Photo by C.C. Lockwood

October 2011. Into the Woods, in the Footsteps of Teddy Roosevelt: The little known but fantastically beautiful Delta National Forest.

“The rich deep black alluvial soil which would grow cotton taller than the head of a man on a horse, already one jungle one brake one impassable density of brier and cane and vine interlocking the soar of gum and cypress and hickory and pinoak and ash, printed now by the tracks of unalien shapes – bear and deer and panthers and bison and wolves and alligators and the myriad smaller beasts, and unalien men to name too perhaps…”

So it is that William Faulkner paints the pre-European Mississippi Delta, the flat, intensely fertile region east of the River from modern Memphis down to Vicksburg, and now more accurately described as the Yazoo River Floodplain. These words come from Faulkner’s prelude to Big Woods, a collection of short stories revolving around a deep woods black bear hunt, a dog named Lion of fabled strength and tenacity, and a young boy, Quentin Compson, coming into his own in pre-Civil War Mississippi.

In the end, Big Woods amounts to a lament of the loss of the region’s famed and powerful wilderness well before Faulkner’s own birth. The Delta, long a victim of its own fertility, is now over ninety-five percent farmland, and the region’s subspecies of black bear is Federally Threatened. Yet both ecologically and culturally, its history is as rich as its own soil and as any other region in the country.

It was to a part of the Delta I traveled recently in pursuit of Faulkner’s tale I’ve so long admired, but also the site of a real-life version of the story, led not by a young, inexperienced, fictional protagonist, but by a U.S. president. Teddy Roosevelt, widely known in both his day and ours as a lover of manly pursuits generally, and big game hunts, in particular, came to north Mississippi and Louisiana in 1902 to try his hand at tracking down the great beast of the storied southern bottomlands, most of which had disappeared to cotton already.

In Sharkey County, in deep, dark, wet forests along the Little Sunflower River, Roosevelt was led on horseback by a pack of first class Walker hounds and an ex-slave and ex-confederate (yes, a black confederate) soldier named Holt Collier, who had been tracking and killing black bears since childhood. Roosevelt, who had hunted across the nation, described Collier as the best guide and hunter he’d ever seen, with “…all the dignity of an African chief.” Collier also admired Roosevelt, and described him as “a pleasant man” with “a thousand questions to ask.” Also in the party, by chance, was LeRoy Percy, a powerful Delta senator and great uncle of the brilliant Louisiana novelist Walker Percy.

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