The pack of bear hounds ran through the thick forest in long, stretching leaps, their motion a combination of frenetic excitement and smooth, conditioned ease. This was what they were bred for, and what they lived for. The leaf canopy was so dense that at times only a half-light, a sort of dusky murk, penetrated to the forest floor where the hounds ran. Their chorus of howls and yowls was all that kept them connected to the hunters who lagged far behind. Horses just couldn’t move through this stuff as fast as dogs could.
Now the sound was muffled from the hunters as the dogs passed around a canebrake wall bordered by a dark bayou. Now the sound was clear as the hounds raced in a long, scattered string through an open glade. But always the sound was telling the hunters what was happening.
The houndsman, the only black man on the hunt, heard much more than the others. His friends and clients knew bear dogs and bear hunting, but this was his pack, and he knew each voice, each inflection, and he knew that, to the extent that the hounds called for any reason besides the exuberance of a hot trail, they called for him.
Then, off in the distance, he heard the hounds bark treed, as he’d heard this pack and others do a thousand or more times. But there was something different this time. The sound was muffled and unfamiliar. Something was wrong up there with the dogs, and he rushed on anxiously to find out what it was.
The something was an enormous downed tree, hollow through its lower trunk. The bear had sought refuge in it, and as the houndsman and his friends pulled up in sight of it, the muffled squeals of the dogs, which had instantly followed the bear in, told the men that the pack was getting smaller every minute.
This pack was famous throughout the lower Mississippi valley, almost as famous as its owner had become in the years since the Civil War, when he’d settled into a life of bear and panther hunting. This was more than his pack; it was his life. Without hesitation, holding his long hunting knife in his mouth, he bent to the opening, and before his companions realized what he was doing, he was almost out of sight in the tree. One man was quick enough to grab his ankle and let out a firm objection, but the foot slipped free from the boot and the houndsman was gone into the tight tunnel full of frantic dogs and furious bear.
The surviving account of this incident doesn’t say how many dogs were in there, or how many of them died. The man, as near as can be told, crawled on his hands and knees to a point where he could work his way past the tangle of bleeding dogs.
Imagine him in there. Imagine the ripe smell of swamp-wet dogs, the acrid stench of overheated, enraged bear, the slippery warm blood of pack members already lost; the simply insufferable noise and confusion in that dank little hole. Imagine him grabbing the nearest dog by whatever he could get a grip on and yanking it past him as he moved toward the bear.
And imagine the bear, cornered in an unfamiliar lair, seeing the light of the only exit blocked by this larger attacker that did not howl or bark, but crawled silently toward him through the addled dogs.
It was apparently too much for the bear. It broke, and rushed at him, trying to squeeze past to reach the light and freedom. As it did so, it raked him with its claws, one of only two or three times in nearly three-quarters of a century of hunting that a bear would cut this man at all. And as it did, the man, holding his balance in the slimy trunk with his right hand, laid into the bear with the knife he held in his left, wounding it mortally and saving the rest of his pack to hunt again.
As much as I admire or am intrigued by other great bear hunters, none has so captured my interest as Holt Collier.
Born a slave near Fayette, Mississippi, in Jefferson County, about 1848, he led an advantaged life for a slave child. His father was plantation chef for Howell Hinds, a wealthy planter with about 3,500 acres of land south of present Greenville, Mississippi. Holt not only went to school with Hinds’ children, he traveled with the family around the country as Hinds’ boy valet.
Hinds had trouble keeping Holt in the classroom; the boy loved the woods too much to sit in school. Recognizing (and sharing) the youngster’s enthusiasm for outdoor life, Hinds let him go, and when Holt was 10 he was given a 12-gauge shotgun and was instructed to sit on the front porch of the Hinds home and keep the blackbirds out of the chinaberry trees.
In those days, wilderness began just beyond the doorstep of many plantation homes, so Holt was soon ranging farther and farther away with shotgun and rifle. He learned to shoot from either shoulder and became a skilled woodsman. By the time he was 12, he had ridden behind Hinds on a hunt with the men, and had shot his first bear.
When the Civil War began, Hinds refused to let the boy go along. Barely in his teens, Holt stowed away on a riverboat headed north and rejoined Hinds in Memphis, at which point, Mr. Hinds, now a colonel, relented and let the boy stay and become a Confederate soldier.
