Roy Bean

Roy Bean married 15 year-old Virginia Chavez in1866. They had four children- Roy Jr., Sam, Laura and Zulema. They also adopted a son named John. They divorced a decade and half later.

He died peacefully in his bed, after a bout of heavy drinking in San Antonio to celebrate a new power plant’s construction. He is interred at the Whitehead Memorial Museum in Del Rio.

In 1940, Walter Brennan received an academy award for his portrayal of Roy Bean in the film, ‘The Westerner’. The movie gives the judge an entirely fictitious death scene.

Born in 1825, Phantly Roy Bean Jr. was the son of Phantly and Ann Bean. He had four siblings- Sarah, James, Joshua, and Samuel. The name Phantly Roy was a modification of the name Fauntleroy.

Roy Bean left home at sixteen in 1841 for New Orleans hoping to find work there, but got into trouble and fled to his brother Sam in San Antonio, Texas.

In 1848, the two brothers opened a trading post in Chihuahua, Mexico. He shot dead a Mexican desperado while protecting a white non-Hispanic man. The brothers had to escape to Sonoro in Mexico.

In 1849, he joined his older brother Joshua in San Diego, California. Here, he was jailed after getting into a shooting-duel with a Scotsman Collins to impress the local lasses.

He was a ladies’ man, and among the many gifts he received from female admirers was a knife which he used to dig through the prison wall and escape to San Gabriel in California.

In San Gabriel, he served drinks at his brother Joshua’s saloon, known as the Headquarters Saloon. After Joshua was murdered, he took over the saloon. There, he fell in love with a Mexican girl.

Roy Bean ran the Jersey Lilly Saloon in Langtry, in 1882. He administered ‘justice’ from his tavern - asserted himself as "Law West of the Pecos". He collected fines and kept the money for himself.

He became well-known in 1896, when he staged the Fitzsimmons-Maher heavyweight championship on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande, where Texan rangers had no jurisdiction. Boxing was illegal in Texas and Mexico.