The Wilderness Warrior

by Douglas Brinkley

  But grappling with the “Negro” condition was just part of his agenda in Mississippi. Roosevelt was extremely interested in seeing America’s agricultural sector increase under his leadership. Worried about declining farm ownership in the South, particularly in the delta, Roosevelt wanted to educate himself about how the price of the cotton crop could rise up from seven cents a pound to ten cents a pound. (By 1909 he had achieved this objective.) In fact, farm property values, as a result of Roosevelt’s agricultural policies, doubled throughout the United States between 1900 and 1910. Under the expert management of Secretary of Agriculture Wilson the Roosevelt administration also championed organized food inspection programs and improvements in rural roads. New levees were approved to help control annual overflows. “In many respects,” the historian Lewis L. Gould has pointed out, “his administration was an era of unmatched prosperity on the American farm.”7

  In addition to civil rights and his agriculture policy, there was a third factor that influenced Roosevelt to choose the Mississippi Delta for his first high-profile hunt as president: he tacitly acknowledged that he really wanted a black bear. Ever since the 1880s, when he had read two articles in Scribner’s Magazine by James Gordon—“Bear Hunting in the South” and “A Camp Hunt in Mississippi”—he had itched to explore the Coldwater, Tallahatchie, and Sunflower river floodplains. Such a hunt, of course, included braces of dogs, rough-haired little terriers that could dodge into the canebreak when the bear was enraged. They’d bark and snarl only a few inches from a bear’s muzzle. Other ritual activities were likewise followed. Besides Mississippi black bear, Roosevelt hoped to see tall cypresses rising out of the swamps and camp near cottonwoods reported to be ten feet in diameter. His team would cut through bayous with only moss, which grows on the north side of a tree, as a compass. And the southern planters he would be hunting with, he anticipated, were, as the sportsman Frank Forester once wrote, man for man the finest hunters in the western hemisphere.8 Roosevelt was also hoping to mix with some crack-shot swampers and trampers.

  Despite the light rain glazing the rails and the storm-threatening clouds darkening the horizon, when Roosevelt arrived in Smedes on the afternoon of Thursday, November 13, he was ready to hunt. The grayness was eerily appropriate. Buoyantly Roosevelt thanked the engineer, shook hands, signed autographs, and showed off his ivory-handled knife and custom-made Model 1894 Winchester rifle with its deluxe walnut stock. He felt good to be in bear country. For the most part his arrival time had been kept secret, so there weren’t many greeters in Smedes other than a large contingent of field workers who had taken the day off to see the president; these were the descendants of slaves.9 Among those who had joined Roosevelt in Memphis were other members of his hunting party, including John M. Parker, president of the New Orleans Cotton Exchange who later became governor of Louisiana; John McIlhenny, who had been a lieutenant in the Rough Riders and had founded the Tabasco Company in New Iberia, Louisiana; and a local plantation owner, Hunger L. Foote, whose grandson Shelby would become one of America’s foremost Civil War historians. “My grandfather died before I was born,” Shelby Foote has recalled. “But I’ve got loads of newspaper clippings and photographs from the big hunt. There was no bigger event in our family history.”10

  The main tract of land where Roosevelt would hunt belonged to E. C. Magnum, a shareholder in the Illinois Central and, more important, owner of the sprawling Smedes and Kelso plantations on which the hunt was conducted. Camp was set up on the bank of the Little Sunflower River about twelve miles east of Smedes, reachable after a bushwhacking ride on horseback through a dense tangle of prickly underbrush, stunted pines, sluggish bayous, and canebrake. There were also plenty of fine groves of oak and ash to navigate. Roosevelt had listened to the train chugging for days, and now the delta songbirds immediately provided nourishment to his ears. Supplies were delivered to the camp on mules and by wagon. A-frame sleeping tents had been assembled next to a huge cooking tent that had been erected earlier. That first night, the men swapped bear stories around a roaring bonfire on the bank of the Little Sunflower. Roosevelt’s tales of his cowboy adventures in the Wild West usually stole the show, but in this gathering the star raconteur was a fifty-six-year-old African-American, Holt Collier, chosen to lead this hunt because of his reputation as a bear tracker. There was a “glad to be alive” quality about Collier, to which Roosevelt naturally gravitated. “Though the hunt had been planned at high corporate and governmental levels for months,” the biographer Minor Ferris Buchanan recalled, “its success was wholly dependent upon the skill and performance of Holt Collier.”11

