144 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
Feb. 86, 1895. 
THE SUNNY SOUTH.— II. 
Chicago, Ills, Jan. 22.— Whan I returned to Memphis 
from Brownsville, I met in Mr. Divine's office the very 
man we wanted to see, namely R. E. Bobo, the champion 
bear hunter of the world. With him Mr. Divine wished 
me to have a hunt before going on down to the mouth of 
the river. Both of these gentlemen spoke of Idling a bear 
as nonchalantly as I ever heard anyone speak of killing a 
squirrel. 
In regard to Mr. Bobo, I use the term champion bear 
hunter of the world advisedly and after deliberation, 
valuing as lightly as Mr. Bobo himself, the usually empty 
title of "champion." Mr. Bobo never entered into a con- 
test of hunting of any kind in all his life, yet living alone 
on his Mississippi plantation— on the beautiful Anise 
Ridge, in what is called the Delta country, about eighty 
miles below Memphis— he has in his hunting for mere 
sport — and he never hunted in any other way— killed, I 
presume, twice as many bear as any other man alive to- 
day. The Rocky Mountain hunter who kills a half dozen 
bears in a year is an object of veneration. If he kills 
twenty in a year he is a Grand Mogul. Not long ago an 
account was published in the daily press, probably un- 
truthful at that, about a certain hunter in West Texas 
who had killed 160 bear in one year and who there- 
fore thought he "was champion of the world." 
"That fellow makes me tired," said Mr. Bobo, referring 
to the Texas hunter. But what was Mr. Bobo's record I 
shall eay later, because I can't hurry this story, it's go- 
ing to be so good. Suffice it to say at this point that 
simply, directly, without a bit of plan or forethought, 
except as through the kindness of Mr. Divine, I afterward 
learned that with the invariable and infallible Forest and 
Scream luck, I had blundered right on top of the man 
who, out of all the hunters of the United States or of the 
world, so far as I can tell, is most justly entitled to the 
name of the greatest bear killer. This "i say sincerely 
and truthfully, with no exaggeration about it and I shall 
in due course prove all I say. Did we get any bear? 
Well, I should say— but about that I shall tell later. This 
story can not be hurried. Only, I bless the day I first 
went South to hunt. 
WHAT MR. BOBO LOOKS LIKE. 
The typical Mississippian is supposed to be tall, slim 
and dark-complexioned, but if so, Mr. Bobo does not fol- 
low copy, though his father, who came from North Caro- 
lina, brought up his family in Mississippi. Bobo himself 
reminds you of a bear in build. He is one of the old fron- 
tier type, powerful, hardy-looking, with florid complexion, 
long. sweeping, sandy moustache, and the cold blue shoot- 
ing'eye. Bobo would be the best possible immigration sign 
for the Delta — put him up with the card over him, "no 
malaria here." In character he fulfils his type— headlong, 
impetuous, powerful, crashing through tilings, not going 
around them. I often laughed to myself, though Bobo 
didn't know it, to see him riding through the cane-brake. 
It was like a wild bull of Bashan broken loose. Many men 
have thought they could follow Bobo through the cane, 
but it is said no man ever did it. There is but one cham- 
pion in a class. And by and by I shall tell what qualities 
the bear hunter in that country must have. 
Tom Divine— for this being the second day I have 
known Mr. Divine, I was already very often calling him 
Tom Divine, just as everybody else does — and Bob Bobo 
are the best of friends in the world, and either honors 
the requisition of the other unhesitatingly ' That was the 
only way I could have gone hunting with Mr. Bobo. Mr. 
Divine said he wanted him to take me, and that settled 
it. Once somebody wanted to hire Mr. Bobo at $10 or §20 
a day to take in a hunting party. My! wasn't he hot about 
that! He hasn't gotten over it yet. "I'm no guide!" 
he said, "and.I don't hire out, I hunt for fun." 
REASONS FOR FRIENDSHIP. 
The way these two men happened to be such good friends 
is this. You see , Tom Divine is the claim agent for the 
Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad, an arm of the Illi- 
nois Central, which not many years ago was built down 
through the rich Delta country, as all the valley of the 
Misissippi from Memphis down is called. It is Tom Di- 
vine's business to settle damage suits against the road. 
When a cow is killed the damage claim is handed over 
to Tom Divine, and if a man's wife and family are run 
over by the carsS^ it becomes Tom Divine's business to ap- 
praise the cost value of the lady and the offspring. You 
would think that his business would make, him hard, 
crabbed and cynical, but, well, that's where you don't 
know Tom Divine. 
