by H. H. Knibbs
At home for a few days, Ben began to feel the aftereffects of the long months of tension in jail, the strain of the dragged-out court ordeal. In the city, he went through the motions of making his rounds and generally fulfilling his duties as town marshal. To give him new strength, he found everywhere additional signs of his unabated popularity and general esteem.
But, try as he might, Ben could not quite snap back to his old self. The old ease of quick readjustment seemed to be missing. The bounce, the resiliency, that he could count on in a tight spot, were markedly absent. The man who prided himself on always being able to land on his feet now seemed to be off-balance.
The whole Harris episode, starting with the Foster dispute and ending with the trial, had burned deeper into his being than he himself realized. He knew he was tired, bone-weary and soul-weary, and he wanted, most of all right at the moment, a complete rest. Ben decided to resign his post as city marshal. With a friend, Monroe Miller, he went on an extended trip. They visited Laredo, Brownsville, Matamoros, Corpus Christi, Galveston, and New Orleans.
On his return, Ben got encouragement and backing for a new gambling parlor. As soon as he opened the doors, it again became the most popular of such places in Austin. Ben’s old friends flocked to the hall, and many new clients came, attracted by the glamour of Ben’s reputation. At this point, with two such recent episodes as The Senate slayings and the San Antonio shooting, there was no doubt that Ben Thompson held the spotlight as the premier pistoleer in all of Texas.
This prestige undoubtedly served him effectively in helping his brother, Billy, out of his most recent trouble. Billy had been picked up in Refugio County and charged with a murder committed some years back. Ben, as usual, dropped everything else to try to clear Billy. He arranged for five thousand dollars bail which was granted, employed counsel, and succeeded in obtaining a change of venue to De Witt County. The twelve good men and true acquitted Billy without even leaving the jury box.
For the first time since their teen-age days, the Thompson brothers were back in Austin clear of all pending charges. It looked like an auspicious moment for a new start. Ben had made it to some degree in reopening his gambling parlor. But still it was gambling, which he himself had publicly condemned. Was he, too, an agent of the devil, such as Jack Harris had been? The defense attorneys’ vitriolic description of Jack Harris echoed in Ben’s memory now. How far was he removed from the same charges?
Still, there was always the other side. This was his trade, his profession, his calling, the one way he knew for earning a livelihood that he felt adequate for his talents and appetites, and for the needs of his family. There was nothing in the public mind that held a gambling hall per se disreputable. The operator could establish his code, and if he ran things honestly, did not embroider his operations with the lurid vices associated with night life, he could go on maintaining his self-respect as an investor and manager in a branch of the amusement and entertainment business.
The inner transformation at work on Ben Thompson began to show openly during the final sickness and death of his mother. He went to her home in Bastrop County, and remained at her side continuously through her dying days. After her funeral, Ben returned to Austin and his upstairs gambling hall. Soon the breakdown became evident. Buck Walton said:
“Dissipation in constant gambling, loss of sleep and the circumstances which surround such a life, had made more or less inroads on the health of Ben Thompson. His face became pale, and being almost beardless, he presented the appearance of being feebler than he really was, and when he dressed in black looked much like an invalid suffering from consumption…
Indeed, Ben Thompson suffered from a kind of consumption even more insidious than tuberculosis: a sickness of the soul, and it was eating away at the very core of his being. He drank more liquor than ever. In addition to his steady imbibing during the day, it was said that each night be put an unopened bottle of brandy at his bedside when going to sleep, and that by morning he had emptied it. The Ben Thompson who had always been a model of affability, modesty, quiet manner, and sweet, soft talk—except in a “fuss” or a binge—seemed to have vanished completely.
In his place there developed a Ben Thompson who was inclined to arrogance more and more, to becoming dictatorial and dogmatic. Often without any apparent provocation, he became insulting and overbearing. Friends found it more difficult and disagreeable to be in his company. Whatever respect remained for Ben Thompson, generally speaking, was limited strictly to respect for his unerring pistol.