And a soldier he was, distinguishing himself throughout the war, the only black man serving in the Confederate Army from the state of Mississippi, according to the state’s department of archives and history. As a cavalryman and sharpshooter, he fought in many campaigns; his woodcraft was invaluable to his fellow troopers. In one of the few reliable published interviews, he described those times: “During that time, I did a great deal of scout duty. The whole country was a wilderness, and if our boys got lost I could always find the way out. I had been raised in this part of the country and had hunted in the woods all my life.”
Holt Collier was a fine and daring enough soldier in the Civil War to come home a hero among both his white and black neighbors. Still just a teenager, he was a well-known man around Greenville by 1865, long before he became a regional legend as a bear hunter.
Studying the life of Collier has been as frustrating as it has been rewarding, because there are so many obstacles in the way of really getting to know him.
There is a shortage of firsthand information about him. As articulate as he was, and as prominent as he was, he was illiterate—legal documents show only his “mark,” with his name written in by some other person. We rely almost entirely on secondhand information, and it is widely variable in its quality. Thus, various sources give his birthdate as January 1, 1846, or January 21, 1846, or some time in 1848. Many people who wrote about him did so with casual attention to details, having no idea that such information would matter to anyone 50 or more years later.
There is another obstacle, a racial one. This man fought for the Confederacy, a choice that would not endear him to some people even today, though he obviously fought out of loyalty to Mr. Hinds more than out of any understanding of the political or social issues of the war. Still, it will always be a part of the irony of Holt Collier’s saga that he was a slave fighting on the side of proslavery forces.
I don’t think that his involvement in the war was really of much importance to those who produced the later portrayals of him. Many of those who wrote about Collier did so in the 1920s and 1930s, late in his life. The fashionable style then among many journalists was to turn any southern black into a stereotypical “darkie” who spouted remarks like “Yas, suh,” and “Sho, ‘nough.” More reliable sources, including local historians who took the trouble to interview him before his death in 1936, pointed out that a lifetime of contact with well-heeled, educated whites, and more educational opportunities than most blacks of his day, had made Collier an able speaker who could tell his story with clarity and strength.
Following his discharge from the Confederate Army, Collier returned to Greenville, a small town in Washington County along the Mississippi River. Whenever he made some extra money, from bear bounties for example, he traveled, once going to Texas to visit army friends, more often going to horse races and other sporting events. He took to the life of the hunter/guide, married and had children, and seemed to live about as happy a life as he could have wished.
Except for politics. Probably because of his service in the war, but also because of his friendships with various influential Mississippians and his own strong personality, he frequently ran afoul of the carpetbag rulers of the state. More than once, his white planter friends stood by him in court and kept him from unjust imprisonment and even execution. On one occasion, Collier was the only black among several hundred white southerners who staged a protest march in Greenville against the carpetbaggers. He was not merely tolerated, he was welcome, and he occupied an odd position of social prominence in a confused and struggling society.
I do regret that we do not have more stories of his hunting experiences in print. But, he was well-known, and the stories may still be out there, undiscovered, even yet.
We know that he hunted in many quail-shooting matches as a representative of Col. Hinds. He was said to have once won a $1,000 purse in a match against a famous Arkansas shooter.
He and the colonel also hunted the now-extinct passenger pigeon, though it was more like harvesting than hunting. At night, they would take pine knot torches into the woods and beat the pigeons from the trees by the buggyload with no stouter weapons than cane fishing poles.
But mostly he seems to have hunted bigger game, especially deer, bear and cougar.
