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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

Perhaps the most famous cartoon of the twentieth century was Clifford Berryman’s “The Passing Show,” more commonly referred to as “Drawing the Line in Mississippi.” It appeared in the Washington Post and started the “teddy bear” phenomenon.

Clifford Berryman’s “Drawing the Line in Mississippi.” (Courtesy of the Cartoon Museum)

Berryman’s cartoon was a hit and was reprinted nationwide, eliciting praise for the president but also chuckles at his inability to bag a bear in Mississippi. Having worked with the Post since 1891, Berryman had developed a fine reputation for political satire. He had been raised in the Kentucky bluegrass country and had never heard of a southern bear hunt where the hunter refused to kill the prey—it struck him as funny. There were four or five variants of his cartoon, which is now a classic. One of the disregarded versions portrayed the president as a small boy. Berryman’s editor chose the version in which Roosevelt was an adult and the bear was small. But, as Buchanan pointed out in Holt Collier, Berryman had two major mistakes in his celebrated cartoon: the bear was not a cub and the man holding the rope wasn’t white (it was Holt Collier). “Naturally,” Roosevelt wrote to a friend, “the comic press jumped at the failure and have done a good job of laughing over it.”23

Reporters had swarmed around the president all that first day, hoping to send colorful dispatches. But no bear shot by the president was ever hung in the camp. Meanwhile the reporters were stuck in the middle of nowhere, twelve miles from the Smedes telegraph line, with no lively copy to offer from the delta. Some reporters quipped that the president would have been better off fishing for smallmouth bass or chasing after moccasins to exterminate. Any way you sliced it, the story was a non-story: