Soaked and disgruntled, Roosevelt remained determined. There was no way he was going be denied this trophy, as he had been in 1902. He wasn’t going to leave the Tenasas River area without killing a bear. Eventually Collier showed up with two planters from Greenville, Mississippi—Clive and Harley Metcalfe—accompanied by a wagon full of bloodhounds. Collier now took charge of the hunt. He instructed Clive and Harvey Metcalfe in a low voice to “take the Cunnel and bum around with him in the woods like you an’ me always does, and don’t put him on no more stand. He ain’t no baby. He kin go anywhere you kin go; jes’ keep him as near to the dogs as you kin. Mr. Harley and me’ll follow the hounds; when we strike a trail you and the Cunnel come a-runnin.”55
It’s thought that the Roosevelt party pitched their tents at the Bear Lake Hunting Club near Tallulah, Louisiana (the club had been incorporated in 1899 by delta planters). The gentlemen of Louisiana and Mississippi still preferred to hunt from the stand, staying dry from and keeping out of the pneumonia-inducing weather. Roosevelt headed toward the cane thicket and the bogs around Bear Lake. He tracked for hours, but the bear proved elusive. At one juncture a wild boar attacked the hunt dogs, killing two of them.
Spending time with Collier was worth the struggle with briar patches and boars. Much as he had done with Catch ’Em Alive Abernathy, Roosevelt had used Collier as a source of anecdotes to entertain listeners in Georgetown and on Capitol Hill. As Roosevelt told it, Collier was a flawless hunter who wasn’t afraid to bloody his knuckles, a black man who had befriended Frank James, killed more bears than Davy Crockett, fought at the battle of Shiloh, traveled with springtime fairs to chase skirts, and gambled in high-stakes poker games on the Mississippi River. Blacks outnumbered whites four to one in the delta, but Collier was the kind of man who transcended racial categorization. Everybody, regardless of color, took a shine to him. “When ten years old Holt had been taken on the horse behind his young master, the Hinds of that day, on a bear hunt, when he killed his first bear,” Roosevelt wrote. “In the Civil War he had not only followed his master to battle as his body-servant, but had acted under him as sharpshooter against the Union soldiers. After the war he continued to stay with his master until the latter died, and had then been adopted by the Metcalfs; and he felt that he had brought them up, and treated them with that mixture of affection and grumbling respect which an old nurse shows toward the lad who has ceased being a child.”56
Frustrated by the thought that he was going to leave the Louisiana canebrakes without a bear trophy, Roosevelt pulled Collier aside, out of earshot from the white planters. “Holt,” Roosevelt said. “I haven’t got but one or two more days. What am I going to do? I haven’t killed a bear.” Collier whispered back, “Cunnel, ef you let me manage the hunt you’ll sho’ kill one to-morrow. One of ’em got away to-day that you ought to have killed.” “Whatever you say goes, Holt,” was Roosevelt’s reply. Collier answered, “All right, Cunnel.”
The next day Collier showed the right stuff. The streaming rain had stopped, replaced by mild, clear weather. Collier’s dogs got a scent and started following it in the direction of Roosevelt, who was crouched in the hardwood forest waiting for his golden moment. To Roosevelt, this was America’s “great forest” of red gums and white oaks, which he called the “Northeast Louisiana Bottoms.” “In stature, in towering majesty, they are unsurpassed by any trees of our eastern forests,” Roosevelt wrote, “lordlier kings of the green-leaved world are not to be found until we reach the sequoias and redwoods of the Sierras.” The greenest mosses of the Tensas River were now surrounding Roosevelt. Worried about encounters with rough thickets, Roosevelt had sensibly worn thornproof gear, which served him well during the hours of pursuit.
Roosevelt would look into hollowed or downed logs for bears. He wasn’t worried about other so-called predators. Back in the days when Louisiana was owned by France, there were lots of red wolves and Florida panthers in the primeval Tensas River forest, but they had been wiped out in the effort to control predators. Only the Louisiana black bears—a threatened species in 2009—remained in the thick tangle of creepers and vines. In the adrenaline rush of the hunt, Roosevelt’s banged-up knees weren’t aching. Eventually the dogs found a she-bear. Leaping up in front of the bear, which was twenty yards away, Roosevelt took aim with his rifle as the animal ran toward him. The shot caught the bear clean in the chest. She moaned as if in surrender or defiance. According to Roosevelt the bear “turned almost broadside” and started walking “forward very stiff-legged, almost as if on tiptoe, now and then looking back at the nearest dogs.” She toppled over “stark dead,” as Roosevelt put it, “slain in the canebreak in true hunter fashion.”57
Dancing a jig, Roosevelt dropped his rifle, pulled Harley Metcalfe off his horse, and gave him a hug. What ecstasy Roosevelt felt at killing a five-foot fully mature she-bear with his 45–70 rifle.58 He had also absorbed the recoil without a bruised shoulder, so the hunt was deemed a complete victory. He talked about it for weeks. Today a lone historical marker commemorating the hunt can be found in the hamlet of Sondheim, Louisiana.
