HODAG

Opening

On 28 October 1893, Rhinelander's weekly paper, The New North, printed Eugene Shepard's drawing of a "Black Hodag": a beast with the head of a frog, the grinning face of an elephant, the spiked back of a dinosaur, short thick legs with huge claws, and a long tail tipped with spears.

Shepard, a timber cruiser and the best-known joker in the Wisconsin Northwoods, said he and a group of lumbermen had needed dynamite to kill it. Three years later he caught a second one alive and charged people to see it. It was a hoax both times, Shepard admitted as much, and the town has kept the monster ever since.

Timeline

1870The word "hodag" is already in print, in a history of Kent County, Michigan, more than twenty years before Shepard.

1889 to 1892Newspapers from New Hampshire to Arizona run tall tales about hodags. Shepard was working a known joke, not inventing one.

28 October 1893The New North prints Shepard's drawing and account. The beast, he says, lived on white bulldogs, and died out locally when they became scarce.

1896Shepard announces a live capture: he and his men pushed a pole soaked in chloroform into its cave. He shows it at the first Oneida County fair, then in a shanty at his home. The creature is made of wood, ox hide, bull horns and steel, and Shepard works hidden wires to make it move, which sends visitors running.

After the fairWhen Smithsonian scientists announce they want to inspect the specimen, Shepard admits it is a fake.

1899Shepard stages the famous capture photograph: men with sticks cornering the hodag, Shepard on the far right and his son Layton posing as if under attack. It is later sold as a postcard.

1923Shepard dies in Rhinelander, aged about 69.

2019Algoma, Michigan, floats its own hodag festival. Rhinelander objects, and some officials suggest trademarking the creature.

Key figures

Eugene "Gene" Shepard was born in Green Bay in 1854 and moved to Rhinelander in 1885, working as a surveyor and timber cruiser. He also drew Paul Bunyan stories that circulated widely, made the plat book for Oneida and Vilas counties, and ran a resort in later life.

The Smithsonian's interest is what ended the hoax, though nobody from the institution needed to make the trip.

Physical and documentary trail

What survives: the 28 October 1893 issue of The New North, the staged 1899 photograph and its postcards, and Shepard's admission. Unusually for a monster case, the person who made it up said so.

The 1896 model itself has not survived. What exists today is everything it inspired: the high school mascot, the Hodag Country Festival, and a large fibreglass hodag by Tracy Goberville outside the Rhinelander Area Chamber of Commerce.

Things you might not know

• Its favourite food was white bulldogs. According to Shepard, that's why it disappeared: the bulldogs ran out.
• Shepard's son played the victim. In the 1899 photo, the boy apparently being attacked is Layton Shepard.
• A governor joked about protecting it. In 1984, Wisconsin governor Tony Earl said he might put the hodag on the endangered species list if Michigan kept trying to claim it.
• It made it into Harry Potter. The hodag appears in the expanded 2017 edition of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and Scooby-Doo met one in "The Hodag of Horror".
• The family still keeps one. Harold the Hodag stands at Hoodoo Ski Area in Oregon, owned by a Shepard descendant, Chuck Shepard.

Competing explanations

There isn't a serious one. Shepard built both hodags and admitted it. The only real question is where the name came from, since it was in print before he used it, probably from the tall-tale culture of the logging camps.

Later life of the case

Rhinelander calls itself "The Home of the Hodag". The beast is the high school's mascot, the name of the town's country music festival, and the subject of painted statues all over town.

Finding

The hodag is a hoax, confessed by the man who made it, and that part is settled. It is also one of the most successful hoaxes in American folklore: a joke from 1893 that a town adopted as its identity and is still defending more than 130 years later.

What still will not resolve: who first said "hodag", and what they meant by it, two decades before Shepard drew one.