulging forehead, straight thin nose, ball chin.
Ben stood in position to command the outside and inside approaches. To a nearby trooper he shouted, “Go get the doctor,” and let the frightened man pass through the doorway.
Ben looked searchingly into the darkening room. Several soldiers had lifted the wounded sergeant onto a cot. When the doctor arrived, he motioned the man through with his pistol. The troopers inside crowded around the wounded sergeant.
“Stop where you are, Lieutenant!”
Ben’s voice rang out high and clear, as he disappeared through the doorway. The men dashed up to the steps and to the outside platform. They saw Ben pointing his pistol at a tall, young officer, Lieutenant Naigler. The lieutenant, with sword raised, advanced swiftly toward Thompson. Two steps away from him, Naigler ordered:
“Drop that pistol!”
Ben ignored the words. Naigler lunged forward and brought the sword down in a sleeping arc. The blade quivered and hissed, cutting the air past Ben’s left ear and shoulder. The sharp edge sliced a strip of cloth from the sleeve, slashed the skin beneath. Ben winced. Blood soaked the gray fabric. The slowly spreading oval stain was the color of coral.
Ben sidestepped quickly. The lieutenant now aimed at the pistol arm. Twice he brought powerful strokes downward. Twice Ben skipped out of range. Naigler raised his aim now, and lunged at Ben with the saber point. It probed for the soft flesh of the neck, just above the collarbone.
Then, in a desperate maneuver, Lieutenant Naigler leaped back and then forward swiftly. He swung the blade across, straight for Ben’s face. Ben ducked, stooping almost to the ground. The sword whistled overhead. Ben felt the breeze from it rippling his hair. He pivoted at the waist from his stooping position, pointed the pistol upward, and squeezed the trigger.
The bullet seared a jagged hole in the lieutenant’s neck, just under the chin. It coursed upward toward the top of the spine. Naigler stopped sharply, as if suspended in mid-air. Then he dropped heavily to one side, hitting the ground face first. His nose and cheek were scraped raw by the grit. Blood bubbled from his neck, and made a widening pool in the dust.
Ben pointed his pistol toward the barracks doorway. The men jammed there vanished as if sucked in by a vacuum. To Ben’s right, Captain Hamner approached, unarmed. He moved straight toward Ben’s pistol. A few paces away he ordered Ben to drop the weapon and give himself up. He promised a fair trial.
Ben advanced cautiously as the officer spoke, until the captain stood between him and the men at the building entrance. Then he released his grip on the revolver. His fingers opened slowly and spread out like the points of a star. The pistol rolled from his hand, smacked the ground, and then settled against the cushion of dust.
The captain picked up the weapon and faced the barracks. He called for the doctor. Then he marched Private Ben Thompson of the Texas Volunteers, to a little stone building about a hundred yards away.
In the Fort Clark guardhouse that steaming July night of 1861, young Ben Thompson stared unworried through the barred opening in the stone wall. Then he turned from the moonlit emptiness outside to the warm yellow candle-glow of his cell. He ran his knuckles across the heavy wooden door. It had a small peephole near the top, and a cut-out slot at the bottom. Through this slot a pewter bowl of stew had been shoved.
With the sharp-pointed toe of his right boot, Ben kicked at two big iron rings imbedded in the mold-stained floor. He picked up a rickety chair and smashed it against the unyielding door. The blow splintered the legs and ripped the rotted rawhide seat. He pushed the wreckage with his boots into a neat pile near the door.
Ben flopped down on the floor pallet and blew out the candle. He lay in the darkness on his back, head cradled on his intertwined fingers. His legs were crossed at his upraised knees, one boot swinging nervously.
One hell of a mess to be in, and the war just barely started! Enlist to fight Yankees, and wind up shooting it out with men on your own side! But that’s the way it was. That’s the way it always had been in Ben Thompson’s Texas. When there was shooting to be done, you did it. And they might be strangers you tangled with. Or they might be your own kinfolks.
