Ep. 07: The Mystery of Ben Thompson

Join author Bryan Burrough for the story of the greatest Old West gunfighter you’ve never heard of. Thank you to our sponsor, Tecovas tecovas.com. Follow now on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-american-west/id1811365050, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0wrs79YL0Jw2AjQrCBKUUu?si=56a282df832a4bd2, iHeart, and YouTube https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIQv7voZWHy4X3UFECqr3ggFIj9uQJT2O&si=TG3vGnVvFhznWz0g. MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAaa0mleeU128Ad5iM1RFIg, and Youtube Clips https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterClips Check out more MeatEater's American History audio originals "The Long Hunters https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-long-hunters.html?lang=en_US&persistUserId=MT777dfccfb5ad885f&_gl=1*1wsssmp*_gcl_au*OTE4NjU0MjA1LjE3NDE4MDEzNTI.*_ga*MTUzMTAxNzcxNC4xNzQwNTEzMzQ0*_ga_J3M86GMH9B*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuNTMuMC4w*_ga_VNCSXFY0BW*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuMC4wLjA." and "Mountain Men https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-mountain-men.html?lang=en_US" Subscribe to The MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Shop MeatEater Merch https://store.themeateater.com/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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  Early on a hot summer evening, July 11th, 1882, one of the greatest gunfighters you've probably never heard of, the Texas gambler Ben Thompson, was spitting mad, pacing up and down outside the Vaudeville Theater in San Antonio. He and one of the theater's owners, a volatile type named Jack Harris, had argued over a gambling debt. And for the last two years, Harris had told pretty much everyone he met that he intended to kill Thompson. At one point, he delicately told a mutual friend he planned to, quote, "make a hole in him that a cat can jump through." Finally, Thompson had enough. He came to the Vaudeville that day, determined to have it out with Harris, one way or the other.

• 2:20Speaker 03

  Unfortunately, when Thompson first showed up, Harris was nowhere to be found. One of his partners walked out into the street and gingerly tried to calm Thompson down. "No use talking to me, Billy," Thompson said. "There's going to be hell here tonight." When Harris finally appeared and snatched up a shotgun, Thompson had gone. But a little after sundown, Thompson returned and once again stood in the street outside. Again, there was no sight of Harris. At one point, Thompson was seen stepping off a curb in the shadow beyond a streetlight's glow. He leaned over to peer into the theater's dim front saloon.

• 3:00Speaker 03

  There, behind a lattice screen, he spied Harris leaning against a wall, holding that shotgun. Thompson shouted, "What are you doing with that shotgun, you damn son of a bitch?" Harris replied, "You kiss my ass, you damn son of a bitch." and raised the gun. Thompson whipped out his pistol and, well, let's hold off on that just a second, okay? First, I want to tell you a little bit about who Ben Thompson really was, because for my money, he probably was the deadliest gunfighter you've never heard of. This is Gunfighters, brought to you by Tacovas, good boots for good times.

• 3:48Speaker 03

  Hey y'all, it's Brian Bura, and welcome to episode seven of Gunfighters. Thanks for coming by. One of the things I love about writing history, and I enjoy this in such a big way around the subject of Old West gunfighters, is when I get to dig up and kind of reintroduce to a modern audience, someone who used to be pretty famous back in the day, but who, for whatever reason, ended up more or less forgotten. I mean, there's a lot of people like that in this series. Few gunfighters, though, got to be as famous or as forgotten as Ben Thompson. In fact, if the pantheon of Old West shooters is led by what I think of as the big five, that'd be Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, Wild Bill Hickok, John Wesley Hardin, and Jesse

• 4:32Speaker 03

  James, I think I'd place Thompson squarely in the next, the second tier, probably at the top of it. He may be the most important gunfighter you've never heard of, and his mysterious demise is kind of the Old West equivalent of the Kennedy assassination, a very public death that spawned years of conspiracy theories. Certainly among gamblers of the day who roamed the West and swarmed those Kansas cowtowns, they were known as sporting men, or sports, which I totally love, Thompson was one of the most famous and feared. In fact, some have argued he belongs in that top tier himself.

