How the sons of Teddy Roosevelt discovered the mythical Giant Panda

Among the great hunters and adventurers of the Roaring 1920s were the two eldest sons of Teddy Roosevelt, America’s 26th president, former New York governor and one of the country’s most energetic and famous figures.The Roosevelt family had funded museums to fill their halls with exhibits of virtually every large animal known to man, but for one — the elusive and legendary creature, the giant black and white panda.Emboldened by their legendary lineage, Ted Jr.

and Kermit Roosevelt decided to follow in the footsteps of their big-game-hunting father who had brought back kills of lions, tigers, elephants and bears — often exhibited in New York City’s American Museum of Natural History, which the boys’ grandfather had co-founded in 1869.Pursuing fame and glory — as well as hoping to escape the shadow of their father — the brothers set out for remote, and inhospitable Himalayan mountains in Asia, which had yet to be explored by Westerners.Their goal was to find the panda thought to be some kind of polar bear — but a beast that many believed did not exist.

And the brothers faced a punishing route up a 16,000-foot peak with howling winter storms.As Nathalia Holt writes in her deeply researched nonfiction account, “The Beast in the Clouds: The Roosevelt Brothers’ Deadly Quest to Find the Mythical Giant Panda” )One Signal Publishers): “The animal the brothers coveted looked like no other species in the world . . .a black and white bear so rare that many people did not believe it was real. “Not even naturalists who had worked in China all their lives would say precisely where the creature lived, what it ate, or how it behaved . . .

The Roosevelts desired this one animal so acutely that they could barely speak about it with each other, much less anyone else,” the author observes.Few people in the Republic of China had ever seen the panda, but there was a probable reference to it in Chinese literature in the early Third Century, accordi...