In what were something near his own words, published in April 1909, in The Saturday Evening Post, Collier reminisced about those years:
In the spring, I’d go away and foller the races, same as I used to—St. Louis and Saratoga and New Orleans, and way out in Texas takin’ in the fairs. Then in the fall, I’d come home, get my dogs together and hit the canebrake again. I jes’ naturally loved a hoss and loved to hunt bears. Didn’t do nothin’ much ‘cept hunt. I would kill on an average 125 to 130 and 140 bears in a season. I reckon I have kilt more bear than any man in the whole entire world. I kept count of ’em up to 2,100, but the book of my tallies got burnt up in my house 20 years ago. When the Valley Railroad was being built through here I kept the commissary supplied constant with bear meat—they bought it reg’lar instead o’ beef. Out o’ 76 bear I shot 54 of ’em in the head; made over $900 that season sellin’ bear meat…. Since that time I never did know what ’twas to kill less than 50 to 75 bear in a season; but now the bear is got so scarce I won’t go to the trouble to train the hounds like I used to. My dogs would fight a bear three or four days and nights until they ‘most starved to death, waitin’ for me to come. I often found ’em the third or fourth day treein’ or fightin’. Me and them both have lived off of raw meat and not cared whether ’twere cooked or not.
After the death of Mr. Hinds, Collier came to be good friends with the Metcalfe family of Greenville, and for most of the rest of his life, Clive and Harley Metcalfe watched over the man with the solicitousness of older brothers. They hunted with him, saw to it that he had what he needed if he ran short of money, and involved him in their family life.
All of this sounds like a fulsome enough existence for any man who loved the outdoors, who had strong loyalties to his friends, and who was lucky enough to have friends who deserved such loyalties, but we would know much less of Collier than we do if his existence had gone only this far. Collier’s war adventures may have set him apart from most men, and his career as a hunter may have made him rare in the annals of sport, but we would probably have almost no record of him at all today were it not for a single hunt he guided in 1902. It was a hunt, ironically enough, in which the main client didn’t even get a shot at a bear. But it was a hunt that made Collier famous and gave him a peculiar and enduring place not only in sporting history but in American political history as well. It was the infamous Mississippi bear hunt of Theodore Roosevelt.
The results of this hunt are well-known: an embarrassed president, an amused press and a disappointing shortage of bears. The hunt itself is surprisingly rich in lore, however, as well as in conflicting details. It seems that for every participant, as well as for every journalist who reported on it, there is a different version of exactly what happened. Donald Finn, a history buff who has spent years gathering information about it, is certain that none of the published accounts are totally accurate.
My own reading of the accounts, assisted by the extensive readings and research of Sandra Desmond, shows me that the accounts are troublesome in that way. Some disagree in this detail, or that sequence of events, or this alleged quotation, or that reported participant. I would need 100 pages to simply list and analyze the variant versions of the story, so instead I will concentrate on Collier’s role in the hunt and give a generalized account of the affair based on a careful reading of the surviving accounts.
Roosevelt had been interested in Southern bears for many years and had read a good bit about the hunting of them. Shortly after he took office, in 1902, Roosevelt received an invitation from Mississippi Governor Longino to join him and a couple of dozen or so other prominent Southerners in a bear hunt. Roosevelt wanted a bear hunt but knew that the crowd would make hunting impossible, so he declined with regret. Then, Stuyvesant Fish of the Illinois Central Railroad, whose line ran right through the bear country, made a similar invitation and offered to keep the party small. The president perked up, took notice, and decided to go. Lindsay Denison, one of the three professional journalists eventually allowed to join the party, wrote the hunt up in Outing in February 1903, and described the filling out of the guest list:
Mr. Fish wrote to Mr. John M. Parker, of New Orleans, a cotton factor, whom he knew had hunted in the delta. Mr. Parker wrote to E.C. Mangum, of Sharkey County, who owns and manages four cotton plantations on the edge of the bear canebrakes. Mr. Magnum wrote to Holt Collier, the negro guide, former Confederate scout and a marked character through all the delta; to Major George Helm, to Hugh Foote, and to Leroy Percy, all crack shots and all familiar with jungle hunting, as every planter and Mississippi gentleman must be. Mr. Fish wrote to Judge Dickinson, the general solicitor of the railroad. Mr. Roosevelt, asked to invite a guest, sent for John McIlhenny, a young man of New Orleans, who had been under his command in Cuba. It was, of course, understood that the secretary to the president, Mr. Cortelyou, and the president’s surgeon, Dr. Lung, should accompany him. It will be seen, therefore, that with the sincerest desire in the world to keep down the membership of the party, there were already 10 white men in it.
Ten was of course too many, what with the addition of camp helpers, assistants, aides and so on. Collier was the logical choice for houndsman.
