The Capture
On September 10, 1893, a man named Eugene Shepard walked into the office of the Rhinelander, Wisconsin newspaper and announced that he had captured a Hodag. This was remarkable for several reasons, the most notable being that the Hodag did not exist. Eugene Shepard knew this. He had, in fact, just built one.
The creature Shepard described was something between a nightmare and a bad livestock decision. It had the head of a frog, the grinning face of a giant elephant, thick short legs, enormous claws, a back covered in sharp spines, and a tail with a spear-point tip. It smelled, according to Shepard, of buzzards and skunk perfume combined. This smell was considered one of its most remarkable features. The other remarkable features were that it was real and he had captured it alive and was prepared to show people, for a modest fee.
The newspaper ran the story. Other newspapers picked it up. Crowds came to Rhinelander to see the thing. Shepard charged admission. The creature was kept in a darkened pit, visible mainly by lantern, so that the precise details of its construction remained somewhat ambiguous to paying customers. It hissed. It moved. It was, by all accounts, convincing enough.
The year was 1893. People had seen a lot of things by lantern light and believed most of them. Eugene Shepard understood his audience. He had built them exactly what they wanted.
The Backstory Shepard Invented
Every good hoax needs a mythology, and Shepard was not a man who did things halfway.
The Hodag, he explained, was born from the ashes of oxen. Specifically, when a working ox died and was cremated, the accumulated suffering of seven years of toil condensed in the smoke and reformed as a Hodag. This was just specific enough to sound like real folklore and just ridiculous enough that nobody could trace it to an actual source. The creature had been terrorizing the Wisconsin north woods for generations. Everyone had heard about it but nobody had caught one. Until Shepard.
He had a team. He had a story about the capture that involved chloroform, ropes, and a quantity of personal bravery that he was too modest to fully quantify. He had affidavits from witnesses. He had, in short, everything a nineteenth-century media event needed except a real animal, and he had solved that problem with carpentry, animal hides, and steel wires operated by assistants hidden behind the pit.
The Smithsonian Institution heard about the creature and sent a representative to investigate. This was the moment most people would have folded. Shepard did not fold. He met the representative, showed him the creature, and told him that it was far too dangerous to be moved or examined closely. The Smithsonian representative wrote up a report that managed to be officially skeptical without quite saying the word "fake." Shepard took this as a compliment and kept charging admission.
The Confession, Such As It Was
The confession came in 1896. Shepard held a press conference and explained that the Hodag was, in fact, a construction. He produced the mechanics. He demonstrated the wires. He showed people the fake. He had caught the Hodag with carpentry and had charged people to see it for three years and had made, by certain estimates, a comfortable amount of money doing so.
The press received this information and did what the press does: they reported it. The public received this information and did what the public does: they did not particularly care.
Rhinelander had already decided that the Hodag was theirs. The confession made it funnier, not less. A town that had been home to an elaborate three-year monster fraud was more interesting than a town that had simply had a monster. The story was better with Shepard in it. The Hodag became a local character the way a beloved eccentric relative becomes a local character: everyone knew the truth, nobody minded, and it made for excellent conversation.
Shepard himself lived out his days in Rhinelander as something between a folk hero and a civic institution. He continued to occasionally make claims about the Hodag that were not strictly factual. The town continued to not strictly require factual claims from him.
The Rhinelander Commitment
At some point in the early twentieth century, Rhinelander, Wisconsin made a decision that other cities rarely make and perhaps should consider. They looked at the fact that their most famous historical event was a three-year successful fraud, and they said: good, let's build on that.
The Hodag became the official mascot of Rhinelander. It appeared on city seals and signage. Schools adopted it as their sports team symbol. The Rhinelander Hodags. Say it out loud: it sounds like something you'd hear from an announcer who had given up caring about professionalism, and yet it works completely. You remember it.
A large fibreglass Hodag sculpture was installed on a main road. There is a Hodag Country Festival, a significant annual music event that draws tens of thousands of people to northern Wisconsin and has been running for decades. There is a Hodag Bar. There are Hodag gift shops. If you drive through Rhinelander without encountering the Hodag, you are not paying attention, which is a failure mode Shepard himself would recognize and appreciate.
The Chamber of Commerce leans into the fraud angle completely. They do not pretend Shepard found something real. They celebrate the fact that he didn't. The pitch is: a man built a monster and fooled the Smithsonian, and we're proud of him for it. This is, honestly, a more honest approach to local mythology than most places take.
What It Actually Looked Like
Over time, the Hodag's appearance has been refined into something consistent, which is interesting because the original creature was whatever Shepard happened to nail together in 1893.
The canonical Hodag is squat and roughly the size of a large dog, covered in dark, coarse hair. It has a row of spines running down its back, two long curved horns on its head, and claws that early descriptions compared favorably to those of a bear. The face is the distinguishing feature: a wide, flat, vaguely happy expression that has evolved over a century of Wisconsin merchandising from terrifying to endearing. Modern Hodag depictions are friendly in the way that all monster mascots eventually become friendly, which is to say: the teeth are still there, but they are arranged in a way that says "souvenir" rather than "threat."
The smell is no longer mentioned. This is probably for the best.
Shepard's original construction used steer hides, bull horns, and steel claws. It was about four feet long and heavy enough that operating it with hidden wires required at least two assistants and considerable advance preparation. Contemporary accounts note that it was visible only by lantern and only briefly, which were not accidents. Shepard knew the difference between a good look and a good enough look, and he consistently provided the latter.
Still Official
Eugene Shepard died in 1923. The Hodag was already a fixture by then, no longer requiring him to maintain it. He had done the hard work of establishing a fictional creature so firmly in a community's identity that the community would carry it forward indefinitely without further effort on his part. This is, as far as legacies go, an efficient one.
Rhinelander has a population of around seven thousand people. It is the county seat of Oneida County. It has a paper mill, a waterfront, and an economy that runs in significant part on tourism, outdoor recreation, and the annual festival named after a creature its founder openly admitted was a puppet. The Hodag Country Festival has hosted major national acts. Willie Nelson has played the Hodag Country Festival. This feels like something Eugene Shepard would have appreciated enormously.
The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources has never officially classified the Hodag. This omission is either an oversight or a deliberate act of institutional good humor. Given the state, probably the latter.
There is a reasonable argument that the Hodag is the most successful hoax in American history, measured not by how long people believed it, but by how thoroughly a community embraced it after they stopped believing. Most hoaxes end in embarrassment. This one ended in a fibreglass monument and a music festival. Shepard aimed for three years of admission fees and got a hundred years of civic identity. You take the wins where you find them.
Field Notes
- Eugene Shepard first "captured" the Hodag in Rhinelander, Wisconsin on September 10, 1893, charging admission to see the creature before confessing the hoax in 1896.
- Shepard's original Hodag was constructed from steer hides, bull horns, and steel claws, operated by hidden assistants using wires from a pit in his camp.
- When the Smithsonian Institution sent a representative to investigate, Shepard refused to allow close examination, claiming the creature was too dangerous. The Smithsonian never officially classified the Hodag as real or fake.
- Rhinelander adopted the Hodag as its official city symbol. The Rhinelander High School athletic teams are called the Hodags, and the city mascot appears on municipal signage and promotional materials.
- The Hodag Country Festival, held annually in Rhinelander, is one of the largest country music festivals in Wisconsin, drawing tens of thousands of attendees each year to a city with a permanent population of roughly 7,000.
Dig Deeper
Want the facts behind the folklore? Explore the real history of the Hodag and the man who built it.
Learn more about the Hodag