CHAPTER 2
Such was the way of life in the Texas that became Ben Thompson’s home when he was but two years old. Such was the pattern—the details filled in as he grew up—for the career of one of the most notorious man-killers of his day; a dead-shot, feared and respected for his amazing pistol prowess, and regarded by experts as the most dangerous man of the Southwest in a gunfight.
No factual book about his era and milieu could be regarded as complete without some mention of Ben Thompson: a line, perhaps a paragraph or two, and occasionally several pages. Still, with his great renown as a master of the six-shooter and as a brave fighter, Thompson has remained an enigma among gunmen.
Most of the killers of the Old West were desperadoes, or sometimes law officers; in several instances officers who were ex-desperadoes or desperadoes who were ex-officers. But Ben Thompson was primarily a professional gambler, which was regarded as a perfectly respectable calling. Besides, Thompson as an individual seemed to be more complex than the run-of-the-mill bad man. He appeared to be driven by a powerful, but rarely cultivated, sense of morality. It found expression in several episodes of his efforts to “reform,” and ultimately in his brief but brilliant career as chief of police in Austin, Texas.
Because he was already a legend in his own day, numerous tales developed around Ben Thompson and his feats. Some have the certification of the written record; often, however, only the account as put down in the biography written by Colonel W. M. (Buck) Walton, Ben’s lawyer. This fact-filled book, in many ways incomplete, often eulogistic, and not infrequently hyperbolic, was published soon after Thompson’s violent death in 1884.
Other yarns about Ben Thompson have been passed along by word of mouth and embroidered in the frequent retelling. They were told by friends or enemies, by acquaintances, or friends of friends. Sometimes they were told privately. Many were heard during the lore-veined annual meetings of the Old Trail Drivers of Texas. There the swapping of fact and fable about The Old Days was often more rewarding than the formal sessions for reporters in search of a good story. A good many of the stories have been accepted, despite lack of full documentation, because they have at least a kernel of authenticity. And they seem to fit properly and plausibly into the mosaic composite of Ben Thompson highly-colored, almost unbelievable, kaleidoscopic career.
Ben’s high ranking by the experts, the “professionals” among the gun-toting fraternity, is indicated in an exhaustive appraisal by one of his more articulate contemporaries: William Barclay (Bat) Masterson. Bat was commissioned in 1906 by the magazine Human Life, to write a series of articles on famous gunfighters of the Old West. Masterson chose Ben Thompson as the subject of his first article. It appeared in the January, 1907, issue, and was followed in the February number by an article about Wyatt Earp. In his first article, Masterson said in part:
“Ben Thompson was a remarkable man in many ways, and it is very doubtful if in his time there was another man who equaled him with the pistol in a life and death struggle… He possessed a much higher order of intelligence than the average gunfighter or man killer.… He was more resourceful and a better general under trying conditions than any of the great army of desperate men who flourished on our frontier.… He was absolutely without fear, and his nerves were those of the finest steel. He shot at his adversary with the same precision and deliberation that he shot at a target.
“He was a past master in the use of the pistol and his aim was as true as his nerves were strong and steady. He had during his career more deadly encounters with the pistol than any man living, and won out in every single i
nstance… Thompson killed many men during his career, but always in an open and manly way. He scorned the man who was known to have committed murder, and looked with contempt on the man who sought unfair advantages in a fight.
“The men whom he shot and killed were without exception men who had tried to kill him.… He was what could be properly termed a thoroughly game man.”
In making a comparison with other noted pistol-pushers of the day, Masterson concluded that several would have given Ben Thompson battle to the death. “Such men,” he said, “as Wild Bill Hickok, Wyatt Earp, Billy Tilghman, Charley Bassett, Luke Short, Clay Allison, Joe Lowe and Jim Curry, were all men with nerves of steel who had often been put to the test.… It is safe to assume that not one of them would have declined the gage of battle with him… However, I am constrained to say that little doubt exists in my mind but that Thompson would have returned the winner of the contest.” Bat Masterson was, of course, a good friend of Ben Thompson’s, and on one occasion Ben was credited with saving Bat’s life. But Bat was also a good friend of many of the other gunfighters, and he has not been alone in according to Thompson a standing on a par with such well-known killers as John Wesley Hardin, Bill Longley, King Fisher, and others of “Fighting Ben’s” day and place.
