by H. H. Knibbs
Ben repeatedly and vehemently denied that he had received any money at Pueblo, other than the five thousand dollars which the Santa Fe had agreed to pay him for holding the roundhouse until legally dispossessed.
After the railroad job, Ben made the rounds of some of the nearby mining camps, banking faro and monte games. He was seen also in Kansas City, and in St. Louis, before he turned back toward Austin. When he got home, Ben was well-heeled and prepared to open a first-class gambling establishment. This could be, he figured, his chance of building up a business that would end his financial ups-and-downs. For Austin, in 1879 and 1880 had become firmly established as the Texas capital, winning out over claims of other cities. It had acquired the prestige of a seat of government and was closely linked to the powerful interests in nearby San Antonio, the big town of Texas.
CHAPTER 40
Ben Thompson ran Billy Simms out of Austin twice during the late seventies. During these years, Ben was trying to settle down. He had come to feel that his footloose years were past, and he was tired of his boom and bust existence. The hopes of establishing himself in a trail town had vanished with the rise and fall of one cattle-trading center after another. In each of these puddles, Ben had been a good-sized frog, but his good fortune from one year to the next had been as ephemeral as the herd-market season.
As things shaped up in south Texas, in the Austin-San Antonio orbit, Ben’s prospects for establishing a going business were good. But here, with his reputation as a gunfighter and his prestige as one of the elite of the sporting world, Ben could not afford to play second fiddle to anybody in his field. He had to have the number one place, or continue the free-lance game that he felt he had outgrown. Passing the age of thirty-five, by six-shooter era calculations, was tantamount to entering old age. Ben Thompson, as many another man before and after him, looked for security in his declining years, assurance that he and his family would not have to make the trek to the poorhouse.
In Austin, Billy Simms stood in Ben’s way to quick realization of his plans. Plodding Billy Simms, once Ben’s protégé, had been steadily building his following and ran one of the best patronized gambling houses in all of Texas. Billy’s place offered a great variety of play, the gamut from monte to chuckaluck, and a keno parlor. This was one of the hurdles that Ben had to face in setting up his own business. It certainly provided motive enough for the hard feelings that developed between the two who had been boyhood friends.
At any rate, Ben paid a visit to Billy’s place during one of his infrequent sprees of this epoch. He raised forty different kinds of hell, of the kind that would tend to discourage patrons who liked a more quiet atmosphere for their relaxation at cards or dice. In the course of Ben’s plain and fancy shooting there, he managed to dispose of a chandelier, several fully equipped tables, and a variety of paraphernalia. The crowning touch was the shooting of the keno “goose,” the container of the numbered pellets used during the playing of this bingo-type game.
Billy Simms closed down his Austin place, and left for cities to the north, ranging as far up as Chicago, before circling back to San Antonio, where he became associated with Jack Harris. First he worked as a dealer, then as a kind of floor manager or chief bouncer, and eventually as part owner of the Variety Vaudeville House, becoming the gambling headquarters for all the Southwest. Billy made another trip to Austin, to visit his mother during a critical illness. Ben was said to have sent out word that he would not harm a man who was visiting his sick mother.
Some people insisted that Ben was seriously gunning for Billy Simms personally and that there would be a showdown eventually. Such an implication did not seem to be warranted, in view of Ben Thompson’s history and his makeup. He was not customarily given to making threats, especially about using his six-shooter. But there is little doubt that the estrangement left Billy Simms feeling very uneasy, and that his nervousness mounted each time Ben Thompson visited San Antonio.
These visits were rather frequent during Ben’s final years. For Ben’s heart, professionally speaking, still belonged to San Antonio. It was there, during his Confederate soldier days, that he had received his first introduction to the “big time” of the night-life world. Still and all, even though he was well-known there as anywhere in the Southwest, Ben did not open a place in the City of the Alamo. Many causes, psychological or financial, might undoubtedly be advanced for Ben’s lack of representation there. Whatever they were, their ultimate effect was to make Ben’s role in San Antonio that of a “Sport” in town to enjoy the sights and sounds. If he gambled, it was not as a dealer, but taking his chances as a client, a patron, along with many other men who flocked to San Antonio to spend money they had made in handling legitimate cattle or selling stolen cattle, or in freighting operations, as soldiers, or in robbing a train or a bank, or in the big boom business of buying and selling sheep.
