August 24, 2022 • 61 mins
On this episode of the Bear Grease Podcast we'll be introduced to the man that president Theodore Roosevelt said was “the greatest hunter and guide I have ever known.” Many believe his legacy deserves to be on the American pedestal with the likes of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. And some might even suggest he stand with the great African American civil rights pioneers early 20th century, based upon the standing he had in society and the life he lived. However, his life is riddled with mystery and controversy, but if you’re like me, after you’ve been exposed to the energy, audacity and bravery of this life, you’ll never – ever – forget the name Holt Collier.
Holt Collier was born a slave and at age fourteen after he joined the Confederate Army and fought with distinction the entirety of the war. Afterwards he became a market hunter black bear. After the civil war he killed a white man in Mississippi, but no charges were pressed and was later accused of killing another one and was acquitted for the murder. He hob-knobbed with some of the most powerful men in the Delta gaining their loyalty and trust. But what he’s most known for is guiding the then sitting president, Theodore Roosevelt on two bear hunts in the Mississippi Delta and gaining his friendship and respect. Holt Collier lassoed a bear and tied it to a tree for the president, who refused to shoot it, and from this the press coined the term “Teddy Bear” which has become a global term, and it would have never happened if it wasn’t for the creative grit of a black man named, Holt Collier. Undoubtedly, Holt’s life doesn’t fit into anybody’s mold and I think that’s what qualifies him as a great American. He lived an almost unbelievable life. On this episode we'll interview Minor Ferris Buchannon, Hank Burdine and Jonathan Wilkins to try to understand who Holt was.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Yeah, he's a fascinating dude, like the way I described
in The People, because I'm like, man, it's like if
you took Django Unchained and Daniel Boone and like mixed
it together. Right On this episode of the Bear Grease Podcast,
I want to introduce you to the life of the
(00:21):
man that President Theodore Roosevelt said quote was the greatest
hunter and guide I have ever known. This man has
been gone from this earth since nineteen thirty six. There
are no video or audio recordings of him. We do
have roughly thirteen photographs, six articles written about him, and
(00:41):
the first hand accounts of those who knew him, including
Theodore Roosevelt. Many believe this man's legacy deserves to be
on the American pedestal with the likes of Daniel Boone
and Davy Crockett, and some might even suggest he stand
with the great African American civil rights pioneers of the
early twentieth century based upon the standing he had in
(01:03):
society and the life he lived. However, his life is
riddled with mystery and controversy. But if you're like me,
after you've been exposed to the energy, audacity, and bravery
of this life, you'll never ever forget the name Holt
(01:25):
call Your I'm in search of understanding who Holpe Callier was,
and all the questions that will still have after we
know everything we can know. I really doubt that you're
gonna want to miss this one. This name whole Callier
keeps coming up, and who is this person? I just
I had no idea, and as I dug and Doug
(01:47):
and I found all these other stories that were part
of his life, multiple chapters in his life, the fact
that he was connected to the Hinds family, that Andrew Jackson,
to all the prominent families from down in the Natchez district,
and nothing had ever been definitive, had ever been written
about him. My name is Clay Nukelem, and this is
(02:15):
the Bear Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant,
search for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell
the story of Americans who lived their lives close to
the land. Presented by f HF Gear American Maid, purpose
built hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as
(02:37):
rugged as the places we explore. I haven't and I never,
of course, no way from me ever to have even
met Whole called you, but to know what kind of
man he was, And I've said he was a man
amongst men. I mean, to sit down with a president,
(02:59):
to shit down with some of the titans of industry
and law, business, and to be respected the way he was.
That says so much to me in today's time. And
I've said before, and it's something that we don't think
could have happened, but it did. And it's because of
(03:22):
the integrity and the matter and the meat of who
Hope call your wash. As Roosevelt said, he was a
man of sixty that couldn't either read nor write. Yet
he had the dignity of an African king. And if
you look at pictures of Hope, you see that in him.
(03:43):
Throughout the course of this conversation, my hope is that
will all see Holt call your I believe that within
his life are the keys to some relevant lessons. I
don't want to bury the hook too deep on the story,
because I'm dying to tell you the bullet points of
Holt's life. He was born a slave, and at the
(04:04):
age of fourteen, he joined the Confederate Army and fought
with distinction the entirety of the Civil War. And afterwards
he became a market black bear hunter. After the Civil War,
he killed a white man in Mississippi, but no charges
were pressed, and was later accused of killing another one,
but was acquitted for the murder. He hobb nobbed with
(04:27):
some of the most powerful men in the Delta, gaining
their loyalty and trust. But what he's most known for
is guiding the then sitting President, Theodore Roosevelt on two
bear hunts in the Mississippi Delta and gaining his friendship
and respect. Holt Collier lasso to bear and tied it
(04:47):
to the tree for the President, who refused to shoot it,
and from this the press coined the term teddy bear,
which has become a global term. And it would have
never happened if it wasn't for the creative grit a
black man from Mississippi named Holt Collyer. He was rough,
but polished, ruthlessly loyal, and he navigated the Antebellum and
(05:09):
post Bellum South with an uncanny confidence, skill and grace. Undoubtedly,
holtz life doesn't fit into anybody's mold, and I think
that's what qualifies him as a great American. He lived
an almost unbelievable life. You could take every ten years
of this guy's life and look at what he's what
(05:32):
he was doing, and it would be you know, movie
worthy or bookworthy or story worthy. And so you take
his life in its entirety, especially as long as it was,
and it's it's just kind of it's hard to fathom
how a person puts that much stuff into a life,
especially with everything you know he had going against him.
(05:52):
Holt Collyer was born a slave in eighteen forty six
in Jefferson County, Mississippi, within the floodplain of the Rate
Father of Waters the Mississippi River. He appeared on planet
Earth fourteen years before the Civil War, a war that
would greatly impact his life in multiple ways. Time is
(06:13):
a ruthless master, eroding the answers and shrouding the truth
in a haze of mystery. We have accurate data on
his life. Much of what he actually told us is
the data we have, which would seemingly be enough to
make some profound conclusions of his motivations. But I think
we'll see that holtz world was very complex. But who
(06:37):
was Holt Collier to describe? Hope? He was a refined man,
yet could not read nor right, a superbe sportsman, a
contriment outdoorsman, I will say, a gentleman, and a man
among men that could go anywhere, be among any type
(06:59):
of person. He knew what respect was and he commanded respect.
You know, Uh, vonna slave yet road with the Texas
Cavalry and the Confederate Armed Services during the Civil War. Uh,
there was no reason for him to bow his head
to anyone. And I will call you. That was the
(07:23):
voice of writer, Delta historian, and river rat hankber died
though he never knew him. He is one of the
men who has worked tirelessly to preserve the memory and
the legacy of Hulk Collier. The other voice you've heard
is my friend and fellow are Kans and Jonathan Wilkins.
He's a writer, a chef, a waterfowl outfitter who lives
(07:47):
in hunts in the Delta. After being exposed to hold
story as a black hunter in the South, he studied
Holt's life with particular interests. We're going to dial in
on the details we have about Holt. Here's Jonathan. I'd
say that you know, Holt Collier is one of, if
(08:08):
not the greatest American Southern big game hunter, one of
the most prolific black bear hunters I think we could
assume has ever lived. Born under the guise of enslavement
in eighteen forty six in Mississippi. So we've established he
was a black man born into slavery and became a
(08:28):
great bear hunter. He had legitimate records indicating he killed
over three thousand bears in his lifetime, presumably more than
our broad Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett combined. But the
wildest thing mentioned so far is that he fought with
the Confederate Army, and an effort to completely over clarify,
the Confederate Army was the armed forces of the southern
(08:51):
portion of the United States that seceded from the United
States on December sixty and this newly formed government was
in favor of keeping the institution of slavery legal. The
Northern Army of the United States was against slavery. We're
going to expend a lot of energy trying to understand
(09:12):
Holt's motivation in his unusual loyalty to the South, But
to be fair, we've got to say they're all conjecture.
Here's Jonathan, you know, that's the That's the thing about life.
It's rarely as binary as as human beings like to
(09:33):
make it right. Like I, I still don't have a
handle on on Collier's motivations for some of his actions.
You know, I have suspicions that are you know, and
these are informed by my life and my perspectives and
how I understand the world. He's a fascinating dude, like
the way I described the people, because I'm like, man,
it's like if you took Django Unchained and Daniel Boone
(09:56):
and like mixed it together, right, Because there's there's so
many there's so many facets of the guy's life that
like that don't make sense as far as kind of
the assertions of himself that he was able to make right,
especially you're talking about within a society that is foundationally
built upon him not being able to assert himself right,
(10:18):
him not being able to be an authority, him not
being able to thrive, you know, for all intents and purposes,
especially for the time period, he was more financially successful
than you know, almost any other black people around. You know,
he enjoyed great longevity, He enjoyed you know, kind of
high social standing in a society where black men, you know,
(10:40):
that was not something that was available to them. Then
to the point that he interacts, he interacts with the
seminal American figure, you know, American political figure in such
an influential way that twenty one years later you have
this legacy of the Teddy Bear that has touched pretty
much every American you know. I'd argue probably a large
(11:00):
percentage of the world. It's familiar with the Teddy Bearer.
But again, like no one knows who this guy is.
No one knows who this guy is. Have you ever
heard of Hault Collyer. I'm walking down the street in
downtown Jackson, Mississippi. The dome of the state Capitol is
(11:21):
directly at my back. I slip a breath mat in
my mouth as I push open the door of a
swanky office building. I'm told by the receptionist the man
I'm looking for is on the mezzanine floor, which is
an odd architectural term used to describe a floor between
the first and second floor as in a building. It's
(11:41):
an odd and unfamiliar term to me, kind of like
Hulk Collyer's life. I'm looking for a lawyer named minor
if Buchanon. It would be easy to say that he's
been the bulwark of preserving Hulk Collyer's legacy in modern times.
He's traveled across the country to give presentations about Holt.
(12:02):
He commissioned the painting of a watercolor print of Holt
on his horse. But his biggest contribution is that he's
written the only book in existence dedicated to hold Collier,
aptly titled Holt Collier Minor. Will be our primary guide
through the details of this story. Here's how he got
(12:23):
interested in Holt. It's a circuitous tale. I am a
native Mississippian, born and raised here as Holt was, and
if you're familiar with his story, you know it's epic.
It's an absolutely epic story. But I had never heard
his name. And I was visiting with my children the
(12:46):
Memphis Zoo in nine We got in a rush. We
were in the Bay exhibit and we had to go
meet somebody and we had to leave, and I was
in a little bit of a hurry. So I grabbed
my five year old daughter and I said, We've got
to go, and she says, wait a minute, daddy, I
haven't seen the Teddy Bear. She thought that Teddy Bear
was real, and I didn't even think when I said,
(13:08):
I said, honey, I'm that Teddy Bear is not real.
It's just a toy. And she broke into tears. I
may as well as shot the Easter Bunny in front
of her, you know, and uh, she broke into tears.
But when she got her composer, she said, well, if
it's not real, where did it come from? Now? I
had heard these human entrant stories that would get published
in the newspaper, in the magazine about once a year
(13:30):
that Theodore Roosevelt had come to Mississippi for a bear hunt,
and that's where the Teddy Bear got started. But that's
really all it was, ever was. So I'm I promised
her I'd make a bedtime story out of it. My
law offices downtown Jackson, right across street from the Department
of Archives and History, and I knew those people pretty well.
So sure enough, I was good for my promise and
(13:51):
went over to the archives, walked over there, and there's
a subject file on the Theodore Roosevelt hunt. As I'm
getting into this subject file went on the Teddy Bear,
another one on Theodore Roosevelt. This name whole Callyer keeps
coming up, and who is this person? I just had
no idea, And as I dug and Doug and I
found all these other stories that were part of his life,
(14:13):
multiple chapters in his life. The fact that he was
connected to the Hinds family, to the Andrew Jackson, to
all the prominent families from down in the Natchez district,
and nothing had ever been definitive, had ever been written
about him. I decided to make a book project, and
it came out in two thousand two, which was a
hundred anniversary of the nineteen o two Teddy Bear hunt.