Now, it is part of Tom Divine's creed, in his calling, 
never to offer "any more than $15 to settle any damage 
claim, no matter how big it may be. If a man's horse 
and buggy are run over, it strikes Tom they ought to be 
worth about $15 if they were a good horse and buggy. In 
the same way, if a man's wife and family are killed, he 
thinks $15 ought to square it, (and I violate no con- 
fidence. I trust, in sa'ying it has been known to square it, 
too.) Well, the railroad was new to- the cattle of the Delta 
for awhile, and it used to mash up a good many of tiiem, 
one day including two or three heifers belonging to Mr. 
Bobo. " Bobo sent in his claim. Tom came down one day 
to settle it. 
They sat on a log near the railroad, on Bobo's planta- 
tion, and discussed the value of the heifers pretty much 
all the afternoon. Tom offered his regular $15. Bobo 
said $55. They couldn't agree. "Why, those cows are 
dead now, man," said Tom, who had never met Bobo be- 
fore. "What's more, you've buried 'em. They ain't worth 
more'n $15 to us, and I'm only offering that because 
I rather- like you." Still Bobo held out for $50, and they 
argued it till near sundown. In the distance appeared 
the smoke of a train bound up to Memphis. Tom arose, 
folded up his jack-knife — for of course both had been 
whittling — and said, "Well, Mr. Bobo, I see we can't 
agree. There's my train coming, so I reckon I'll get 
aboard and get back to town. 
As he said this, he stood at one end of the log and Bobo 
was astride the other end of it. What Bobo did was to 
pull a long, large gun out of his clothes and draw down 
on Tom. "I don't reckon that's what you're going to do 
at all, Mr. Divine," said he; "I reckon you're going to sit 
down on this log and write me out a check for $50, right 
now.' 
"Dear me!" said Tom Divine, "fifty dollar-? Why, 
that's what I've said all along. ' Is it possible you have 
misunderstood me?" So he sat down and wrote a check 
for $50. 
Not long after that, a man a little further down the 
road lost his wife and family from too great familiarity 
with the cars, and Tom went down and offered his same 
old $15 to compromise the matter, but the offer was not 
accepted. The neighbors got together and said it was a 
shame, as nice looking a woman as that and several fine 
children, should go at $15. So they were going to hang 
Tom. It was kind of woolly down in the Delta in those 
days. They had Tom up on the table, with a rope around 
his neck, and were about to make him jump off when 
Bobo, who was riding by, came in to see what was the 
matter. He recognized Tom, and at once called a halt. 
"I know that man," said he, "and he's all right. Turn 
him loose." Bobo's word being law through many a mile 
of the Delta side, he was at once obeyed, and Tom was 
set free, and afterward convinced the man that as his 
wife was a bit cross-eyed, and one of the children had 
warts, the lot wasn't worth over $15 at the outside on the 
hoof. He has a cold sort of way of looking at things, I 
think. 
It was shortly after this that in one of the race troubles 
which sometimes spring up in that country (in Missis- 
sippi, 69.3 of the population are blacks) that in response to 
certain decisive actions in regard to a couple of its Afro- 
Americans of his plantation, the blacks of that settlement 
swore revenge against Mr. Bobo. They formed what Rider 
Haggard would call an impi, and had by several indunas, 
got ready to march on the house, and so happened that 
Mr. Divine and four or five friends were in the neighbor- 
hood, about five miles away, and they got word of the 
trouble. At once, mounting, they rode over to Bobo's 
place, and said they were with him. There was no up- 
rising when the indunas heard of this. By this time 
both Rob and Tom had learned that a friend in need is a 
friend indeed. They have been like brothers ever since. 
DOWN IN M2SSISSIP'. 
According to Mr. Divine's plans, I was to go down to 
Bobo— for Mr. Bobo enjoys the distinction of having a 
whole town named, after him— on Monday, devote that 
day and Tuesday to the killing of a bear or so, and take 
the south-bound train Tuesday night for New Orleans, 
Mr. Divine agreeing to be on that train with all my per- 
sonal baggage, so that if necessary, I could take the train 
at some siding below Bobo station, in case our hunt took 
us far away from home. How this railroad fashion of 
bear hunting progressed we shall see. At any rate, I 
reached Bobo Monday at noon, about as incredulous a 
bear hunter as ever was. but none the less enjoying the 
visit to a country entirely new to me. I found the "Delta" 
country a land of luxuriance, of big trees and heavy corn 
and cotton. You could hardly see the ground in any place, 
so dense was the vegetable growth. 
