04/06/2026
The slave who raised a panther to kill fourteen slave owners and became legendary. Louisiana, 1847......."
The photograph was taken on August 9th, 1847 in a clearing approximately one mile south of the Bowmont plantation in southern Louisiana by itinerant photographer Henri Mercier, who'd been traveling through the region documenting plantation life for wealthy land owners at the rate of $5.50 per portrait session.
The image shows a black boy who appears to be approximately 14 years old, sitting barefoot beside a black panther that measures approximately 7 ft from nose totail and weighs an estimated 140 lb. Both subjects positioned against a background of scrub vegetation and scattered pine trees typical of Louisiana's transitional zone between swampland and higher ground.
What Mercier's camera couldn't capture during the 82nd exposure required by the early darotype process was that the boy whose name was Elijah Freeman was enslaved property valued at $600 in the estate ledgers of plantation owner Jean Paul Bowmont that he'd found the panther as a 6-week old cub orphaned in the swamp 3 years earlier in 1844 and had raised it in complete secrecy ever since.
and that over the next six years between 1847 and 1853, Elijah would use the panther he'd named Shadow to kill 14 people, seven overseers, five plantation owners, and two slave catchers, staging the deaths to appear as attacks by wild predators while actually executing a methodical assassination campaign that would terrorize Louisiana's planter class and contribute to the largest mass escape of enslaved people in state history when panic over the Phantom Panther killings caused security breakdowns across multiple plantations simultaneously.
Elijah Freeman was 14 years old in August 1847. Stood approximately 5'4 in tall, weighed roughly 105 lb, and had been enslaved since birth on the Bowmont plantation where his mother worked as a fieldand. And his father had died three years earlier from fever. Though Elijah