(14:34):
So this bedtime story goal turned into a book project. Yeah.
She was five years old when she asked me where
the teddy bear came from? When when the book came out,
she was a junior. She was probably satisfied that you
wrote a great book on the whole thing. Yeah, but
she was a freshman freshman of college when he came
in in nineteen eighty nine. Miner began his research on
(14:58):
Whole Callier and the book was sell published in two
thousand two, after being rejected by a few university publishing presses,
perhaps because of the controversial nature of Holtz life. Perhaps
it's because he was a black man who fought for
the Confederate army. That's a complex story to tell in
today's society. It's very quick to see that Minor didn't
(15:21):
write this book on a whim or with the hope
of creating a New York Times bestseller. It evolved out
of a genuine curiosity and morphed into a decade long
project of trailing a man's life whose story was bypassed
by the world. I'm incredibly grateful for those who do
work like this. I've read a lot of self published books,
(15:43):
and I was impressed by the amount of research and
corroboration of the information in the book. It's well written,
but still no one fully is able to understand wholtz situation.
So what do we know about Wold Collyer's earliest days?
I think it's interesting sometimes with these you know an
(16:04):
enslaved person, A lot of times you don't have a
lot of information. But with Hope, we have a fair
bit of information about his upbringing. What do we know
about his childhood? Well, let me make a comment on
what you just said. When somebody's born there, enslaved there,
they lived during this period of time. It's hard to
find information about him. It's impossible to find an image
(16:25):
of them. For instance, Robert Johnson, the famous blues player,
I think there's only one, maybe two images of him,
and he lived in a time when cameras were pretty prevalent.
Whole Caryer was born in eighteen forty six, died in
nineteen thirty six at the age of ninety, and I
think I found thirteen images of him. I thought was incredible.
(16:48):
Polt lived to be ninety years old, which is hard
to believe when you hear of the skirmishes with death
that he avoided. I want to hear from Jonathan Wilkins
about this very thing we just wrought up why some
of these African American figures are so undocumented by pop culture.
My personal hope is that I can truly listen to
(17:09):
people with unique and different perspectives than mine, and over
the years, Jonathan has often helped me do just that. Well.
I mean, that's you know, that's kind of the American way, right,
like we we footnote the black people in this country
that have have done important things right, like he's he's
(17:33):
he's phenomenal. But I you know, I wonder how many
other phenomenal and brilliant and like just incredibly interesting stories
will never know. I'll give you like a good reference
point for this. So oftentimes they talk about the the
first film ever made, right, and it's this little tiny
snippet and it's a black guy riding a horse. All right.
(17:55):
No one knows the black guy's name, but they preserve
the horse's name. You know. I bet you that a
lot of people don't know that the White House was
built by slaves. You know, history is written by the victors.
I don't know, you know, it's just it's it's just
kind of like it's the story of America. Really, I
(18:17):
think what Jonathan is saying is true. It's powerful and
interesting stuff. Here's how Minors started his first research on
Wholk Collier. When I first started my research, I couldn't
find anybody that ever heard of Whole Callier unless they
were from Washington, Kent. When I first learned about him,
I said, well, maybe some people in these nursing homes
(18:39):
will remember him. Because I started my research in nineteen
eighty nine and he died in nineteen thirty six, it's
possible that somebody remembers Whole care Thank god I started
my research when I did, because I found about six
people who remembered whole callier really who had met him,
Oh knew him. They were children, they knew him as
(19:00):
an old man. And one of them was the most amazing.
His recall was perfect. He was he was as smart
as a whip. He could remember everything about the whole car.
His name was Pete Johnson, and Pete owned the liquor
store in Los Angeles. And I had gone up to Greenville,
and people knew I was doing this research and I
was trying to find folks. And the first person I
(19:21):
met was Jane Weather. She was a widow who part
of the Metcalf family and she's she was ninety four
years old, and she remembered Holt very well. He had
lived there on their place, and she gave me a
lot of information on him. Soon after that, about a
month or two after that, I get this telephone call
from a friend who's helped me out, and he says, Minor,
you need to write this down. Pete Johnson gave me
(19:41):
his telephone number out in Los Angeles. He had just
come home to Greenville, Mississippi. He had been raised there
as a child, and he was trying to get some
statue or some memory or a park named after whole Car.
So I got on the phone and talked to him.
I ended up talking to Pete Johnson probably ten or
twelve of hours interviewing him over the phone. He had
(20:02):
been raised right next door the Whole Car. His Whole
Car is an old man sitting on his front porch,
telling his stories about bear hunt with Theodore Roosevelt, by
the Civil War, escapades about killing men after the war
and not being prosecuted for it, and and and what
I loved Pete Johnson telling me was it all the
children of the neighbors before television and really before radio,
(20:25):
but all the children in the neighborhood would come up
there as the son's going down and say, you know,
Mr Hotels, some stories tell Uncle Holt, they call him.
But before whole Care sitting on his front porch, almost
blind at this say, before he would tell him the stories,
he would make them put their pennies together and go
down the street that you know with the little corner
(20:45):
grocery thing, and make them buy him a plug of
tobaccup and a knee high orange And when they bring
that plug in the back and knee high orange. He'd
sit there and talk to him for until the parents,
until the parents called him home, a plug of tobacco
and a knee high orange. It's stories like this that
wouldn't be in the national newspaper article, but they give
(21:09):
you a feel for the man. I'm grateful for people
like Minor who took the time to document the last
remaining people on planet Earth who knew Uncle Holt. Now
we're going to get into Holt's early life history. Hold
(21:33):
was born down there in Jefferson County at a place
called home Hill Plantation, just a few about four miles
out of Fayette. Who was born to the Hines family,
best known for General Thomas Hines, who served with Andrew
Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans. Was uh in
the United States Congress, elected in eight same year Andrew
(21:56):
Jackson was elected president. Was was a friend of Jackson,
was a friend of the all the prominent people in
that area down Air Marshton Green and so Holt was
born into affluent circumstances, although he's enslaved and he's part
of the labor class, and his father had served with
(22:16):
General Thomas Hines as a man servant at the Battle
of New Orleans, so they were closely connected. He was
not a These were not field hands and were not
people working in the field. And holtz mother served the
main house and I don't know as a cook or
seamstress of what. And when Holt got to be old enough,
they put him in charge of the horses and the dogs.
(22:38):
They were big hunters, and that's what hold did. He
started out hunting from from a very early age, and
he knew the horses and he knew the dogs. Holt
was enslaved, and inside that system he worked in close
proximity to his slave owners, the Hines family, who were
part of the powerful southern aristocracy of the region. They
(23:00):
had even been friends with the former president Andrew Jackson.
Here's Jonathan describing Holt's early life. I mean, so prior
to the Civil War, he's living on this Hines plantation
and this is basically a this is a Mississippi plantation
that's like literally hacked out of the wilderness. Right they
(23:20):
talk about like basically this is just a malaria infested swamp.
You know, essentially what is a you know, American jungle, right,
So human beings have to go in there and cut
and hack and channelized stuff and drain it out. And
so he's born to servitude. You know, his family has
been enslaved for multiple generations by the Hines family. He's
(23:42):
born into that family. He's born into that system of enslavement.
You know, I guess on the plantation his family had,
you know, a slightly higher position than maybe some of
some of the other enslaved people, which is, to my
mind is a is a very dangerous distinction to make
because it and imply is that it makes a situation
not what it was. Right. But he's kind of this
(24:04):
family of house slaves, you know, I guess we'd be
the colloquialism for it. And around ten years old he
kills his first bear. So even for that to happen,
he's got to have some access that other enslaved people
don't have, right, He's got to have access to weapons.
He's got to have access, you know, or the ability
(24:25):
to go out into the wilderness. And so I think
he's he's probably showing himself to be an extraordinary human
being from a very young age. Killing a bear that
young is an impressive feat from a sportsman standpoint, But
of more note is that a young slave boy would
have had a gun and been able to hunt. Here's
(24:45):
Minor developing the context for holtz life. One of the
unusual things about the Mississippi Delta is it flooding almost
every every year, which prohibited raising any kind of livestock.
There was no meat source, but you had this labor
coming in and they had to be fed, so you
had to get this protein the food through hunting. And uh.
(25:08):
But anyway, Holt goes up there and he's, uh, this
is about eighteen fifty six, and he's given a shotgun
hist his instructions. After he takes care of the dogs
and the horses, his instructions will go out into the
woods and kill anything and everything that's edible, whether it's
an alligator, whether it's a duck, whether it's a bear.
He killed his first bear at an age of ten,
(25:29):
and that was his job. Here's Jonathan with more details
of where this wild game meat went. In very short
order in his life, basically becomes a meat hunter for
this plantation. So he's doing two things. He's procuring what
would be considered top shelf meat for the plantation owners
and then like the leftovers and the less desirable meat
(25:51):
is being used as a way to supplement the foodstuffs
of the enslaved people there, right, So Holt is getting
an education and horsemanship, being a houndsman, shooting and being
a general hunter in the swamps of Mississippi. Later in
this series, we're going to learn that this was common
for some sector of the slaves to become incredible hunters.
(26:16):
Here's minor turns out Holt was a heck of a shot.
So that's what hold did. Then, how he became such
a proficient marksman that when his right shoulder would be
too sore and he'd complain about it, Howard Haines made
him shoot with his left shoulder. Became a proficient marksman
his right shoulder and his left shoulder. There were times
(26:38):
how Heins, on a yearly basis, would travel up and
down the river to go up into Kentucky. But how
Haines was a gambler and a sportsman, and that he
always went to the races and they always had shooting events,
clay pigeon type shooting events, and Holt and how Heins
had this routine where the men would challenge each other
(26:58):
to a shooting contest and how Hens would shame somebody
who's willing to bet money and saying, hey, my my
servant boy over here is only ten years only he
can outshoot you and old and they would build odds
and then Hold go out there and beat him and
make howl. Henes a lot of money. And we were
fortunate enough to find that documentation. And uh, they dressed
(27:19):
Hold up and find clothing, bought him good boots and
hold in his later interviews in life, would tell about
how when he'd get up there to Cincinnati, Ohio and
places like that, he actually the city went to Brighton
Beach one time, which was in New York. Uh. He
says that people would try to get him to run
away because he's in a free state and he could
(27:40):
run away, and he always refused. He says that there's
no way I could have a better life up here
than I have down there. And that's that's that's Holds
interviews when he's in his eighties, he's telling Holt was
interviewed later in life, and it is the subject of
I believe it's six or seven major magazine articles during
(28:00):
his lifetime, and that would have been prior to the
Great White Hope Jim Johnson, the boxing great. I always
hear that he's he's the first man of African descent
sportsman to become a national figure. But hold, these magazine
articles actually came out on the hold. The first ones
(28:20):
came out immediately after the nineteen o two hunt, and
there's a second hunt in nineteen oh seven. Magazine articles
came out then, So hold was well, well say, well, no,
he was in the articles that I read in nineteen
or to a nineteen o seven There's more. Just Holts
mentioned more in those articles, and Roosevelt is Minor is
(28:41):
saying that Holk Collyer was potentially America's first African American
national sporting figure. Why don't we all know who this
guy is? Let's now begin to answer an even bigger question.
How did a fourteen year old Hulk Collyer end in
the Civil War? This is the way Holt told the story.
(29:05):
Here's Minor the time the Civil War broke out. Howell Haines,
who's adult in his forties. Now, Howell has his young
son named Thomas Haines would be a junior named after
his grandfather, who's in his twenties. Will both of them
sign up to join the Confederacy and Hold because of
the stories he's been told by his father following his
(29:28):
master into battle. Being a man servant, Holt wants to go.
