4 2 Hunting the Grisly 



General Hampton always hunted with large 

 packs of hounds, managed sometimes by him- 

 self and sometimes by his negro hunters. He 

 occasionally took out forty dogs at a time. He 

 found that all his dogs together could not kill 

 a big fat bear, but they occasionally killed 

 three-year-olds, or lean and poor bears. Dur- 

 ing the course of his life he has himself killed 

 or been in at the death of, five hundred bears, 

 at least two-thirds of them falling by his own 

 hand. In the year just before the war he had 

 on one occasion, in Mississippi, killed sixty- 

 eight bears in five months. Once he killed 

 four bears in a day; at another time three, and 

 frequently two. The two largest bears he 

 himself killed weighed, respectively, 408 and 

 410 pounds. They were both shot in Missis- 

 sippi. But he saw at least one bear killed 

 which was much larger than either of these. 

 These figures were taken down at the time, 

 when the animals were actually weighed on 

 the scales. Most of his hunting for bear was 

 done in northern Mississippi, where one of 

 his plantations was situated, near Greenville. 

 During the half century that he hunted, on 

 and off, in this neighborhood, he knew of two 

 instances where hunters were fatally wounded 

 in the chase of the black bear. Both of the 