Now the kennel wagon was loaded up. Holt Collier had earned his pay, and he was toasted by the president as an Olympian of the Tensas River. Dr. Lambert apparently took a series of photographs of Roosevelt and Collier on the hunt, but these have never been found. Others have surfaced, however, courtesy of the Parker estate (one shows the men looking like borderland desperados). The press exaggerated the size of the bear, saying that Roosevelt had shot a 375-pound giant; the president said no, it was only 202 pounds. That evening the hunters ate bear steak, with Roosevelt rattling on about his quarry. The president kept an inventory of what his party had shot: the final count was three bears, six deer, and twelve squirrels, and one each of wild turkey, possum, and duck.
And the birding had proved first-class. Long ago John James Audubon had learned what an avian paradise the Louisiana wetlands could be. Audubon had lived in Saint Francisville for on and off twenty-three months from 1821 until 1830, painting eighty of his exquisite folios there. Using Oakley Plantation as his base, Audubon would regularly live among flocks of egrets and herons. In Louisiana, he drew such fine works as Carolina Parrot and Mocking Birds Attacked by Rattlesnakes. Roosevelt had expected to see mockingbirds and half a dozen sparrows perking about in the thick woods and sloughs, but nothing had prepared him for the variety of woodpeckers he observed in the groves of giant cypress. Quite famously in the annals of bird-watching, he recorded seeing three great ivory-billed woodpeckers. And dozens of barred owls “hooted at intervals for several minutes at mid-day”—turning their heads sharply when footsteps were heard. To Roosevelt these owls took on a special mystery at night, their cries seemed “strange and unearthly” like the long hoot of the Southern Pacific headed across the flatlands.59
Roosevelt spent October 20 at the home of a Delta planter. All in all, despite the deprivations, it had been a fine week of hunting and bird-watching. Fully rested, with a bearskin as a memento for a museum, he headed east to Vicksburg, once called the Gibraltar of the Confederacy. Largely owing to the president’s lobbying, the Vicksburg battlefield was being preserved as a 1,800-acre national military park. There was a triumphant procession in the town for the first time since the Civil War, and Roosevelt was given a grand welcome. A new monument was being erected, and the townspeople were excited. Everybody, it seemed, asked Roosevelt about the Louisiana bear hunt—such light conversation helped ease the tension between Democrats and a Republican president. Governor Vardaman of Mississippi, still furious over Roosevelt’s dinner with Booker T. Washington, tried to spoil the special event, which was intended to honor the gallantry of both Union and Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. But although Vardaman injected some invective into the gala, Roosevelt was equal to the situation. Because he was in Vicksburg officially, to dedicate a war memorial to Union and Confederate soldiers, he made a concession for the sake of national unity by praising Jefferson Davis for the fir
st and only time in his life. Surrounded by proud soldiers, he basked in every expression of American pride. Vicksburg—the site of a famous Union siege during the Civil War.
Vicksburg—where from 1899 to 1902 the Corps of Engineers diverted the Yazoo River to flow into the old riverbed so that today the Yazoo, not the Mississippi, flows past the town. Vicksburg—the very word had been part of his life since his boyhood. Vicksburg—to Roosevelt it was a sacred site of both the Union’s glory and America’s eventual healing.
Following an obligatory speech in Leland, Mississippi, Roosevelt made his way back to Memphis and then headed by train to Washington, D.C. The combination of the Mississippi River steamboat trip followed by stalking bears in the Louisiana canebrakes had made him long for the vitality of his youth. How simple the outdoors life, rich with bird life, was: the search for wood, meat in the pot, the sound of painted finches singing in the dawn. Everything required to feel alive with God was available by walking through a meadow, the woods, or a bayou with an eye out for warblers and vireos. An idea started to percolate in Roosevelt. Perhaps he would lead specimen collecting expeditions to the three A’s: the Arctic, Africa, and the Amazon. There were still wild places left where an explorer could make his mark.