Especially sheep. During this period that preceded Ben’s elevation to the Valhalla of Western Gunfighters, wool was the bonanza crop of Texas. The boom, begun about 1873 with the dwindling of the great wild herds by the trail drives and drought, reached its peak in the late seventies and early eighties. All the south Texas country south and west of San Antonio offered superb grazing grounds. The gains to the sheep-raiser averaged one hundred percent of his investment. One shearing paid expenses and the next shearing was clear profit. And the biggest wool market in the world at this time was San Antonio, through which millions of pounds moved annually.
While the rest of the country was depressed with the aftermath of the 1873 panic, San Antonio and the surrounding areas, including Austin, enjoyed one of the most prosperous decades of their history. Hundreds of ox-carts, loaded to great heights under canvas covering the arched tops, thronged the plazas.
Many a new fortune was made in wool, and among those who participated in a modest way was none other than Roy Bean, who later became famed as “The Law West of the Pecos.”
San Antonio’s prosperity was directly reflected in Austin, which had been finally designated as the permanent capital in 1872 over competing claims of other cities. For San Antonio was then to Austin what New York and Philadelphia became in relation to Washington: the center of wealth and influence. Houston and Dallas and Fort Worth, Waco and El Paso were on the upgrade at that time, but San Antonio was the “Big Town.” Galveston was “The Port,” and Austin the center of statehood consolidation.
Ben’s gambling establishment in Austin grew, as he had hoped, to become the biggest and best in town. Between his earnings there and his winnings during his periods of recreation in San Antonio, Ben’s fortune fattened. So did he. Ben became a man-about-town, with all the air and trappings of prosperity. He dressed in custom-made clothes of fashionable tailoring, and could be seen at all places that people of note and position frequented, where he was accepted as one of them.
Austin, with its new glory and wealth, was really putting on the dog. While the sheriff still occasionally caught up with a horse thief on Congress Avenue, most of the pilfering had become much more genteel, along with the general tone of the city. There were saloons galore, of course, among them Four-Eyed Brown’s, the Black Elephant, and Hermann Schmidt’s, but there was also a bookstore and a circulating library. The city was on the itinerary of all traveling theatrical troupes, and enjoyed such treats as Roland Reed in “Humbug,” Blanche Curtisse in “Only A Farmer’s Daughter,” “Peck’s Bad Boy,” “The Mikado,” Modjeska in “Adrienne Lecouvreur,” and Minnie Maddern in Sardou’s “Victorine.”
Big-time gamblers like non-drinking, non-fighting Nat Kramer, who had worked the Mississippi steamboats, made regular stopovers in Austin, and Kramer was a well-known figure around Ben’s establishment. With him, too, came many of the familiar figures of the “sporting world” of the old trail towns up North, eternally in quest of the bonanza, now shedding some of its benefits in San Antonio and Austin.
Ben might have been seen, during his off-hours,
lounging around the hotels. Of a Sunday, Ben was particularly resplendent in his home town, no longer the hick village in which he grew up, but a new-rich city with metropolitan pretensions. He wore his tall silk hat, Prince Albert coat, elegant trousers, and boots of the softest calfskin leather with three-inch heels. He carried a gold-nobbed walking stick in his small, exquisitely formed trigger-finger hand.
For his trips to San Antonio, Ben had placed his faithful black mule at permanent first-class board and lodging in a livery stable there. He had, besides, bought a finely crafted saddle and fittings of hand-tooled leather, with gold and silver trimmings—all told said to have represented an investment of about two thousand dollars. On many occasions, Ben was seen riding about the streets of San Antonio on his superbly appointed mule, the saddle covering almost the entire back of the jet-black animal. Mule and rider carried their heads high and proud. Neither would yield in the least to the pretensions of so-called thoroughbreds, equine or human.