At Bobo station I was met by Mr. Bobo's plantation 
manager and taken up to the house, which I found to be 
long, low, and wide, one storied, with wide galleries all 
about it, a typical plantation house. On every side were 
the outbuildings, smoke-houses, barns, store-rooms, 
negro houses, etc. , which belong on a Southern planta- 
tion. We were now in a country where there is plenty 
of room. No piling up of twenty houses, one on top of 
the other, on a bit of ground somebody's grandfather 
stole of an Indian, but a spreading out, widely and lav- 
ishly, of the twenty buildings over as much ground as 
one cared to use. In short, here was a country of breadth, 
not of narrowness; of liberality, not of sordidness; of 
generosity, not of avarice and selfishness. I could not help 
thinking of the expression used by Gus Matthews, the 
editor of the leading daily of Memphis, in a conversation 
not long before that: "Where the trees grow big, and 
where^the wild fowl come — there is where God meant man 
to five. " Here the trees grow big, and the wild fowl come 
to the lakes among them, and it seemed a country meant 
for man to live in without fretting out his heart. For the 
time, I pitied the city dwellers, and rejoiced that for a lit- 
tle while I had left the city far away. 
"I have between 800 and 1,000 acres here," said Mr. 
Bobo to me, "and there is no richer soil on earth. I came 
here a little more than ten years ago, and at that time 
all this groundwas covered as thick as it could stand with 
heavy blue cane. This high ridge was called the Anise 
Ridge, and it never overflowed, and at the time of my 
first .hunt here the game was thicker around than I 
ever saw it anywhere. I said then I would own this ridge 
some day, and so I did. Come with me and I will show 
you something about potatoes. •' 
HOW A PLANTATION IS RUN. 
We went out into one of the fields where the potato 
crop was not yet dug, and there I saw a revelation in soil. 
There had been no rain for eight weeks, yet, there was not 
a cake nor a clod visible. You could crumble into fine 
black flour in your fingers the hardest clod you could find. 
Mr. Bobo showed me that in this loose loam you could dig 
potatoes with the naked fingers, and we fished out some 
great big ones, fat and mealy, and these I bore with me 
and had them cooked for supper as trophies of a nove 
chase. 
"I lease nearly all of the land to a firm of potato 
growers," said Mr. Bobo, the Barker Bros., of Tennessee. 
They pay me $10 an acre cash rent for it, and do all the 
work. They raise two crops a year on the land, right 
along. 
"We raise cotton and corn, and cattle and hogs, and 
about everything we need to eat on the place, and as we 
have over 100 souls on the place, we don't ship much ex- 
cept cotton, and, of course, the potatoes. The negroes do 
all the work, and. we pay them wages, but they are really 
as dependent as they were before the war. The negro only 
cares for one meal ahead and a place to sleep over night, 
and the further he can get in debt the better he is pleased. 
They never have any cash, and we don't dare let them 
have, and we have to watch mighty close to keep them 
from getting into us. The whole place is run on a system 
of accounts, each negro being given a piece of ground and 
means to farm it. At the end of the year he turns in his 
crop against his store account, and he is lucky if becomes 
out even, though the more he is in debt the better he 
thinks he has done. During the year he will come to me 
and ask for everything he can think of, and if I would let 
him have the goods he and his family would five high and 
dress well. I have to fairly be a father to the whole im-. 
provident, shiftless lot of them, and I tcy my best to get 
them to work hard and live close and 60 get ahead of the 
world, but it isn't much use. As a class, they can not 
think, and bid fair to be always dependents. They make 
the great problem for this country, and the question is 
not settled. Treat one as anything but an inferior, and 
you ruin him. No Northern man understands the negro, 
and only the Southern man knows how to get along with 
him. My hands here know there can't be any foolishness, 
but they have good treatment, and every chance in the 
world to get ahead, and I talk to them and reason with 
them over it, but only a few of them remember it. They 
are the products of a rich soil and an easy climate, and 
they do not grow in intelligence in any such measure as 
they should. They look to the whites still for their think- 
ing." 
As we talked, Mr. Bobo and I walked on over the whole 
plantation, cotton, corn and potatoes, to the very edge 
where the big timber shut in, black and mysterious. We 
looked at the many horses |and mules, the pigs, poultry 
and cattle, all the busy population of, the place. The soil 
seemed fruitful of every sort of life, We went over to 
the cotton-gin, and it seemed a most singular and amus- 
ing thing to all the hands to see a man who had never 
seen a cotton-gin at work before. But I made a good pho- 
tograph of it, so I am sure I would know the next one I 
saw. 
THE BOBO BEAR PAOK. 