President Roosevelt in the Louisiana canebrakes with his hunting partners.
T.R. at the Louisiana canebrakes hunt. (Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library)
As a token of appreciation to Harley and Clive Metcalfe and Holt Collier, Roosevelt had three 45–70-caliber model 1886 Winchester rifles shipped to Mississippi as “treasured keepsakes.” On each weapon the hunter’s full name was engraved, with “1907” underneath.60
V
Reports of Roosevelt’s bear hunt sickened Mark Twain. He saw Roosevelt as a hypocrite: a purported conservationist but also an obsessive hunter. To Twain, the spectacle of the president, who was getting rounder by the day, trudging through swamplands in a downpour to kill one of the last black bears in East Carroll Parish was pathetic. Also, why was a busy president disappearing for days to beat the bushes for bears? Twain personally liked Roosevelt, who had once helped him with a tricky customs issue in Europe. He even enjoyed Roosevelt’s conversation from time to time. But the hunt in Louisiana was the tipping point. As America’s foremost humorist, Twain attacked Roosevelt by writing burlesque versions of the hunt. The gist of the ridicule was that Roosevelt had a rogue hormone, which caused him to light out after animals with deadly intent. A bear or cougar would be better off taking an anesthetic than having to encounter an inglorious death at the hands of a maniac shouting bully before pulling the trigger. Yet Twain was dealing with only one side of Roosevelt’s multidimensional self. As many others have noted, T.R. had thousands of sides, including bird-watching and forest preservation. But Twain, of course, wasn’t looking for balance.
And Twain, as he was apt to do, hit his mark. He had a legitimate ax to grind in this regard. A longtime animal rights advocate who had written A Horse’s Tale and A Dog’s Tale and condemned bullfighting, Twain now insisted that killing a bear with a pack of yapping hounds and mastiffs was the equivalent of shooting a cow in a pasture. In the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he described two loafers in the town of Bricksville who enjoyed pouring kerosene on stray dogs and torching them.61 Turning to Roosevelt, he now imagined the unfortunate cow looking at the president and saying, “Have pity, sir, and spare me. I am alone, you are many…. Have pity, sir—there is no heroism in killing an exhausted cow.” But Roosevelt—who Twain said was “still only fourteen years old after living a half century”—coldly refused. Sarcastically, Twain claimed that Roosevelt had shot the Louisiana black bear in an “extremely sportsmanlike manner” and then triumphantly hugged his planter guides as if he just scored the winning touchdown in the Harvard-Yale game. Then Twain essentially severed his friendship with Roosevelt by declaring that Roosevelt was “the most formidable disaster that has befallen the country since the Civil War.”62
Much as H. L. Mencken or (in our own time) Maureen Dowd cleverly attacked politicians, Twain started eviscerating Roosevelt, deriding the president as one of the most “impulsive men in existence.” Twain was baffled as to why the president was so widely admired as an embodiment of America malehood. Solve that mystery, and you would know the soul of the American people in all their cruelty and glory. Typically, Twain provided his own answer, saying that Roosevelt would “slap the Devil on his back and shoulder and say ‘Why Satan, how do you do? I am so glad to meet you. I’ve read all your books and enjoyed every one of them.’ Who wouldn’t be popular with an act like that?”
