Ben Thompson: Portrait of a Gunfighter by Thomas C. Bicknell, Chuck Parsons (review)

On Tuesday evening, March 11, 1884, Ben Thompson climbed upstairs to the second floor gallery at the Vaudeville Theater in San Antonio to see a play. A few minutes later, he died in a hail of bullets, victim of an ambush, the murder still unsolved. Eerily presaging another Texas ambush seventy-nine years later, questions emerged: who conspired and murdered Ben Thompson? Why had someone wanted to kill him that night and at that place? While coauthors Bicknell and Parsons make no explicit suggestions, their well-researched and compelling biography hints that Thompson’s end was a consequence of his own making.

Portrait of a Gunfighter is set in an American West of towns on the threshold of becoming urban centers, providing a glimpse of American growth happening away from cattle herds and sodbusters. San Antonio and Austin, Texas, are primary but not exclusive sets of the tableau. Thompson arrived in Austin in 1852, the nine-year-old son of English immigrants. By the time he was twenty-eight, his past included two murders, several assaults, service in two lost causes (the Confederacy and Maximilian’s army in Mexico) and a pardon from President Ulysses S. Grant releasing him from a Texas prison. He might also have been complicit in the 1865 state treasury heist.

Thompson left prison to start anew as part owner of a saloon in Abilene, Kansas, where, in 1871, one of his business partners confronted city marshal “Wild” Bill Hickok and died in the ensuing fracas. Thompson returned to Austin, where his “sporting” lifestyle thrust him into several rows. During an 1876 brawl at Austin’s Capital Theater, Thompson’s intervention to protect a friend resulted in the death of a shotgun-wielding assailant. Three years later at Leadville, Colorado, Thompson joined Sheriff Bat Masterson’s private army in a railroad right-of-way dispute. Breaking his lawless pattern, however, Thompson won election as Austin’s city marshal from 1880 to 1882. Journalists at the Texas Siftings proclaimed him “the best city marshal in Texas to-day” (375), even if he did shoot up the Congress Avenue newspaper office of the Austin Daily Statesman.

A January 1880 incident planted the seeds of Thompson’s violent end when he entered the Vaudeville Theater to reclaim at gunpoint collateral he had left as security for a gambling loan. Prominent San Antonio gambler and co-owner of the Vaudeville, Jack Harris, became enraged, vowing retribution. Two years later, Thompson returned, and Harris attempted to kill him from a concealed alcove. Harris died in the shootout, and a jury found that Thompson had acted in self-defense, creating a sensational story across the country and burnishing his reputation as a shootist. The verdict for Thompson’s acquittal, however, had probably set into motion forces for revenge on a Tuesday night in March 1884.

Portrait of a Gunfighter works well as a biography and as a history of Old West towns and frontier justice. While Thompson’s career ended in San Antonio, he lived in Austin, for which the book could work as a historical tourist guide; the old city map on page 394 is keyed to incidents in this book. Readers will want to browse the endnotes, where anecdotal comments enrich the narrative drawn from primary documents, census data, websites, interviews, newspaper archives, and secondary articles.

Thompson’s murder in the Vaudeville Theater ended a lifetime of dangerous habits. He was a complex figure. He was a British import. He gambled, played the banjo, wrote poetry, and owned a sailboat. He was soft spoken, well groomed, and fearless. Mostly, however, he was a shootist who preferred single-action to double-action pistols because double action guns were, he insisted, unreliable. Visitors to Austin’s Oakwood Cemetery can visit his gravesite, which bears the wrong birth date. (He probably would not like that.)