The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (115 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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
—the kind of man who knew how to die standing up—that he couldn’t resist. “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 twenty-four hours; for he did not like to drink the swamp water,” Roosevelt wrote. “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.”
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Rain fell all over the Delta that October. It was pouring on every stretch of the soggy plains, on the cottonfields, on Poverty Point all the way eastward across the Mississippi River to Port Gibson, and on the dark, sinuous Mississippi riptide. It was falling, too, on the federal cem
etery on the bluff in Vicksburg, where Union and Confederate soldiers lay under marble slabs. It rained heavily on every interesting wildlife-rich area along the Tensas River bottomland hardwoods, open water pools, and old runs as Roosevelt’s party set up a tent camp near Bear Lake, everything turning into a dull mud.

The Roosevelt party was in the thickest patch of this hardwood habitat. Bottomland forests were rapidly being clear-cut for conversion into agricultural areas. So there was a sense that this was the “last” hunt. Garfish were caught. An alligator slid into the water, and a couple of crows pecked for food in a field. Black squirrels made a commotion in the trees, living in easy community with wood rats. The swamp rabbits were amphibious, behaving like muskrats. Bats bawked. Roosevelt described the snapping turtles he encountered as “fearsome brutes of the slime, as heavy as man, and with huge horny beaks that with a single snap could take off a man’s hand or foot.”
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The Louisiana Canebreak was a place where a man could die and not even be noticed. The fleas had disappeared, and even though winter was approaching, the oak trees weren’t bare. “Palmettos grow thickly in places,” Roosevelt wrote. “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 fifteen or twenty 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.”
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Clearly this fourteen-day hunt wasn’t a dignified sport like shooting quail in the sedge. Roosevelt grew perturbed when he was told that there were only four or five bears left in the Louisiana canebrakes (although bears were reported regularly in the more western parishes of Ouachita and Lincoln). As the world’s leading advocate of wildlife protection, Roosevelt could have called it quits and headed back to Memphis and the silk bedsheets of the Peabody Hotel. Instead he started insisting that the Mississippi tracker Holt Collier was needed lickety-split. Collier could definitely find a Louisiana black bear (
Ursus americanus luteolus
) in high water. It seemed that Roosevelt had entered the realm of fantasy, barking orders like a colonel while also imagining that he was the type of old-fashioned bayou character Mayne Reid had written about in
The Boy Hunters
. To understand Roosevelt’s hunt in the canebrakes, it is necessary to realize that he wasn’t after just any bear. He wanted a Louisiana black
bear, distinguished by having a longer, narrower snout than most bears, and one of the sixteen recognized subspecies of black bears in America. Long ago this subspecies had been widespread from Mexico to Canada, but now it was dwindling under the pressure of human encroachment. Roosevelt wanted to shoot one to use for a museum display.

Soaked and disgruntled, Roosevelt remained determined. There was no way he was going be denied this trophy, as he had been in 1902. He wasn’t going to leave the Tenasas River area without killing a bear. Eventually Collier showed up with two planters from Greenville, Mississippi—Clive and Harley Metcalfe—accompanied by a wagon full of bloodhounds. Collier now took charge of the hunt. He instructed Clive and Harvey Metcalfe in a low voice to “take the Cunnel and bum around with him in the woods like you an’ me always does, and don’t put him on no more stand. He ain’t no baby. He kin go anywhere you kin go; jes’ keep him as near to the dogs as you kin. Mr. Harley and me’ll follow the hounds; when we strike a trail you and the Cunnel come a-runnin.”
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It’s thought that the Roosevelt party pitched their tents at the Bear Lake Hunting Club near Tallulah, Louisiana (the club had been incorporated in 1899 by delta planters). The gentlemen of Louisiana and Mississippi still preferred to hunt from the stand, staying dry from and keeping out of the pneumonia-inducing weather. Roosevelt headed toward the cane thicket and the bogs around Bear Lake. He tracked for hours, but the bear proved elusive. At one juncture a wild boar attacked the hunt dogs, killing two of them.