Estimates of the number of men Thompson killed range as high as twenty-eight. All efforts to substantiate the varying “credits” have agreed with Eugene Cunningham’s conclusion that “anything like a correct tabulation of Ben Thompson’s killings is impossible.” More often than not, because of his reputation as an unerring pistol thrower, he was able to relax his trigger finger during a “fuss” in which most others would have had to shoot or be shot.
“Fear he did not know,” said Emerson Hough, a student of the Old West and its ways, in commenting on Ben Thompson. Hough said Ben had “a reputation far wider than his state, and in all the main cities of Texas he was a figure more or less familiar, and always dreaded.” Ben’s skill with the six-shooter, he added, “was a proverb in a state full of men skilled with weapons…it is certain that the worst bad men all over Texas were afraid of Ben Thompson.”
So go most of the opinions of Ben Thompson as an untamed man of violence, part of whose tragedy consisted of his valiant efforts to adjust to the dawning of a new era of house-broken men. Through much of the post-Civil War lore of the fast-shooting cattle country—written, spoken, published, and unpublished—this sometimes belligerent, sometimes quixotic fighting and gambling man moved wherever things were happening, along the herd trails, all over the Kansas cow-towns, in mining camps and through railroad wars of Colorado. Most of all, however, he belonged to Texas, and his six-gun was certainly feared all over the big state.
CHAPTER 3
Ben Thompson’s Texas had opened for him in 1845, sixteen years before that fateful day in 1861 that found him a prisoner in an army guardhouse. Ben’s father and mother trekked down to Austin from Nova Scotia. The elder Thompson had been a seafaring man in England. Now he hoped to realize a dream of many a salt-sprayed wanderer of the ocean lanes. He came to settle down in a brand new country—Texas. Here a man might have a chance to build his life on equal terms with his neighbor. Texas had fought a war to win independence from Mexico. Then, after joining the Union, Texas was in the middle of a new war against Mexico.
The peace the Thompsons sought eluded them in the Texas of the mid-1800‘s. The region was under the sway of the sword and the six-shooter, the rifle, the carbine, the buffalo gun, and the Indians’ lance and bow-and-arrow. Many men of good will had moved out to settle in Texas. But the country also swarmed with robbers, killers, desperadoes. They had “Gone To Texas“—marked “G.T.T.” on the sheriffs’ warrants—when they could no longer go anyplace else in safety. Here there was still very little law, and even less order. Each man made his own law—in the light of his conscience, or the flash of his six-shooter, or sometimes by both.
For the elder Thompson, this change to a wildly undisciplined life probably came too late. He sought the solace of withdrawal and ultimately of the bottle. He spent long hours fishing in the Colorado River. When he went away, they said he was on a business trip, in England. He never came back.
Young Ben Thompson, on the other hand, was of the bone and sinew of this new free country. Its untamed quality had emerged in him, as in most lads brought up in these lawless years. He was stamped with an unmistakable manner, bearing, and attitude: the wave of civilization lapping at the edge of the frontier. Not that the frontiersman was averse to the benefits of teamwork. He had his building and planting “bees,” community hunts for meat and hides, joint endeavors in schools and churches, committees endowed with governmental power to protect life and property. But there was no theory in all of this. Its only meaning was to strengthen the individual. If a government failed of this, it soon fell into disrepute. Then the law of the jungle displaced the law of the pack.
During his eighteen years in Texas, Ben’s law had been jungle law. Under its terms, it was said, a boy was a man before he grew up. Certainly, as he lay thinking in the darkness of his cell now, Ben felt himself the equal of any man. And, considering his dead-eye accuracy with a pistol, a damned sight better than most.
