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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.