A documented and confessed 1893 hoax, now the town mascot
The hodag is a fearsome critter of American folklore, a large bull-horned carnivore with a row of thick curved spines down its back, said to be born from the ashes of cremated oxen as the sum of all the abuse they had suffered from their masters. It belongs to Rhinelander, Wisconsin, a northwoods town founded on logging that, in the late 1800s, was watching its pine and hemlock run out and needed something new to live on.
In 1893 the land surveyor, timber cruiser and prankster Eugene Shepard put it in the papers. The reports gave it the head of a frog, the grinning face of a giant elephant, thick short legs set off by huge claws, the back of a dinosaur and a long tail with spears at the end. Shepard rounded up a group of locals to capture it, they reported needing dynamite to kill it, and a photograph of its charred remains went out to the press. It had become extinct, the story said, after its main food source, white bulldogs, grew scarce.
In 1896 he produced a live one, overcome in its cave with chloroform on the end of a long pole, and displayed it at the first Oneida County fair and in a shanty at his house. Thousands came to see it. Shepard had wires connected to it and would move it now and then, which sent already skittish viewers fleeing. When newspapers took the story national and scientists from the Smithsonian Institution announced they would come to Rhinelander to inspect it, he was forced to admit the hodag was a hoax.
The town kept it anyway. The hodag is Rhinelander's official symbol, the mascot of Rhinelander High School and the name of the Hodag Country Festival, and the city calls itself the Home of the Hodag. A fibreglass hodag by the local artist Tracy Goberville stands at the Rhinelander Area Chamber of Commerce and draws thousands of visitors a year, and the ice arena holds two more, one an oversized head that blows smoke. Senator John F. Kennedy was given a miniature on a campaign visit and called it a provocative conversation piece. Out west, Shepard's descendant Chuck Shepard owns Hoodoo ski area in the Oregon Cascades, where the mascot is Harold, a friendly hodag who prefers single ski gloves to bulldogs.
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