HODAG
A myth to take a Michigander at.
Journey, if you will, to the northern Midwest town of Rhinelander, Wisconsin. In the late 1800s, Anderson Brown traveled from Stevens Point up to the nexus of the Wisconsin and Pelican Rivers. The high banks and towering pines made Brown’s imagination soar with the possibilities of opening… a lumber mill! Hey, people weren’t too imaginative back then. But, once Anderson convinced his daddy to give him money, the town of Rhinelander was born.
As the timber industry thrived and more folks came to get a piece of the action, so too did a strange tale begin to circulate amongst local lumberjacks and citizens. An 1893 newspaper reported the discovery of a “hodag” in the burgeoning town—a fearsome creature with “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.” And if that didn’t freak people out enough, Wisconsin land surveyor and Punk’d-era Ashton Kutcher of his time, Eugene Shepard, fueled the rumor flames by reportedly killing one of the creatures.
Things in the land surveying industry must have been pretty slow at the time, because ol’ Eugeney Knoxville took things a step further by rigging up the supposed corpse of the beast at the Oneida County Fair. He could operate and move the taxidermy contraption to give gullible 19th-century Wisconsinites a fright. He led publicity campaigns and continued to write article after article, and quite ingeniously, market the shit out of Rhinelander in a fun way. After doubling down, Washington wet-blankets the Smithsonian got involved saying that they needed to come out and see what all the hodag hubbub was about. So, after what seemed to be the best prank of all time (remember, these people had never seen a single SMOSH YouTube video), Shepard was forced to admit it was all a hoax. Despite the anthropological intervention, the hodag was reborn as the symbol of Rhinelander, becoming the town’s (and its high school’s) mascot, as well as the namesake of its radio station and annual country music festival.
And then for a long time nothing happened. Until in 2019 when the town of Algoma, Michigan, co-opted the hodag as their own! Understably, most Rhinelanders’ reactions were something similar to “…the fuck?” City Council members fumed and some citizens called for a trademark of their beloved creature. But, as local historian Kerry Bloedern notes, the hodag has its roots in lumberjack and Native American lore, and there were plenty of lumberjack camps in Michigan across the border. “Truth be told,” he adds, “the hodag as a creature within lumberjack lore has been invoked in logging camp bunkhouses from Maine to Minnesota throughout the 1800s.”
Yikes. Chill, Bloedern—you’re on Rhinelander’s side, remember? However, it begs the question if the true owners of a story are the ones who experienced it, or the ones who talked about it the loudest and the longest. Maybe Algomans truly believed the hodag was their rightful claim. Maybe they were just hurting for an identity. At the end of the day, we’re all creatures who define ourselves by the stories we tell. And how is this any different than rebooting Spider-Man six times or our passé fascination with the multiverse? It’s capitalism, babyyyy. Just because the hodag is emblazoned on Rhinelander High School’s football jerseys, does that mean Algoma can’t get in on the fun? Or what about some town in Minnesota—or Maine? Okay, maybe not Maine, let’s not go nuts. But the magic of folklore is that it can mold and change with the times, the setting, even the people who tell it. Rhinelander may have their hodag. But there can always be others.
See you out there.
