The Hodag
In 1893 the Rhinelander papers reported that a party of local men had cornered a horned, spine backed beast in the woods and killed it with dynamite. Eugene Shepard produced a live one three years later, kept it in a shanty, worked it with hidden wires, and charged people to look. He gave it up when the Smithsonian said it was sending someone to examine the animal.
Field Guide Entry
1893
Shepard was a timber cruiser, a surveyor of standing pine, and a practical joker with a newspaper's ear. The first hodag story ran in 1893: a beast with horns, a ridge of spines, and a temper, hunted down by a group of townsmen and finished off with dynamite. A photograph of charred remains went out with it.
1896
Three years later he said he had taken one alive, using chloroform on the end of a pole in a cave. He showed it at the Oneida County fair and then in a shanty at his house, in low light, where it moved. Thousands paid. His sons worked the wires.
The end of it
Word came that scientists from the Smithsonian Institution were traveling to Rhinelander to inspect the creature. Shepard admitted the hodag was his own work before they arrived. The exhibit was wood, oxhide, and ox horns.
What the town did next
Rhinelander kept it. The hodag is the city's official symbol and the high school mascot, a large fiberglass one sits on the lawn of the Chamber of Commerce, and painted versions stand around downtown for people to find. A hoax that lasted three years has now been the town's identity for more than a century, which is a better outcome than the truth usually gets.
Visiting Information
The statue on the Chamber of Commerce lawn is outdoors, free, and available whenever there is light, which is what most people come for. The Chamber inside keeps ordinary weekday hours and hands out the map to the painted hodags scattered around downtown.
Pioneer Park Historical Complex, which holds the logging museum and the material from the era the hoax came out of, runs a summer season only.
Rhinelander is a small northern town, and the hodag is spread across it rather than concentrated in one attraction, so an hour of wandering gets more of it than a single stop does.
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