Appalachian Figures
In most stories about Benjamin Vernon “Ben” Lilly, the hunter appears fully formed. He pads through the Gila Wilderness with a pack of hounds, slips after lions in the Sierra Madre, or guides President Theodore Roosevelt on a black bear hunt along a Louisiana bayou. Roosevelt remembered him as a man who slept in trees during storms, walked for a day without food or water, and treated cold rain and hunger as minor inconveniences.
Long before he became a legend of the Southwest, though, Lilly was a blacksmith’s son in a violent, deeply religious corner of eastern Mississippi. His childhood in Kemper County helps explain how a quiet boy from a rural workshop turned into the last of the old style mountain men.
Kemper County: Cotton, Churches, and “Bloody Kemper”
Kemper County was carved out of former Choctaw land in 1833, part of the wave of cotton frontier counties that rose after the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek opened much of east central Mississippi to white settlement. By 1840 the county counted 4,623 free residents and 3,040 enslaved people. On the eve of the Civil War that population had nearly doubled and was roughly half free and half enslaved, supported by farms and plantations that raised cotton, corn, sweet potatoes, and livestock.
Kemper was never a railroad or industrial hub. It was a landscape of small towns and scattered farmsteads: De Kalb at the center, crossroads communities like Oak Grove and Binnsville dotted along dirt roads and creeks. Churches loomed large in that world. On the eve of the war the county had forty two congregations, one of the highest totals in Mississippi, most of them Baptist or Methodist.
After the Confederacy fell, Kemper gained a darker reputation. Reconstruction brought a majority Black population, federal civil rights, and ferocious white resistance. One modern historian describes a “frontier atmosphere” where pistols and Bowie knives were routine tools for settling political scores. The county became known as “Bloody Kemper.” The most notorious example was the Chisholm Massacre of 1877, when a mob stormed the jail in De Kalb and murdered Republican sheriff William Chisholm, members of his family, and Black supporters while authorities looked away.
This was the world, and the reputation, that shaped the young Ben Lilly.
A Blacksmith’s Household in the 1860 Census
Most modern biographies agree that Ben Lilly was born in the winter of 1856 in Wilcox County, Alabama, one of several children of Albert and Margaret Lilly. Some accounts give slightly different birth years, but they converge on a simple story: Albert was a blacksmith, and the family moved west into Mississippi while Ben was still a boy.
The key documentary link is the 1860 federal census for Kemper County. A transcription preserved on the Kemper County MSGenWeb site shows a household headed by “Albert Lilly,” with “Margaret,” “Ben,” “Sarah,” and “Joel Lilly” listed beneath him. That single line places the family in Kemper just before the Civil War and confirms that a child named Ben was living under Albert’s roof.
Census and compiled family records suggest that Albert spent about a decade in Kemper County before moving on to other parts of Mississippi and, eventually, Louisiana. The summary on FamilySearch, which draws from the same federal records, notes a period in “Kemper, Mississippi, United States” in the 1850s and 1860s before later addresses in Copiah County and beyond.
Land and tax records, many of them still only accessible in the Kemper County courthouse or at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, show that white families with the Lilly surname held property in the county’s central and eastern beats. The commercial “Family Maps of Kemper County, Mississippi,” compiled from federal land patents, plots those surnames on a grid of sections and townships, making it possible to see exactly where the Lilly place stood in relation to neighbors, roads, and streams.
What we cannot yet say with certainty, without a closer look at the original slave schedules and deed books, is exactly how many acres Albert controlled or whether he personally enslaved people. What we can say is that young Ben grew up in a county where nearly half the population was enslaved, under a system of law and custom that tied white landholding, Black labor, and violence together.
Faith, Family, and a Restless Boy
Kemper County was saturated with Protestant churches. Baptist and Methodist congregations ringed the countryside, from Blackwater Baptist to Hopewell and Spring Hill Methodist. Surviving cemetery transcriptions from Kemper show multiple Lilly burials at churches like Hopewell, suggesting an extended family network anchored in those congregations.
Later writers consistently describe Ben’s parents as strict Christians who raised their children in a world of revival meetings and Sabbath rules. Kelby Ouchley’s well documented biography for 64 Parishes notes that Albert moved his family to Kemper County, continued his blacksmith trade, and brought up Ben as a devout believer who particularly delighted in knife making at the forge.
That mix of piety and craftwork foreshadowed Lilly’s adult life. The same hands that learned to shape iron into plowshares and horseshoes in Kemper would later hammer out the long, double edged knives that he used on bears and mountain lions.
After the Civil War, the family tried to steer their son toward respectability. According to both Ouchley and later summaries, Albert and Margaret sent twelve year old Ben to a military academy in Jackson, Mississippi, hoping he would acquire discipline and perhaps a profession. Instead, he ran away.