And now that weapon, which in the past had spoken its deadly language only in moments of mortal danger; the same six-shooter which had been the solemn arbiter of many a fatal combat, it too, now, was debauched, in a manner of speaking. Ben Thompson’s pistol had descended from its dignified role as protector and defender, to become a practical joker’s toy in a grim game of terrorizing the town whenever he felt like it.
Austin was being “hurrahed” more than any trail town ever had been. The Ben Thompson public binge soon developed into a nightly occurrence, and became the scandal and shame of Austin. Hardly a night passed that Ben did not fire his six-shooter somewhere in town. Nobody got hurt from it, but it became a constant threat and an everlasting menace, especially since the police seemed to be afraid to do anything. Ben came to be looked upon, at best, as the town’s bad boy. At worst, he was seen as a Public Enemy.
CHAPTER 48
During Ben Thompson’s berserk period, he was involved in many incidents, some of them amusing, but in most cases more bewildering than funny. One notable instance was the sudden ending of a theater performance when Ben Thompson appeared in a box seat and opened fire on the audience. The panic that ensued, emptying the auditorium in a few minutes, brought near-hysterical laughter to Ben, for only he knew that his pistol had been loaded with blank cartridges.
On another spree, during one of his periodical excursions into shooting up the red light district, Ben was annoyed by an organ-grinder’s tunes. He shot the box full of holes and frightened the man half to death, but did not hurt him. Next morning he hunted up the producer of mechanical music and made amends, including the payment of more than enough cash for replacing the old organ with a shiny new one.
As part of one of his outbursts, Ben undertook the task of single-handed and immediate abolition of racial segregation in public drinking places. Making the rounds, Ben entered a saloon where Negroes were being served at one end of the bar, and the rest of the counter reserved for white patrons, the customary arrangement. Ben commanded the bartender to permit the Negros to spread out from their crowded corner to the larger extension of unoccupied space along the white section of the bar.
Who can say from what deep recesses of Ben’s tortured mind came this urge to defy the time-sanctified segregation? It might have come from his adventures in Mexico, where men served together in the army regardless of the hue of their skin. Or from his being nursed back to health by the mulatto woman in Veracruz. Or because he thought he recognized among the Negroes at the bar one who had brought him a timely warning that may have saved his life. But that is pure speculation, and most of his friends wrote the incident off as mere horseplay, another joke of Ben’s. Others said, “That was not Ben Thompson, that was whisky talking.”
In any case, the proprietor of the saloon refused to accede to Ben’s demand. Thompson drew his pistol, rapped it on the bar and again demanded that his order be carried out. Friends of Ben’s in the saloon crowded around him, talked, coaxed, and cajoled, and ultimately persuaded him to let the matter rest. Next day, Ben apologized to the saloonkeeper for whatever personal insults he may have directed toward him during the excitement.
Hardly a day went by that some escapade or other of Ben’s was not mentioned in the press. Gradually, the straightforward reporting of these incidents took on a more critical tone. Soon editorials desperately asked what had become of the police force, what had beco
me of law and order in Austin? As the newspaper comment increased in frequency and sharpened in tone, Ben’s resentment grew.
Ben’s answer to the questions came with a spree of sprees, one in which he shot up a large part of town, and then wound up at the office of the Austin Statesman, looking for the editor. It was early morning, and the editorial staff had gone. Ben, revolver in hand, spread terror among the employees preparing the paper for printing and distribution. He shot out a few lights, and then, as if in an outbreak of accumulated resentment against anything connected with printing, he systematically dumped the type out of all the forms ready for the press.
Among the most memorable, and conceivably the most significant of Ben’s performances in the heyday of keeping Austin treed was his invasion of the cattlemen’s association banquet at Simon’s Cafe on Congress Avenue, the main street of the town. The inciting spark came from the uninvited appearance of L. E. Edwards, an attorney and friend of Ben’s, at the banquet hall. Edwards was ushered out minus any protocol by one of the cattlemen who had been drinking rather heavily, along with his fellow herdsmen, at the bar adjoining the dining room. Edwards, too, was deep enough in the cup that cheers to make an issue of the event. He sought out Thompson, and reported that he had been insulted.
