The Real Story of the Teddy Bear, 1902

By the middle of November 1902, the hunting party in the canebrakes of Sharkey County, Mississippi, had a problem. Other hunters in camp had found bears. The President of the United States had not.

So his guide went and got one. Holt Collier's dogs ran down a black bear and brought it to bay. The bear was badly hurt in the fight. Collier struck it with the stock of his rifle, tied it to a tree, and sent for Theodore Roosevelt.

Roosevelt looked at the stunned, roped animal and refused to shoot it. To him it was not a fair shot. Within days the story was in newspapers across the country, and within a year there was a stuffed toy named for him. The toy is the part everyone knows. The guide who found the bear, and what happened to the bear afterward, are the parts most of us were never told.

A hunt in the Delta

Roosevelt came to Mississippi at the invitation of Governor Andrew H. Longino, for a black bear hunt in the Smedes Plantation area of southern Sharkey County, near the town of Onward. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service identifies the animal he was after as the Louisiana black bear, a subspecies of the American black bear.

The exact day of the famous moment depends on whose record you read. The National Park Service dates it to November 14, 1902. The Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University puts it on November 15.

The guide

Holt Collier was born enslaved, about 1846, on Home Hill Plantation in Jefferson County, Mississippi, the property of the family of General Thomas Hinds. According to the Mississippi Encyclopedia, he was a teenager when he ran away and served on behalf of the Confederacy with the 9th Texas Cavalry.

After the war he made his name in the Delta as a hunter and guide. The Encyclopedia credits him with killing more than 3,000 bears in his lifetime, a number that comes from reports of his career, not a count anyone kept.

What happened at the tree

The usual version ends with Roosevelt sparing the bear. The record does not.

The bear was already badly mauled by the dogs. According to the Park Service, Roosevelt refused to shoot it but asked that it be put out of its misery, and it was killed with a hunting knife. On November 16, the Richmond Times ran the story under the headline "The President Killed No Bear." The hunt went on, and a record at the Theodore Roosevelt Center still places Roosevelt at Smedes on November 18. He went home from Mississippi without a bear.

The Smithsonian gives the bear's weight as 235 pounds.

From a cartoon to a toy

Also on November 16, 1902, the Washington Post ran a cartoon by Clifford Berryman titled "Drawing the line in Mississippi." It showed Roosevelt with his rifle, refusing to shoot a bear held on a rope. Berryman drew the bear small and round, more like a cub than the animal in the canebrake. Berryman kept the little bear in his cartoons for years, and it became his signature.

The Library of Congress is careful on one point: Berryman made the bear famous, but he did not invent the toy.

That was Morris and Rose Michtom, who ran a candy shop in Brooklyn and also made stuffed animals. After the cartoon, they made a toy bear and called it "Teddy's Bear." Family accounts say Morris Michtom wrote to Roosevelt for permission to use his name. The Smithsonian describes that story as family lore, and the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library says no such letter has been found.

The bears sold, and the Michtoms built a company on them. Smithsonian records date the Ideal Novelty and Toy Company to around 1903, though some accounts say 1907.

At almost the same moment, an ocean away, a German company was arriving at the same idea. Richard Steiff of the Steiff firm designed a toy bear, catalogued as the 55 PB, in 1902 and showed it at the Leipzig trade fair in 1903. The Park Service presents the two bears as parallel inventions.

What became of Holt Collier

The two men hunted together again. In October 1907, Collier led Roosevelt on another bear hunt, this time near the Tensas River in Louisiana.

Collier died in 1936 and was buried at Live Oak Cemetery in Greenville, Mississippi. The state put up a historical marker there in 1996. In 2004, Congress established the Holt Collier National Wildlife Refuge in the Mississippi Delta. Not far off, the Fish and Wildlife Service also manages the Theodore Roosevelt National Wildlife Refuge, near the site of the 1902 hunt. The President and his guide each have a refuge in the same corner of Mississippi.