• 5:12Speaker 03

  Writing 25 years after his death, Bat Masterson actually judged Thompson the greatest gunfighter of all, which feels to me like a stretch. Masterson, and remember, this was a guy who knew as many actual gunfighters as anyone, judged Ben Thompson not only the killer of the most men, sorry, no, but the keenest marksman, sure, I mean, maybe, and the most feared. Okay, well, if he says so. Whatever his statistics, though, there's no denying Thompson's fame. There's a moment in the 1870s, after Hickok's death and before the rise of Billy the Kid, when he might have been the most famous gunfighter of all.

• 5:53Speaker 03

  At the height of his fame, Thompson owned a sailboat he named after the editor of a New York newspaper. A sailboat. He was kind of an odd bird, dapper and press-friendly, with a mix of southern gentility but a hair-trickled temper. He could be genial and gentlemanly one moment, drunk and deadly the next, which can be a little jarring. I had this theory about Thompson that could help explain this. As you listen to his story, keep in mind the violence he encountered as a young man during and after the Civil War. I think there's a case to be made he may have suffered from something like PTSD. Oh, and Thompson's backstory is one of the more colorful you'll hear about in this series.

• 6:37Speaker 03

  Almost all the details of it come from Thompson himself, who loved relating them to newspaper reporters, especially the ones in Texans. He probably did a better job than any other gunfighter, controlling his personal narrative, as they say these days.

• 6:54Speaker 03

  It's fair to ask how much of this backstory could possibly be true. What I'll tell you is that his biographers had generally confirmed the outlines of Thompson's tales and haven't found any major holes in the narrative he presented. He was born, in of all places, England, near the city of Leeds in north-central England. His family immigrated to the Texas capital city of Austin when he was eight. His father, we're told, worked as a fisherman, presumably on the Colorado River there. Even as an adolescent, it's pretty clear young Ben had developed quite the temper, and that he thought little of drawing his gun to settle a disagreement.

• 7:36Speaker 03

  He shot his first man, it looks like, another teenager, when he was 15. The other boy, we're told, mocked his ability to shoot, offered his rear end as a target, and boldly dared Ben to hit it. Ben hoisted a shotgun and blasted him with birdshot. He drew 60 days in jail. After that, he became a printer's apprentice in Austin and later in New Orleans. There, his penchant for violence grew. He later told of a time he shot and wounded a man he caught stealing from the shop where he worked. Another time, Thompson saw a Frenchman offend a woman on a trolley, and he rose to defend her.

• 8:21Speaker 03

  In the ensuing tussle, Thompson stabbed the man. So this fella caught up with Thompson later on and demanded a duel. According to Thompson, they fought with knives in a darkened basement. The Frenchman ended up dead, and when his friends vowed revenge, Thompson ended up on a mule fleeing back to Austin. When the war began, Thompson was 17. He enlisted in the Confederate Army and fought in Louisiana and at Galveston. His first serious shooting was in December 1861, at a fort on the Rio Grande. As Thompson told it, in the heat of a disagreement, he shot a sergeant and then fended off another officer who attacked him with a sword, shooting him too.

• 9:06Speaker 03

  Well, maybe. The sergeant, an older soldier named Billy Vance, had his own version of the story, which he later told a reporter. According to Vance, he and Thompson had argued over a scrap of meat at chow time. When Thompson suddenly drew his gun, Vance said he grabbed its muzzle and the shot went wild. I tend to believe this version of the story. Anyway, Thompson was thrown in a stockade for four months. It probably says something about his charm, and Thompson's known for his charm, that Sergeant Vance dismissed all this as boyish bravado, and the two went on to become fast friends.

• 9:49Speaker 03

  The centerpiece of Thompson's origin story is another episode from the final months of the war, a wild tale of gambling and gunfights down on the Rio Grande. Here's also where we meet Thompson's brother Billy, a drunk who Thompson was forever bailing out of scrapes. The meat of the tale is a two-night card game in Laredo, during which a dozen Mexican-American soldiers bet and lost their pistols and paychecks. Thompson was hosting the game, and when he closed it, he faced a room full of angry losers. An officer stepped forward and menacingly demanded the guns back. When Thompson refused, someone fired a shot.

• 10:32Speaker 03

  Thompson remembers he ducked low, then shot and killed the soldier who apparently fired it, and then the officer as well. The two candles that had lit the room blew out. In the gloom, Thompson plunged into the crowd at the door to make his escape. Outside, another soldier shot at him. Ben dived into a cistern. When he emerged, he found his brother Billy waiting to flee with him. In Thompson's telling, their escape north to Austin featured an attack by feral dogs and a climactic battle, cannons and all, in which the Thompsons and a Confederate regiment fought off a mob of angry Mexican-American soldiers attempting to bring Ben to justice.

• 11:17Speaker 03

  Some story.

• 11:20Speaker 03

  Was any of it remotely true? I mean, really, it's impossible to know. But late in the war, there were two other confirmed incidents that made Thompson's reputation as a gunman, at least there in Austin. In 1864, while he was working for Confederate recruiters, he and a pal named John Rapp ran into some kind of trouble with a tough guy named John Coombs. Coombs then knifed Rapp in a bar fight, and Rapp staggered to Thompson's house for protection. Thompson grabbed the pistol. When they left the house, they learned that this Coombs was busy rounding up a mob to come after them.

• 12:02Speaker 03

  When Thompson crept into a darkened alleyway to investigate, Coombs and a crowd of maybe 20 guys emerged and opened fire. Rather than run, Thompson rushed forward in the shadows. He shot one man at close range, then he wheeled and shot and killed another man on horseback. It seems Coombs was the man on horseback, and once he was killed, the mob lost its enthusiasm and kinda, you know, melted away into the night. The next day, Thompson turned himself in. He was charged with murder, but he went free on bond. The second of these incidents came nine months later, in the final days of the war.

• 12:46Speaker 03

  Thompson and another soldier noticed an Italian teamster named Alberto Algerio driving a team of horses bearing Confederate brands. Sensing the horses were stolen, they flagged down Algerio and tried to question him. Algerio didn't speak English, though, and confused and probably thinking he was being robbed, he responded by hoisting a shotgun. Thompson drew his pistol and shot the Italian dead. In July 1865, three months after the war's end, Union forces assumed control in Austin, and Thompson found himself in jail, probably on charges related to these killings.

• 13:29Speaker 03

  Thompson eventually slipped bribes to a pair of his guards, and two months after that, on September 17, 1865, he disguised himself as a Union soldier, escaped, and rode for Mexico. At the time, another civil war was underway there against Emperor Maximilian I, who'd been installed by the French the year before. For the next two years, Thompson served in Maximilian's forces. He saw action in a dozen battles until Maximilian was defeated in 1867. After that, Thompson survived a bout of yellow fever and eventually made his way back to Austin.

• 14:09Speaker 03

  Back in his hometown, he stood trial for the murder of John Coombs and was found not guilty. By now, Ben Thompson was putting down roots. He had a wife and a child who would need his support, so he needed a job, and he became a professional gambler. He was granted a concession at a downtown barroom called the Rawhide Saloon, where he began to make his living. There's reason to doubt whether this was the best career move, though. In an early biography, Thompson admits that in his first years as a professional, he was often so broke he had to pawn his pistol, like, three times. The great gambling historian Herbert Asbury once wrote that Thompson's "talent as a

• 14:54Speaker 03

  sharper" was mediocre. "He was clumsy at short cards and usually dealt pharaoh honestly because he wasn't clever enough to deal it otherwise." Before long, though, Thompson's temper got him in trouble again, and this time it was serious. This time involved his no-account brother-in-law, James Moore. In September 1868, after some kind of family squabble, Thompson went to ask a justice of the peace for a protection order against Moore. Just then, a man rushed in saying that someone had attacked Thompson's pregnant wife. Thompson raced home and found that Moore had struck her with a pistol.

