In 1883, future president Theodore Roosevelt went on a buffalo hunting expedition to the Badlands of Montana. After his wife Alice passed away, he returned to Montana to take up cattle ranching and clear his head in the great outdoors. Best known today for his vast hunting expeditions and the cuddly “teddy bears” of his namesake, Roosevelt knew the outdoors. And he knew the minds of men like him who spent long hours in the wilderness:
“Frontiersmen are not, as a rule, apt to be very superstitious. They lead lives too hard and practical, and have too little imagination in things spiritual and supernatural. I have heard but few ghost stories while living on the frontier, and these few were of a perfectly commonplace and conventional type.”
Among the books written my Roosevelt out in remote Montana was The Wilderness Hunter, published in 1893. Tossed in between tales of heroic hunters and tough-as-nails outdoorsmen is one puzzling piece of history that cryptozoologists have latched on to as a second hand account of one man’s encounter with something as-yet unidentified. Roosevelt himself rationalized it as a credible account of something horrific and made no attempt to pass judgment on the man who told him the story, leaving its validity up to readers to decide, but nonetheless documented the precise details in his book: