The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [280]
The fad continued after Roosevelt left the White House in 1909. One toy company, eager to cash in by bestowing on the incoming president, William Howard Taft, his own stuffed animal, designed a plush opossum marketed under the slogan, “Good-Bye Teddy Bear. Hello Billy Possum.” Unfortunately, with its weird pink eyes, frightening grin, and ratlike tail, Billy Possum was one stuffed critter children refused to hug. The toy was a flop. Other presidents might be remembered as anglers—among them Cleveland, Coolidge, Hoover, Truman, Eisenhower, and George H. W. Bush—but only Theodore Roosevelt was firmly established as an outdoorsman. The teddy bear probably had more to do with this image than his setting aside of more than 230 million acres of federal parklands.29
Once he was back in Washington, Roosevelt initiated a correspondence with Collier, sending him letters and promising to stay in touch. Presumably a literate friend read these letters to Collier. With so many parvenus in town Roosevelt enjoyed staying in touch with a outdoorsman like Collier. Although it took a few years, Roosevelt would again go hunting with Collier in 1907. Roosevelt pronounced him a better hunter than even John “Grizzly” Adams, Ben Lilly, or Wade Hampton III. At the turn of the twentieth century men used to vie for being considered the best shot; Roosevelt was giving the gold medal to Collier. “He was a man of sixty and could neither read nor write, but he had all the dignity of an African chief,” Roosevelt wrote, “and for half a century he had been a bear hunter, having killed or assisted in killing over three thousand bears.”30 A young novelist from Oxford, Mississippi, William Faulkner, drawing on Roosevelt’s enthusiasm, later modeled a character in his allegorical short story “The Bear” on Collier, though he made his fictional figure a Chickasaw chief.31 Capturing the mythical tenor of the bear hunt, Faulkner wrote of his character Sam Fathers that he was an “old man of seventy” and that “the woods” were his “mistress and his wife.”32
Although the correlation isn’t provable, Holt Collier’s outdoors acumen may have influenced President Roosevelt in another, unexpected way. Roosevelt had long been an admirer of the buffalo soldiers—the 14,000 African-American men who served in cavalry and infantry units during the Indian Wars on the Great Plains. After his trip to Mississippi Roosevelt suddenly assigned them to patrol the three national parks of California: General Grant, Yosemite, and Sequoia. Additional buffalo soldiers were put in charge of Monterey’s Presidio. Roosevelt had developed the idea that African-Americans made fine wilderness police. Captain Charles Young—the third African-American West Point graduate, and a personal friend of Roosevelt—was named acting superintendent of Sequoia National Park. Young’s outfit would escort Roosevelt to Yosemite in 1903, discussing with the president ways to protect the “big trees.”
From Collier’s perspective Roosevelt’s hunt was all upbeat. Fame came to him like a race horse. For Roosevelt, unlike Collier, the Mississippi bear hunt had an unfortunate outcome, which plagued him to the grave and beyond. More than ever, Americans now called him Teddy—the name he loathed. The first sign that individuals knew absolutely nothing about the real Roosevelt was that they dared to say “Teddy Roosevelt charged up San Juan Hill” or boasted that “Teddy Roosevelt was in town.” Newspaper columnists were famous for this. Why didn’t they call Lincoln “Abie” or Washington “Georgie” while they were at it? Whenever J. P. Morgan, John Hay, and Mark Hanna called Roosevelt “Teddy”—as they often did—he took it as a direct insult. “No man who knows me well calls me by the nickname…,” Roosevelt wrote