• 15:37Speaker 03

  Thompson went to find Moore, and when he did, he shot him in the side. Moore survived, but Thompson was thrown in jail again. This time, a military tribunal sentenced him to four years hard labor at the state prison in Huntsville. A local paper described Thompson as "somewhat notorious for murders and assaults." The paper explained that the tribunal had gotten involved because "no one dared appear against him in other courts." The same news account also offers a sense of how furious Thompson was, noting that he "saw fit to inform the magistrate who issued process against him that he intended

• 16:19Speaker 03

  to kill him at his earliest convenience." In prison, Ben Thompson was measured at 5'8" and 117 pounds with blue eyes and wavy brown hair. His prison file doesn't say much else about him, and that's because just two years into his sentence, he received a presidential pardon. That's right, a presidential pardon, from the actual president at the time, Ulysses S. Grant. To this day, there's never been a full explanation for what that pardon was really about, though Thompson once suggested it was some kind of legal technicality. I'm guessing it had to be, probably a standard legal appeal lost to history, because, I

• 17:01Speaker 03

  mean, it's not like Ben Thompson was prominent enough to have friends who could have influenced the White House. Anyway, the point is, one day, he was in prison, the next day, he was back in Austin, looking for a job. A gambler named Phil Coe, and this is the same Phil Coe, killed by Wild Bill Hickok last episode, welcomed Thompson back to Austin and told him about a new venture he and his partners were planning: a bar for Texas cowboys in the booming Kansas cowtown of Abilene. It can be hard to reconcile the frankly thuggish Ben Thompson of these early years and the dapper Ben Thompson whose charming newspaper reporters barely five years later.

• 17:45Speaker 03

  Clearly, his behavior softened after prison. Maybe he just grew up. Because over the next few years, Thompson emerged as one of the best-known sports in the Kansas cowtowns, popular with the Texans and mostly friendly with lawmen. Mostly, I say, because in his first season in Kansas, he had a walk-on role in that famous squabble we told you about last episode between Wild Bill Hickok and Wes Harden. Thompson and a partner had started a bar called the Bull's Head Tavern. We're told its sign on the street featured a, um, erect bull's penis, which apparently didn't please some of the more conservative townspeople.

• 18:26Speaker 03

  We're told further that Hickok had it painted over and that Thompson was livid about that. According to Wes Harden, who wrote about all this years later, Thompson urged him to kill Hickok, at which point Harden, no fool, suggested Thompson do it himself. In what became a very violent summer for Abilene, almost all due to Harden, he and Hickok never pulled pistols on each other. Thompson, in fact, missed almost all the violence. He invited his family to come join him in Kansas and met them in Kansas City. After their reunion, though, they were riding in this buggy one day when the buggy suddenly overturned. Both Thompson and his wife were severely injured.

• 19:10Speaker 03

  She actually had her arm amputated, and for months, he was laid up with a broken leg. By 1873, Thompson had recovered sufficiently, though, to join the gamblers flocking to the new hotspot in central Kansas, the famed cattle town of Ellsworth. Ellsworth was six years old that summer and had become the main shipment point for Texans and their cattle. It would go down in history as the most corrupt of the cattle towns and certainly the most corrupt police force. The marshal was this character named John Norton, known as Brockie Jack, who'd once been a deputy of Hickok's and who'd relocated to Ellsworth after being shot by another

• 19:54Speaker 03

  deputy, which happens. Brockie Jack's officers included, and I love this, Long Jack DeLong, High Low Jack Branham, Happy Jack Morco, and the sadly unnamed Ed Hoag. This force is known to Old West history as Four Jacks and a Joker. According to one local memoirist...

• 20:17Speaker 04

  Every man on the force was a bribe-taker and a villain. Every man on the force would kill on the slightest provocation.

• 20:25Speaker 03

  The roughest of the bunch was Happy Jack Morco. Morco was a refugee from the West Coast. When he first arrived in Ellsworth, he was arrested for vagrancy. He's described as a drunk, swaggering braggart who boasted of having killed 12 men. So, in the spirit of the town, he was promptly hired to help police it. What could go wrong, right? Brockie Jack and his men delighted in harassing the Texas drovers and especially the Texas gamblers. They'd arrest them for almost anything: carrying a weapon, disorderly conduct, disturbing the peace, unnecessary belching, just about anything real and imagined.

