The Last Mountain Man

THE BEN LILLY LEGEND (237 pp.)-- J. Frank Dobie--Little, Brown ($3.50).

The big hunt was to be princely in scale, continental in scope. It would start near the Mexican border in the spring of 1921 and continue right on up through the Rockies into Alaska, fanning out wherever the game ran thickest.

When Multimillionaire Southwest Oilman William H. McFadden told his agents to hire the best guides available, they lost no time signing up bearded, barrel-chested, Bible-reading Ben Lilly, 64, the most indefatigable hunter of bears and mountain lions in the West. With four mule-drawn wagons and a small army of dogs, horses, pack mules, cooks and a photographer, McFadden and a party of his friends started north. Hunter Ben Lilly's chief mission: "To get McFadden a chance at a grizzly bear."

Shadow That Bear. Scouting ahead in the mountains above Taos, N. Mex., Ben Lilly struck a fresh trail. He hurried back to camp with the good news but McFadden had been called East on business.

Keep that bear shadowed, Ben was told; as soon as he could, McFadden would come back and shoot it.

Like Ahab tracking Moby Dick, tireless Ben spent the summer and fall following his grizzly over New Mexico and Colorado. Faithfully he sent back his dispatches to the hunting party: "We will get him sooner or later--just as it suits you." Ben kept on the trail till the grizzly hibernated, though once he complained, "My gun froze on the route. I didn't have a mouthful of meat for ten days."

When spring came, Ben rejoined the party in Idaho. But the lost bear continued to haunt him. Three years later, long after the hunt was over, disappointed Hunter Lilly was still writing to McFadden: "I will never feel right until we get him."

Root-Hog or Die. Southwest Historian J. Frank Dobie (Coronado's Children, The Voice of the Coyote) picked up Ben Lilly's trail back in 1928, when he met the 20th Century Davy Crockett in El Paso, read two chapters of his never-completed autobiography and listened to such Thoreau-like observations as "Property is a handicap to man." After Ben died in 1936. at 79, Dobie started back-trailing on his life in an effort to flush the truth out of the thicket of legend which had grown up around his name. The result is a briery, humor-speckled portrait of a roughhewn U.S. eccentric who lived only for the kill.

As a young man, Alabama-born Ben Lilly inherited his uncle's Louisiana farm but left his livestock to "root-hog or die" while he spent long weeks in the woods, hunting bear. As a husband he was no more successful than as a farmer. One day when his wife said, "Ben, you like to shoot so well, why don't you get your gun and shoot that chicken hawk?" he left the house and did not come back for more than a year. "That hawk kept flying," he explained.

His athletic prowess was the talk of the countryside. Seizing a 100-lb. blacksmith anvil with one hand, he would lift it straight out and up, and then with both hands toss it over his shoulder. At 44, and holding a brick in each hand, so the story goes, he completed three consecutive standing broad jumps totaling 36 feet. (U.S. standing broad-jump record, without bricks: 11 ft. 4 7/8 in.) At 50, he could stand in an empty barrel and jump out without touching the rim.

Author Dobie calls Lilly a "brutal exterminator" of Western wild life who somehow believed hunting to be his "patriotic duty." He preferred to sleep on the ground even when a bed was available, and carried no food except some meal and corn into the wilderness with him. In winter he wore three or four wool shirts at a time; to keep them clean enough to suit him, he merely rotated them from skinside to outside, let the elements launder them.

In Lilly's long life as a hunter he probably killed close to 1,000 bears and mountain lions. He might have killed more but for one Sabbatarian self-limitation: he would abandon even the freshest trail on Saturday evening and refuse to pick it up again until Monday morning. Says Author Dobie: Ben Lilly "was in the tradition of the Mountain Men and was the very last man in that tradition. There can never be another."

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