He desperately wants to go with Howel and Thomas Haines
into the Confederacy and served as a as a valet. Well,
they told him he couldn't go. He was a very
small frame kid, and uh, and they just told him
he's not going. He saw them leave the plantation and
(29:48):
he's and he's just not gonna put up with it.
So he puts together a little sack of belongings. There
are a string of riverboats on the landing in Greenville,
which is where the Hineses are going to report, and
Hold makes his way through the swamp to get to
that landing because he doesn't want to get caught. He's
down runaway slave, and so he gets on one of
those riverboats and he becomes a stowaway. He talks about
(30:11):
how somebody allowed him to be a stowaway, and they
go up river to Memphis, Tennessee, and so you've got
no telling how many steamboats are pulling up there, and
how Heins and Thomas Heimes are standing there talking to
some Confederate general and Thomas Nudges is how how heines
and says, Dad, look at that, you're not gonna believe it.
(30:32):
And they see Hold walking up to him, and they realize, well,
we're not gonna send you back, so you're gonna be
the days of travel away from his home, right, So
they said, okay, Hold, you can have your way. You're
gonna go ahead, and so he becomes in essence of Valet.
So Holt was left in Mississippi but snuck to the
battleground following how heinz and he is allowed to stay.
(30:55):
Hold then travels with the army into Kentucky and has
given a job as a hospital orderly and as he
told the story, one day he was working and he
heard some gunshots in the distance, so he grabbed a
gun and ran towards the gunfire. He proceeds to actively
partake in the battle with the men in his company
and immediately gained their respect. The story goes on, and
(31:18):
they allowed him to carry a long gun with him
from then on, and they made fun of him because
he was, you know, where's that little kid going with
that big long gun kind of thing. He worked proudly
and he was at Shilloh. His description of the Battle
of Shallow is dead on. You know, Holton never learned
to read write, so who ever could even write his
own name, never could even write his own name sign
(31:41):
it with an next. So when I'm reading an interview
of Whole Carrier late in life and he's describing the
death of Albert Sidney Johnson, which was well documented in
multiple sources, and he describes exactly what happened, there's no
question in my mind that he's telling the truth. That
he actually all Outbret Sidney Johnson. He didn't read it anywhere,
(32:03):
He didn't read it anywhere. As a historical writer, Minor
was interested in getting the story right. Often in history,
much of what we have to go on is simply
oral stories passed down which we know can easily be
shifted over time. Again, lucky for us, Halt was interviewed
multiple times later in his life. So after after Shallow,
(32:27):
both howl Heines and young Thomas Hains were there with
him at Shallow, and howl Heins and Young Thomas Hains
have seen enough. If you're familiar with the Battle of Shallow,
it was an absolute blood bath. Nothing had been seen
like that on the North American continent. Nothing had been
saying like that since the age of Napoleon. And it
was just it was horrible. Even Grant said, you could
(32:49):
walk across the field, you know, a hundred yards without
stepping on anything but dead bodies. The brutality of the
Civil War was unprecedented in modern war on the North
American continent. And I say modern war because it's believed
that as many as twenty million Native Americans died from
disease after the arrival of the Europeans. Modern estimates of
(33:12):
the Civil War believed that six hundred and fifty to
eight hundred and fifty thousand Americans died during that five
year period. In the past, it was believed to be lower. Oddly,
the casualties of the Union Army were substantially more than
the Confederate army, but records during the time give dim
light to the facts. The bottom line is that holtz
(33:35):
life was impacted by the difficulty of this time. So
on with the story, how and Thomas Hines leave the battlefield?
How requests from his personal friend Jefferson Davis, the President
of the Confederacy, to be made Provost Marshal of Jefferson
County and Thomas his son basically deserts the Confederate Army.
(34:00):
This is where things get interesting because they give Holt
a decision, and they looked at Holt and said, who
do you you? Which one of us do you want
to go with or do you want to stay? Well,
at that point in time, since he had been in
Corinth for several weeks, he admit this group of young
soldiers who had come in from Texas, and he had
(34:22):
gotten to be buddies with him. These are all fourteen fifteen,
sixteen year old kids who joined the Confederacy. They were
under the command of Van Dorn and holding. These kids
got to be friends, and they said, I'd rather stay
with these Texas boys. Isn't that an incredible amount of
agency that they would have given Holt For an owner
to tell someone, you know, an enslaved person, Hey, what
(34:44):
do you want to do? You want to go back
with us? Do you want to stay here and fight?
I think at that point in time, it's very possible
that the Times said, if we can't contribute to the
Confederate College, we can give this boy up to fight
for the Confederation and that'll be that will be our contribution.
And I have no idea what motivated them, and I've
(35:04):
had the same question as crossed my mind. But they
allowed him to stay, so he stayed with not only
allowed can not only allowed him to stay, Holines gave
him a horse and gave him a side arm. And
from that moment forward, you got this young black kid
armed with his own horse in the Confederacy. This is
(35:26):
a wild image in a critical moment and Holp Collyer's life.
He joins the ninth Texas Cavalry, which is a horseback
roving unit of the Confederate Army, and they become a
notorious outfit. I want to read some quotes from your
book about these guys. There were multiple descriptions of what
(35:48):
they did. One guy said that they were the best
horseman in the world. That was a quote. Another quote
was that they were common guerrilla outlaws and that they
were they were rude flists towards Union sympathizers. So, I mean,
these guys were pretty bad, dude. If you were a
Yankee sympathizer, it's very likely you would be tried and executed.
(36:09):
And when they would execute somebody, they were disposed of
the body by throwing them in the swamp and covering
the body up with some cut cane. When somebody find
a body disposed of like that, they knew that company
out of the night Texas cab had been through there,
and there would be a reason. But they didn't like sympathizers.
But these guys kill their own. There's one account where
(36:32):
two young men from Texas have robbed a citizen, which
is not unusual, but they lined them up on creek
back and shot him. Their all men, So they treat
everybody equally. I'll give them that. Here's hankberd Dye with
information on a very interesting request to hold from a
(36:53):
very powerful Confederate general. He had been asked by Nathan Bedford,
ours General Farrest, to ride with him. He won't hold
a ride with him. He heard about holding Colonel hin
whoever worded at the time, said that's up to Hope
Holt soldier. I can't say what he does, what he's
gonna do, that's up to him. And when the request
(37:14):
got down to Hope, Hope sent the answer or demeral
farre should he appreciated awful, but he'd already ride when
the bars from Texas. He thinks he's just gonna tick
with them. There are so many unique overlaps of Holtz
life with odd characters in history. Nathan Bedford Forrest is
an extremely controversial figure, but he can't be understood in
(37:38):
the sound bite. So here's what I've got for you.
Forrest was known as a brilliant Calvary strategist, and he
once also took some heat for killing some Union soldiers
after they had surrendered. But the biggest strike on his
record is that he was the first grand Wizard of
the clue Klux Klan and originally helped the organization grow,
(38:01):
but as a green check on his record, years later
he withdrew from the KKK and he issued a letter
calling for the dissolution of the clan, and he denied
that he'd ever been a member, and in a public
speech in eighteen seventy five in Memphis, he said he
believed that black should be able to vote and their
lives elevated. I don't know, but I do know that
(38:25):
he requested our Brohlt Collier to ride with him because
Holt was bad to the bone, and this twenty year
old black man turned him down. I like the boldness
of it. Here's more from Hank on the ninth Texas Cavalry.
Now the beauty of Holt riding with the ninth Texas Covery,
(38:48):
holy little guys out of Texas. They were the wildest, wiriest,
craziest little things you've ever seen. Could ride a horsh
like lightning. One of the things that they did they
would urdle a tree with two six shooters as they
would run around the tree at a wide open galloping space,
shooting into the tree. I hope you gotta understand and
(39:10):
remember that he was running the best horsemen around. He
raised on a horse. He would he would go and
race horses all up in Kentucky and definitely, and he
was in charge of He worked at a stable when
he was young, and he took care of hounds. But
he also he was in charge of him. He was
the hustler, hustler so to speak, which takes care of
all the animals on the place. Plus he was given
(39:32):
that Webley Scott shotgun to kill as much game as
he could to feed the plantation. And he was an
expert marksman. Hold wasn't a great big man. He wasn't
a slight man, but he wasn't a huge big, bulky
kind of guy. He could get around, and he did.
Holtz involvement with this rough gang of horsemen out of
(39:53):
Texas Impacts, and this was a wild and chaotic time period.
Once Holt went under cover like Brent Reeves to bus
some bad outlaws, there's a wonderful story. It was just
outlaw haveing back then. You didn't know who to trust.
You'd be lucky to get to go to bed at night.
(40:14):
There were outlaws roaming everywhere. And there was a fellow
who lived on an island seventy six. And the islands
are numbered in the Mississippi River, and they're numbered going
down river up from where the confluence of the Ohio
River and the Mississippi River. So the first island south
of that would be number one, and then the second
island would be number two, et cetera. Coming on down,
(40:36):
there's a fell out there who's who sells timber that
you got all these Union gunboats coming up and down
the river, and and he's he's going he's making raids.
He's an outlaw, and he's making raids into the interior
of the Mississippi Delta, stealing livestock, stealing the slaves, of
burning houses. And they approached company out of the night
(40:59):
Texas Cavalry, and they say, we got to do something
with this felt. It's kind of a reunion with how
Heinz and whole car here. And they come up with
a plan and they say, well, let's put Hold out
there on this island and he'll be a spy and
he'll come back into two or three days and tell
us where all the buildings are, where everybody is, where
the weapons are kept. That kind because there would have
been there would have been slaves on that island, and
(41:21):
Holt could come in acting like a runaway, acting like
a runaway, and that's exactly what happened. Hope went out
there and he stayed with on this island for two
or three days, and he came back and he gave
his report, and then Hold went in with him, and
how the Hens joined him, and they went in on
these very quiet at night, and it was a raid
and they killed a bunch of people, and they took
the four main characters who lived on the island who
(41:44):
were part of his outlaw gang, and and strung him
up and hum And that was in of Milford alan
Co I believe his name was Holtz saw some wild
stuff in the ninth Texas Calvary, and you can infer
it's influenced by the gunfights he get into later in
his life. Here's the end of Holt's career as a soldier.
(42:10):
At the end of the war, Holt says that, uh,
he he mustered out in Vicksburg, and uh, I have
no reason to doubt that he ends up going back
to What does that mean? Well, you muster in and
you must out. That's what you're signed in. And he
signed out. And now I know that that's a very
highly debated issue about blacks and the Confederacy, but I
(42:30):
found several accounts of it out of northern newspapers, and uh,
you know where where the Union soldiers were right back home,
they've they've encountered black Confederates. I don't I don't question
that it happened. If they exist, didn't I think they did.
They were all brought in as his servants and ended
up with. As Shelby Foote would say, why are you fighting?
(42:53):
It has nothing political other than the fact it because
you've invaded us, and that Farewell could have been the
motive behind it. Hold service with the Confederacy went from
day one to the very end. He never left him.
He never was a wall. He followed orders. He never
got any kind of commission, obviously, and he never had
a uniform, but he had a Confederate hat. And we
(43:15):
had many photographs of him in that Confederate hat. And
if you read the narratives from the Ninth Texas Cavalry,
they wore they had in a very unusual way, and
that was with the front turned up. In all of
these pictures of Hope wearing his Confederate hat has the
front turned up just exactly the way the Ninth Texas
Cavalry narratives describe it. And Hope wore that hat to
(43:39):
his death bed. He he loved that hat, and in
his many of his photographs in later life he's wearing
that still. That whols involvement in the Civil War is
one of the most mysterious parts of his life, at
least as we would look at it from today's perspective.