Meanwhile, the banquet had gotten under way, and from all contemporary descriptions, it already bordered on the riotous. Some of the men at the long table were eating, or trying to eat, but most of them were still drinking, talking, roaring with laughter, walking around, standing on chairs, and generally carrying on in high spirits. One of the better known of the cattle barons, Abel Head (Shanghai) Pierce, had taken a seat at the far end of the table. He yelled for the turkey, but the platter was at the opposite end. Shanghai Pierce’s booming voice was lost in the bedlam. He kept shouting and finally determined on direct action suitable to the occasion. He removed his boots, climbed aboard the table, and started a lone journey to the faraway dish of turkey.
Pierce, who had known Ben Thompson in some dealings around the trail towns, froze in his tracks, between the cranberry sauce and the gravy, when he recognized Ben, pistol drawn, coming through the door, and heard Ben call out:
“What goddam shorthorn put my friend Edwards out of here?”
Ranger Lee Hall, a guest at the banquet, stood on a chair. He and Ben Thompson did not get along too well. Hall’s hands dropped to his sides, close to his gun belt. In that brief moment, a devastating silence fell over the hilarious banquet. Next instant there was a scramble for doors and windows. Shanghai Pierce leaped from the table and dived through a window with such force that he not only shattered the glass but pulled the sash loose.
The banquet hall was empty now, except for one or two persons standing alongside Ben and the ranger. The two men glared at each other. Hall had no intention of being run out by Ben Thompson or anyone else. Even if such an urge had reached him, he could not yield to it, for it would mean the end of his career. It would be something that could never be lived down.
The tension was broken by a bystander who walked between the two. Some identified the man as William Crain, a Texas legislator. He knew Ben Thompson well enough to say: “Ben, let me have that pistol—hand it over.”
Thompson knew him well enough to comply.
The stories that spread after the banquet were embellished beyond all recognition, as often happened with a Thompson escapade. There were versions that Ben opened fire and riddled the table and shot down the chandelier. Others that he stood there and engaged in a half-hour’s target practice, splitting bowls and tumblers in front of the dining guests, smashing decanters one by one with his bullets. All of which would have been in keeping with the general tenor of his escapades. But it seems certain, from an examination of various conflicting stories, that there was no shooting on this occasion. The mere presence of Ben Thompson pointing a pistol was enough to break up the gathering.
One of the cattlemen was later quoted as saying:
“I sure changed my opinion of Ben Thompson after that banquet. Here, I thought all along that he was a brave man and bold. But what did he do? Did he jump us where we were by the hundreds in the convention hall, as any game man might do? No, he waited till he could cut out a little bunch of forty or fifty and then ganged up on us!”
But things happening in Texas at that time took the whole incident out of the usual run of Thompsonian pranks. In directing the muzzle of his pistol against some of the biggest cattlemen in Texas, Ben had given expression to desires seething in the hearts and brains of many a small herd owner and nester. For between the men who still needed free grass for cattle and those who wanted their herds fenced in, a bitter feud had developed. The violent and bloody conflict became known as The Fence-Cutting War.
CHAPTER 49
When King Fisher visited Ben Thompson in March of 1884, the Uvalde County deputy sheriff had come up to Austin on business connected with the Fence-Cutting War. Every local law enforcement officer was on a spot in this conflict over pasturelands. On one side were the big cattle “barons” who for several years had been grabbing every piece of land within reach and putting a barbed wire fence around it. On the other, “little” men, in most cases owners of small herds, complained that their stock was being cut off from grass and water. A third group consisted of farmers, favoring fencing on one hand, but also finding themselves in some cases fenced in by the big ranchers’ land-seizing operations, and without entry or exit roads to their enclosed properties.