Ben’s sartorial affectations in what was still often the frontier rough-and-tumble town of Austin led him into an amusing but nearly tragic shooting that remains among the most memorable of his pistol-throwing incidents. Along with Ben, the main participants were a group of cowboys from San Saba County who were whooping it up, and Pres Hopkins, the bar attendant at a saloon. The San Saba boys were getting louder by the minute, and itching for a fight. “They wanted to eat a Yankee, if they could find a raw one,” said Buck Walton.
Ben was putting on his fancy city overcoat, called for his gold-headed whalebone walking stick, and his new Boston beaver hat. He and Pres spoke to each other in mock Boston dialect, at least the Boston dialect as they knew it from the traveling stock companies. This, to the San Saba boys out for a bit of fun, was too good to be true. They followed Ben outside the saloon, and one of them accosted him. At Ben’s court hearing, the following scene was related:
The cowboy, with pistol in hand, walked over to Ben while the others gathered around.
“Look here, Babe,” he said, “where did you come from?”
“Did you speak to me?” Ben asked in his best Boston accent.
“Yes, sugar, I spoke to you.”
“I came from the North for my health. All my family save one have died from the consumption, and one of my lungs is gone.”
“This is not a healthy country for you, or the likes of you.”
“Why, sir, I find the climate genial and I have already obtained much benefit.”
“Then I am a liar, am I?” And the cowboy’s arm went up and knocked off Ben’s hat, which fell to the wet sidewalk. Ben picked it up, still going along with the horseplay. Then the assailant spoke again:
“If we had you in San Saba we would make wolf meat out of you in no time.”
“Why would you mistreat a stranger,” Ben asked, as he picked up the hat and put it back on his head, “and an invalid, who came to this fine climate for his failing health, and who behaved like an honest gentleman?”
The cowboy answered by knocking the hat off again, and this time he kicked the beaver as it rolled on the muddy walk.
“What’s your name?” the cowboy asked, now becoming more menacing than ever.
Ben stooped down to pick up the hat, and this time he came up with his six-shooter in his hand.
“Ben Thompson’s the name, and you and your white-livered friends better make tracks—”
The cowboys scattered, and the man who had knocked off the hat ran behind a post and fired a shot at Ben.
“Come out and fight like a man,” Ben said. The man pulled the trigger again, but his pistol cylinder got fouled up.
Ben’s revolver flared. The cowboy was almost entirely concealed by the post. The bullet took the paint off where it grazed the post and then cut a clean hole in the cowboy’s left ear lobe. The cowboy hurled his useless revolver to the street, turned, and made very fast tracks away from there.
Ben did not shoot at the man as he ran. Instead, he reloaded his six-shooter, put it back in his holster, picked up his cane, and went about his usual evening stroll that had been so rudely interrupted.
CHAPTER 41
The Christmas Eve killings in The Senate marked a high point of these genial years in Austin. The Senate was a combination saloon and variety theater, operated by Mark Wilson. Ben had opened a gambling hall several doors away. While there was some opinion that the places were in competition, it was Ben’s contention that such was not the case, that they were complementary rather than rival establishments. At The Senate, the customers got well oiled, and then at the gambling hall they got a thorough cleaning.
Ben Thompson and Mark Wilson were friends, but Wilson, a ruddy-complexioned Irishman with plenty of spunk, was said to have resented Ben’s untouchable status because of his shooting reputation. Wilson was described as a brave and impulsive man, generous and warm-hearted, but with a temper that flashed white hot when he was crossed.
Several nights before the Christmas Eve party of 1880, Jim Burdette, a hanger-on whom Ben had protected on several occasions, had a run-in with Wilson at The Senate. Wilson slapped his face, and then ordered him out of the saloon.
“I’ll go get Ben Thompson,” Burdette said, repeating a threat that had become famous in the cattle trail towns where Ben had acquired the role of unofficial defender of all Texans in trouble.
