Ben Thompson’s tombstone

In 1910, as the City of Austin was demolishing a group of dilapidated buildings on the corner of Sixth Street and Congress Avenue, a group of what the Austin paper identified as “prominent citizens” went rummaging through the backrooms of an old building that once housed the fabled Iron Front Saloon. There, they happened upon an old tombstone.

The paper described “a remarkably fine obelisk tombstone, two feet high and of proportionate width.” The stone also had inscribed upon it the name of a woman, age 83 at the time of her death. The story continued: “It was figured that where there was a name there should be a grave. The fact that the tombstone was found on the second floor did not alter the fact.” 

These prominent citizens spent hours digging a big hole in the floor but found no body. They tapped on the walls but no little old lady tapped back. The citizens then enlisted the former owner of the Iron Front, Lon Martin, to help them search. 

 “A tombstone peddler left it behind after a visit to the Iron Front,” Martin told them, adding only that the salesman left it behind as a sample tombstone. The disappointed grave hunters left the saloon in disgruntled silence. 

That was how the story went until 1924, when a group of reporters took a stroll down memory lane and somebody mentioned the tombstone at the Iron Front back in 1910. They called on Jim Long, a man who had spent a considerable amount of time at the saloon. Long confirmed that the tombstone in question originally belonged to a peddler of tombstones named Luke Watts, who sometime in the 1880s stopped by Austin on a tour of the Hill Country. Watts had a one-horse wagon, samples of his work and plenty of cash.  He quenched his thirst at the Iron Front, bought a round for the house, then headed upstairs to the gaming room to play poker. 

There he met up with Ben Thompson, a notorious gunfighter and City Marshall who also owned the Iron Front’s gambling concession. Thompson joined the poker game and began to needle Watts about his gloomy line of work. 

Watts took it in stride. “Ben,” he said, “you will be took off sudden one of these days and I may not be around just at the time to sell a tombstone to ornament your grave. You had better order one from me now.” 

Thompson replied that a simple wooden marker would do him just fine. 

The game continued for hours. Watts couldn’t win for losing. By midnight his bankroll was gone but Ben Thompson was having too much fun to quit. He asked Watts what his tombstones were worth. Watts said it depended on the kind of stone used to make the tombstone. 

“I don’t want any cheap monument,” Ben said. “Have you got any that is made out of pure marble?” 

Watts just happened to have such a tombstone. He had it hauled upstairs for Thompson’s inspection and told him it would be a bargain at $200. Thompson proposed playing a hand with two hundred of his dollars bet against the tombstone. 

Watts agreed and continued his losing ways by losing the tombstone, but he was a good loser, probably because he had a lot of practice. Plus, plus he didn’t want to get Ben Thompson all riled up. “To offend him,” one observer noted “was to invite termination.” Watts offered to inscribe the tombstone but Thompson said he’d wait until he did something worthy of an inscription. 

Here, we must point out that the 1910 article stated that the Iron Front tombstone was inscribed with the name of an 83-year-old woman. Long’s version didn’t mention an inscription other than to note that Thompson refused Watts’s offer to carve one. 

Long reckoned the alleged poker game took place in the 1880s but he couldn’t pinpoint the year. It had to be before March 11, 1884, when Thompson and another suspicious character, King Fisher, were gunned down in an ambush at Jack Harris’ Vaudeville Saloon and Theater in San Antonio.The theater’s namesake wasn’t present because Thompson had shot him to death two years prior. The subsequent bushwhacking was directed at Thompson in retaliation for that killing. King Fisher just ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

Ben Thompson’s funeral was one of the largest in Austn history up to that time but no one mentioned him having a marble tombstone stored at the Iron Front. A simple white stone marked Thompson grave in Austin’s Oakwood Cemetery for many years. Though it’s highly unlikely that Thompson wagered $200 for an old woman’s tombstone, you never know what a gambler with a few drinks in him might do, or what yarns an old timer might spin.