hodag statue in front of the Rhinelander Area Chamber of Commerce (© Gourami
Watcher/Wikipedia – CC BY-SA 3.0 licence)
Back in the pioneering days of North
America, when European settlers were attempting to tame the vast wildernesses
full of unfamiliar creatures in what to them was the new and very strange, even
somewhat frightening continent of North America, rural workers such as
lumberjacks and loggers would often spend appreciable periods of time away from
their families and homesteads.
Consequently, for company and to keep
safe, they would bond together by gathering around fires in their campsites at
night, deep within the dark, forbidding forests, and while away the hours by
telling tall tales to amuse and play-scare each other, seeing who could spin
the most outlandish, spine-chilling yarns, full of daring feats and terrifying
monsters – the latter often being inspired by sightings and sounds of what to
them were still very mysterious, potentially dangerous native creatures inhabiting
this immense New World.
A
1932 hodag-depicting commemorative medallion from Rhinelander (public domain)
These largely made-up monstrosities
became known collectively as ‘Fearsome Critters’ or ‘Fierce Critters’, and took many different forms.
Some were fantastical mammals, birds, reptiles, or amphibians, others were
colossal fishes, creepy-crawlies, or totally bizarre unclassifiables. Today (which
just so happens to be ShukerNature’s 15th anniversary!), I am
documenting possibly the most famous one of all, Wisconsin’s truly horrific,
horrible and unequivocally hideous hodag – an allegedly ferocious terror beast
that has long fascinated folklorists and even a few cryptozoologists.
With many Fearsome Critters, their origins
have been lost in the mists of time, which makes the hodag’s history particularly
memorable, in every sense, because this is one whose origin in its modern-day
form is known very specifically, thanks to a certain Eugene Simeon Shepard.
Eugene
Shepard as a young man (public domain)
Born on 22 March 1854 in Old Fort Howard
(later renamed Green Bay), Wisconsin, Shepard moved with his family shortly
afterwards to this US state’s New London area, where he worked on his father’s
farm for a time after leaving school before moving further afield when his
father died to work on other, larger farms in wilder, more remote regions. At
16, he became an apprentice timber cruiser, in Wisconsin’s Northwoods, where he
learnt how to assess tracts of forested land for their lumber value.
And it was here, working for years
alongside the lumberjacks and loggers who did the physical toiling required to
convert the tracts assessed by him into timber, and listening at night to their
humorous, highly imaginative stories of Fearsome Critters, that embryonic visions
of what would become the fearsome hodag in the form by which it is so well
known today began to stir inside Shepard’s singularly inventive mind – a mind
that proved more than capable of outdoing even the lumberjacks and loggers for
weaving yarns. In short, Shepard had a serious talent for tall tales, and
practical jokes too, so he decided to put this talent to good, financially-sound
use.
Ever
the showman, Eugene Shepard in a cart pulled by a moose (public domain)
For although timber cruising had made him
rich over the years, Shepard could see that the timber and logging industry,
for such a long time a highly profitable one, was now beginning, slowly yet
surely, to die, due in no small way to the wholesale denuding by unceasing
logging of great swathes of land once profusely covered in trees. So if he
wanted to stay wealthy, he needed to look elsewhere to make money.
Since 1882, Shepard had lived in the
Northwoods town (now small city) of Rhinelander, within northern Wisconsin’s
Oneida County, where in addition to timber cruising he had made good money
buying and selling property, including areas of tree-cleared land for use in
farming. Consequently, this is what he saw as his – and Rhinelander’s – future,
turning the town into a renowned, famous centre for land speculation, property
development, and farming. But in order for this to succeed, Rhinelander needed
to be placed fairly and squarely on the map – the media map, that is. In other
words, it needed an attraction, one that would serve to draw in from far and
wide as many prospective land buyers and farmers interested in settling here as
possible.
Vintage
hodag illustration by Margaret R. Tryon (public domain)
And this was when the enterprising
Shepard remembered those folksy fireside lumberjack tales of monsters, in
particular the then only vaguely-defined hodag, and decided to put them to
good, practical use – by bringing the hodag to life, literally!