  Collier had been born a slave in 1846 to the family of General Thomas Hinds, who won fame with Andrew Jackson at the battle of New Orleans. Collier never received a formal education and couldn’t even sign his own name. When he was a young boy, his job on the Plum Ridge Plantation had been to provide meat for the Hinds family and their field hands. Accordingly, Collier had killed his first bear with a twelve-gauge Scott shotgun in a wilderness swamp when he was only ten years old. Collier became a runaway slave at the age of fourteen but then, oddly (and intriguingly to Roosevelt), joined the Confederate army. (There was a prohibition against African-Americans serving in uniform in the Confederate army, but an exception was made for Collier.12) A brave, gallant soldier with a virile demeanor, he witnessed the death of General Albert Sidney Johnston at Shiloh. He signed up with Company I of the Ninth Texas Cavalry a few weeks later and saw combat in Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee.

  Like the kind of folk figure Ramblin’ Jack Elliott or Woody Guthrie might sing about, Collier became a Texas cowboy during Reconstruction, driving cattle on the open prairie, spitting tobacco on the run. He had gone to Texas after being acquitted of the murder of a Union captain, James A. King of Newton, Iowa, in 1866. Upon hearing that Howell Hinds, his former master, had been murdered in Greenville, Collier came back to Mississippi to avenge his death. Often involved in chasing fugitives, in gunfights, and in horse racing, and having spent decades as an expert guide, Collier had an unsurpassed reputation for being his own man, able to track bears or humans with unfailing instinct. As a marksman he had few peers in the delta. He lived closer to the ground and understood the local geography better than anybody else. Collier epitomized a forest trickster character that the South Carolina Gullahs called “Bur,” like “Bur Rabbit” or “Burr Bear.”

  Holt Collier was the best bear hunter in the Mississippi Delta. William Faulkner later based his story “The Bear,” in part, on Collier.

  Holt Collier. (Courtesy of Minor Ferris Buchanan)

  Mississippi, in the years following the Civil War, was teeming with wildlife; primeval forests and jungle swamps provided ideal habitats for wild game including bear, cougars, and deer. And the state had been a safe haven from slavery and now was a haven from Jim Crow. Many of the slaves who escaped north on the Underground Railroad hid in its forestlands on their journey following the “Drinking Gourd” (the Big Dipper). When they returned home as freedmen after Appomattox they considered the forest their friend. (Unfortunately, the Klu Klux Klan also used the forest for secret lynchings and to burn bodies.13) The woods were Collier’s sanctuary too. Collier could wake up in the woods at dawn and shoot a deer for breakfast within an hour. He often brought forest meat into town for white people. In the late nineteenth century, bears were considered a nuisance in towns such as Greenville and Leland. If you traveled in the delta cane fields a rifle or shotgun was always necessary, because the likelihood of encountering a bear was high. Just as polar bears ruled the Arctic and grizzlies ruled the Rockies, in the Mississippi Delta the black bear was king. Collier, as a boy, had been attacked by a bear, wrestled with it, and eventually stabbed it to death. Whenever he retold this drama, Collier would show off the scar, which had stayed risen on his arm, to admiring sympathizers.

  By the time Roosevelt met him at Smedes, Collier had killed more than 3,000 bear; this was considered an American record. Well-dressed—c
ourtesy of a haberdasher in Greenville—and convivial, Collier had piercing brown eyes and very pronounced features. With stolid dignity he wore a Vandyke beard that he had acquired as a Civil War scout, and his cropped salt-and-pepper hair was often covered by a well-worn Confederate cap. His taut muscles seemed to grip his bones. Roosevelt, who was a promoter of Joel Chandler Harris, immediately took to Collier’s briar-patch bear tales as if Collier were Uncle Remus come to life. The stories reminded him of the Bear Bob stories his mother had told him when he was a boy. Just hearing the way Collier said “painter” (for panther) brought a smile to Roosevelt’s face. Nobody Roosevelt had ever met in the Rockies had as many close personal encounters with bears as Collier. Until the 1890s Collier had earned a very good living as a hunter, evolving into a first-rate guide. Collier hunted through the fall and winter months for thirty-plus years. He sold the meat to railroad workers, timber companies, and levee men. When not hunting he would follow the seasonal spring fairs from town to town, offering his services. In the summer he worked in the stable of his brother Marshall. Mainly, Collier was a survivalist, living off the land with his gun to keep him company. “Money don’t buy nothin’ in the cane-break, nohow,” he used to say, “and a man’s dog don’t care whether he’s rich or po’.”14

  Roosevelt enjoyed such folk wisdom. When John M. Parker, who was choreographing the hunt, commented that its rigors might be too hazardous for a sitting president, a mildly insulted Roosevelt, looking at Collier with a half-embarrassed smile, exclaimed, “This is exactly what I want!” The other hunters, sensing that the president felt insulted, began shifting uneasily, uncomfortable with the ensuing silence.

