I can only go so many consecutive weeks ascribing deep cultural significance to the folkloric capers of cryptozoological second stringers before I start getting a bit antsy. Sure, it’s interesting to think about that aspect of the human condition that abets our collective addiction to narrative and ordered fictions by sticking its fingers in its ears and humming away every time Bigfoot or Nessie or fear Liath is heartily debunked… to think about the way we happily allow stories to fool us. But what are stories? They’re motiveless, elusory things.

If you can identify authorship, though, you can find the meat and bone and beating heart behind the ghostly, transient words. Demystifying? Yeah. But there are more than enough legends packed with mystique. The Jersey Devil. Black dogs. Bloody Mary. One reason they’re so effective, evocative and widespread is that, though they’re myths, they’re dressed in the guise of collective knowledge. Unsourcable, voiceless echoes resounding through time
But what about a fiction that has an identifiable and outspoken (some might even say over-spoken) author? A story that’s obviously invented – that everyone knows is invented – but that’s embraced anyway. What about the story of the Rhinelander Hodag?

When rifles, hunting dogs and poison-filled water guns all failed to fell the fearsome Hodag, Eugene Shepard and his posse of Wisconsinite lumberjacks were forced to resort to sticks of dynamite, which they bravely lobbed at the slavering beast. The Hodag was 200 odd pounds of flame-spewing, black-furred muscle and lizard skin, complete with various spikes, claws and horns. The ever-quotable Shepard described the animal as smelling like “a combination of buzzard meat and skunk perfume.” Even as the creature’s crispy remains were triumphantly carted back to Rhinelander to be put on display, Shepard was bemoaning his inability to capture the Hodag alive.

In name, the Hodag already existed as a fixture of local folklore – a vengeful spirit that rose from the ashes of cremated lumber oxen. Though a popular bedtime story among the loggers and woodsmen who collectively shouldered the economy of the rural Wisconsin town, Shepard was the first man to see, describe and kill one of these ferocious monsters. (Later, Shepard imbued his Hodag with a less industry-specific back story – as a “remnant of the rehistoric dinasaures.”) And three years later, during the fall of 1896, he would become, along with another band of artillery-laden locals, the first – and, to this day, only – man to trap a live specimen. This triumph for humanity, which was immortalized in the aptly-titled photograph “The Hodag Capture” (in reality, taken three years after the “actual” event), found Shepard and his men equipped with both standard-issue angry mob accessories (pitchforks, shotguns, etc.) and long wooden sticks topped with chloroform-soaked rags. Needless to say, the still-breathing Hodag timbered like a Douglas Fir.

The twitching, growling monster that Shepard subsequently displayed for 10 cents a gander at the first-ever Oneida County Fair was actually a carved-out stump, covered in ox hide and cattle bones, and brought to marvelous, shuttering life by a simple electrical system. The coup de grace – it’s ferocious, inhuman roar – was provided by Shepard’s young son. Accounts vary as to whether a majority of fairgoers actually believed the hoax, or simply appreciated it as a harmless, clever caprice, but, either way, the dimes poured in and people from all over the state flocked to the exhibit in order to lay eyes on the hostage monstrosity.
But the Hodag is remembered as more than just a money-grubbing prank perpetrated by a known practical jokester (even before Hodag-mania, Eugene Shepard was infamous for organizing entertaining shenanigans). At the time of the county fair, Rhinelander was a dying town. In less than two decades, the booming logging industry had sawed and chopped its way through a majority of the surrounding pine forests (which might account for all the downtime Shepard had to rig up mechanical dinasaures). While other local communities flourished via long-standing livestock and farming businesses, Rhinelander struggled to gain a foothold in either industry. In fact, the Oneida County Fair was conceived as a means by which to promote Northern Wisconsin, and bring tourism and industry to the struggling region. Without an impressive gallery of crops and livestock to display, the Hodag tent was actually born out of a request by city officials, who asked Eugene Shepard, showman that he was, to find some way to draw in out-of-towners. One almost has to wonder if they were implicitly begging him to revisit his Hodag antics.

Though Shepard’s modest bid to save his town – a bundle of skin, bones and wires – was ultimately destroyed in a fire, both the memory of the Hodag, and the city of Rhinelander, Wisconsin, now unofficially known as Hodag City, live on. A giant fiberglass Hodag adorns the lawn of Rhinelander’s Chamber of Commerce. The local high school’s mascot is a roof-raising Hodag. Even the town’s website proudly identifies Rhinelander as the Home of the Hodag.
It would be reductive to claim that Eugene Shepard single-hodaggedly saved his town, but even Shepard himself wasn’t shy about acknowledging that he’d played a part: “Not only hundreds but thousands of people came to view the Hodag… and not one of them went away without having learned a little more about northern Wisconsin…”

Whether by luck or by skill, Shepard managed to author a tale that was remembered as much for the story as it was for the story of the story. The Hodag, as imagined and built by Eugene Shepard, became as important as the details of the hoax itself. Other merry pranksters haven’t fared nearly as well…

Wednesday: The Lake George Monster

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