Shepard recalled that the lumberjacks had
claimed the hodag to be the demonic, vengeful spawn engendered by all the tortured
souls of dead cremated oxen that when alive had been cruelly abused as beasts
of burden by these selfsame loggers. Yet apart from stating that like its
bovine progenitors it possessed a fearsome pair of long curved horns, they gave
little consistent indications of what this malevolent monster actually looked
like.
Phineas
T. Barnum (public domain)
Consequently, if he wanted to employ the
hodag as his media magnet, Shepard needed to provide it with a well-defined
form, which is something that his inordinately creative imagination had little
problem in conjuring forth. He then needed to transform this newly-rendered
manifestation from a bogey beast of tall tales and yarns into a bona fide
physical, tangible reality – and once again, his entrepreneurial skills soon
showed him the way to achieve this. Not for nothing has Shepard been popularly
compared to that most famous of all 19th-Century American showmen
and shysters, the great Phineas T. Barnum himself!
So it was that via a sensational article written
by himself and published in an October 1893 issue of a Rhinelander newspaper
entitled the Near North, Shepard
claimed in his well-honed flair for melodramatic monologues that he and some
fellow workers had lately encountered – and killed – an actual hodag in
Rhinelander’s very own forests. He described it as “a terrible brute
[that] assumes the strength of an ox, the ferocity of a bear, the cunning of a
fox and the sagacity of a hindoo [Hindu] snake, and is truly the most feared
animal the lumbermen come in contact with”.
Artistic
representation of the hodag (© Richard Svensson)
As for its physical appearance: Shepard
claimed that the hodag sported the scaly body of a dragon (and breathed fire
like one too), plus the head of a huge bull-horned frog, a terrifying elephantine
face that snarled with a fanged grin-like grimace, a row of thick curved spines
running along its back, four short but sturdy legs with razor-sharp claws on
their feet, and a lengthy tail that bore spear-like spines at its tip.
In short, this hodag sounded more than a
little reminiscent of certain non-avian dinosaurs (and was subsequently likened
to such by some chroniclers), in particular certain spine-bearing stegosaurs armed
with thrashing thagomizers, like Kentrosaurus and Huayangosaurus, for instance –
overlooking of course its carnivore-consistent fangs, which were conspicuously lacked
by these strictly herbivorous prehistoric reptiles!
Speaking of the hodag’s meat-eating
proclivities: perhaps the most surprising, offbeat characteristic attributed to
it by Shepard was its supposed fondness for devouring an extremely singular,
highly specific item of prey – pure-white bulldogs, but only on Sundays! During
the remainder of the week, it satiated its hunger pangs by consuming cattle,
mud turtles, water snakes, and large freshwater fishes.
Shepard also added somewhat histrionically
that this revolting hodag stank of “buzzard meat and skunk perfume”
(a distinctive characteristic that he would return to in a subsequent
hodag-themed escapade – see later), and that despite shooting it with “heavy
rifles and large-bore squirt guns loaded with poisonous water”, the
creature withstood all of their efforts to dispatch it. In addition, it had already
torn apart the hunting dogs that he and his companions had used to corner it
after having encountered this monster in the forests.
Reconstruction of the hodag based directly upon the specimen in Shepard’s 1893 hodag photograph – see below for details re this
latter photo (public domain)
Continuing his febrile fable, Shepard
asserted that finally, after hours of fruitless, futile struggle against it, in
desperation he and the other men resorted to a very extreme measure – blowing
up the hodag using dynamite! Not surprisingly, this certainly worked, reducing
it to a mass of charred, unidentifiable remains.
Fortunately (or conveniently, depending
upon your point of view!), however, prior to annihilating their aggressor they
had been able to photograph it alive – the resulting picture revealing the
hodag in all its savage (albeit unexpectedly diminutive) splendour (and despite
its pose being decidedly wooden, in every sense!). This photo was reproduced
alongside Shepard’s account within his published article, and here it is now in
mine:
Shepard’s
1893 hodag photograph (public domain)
Although this hair-raising tale certainly
achieved Shepard’s aim of attracting some much-needed publicity for, and
interest in, Rhinelander, he was not content to put aside his prankster
predilection just yet. Three years later, the hodag reappeared in Rhinelander,
courtesy once again of Shepard, who went one stage better this second time round
than he’d previously done. For instead of a mere photograph and some charred
cinders, he now chose to present the genuine item – a living, breathing hodag!