The wire-cutter became a weapon after words and lawsuits failed. Landowners formed organizations whose members rode by night, slashing the offending barriers, burning homes and farms, and hanging or shooting men. The little men rode against the big, and the big men did not scorn similar methods to rid themselves of a farmer whose tilled acres stood in the path of spreading the boundaries of a huge ranch. Cattlemen who resorted to direct action complained, among other things, that the wire barbs played havoc with their stock. The animals were slashed and bruised by the sharp projections on the unfamiliar fence, and then screw worms set in to bring complications.
In some cases, the fencers did not limit their appropriations to land that they had bought or leased. They spread the barbed enclosures around adjacent land that might be public property, part of a grant to schools or colleges, or still held in the name of the state government. In the orgy of wire-spreading, the fence went up first and questions were asked or answered later. Often the only answer to a request for removal of an offending fence amounted to “Who’s gonna make me?” Then the wire-cutter went into action.
All of this, historians and sociologists see in retrospect, was part of the transition of the cattle-raising “game,” from a bonanza operation to an established industry. But to many of the men involved, especially those in the category of small operators, it was often a matter of life and death. And their reactions were guided by that fact. In some counties, a state of open warfare existed.
The issue of fence-cutting became a popular rallying-cry. The battle for possession of the land extended to a battle for public opinion and for favorable legislation. Men ran for public office on promises of doing something—or doing nothing—about the fence problem. Newspapers were filled with accounts of the hostilities and with editorials pro and con. Some favored the cattle barons’ tactics as essential to the creation of a stabilized industry. Most assailed the barons as a threat to settlement, and told of the cattle barons’ high style of living, “drinking champagne from beer glasses,” wearing diamonds as big as pecans, and arrogantly buying legislation that would condone their practices.
Governor John Ireland called the legislature into special session to attempt a solution. By February of 1884, a few weeks before King Fisher called on Ben Thompson in Austin, a law had been passed and signed, purporting to regulate fencing. It made fence-cutting a felony, and the penalty might be a term in the penitentiary. On the other hand, the fencers were bound
by statute compelling them to leave gates for passage through their properties, forbidding the fencing of public lands and school lands, and making it unlawful to fence in smaller landowners.
But there was many a slip twixt writing the laws on the books and enforcing them. Since the sheriffs were elected by popular vote, the candidates found themselves in a crossfire of influence. They had to favor fencing, and they had to favor fence-cutting, and no jury would send a man to prison for snipping a wire.
King Fisher, a candidate for sheriff in Uvalde County, like many another county law officer, found it necessary to get the co-operation of state authorities. Fisher’s visit to the governor was but one of many such. Men with power and influence flatly told candidates that their support implied rigid prosecution of all fence-cutting. In many instances, the bitterness and hostility were diverted from the landowners to the head of the sheriff and his deputies, who were the physical instruments of enforcement. In every county, men were gunning for an officer who had made an arrest or created other hardships.
With all this weighing on his mind, and with an election in the offing, King Fisher stopped in to visit his old friend, Ben Thompson, in Austin. As city marshal, Ben had run into some incidents developed out of fencing fights. During the taking of depositions in one such lawsuit, Ben was angered by a Chicago lawyer who sought to discredit his testimony, and the public prints of the day related:
“This led to a general muss, and inkstands, paperweights, and mucilage bottles flew about the head of the lawyer… The poor fellow hadn’t bargained for such developments. Texas is the land of the free and the home of the brave.”
By 1884, the time of King Fisher’s visit, however, Ben had long ceased being a law enforces He had come through the Jack Harris killing and trial, and the bitter aftermath, the death of his mother, and his return to heavy drinking and nightly benders. What, if any, motive King Fisher may have had in calling on Ben, other than to have a drink or two, has remained a matter of considerable conjecture. It is known that they did get together on March 11, 1884, in Austin, and that they passed several hours talking and drinking.