  “Good,” Parker shot back, “we will have bear meat for Sunday dinner!”—to which Roosevelt condescendingly replied, “Let us get the bear meat before we arrange for the dinner.” Except for this verbal sparring Roosevelt and Parker got on famously, and they formed an important political alliance in coming years.

  Roosevelt understood that the secret of Holt Collier’s success, as with all good hunters, was that he revered bears and knew all their habits. Black bears, for example, would never sleep in a wet area: they pulled down cane stalks to make a comfortable nesting place. People who thought bears slept in the swamps were wrong. Although constantly maligned in the delta as meat-eating predators, bears actually preferred a diet of acorns, hickory nuts, black walnuts, persimmons, and melons. Sometimes they would wander onto farms to swipe piglets or to raid a hen house, but not often. Though Collier considered it unsportsmanlike, a fairly common bear trap used by others in the region was a pot of honey mixed with whiskey. Lapping up the honey, the bears eventually toppled over drunk; in such an inebriated condition they were easy to shoot or stab. Roosevelt made it clear upon his arrival in the delta that “pothunting,” as it was called, wouldn’t be tolerated.

  Because the press had limited access to the campsite, details of the president’s six days in the Mississippi Delta are sketchy. The New York Times reported that Roosevelt often simply took to the trails to enjoy nature, preferring gentler episodes to the barking terriers, not particularly interested in rousting a bruin or pulling a ligament. An excellent dinner seemed to always be the main event, with bear paws, opossum, gravy, and sweet potatoes served on tin dishes and accompanied by wine. The clatter of fine cutlery was far more commonplace than gunshot fire during those six days. Bored reporters wrote about dreamy aromas rising from plates of onion fritters, hush puppies, and okra. Everything was served on a rough pine-board picnic table in a clearing; the scene looked like an advertisement for the national parks. The president stuck to his earlier decision not to shoot deer; they weren’t predators or nuisances. This was part of Roosevelt’s attempt to promote the sportsman’s ethic in the South. Despite the bad trails and impenetrable canebreak Roosevelt rode hard, enjoying what the newspapers described as “African jungle” terrain.15 “The President is enjoying his outing very much,” the Times reported. “He has not had three days of such complete freedom and rest since he entered the White House.”16

  Collier, his baying hounds, and the terriers first picked up the scent of a bear on the morning of Friday, November 14. Roosevelt had been placed in a stand while Collier, following large misshapen paw prints, tracked the animal through mud gullies and unruly thickets for hours. Eventually, convinced that the hounds had lost the scent, Roosevelt and Hunger Foote returned to camp on horseback for a late lunch. Collier continued the pursuit, and around three-thirty PM his dogs caught up with an old 235-pound giant. (Collier said that the bear would have weighed 500 pounds but for a drought that had reduced its food supply.) Immediately Collier bugled for the president to take part in the kill; chasing the exhausted bear into a slough or watering hole, the dogs plunged in after it and refused to let up. Before long the pack had surrounded the doomed bear, lunging at it with their fangs and yelping nonstop in a frenzy. Desperate for its life, with the sweep of a mighty forepaw, the bear seized one of the dogs by the neck and crushed it to death. Collier, irate at the loss—and under strict instructions not to kill the bear but to save the first kill for Roosevelt—leaped from his mount to protect his remaining dogs from the attack. As the bear was at bay with the dogs, Collier lurched close enough to strike the bear’s head with a swing of the barrel, stunning the beast. He struck the bear so hard, in fact, that he bent the barrel of his rifle, rendering it useless. With a dog still gnawing at its hind legs, Collier carefully lassoed the bear around the neck and tied it to an oak tree.