I think it made complete sense to him, and on
(43:59):
the surface it seems simple. He was endeared to the
people that owned him, and an army had invaded the
area he called home, and perhaps it was even the
naivety of his youth thrown in there and him not
understanding the bigger picture. Regardless, Jonathan has some insightful ideas
on Holt's involvement in the Civil War. You know, I
(44:23):
think that that Collier's involvement is a civil war is
the main place that that I take some umbrage with
the way the story is told about him, because what
are the what's the actual motivations behind that. So this
idea of like the loyal slave is problematic to me
because one, it completely ignores the fact that you're dealing
(44:46):
with people that have no choice. I don't think that
the motivations could possibly be as as simple or as
buying area. As he loved the people that enslaved him
and enslaved his mother and either and everyone he ever
knew and cared about so much that he was willing
to put his life on the line to protect them,
(45:08):
it is possible for a situation to be more complex
than the summation of all the information we have. I
think Holt deserves more than turning this story into a
story about race. All of us simply wants to celebrate
the life of an incredible man, but the story of
race is the backdrop of his whole life, So in
(45:29):
an effort to understand his context, we owe it to
halt to talk about it. Jonathan and I have a
lot of rapport with one another and have always been
able to have productive conversations about tough subjects. Here's Jonathan again.
There's no denying the fact that he fought for the Confederacy,
(45:49):
and not only fought, but did so with the distinction
to the point that he was able to apply for
and receive a Confederate pension, which is mind boggling. But
to me, that speaks more to the extraordinary nature of
the man, much more so than this idea that he
so loved his you know, his brutalizers. Yeah. So it's
(46:13):
it's certain that Hult Collier was an outlier. I mean,
isn't he the one that told us why he did
what he did? Yeah, So that's a good point, and
I and I would actually argue that that is further
evidence of him being in an extraordinary person and an outlier.
I think it would be anyone who understands Collier's story
(46:34):
would be hard pressed to say that he wasn't incredibly capable,
naturally intelligent, politically adapt and if you think about the
time that this man lived in, he never was free
of the yoke of white supremacy at any point. Right,
the argument could actually be made, and I think pretty
pretty astutely, that the South was a much more dangerous
(46:56):
place for black people after the Civil War than it
was before because that social order had been so upended
that there was a brutality that was that was instituted
to try and hold onto the vestiges of that social order. Right. So,
what I would say about whole Collier telling these stories
in the way that he did, explaining his motivations, there's
(47:19):
kind of two possibility. It's either that everything he's saying
and putting out there into the cultural zeitguys is true
that he loved these people that he hated Yankees, or
he's a person who spent his whole life within these
systems and he understood that for him to to have
some sort of quality of life, it was necessary for
(47:41):
him to ingratiate himself to the people around him that
had power, and to ingratiate himself to a social narrative
that provided comfort to those people that were in a
powerful position. Very interesting thoughts a black man getting a
Confederate pension is incredibly rare and only documented a few times. Basically,
(48:04):
the United States government gave money to Confederate soldiers injured
in the Civil War in hopes to help rebuild the South.
It's unclear if and how Halt was injured, but he
did get a small Confederate pension. Tighten up your belts, brothers,
because we're gonna get even deeper. This is bear grease, folks.
(48:25):
We ain't scared of this kind of talk. I'd argue
that what allowed him to endure was his understanding the
people around him so intimately that he was able to
manipulate them into allowing him to take advantage of opportunities
that virtually no other black men around him were able
(48:46):
to access. So does that make him a problematic figure?
I mean, because it it feels like what you're saying
means that he was being disingenuous through his whole life.
So if that were the k is he is he
a hero? Or is he a villain? Oh? Man? I
think that, again, rejecting the buying area, I don't think
(49:07):
you can say either, right, I think that Do you
see what I'm saying? No, I totally I totally get
what you're saying, because if I mean, if you thought
that train of thought, it feels like you're saying, if
he was being true to himself and true to his people,
he should have been outwardly against all these people. No,
that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that so one
(49:32):
at one point in my life I would I might
have been implying to say that he was a traitor
or sellout or whatever, And now I'm kind of more
implying to say that he's a complicated human being, which
we all are. Right. What I'm saying is that his
circumstances were so different than the ones we live in
today that it's difficult to to bring all of our
(49:54):
sensibilities and understandings to those interpretations, right, which is I'm
not playing a moral relativism game here, but I am
saying that when you're dealing with a system that is
completely devoid of honor, completely devoid of righteousness, I don't
know that I can fully criticize somebody who finds a
(50:15):
way to survive and in some ways thrive within it.
And you know, honestly, that's one of the more interesting
things about Collier's life. To me is how complicated it
really had to be. That's one thing that's for sure.
The South after the Civil War was a complicated place
(50:36):
and time. I now want to dive into two unbelievable stories.
I'll tell you one and I'll let Minor tell you
the other. Shortly after the war, when Holt was nineteen
years old, He's still living and working for his former owner,
how Heinz. They're trying to order an uber of the time,
(50:58):
which was a pay for horse on coach, and the
white driver of the uber refuses to let Holt, a black,
emancipated freed slave, ride the coach. Hol Hins objects and
gets in a physical altercation with the uber driver and
old how was a fighter with a short fuse, and
(51:19):
the coach driver pulls out a knife and is about
to stab how when Holt, who is armed, pulls a
pistol and shoots the guy in the hip. Holt would
later say that he didn't want to kill the man,
but just keep him from killing how. The gunshot ends
the fight, and in an almost unbelievable outcome, how and
(51:41):
several other influential people on the coach tell the authorities
what happened and no charges were ever pressed on this
nineteen year old kid that shot a white man in
Mississippi shortly after the Civil War. That is a wild story.
Here's my miner talking about the most trouble that whole
(52:03):
would ever get in. It involved the killing of a
former Union officer. He ends up going back to Greenville, Mississippi,
where howl Haines ends up going back. And the South,
not just the Greenville or Fayette or but the entire
South now is occupied in what is known as the
(52:25):
Reconstruction era, and economically it's a terribly depressed time. But
the Union soldiers are still here. They're in occupying for
the wars over. The slaves are emancipated. Slaves are emancipated.
They come under the jurisdiction of something called the Freedman's Bureau,
(52:46):
so organized and it's control and it's run by the
Union Army. The captain, the commander at Greenville is a
guy named James A. Keen from Newton, Iowa. And he
was born and raised an abolitionist, and he fought the
entire war for the Union Army. And he's been given
(53:06):
this command and his command is basically manage and control
the entire former slave labor force and negotiate contracts with
what remaining plantations that owners there are, so that he
can collect the money and then spread it out among
the labor force. At the end of the season and
the hinds and still have land. They're devastated financially, but
(53:29):
they still got a piece of property had been taken
away from him. Yet they end up losing it at all.
But in eighteen sixty six they negotiate with James A. King,
so many bills per aker, They'll pay him whatever those
bills of country bales of cotton. At the end of
the season, they give him the money and he's to
disperse it well. James King, as you might imagine, didn't
(53:49):
have a very good reputation among the locals. Uh. He
was accused of stealing money. Was it was, It was
pretty common. As I said, Howell Hinz has been wounded
twice during the war, and so he and I'm not
gonna say it was an envelope, but he was a
crippled man. And Holt tells later in life about the
fact that James King had picked several fights with Howell Haines,
and Holts says it's a good thing he wasn't there
(54:12):
because he would have killed him on the spot. So
there's bad blood between James A. King and Howell Haines,
and being true to his past, Holt had threatened to
kill King. And the money comes in. The cotton crop
is sold, and in Natchez and New Orleans. I don't know,
but young Thomas and Howell Haines A Holts going into town,
(54:34):
right into Greenville for some reason. It says, stop by
James King's wherever you can find him, tell him the
money is here, to come on out. And so Hope
goes to the boarding house, tells James King the money
is at at home at plumber Its plantation for him
to come pick it up. And the hole goes on
about his business, and James came in. This money is
(54:55):
money that has been so there's been work done by
this cotton has been sold and now this money James
King gets us. How is going to give King this
money to distribute to the former slaves. That's so James
King makes two mistakes. He goes out that evening. It's
obviously he's gonna be coming back in the dark. And
(55:17):
he goes along and his body has found three days later,
his horses. His horses found rider list the next morning
in Greenville, and so the search party goes out and
they find his body and it's covered by Kine in
the same manner that the company I have, the Knight's
Texas Cavalry used to cover the bodies and people, as
we discussed earlier. And so they immediately they went out
(55:39):
and question the hind Us, and they immediately zero in
on Hold and they arrest Hold, charging him with the
murder of James King. It's one year after the Civil
War and Holt is charged with murdering a white guy
who was a Union officer. And don't forget he's already
shot another white guy. There's no way this is to
(56:00):
end well. Holt never confesses. It's a big mystery. Who
killed James King. They take Hold down to Vicksburg, Mississippi,
and then the old courthouse which is still there, the
Warren County Courthouse. They have a military court martial of
a civilian for the murder of this Union officer, and
it's uh. He's found not guilty. Many of the prominent
(56:22):
people of Greenville, Mississippi, come down for this hearing and howl.
Heinz scratches up enough money to hire William Alexander Percy,
who is known as the Gray Eagle of the Delta.
His son made great famous Leroy Percy, a United States
Senator and friend of the the big time lawyer, the best,
(56:44):
and uh there was no There was nobody to compare
to William Alexander Percy. But fortunately as as anybody in
criminal law in those of the convictions, because somebody talks,
assume their version of the prosecution as correct. Ho would
have been the only one there. And James King was
killed he never talked. Holtz acquittal, meaning he was found
(57:06):
not guilty, is almost unbelievable. William Alexander Percy was the
best lawyer in Mississippi and wielded incredible power in the Delta.
It's interesting to consider why he'd take the case of
a young black man that everybody knew was guilty. Later
we'll learn that the Percy family fought adamantly against the
(57:28):
klu Klux Klan and had an uncommon vision for the
reconstructed South. Wholes acquittal is one of the greatest examples
of the uncommon nature of his life. He had a
way of gaining people's loyalty here's Hank Berdine with the
story behind the story about the trial. They took him
(57:52):
to Vicksburg, had him arrested for the murder of Captain King.
Mr Pressure went DNA representing him and all these other folks. When,
as his character witnesses, the court house is still down there,
the courtrooms on the second floor. He was acquitted, and
there was a reporter there from up north, whether it
was a carpet bagging reporter or whatever, and said to
the judge, says, judge, why did you let that man go?
(58:14):
You know he was guilty. And the judge says, would
you walk over to that one and look out on
that front yard? And the guy did, and he looked
out in the front yard of the court house at
Warren County in Vicksburg, Mississippi, on the banks of the
Mississippi River, and there stood six of the Ninth Texas
Cavalry cowboys and there were seven horses. He said, they
(58:35):
were gonna get him anyway, no mind of what. So
his buddies in the Ninth Texas Cavalry knew he was
going to trial, and basically, if he was convicted, they
were going to take him by forest and bust him
out of there, and they looked at the world back then.
Was that unstable? That that was a real thing. I
mean it was like this was that this was right
(58:56):
after the Civil War, This this place was just chaos,
us down here, and so I mean this, this wasn't
just an idle threat. And when you had six of
the ninth Texas after much, they couldn't do what't much
they wouldn't do. If Holt had a bumper sticker slogan,
(59:18):
it might have been ready to roll. That's a pretty
good descriptor of him. In everything he did, he didn't
seem to let much hold him back. In this first episode,
we've covered only the first twenty years of holtz life
and he lived to be ninety, so we've got an
interesting journey ahead of us. Like Jonathan Wilkins said, holtz
(59:40):
life can't be understood in a binary way, meaning that
there are only two options. It wasn't just black and white.
