124 years ago today, on Friday, November 14, 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt rode out of a hunting camp on the Little Sunflower River in Sharkey County, Mississippi, hoping for his first bear. By evening a bear was dead, and the president had not fired a shot. What happened in between gave the country the teddy bear.

The guide was Holt Collier. Born into slavery in Mississippi around 1846, he was famous across the Delta as a bear hunter. When the hounds struck a trail that morning, Collier guessed where the bear would break out of the cane. He sent Roosevelt to wait at that spot with H. L. Foote, a Mississippi planter. The two men waited for hours. A little after noon they gave up and rode back to camp for lunch.

The bear came through almost exactly where Collier had said it would. About a mile farther on, worn out by the chase, it backed into a water hole and turned on the dogs, killing one hound. Collier jumped from his horse, knocked the bear down with a blow from his rifle, and blew his horn to call the president. Then he roped the bear to a tree.

Roosevelt arrived to find the stunned animal tied and helpless. He refused to shoot it, and he would not let anyone else shoot it either. "Put it out of its misery," he told John M. Parker of New Orleans, who had charge of the preparations for the hunt, and Parker killed the bear with his knife. It weighed 235 pounds. Back at camp, Collier told the Associated Press man that if the colonel had stayed where he put him, he would have gotten that bear himself.

The wire stories ran in papers across the country the next morning. On Sunday, November 16, the Washington Post printed a cartoon by Clifford Berryman titled "Drawing the Line in Mississippi." Roosevelt stands with his rifle grounded and one hand raised, while a man behind him holds a rope tied to a small bear with round ears and wide eyes. In Berryman's hands the 235-pound bear had become a cub. He kept drawing that little bear for years. In one of his 1906 cartoons, "To the Woods!", it hurries away from the White House at Roosevelt's heels, carrying his bag.

In Brooklyn, Morris Michtom and his wife, Rose, ran a candy store and made stuffed toys on the side. After the cartoon they made a toy bear, set it in the shop window, and called it "Teddy's Bear." According to the Michtom family, Morris wrote to Roosevelt for permission to use his name, and the president agreed, though he doubted it would do much for the toy business. The bears sold so well that the Michtoms went on to found the Ideal Toy Company.

In 1963, for the teddy bear's 60th birthday, their son Benjamin, by then president of Ideal, offered one of the first bears to Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the president's eldest daughter. She had been 18 the autumn her father went to Mississippi. She turned it down. "What does a 79-year-old doll want with a 60-year-old bear?"

So the bear went to the president's grandson Kermit Roosevelt, on the understanding that it would end up at the Smithsonian. His children, Mark and Anne, posed with it for photographs and then hid it from their parents. They let it go in January 1964, and the bear has belonged to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History ever since.

The Roosevelt children have bears of their own in our shop. Midwest of Cannon Falls dressed a family of plush bear ornaments as the Roosevelts, and our Quentin Roosevelt Bear Ornament wears a dark brown suit with a big green bow. Quentin was the youngest of the six children. He turned five on November 19, 1902, five days after the hunt.