Roosevelt greatly enjoyed his time with Ben Lilly. He later wrote:
“I never met any other man so indifferent to fatigue and hardship. 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. It had rained hard throughout the night and he had no shelter, no rubber coat, nothing but the clothes he was wearing and the ground was too wet for him to lie on, so he perched in a crooked tree in the beating rain, much as if he had been a wild turkey. He equaled Cooper’s Deerslayer in woodcraft, in hardihood, in simplicity—and also in loquacity.”
Unlike the difficulties experienced during the 1902 hunt, the 1907 expedition proved to be very productive.
“We got three bears, six deer, one wild turkey, twelve squirrels, one duck, one opossum and one wildcat,” Roosevelt wrote. “We ate them all except the wildcat, and there were times when we almost felt as if we could eat it. I think it is a pretty good record. I am perfectly satisfied.”
Lilly and these men from the Biological Survey were camped in the Gila Region of southwestern New Mexico’s high country around 1920. L-r: J.B. “Jack” Thompson, Ben Lilly, Walter W. Hotchkiss and J. Stokley Ligon. Note the hounds in the foreground and Lilly’s trusty Winchester.