“Go get him if you want to,” Wilson said, “I’m not afraid.”
This remark probably was distorted to a challenge by the time it got to Ben.
The night before Christmas all of Austin was celebrating in high style—music, dancing, drinking, gambling, the full range of conviviality of a festive occasion. At The Senate, Mark Wilson had brought in a special stage show for his all-male clientele, and the place was packed to the rafters. As part of his defense, Ben Thompson’s lawyer, Buck Walton, described The Senate as follows:
“There was a bar in the hall at which was sold all kinds of liquors—adulterated, compounded, mixed, and probably drugged… Semi-nude women, writhing their bodies into every conceivable shape, singing lascivious songs while on the stage and then, forgetful of all womanhood, decency and modesty, lounging in the private boxes with half-drunken male companions…catcalls, whistling, applause, yelling, filling the hall, all this could not but end in difficulties more or less serious nightly.”
To take care of such possible trouble for the extra-large crowd of Christmas Eve, Wilson had obtained a special detail of two policemen. Besides, he had concealed in several places, easily accessible to him, some loaded weapons, including a double-barreled shotgun and two six-shooters. Sam Mathews, the bartender, had a Winchester rifle under the counter.
Ben had not planned to go to The Senate that night, according to his story. But, since all the prospective customers were there, and things were quiet at the gaming rooms, he yielded to the invitation of several friends who stopped by for him en route to Mark Wilson’s place. As they strolled down the street, the sound of bursting fireworks echoed in the freezing night. The hiss and roar of rockets as the flares broke and showered overhead, the staccato popping of firecrackers, the sizzle of sparklers—all these were a traditional part of Christmas and New Year celebrations in the South, whereas the Fourth of July passed almost unnoticed then. In the distance, the tolling of church bells and the chant of strolling carol singers provided a steady accompaniment to the occasional explosions.
The Senate was so jammed that Ben Thompson and his companions could not find seats. They separated, seeking available standing room, and Ben found an unoccupied table in the north aisle, about seventeen feet in front of the bar. There were no empty chairs, so Ben sat on the edge of the round table, facing the stage, first shifting his pistol scabbard under his overcoat so that it hung clear of the table top. Mark Wilson, behind the scenes, directed the program which he had arranged especially for this night to include several songs appropriate to the mor
e serious aspects of Christmas observance.
The crowd was still roaring over the antics of a female impersonator and a comedian, who had just finished a burlesque skit, when a tenor took the spotlight and began singing a sentimental ballad. The audience began to settle down when the crackle of exploding firecrackers stopped the singer cold.
The saloon was instantly plunged into confusion. Some thought the firecrackers were pistol shots. Others enjoyed the interruption as a big joke, while a few resented it as a rude intrusion. Loud arguments broke out all over the place. In a rage, Mark Wilson stormed out from behind the scenes and in front of the stage, demanding that the creator of the disturbance step forward. Instead, someone sneaked up and daubed lampblack on Wilson’s face, and this brought thunderous laughter and applause from the audience; but the proprietor was fit to be tied.
Wilson called to one of the policemen and ordered him to arrest a man, who turned out to be Jim Burdette. The officer collared Burdette and shoved him along toward the door. As they approached his table, Ben said to the policeman:
“You don’t have to take him in. He was only having some fun and meant no harm. I’ll be responsible for him, and I’ll have him at the mayor’s office for a hearing.”
The policeman was more than willing to go along with Ben’s suggestion. For one thing, he had no desire to cross Ben. Then, he’d just as soon stay and enjoy the show as go traipsing about to the jail on a bitter cold night. Wilson saw the officer hesitate and rushed to the group.
“Why don’t you take the man to jail?” he asked the policeman.
Ben interceded, repeating his willingness to stand good for the man. But Wilson stopped him, saying:
“Say, who is running this house, you or me? You attend to your business, and I’ll attend to mine.”
“This is my business, Mark,” Ben said, “when it’s a matter of keeping a friend of mine out of the lockup on Christmas Eve, and besides it was all just a joke—”