The world's best-loved toy is named after a bear hunt in which the president did not shoot the bear.

In November 1902, Theodore Roosevelt went hunting in the Mississippi Delta, near Onward and Smedes. His guide was Holt Collier, a formerly enslaved man who, according to Smithsonian magazine, had killed more than 3,000 bears. Hounds cornered a full-grown black bear, about 225 to 235 pounds by different accounts, in a watering hole. Collier struck it with his rifle and tied it to a tree so the president could have the kill.

Roosevelt refused. Shooting a tied, injured animal would have been unsportsmanlike. The bear was then killed with a knife, so the story is less gentle than the toy suggests.

The cartoonist Clifford Berryman drew the scene for The Washington Post as "Drawing the Line in Mississippi." Sources date it to November 16 or 17, 1902. In later versions and follow-up cartoons, Berryman's bear became a small, cute cub, though the real one was full grown.

Not every detail is secure. The New-York Historical Society points out that the Post and the New York Times did not report a tied bear in their coverage. Those papers reported only that he failed to bag a bear.

The toy followed quickly. Morris and Rose Michtom, Russian immigrants with a shop in Brooklyn, made a plush bear and called it "Teddy's bear." They went on to found the Ideal Novelty and Toy Company. A family story says Roosevelt wrote to approve the use of his name, but nobody has found the letter. In Germany, the Steiff company was also making jointed bears, and an American buyer ordered 3,000 of them in 1903.

The exact phrase came a little later. Etymonline dates "teddy bear" to 1906 and points to a New York Times poem that January about two bears named Teddy B. and Teddy G. Those were the heroes of Seymour Eaton's "Roosevelt Bears," a newspaper serial collected as a book in September 1906. Toy dealers were using "teddy bear" by 1907.

By then the craze had arrived. The name stayed attached to every soft bear that followed, long after most people forgot the hunt.