And I don't think we can fully understand him, but
we're going to do our best to do it. His
wholehearted engagement in the Civil War is shooting of multiple
white men shortly after the war, and not get and
in trouble for it. It's wild. It's clear that he
(01:00:02):
had an incredible drawl to his life that overrode the
predominant relational themes of the time. It's a shame that
America doesn't know the story of Whole Call. You're on
a broad scale, and I think we can make this
statement that it's definitely a complicated story, but that's exactly
why it needs to be told. I can't wait for
(01:00:25):
episode two. I can't thank you, guys and gals enough
for listening to Bear Grease. We've got some very interesting
episodes coming up as we continue to explore the incredible
life from this man. So do me a favor. Tell
a body about this podcast, leave us a review on iTunes,
(01:00:47):
Go check out the meat eater dot com for some
Bear Grease merch, and I can't wait to talk all
this over with the Render crew next week. M
Yeah, he's a fascinating dude, like the way I described
in The People, because I'm like, man, it's like if
you took Django Unchained and Daniel Boone and like mixed
it together. Right On this episode of the Bear Grease Podcast,
I want to introduce you to the life of the
(00:21):
man that President Theodore Roosevelt said quote was the greatest
hunter and guide I have ever known. This man has
been gone from this earth since nineteen thirty six. There
are no video or audio recordings of him. We do
have roughly thirteen photographs, six articles written about him, and
(00:41):
the first hand accounts of those who knew him, including
Theodore Roosevelt. Many believe this man's legacy deserves to be
on the American pedestal with the likes of Daniel Boone
and Davy Crockett, and some might even suggest he stand
with the great African American civil rights pioneers of the
early twentieth century based upon the standing he had in
(01:03):
society and the life he lived. However, his life is
riddled with mystery and controversy. But if you're like me,
after you've been exposed to the energy, audacity, and bravery
of this life, you'll never ever forget the name Holt
(01:25):
call Your I'm in search of understanding who Holpe Callier was,
and all the questions that will still have after we
know everything we can know. I really doubt that you're
gonna want to miss this one. This name whole Callier
keeps coming up, and who is this person? I just
I had no idea, and as I dug and Doug
(01:47):
and I found all these other stories that were part
of his life, multiple chapters in his life, the fact
that he was connected to the Hinds family, that Andrew Jackson,
to all the prominent families from down in the Natchez district,
and nothing had ever been definitive, had ever been written
about him. My name is Clay Nukelem, and this is
(02:15):
the Bear Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant,
search for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell
the story of Americans who lived their lives close to
the land. Presented by f HF Gear American Maid, purpose
built hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as
(02:37):
rugged as the places we explore. I haven't and I never,
of course, no way from me ever to have even
met Whole called you, but to know what kind of
man he was, And I've said he was a man
amongst men. I mean, to sit down with a president,
(02:59):
to shit down with some of the titans of industry
and law, business, and to be respected the way he was.
That says so much to me in today's time. And
I've said before, and it's something that we don't think
could have happened, but it did. And it's because of
(03:22):
the integrity and the matter and the meat of who
Hope call your wash. As Roosevelt said, he was a
man of sixty that couldn't either read nor write. Yet
he had the dignity of an African king. And if
you look at pictures of Hope, you see that in him.
(03:43):
Throughout the course of this conversation, my hope is that
will all see Holt call your I believe that within
his life are the keys to some relevant lessons. I
don't want to bury the hook too deep on the story,
because I'm dying to tell you the bullet points of
Holt's life. He was born a slave, and at the
(04:04):
age of fourteen, he joined the Confederate Army and fought
with distinction the entirety of the Civil War. And afterwards
he became a market black bear hunter. After the Civil War,
he killed a white man in Mississippi, but no charges
were pressed, and was later accused of killing another one,
but was acquitted for the murder. He hobb nobbed with
(04:27):
some of the most powerful men in the Delta, gaining
their loyalty and trust. But what he's most known for
is guiding the then sitting President, Theodore Roosevelt on two
bear hunts in the Mississippi Delta and gaining his friendship
and respect. Holt Collier lasso to bear and tied it
(04:47):
to the tree for the President, who refused to shoot it,
and from this the press coined the term teddy bear,
which has become a global term. And it would have
never happened if it wasn't for the creative grit a
black man from Mississippi named Holt Collyer. He was rough,
but polished, ruthlessly loyal, and he navigated the Antebellum and
(05:09):
post Bellum South with an uncanny confidence, skill and grace. Undoubtedly,
holtz life doesn't fit into anybody's mold, and I think
that's what qualifies him as a great American. He lived
an almost unbelievable life. You could take every ten years
of this guy's life and look at what he's what
(05:32):
he was doing, and it would be you know, movie
worthy or bookworthy or story worthy. And so you take
his life in its entirety, especially as long as it was,
and it's it's just kind of it's hard to fathom
how a person puts that much stuff into a life,
especially with everything you know he had going against him.
(05:52):
Holt Collyer was born a slave in eighteen forty six
in Jefferson County, Mississippi, within the floodplain of the Rate
Father of Waters the Mississippi River. He appeared on planet
Earth fourteen years before the Civil War, a war that
would greatly impact his life in multiple ways. Time is
(06:13):
a ruthless master, eroding the answers and shrouding the truth
in a haze of mystery. We have accurate data on
his life. Much of what he actually told us is
the data we have, which would seemingly be enough to
make some profound conclusions of his motivations. But I think
we'll see that holtz world was very complex. But who
(06:37):
was Holt Collier to describe? Hope? He was a refined man,
yet could not read nor right, a superbe sportsman, a
contriment outdoorsman, I will say, a gentleman, and a man
among men that could go anywhere, be among any type
(06:59):
of person. He knew what respect was and he commanded respect.
You know, Uh, vonna slave yet road with the Texas
Cavalry and the Confederate Armed Services during the Civil War. Uh,
there was no reason for him to bow his head
to anyone. And I will call you. That was the
(07:23):
voice of writer, Delta historian, and river rat hankber died
though he never knew him. He is one of the
men who has worked tirelessly to preserve the memory and
the legacy of Hulk Collier. The other voice you've heard
is my friend and fellow are Kans and Jonathan Wilkins.
He's a writer, a chef, a waterfowl outfitter who lives
(07:47):
in hunts in the Delta. After being exposed to hold
story as a black hunter in the South, he studied
Holt's life with particular interests. We're going to dial in
on the details we have about Holt. Here's Jonathan. I'd
say that you know, Holt Collier is one of, if
(08:08):
not the greatest American Southern big game hunter, one of
the most prolific black bear hunters I think we could
assume has ever lived. Born under the guise of enslavement
in eighteen forty six in Mississippi. So we've established he
was a black man born into slavery and became a
(08:28):
great bear hunter. He had legitimate records indicating he killed
over three thousand bears in his lifetime, presumably more than
our broad Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett combined. But the
wildest thing mentioned so far is that he fought with
the Confederate Army, and an effort to completely over clarify,
the Confederate Army was the armed forces of the southern
(08:51):
portion of the United States that seceded from the United
States on December sixty and this newly formed government was
in favor of keeping the institution of slavery legal. The
Northern Army of the United States was against slavery. We're
going to expend a lot of energy trying to understand
(09:12):
Holt's motivation in his unusual loyalty to the South, But
to be fair, we've got to say they're all conjecture.
Here's Jonathan, you know, that's the That's the thing about life.
It's rarely as binary as as human beings like to
(09:33):
make it right. Like I, I still don't have a
handle on on Collier's motivations for some of his actions.
You know, I have suspicions that are you know, and
these are informed by my life and my perspectives and
how I understand the world. He's a fascinating dude, like
the way I described the people, because I'm like, man,
it's like if you took Django Unchained and Daniel Boone
(09:56):
and like mixed it together, right, Because there's there's so
many there's so many facets of the guy's life that
like that don't make sense as far as kind of
the assertions of himself that he was able to make right,
especially you're talking about within a society that is foundationally
built upon him not being able to assert himself right,
(10:18):
him not being able to be an authority, him not
being able to thrive, you know, for all intents and purposes,
especially for the time period, he was more financially successful
than you know, almost any other black people around. You know,
he enjoyed great longevity, He enjoyed you know, kind of
high social standing in a society where black men, you know,
(10:40):
that was not something that was available to them. Then
to the point that he interacts, he interacts with the
seminal American figure, you know, American political figure in such
an influential way that twenty one years later you have
this legacy of the Teddy Bear that has touched pretty
much every American you know. I'd argue probably a large
(11:00):
percentage of the world. It's familiar with the Teddy Bearer.
But again, like no one knows who this guy is.
No one knows who this guy is. Have you ever
heard of Hault Collyer. I'm walking down the street in
downtown Jackson, Mississippi. The dome of the state Capitol is
(11:21):
directly at my back. I slip a breath mat in
my mouth as I push open the door of a
swanky office building. I'm told by the receptionist the man
I'm looking for is on the mezzanine floor, which is
an odd architectural term used to describe a floor between
the first and second floor as in a building. It's
(11:41):
an odd and unfamiliar term to me, kind of like
Hulk Collyer's life. I'm looking for a lawyer named minor
if Buchanon. It would be easy to say that he's
been the bulwark of preserving Hulk Collyer's legacy in modern times.
He's traveled across the country to give presentations about Holt.
(12:02):
He commissioned the painting of a watercolor print of Holt
on his horse. But his biggest contribution is that he's
written the only book in existence dedicated to hold Collier,
aptly titled Holt Collier Minor. Will be our primary guide
through the details of this story. Here's how he got
(12:23):
interested in Holt. It's a circuitous tale. I am a
native Mississippian, born and raised here as Holt was, and
if you're familiar with his story, you know it's epic.
It's an absolutely epic story. But I had never heard
his name. And I was visiting with my children the
(12:46):
Memphis Zoo in nine We got in a rush. We
were in the Bay exhibit and we had to go
meet somebody and we had to leave, and I was
in a little bit of a hurry. So I grabbed
my five year old daughter and I said, We've got
to go, and she says, wait a minute, daddy, I
haven't seen the Teddy Bear. She thought that Teddy Bear
was real, and I didn't even think when I said,
(13:08):
I said, honey, I'm that Teddy Bear is not real.
It's just a toy. And she broke into tears. I
may as well as shot the Easter Bunny in front
of her, you know, and uh, she broke into tears.
But when she got her composer, she said, well, if
it's not real, where did it come from? Now? I
had heard these human entrant stories that would get published
in the newspaper, in the magazine about once a year
(13:30):
that Theodore Roosevelt had come to Mississippi for a bear hunt,
and that's where the Teddy Bear got started. But that's
really all it was, ever was. So I'm I promised
her I'd make a bedtime story out of it. My
law offices downtown Jackson, right across street from the Department
of Archives and History, and I knew those people pretty well.
So sure enough, I was good for my promise and
(13:51):
went over to the archives, walked over there, and there's
a subject file on the Theodore Roosevelt hunt. As I'm
getting into this subject file went on the Teddy Bear,
another one on Theodore Roosevelt. This name whole Callyer keeps
coming up, and who is this person? I just had
no idea, And as I dug and Doug and I
found all these other stories that were part of his life,
(14:13):
multiple chapters in his life. The fact that he was
connected to the Hinds family, to the Andrew Jackson, to
all the prominent families from down in the Natchez district,
and nothing had ever been definitive, had ever been written
about him. I decided to make a book project, and
it came out in two thousand two, which was a
hundred anniversary of the nineteen o two Teddy Bear hunt.
(14:34):
So this bedtime story goal turned into a book project. Yeah.