• 21:08Speaker 03

  Most arrests were made in and around the bars on South Main Street on a stretch everyone called Snake Row. From there, the arrested men would be escorted across a plaza and into court, where they'd be fined between $15 and $35, unless they'd already bribed a deputy to get out of it. By one estimate, as many as 30 men a day made that trip. That summer of 1873 was oppressively hot by Kansas standards. Temperatures were regularly above 90 degrees, and thanks to this harassment by the police, temperatures were rising among the Texans, too. By July, rumors of violence were brewing.

• 21:51Speaker 03

  On July 3, one paper ran a headline that managed to be both hopeful and ominous. It was just three words: "nobody killed yet." When the violence finally started, no one was all that surprised that the man who seemed to start it was Ben Thompson.

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• 24:48Speaker 03

  Thompson's brother Billy had joined him there in Ellsworth, and they were both locally known as hell raisers. Billy had been arrested twice there already. The first time was for firing his pistol in the air, and he spent a week in jail for it. Then on July 31st, 1873, Happy Jack Morco arrested Billy for public drunkenness. Billy tried to resist and he was given a fine. This second arrest became a flashpoint in the evolving feud between the Texans and the police. Morco ended up getting fired, then rehired, and he apparently blamed the Thompson brothers for his trouble. The shooting began on a sweltering Friday morning, August 15th.

• 25:32Speaker 03

  Ben Thompson was in Brennan's Saloon that morning, watching a money game between two Texas cattlemen. When one of them bet more than the other wanted to handle, Thompson was asked to find someone who could cover the man's over bets. Thompson turned to another gambler named John Sterling, who agreed to cover the bets and to split any winnings with Thompson. Sterling ended up joining the game himself and winning something like $1,000, which was a major haul. By that point, Thompson had left, and Sterling showed no inclination to pay him his part of the proceeds. When Thompson heard this, he went looking for Sterling. He found him in another saloon and asked for his money.

• 26:16Speaker 03

  Sterling, who was by now deeply drunk, slapped Thompson. From all accounts, Thompson was pretty close to drawing his gun. But Happy Jack Morco was in the saloon and drew his gun first. Morco warned Ben not to escalate the fight. Ben stormed out and returned to Brennan's, where he buttonholed one of the cattlemen, probably to serve as a witness to the promise Sterling had made to share his winnings. As Thompson and the cattlemen spoke, Happy Jack Morco and John Sterling appeared at the front door. Morco was holding two pistols, Sterling a shotgun. One of them, I'm thinking it was Morco, yelled at them,

• 26:59Speaker 04

  Get your guns, you Texas sons of bitches, and fight!

• 27:03Speaker 03

  That was all it took. Thompson was unarmed. He demanded someone hand him a gun. Nobody would though, so Thompson stalked out a back door to another saloon where he checked his guns earlier. He grabbed his pistol and a Winchester rifle and circled back to the plaza. His brother Billy, meanwhile, was waiting there, drunk as usual, and holding a bulky shotgun of his own. Billy offered to help, but Thompson shoot him away. A crowd was gathering along Snake Road, and Thompson hollered at them,

• 27:38Speaker 04

  If you damn sons of bitches want to fight, here we are.

• 27:42Speaker 03

  This was the moment that cemented Ben Thompson's legend, a story told for years, up and down Kansas and eventually beyond. As it happened though, the only man who met Thompson's challenge was the county's kindly sheriff, this guy Chauncey Whitney, who strode up and suggested everyone join him for a drink and just calm down. Thompson was still simmering, but he agreed. As they walked together into Brennan's Saloon, looking like everything was done, someone suddenly shouted, "Look out, Ben!" Thompson turned to see Morco and Sterling duck into some storefronts down the street. Thompson immediately raised his Winchester and fired.

• 28:26Speaker 03

  He had just stepped toward the men's hiding places when the sound of a shotgun blast exploded behind him. Thompson whirled to see Sheriff Whitney standing with a stricken look on his face. A step or two behind the sheriff stood his brother Billy, the shotgun in his hands. It had gone off accidentally. Whitney managed to say, quote,

• 28:50Speaker 04

  My God, Billy, you've shot me.

• 28:53Speaker 03

  Thompson barked at his brother, quote,

• 28:55Speaker 04

  My God, you've shot our best friend!

