Jules Beni of Julesburg: A Pony Express Stationmaster and His Violent End

Part of the National Park Service series People of the Pony Express, from the Pony Express National Historic Trail.

Julesburg

Long after the fur trade's heyday, the French-Canadian trapper Jules Beni, "Old Jules" to some, went looking for new chances. In the late 1850s he set up a trading post at the Upper Crossing of the South Platte River, where the roads to Salt Lake City and Denver parted. The one-storey cedar log building soon became a meeting place for traders, buffalo hunters, adventurers, bandits and desperadoes who came to split their loot and spend it wildly. By the time Russell, Majors and Waddell, the firm behind the Pony Express, hired Beni as stationmaster at Upper Crossing, the place was already called Julesburg, after him, and had grown to include a stagecoach station, stable, store and blacksmith's shop.

A crooked stationmaster

Beni quickly earned a name for corruption. By some accounts he stole the company's horses, ransomed them back, charged the loss to the company and pocketed the money; travellers were said to complain of his high prices for food and lodging, misrouted mail and a stage schedule thrown off by the missing horses. When the company made Jack Slade superintendent of its Sweetwater Division, his first task was to look into the rustlers and thieves around Julesburg, and Benjamin Ficklin, who oversaw the firm's division superintendents, suspected his stationmaster was involved.

Slade and Beni

Exactly what happened when Slade came to relieve Beni of his job is hard to know. Beni emptied a six-shooter (or, some say, a double-barrelled shotgun) into Slade at close range. Slade, left for dead, survived. Ficklin told Beni to leave his namesake town and never return, unless he wanted to hang. Most stories say he left, but not for long.

Beni, above all a cattleman, came back to Julesburg in August 1861, driving stock from Denver, and Slade ambushed and shot him. That is the simple version; there are many others. In one, Beni rode into town boasting that he feared no one from the mail company, and Slade sent men to capture him for a reward. Two of them wounded Beni in a gunfight, tied him to a packhorse and set off for Cold Spring Station, in what is now Wyoming. Beni died on the way, and, knowing Slade wanted his own revenge, the men tied the body to a post so it looked alive. Slade apparently suspected Beni was already dead, but cut off an ear to be sure; some legends say he carried it as a souvenir.

However it happened, Beni's death became such a part of Pony Express lore that Charles M. Russell drew it around 1922 as "Killing of Jules Reni [sic] by Slade."

What remains

No one knows where Beni is buried, and nothing suggests he ever married or had children. His name is bound to Slade's; many accounts of Slade dwell on the gruesome killing to enlarge his legend. Beni left few traces in the record, but the town named after him remains a living link to the early days of the U.S. mail. The original Julesburg was attacked on January 7, 1865, by more than one thousand Cheyenne, Arapaho and Lakota in retaliation for the Sand Creek massacre; nearly a month later the Cheyenne returned and burned every building.

Sources

• National Park Service, National Trails, "Jules Beni, the Pony Express," by Angela Reiniche, part of the 2016–2018 "Student Experience in National Trails Historic Research: Vignettes Project" of the National Park Service and the University of New Mexico Department of History. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/jules-beni-the-pony-express.htm
• Its sources include Frank A. Root and William Elsey Connelley, The Overland Stage to California (1901); William E. Hill, The Pony Express Trail: Yesterday and Today (2010); and Dan Rottenberg, "Jack Slade: Western Jekyll and Hyde," Wild West (2010).
• In the series: previous, Henry Avis; next, Melville "Mel" Baughn. More on the Pony Express National Historic Trail.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.