Collier learned of the hunt about a month in advance, and was sent out to find a good bear ground. He investigated the brakes along the Sunflower River near the town of Smedes, Mississippi, scouting for bear sign and assuring himself and the others that there were lots of bears around. He found the prints of nine different bears at one water hole near the chosen campsite. It looked promising. It should have been a good hunt.
It wasn’t. Roosevelt had a lot to learn about hunting while president. There were simply too many people. Collier remembered that Roosevelt showed up with a “carload of guards,” most of whom were left behind or stationed here and there on the borders of the hunting area, but the party was still too big.
This wasn’t Collier’s fault, of course.
Three bears were taken, and, in keeping with the southern tradition of bear hunting, Roosevelt’s hosts were a bit puzzled by the president’s disappointment. Being on a hunt where three bears were taken was just about as good as having shot the bears yourself, to their way of thinking; the president got three bears, didn’t he? What was he upset about?
Actually, the failure of Roosevelt to get a bear may have been more his own fault than he admitted. According to Theodore Roosevelt scholar Gregory C. Wilson, former curator of the Theodore Roosevelt Collection at Harvard and author of the most authoritative of the modern accounts of the hunt, Roosevelt missed a perfect chance on the first day of the hunt.
Someone, either Collier or some of the others, stationed Roosevelt and a companion or two near a spot where they were sure the bear would pass during the chase. They were reluctant to risk the presidential person on a wild-running horse in that country, so to the embarrassment of the president, he was left afoot at this hopeful junction of trails. After a few hours of waiting in the drizzly November woods, he and his friend impatiently returned to camp. Not long after they deserted their post, Collier and his hounds drove the day’s bear within a few yards of it. If the president had stayed parked where he was supposed to, it all would have worked out fine.
But, to his everlasting chagrin, Roosevelt had not seen the last of that bear. About a mile past the spot where he should have stayed, the bear was run into a pond, exhausted. What happened next has found a small place in American history. A president was about to get a mascot.
Let’s back up a moment first, to set the stage before Collier walks out on it. According to some of the better accounts, the night before the hunt Roosevelt and the rest had been talking as they sat around the campfire. The conversation turned inevitably to Holt’s life and skills. Someone wondered if Collier could rope a bear alive. One of his friends asserted, as Collier sat in respectful silence, that Collier could catch a bear without a rope if he wanted to, and that with a rope it would be easy.
This may be why, as Collier watched the fatigued bear flounder in the water with his equally worn dogs, he took his rope and waded in. He was impressed, above all else, with making sure that “the colonel” (Roosevelt) got a chance at a bear, and here was one that couldn’t get away. His own reminiscence, taken down by a historian years later, does the moment justice:
I followed the bear into the lake with my Texas rope on my arm. I slicked up the rope with the blue mud from the bottom. I had one dog in the water with me; he tangled with the bear and they went under. I kicked the bear and he stuck his head up. While he was shaking the water from his eyes, I dropped the rope over his head, moved back about 10 feet or so, and tied it to a tree. The bear was old, but he was fat; he had gray hair on his paws and head, and he had two big black teeth. That bear killed several fine dogs for me.
Later reports would place the bear’s weight as high as 600 pounds, but the most reliable estimates were less than 250. It appears that at least one dog was killed, bitten through the neck, while the bear was in the water. Some stories say that Collier broke his rifle over the bear’s head while trying to protect the dogs, but his own remembrances sometimes leave that out. In any case, somehow Collier and one or two others who caught up with him tied the bear to a tree, leaving the animal entangled in the rope and wallowing in exhaustion in the shallow water. Someone went to get Roosevelt.
When he arrived, he unhesitatingly refused to shoot the bear. Some accounts say that Collier quietly approached him and advised him that it was poor form to shoot a tied bear, but without question, Roosevelt would have known this anyway. There does seem to have been a high and immediate sense of understanding and appreciation between the president and Collier, so such an exchange between them seems possible. Roosevelt laughed at the idea of shooting a roped animal and told his companions to put the bear out of its misery, then left.
This caused a good deal of confusion, as I say, because the others had a different idea of what one did on a bear hunt. As one put it, “If I’d had the slightest idea he was going to feel that way about it, sir, I’d have had those ropes cut off that bear long before he came in sight.”