• 28:58Speaker 03

  An angry crowd began gathering. Thompson managed to get his brother onto horse to leave town before they were lynched. By that afternoon, 100 Texans were milling in front of Ben's hotel, making sure no one came after him. The sheriff died, and Billy got charged with murder. He became a fugitive. Ben was briefly detained and testified at the inquest, then boarded a train to safety. The violence that day and afterwards was news all the way to Chicago. And in fact, the violence was only beginning. A vigilance committee was formed. The police clearly wanted revenge on the Texans. Rumors swirled about certain Texans who'd been marked for death.

• 29:43Speaker 03

  The next week, an officer named Edward Crawford got into an argument inside a store with a Texas cattlerman named Cad Pierce. The officer shot Pierce, then leaned down and beat him with a revolver until his brain spilled onto the floor. The next day, August 21st, Ellsworth pretty much emptied out. Dozens of gamblers and cattlemen boarded trains east, just as Ben had. Happy Jack Morco, who'd been fired yet again, left town for a time. Then though, against all warnings, he returned in early September. When he arrived, a new lawman in town named Charles Brown demanded Morco's revolvers. Morco drew on him, and Brown shot Morco through the heart.

• 30:28Speaker 03

  So yeah, tough place. And it wasn't over. Edward Crawford, the officer who'd killed Cad Pierce, also refused to leave town. That November, he was shot and killed too. That was pretty much the end of Ellsworth's days as a cattle town.

• 30:45Speaker 03

  Thompson's adventures in Kansas made his reputation. He emerged as a celebrity in Texas in a figure of curiosity to editors back east. He was the rare frontier gunman who could sit and explain, once over a dish of strawberry ice cream, the acceptable way to kill one's adversary. Thompson liked to emphasize that honor, not to mention a legal verdict of self-defense, required him to always allow an opponent to fire first. He once said, quote, "I know that he's pretty certain in his hurry to miss. I never do." Thompson adored the coverage he received. When he traveled, he'd send telegrams back to the newspaper in Austin recapping his days.

• 31:30Speaker 03

  Journalists returned the love. One wrote that, quote,

• 31:33Speaker 04

  Ben Thompson probably comes nearer the ideal knight of chivalrous desperadoism than any other man in Texas.

• 31:43Speaker 03

  For the rest of his career, Thompson's gunfights were limited to Texas. In time though, his story begins to darken. As he grows older, Thompson began to drink more heavily and was prone to a kind of juvenile hell raising that undercut his reputation as a gentleman. He liked to shoot out streetlights, among other things. He suffered from insomnia, which kept him out too much and too late, inevitably drunk. His first biographer, who happened to be his lawyer, wrote that, quote, While sober, he was polite, affable, and as much the gentleman as in all the times past. But when indulging in drink beyond

• 32:22Speaker 03

  On a certain degree, he became dictatorial and dogmatic, making it extremely disagreeable to be in his company. Dangerous, too. On Christmas night in 1876, one of Thompson's pals got into a fight at a crowded theater with the owner of the theater, a hot-tempered type named Mark Wilson. In the ensuing fight, Thompson threw a punch. Wilson pulled out a shotgun behind the bar and pointed it at Thompson. As Wilson fired, a policeman knocked the barrel aside, and the buckshot flew wide, hitting a wall. Thompson then drew and shot Wilson at least three times, killing him.

• 33:06Speaker 03

  A bartender grabbed a Winchester and then shot at Thompson. The bullet creased Thompson's hip. Thompson fired back, striking the man in the jaw, badly wounding him. Across Texas, this shooting was front-page news. Most thought it self-defense. Thompson was tried for Wilson's murder and acquitted. In another incident that made headlines, four drunks from the cattle town of Lano were in a bar in Austin, going on about how tough Lano men were. Thompson, no doubt drunk, dressed in his top hat and a diamond stick pin, stepped close

• 33:47Speaker 03

  to one of them, a man named William Hannah, and lightly drew the back of his hand down Hannah's cheek. He purred at the Lano man, quote, "I'm Ben Thompson, and if I should go up there, I would serve you boys just so," close quote. Whatever that meant, Hannah responded by punching Thompson, knocking off his hat. Both men went for their pistols. Hannah shot and missed. His gun jammed, he ran outside, where he attempted to hide behind a light pole. Thompson called on Hannah to step out from behind the pole. When he did, Thompson said, "Well, I will mark you anyway." He raised his pistol and fired.