She was five years old when she asked me where
the teddy bear came from? When when the book came out,
she was a junior. She was probably satisfied that you
wrote a great book on the whole thing. Yeah, but
she was a freshman freshman of college when he came
in in nineteen eighty nine. Miner began his research on
(14:58):
Whole Callier and the book was sell published in two
thousand two, after being rejected by a few university publishing presses,
perhaps because of the controversial nature of Holtz life. Perhaps
it's because he was a black man who fought for
the Confederate army. That's a complex story to tell in
today's society. It's very quick to see that Minor didn't
(15:21):
write this book on a whim or with the hope
of creating a New York Times bestseller. It evolved out
of a genuine curiosity and morphed into a decade long
project of trailing a man's life whose story was bypassed
by the world. I'm incredibly grateful for those who do
work like this. I've read a lot of self published books,
(15:43):
and I was impressed by the amount of research and
corroboration of the information in the book. It's well written,
but still no one fully is able to understand wholtz situation.
So what do we know about Wold Collyer's earliest days?
I think it's interesting sometimes with these you know an
(16:04):
enslaved person, A lot of times you don't have a
lot of information. But with Hope, we have a fair
bit of information about his upbringing. What do we know
about his childhood? Well, let me make a comment on
what you just said. When somebody's born there, enslaved there,
they lived during this period of time. It's hard to
find information about him. It's impossible to find an image
(16:25):
of them. For instance, Robert Johnson, the famous blues player,
I think there's only one, maybe two images of him,
and he lived in a time when cameras were pretty prevalent.
Whole Caryer was born in eighteen forty six, died in
nineteen thirty six at the age of ninety, and I
think I found thirteen images of him. I thought was incredible.
(16:48):
Polt lived to be ninety years old, which is hard
to believe when you hear of the skirmishes with death
that he avoided. I want to hear from Jonathan Wilkins
about this very thing we just wrought up why some
of these African American figures are so undocumented by pop culture.
My personal hope is that I can truly listen to
(17:09):
people with unique and different perspectives than mine, and over
the years, Jonathan has often helped me do just that. Well.
I mean, that's you know, that's kind of the American way, right,
like we we footnote the black people in this country
that have have done important things right, like he's he's
(17:33):
he's phenomenal. But I you know, I wonder how many
other phenomenal and brilliant and like just incredibly interesting stories
will never know. I'll give you like a good reference
point for this. So oftentimes they talk about the the
first film ever made, right, and it's this little tiny
snippet and it's a black guy riding a horse. All right.
(17:55):
No one knows the black guy's name, but they preserve
the horse's name. You know. I bet you that a
lot of people don't know that the White House was
built by slaves. You know, history is written by the victors.
I don't know, you know, it's just it's it's just
kind of like it's the story of America. Really, I
(18:17):
think what Jonathan is saying is true. It's powerful and
interesting stuff. Here's how Minors started his first research on
Wholk Collier. When I first started my research, I couldn't
find anybody that ever heard of Whole Callier unless they
were from Washington, Kent. When I first learned about him,
I said, well, maybe some people in these nursing homes
(18:39):
will remember him. Because I started my research in nineteen
eighty nine and he died in nineteen thirty six, it's
possible that somebody remembers Whole care Thank god I started
my research when I did, because I found about six
people who remembered whole callier really who had met him,
Oh knew him. They were children, they knew him as
(19:00):
an old man. And one of them was the most amazing.
His recall was perfect. He was he was as smart
as a whip. He could remember everything about the whole car.
His name was Pete Johnson, and Pete owned the liquor
store in Los Angeles. And I had gone up to Greenville,
and people knew I was doing this research and I
was trying to find folks. And the first person I
(19:21):
met was Jane Weather. She was a widow who part
of the Metcalf family and she's she was ninety four
years old, and she remembered Holt very well. He had
lived there on their place, and she gave me a
lot of information on him. Soon after that, about a
month or two after that, I get this telephone call
from a friend who's helped me out, and he says, Minor,
you need to write this down. Pete Johnson gave me
(19:41):
his telephone number out in Los Angeles. He had just
come home to Greenville, Mississippi. He had been raised there
as a child, and he was trying to get some
statue or some memory or a park named after whole Car.
So I got on the phone and talked to him.
I ended up talking to Pete Johnson probably ten or
twelve of hours interviewing him over the phone. He had
(20:02):
been raised right next door the Whole Car. His Whole
Car is an old man sitting on his front porch,
telling his stories about bear hunt with Theodore Roosevelt, by
the Civil War, escapades about killing men after the war
and not being prosecuted for it, and and and what
I loved Pete Johnson telling me was it all the
children of the neighbors before television and really before radio,
(20:25):
but all the children in the neighborhood would come up
there as the son's going down and say, you know,
Mr Hotels, some stories tell Uncle Holt, they call him.
But before whole Care sitting on his front porch, almost
blind at this say, before he would tell him the stories,
he would make them put their pennies together and go
down the street that you know with the little corner
(20:45):
grocery thing, and make them buy him a plug of
tobaccup and a knee high orange And when they bring
that plug in the back and knee high orange. He'd
sit there and talk to him for until the parents,
until the parents called him home, a plug of tobacco
and a knee high orange. It's stories like this that
wouldn't be in the national newspaper article, but they give
(21:09):
you a feel for the man. I'm grateful for people
like Minor who took the time to document the last
remaining people on planet Earth who knew Uncle Holt. Now
we're going to get into Holt's early life history. Hold
(21:33):
was born down there in Jefferson County at a place
called home Hill Plantation, just a few about four miles
out of Fayette. Who was born to the Hines family,
best known for General Thomas Hines, who served with Andrew
Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans. Was uh in
the United States Congress, elected in eight same year Andrew
(21:56):
Jackson was elected president. Was was a friend of Jackson,
was a friend of the all the prominent people in
that area down Air Marshton Green and so Holt was
born into affluent circumstances, although he's enslaved and he's part
of the labor class, and his father had served with
(22:16):
General Thomas Hines as a man servant at the Battle
of New Orleans, so they were closely connected. He was
not a These were not field hands and were not
people working in the field. And holtz mother served the
main house and I don't know as a cook or
seamstress of what. And when Holt got to be old enough,
they put him in charge of the horses and the dogs.
(22:38):
They were big hunters, and that's what hold did. He
started out hunting from from a very early age, and
he knew the horses and he knew the dogs. Holt
was enslaved, and inside that system he worked in close
proximity to his slave owners, the Hines family, who were
part of the powerful southern aristocracy of the region. They
(23:00):
had even been friends with the former president Andrew Jackson.
Here's Jonathan describing Holt's early life. I mean, so prior
to the Civil War, he's living on this Hines plantation
and this is basically a this is a Mississippi plantation
that's like literally hacked out of the wilderness. Right they
(23:20):
talk about like basically this is just a malaria infested swamp.
You know, essentially what is a you know, American jungle, right,
So human beings have to go in there and cut
and hack and channelized stuff and drain it out. And
so he's born to servitude. You know, his family has
been enslaved for multiple generations by the Hines family. He's
(23:42):
born into that family. He's born into that system of enslavement.
You know, I guess on the plantation his family had,
you know, a slightly higher position than maybe some of
some of the other enslaved people, which is, to my
mind is a is a very dangerous distinction to make
because it and imply is that it makes a situation
not what it was. Right. But he's kind of this
(24:04):
family of house slaves, you know, I guess we'd be
the colloquialism for it. And around ten years old he
kills his first bear. So even for that to happen,
he's got to have some access that other enslaved people
don't have, right, He's got to have access to weapons.
He's got to have access, you know, or the ability
(24:25):
to go out into the wilderness. And so I think
he's he's probably showing himself to be an extraordinary human
being from a very young age. Killing a bear that
young is an impressive feat from a sportsman standpoint, But
of more note is that a young slave boy would
have had a gun and been able to hunt. Here's
(24:45):
Minor developing the context for holtz life. One of the
unusual things about the Mississippi Delta is it flooding almost
every every year, which prohibited raising any kind of livestock.
There was no meat source, but you had this labor
coming in and they had to be fed, so you
had to get this protein the food through hunting. And uh.
(25:08):
But anyway, Holt goes up there and he's, uh, this
is about eighteen fifty six, and he's given a shotgun
hist his instructions. After he takes care of the dogs
and the horses, his instructions will go out into the
woods and kill anything and everything that's edible, whether it's
an alligator, whether it's a duck, whether it's a bear.
He killed his first bear at an age of ten,
(25:29):
and that was his job. Here's Jonathan with more details
of where this wild game meat went. In very short
order in his life, basically becomes a meat hunter for
this plantation. So he's doing two things. He's procuring what
would be considered top shelf meat for the plantation owners
and then like the leftovers and the less desirable meat
(25:51):
is being used as a way to supplement the foodstuffs
of the enslaved people there, right, So Holt is getting
an education and horsemanship, being a houndsman, shooting and being
a general hunter in the swamps of Mississippi. Later in
this series, we're going to learn that this was common
for some sector of the slaves to become incredible hunters.
(26:16):
Here's minor turns out Holt was a heck of a shot.
So that's what hold did. Then, how he became such
a proficient marksman that when his right shoulder would be
too sore and he'd complain about it, Howard Haines made
him shoot with his left shoulder. Became a proficient marksman
his right shoulder and his left shoulder. There were times
(26:38):
how Heins, on a yearly basis, would travel up and
down the river to go up into Kentucky. But how
Haines was a gambler and a sportsman, and that he
always went to the races and they always had shooting events,
clay pigeon type shooting events, and Holt and how Heins
had this routine where the men would challenge each other
(26:58):
to a shooting contest and how Hens would shame somebody
who's willing to bet money and saying, hey, my my
servant boy over here is only ten years only he
can outshoot you and old and they would build odds
and then Hold go out there and beat him and
make howl. Henes a lot of money. And we were
fortunate enough to find that documentation. And uh, they dressed
(27:19):
Hold up and find clothing, bought him good boots and
hold in his later interviews in life, would tell about
how when he'd get up there to Cincinnati, Ohio and
places like that, he actually the city went to Brighton
Beach one time, which was in New York. Uh. He
says that people would try to get him to run
away because he's in a free state and he could
(27:40):
run away, and he always refused. He says that there's
no way I could have a better life up here
than I have down there. And that's that's that's Holds
interviews when he's in his eighties, he's telling Holt was
interviewed later in life, and it is the subject of
I believe it's six or seven major magazine articles during
(28:00):
his lifetime, and that would have been prior to the
Great White Hope Jim Johnson, the boxing great. I always
hear that he's he's the first man of African descent
sportsman to become a national figure. But hold, these magazine
articles actually came out on the hold. The first ones
(28:20):
came out immediately after the nineteen o two hunt, and
there's a second hunt in nineteen oh seven. Magazine articles
came out then, So hold was well, well say, well, no,
he was in the articles that I read in nineteen
or to a nineteen o seven There's more. Just Holts
mentioned more in those articles, and Roosevelt is Minor is
(28:41):
saying that Holk Collyer was potentially America's first African American
national sporting figure. Why don't we all know who this
guy is? Let's now begin to answer an even bigger question.
How did a fourteen year old Hulk Collyer end in
the Civil War? This is the way Holt told the story.
(29:05):
Here's Minor the time the Civil War broke out. Howell Haines,
who's adult in his forties. Now, Howell has his young
son named Thomas Haines would be a junior named after
his grandfather, who's in his twenties. Will both of them
sign up to join the Confederacy and Hold because of
the stories he's been told by his father following his
(29:28):
master into battle. Being a man servant, Holt wants to go.
He desperately wants to go with Howel and Thomas Haines
into the Confederacy and served as a as a valet. Well,
they told him he couldn't go. He was a very
small frame kid, and uh, and they just told him
he's not going. He saw them leave the plantation and
(29:48):
he's and he's just not gonna put up with it.
So he puts together a little sack of belongings. There
are a string of riverboats on the landing in Greenville,
which is where the Hineses are going to report, and
Hold makes his way through the swamp to get to
that landing because he doesn't want to get caught. He's
down runaway slave, and so he gets on one of
those riverboats and he becomes a stowaway. He talks about
(30:11):
how somebody allowed him to be a stowaway, and they
go up river to Memphis, Tennessee, and so you've got
no telling how many steamboats are pulling up there, and
how Heins and Thomas Heimes are standing there talking to
some Confederate general and Thomas Nudges is how how heines
and says, Dad, look at that, you're not gonna believe it.