Being locked up meant little to Ben, except a temporary suspension of his freedom. He had already been in and out of jails several times. He had learned that there were ways to keep out, even if the law said you should be in. And once in, there were faster ways of unlocking the doors than the tedious process of trial.
Gently, a soothing sleep slowly enveloped Ben, and he was not troubled by the fleeting recollection of Joe Brown, his playmate, doubled up in the anguish of mustard shot wounds. Ben, then hardly thirteen years old, had shot Joe. That, by way of squeezing an explosive trigger, was his first assertion of young manhood.
Before then, Ben had seen grown men end their arguments in the selfsame fashion, and go unpunished. He relished the attention of the judicial proceedings that followed his first shooting: the indictment by the grand jury, the trial, and the conviction for assault with a deadly weapon. Then, a pardon, thanks to the protection of a friendly man who could exercise what was known as influence. That proved to be a mysterious power which acted almost chemically on the written law, to make it fit individual cases. Ben could use some of that magic now in the army guardhouse.
CHAPTER 4
Next morning at Fort Clark the brassy glare of another burning midsummer day beat down through the tiny window in Ben’s cell. The long column of glistening dust struck him-in the face, and roused him to awareness of his current plight.
The cell and its mean furnishings looked familiar, as if he had been through all this before.
Yet it was strange enough to make him a tiny bit uneasy. There was just the glimmer of a qualm as he rubbed the dry, caked blood on his sleeve. He realized then that it was part of a uniform, that he was in the army now. It was a “rebel” army, with little formal training, but still the military. As such, its rules would surely be less pliable than those of the civilian world.
Then he remembered the desperate need of the Confederacy for fighting men. Especially men like himself, who could make every scarce bullet count. His confidence rose to a satisfied smile on his face. He reached down toward the slot in the door, and lifted the pewter bowl. Then he hunkered down on his heels, back braced against the wall. With gusto, he ate the mush, and drank the parched corn brew that passed for coffee.
During three days and three nights Ben saw only one other man, the guard, Smitty. And he saw him only twice. The rest of the time he was left completely alone. He slept, or basked in daydreams in which he won great stacks of gold at monte or faro. He was having visions of himself in a fine fancy carriage, such as he had seen in New Orleans. He saw himself arriving at the theater with the belle of the town. As the lock on the carriage door clicked open, he heard the bolts of his cell door clang, and a rumble of voices outside. Ben leaped to his
feet. He stood with his back against the wall, near the window, facing the door.
Captain Hamner, who had arrested him after the shooting, walked in first. Then a squad of soldiers, each carrying a rifle. Then Smitty, the usual guard, and two more soldiers, unarmed. Ben knew at once that at least one of the men he shot had died.
The squad lined up by fours near the pallet. The captain, in front of them, addressed the prisoner:
“Private Benjamin Thompson, you are formally charged with the murder of Lieutenant Naigler. You will remain in irons until the time of your trial.”
The full force of it all struck Ben suddenly. He looked desperately at the glaring window, then toward the deep mass of shadow beyond the open cell door. He shuddered, as if to make a move. But the two unarmed men had by now flanked him. Each seized him by one arm.
“As I told you,” the captain continued, “you will be given a fair trial, with the services of a defense attorney.”
Against his struggle, the two men swung Ben to the floor. They locked the leg chains, fastening him to the iron rings in the stone. Then the soldiers filed out.
Alone, Ben tried the chains, and found that they prevented him from standing. But he could sit up. And there was enough play so he could reach the food slot. Ben lay back again on the cold, damp floor. He shut his eyes and heard the door bolts clink. Then there was a long silence, and Ben sank back in weary sleep.
On the twelfth day the strain of the irons and the reduced rations began to tell on Ben Thompson. After he had been chained to the floor, his three meals had become all the same—hard bread and cold water. They had promised a fair trial. But it began to look as if they expected he might not be alive when the case was called. It now took all his strength to swing himself over to the door, to get his food, and to replace the bowl.