He was a stern practitioner of simple living and outdoor freedom, roamed and hunted from Louisiana to Arizona and from Idaho to as far south as Chihuahua and Durango, Mexico, and was a subject of American folktales.

His whereabouts were not known to his family for a long time, until his uncle, Vernon Lilly, by chance discovered him running a blacksmith shop in Memphis, TN.

After his uncle's death, he inherited the cotton farm, and there, in 1880, he married his first wife, Lelia, whom he not so affectionately referred to as "daughter of Sodom and Gomorrah".

In 1907, he guided President Theodore Roosevelt, as chief huntsman, in a big game hunting expedition in Tensas Bayou, Louisiana.

The morning he joined us in camp, he had come on foot through the thick woods, followed by his two dogs, and had neither eaten nor drunk for twenty-four hours; for he did not like to drink the swamp water.

He equaled Cooper's Deerslayer in woodcraft, in hardihood, in simplicity–and also in loquacity.Lilly was 5'9" tall and around 180 lbs, and known for the strength and stamina that stayed with him until old age, "spare, full bearded, with mild, gentle eyes and a frame of steel and whipcord.

He was, however, fond of eating bear and particularly cougar meat, which, he believed, in a similar fashion to syncretic Native American ideas, would give him feline powers.

Those specimens included mountain lions, brown and black bears, deer, otter, and rare animals like the Mexican gray wolf or ivory-billed woodpecker.

By hunting all bears and cougars, Benjamin Vernon Lilly held the personal belief that he was in a sacred mission for the extermination of "malefic creatures" and spared no effort in doing so.

He was no doubt, one of the most destructive individuals contributing to the reduction of North American apex predators to the brink of extinction, an act contrary to modern standards of both ethical hunting and wildlife conservation.

When I saw him I thought he was a dead man ... walking about, and I was mighty scared.Ben Lilly to a rogue bear, prior to dispatching him with a Bowie knife: You are condemned, you black devil, I kill you in the name of the law!Another time, he said: My reputation is bigger than I am.