Creature record / 1893
Autumn 1893. The woods near Rhinelander, Wisconsin. Eugene Simeon Shepard, a timber cruiser and well-known practical joker, said he and a party of lumbermen had cornered a monster. Seven feet long. Short black hair, green eyes, fangs, horns, and spikes down its back. They piled birch bark around it and set off dynamite. Three years later Shepard claimed a second hodag, taken alive. At the first Oneida County Fair, thousands paid a dime to see it in a dim tent. It moved. It growled. Viewers fled. It was a wooden figure in ox hide, worked by wires while his sons growled out of sight. Today the hodag is the official symbol of Rhinelander.
In the lumber camps of the Northwoods, the hodag was already a word. Lumber-camp slang for a mythical animal, it appears in print in 1870 in Kent County, Michigan directories. Camp lore said the hodag rose from the ashes of cremated oxen, "the incarnation of the accumulation of abuse the animals had suffered."