• 34:29Speaker 03

  The bullet struck Hannah's ear, and he began to run. Thompson fired again, hitting Hannah in the hip. Hannah survived, and Thompson was charged with assault. The case was dismissed when bystanders said it was the Lano men who'd really started all the trouble. This kind of thing made Thompson a polarizing figure in Austin, and eventually the newspaper turned against him. Thompson was still popular enough, or feared enough, that when he ran for city marshal in 1881, he won the election. This might sound like an odd career move, but years later, after Thompson's death,

• 35:09Speaker 03

  one of his critics disclosed that Thompson had used his new post to extort a 30% share from every major gambling house in Austin. This appears to have made Thompson a pretty wealthy man, at least by local standards. He bought that sailboat and a home across from the administration building at the new University of Texas. Thompson was often seen in his front yard there, taking target practice. As marshal, he stayed out of too much trouble. Still, reporters always said it was only a matter of time before his luck ran out. The seeds of his demise were planted in 1879, in San Antonio, 80 miles south, while he was gambling at the Vaudeville Theater.

• 35:52Speaker 03

  Thompson was losing big at Monty that night. As a promise he would pay his debt, he handed over a gold watch and several loose diamonds. But when Thompson returned the next night and retrieved the items, he refused to pay his debt. Thompson said he'd been cheated and pulled a pistol on one of the Vaudeville's owners, a friend named Joe Foster. The next day, the two made up, but Foster's business partner was not satisfied. This guy, whose name was Jack Harris, was kind of a walking volcano. Just about every time Harris met someone from Austin, he swore to them that he'd kill Thompson. Finally, in 1882, Thompson had had enough.

• 36:34Speaker 03

  That's when he showed up that night outside the Vaudeville and saw Harris lurking in the shadows inside. From out in the street, Thompson drew and fired. Everyone said later it was an amazing shot. The bullet hit Harris in the chest, staggering him. A second shot went wide, but Harris was dead soon after. Thompson returned to his rooms at the Mangor Hotel. He sent word he would surrender in the morning, and he did. He was indicted for murder, and for four months, he sat simmering in a jail cell in San Antonio. He was obliged to resign as city marshal of Austin. Every twist and turn of his trial was reported on the newspaper's front pages.

• 37:18Speaker 03

  When the jury finally acquitted him, he returned to a hero's welcome in Austin. A brass band and a cheering crowd actually met him at the train station. So after all this, you'd think Ben Thompson would have turned a page. I mean, the guy just turned 40. His children were teenagers, and he and his wife had been married for 20 years. But something wasn't right here. Thompson's drinking, you can tell, was getting out of control. One night in Austin, he staggered into a theater drunk and opened fire on the audience and the performers. The crowd panicked, and he laughed uproariously because he was firing blanks.

• 38:02Speaker 03

  Another evening, in January 1884, when he heard that a friend of his was in an argument, Thompson barged into the Stockman's Convention banquet, waving a gun around. He wound up in a standoff with another older friend of his as the tuxedo cattlemen stampeded out the exits. Thompson was enraged by news reports about this incident. He kicked a reporter in the street, then stormed into the office of the newspaper and interrogated a teenage clerk at gunpoint. Afterwards, a San Antonio paper denounced all this as Thompson's reign of terror. Papers as far away as Chicago and New York covered the events.

• 38:46Speaker 03

  The Austin paper snapped, quote, "The police are afraid of Thompson, and he knows it, and therefore does as he pleases." This was all so nuts. I mean, I kind of wonder, could this have been PTSD? Or was this a man haunted by his other ghost, just, you know, overwhelmed by drink? Then, out of nowhere, this was March 1884, Thompson received a surprising invitation. Joe Foster, one of the owners of the Vaudeville Theater, asked him to come visit. At first, Thompson scoffed.