But the press loved it. Washington Post cartoonist Clifford Berryman quickly produced a cartoon showing Roosevelt refusing to shoot a tiny bear cub with big sad eyes and a rope around its neck. The cartoon, of which there were eventually at least three variants published, was entitled “Drawing The Line In Mississippi,” apparently a caption of multiple meanings, including some boundary dispute that Roosevelt was involved in settling between Mississippi and Louisiana, Roosevelt’s position on racial issues (the color line, so to speak), and his drawing a line between sporting and unsporting conduct.
Interestingly, the man depicted holding the rope was white.
Within a few weeks, other political cartoonists began to feature small bears in Roosevelt cartoons. An informal political symbol was born. A brisk business sprang up in related items, such as postcards and buttons. A Brooklyn merchant named Morris Michtom created a small toy bear, called it “Teddy’s Bear,” and almost overnight, the Teddy Bear became associated with Roosevelt, who, adding insult to injury, didn’t even like the name “Teddy.” And all because Holt Collier’s friends wondered if he could really rope a bear.
The rest of the hunt went just as poorly, and Roosevelt left without a trophy but with a determination that he would try these Southern bears again some day.
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It took five years, but he came back in October 1907, and this time it all went well.
This is a well-documented hunt, and perhaps the best account of them all is Roosevelt’s “In The Louisiana Canebrakes,” published in Scribner’s Magazine in January 1908.
Again his host was John Parker, and again John McIlhenny was along. Again Holt Collier was the houndsman. A few others were involved, the most extraordinary of them was a hunter named Ben Lilly, then on a brief visit to Mississippi from Texas. (See “The Great Bear Men, Part I: Ben Lilly,” OUTDOOR LIFE, June 1988.) Roosevelt was struck by Lilly’s appearance and behavior:
The morning after we reached camp we were joined by Ben Lilley [sic], the hunter, a spare, full-bearded man, with wild, gentle, blue eyes and a frame of steel and whipcord. I never met any other man so indifferent to fatigue and hardship. He equalled Cooper’s Deerslayer in woodcraft, in hardihood, in simplicity—and also in loquacity. The morning he joined us in camp, he had come on foot through the thick woods, followed by his two dogs, and had neither eaten nor drunk for 24 hours; for he did not like to drink the swamp water. It had rained hard throughout the night and he had no shelter, no rubber coat, nothing but the clothes he was wearing, and the ground was too wet for him to lie on; so he perched in a crooked tree in the beating rain, much as if he had been a wild turkey. But he was not in the least tired when he struck camp; and, though he slept an hour after breakfast, it was chiefly because he had nothing else to do, inasmuch as it was Sunday, on which day he never hunted nor labored. He could run through the woods like a buck, was far more enduring, and quite as indifferent to weather, though he was more than 50 years old. He had trapped and hunted throughout almost all the half century of his life, and on trail of game he was as sure as his own hounds. His observations on wild creatures were singularly close and accurate. He was particularly fond of the chase of the bear, which he followed by himself, with one or two dogs, lying down to sleep wherever night overtook him; and he had killed over 120 bears.
It’s worth giving you that entire quote just for the pleasure of Roosevelt’s gifts at succinct summary, but it is also revealing because that is about all he had to say about Ben Lilly. The eccentric old woodsman seems to have taken no real part in the hunt, and to have been mostly just a curiosity in camp. This was primarily Collier’s show.
The hunt took place in northeastern Louisiana. The first camp was on Tensas Bayou, a few miles west of Tallulah. It was a hunting ground as historic as any in Mississippi; George Lowery, in his Mammals Of Louisiana And Its Adjacent Waters (1974) reports on bear hunting expeditions in Mississippi River canebrakes as early as 1750, and I’ve seen a number of accounts from before the Civil War, including those in A Sporting Family Of The Old South (1936), a book edited by Harry Worcester Smith that contains several hunting adventures written by Frederick Gustavus Skinner. Skinner hunted the Tensas River in the years before 1860, and left vivid descriptions of the wild state of the land at that time.