Spending time with Collier was worth the struggle with briar patches and boars. Much as he had done with Catch ’Em Alive Abernathy, Roosevelt had used Collier as a source of anecdotes to entertain listeners in Georgetown and on Capitol Hill. As Roosevelt told it, Collier was a flawless hunter who wasn’t afraid to bloody his knuckles, a black man who had befriended Frank James, killed more bears than Davy Crockett, fought at the battle of Shiloh, traveled with springtime fairs to chase skirts, and gambled in high-stakes poker games on the Mississippi River. Blacks outnumbered whites four to one in the delta, but Collier was the kind of man who transcended racial categorization. Everybody, regardless of color, took a shine to him. “When ten years old Holt had been taken on the horse behind his young master, the Hinds of that day, on a bear hunt, when he killed his first bear,” Roosevelt wrote. “In the Civil War he had not only followed his master to battle as his body-servant, but had acted under him as sharpshooter against the Union soldiers. After the war he continued to stay with his master until the latter died, and
had then been adopted by the Metcalfs; and he felt that he had brought them up, and treated them with that mixture of affection and grumbling respect which an old nurse shows toward the lad who has ceased being a child.”
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Frustrated by the thought that he was going to leave the Louisiana canebrakes without a bear trophy, Roosevelt pulled Collier aside, out of earshot from the white planters. “Holt,” Roosevelt said. “I haven’t got but one or two more days. What am I going to do? I haven’t killed a bear.” Collier whispered back, “Cunnel, ef you let me manage the hunt you’ll sho’ kill one to-morrow. One of ’em got away to-day that you ought to have killed.” “Whatever you say goes, Holt,” was Roosevelt’s reply. Collier answered, “All right, Cunnel.”

The next day Collier showed the right stuff. The streaming rain had stopped, replaced by mild, clear weather. Collier’s dogs got a scent and started following it in the direction of Roosevelt, who was crouched in the hardwood forest waiting for his golden moment. To Roosevelt, this was America’s “great forest” of red gums and white oaks, which he called the “Northeast Louisiana Bottoms.” “In stature, in towering majesty, they are unsurpassed by any trees of our eastern forests,” Roosevelt wrote, “lordlier kings of the green-leaved world are not to be found until we reach the sequoias and redwoods of the Sierras.” The greenest mosses of the Tensas River were now surrounding Roosevelt. Worried about encounters with rough thickets, Roosevelt had sensibly worn thornproof gear, which served him well during the hours of pursuit.

Roosevelt would look into hollowed or downed logs for bears. He wasn’t worried about other so-called predators. Back in the days when Louisiana was owned by France, there were lots of red wolves and Florida panthers in the primeval Tensas River forest, but they had been wiped out in the effort to control predators. Only the Louisiana black bears—a threatened species in 2009—remained in the thick tangle of creepers and vines. In the adrenaline rush of the hunt, Roosevelt’s banged-up knees weren’t aching. Eventually the dogs found a she-bear. Leaping up in front of the bear, which was twenty yards away, Roosevelt took aim with his rifle as the animal ran toward him. The shot caught the bear clean in the chest. She moaned as if in surrender or defiance. According to Roosevelt the bear “turned almost broadside” and started walking “forward very stiff-legged, almost as if on tiptoe, now and then looking back at the nearest dogs.” She toppled over “stark dead,” as Roosevelt put it, “slain in the canebreak in true hunter fashion.”
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Dancing a jig, Roosevelt dropped his rifle, pulled Harley Metcalfe off
his horse, and gave him a hug. What ecstasy Roosevelt felt at killing a five-foot fully mature she-bear with his 45–70 rifle.
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He had also absorbed the recoil without a bruised shoulder, so the hunt was deemed a complete victory. He talked about it for weeks. Today a lone historical marker commemorating the hunt can be found in the hamlet of Sondheim, Louisiana.

Now the kennel wagon was loaded up. Holt Collier had earned his pay, and he was toasted by the president as an Olympian of the Tensas River. Dr. Lambert apparently took a series of photographs of Roosevelt and Collier on the hunt, but these have never been found. Others have surfaced, however, courtesy of the Parker estate (one shows the men looking like borderland desperados). The press exaggerated the size of the bear, saying that Roosevelt had shot a 375-pound giant; the president said no, it was only 202 pounds. That evening the hunters ate bear steak, with Roosevelt rattling on about his quarry. The president kept an inventory of what his party had shot: the final count was three bears, six deer, and twelve squirrels, and one each of wild turkey, possum, and duck.

And the birding had proved first-class. Long ago John James Audubon had learned what an avian paradise the Louisiana wetlands could be. Audubon had lived in Saint Francisville for on and off twenty-three months from 1821 until 1830, painting eighty of his exquisite folios there. Using Oakley Plantation as his base, Audubon would regularly live among flocks of egrets and herons. In Louisiana, he drew such fine works as
Carolina Parrot
and
Mocking Birds Attacked by Rattlesnakes
. Roosevelt had expected to see mockingbirds and half a dozen sparrows perking about in the thick woods and sloughs, but nothing had prepared him for the variety of woodpeckers he observed in the groves of giant cypress. Quite famously in the annals of bird-watching, he recorded seeing three great ivory-billed woodpeckers. And dozens of barred owls “hooted at intervals for several minutes at mid-day”—turning their heads sharply when footsteps were heard. To Roosevelt these owls took on a special mystery at night, their cries seemed “strange and unearthly” like the long hoot of the Southern Pacific headed across the flatlands.
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