The South's Bear Hunter Holt Collier

A former slave, a confederate soldier, a cowboy, a master houndsman & a bear hunter: Holt Collier

- Joanthan Wilkins

A slave was born in 1846. No month was recorded. The day of his birth was not thought significant enough to remember. He was the third generation of his family to live in bondage and servitude to a farmer in Mississippi.

He was born to the Mississippi Delta, a place that, at the time, echoed all of the same mysterious breadth of flora and fauna that the Amazon jungles could provide. Plantations were hacked, by hand, out of canebrakes and swamps so thick that every step forward necessitated a battle with nature. Mosquitos, stinging insects, and venomous snakes were constant adversaries in the primeval forest and the labor merciless in the agricultural fields that were created. Slaves died of malaria, yellow fever, and typhoid. They died of exhaustion, they were beaten to death, and they were hanged. The brutality of the space and the era was both mercurial and omnipresent. It was persistent in its danger, its wildness and its horror.

Landscape shapes our existence and it informs our understanding of self. This was the space that helped to form one of the superlative hunters of America and arguably the greatest bear hunter in the country’s history, Holt Collier.