It was still wild, if being chopped down fast, when Roosevelt arrived. From Roosevelt’s words, we can get a vivid picture:
Beyond the end of cultivation towers the great forest. Wherever the water stands in pools, and by the edges of the lakes and bayous, the giant cypress loom aloft, rivaled in size by some of the red gums and white oaks. In stature, in towering majesty, they are unsurpassed by any trees of our eastern forests; lordlier kings of the green-leaved world are not to be found until we reach the sequoias and redwoods of the Sierras…. The canebrakes stretch along the slight rises of ground, often extending for miles, forming one of the most striking and interesting features of the country. They choke out other growths, the feathery, graceful canes standing in ranks, tall, slender, serried, each but a few inches from his brother, and springing to a height of 15 or 20 feet. They look like bamboos; they are well-nigh impenetrable to a man on horseback; even on foot they make difficult walking unless free use is made of the heavy bush knife. It is impossible to see through them for more than 15 or 20 feet, and often for not half that distance. Bears make their lairs in them, and they are the refuge for hunted things.
One more observation from Roosevelt concludes the arrangements for this hunt:
Late in the evening of the same day we were joined by two gentlemen, to whom we owed the success of our hunt. They were Messrs. Clive and Harley Metcalf [sic], planters from Mississippi, men in the prime of life, thorough woodsmen and hunters, skilled marksmen, and utterly fearless horsemen. For a quarter of a century, they had hunted bear and deer with horse and hound, and were masters of the art. They brought with them their pack of bear hounds, only one, however, being a thoroughly staunch and seasoned veteran. The pack was under the immediate control of a negro hunter, Holt Collier, in his own way as remarkable a character as Ben Lilley [sic]. He was a man of 60 and could neither read nor write, but he had all the dignity of an African chief, and for half a century he had been a bear hunter, having killed or assisted in killing over 3,000 bears…. After the war, he continued to stay with his master until the latter died, and had then been adopted by the Metcalfs [sic]; and he felt that he had brought them up, and treated them with that mixture of affection and grumbling respect that an old nurse shows toward the lad who has ceased being a child. The two Metcalfs [sic] and Holt understood one another thoroughly, and understood their hounds and the game their hounds followed almost as thoroughly.
But there were no bears to be found right then on the Bayou, so after a few days camp was moved to Bear Lake, a long, winding body of water once part of a river but now stillwater. They were joined by Ichabod and Tom Osborn, planters whose ancestors had settled in the area a century before, and who contributed a few dogs of their own to the pack. A small yearling bear was killed, then, after a couple of days, the pack crossed the trail of an adult female. While Holt managed the dogs, the men split up, each aiming to head the bear off.
The descriptions of the hunt don’t make it clear just where anyone was when Roosevelt got the bear. Clive Metcalfe led the president to a likely spot, then another, listening all the while to the sound of the pack as it drifted here and there in the heavy growth, trying to estimate where it was headed, and ultimately doing a good job of guessing its course. Furious riding was alternated with brief, puffing interludes of listening. The bear would approach a clearing, the pack and Holt hard on its heels, but then it would turn and leave the disappointed hunters waiting in vain. They would mount up and tear through the cane to a new spot.
This, according to one probably trustworthy account, was the arrangement settled upon by Collier. According to this version, Collier had told Roosevelt that if the hunt was turned over to him, completely, the bear would be found. Collier directed the hunters on their movements, and gave the following instructions to Clive: “Now, Mr. Clive, you take the Cunnel [Roosevelt] and bum around with him in the woods like you an’ me always does, an’ don’ put him on no stand. He ain’t no baby. He can go anywhere you can go; jest keep him as near to the dogs as you can. Mr. Harley an’ me will follow the hounds an’ when we strike a trail, you and the Cunnel come a-runnin’.”
If that speech was made, I can imagine Roosevelt’s face disappearing behind his great smile when he heard he “ain’t no baby,” to know that at least one man present beside himself wasn’t going to over-pamper him. And whether just those words were said or not, that’s just how it worked out. Clive and Roosevelt at last heard the shouts of the others and the wild baying cry of the lead dogs, unable to bring the bear to a full bay but easily able now to keep it in sight. Clive, with the unerring judgment of a man who’d learned his sport from one of the world’s premier bear men, and following the advice that man had given him earlier in the day, led the president to what he figured was the right place.