The year 1896 saw the very first Oneida
County Fair, organized to promote Rhinelander as a prospective location for
future business and farming developments, and just a few days before it opened
another hodag-themed article by Shepard appeared in the Near North newspaper. Once again it related in stirring fashion how
he and some companions had supposedly encountered a hodag in Rhinelander’s
neighbouring forests – but this time they didn’t kill it. Instead, after
trapping it inside its den with stones so that it couldn’t escape, they
successfully chloroformed the creature, enabling them to capture it alive – and
now, at the forthcoming Oneida County Fair, it would be on display, still very
much living and breathing, for the fair’s visitors to see for themselves!
Eugene
Shepard’s Rhinelander home, with its hodag-holding shed on the right (public
domain)
And sure enough, held captive within a shanty
yet sturdily-built shed attached to Shepard’s own house in Rhinelander, was a
real-life hodag – or, to be precise, something that its nervous observers believed to be a real-life hodag.
Partially concealed by shadows and a curtain, and held some distance back from
its fee-paying public (who were only permitted to glance upon it through a
small knot-hole), something seemingly resembling Shepard’s famous 1893
description did indeed lurk, measuring 7.5 ft long, 2.5 ft tall, pitch black in
colour and bristly, armed with 12 lengthy spines along its back, moving jerkily
on its short but formidably clawed limbs, and growling. Also, of particular
note, it gave off a putrid stink, just like Shepard had described for it in his
original 1893 article.
Confronted by such a menacing entity, its
visitors did not stay long enough or approach close enough to obtain a good
view of it, which was just as well, at least as far as Shepard was concerned.
For, needless to say, the hodag was a hoax – a large model sculpted from wooden
logs with fine wires attached to make it move. It had been skilfully constructed
by Luke Kearney, one of Shepard’s friends (who, years later, went on to write
the very informative book The Hodag and
Other Tales of the Logging Camps), and was deftly manipulated by Shepard’s
sons Claude and Layton, acting like puppeteers (with a hidden dog giving voice
to the supposed hodag’s belligerent moans, groans, and growls when prodded by a
small boy). As for its stench, this derived from rank, discarded animal hides
obtained from the local tannery that were used to cover the hodag model’s
wooden framework.
Artistic
reconstruction of Shepard’s captive hodag of 1896, in Wide World Magazine, May 1915 (public domain)
Whether Shepard would have ever owned up
of his own volition to committing this fraud, or whether he would have
continued with it, will never be known, because in the event he had no option
but to confess. For he learned that some scientists from the Smithsonian
Institution were so intrigued by media reports of this astonishing animal that
they were planning to visit Rhinelander and observe it directly. The game was
definitely over, and so was the hodag marionette, which performed no more.
Nevertheless, Shepard’s promotion-serving
pranks had achieved all that he had hoped for, and more. Rhinelander was indeed
on the map now, and the hodag duly entered local folklore on a permanent basis.
Yet ironically, Shepard’s success actually worked against him on a personal
level, because his hodag hoaxes turned him into an infamous, despised figure
locally, who became shunned both within and even beyond his Rhinelander
homeland. Tragically, on 26 March 1923 aged 69, Shepard died alone, of kidney
failure, still estranged from his family and former friends. In modern times,
conversely, his reputation has been largely regained and his contributions to
Rhinelander’s thriving success repatriated, due in no small way to the hodag’s
fame and lasting legacy in Rhinelander, and Wisconsin in general, for that
matter.
Eugene
Shepard in c.1915 (public domain)
Indeed, like all the best local legends,
down through the decades since Shepard’s time the hodag’s mythology has
continued to evolve and expand. Nowadays, for example, several different types
of hodag are recognized.
These include the self-explanatory
shovel-nosed hodag, which also has longer limbs than the standard variety, and
the highly-specialised cave-dwelling hodag, distinguished by its complement of
three eyes, enabling it to see clearly within its realm’s stygian darkness.