• 39:23Speaker 04

  If I were to go into that place, it would be my graveyard.

• 39:27Speaker 03

  But then, on March 11th, another aging gunfighter, a one-time South Texas killer named King Fisher, came to Austin, and he and Thompson got to drinking. For reasons no one was ever quite able to explain, Fisher insisted they go down to the Vaudeville, back to San Antonio. Everyone wondered later why Thompson went. Was it to see his brother Billy, who was in San Antonio that day? Or to see a woman? Or a show? It was true that Joe Foster hadn't taken it well when Thompson killed his business partner. Maybe this was Fisher's attempt to broker a peace? Or maybe something darker was afoot?

• 40:12Speaker 03

  Whatever the reason, the two gunfighters found themselves on the 4:00 PM train headed south to San Antonio. Thompson was at his very worst on the ride down, deep into a bender. At one point, he swiped a bottle of whiskey from a fellow traveler. When he became irritated by something the porter said, Thompson bashed the whiskey bottle over the porter's head, spraying blood all over his own silk top hat. Thompson then ripped off the hat's crown and disembarked in San Antonio, wearing only its brim. Word spread that Thompson and King Fisher were in town. Police, suspecting trouble, took up positions outside the Vaudeville.

• 40:56Speaker 03

  The two gunfighters first took in a show at another establishment, but then, yeah, walked to the Vaudeville, walking right in, rushing past the police. They took seats in an upstairs theater to watch a play. One of Thompson's friends, a gambler named Billy Sims, came over to join them along with a bouncer. They ordered cigars and whiskey. The theater's other co-owner, Joe Foster, was sitting nearby, and Sims called out to him. Foster got up and walked over. After a moment, he and Thompson began arguing. Later, it's said that Thompson called Foster a thief. It was at that point, suddenly, that gunshots rang out. Pandemonium erupted in the theater.

• 41:40Speaker 03

  Patrons were running and screaming. No one understood what was happening. But when the shooting stopped, both Thompson and King Fisher were found dead in a pool of blood. Thompson had been shot three times in the head. The three Vaudeville men, Joe Foster, Billy Sims, and that bouncer, were holding pistols. Joe Foster was badly wounded and died soon after. When Thompson's gun was checked, it had fired five times. Fisher's never left its holster.

• 42:15Speaker 03

  Both Thompson and Fisher had been public figures in Texas. These were among the newsiest killings in Texas history to that point. You'd think there would have been a big time investigation, right? You would be wrong. A San Antonio coroner simply ruled the killing self-defense. And after that, there was no serious inquiry. A hundred and some odd years later, there still hasn't been one. So what exactly happened there in the balcony of the theater? Was it simply an argument that turned into a shootout? Or was this all a staged assassination? Some speculate there had been riflemen hidden in the theater, shooting from the vaudeville's equivalent of the grassy knoll.

• 42:56Speaker 03

  Later, a coroner in Austin, probably a friend of Thompson's, claimed the bullets that killed Thompson had come from Winchester rifles fired from behind him. Maybe, maybe not. Every few years, even now, some local historian or hobbyist will float a new theory about what really happened. The fact is, we'll probably never know the truth. Which is a shame, to me at least, as is the fact that Ben Thompson is mostly forgotten today, except to gunfighter aficionados. The vaudeville, that's long gone too. But for years, the spot where it stood, at Commerce and Solidad Streets in downtown San Antonio, was known to Texans as the Fatal Corner.

• 43:40Speaker 03

  What set Ben Thompson apart, we're told, was less his physical than his mental gifts. His friend Bat Masterson credited him with, quote, "a much higher order of intelligence", close quote, "than his peers, and a coolness under fire to match." He was a man with gentlemanly pretensions, described as a stickler for honor and decorum. Masterson wasn't the only one to write that the men Thompson killed were dispatched, quote, "in an open and manly way." I'm Brian Bryan. This has been episode seven of Gunfighters. Thanks so much for coming by. Coming up in episode eight, we'll take you to the most famous gunfighter town of all. Really, gunfighter central. It's time to tell you the story of Dodge City.

• 44:40Speaker 02

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• 46:26Speaker 00

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