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owing to the advent of railroad traffic, there were far fewer river vessels. But Roosevelt didn’t pine for the steamboat era, per se. His romanticism was always tilted more toward horseback riding on the prairie. With his type A personality, he didn’t like being confined on a boat. It made him feel antsy, and also helpless—the very thought of boiler explosions, snags, and sandbars made him restless. He was proud that his great-great uncle Nicholas Roosevelt, a gifted associate of the inventor Robert Fulton, had been the first to steamboat down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers in the New Orleans, traversing thousands of miles before the vessel reached its namesake city and anchored across from The Cabildo (where the Louisiana Purchase was signed in 1803, doubling the size of America).45

Following his speech in Memphis, Roosevelt headed by train to Stamboul, a hamlet in East Carroll Parish, Louisiana. Stamboul was known for its cypress timber, for its pecan trees, and—henceforth—for President Roosevelt’s having set foot there.46 As usual, Dr. Alexander Lambert was at Roosevelt’s side, this time along with two other physicians. Originally Roosevelt was hoping to meet Reverend Herbert K. Job to inspect the Breton Island Federal Bird Reservation, and then to visit Avery Island, which had become a privately managed nursery for the preservation of egrets.47 But time constraints forced him to settle for a hunt for black bears in northern Louisiana, a short way from the Mississippi River, with John M. Parker and John McIlhenny as his hosts in the canebrakes. Concerned about bad publicity (which he had received in Mississippi five years earlier), Roosevelt banned reporters and gawkers, and even the Secret Service men did not know where his camp was. When reporters followed Roosevelt around on such hunting trips, he saw them as mice looking for sensational copy so as to become rats.48

The ever-obliging John Parker took a chance in hiring the uncouth fifty-three-year-old pot hunter Ben Lilly as Roosevelt’s guide through the Tensas bayou wilderness in search of black bear. Lilly knew the extensive bottomlands of this part of the alluvial Mississippi Valley better than anyone else. By all accounts Lilly seldom washed; was scraggly, grizzled, and unkempt; and refused to sleep indoors—he preferred hollowed-out logs and switch cane. He had a full beard and intense, wild blue eyes, and was deemed a “goofy old coot” by Roosevelt because of his obsessive muttering. Roosevelt’s first impression of Lilly, when the guide arrived in camp dressed like a blacksmith, was a “religious fanatic.”49 As night began to lower, Roosevelt nevertheless strategized with Lilly about their best tracking options come morning. It was as if the president were testing uncertain ice. An early autumn cold had crept into camp, and the men were already getting sniffles and coughs. Roosevelt and Lilly stayed up late and talked about Louisiana black bear and water moccasins, enjoying each other’s openness of manner. “I never met any other man,” Roosevelt wrote, “so indifferent to fatigue and hardship.”50

Roosevelt, however, never fully warmed to Lilly. A wise man once said that a person (like Lilly) unable to live in society was either a beast or a god—and Lilly, raised a hunter, was clearly of the first type. But Roosevelt found the whole concept of a wild man anthropologically fascinating. Lilly was called the “most skilled hunter who ever followed a hound,” and he was hired throughout the Mississippi Delta to hunt (for a bounty) menacing bears or cougars who had destroyed livestock.51 Because the canebrakes grew ten to twelve feet high, it was difficult for hunters to see in front of themselves; hence the brakes were a fine cover for bears. Comparing Lilly to James Fenimore Cooper’s Deerslayer in “woodcraft, in handihood, in simplicity—and also in loquacity,” Roosevelt began sketching Lilly’s character traits in rather psychologically complex prose for Scribner’s Magazine. It was unusual for Roosevelt to write in this way about people, but Lilly was so like an animal