  Summoned by others with Collier, President Roosevelt and Foote rushed to the slough. The president was dismayed when he took in the gruesome scene: a dog lying dead in the dirt, two others seriously hurt, and a badly stunned, immobile bear tied to a tree, groaning for air. A light rain had become heavier, bringing a chill of evening. The whole scene had a macabre look, or a look of something gone tragically wrong. Seemingly in unison, the hunters cried, “Let the president shoot the bear.” For a second, or perhaps a second and a half, a blank-faced Roosevelt thought about what to do. It was an I-Ching moment: I cannot go backward…I cannot go forward…Nothing serves to further. Humility fell over Roosevelt. To shoot that bear would be akin to rape, a travesty of the sportsman’s ethos. Eventually he shook his head “no” and refused to draw his Winchester. “Put it out of its misery,” he ordered, tossing his knife—a gift from the emperor of Japan—to Parker. “I declined to use that knife,” Parker recalled in 1924, “but John McIlhenny threw his hunting knife, and I used that, sticking the bear under the ribs while the dogs were in front of him.”17

  After walking away from the scene, Roosevelt later called the afternoon “a most unsatisfactory experience.”18 At best Roosevelt went through the superficial motions of a good guest but, in truth, he was insulted at the roping stunt. According to Minor Ferris Buchanan, a hesitant Parker, following instructions from Collier, plunged the knife into the bear’s side; but he failed in his effort to kill it in a single stab, and an obliging Collier had to finish the job, on a very angry animal. The bear’s carcass was slung over a horse and brought back to camp by Collier. The whole episode made Roosevelt feel downcast. The bear hunt in the wilderness had turned into an embarrassment.

  Hidden for years in the Roosevelt Collection at Harvard University was a photograph of the dead bear strapped to a horse. It is a black eye to Rooseveltian folklore. The president’s great-grandson, Tweed Roosevelt, unearthed the photo in 1989 when he was researching the November 1902 hunt in preparation for an address to the Teddy Bear Society of America, a toy collectors’ group, in Boston. It’s unclear who took the photo—probably Parker. “I told them the truth,” Tweed Roosevelt recalls. “I didn’t gussy it up. There never was a bear cub, and the bear with T.R. wasn’t shot but was knifed to death. They didn’t like hearing it.”19

  Nevertheless, by not shooting the bear, Roosevelt stayed true to the “sportsmen’s code,” the aristocratic European tradition. As the historian Louis S. Warren explained in The Hunter�
�s Game, the code frowned on killing young deer or young bears. Some people called such an act “slob shooting.” The true conservationists of Roosevelt’s era abided by the general premises of the code, which also included never shooting any captured animal for recreation. “For many men, hunting became a symbol of masculine strength,” Warren writes. “How one hunted and what one killed came to define what kind of man one was.” By refusing to shoot Collier’s helpless, tied-up bear, Roosevelt was merely abiding by the sportsman’s code. But to many average Americans, not killing the bear seemed odd. “Any good hunter realized that to have shot that particular Mississippi bear would have been cowardice,” Tweed Roosevelt noted. “As a true hunter-conservationist, T.R. would have never considered engaging in such a sordid act.” 20

  Three bears were killed on the 1902 hunt, though none by Roosevelt. “There were plenty of bears,” Roosevelt later wrote to Philip Stewart, who had hunted cougars with him in Colorado, “and if I had gone alone or with one companion I would have gotten one or two. But my kind hosts, with best of intentions, insisted upon turning the affair into a cross between a hunt and a picnic.” 21

  The next morning, Sunday, November 16, the newspapers carried stories about the president’s good sportsmanship, as shown in his steadfast refusal to shoot a captive bear. The Washington Post ran a front-page article, headlined “One Bear Bagged. But It Did Not Fall a Trophy to President’s Winchester.” The Post reported that the president had been summoned “after the beast had been lassoed” and “refused to make an unsportsmanlike shot.” For once compassion overcame single-mindedness in one of Roosevelt’s hunts. Then the story took off. The front page of the next day’s Washington Post featured a cartoon by Clifford Berryman, “The Passing Show,” that depicted Roosevelt in his hunting regalia, with one hand holding his rifle butt on the ground and the other thrust out in a firm “No!” and a perplexed fellow hunter holding a black bear by a rope around its neck. The caption read “Drawing the Line in Mississippi”—a double entendre that many scholars believe referred to Roosevelt’s fierce criticism of the lynchings of African-Americans in the South. The racial inference in Berryman’s cartoon must have chilled Roosevelt.22