(30:32):
And they see Hold walking up to him, and they realize, well,
we're not gonna send you back, so you're gonna be
the days of travel away from his home, right, So
they said, okay, Hold, you can have your way. You're
gonna go ahead, and so he becomes in essence of Valet.
So Holt was left in Mississippi but snuck to the
battleground following how heinz and he is allowed to stay.
(30:55):
Hold then travels with the army into Kentucky and has
given a job as a hospital orderly and as he
told the story, one day he was working and he
heard some gunshots in the distance, so he grabbed a
gun and ran towards the gunfire. He proceeds to actively
partake in the battle with the men in his company
and immediately gained their respect. The story goes on, and
(31:18):
they allowed him to carry a long gun with him
from then on, and they made fun of him because
he was, you know, where's that little kid going with
that big long gun kind of thing. He worked proudly
and he was at Shilloh. His description of the Battle
of Shallow is dead on. You know, Holton never learned
to read write, so who ever could even write his
own name, never could even write his own name sign
(31:41):
it with an next. So when I'm reading an interview
of Whole Carrier late in life and he's describing the
death of Albert Sidney Johnson, which was well documented in
multiple sources, and he describes exactly what happened, there's no
question in my mind that he's telling the truth. That
he actually all Outbret Sidney Johnson. He didn't read it anywhere,
(32:03):
He didn't read it anywhere. As a historical writer, Minor
was interested in getting the story right. Often in history,
much of what we have to go on is simply
oral stories passed down which we know can easily be
shifted over time. Again, lucky for us, Halt was interviewed
multiple times later in his life. So after after Shallow,
(32:27):
both howl Heines and young Thomas Hains were there with
him at Shallow, and howl Heins and Young Thomas Hains
have seen enough. If you're familiar with the Battle of Shallow,
it was an absolute blood bath. Nothing had been seen
like that on the North American continent. Nothing had been
saying like that since the age of Napoleon. And it
was just it was horrible. Even Grant said, you could
(32:49):
walk across the field, you know, a hundred yards without
stepping on anything but dead bodies. The brutality of the
Civil War was unprecedented in modern war on the North
American continent. And I say modern war because it's believed
that as many as twenty million Native Americans died from
disease after the arrival of the Europeans. Modern estimates of
(33:12):
the Civil War believed that six hundred and fifty to
eight hundred and fifty thousand Americans died during that five
year period. In the past, it was believed to be lower. Oddly,
the casualties of the Union Army were substantially more than
the Confederate army, but records during the time give dim
light to the facts. The bottom line is that holtz
(33:35):
life was impacted by the difficulty of this time. So
on with the story, how and Thomas Hines leave the battlefield?
How requests from his personal friend Jefferson Davis, the President
of the Confederacy, to be made Provost Marshal of Jefferson
County and Thomas his son basically deserts the Confederate Army.
(34:00):
This is where things get interesting because they give Holt
a decision, and they looked at Holt and said, who
do you you? Which one of us do you want
to go with or do you want to stay? Well,
at that point in time, since he had been in
Corinth for several weeks, he admit this group of young
soldiers who had come in from Texas, and he had
(34:22):
gotten to be buddies with him. These are all fourteen fifteen,
sixteen year old kids who joined the Confederacy. They were
under the command of Van Dorn and holding. These kids
got to be friends, and they said, I'd rather stay
with these Texas boys. Isn't that an incredible amount of
agency that they would have given Holt For an owner
to tell someone, you know, an enslaved person, Hey, what
(34:44):
do you want to do? You want to go back
with us? Do you want to stay here and fight?
I think at that point in time, it's very possible
that the Times said, if we can't contribute to the
Confederate College, we can give this boy up to fight
for the Confederation and that'll be that will be our contribution.
And I have no idea what motivated them, and I've
(35:04):
had the same question as crossed my mind. But they
allowed him to stay, so he stayed with not only
allowed can not only allowed him to stay, Holines gave
him a horse and gave him a side arm. And
from that moment forward, you got this young black kid
armed with his own horse in the Confederacy. This is
(35:26):
a wild image in a critical moment and Holp Collyer's life.
He joins the ninth Texas Cavalry, which is a horseback
roving unit of the Confederate Army, and they become a
notorious outfit. I want to read some quotes from your
book about these guys. There were multiple descriptions of what
(35:48):
they did. One guy said that they were the best
horseman in the world. That was a quote. Another quote
was that they were common guerrilla outlaws and that they
were they were rude flists towards Union sympathizers. So, I mean,
these guys were pretty bad, dude. If you were a
Yankee sympathizer, it's very likely you would be tried and executed.
(36:09):
And when they would execute somebody, they were disposed of
the body by throwing them in the swamp and covering
the body up with some cut cane. When somebody find
a body disposed of like that, they knew that company
out of the night Texas cab had been through there,
and there would be a reason. But they didn't like sympathizers.
But these guys kill their own. There's one account where
(36:32):
two young men from Texas have robbed a citizen, which
is not unusual, but they lined them up on creek
back and shot him. Their all men, So they treat
everybody equally. I'll give them that. Here's hankberd Dye with
information on a very interesting request to hold from a
(36:53):
very powerful Confederate general. He had been asked by Nathan Bedford,
ours General Farrest, to ride with him. He won't hold
a ride with him. He heard about holding Colonel hin
whoever worded at the time, said that's up to Hope
Holt soldier. I can't say what he does, what he's
gonna do, that's up to him. And when the request
(37:14):
got down to Hope, Hope sent the answer or demeral
farre should he appreciated awful, but he'd already ride when
the bars from Texas. He thinks he's just gonna tick
with them. There are so many unique overlaps of Holtz
life with odd characters in history. Nathan Bedford Forrest is
an extremely controversial figure, but he can't be understood in
(37:38):
the sound bite. So here's what I've got for you.
Forrest was known as a brilliant Calvary strategist, and he
once also took some heat for killing some Union soldiers
after they had surrendered. But the biggest strike on his
record is that he was the first grand Wizard of
the clue Klux Klan and originally helped the organization grow,
(38:01):
but as a green check on his record, years later
he withdrew from the KKK and he issued a letter
calling for the dissolution of the clan, and he denied
that he'd ever been a member, and in a public
speech in eighteen seventy five in Memphis, he said he
believed that black should be able to vote and their
lives elevated. I don't know, but I do know that
(38:25):
he requested our Brohlt Collier to ride with him because
Holt was bad to the bone, and this twenty year
old black man turned him down. I like the boldness
of it. Here's more from Hank on the ninth Texas Cavalry.
Now the beauty of Holt riding with the ninth Texas Covery,
(38:48):
holy little guys out of Texas. They were the wildest, wiriest,
craziest little things you've ever seen. Could ride a horsh
like lightning. One of the things that they did they
would urdle a tree with two six shooters as they
would run around the tree at a wide open galloping space,
shooting into the tree. I hope you gotta understand and
(39:10):
remember that he was running the best horsemen around. He
raised on a horse. He would he would go and
race horses all up in Kentucky and definitely, and he
was in charge of He worked at a stable when
he was young, and he took care of hounds. But
he also he was in charge of him. He was
the hustler, hustler so to speak, which takes care of
all the animals on the place. Plus he was given
(39:32):
that Webley Scott shotgun to kill as much game as
he could to feed the plantation. And he was an
expert marksman. Hold wasn't a great big man. He wasn't
a slight man, but he wasn't a huge big, bulky
kind of guy. He could get around, and he did.
Holtz involvement with this rough gang of horsemen out of
(39:53):
Texas Impacts, and this was a wild and chaotic time period.
Once Holt went under cover like Brent Reeves to bus
some bad outlaws, there's a wonderful story. It was just
outlaw haveing back then. You didn't know who to trust.
You'd be lucky to get to go to bed at night.
(40:14):
There were outlaws roaming everywhere. And there was a fellow
who lived on an island seventy six. And the islands
are numbered in the Mississippi River, and they're numbered going
down river up from where the confluence of the Ohio
River and the Mississippi River. So the first island south
of that would be number one, and then the second
island would be number two, et cetera. Coming on down,
(40:36):
there's a fell out there who's who sells timber that
you got all these Union gunboats coming up and down
the river, and and he's he's going he's making raids.
He's an outlaw, and he's making raids into the interior
of the Mississippi Delta, stealing livestock, stealing the slaves, of
burning houses. And they approached company out of the night
(40:59):
Texas Cavalry, and they say, we got to do something
with this felt. It's kind of a reunion with how
Heinz and whole car here. And they come up with
a plan and they say, well, let's put Hold out
there on this island and he'll be a spy and
he'll come back into two or three days and tell
us where all the buildings are, where everybody is, where
the weapons are kept. That kind because there would have
been there would have been slaves on that island, and
(41:21):
Holt could come in acting like a runaway, acting like
a runaway, and that's exactly what happened. Hope went out
there and he stayed with on this island for two
or three days, and he came back and he gave
his report, and then Hold went in with him, and
how the Hens joined him, and they went in on
these very quiet at night, and it was a raid
and they killed a bunch of people, and they took
the four main characters who lived on the island who
(41:44):
were part of his outlaw gang, and and strung him
up and hum And that was in of Milford alan
Co I believe his name was Holtz saw some wild
stuff in the ninth Texas Calvary, and you can infer
it's influenced by the gunfights he get into later in
his life. Here's the end of Holt's career as a soldier.
(42:10):
At the end of the war, Holt says that, uh,
he he mustered out in Vicksburg, and uh, I have
no reason to doubt that he ends up going back
to What does that mean? Well, you muster in and
you must out. That's what you're signed in. And he
signed out. And now I know that that's a very
highly debated issue about blacks and the Confederacy, but I
(42:30):
found several accounts of it out of northern newspapers, and uh,
you know where where the Union soldiers were right back home,
they've they've encountered black Confederates. I don't I don't question
that it happened. If they exist, didn't I think they did.
They were all brought in as his servants and ended
up with. As Shelby Foote would say, why are you fighting?
(42:53):
It has nothing political other than the fact it because
you've invaded us, and that Farewell could have been the
motive behind it. Hold service with the Confederacy went from
day one to the very end. He never left him.
He never was a wall. He followed orders. He never
got any kind of commission, obviously, and he never had
a uniform, but he had a Confederate hat. And we
(43:15):
had many photographs of him in that Confederate hat. And
if you read the narratives from the Ninth Texas Cavalry,
they wore they had in a very unusual way, and
that was with the front turned up. In all of
these pictures of Hope wearing his Confederate hat has the
front turned up just exactly the way the Ninth Texas
Cavalry narratives describe it. And Hope wore that hat to
(43:39):
his death bed. He he loved that hat, and in
his many of his photographs in later life he's wearing
that still. That whols involvement in the Civil War is
one of the most mysterious parts of his life, at
least as we would look at it from today's perspective.
I think it made complete sense to him, and on
(43:59):
the surface it seems simple. He was endeared to the
people that owned him, and an army had invaded the
area he called home, and perhaps it was even the
naivety of his youth thrown in there and him not
understanding the bigger picture. Regardless, Jonathan has some insightful ideas
on Holt's involvement in the Civil War. You know, I
(44:23):
think that that Collier's involvement is a civil war is
the main place that that I take some umbrage with
the way the story is told about him, because what
are the what's the actual motivations behind that. So this
idea of like the loyal slave is problematic to me
because one, it completely ignores the fact that you're dealing
(44:46):
with people that have no choice. I don't think that
the motivations could possibly be as as simple or as
buying area. As he loved the people that enslaved him
and enslaved his mother and either and everyone he ever
knew and cared about so much that he was willing
to put his life on the line to protect them,
(45:08):
it is possible for a situation to be more complex
than the summation of all the information we have. I
think Holt deserves more than turning this story into a
story about race. All of us simply wants to celebrate
the life of an incredible man, but the story of
race is the backdrop of his whole life, So in
(45:29):
an effort to understand his context, we owe it to
halt to talk about it. Jonathan and I have a
lot of rapport with one another and have always been
able to have productive conversations about tough subjects. Here's Jonathan again.