Shovel-nosed
hodag (top) and cave hodag (bottom) (© Richard Svensson)
Also, some of the more free-thinking
members of today’s cryptozoological community actually harbor suspicions that
the hodag may be more than a fanciful fabrication.
Such speculation posits that there could in
fact be a real, still-undiscovered animal species evading scientific detection
amid the more remote regions of Wisconsin that inspired Shepard’s morphology musings
when creating his hoax specimens.
Native American pictograph of Mishibeshu at Lake Superior Provincial Park (© D
Gordon E Robertson/Wikipedia – CC BY-SA 3.0 licence)
It has even been tentatively linked to a
superficially similar-looking mythical entity known as Mishipeshu (‘great
lynx’), also dubbed the water panther, and traditionally claimed by a number of
different indigenous peoples of the Northeastern Woodlands and Great Lakes region
to inhabit Lake Superior.
Oral descriptions as well as petroglyphs of
Mishipeshu that date back as far as 400 years ago portray a lengthy reptilian
water monster covered with scales but sporting a pair of large cow-like horns
on its head, plus a snarling feline face with prominent fangs, four stout
clawed limbs, and a series of long spines running down its back and lengthy tail.
Might Shepard have conceivably been inspired by folk-stories of this legendary
aquatic beast when fleshing out his hodag specimens?
Image
of water panther, from the National Museum of the American Indian, George
Gustav Heye Center library (public domain)
Notwithstanding any such hypothetical real-life
or legendary water-dwelling hodag precursors, what is unquestionably a fact is
that today Wisconsin’s most exceptional, unexpected representative is
commemorated in all manner of different cultural ways here. Several Rhinelander
organizations and businesses incorporate the hodag in their formal names, for
instance, plus this city’s annual music festival is known officially as the
Hodag County Festival, its high school embraces the hodag as its official
mascot, and many shops here sell a wide range of hodag souvenirs, including
friendly hodag cuddly toys.
In autumn 1959, the then-Senator John F.
Kennedy was even presented with a miniature hodag figurine when he visited
Rhinelander during a political campaign, this unusual gift impressing and delighting
him so much that he placed it on display at his home afterwards for guests to
talk about. He also specifically referred to it himself in a subsequent press
interview (Rhinelander Daily News, 16
July 1960).
hodag statue in front of the Rhinelander Area Chamber of Commerce (© redlegsfan21/Wikipedia
– CC BY-SA 2.0 licence)
Most impressive of all, however, are a
number of spectacular hodag statues dotted around this city. Perhaps the most
famous one is the larger than life-size, bright green, fibre-glass example
created by local artist Tracy Goberville that stands proudly in the grounds of the
Rhinelander Area Chamber of Commerce, with another two on display at
Rhinelander’s Ice Arena (one of which even blows out smoke from its nostrils as
its red eyes light up!).
These and other eyecatching replica
hodags attract countless tourists visiting Rhinelander every year. Were he here
to see them himself, I feel certain that Eugene Shepard would have approved!
Eyes on the Hodag’ statue by artist Linda Gilbert-Ferzatta in Rhinelander (© Corey
Coyle/Wikipedia – CC BY 3.0 licence)
Last, but by no means least: from where
is the name ‘hodag’ derived? It certainly didn’t originate with Shepard,
because this term existed long before his hoax specimens did. In fact, there is
no common consensus as to its etymological origin.
However, the most popular explanation on
offer, and favoured by leading hodag historian Kurt Kortenhof (author of the definitive
2006 book Long Live the Hodag: The Life
and Legacy of Eugene Simeon Shepard) is that ‘hodag’ derives from
lumberjack slang for one of the implements that they used in their work. The
two likeliest possibilities are a type of heavy-duty hoe known technically as a
grub hoe, or a type of flat-faced pickaxe known technically as a maddox. So now
we know…sort of!
Top:
Photograph of a re-creation of Shepard’s 1893 hodag capture scene for a 1950 Rhinelander
pageant (public domain); Bottom: Vintage picture postcard presenting Shepard’s 1893
hodag photograph in close-up (public domain)