For years his whereabouts were a mystery. One can imagine the rumors that might have circulated among kin and church members in Kemper: stories of a boy gone West, or lost in the woods, or dead. In reality, he had slipped into the wider river of Gilded Age migration.
From Kemper to Memphis to Morehouse Parish
The next trace of Ben Lilly comes not from Mississippi but from Memphis, Tennessee. There, according to Ouchley and other biographers, Ben’s uncle Vernon Lilly stumbled across a familiar looking young blacksmith and realized he had found his missing nephew.
Vernon was a planter in Morehouse Parish, Louisiana, across the Mississippi River from the hill country of east central Mississippi. He offered Ben work and, eventually, an inheritance if he would come back and help run the farm. Ben accepted. That choice pulled him out of Kemper County’s hills and into the bottomland world of Bayou Bartholomew and the Bonne Idee swamp.
By 1880 he had married Lelia Bunckley in Morehouse Parish and settled into the uneasy life of a cotton farmer. Ouchley’s account, supported by local records and J. Frank Dobie’s classic book The Ben Lilly Legend, reports that the marriage failed, the farm never suited him, and by the turn of the century he had abandoned domestic respectability for the life of a professional hunter.
In that sense, Kemper County was both origin and negative example. The same frontier culture that thrilled to hard work, outdoor skill, and old time religion also prized settled respectability and patriarchal control. Lilly embraced the first part and walked away from the second.
Theodore Roosevelt Meets a Hunter From Kemper County
If the census and church registers give us the bare facts of Ben Lilly’s youth, Theodore Roosevelt gives us something more vivid: an eyewitness sketch of the man he became. In 1907 Roosevelt traveled to northeastern Louisiana hoping to kill a black bear “after the fashion of the old Southern planters.” His chief guide on the hunt was the wiry, blue eyed hunter from Alabama and Mississippi who had made a name for himself in the Louisiana and Texas swamps.
Roosevelt later wrote that Lilly had joined the camp on foot, after tramping for roughly a day through thick woods without food or water, then sleeping for a few hours in a crooked tree rather than lie on the wet ground. He described Lilly’s “wild, gentle face,” his full beard, his habit of living constantly outdoors, and his fanatical religious convictions.
Those lines, preserved in Roosevelt’s letters and in his hunting book Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter, are among the most important primary sources on Lilly’s character. Roosevelt, who prided himself on toughness, openly marveled at this hunter’s indifference to hardship. Later popular writers would quote the same passages when crowning Lilly “the last mountain man” or “the toughest Westerner you have never heard of.”
Behind Roosevelt’s polished prose stands a lifetime of habits formed in places like Kemper County. Long days at the forge, hard work in cotton fields, and Sabbath strictness in rural churches prepared Lilly for the self denial he demanded of himself on the trail.
Predators, Specimens, and a Complicated Legacy
As Lilly drifted west through Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and northern Mexico, his reputation grew. Hunters, ranchers, and journalists celebrated him for tracking bears and cougars across hundreds of miles with only a few dogs and a rifle. Modern articles aimed at houndsmen and big game hunters repeat stories of hundred mile chases, knife fights with cornered bears, and a personal tally of predators that ran into the hundreds or even thousands.
There is folklore in those numbers, but there is also a paper trail. Beginning around 1904 Lilly sent animal skins and skulls to the United States Bureau of Biological Survey, the federal agency that became today’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Specimens attributed to him include cougars, black bears, red wolves, and even ivory billed woodpeckers from the disappearing bottomland forests. Several of those skulls and mounts ended up in the Smithsonian Institution’s collections in Washington.
Between 1916 and 1920 Lilly worked full time for the Biological Survey as a government predator control hunter, earning more money than he likely ever saw in Kemper County. In the short run, his work fit the priorities of his era. Ranchers and many wildlife managers believed that killing apex predators was necessary to protect livestock and big game.
Seen from today, Lilly’s record looks very different. Modern conservationists and environmental writers point out that men like Lilly helped drive grizzly bears, red wolves, and cougars to near extinction across large swaths of the South and Southwest. One recent essay bluntly describes him as “one of the most destructive individuals” in the history of North American predator control.
That contradiction runs back to his Kemper County roots. He was a product of a rural Southern culture that could be both intensely religious and unflinchingly violent. The same county that built dozens of churches also produced the Chisholm Massacre and a national reputation for political killings. Lilly’s own life shows the same tension between piety and bloodshed.
Why Kemper County Matters in the Ben Lilly Story
Most popular pieces about Ben Lilly begin along the Tensas River in Louisiana or in the canyons of New Mexico. That makes sense for hunters looking for campfire stories. Yet tracing him back to Kemper County changes how we read those tales.