And now Mr. Bobo went into the house and took down 
his hunting horn. "I will show you a few dogs," he 
said, and blew a call, at which there arose a great confu- 
sion of tongues, and the bear pack came running in from 
every direction, and from every sort of place. From under 
the house and out of the house, and behind the house, and 
from out of the barns and the sheds and from across the 
fields, the hounds came galloping in dozens, every one of 
them at cry, till the yard was full of a howling, jumping, 
baying lot of dogs, more than I ever saw in one pack 
before. 
"This is only a few of them," said Mr. Bobo. "They 
are scattered over the neighborhood for miles. My friend 
Felix Payne and I hunt together, and he keeps some of 
the dogs, and the negroes have them all around over the 
country. I suppose there are sixty or eighty of them if 
we had them altogether." 
"It takes all sorts of dogs to make a bear pack, as you 
see," he continued. "The base of this pack is the old 
pack of fox hounds my father brought from North Caro- 
lina. I have always kept up the pack. We are obliged to 
have a great many dogs coming in all the time, for the 
life of a bear dog in this country is only about four years, 
and not all the dogs will make good bear dogs. We have 
to be continually training and trying and selecting. No 
one knows how many times the material of the pack has 
changed, though, of course, I remember a long line of 
good bear dogs I have had. 
"I like a cross of staghound pretty well; such dogs usu- 
ally will run a bear trail. Then we have half-bree'd curs \ 
which do well, too. We never dare let go of the cold I 
foxhound nose though, for that must puzzle out the faint 
trails. Plenty of cold-nosed dogs will not run on a bear 
trail, and some cold ones will run deer, or cat, or coons 
or such stuff, none of which we want, The right bear 
dogs has nose enough to trail bear, and will not trail any- 
thing else." 
ONE BEAR, ANYHOW. 
"Now you must see my pet bear," said Mr. Bobo. So 
we walked over to the little house where this part of the ■ 
live stock was kept. "I nearly always have a pet bear or | 
so around," said Mr. Bobo. "We had a mate for this one | 
but it got killed. Come out here, Miss Alice!" qoj j 
Miss Alice proved to be a youngster, rather over a year 
old, of the black bear, native to that region. She was fat, I 
sleek and saucy, and ,not afraid of the dogs, though she i 
had sense enough to run into her house when Mr. Bobo J 
laid the dogs on for fun. Miss Alice was willing to stand t 
up and eat from Mr.Bobo's hand, but for the rest of us, I 
she showed a very capricious temper. Once I thought to I 
stroke her head, but she made a lightning-like swipe with 
a paw which just barely missed taking off a leg for me. ] 
The only one for whom Miss Alice is constantly trust- • 
worthy and affectionate is Horace, Mr. Bobo's son, who a 
can hustle her round as he likes. No one else takes many 
liberties with her. We spent some time watching the odd 
actions of the bear, and I got some pictures of it and a 
few of the dogs, and of Mi-. Bobo and his friend Mr. Felix J 
Payne incidentally, the latter having by this time come , 
over to see about that bear bunt. 
One habit of this bear I never saw in any other, and it 
reminded me of the mooted "whickering" of the coon. It 1 
would lie by the half hour and lick at the head of a nail ! 
in the side of its house, all the time uttering a rapid, I 
twittering note much like the distant sound of the sickle- ! 
bar of a reaper, only of higher key. It had worn the 
wpod away from around the head of the nail by constant 
licking at it. While at this pastime the animal would move 
its paws a little, and apparently be quite happy, as a cat 
is when it purrs. The note was very high and rapid, a 
sort of "whickering" sound. 
On the shed near the depot I had noticed a bear skin 
tacked out, and commenting on this, Mr. Bobo showed 
me three more, also a very large wolf. "We had a little 
hunt two weeks ago," said he, carelessly, "killed five bear. 
They are not very plenty, some way, this fall, and I think 
they are moving off hunting for the mast. Still, I reckon 
we can get a bear. You could kill a deer this evening if 
you wanted to, over at the edge of the field, but we don't 
bother very much with deer. Of course, we never kill 
anything but bear ahead of the dogs." 
A LAND OF PLENTY. 
Thus we passed the afternoon even too quickly, and at 
dark sat down to a plantation dinner, such a dinner, if I 
may be forgiven comment upon it, as no city club man 
ever saw, unless he went away from home. After all, no 
cooks surpass the Southern negroes, raised in the art, and 
I do think they are the only beings on earth who really 
know how to make coffee. The many breads, the different 
honeys, the several preserves of fruits, the fowls, the 
many vegetables— above all the delicious yams; you can't 
eet sweet potatoes in the North— everything, Mr. Bobo 
said except the coffee and the sugar, was the product of 
the country 1 'And the sugar doesn't come from very far 
down the river, "said he, Verily, you could build a wall 
