Teddy Roosevelt's Record Mountain Lion

John Goff (left) and Teddy Roosevelt, 1901

Teddy Roosevelt held the record for largest Colorado Mountain Lion from 1901 until 2007. 

Rooselvelt killed 12 lions in his 1901 trip to Colorado, four of them dispatched by knife, including his record 227-pound big cat. 

Roosevelt relied on legendary big game guide John Goff to put him on Mountain Lion and bear, and it was this same John Goff who later gave Roosevelt Skip, his beloved terrier, with which Roosevelt hunted rats in the White House basement.

In a letter to his son Ted, Roosevelt described the first part of his 1901 trip to Colorado:

Yesterday we were in the saddle for ten hours. The dogs ran one lynx down and killed it among the rocks after a vigorous scuffle. It was in a hole and only two of them could get at it.

This morning, soon after starting out, we struck the cold trail of a mountain lion. The hounds puzzled about for nearly two hours, going up and down the great gorges, until we sometimes absolutely lost even the sound of the baying. Then they struck the fresh trail, where the cougar had killed a deer over night. In half an hour a clamorous yelling told us they had overtaken the quarry; for we had been riding up the slopes and along the crests, wherever it was possible for the horses to get footing. As we plunged and scrambled down towards the noise, one of my companions, Phil Stewart, stopped us while he took a kodak of a rabbit which sat unconcernedly right beside our path. Soon we saw the lion in a treetop, with two of the dogs so high up among the branches that he was striking at them. He was more afraid of us than of the dogs, and as soon as he saw us he took a great flying leap and was off, the pack close behind. In a few hundred yards they had him up another tree. Here I could have shot him (Tony climbed almost up to him, and then fell twenty feet out of the tree), but waited for Stewart to get a photo; and he jumped again. This time, after a couple of hundred yards, the dogs caught him, and a great fight followed. They could have killed him by themselves, but he bit or clawed four of them, and for fear he might kill one I ran in and stabbed him behind the shoulder, thrusting the knife you loaned me right into his heart. I have always wished to kill a cougar as I did this one, with dogs and the knife.