“Teddy Roosevelt on a Moose: Fake News, or Fake Fake News? An Old Photo of a US President on Mooseback Is Often Used to Illustrate the Deep Roots of Media Deception. The Real Story May Not Back That Up.”, 2020-03-24 (; backlinks):
President Theodore Roosevelt was larger than life, in many ways. He explored the Amazon. He delivered a campaign speech after being shot…And on at least one occasion, Roosevelt rode in a saddle on a moose. There’s even a photo of that last thing: Teddy in his iconic white safari hat, perched atop an antlered beast as it fords a body of water flanked by evergreens.
…The problem is that this particular ride never happened. The image is doctored—a photograph of the president that was cut and glued atop a picture of a moose. Up close, the famous photo is easy to identify as a sham: The seams around his legs and hands are messy and indicate foul play. (Anybody who knows much about moose wouldn’t need to make a close inspection. The wild creatures are not exactly friendly, and they certainly don’t appreciate being ridden.) Yet the image, ripe with the juicy mythology of a president who could sometimes seem as though he’d ridden out of a tall tale, has been shared far and wide, and treated as the real deal. Today, you can find it printed onto mugs, posters and even cheeky t-shirts.
…Then it occurred to me how little I really knew about the picture’s origin. It was clearly fake, that much was obvious. But who had done the faking, and for what reason? And was its awkward cut-and-pasting really meant to be deceptive? Had Teddy put it out himself to show how badass he was? Or had a rival put it out to try and catch him in a lie? What exactly, are we debunking here?
…Here’s what I can say conclusively: The image was created in 1912 by a photography firm called Underwood and Underwood, as part of a political triptych showing each of that year’s presidential candidates cut-and-pasted atop the animal that represented his political party. On the left, William Howard Taft sits on an elephant; and on the right, Woodrow Wilson on a donkey. In the middle, Roosevelt “rides” his trusty moose, there to signify his Bull Moose party. Somewhere along the way, between 1912 and now, the photograph of Teddy and the moose escaped the confines of its context and found a new life as a standalone image. By 2011, it was popping up in posts like Cracked’s “18 Old-Timey Photos You Won’t Believe Aren’t Photoshopped”, which claimed: “This picture is real, this scene existed, and yes, at one point in our history, you could have actually voted for this man.” Posts like this were then debunked in turn by other blog posts, like Gizmodo’s “That Famous Photo of Teddy Roosevelt Riding a Moose is Fake.” Round and round we go again.
…In fact, the photograph, and references to it, quickly vanished after September 1912. The triptych does not seem to be reprinted after its first publication, and the photograph of Roosevelt doesn’t appear again in any newspaper archive that I could access. In other words, Teddy and his moose seem to have entered a long period of dormancy, like a hundred-year presidential cicada…One clue as to how and when Teddy and his moose might have slipped the triptych lies in the photo credit provided for it in recent times. When websites bother to source the image (which they rarely do), they usually give some variation of the following: “UNSPECIFIED—1900124ya: Theodore Roosevelt riding a moose. (Photo by Underwood And Underwood/Underwood And Underwood/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images).” Of course, we know that the photo is from 1912, not 1900; but the rest of this gives us another avenue of inquiry…Here’s what probably happened: LIFE at some point acquired a collection of photographs from Underwood and Underwood for potential use. These were slowly digitized in the early 2000s. As the LIFE collection began making its photographic archives easier to browse online, people discovered the image and delighted in it anew. The rest, as they say, is history.