There's no denying the fact that he fought for the Confederacy,
(45:49):
and not only fought, but did so with the distinction
to the point that he was able to apply for
and receive a Confederate pension, which is mind boggling. But
to me, that speaks more to the extraordinary nature of
the man, much more so than this idea that he
so loved his you know, his brutalizers. Yeah. So it's
(46:13):
it's certain that Hult Collier was an outlier. I mean,
isn't he the one that told us why he did
what he did? Yeah, So that's a good point, and
I and I would actually argue that that is further
evidence of him being in an extraordinary person and an outlier.
I think it would be anyone who understands Collier's story
(46:34):
would be hard pressed to say that he wasn't incredibly capable,
naturally intelligent, politically adapt and if you think about the
time that this man lived in, he never was free
of the yoke of white supremacy at any point. Right,
the argument could actually be made, and I think pretty
pretty astutely, that the South was a much more dangerous
(46:56):
place for black people after the Civil War than it
was before because that social order had been so upended
that there was a brutality that was that was instituted
to try and hold onto the vestiges of that social order. Right. So,
what I would say about whole Collier telling these stories
in the way that he did, explaining his motivations, there's
(47:19):
kind of two possibility. It's either that everything he's saying
and putting out there into the cultural zeitguys is true
that he loved these people that he hated Yankees, or
he's a person who spent his whole life within these
systems and he understood that for him to to have
some sort of quality of life, it was necessary for
(47:41):
him to ingratiate himself to the people around him that
had power, and to ingratiate himself to a social narrative
that provided comfort to those people that were in a
powerful position. Very interesting thoughts a black man getting a
Confederate pension is incredibly rare and only documented a few times. Basically,
(48:04):
the United States government gave money to Confederate soldiers injured
in the Civil War in hopes to help rebuild the South.
It's unclear if and how Halt was injured, but he
did get a small Confederate pension. Tighten up your belts, brothers,
because we're gonna get even deeper. This is bear grease, folks.
(48:25):
We ain't scared of this kind of talk. I'd argue
that what allowed him to endure was his understanding the
people around him so intimately that he was able to
manipulate them into allowing him to take advantage of opportunities
that virtually no other black men around him were able
(48:46):
to access. So does that make him a problematic figure?
I mean, because it it feels like what you're saying
means that he was being disingenuous through his whole life.
So if that were the k is he is he
a hero? Or is he a villain? Oh? Man? I
think that, again, rejecting the buying area, I don't think
(49:07):
you can say either, right, I think that Do you
see what I'm saying? No, I totally I totally get
what you're saying, because if I mean, if you thought
that train of thought, it feels like you're saying, if
he was being true to himself and true to his people,
he should have been outwardly against all these people. No,
that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that so one
(49:32):
at one point in my life I would I might
have been implying to say that he was a traitor
or sellout or whatever, And now I'm kind of more
implying to say that he's a complicated human being, which
we all are. Right. What I'm saying is that his
circumstances were so different than the ones we live in
today that it's difficult to to bring all of our
(49:54):
sensibilities and understandings to those interpretations, right, which is I'm
not playing a moral relativism game here, but I am
saying that when you're dealing with a system that is
completely devoid of honor, completely devoid of righteousness, I don't
know that I can fully criticize somebody who finds a
(50:15):
way to survive and in some ways thrive within it.
And you know, honestly, that's one of the more interesting
things about Collier's life. To me is how complicated it
really had to be. That's one thing that's for sure.
The South after the Civil War was a complicated place
(50:36):
and time. I now want to dive into two unbelievable stories.
I'll tell you one and I'll let Minor tell you
the other. Shortly after the war, when Holt was nineteen
years old, He's still living and working for his former owner,
how Heinz. They're trying to order an uber of the time,
(50:58):
which was a pay for horse on coach, and the
white driver of the uber refuses to let Holt, a black,
emancipated freed slave, ride the coach. Hol Hins objects and
gets in a physical altercation with the uber driver and
old how was a fighter with a short fuse, and
(51:19):
the coach driver pulls out a knife and is about
to stab how when Holt, who is armed, pulls a
pistol and shoots the guy in the hip. Holt would
later say that he didn't want to kill the man,
but just keep him from killing how. The gunshot ends
the fight, and in an almost unbelievable outcome, how and
(51:41):
several other influential people on the coach tell the authorities
what happened and no charges were ever pressed on this
nineteen year old kid that shot a white man in
Mississippi shortly after the Civil War. That is a wild story.
Here's my miner talking about the most trouble that whole
(52:03):
would ever get in. It involved the killing of a
former Union officer. He ends up going back to Greenville, Mississippi,
where howl Haines ends up going back. And the South,
not just the Greenville or Fayette or but the entire
South now is occupied in what is known as the
(52:25):
Reconstruction era, and economically it's a terribly depressed time. But
the Union soldiers are still here. They're in occupying for
the wars over. The slaves are emancipated. Slaves are emancipated.
They come under the jurisdiction of something called the Freedman's Bureau,
(52:46):
so organized and it's control and it's run by the
Union Army. The captain, the commander at Greenville is a
guy named James A. Keen from Newton, Iowa. And he
was born and raised an abolitionist, and he fought the
entire war for the Union Army. And he's been given
(53:06):
this command and his command is basically manage and control
the entire former slave labor force and negotiate contracts with
what remaining plantations that owners there are, so that he
can collect the money and then spread it out among
the labor force. At the end of the season and
the hinds and still have land. They're devastated financially, but
(53:29):
they still got a piece of property had been taken
away from him. Yet they end up losing it at all.
But in eighteen sixty six they negotiate with James A. King,
so many bills per aker, They'll pay him whatever those
bills of country bales of cotton. At the end of
the season, they give him the money and he's to
disperse it well. James King, as you might imagine, didn't
(53:49):
have a very good reputation among the locals. Uh. He
was accused of stealing money. Was it was, It was
pretty common. As I said, Howell Hinz has been wounded
twice during the war, and so he and I'm not
gonna say it was an envelope, but he was a
crippled man. And Holt tells later in life about the
fact that James King had picked several fights with Howell Haines,
and Holts says it's a good thing he wasn't there
(54:12):
because he would have killed him on the spot. So
there's bad blood between James A. King and Howell Haines,
and being true to his past, Holt had threatened to
kill King. And the money comes in. The cotton crop
is sold, and in Natchez and New Orleans. I don't know,
but young Thomas and Howell Haines A Holts going into town,
(54:34):
right into Greenville for some reason. It says, stop by
James King's wherever you can find him, tell him the
money is here, to come on out. And so Hope
goes to the boarding house, tells James King the money
is at at home at plumber Its plantation for him
to come pick it up. And the hole goes on
about his business, and James came in. This money is
(54:55):
money that has been so there's been work done by
this cotton has been sold and now this money James
King gets us. How is going to give King this
money to distribute to the former slaves. That's so James
King makes two mistakes. He goes out that evening. It's
obviously he's gonna be coming back in the dark. And
(55:17):
he goes along and his body has found three days later,
his horses. His horses found rider list the next morning
in Greenville, and so the search party goes out and
they find his body and it's covered by Kine in
the same manner that the company I have, the Knight's
Texas Cavalry used to cover the bodies and people, as
we discussed earlier. And so they immediately they went out
(55:39):
and question the hind Us, and they immediately zero in
on Hold and they arrest Hold, charging him with the
murder of James King. It's one year after the Civil
War and Holt is charged with murdering a white guy
who was a Union officer. And don't forget he's already
shot another white guy. There's no way this is to
(56:00):
end well. Holt never confesses. It's a big mystery. Who
killed James King. They take Hold down to Vicksburg, Mississippi,
and then the old courthouse which is still there, the
Warren County Courthouse. They have a military court martial of
a civilian for the murder of this Union officer, and
it's uh. He's found not guilty. Many of the prominent
(56:22):
people of Greenville, Mississippi, come down for this hearing and howl.
Heinz scratches up enough money to hire William Alexander Percy,
who is known as the Gray Eagle of the Delta.
His son made great famous Leroy Percy, a United States
Senator and friend of the the big time lawyer, the best,
(56:44):
and uh there was no There was nobody to compare
to William Alexander Percy. But fortunately as as anybody in
criminal law in those of the convictions, because somebody talks,
assume their version of the prosecution as correct. Ho would
have been the only one there. And James King was
killed he never talked. Holtz acquittal, meaning he was found
(57:06):
not guilty, is almost unbelievable. William Alexander Percy was the
best lawyer in Mississippi and wielded incredible power in the Delta.
It's interesting to consider why he'd take the case of
a young black man that everybody knew was guilty. Later
we'll learn that the Percy family fought adamantly against the
(57:28):
klu Klux Klan and had an uncommon vision for the
reconstructed South. Wholes acquittal is one of the greatest examples
of the uncommon nature of his life. He had a
way of gaining people's loyalty here's Hank Berdine with the
story behind the story about the trial. They took him
(57:52):
to Vicksburg, had him arrested for the murder of Captain King.
Mr Pressure went DNA representing him and all these other folks. When,
as his character witnesses, the court house is still down there,
the courtrooms on the second floor. He was acquitted, and
there was a reporter there from up north, whether it
was a carpet bagging reporter or whatever, and said to
the judge, says, judge, why did you let that man go?
(58:14):
You know he was guilty. And the judge says, would
you walk over to that one and look out on
that front yard? And the guy did, and he looked
out in the front yard of the court house at
Warren County in Vicksburg, Mississippi, on the banks of the
Mississippi River, and there stood six of the Ninth Texas
Cavalry cowboys and there were seven horses. He said, they
(58:35):
were gonna get him anyway, no mind of what. So
his buddies in the Ninth Texas Cavalry knew he was
going to trial, and basically, if he was convicted, they
were going to take him by forest and bust him
out of there, and they looked at the world back then.
Was that unstable? That that was a real thing. I
mean it was like this was that this was right
(58:56):
after the Civil War, This this place was just chaos,
us down here, and so I mean this, this wasn't
just an idle threat. And when you had six of
the ninth Texas after much, they couldn't do what't much
they wouldn't do. If Holt had a bumper sticker slogan,
(59:18):
it might have been ready to roll. That's a pretty
good descriptor of him. In everything he did, he didn't
seem to let much hold him back. In this first episode,
we've covered only the first twenty years of holtz life
and he lived to be ninety, so we've got an
interesting journey ahead of us. Like Jonathan Wilkins said, holtz
(59:40):
life can't be understood in a binary way, meaning that
there are only two options. It wasn't just black and white.
And I don't think we can fully understand him, but
we're going to do our best to do it. His
wholehearted engagement in the Civil War is shooting of multiple
white men shortly after the war, and not get and
in trouble for it. It's wild. It's clear that he
(01:00:02):
had an incredible drawl to his life that overrode the
predominant relational themes of the time. It's a shame that
America doesn't know the story of Whole Call. You're on
a broad scale, and I think we can make this
statement that it's definitely a complicated story, but that's exactly
why it needs to be told. I can't wait for
(01:00:25):
episode two. I can't thank you, guys and gals enough
for listening to Bear Grease. We've got some very interesting
episodes coming up as we continue to explore the incredible
life from this man. So do me a favor. Tell
a body about this podcast, leave us a review on iTunes,
(01:00:47):
Go check out the meat eater dot com for some
Bear Grease merch, and I can't wait to talk all
this over with the Render crew next week. M
Host
Clay Newcomb
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