ArizonaRealCountry.com 43 December 2018 For English-born Ben Thompson, violence seemed to have followed him almost from the time the nine-year-old Thompson and his newly immigrant family had settled in Austin, Texas. Just four years later the 13-year-old Thompson riddled another adolescent with birdshot in an argument over who was the better shot. Two years after that, in 1858 he was involved in what was quite likely a racial incident, having shot and wounded an African-American teen. A brief apprenticeship as a printer was interrupted with the outset of the Civil War, and even then he was more involved in shooting - and killing - fellow Confederates even more so than the Union soldiers he and his brother Billy were fighting, killing at least two fellow cavalrymen, and then killing a Mexican Army Sergeant in a quarrel over a card game in a border town. One would have thought that marriage coupled with the end of the Civil War might have caused Thompson to think twice and settle down. But no, his hatred of the Yankee occupiers of Texas, that always was simmering under the surface, finally erupted one day when he ended up in a gunfight with some Union soldiers. He killed two of them and was promptly jailed by the Union occupation authorities. However, having bribed a guard he escaped across the Rio Grande to join the Emperor Maximilian's Army in Mexico. He was so trusted by the young Emperor that he was assigned the protecting of the Emperor's gold train. Later, as Maximilian was captured and executed by the forces of Benito Juarez, Thompson escaped in the nick of time, recrossed the Rio Grande, and began yet another murder spree which came to a close when he wounded his brother-in-law whom he had heard was abusing his wife. He was subsequently apprehended by the Union authorities and sent to Huntsville prison. However, with the ascent of pro-Confederates in the Texas state government in 1870, Thompson was pardoned and promptly left the state for the bustling cow-towns of Kansas. There, in Abilene, Thompson made a new friend - and once more promptly got into trouble. Thompson's new friend and partner was a saloon owner by the name of Phil Coe, who with Thompson purchased Abilene's Bull's Head Saloon - then proceeded to paint a mural of a bull, in, well, since this is a family publication, a fairly obscene position. The townsfolk were outraged and their marshal, a lanky, long-haired, wide-mustached chap by the name of James Butler Hickok, better known as "Wild Bill" was not amused. He soon got involved in a quarrel with both Coe and Thompson. To make matters worse, Thompson, as we have already noted despised Yankees. Hickok, who had served as a Union spy in Missouri during the Civil War, and until recently had been a scout for Colonel George Armstrong Custer, was a Yankee. Coe and Thompson tried to get an old Texas friend who had been hanging out at the Bull's Head to gun down Hickok, but John Wesley Hardin turned around and said to them that if Hickok needed killing, they should do it themselves. The plan came to naught when Thompson, bringing up his family from Texas, was involved in a carriage accident where his wife lost an arm and Thompson fractured a leg. While recuperating, Thompson learned that Coe had called out Hickok and was gunned down by the lawman in a now-famous gunfight on the streets of Abilene. For the next decade, Thompson wandered back and forth across Kansas, back to Texas, then back to Kansas again. He tried his hand at the establishment of gambling parlors, but more than likely ended up shooting customers - and an occasional lawman. However, one erstwhile lawman did befriend Thompson and hired him to join his private army protecting the navvies of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe in the railway war with the Denver and Rio Grande (whose President was the Civil War Union cavalry hero General William Palmer) over passage through Colorado's Royal Gorge. That lawman was Bat Masterson. Masterson's life had been saved several years earlier when Thompson ran interference in the brief gun battle that saw Masterson wounded in the hip, his girlfriend murdered, and the perpetrator, Sergeant Melvin King of the U.S. Cavalry shot down by Masterson. A number of King's fellow cavalrymen wanted to shoot down Masterson, but Thompson stepped in, his reputation enough to force the other soldiers to back down. With minimal violence, Masterson managed to get a Federal injunction preventing the Denver and Rio Grande from disturbing the route of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe. Soon it would be Masterson doing Thompson a big favor. Thompson learned that his erratic and possibly mentally unstable brother Billy had shot the hand off of a prominent citizen of Ogallala, Nebraska, with the town sheriff threatening to hang Billy Thompson. Ben Thompson loved his younger brother, and powerless to do anything without risking arrest begged Masterson to save him. Masterson obliged, enlisted the help of an old friend, a rancher who lived near Ogallala, and who himself had quite a reputation. His name? William F. Cody, better known as Buffalo Bill. Masterson engineered the rescue of the grievously wounded younger Thompson from the Ogallala jail, got him to Cody's ranch, waited several days, and then got Billy Thompson on board a train bound for Dodge City - straight to the arms of his vastly relieved older brother. Masterson was briefly in "hot water" with the law, but his Dodge City reputation, plus the fact that Billy Thompson was being railroaded into a hanging situation, got Masterson off the hook. Sensing that he had worn out his welcome in Kansas, Thompson and his family moved back to Texas, where in December 1880 the outlaw Thompson finally became a lawman himself. He was made City Marshal of Austin, Texas, where surprisingly he developed a following among the city's elite, despite never being totally sober even one day during his tenure. Always polite to ladies on the street, Thompson, perhaps remembering his own time behind bars, was exceedingly kind and fair to the inmates in his jail. If he had been able to leave well enough alone, Thompson might have been able to settle down for life in law enforcement. However, a drinking visit to San Antonio turned violent when Thompson got into a quarrel with James Harris, the saloon owner of one of San Antonio's more notorious drinking establishments, the Vaudeville Variety Theater and Gambling Saloon. Barred from entering the establishment, Thompson demanded entry, Harris grabbed a gun but wasn't fast enough. Within minutes Harris lay mortally wounded on the floor, and Thompson acquitted - going home to Austin and despite the pleas of his community who had thrown a big parade in honor of their hot-tempered, hard-drinking Marshal, Thompson chose to turn in his badge. Like a moth drawn to a flame, the 40-year-old Thompson, at an age where he should have known better, once more went on a drinking binge with his friend, another notorious gunman (once arrested by the Texas Rangers for murder and mayhem)-turned-lawman named John King Fisher. To make matters worse, Thompson insisted on a return visit to the Vaudeville Variety Theater and Gambling Saloon to see a show on the evening of March 11, 1884. Harris, of course, was long dead, but his friends had taken over the theater. They calmly invited Thompson and Fisher up to a box to see the show and at first things seemed quite normal. Then someone brought up the Harris murder, tempers flared, and both Thompson and Fisher went for their guns - too late, for while Fisher was able to get off a shot that mortally wounded Harris's new partner Joe Foster, Foster and his friends opened fire at close range on both Fisher and Thompson. Thompson died, riddled with nine bullets; Fisher went down with 13 shots perforating him. His brother Billy, disconsolate over the death of his older brother, would get deeper and deeper into trouble until four years later when a well-placed shot in Laredo would also end his troubled life. By Alan Rockman In this second installment we will take a look at a couple more of the men who began their adolescent and adult lives as outlaws, went respectable for a time, but then reverted back to the Outlaw lifestyle. Of the four, one was relatively famous, two were quite obscure, and the last one, not very well known throughout the West but did become quite a controversial figure here in Arizona at the turn of the 20th Century. They were Ben Thompson, John Larn, Milton J. Yarberry, and (Al)Bert Alvord. The Fine Line Between an Old West Lawman and the Outlaw Life (and how it was crossed over so many times) PART 2 Ben Thompson continued on page 44