Twain’s feud with Roosevelt dated back to 1898, when they had opposing views of the Spanish-American War. Twain was twenty-three years older than Roosevelt, and the generational gap was a factor in his antagonism. Believing that his own hard-earned wisdom was much richer than Roosevelt’s impetuous vitality, Twain differed with Roosevelt on issues such as England against the Boers in South Africa and the revolution in Panama. But something more than foreign policy or disagreements over imperialism erected a barricade between these two colorful figures. Roosevelt’s idea of great literature tended to lean toward swashbuckling epics and romantic sagas. He disdained cynicism, irreverence, and irony in books; but all three attributes were Twain’s trademarks. Roosevelt did, however, consider Twain a “real genius” and thought that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, and Life on the Mississippi were three all-time American “classics.” But he disliked A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court because it mocked the noblemen of the Round Table.63
What Twain was chastising Roosevelt about in 1907 was the Boone and Crockett Club’s “hunting ethos.” As Twain saw it, Roosevelt and other elite hunters would always stalk the largest male big game, the animals with the biggest antlers, tusks, heads, or necks. These hunters, then, were obsessed with bigness. Some modern scientists now believe that Twain was on to something—that, perversely, such selective hunting causes the decline of the very species that elite outdoorsmen want saved. If Charles Darwin was correct in saying that “a law” was the “ascertained sequence of events,” then the shrinking of antler and horn sizes by the twenty-first century was probably an unintended result of hunters’ aiming particularly at game with large antlers and horns. In a landmark report in the January 2009 issue of Proceedings of National Academy of Science, Professor Chris Darimont of the University of California-Santa Cruz offered startling data about the fate of Canadian bighorn sheep’s shrinking curved horns. According to Darimont, modern-day hunters, by aiming for the “mightiest” and “lordliest” big game, had left surviving generations with a noticeably slimmer, less sturdy gene pool. “Human-harvested organisms,” Darimont told National Geographic, regarding his findings, “are the fastest-changing organisms yet observed in the wild.”64
What the National Academy of Science was claiming in 2009 turned the Rooseveltian sportsman’s ethos on its head while proving Darwin’s theory of natural selection once again prescient. Natural selection occurred quickly in the hypertechnological twenty-first century. Trophy hunting and pound-fishing for the biggest quarry were injuring species’ long-term chances for survival.65 “Hunting, commercial fishing, and some conservation regulations like minimum size limits on fish,” Cornelia Dean of the New York Times wrote, summarizing the report, “may all work against species health.”66 In a process called “micro-evolution,” species were apparently getting smaller, in part because hunters and fishermen were always zeroing in on the biggest game and catches. Not only was natural selection real, but Americans like Roosevelt, culturally obsessed with bigness, as typified by the Boone and Crockett Club, by fishing derbies, and by game management protocols that thinned out the largest species first, were completely wrong. The Proceedings of National Academy of Science report didn’t mince words: harvesting the largest organisms in the wild (whether these were Colorado bighorn sheep or Oregon salmon) was wrongheaded. Human predators—using
guns and nets combined with technology—were causing species to shrink in size. “Our preference for largeness in vertebrates is culturally strong because now we can find the largest fish or the biggest brown bears with new gadgetry,” Professor Darimont explained in an interview. “It’s the worst thing a hunter or fisherman can do to aim for the biggest game or catch.”67
Meanwhile, in Alberta, Canada, for example, hunters targeting the largest specimens of Theodore Roosevelt’s beloved bighorn sheep had caused horn length and body mass to decrease by about 20 percent from 1979 to 2009. By the time Barack Obama became president, trophy hunting was also pushing polar bears and grizzly bears into the category of endangered species. What a strange twist of fate for hunters inspired by Roosevelt and Grinnell to contemplate! Killing the trophy game, taking out the alpha males, was adversely affecting the species they loved. At least, however, the Boone and Crockett Club had gotten some things right during Roosevelt’s presidency: it had fought for huge wildlife refuges, promoted seasonal hunting, insisted on licenses in every state, issued bag limits, and banned the killing of females during the breeding season and of young animals at any time.
Obviously, along the Tensas River in 1907, Roosevelt couldn’t have known about “micro-evolution.” Given how seriously Roosevelt took evolution, he might have reformed his hunting practices if he had read Proceedings of National Academy of Science. But such speculation is moot. All that history recorded of Roosevelt’s hunt was his need for a Louisiana black bear to donate to America’s growing natural history collection (and to satisfy his own desires). And the average American continued to cheer the president onward for his wilderness exploits. Roosevelt appealed to an almost mystical attachment that people had toward bears. The public both adored and feared them. Whether dead or alive, in zoos or as toys, bears were popular. The toy teddy bear remained the rage in 1907. And Roosevelt himself sometimes emitted bearlike grumbles when he was in the outdoors and pretended to be standing on haunches, mainly for comical effect. But now Twain was irritated that Roosevelt could so easily sell his bear act to the American people. It wasn’t Roosevelt’s charisma that Twain minded, but the way Roosevelt marketed himself as the “great bear hunter.” In face-to-face encounters, Twain continued to like Roosevelt. But he was nevertheless nauseated by the carnival atmosphere at the White House—a spotted pony in the elevator, a wolf-catcher at the dinner table, and a pet badger biting the ankles of visitors. Such ridiculous stunts were signs of arrested development—as was shooting a bear for no reason.
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