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By Root 4246 0

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—courtesy 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