Last updated: March 7, 2023
Person
Jules Beni
Quick Facts
Significance:
Pony Express Rider
Date of Birth:
1800s
Place of Death:
Julesburg
Date of Death:
1861
Many years removed from the fur trade’s heyday, French Canadian trapper Jules Beni—known to some as “Old Jules”—sought new opportunities. In the late 1850s, he established a trading post at the Upper Crossing of the South Platte River, where roads heading to Salt Lake City and Denver diverged from one another. Before long, the humble one-story cedar log structure grew into a bona fide rendezvous point for traders, buffalo hunters, adventurers, bandits, and desperadoes “who rode into town to divide their loot and squander it riotously.”
By the time that Russell, Majors, and Waddell hired Jules Beni to be the stationmaster at Upper Crossing, it was already known as Julesburg—a nod to Beni’s influence. The small trading post had grown to include a stagecoach station, a stable, a store, and a blacksmith’s shop. Beni quickly developed a reputation for corruption. When the company appointed Jack Slade as the Sweetwater Division superintendent, his first order of business was to investigate the “actions of rustlers and thieves centered in the Julesburg area.” Benjamin Ficklin, who oversaw all of the firm’s division superintendents, believed that his stationmaster at Julesburg had something to do with the problem.
It is hard to know exactly what happened the day that Jack Slade arrived in Julesburg to relieve Beni of his duties. Beni fetched his six-shooter (some say it was a double-barreled shotgun) and unloaded it, at short range, into Slade’s body. Although left for dead, Slade survived Beni’s attack. Ficklin informed Beni that he should leave his namesake town and never return—unless he wanted to be hanged. According to most of the stories, Beni did leave. But not for long.
First and foremost a cattleman, Beni returned to Julesburg in August 1861, driving stock out of Denver. Slade ambushed Beni and shot him. That is the simple story; however, there are many other versions. One story tells that Beni rode into town boasting that he was not afraid of anyone from the mail company and that Slade had sent a party to capture him (and earn a $500 reward from Slade in the process). Two of Slade’s men wounded Beni in the ensuing gunfight, strapped his nearly lifeless body to a pack horse, and headed toward Cold Spring Station in present-day Wyoming. Beni died before they reached the station and—knowing that Slade wanted to exact revenge himself—Slade’s men tied Beni’s body to a post so that he appeared to be wounded rather than dead. Apparently, Slade suspected that Beni had already died, but he sliced “Old Jules’” ear off just to make sure. Whatever happened, the events that led to Beni’s death in August 1861 became such a popular part of Pony Express lore that Charles M. Russell depicted it in a 1922 ink and graphite illustration titled “Killing of Jules Reni [sic] by Slade.”
It is unknown where Beni’s body rests. No extant evidence suggests that he ever married or had any children. Beni’s legacy will be forever tied to Jack Slade; in fact, many accounts of Slade’s life emphasize the gruesomeness of Beni’s death to bolster the former’s legendary status among historians and Pony Express enthusiasts. Despite Beni’s relatively few appearances in the historical record, his namesake town remains an important living link to the early days of the United States mail.
(Special thanks to UNM PhD candidate Angela Reiniche for compiling this information.)