Roosevelt crouched next to his host in the heavy cane and brought his rifle up as he peered this way and that through the tangle, looking for the bear. It came then, badgered and distracted by Collier’s lead dogs Rowdy and Queen. At 20 yards, it stood sideways to the hunters, and Roosevelt had what was the closest he could come to a clear shot. The bullet from his .45/70 bulled undeflected through the dense cane and passed through the bear behind the shoulder, a shot sure to prove fatal but not necessarily to cause instant death. To prevent damage to the dogs in the bear’s dying moments, Metcalfe and Roosevelt finished it with a second shot as the dogs came up and jumped on the carcass. Roosevelt, after a five-year wait, finally had his canebrake bear, shot “in true hunter fashion” over the dogs of Holt Collier.
The bear weighed 202 pounds, and was the last bear Roosevelt shot in his long, colorful hunting career.
Holt’s life was never the same after these hunts. From then on, for the next 30 years, no matter what he did as a hunter, he was known as the man who guided Roosevelt in the canebrakes.
But, as near as I can tell, Holt didn’t hunt much after that. The bears were getting thinned out in Mississippi, and the wilderness was sadly reduced. By the early 1920s, much of the old hunting grounds were gone. Old “Uncle Holt” became a fixture, even something of an institution around Greenville, spending a goodly amount of time telling tales of the old days and being interviewed by the regular stream of journalists who came to take down, one more time, the story of the big hunts. Locals were regaled with other stories of bears, panthers and other game killed where now there were houses and farms. Collier outlived the wild country he loved; he saw habitat destroyed, a surer end to the bears than all of the bullets he’d fired in his long and deadly career as a hunter and guide.
According to The Black Bear In Modern North America (1977), there were 15 to 25 black bears in Mississippi in 1977. A more recent report, in Audubon in 1984, gave the even sadder news that, “for all practical purposes, the species is extinct.” Neighboring Louisiana is doing only a little better than that, and a movement is afoot to restore that state’s bear population. I’m sure some will blame Collier and his contemporaries for this sad state of bearlessness, but I’m equally sure that it’s not an entirely fair charge to make. The old Mississippi wilderness provided generations of bear hunters with many bears without running short; it was only after the canebrakes were cut down and the settlements came and grew that there seemed to be an end to the bear. Even in his last days, Collier seemed to understand this, and he lamented the loss of the wild country even more than he lamented the loss of any particular wild animal. To hunters, it might seem a shame that a life like Collier’s could not be led today, but we have to keep in mind that even in his day, it was extraordinarily rare. No bear population, even one as obviously robust as the Southern one, could withstand the withering assaults of very many Colliers and his contemporaries. The reason why they could kill so many bears year after year is that there were so few of them doing it.
It was a different world, and it gave a different sport. Who today would even want to kill several dozen bears in one year? The way of life and system of values that could support and justify that kind of hunting vanished with the wilderness that made it possible.
We should keep Holt Collier in our memory not so much for his magnificent efficiency at killing bears as for the vicarious excitement he brings us. We can imagine him riding hard after his hounds, or following them into some hollow tree, or sitting and jostling them as he jokes and laughs at the campfire with his most famous client. We can appreciate the world he knew, in all its richness and diversity, by hearing of his hunts, and we can provide ourselves with a benchmark for measuring the health of our own world by recalling the productivity and ecological robustness of his.
But it is on a less lofty level that Collier and his spiritual kin are probably most satisfying: on the personal level of the hunters out doing what hunters do, and doing it with a sense of satisfaction and good will that have so much to do with honest sport. It is in this realm of personal fulfillment that we may find Collier most meaningful to us.
I find that when I think of Collier, one moment comes to mind, a fraternal vignette during the first Roosevelt hunt, described by Denison, who obviously sensed the greater value in all of this excitement over bears: “There was the instructive picture of Holt Collier and some of the white men, too, dipping their horns into the water hole where the first bear had died, and drinking their fill of a puree of bear and dog and mud, all held in solution in water that had been standing for at least eight months.”
It was, indeed, a different world, and for all of its faults and mistakes, it wouldn’t hurt us to mourn its passing.
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