Bears, after all, were considered monsters. For so long, the animal had been a shorthand for the unruliness and danger that Americans were encountering on the western frontier. Bears rarely turned up in toy catalogs and books, one historian notes, and “when they did they looked mean and were apparently designed to upset young children.” Two years before Roosevelt’s trip, Ladies’ Home Journal published a kids’ adventure story about a fourteen-year-old named Balser, described as “the happiest boy in Indiana” because he owned a rifle, “ten pounds of powder, and lead enough to kill every living
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