First, it locates Lilly firmly in the Black Belt South as well as in the mythic West. He was born in Alabama, raised in eastern Mississippi, and only later walked out into the mountains. Rural Kemper gave him much of what made him exceptional: a childhood spent outdoors, a trade at the forge, familiarity with horses and hounds, and a religious framework that made self denial into a kind of calling.
Second, Kemper’s history reminds us that Lilly’s story unfolded inside a larger, harsher landscape. The same county that helped form his character was built on land taken from the Choctaw and on the labor of enslaved people. It passed through the upheaval of emancipation, Black political participation, and violent white reaction.
Finally, putting Kemper County back into the picture shows how Southern backcountry places far from the Blue Ridge still connect to Appalachian themes. Kemper’s mixture of hardscrabble farms, small towns, church centered communities, and enduring poverty would have felt familiar to many mountain counties. So would its long memory of violence and its contested stories about honor, justice, and the proper relationship between people and the land.
Today, hikers in New Mexico can visit a bronze plaque to Ben Lilly, and hunters in Louisiana can walk the Ben Lilly Conservation Area along Bayou Bartholomew. Genealogists and local historians in Mississippi, meanwhile, can stand in front of the Kemper County courthouse, pull nineteenth century deed books from the shelves, and trace the blacksmith’s household where the mountain man began.
Sources and Further Reading
1860 U.S. Federal Census, Kemper County, Mississippi, household of Albert Lilly. Transcription at MSGenWeb, “1860 Census – Partial Page 1, Kemper County, Mississippi” (lists “Albert Lilly Margaret Ben Sarah Joel Lilly”). MSGW+1
Theodore Roosevelt, Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter (New York, 1905), especially the chapter on his Louisiana bear hunt and his descriptions of guide “Ben Lily.” For the key passages, see quotations reprinted in Boone and Crockett Club features and later biographies. Boone and Crockett Club+2Louisiana Sportsman+2
U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey and Smithsonian Institution specimen records for mammals and birds collected by Ben Lilly, summarized in modern accounts of his work with the Biological Survey. 64 Parishes+2American Houndsmen+2
Michael Brian Connolly, “Reconstruction in Kemper County, Mississippi” (M.A. thesis, Old Dominion University, 1989), abstract and thesis text for the county’s Reconstruction era violence and the emergence of “Bloody Kemper.” ODU Digital Commons
James D. Lynch, Kemper County Vindicated, and a Peep at Radical Rule in Mississippi (New York, 1879), a partisan Democratic narrative responding to the Chisholm affair. Internet Archive+1
J. Frank Dobie, The Ben Lilly Legend (Boston: Little, Brown, 1950; later reprints by University of Texas Press), the foundational narrative biography based on interviews and collected stories. UM Libraries Guides+1
Kelby Ouchley, “Ben Lilly,” 64 Parishes (2013), concise and well sourced encyclopedia entry that covers Lilly’s early life in Wilcox County and Kemper County, his move to Morehouse Parish, and his later hunting career. 64 Parishes+1
Aaron Robert Woodard, “He May Have Been the Greatest Big Game Hunter You Have Never Heard Of,” HistoryNet (May 26, 2023). Modern narrative feature that synthesizes Dobie, Roosevelt, and archival photographs. HistoryNet+1
Herman W. Brune, “Legend, Lore and Legacy: Ben Lilly,” Texas Parks and Wildlife Magazine (January 2003), popular history emphasizing Lilly’s East Texas years and his larger than life reputation. Texas Parks & Wildlife Magazine+1
“Ben Lilly,” Wikipedia, for a carefully referenced overview of his life, including details on his work for the Biological Survey and his later years in New Mexico. Wikipedia+1
“Ben Lilly,” American Houndsmen, and Jesse Wolf Hardin, “Ben Lilly: Bears, Blades and Contradictions,” Legends of America, for hunting focused perspectives that frame Lilly as a folk hero and explore the contradictions between his piety and his relentless predator killing. Legends of America+2American Houndsmen+2
Mississippi Encyclopedia, “Kemper County,” for demographic data, economic description, and the county’s long standing reputation for violence during Reconstruction, including the label “Bloody Kemper.” Mississippi Encyclopedia
Anel Darvel Bassett, “A Social and Economic History of Kemper County, Mississippi, in the Ante Bellum Period” (M.A. thesis, University of Alabama, 1947), for detailed analysis of antebellum agriculture, class structure, and landholding. University of Alabama IR
FamilySearch Wiki, “Kemper County, Mississippi Genealogy,” for an updated guide to surviving Kemper records, including deeds, tax rolls, and church registers held locally and at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. FamilySearch+1
MSGenWeb Kemper County pages, including cemetery transcriptions for Hopewell and Spring Hill Methodist cemeteries and local town sketches, for reconstructing Lilly kin networks and worship sites. MSGW+2MSGW+2