Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [102]
A SIGNBOARD READING SMEDES dripped with the damp of a Mississippi autumn afternoon. On one side of the rails was a depot; on the other, a plantation store. Cotton fields sprawled dully, their extent incalculable behind curtains of mist. About twenty Negroes waited on bales, swinging their legs and staring down the track toward Vicksburg. The President had tried to keep the location of his hunting trip secret, but bush telegraph advised that he would look for bear hereabouts, on the banks of the Little Sunflower River.
Among the bale-sitters, at least, Roosevelt was guaranteed a welcome. Ever since his dinner for Booker T. Washington, Southern blacks had called him “our President” and compared him to Lincoln. They did not care that he had only just announced his first appointment of a Negro to high federal office—Dr. William D. Crum, Collector-designate of Customs in Charleston, South Carolina. It was good enough that he elsewhere favored moderate white Democrats over the “Lily White” extremists of his own party. Had not Dr. Washington himself declared Roosevelt’s opposition to any further “drawing of the color line” in Southern politics?
Within the depot, two plantation owners were also waiting. George H. Helm and Hugh L. Foote were not ashamed to show support for the President in a state where so many of his own race despised him. Roosevelt could hardly have chosen a worse time to visit the Yazoo delta. The idea of Dr. Crum (wealthy, cultured, conscientious, but … black) seated in a position of power overlooking Fort Sumter was incendiary enough to revive the passions of a year ago—not to mention the passions of 1861. James K. Vardaman, a prominent Mississippi Democrat, had openly advertised for “16 coons to sleep with Roosevelt.” Given such propaganda, the President’s hosts were worried about a possible assassination attempt. Hence the secrecy surrounding his hunt, and the remoteness of his camp, fifteen miles east of Smedes, in a privately owned forest choked with bud vine and briar. Only one access trail had been hacked. Armed guards were on patrol, ready to stop with buckshot any unauthorized stranger.
Shortly before four o’clock, a locomotive and private car steamed out of the mist and clanked to a halt. Roosevelt emerged in leather leggings, a blue flannel shirt, and a rough corduroy jacket. Around his waist was a cartridge belt, flashing with steel-jacketed and soft-nose bullets. An ivory-handled hunting knife rode on his hip, and he gripped his favorite .40-.90 Winchester. The gun was custom-made, with a crescent cheek-piece that somehow helped alleviate Roosevelt’s 8-D myopia. Its walnut butt was scarred with Colorado cougar bites.
He stepped down with a crunch of hobnail boots onto Mississippi soil, followed by George Cortelyou and the rest of his hunting party. Helm and Foote, assuming he wanted to shed his presidential identity, addressed him politely as “Colonel.” He shook hands, then heaved himself onto a waiting horse. His companions mounted, too, and they rode off together into the fog.
THE NEXT FIVE DAYS made for the worst hunt of Roosevelt’s life: “simply exasperating … I never got a shot.” Bears were not rare around the Little Sunflower, just rare wherever he went. His veteran catcher, Holt Collier (lifetime tally, 1,600 specimens), tried to lure game within range of the presidential rifle, yet hunter and prey invariably moved in different directions.
The other men in the party did not dare to bag anything themselves. Roosevelt insisted on first blood. “I am going on this hunt to kill a bear, not to see anyone else kill it.” Embarrassingly,