The Original Teddy Bear

The man who tied the bear was born into slavery. Holt Collier, born about 1848 at the Hinds family's Plum Ridge plantation in Mississippi, killed his first bear at ten to feed the plantation. When the Civil War began he followed his enslaver, Howell Hinds, into the Confederate army and served in the Ninth Texas Cavalry. During Reconstruction a military tribunal in Vicksburg tried him for killing a captain, and he was acquitted. In November 1902 his dogs cornered the bear, and by his own account he told Roosevelt not to shoot it tied to a tree.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 — 2.8 mi
  The Garden District's 1833 cemetery of about 1,100 family tombs, closed to visitors in 2019 and reopened on October 1, 2026 for small guided tours run by the Preservation Resource Center.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 4.5 mi
  New Orleans' oldest surviving city of the dead, opened in 1789 after the fire of 1788 and the burial place of Homer Plessy, reachable only on a guided tour since March 2015.
• New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park — 4.6 mi
  A National Park Service unit created in 1994 to tell where jazz came from, with free programs and a visitor center in the French Quarter and park land inside Louis Armstrong Park.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 4.6 mi
  A French Quarter museum and research center founded in 1966, whose 2015 Purchased Lives exhibition took on New Orleans' place as the largest slave market in antebellum America.

More markers nearby

• The Flood of 1927 — steps away
• Boré Plantation - Audubon Park — 0.2 mi
• Audubon Park History — 0.4 mi
• Gilbert Academy and New Orleans University — 1.3 mi