The Hodag: How a Hoax Became a Hometown

The Hodag is a useful test case for a simple folklore question: what happens when a story is made on purpose, then carried by people who know it is partly a joke?

This episode starts with Eugene Shepard, a Rhinelander timber cruiser and storyteller. It follows the Hodag’s first newspaper appearance in 1893, its staged capture and fair exhibition in 1896, its move into lumberwoods folklore books, and its later life as a school mascot, public statue, historic marker, and annual heritage festival.

The earliest record is unusually concrete. The Rhinelander Historical Society identifies Shepard’s first published Hodag drawing as appearing in the October 28, 1893 issue of The New North. A 2018 retrospective calls the paper the Near North. The titles differ in the surviving accounts, but both place the first printed account in Rhinelander in October 1893 and attribute it to Shepard. 12

The episode also uses Charles E. Brown’s Paul Bunyan Natural History, a 1935 folklore text that catalogs the Hodag alongside other lumber-camp creatures. 3

The Hodag was a hoax. That fact does not make its history simple. A staged object can still become a durable cultural artifact. The sources below separate Shepard’s claims, the later reports about those claims, and the civic institutions that preserve the story now.

The Wisconsin Historical Society’s digital collection preserves Hodag photographs, postcards, and a historic marker in Hodag Park. 45

The present-day account comes from Rhinelander’s Chamber of Commerce, the Pioneer Park Historical Complex, and the Hodag Heritage Festival. 678