Folktales and Legends of the Middle West

by Edward McClelland

“Those Seven Axemen chopped so fast they chopped down every tree in Nort’ Dakota in two weeks. They had double-headed axes, so they swung ’em one way and cut down a dozen trees, then they swung ‘em the other way and cut down another dozen. But the problem was, after two weeks, the whole territory was covered in tree stumps. The king was not going to send Swedes to farm on tree stumps. But Johnny Inkslinger had an idea. He knew that Babe didn’t like to get his feet wet, so he suggested flooding the entire territory, and having Brimstone Bill put on a pair of hip waders and lead Babe across. Brimstone Bill did that, and Babe stepped from stump to stump, pushing all them stumps deep into the ground. And that’s why there’s no trees or stumps in Nort’ Dakota.

  “After he paid the Seven Axemen, Paul took what was left of his million dollars and decided to go to the Pacific Northwest, where the trees is even bigger then in Minnesota. He and Babe ate a big breakfast in Minneapolis, and were in Seattle for supper. Babe walked right through the Rocky Mountains, sinking up to his knees in rock, and Paul cut down trees as they walked to make a log road for Babe over the stumps.

  “Of course, the mayor of Seattle had heard of Paul and Babe. He asked them to dig a harbor for the city, so it could become a great port and attract ships from China. The city hired Andrew Carnegie to build a plow and a scraper so big they used up all the steel made in Pittsburgh in a whole year. But that plow and scraper still weren’t big enough to build a harbor, so Paul went up to Alaska and hitched Babe to a glacier. They hauled that glacier down to Seattle, and used it to dig Puget Sound. And that’s the last any of us heard of Paul Bunyan.”

  When Batiste Joe was finished, young Numminen stood up on the Deacon’s Seat, with the prize jug of whiskey in his hand.

  “First of all,” Numminen said, “I need to apologize to Shot, for saying that not even Paul Bunyan could cut down as many trees as we did today. After hearing these stories, I’m convinced Paul could have cut down five times as many trees as we did—and all by himself. Second of all, we have to give away this jug of whiskey. Now who here thought Shot told the best Paul Bunyan story?”

  Every shanty boy in the bunkhouse roared at the top of his lungs.

  “OK. Now who thinks Charley told the best story?”

  The roar for Charley was just as loud.

  “And what about Batiste Joe?”

  Not even the most sensitive ear could have detected a difference in the volume of cheering for the three old lumberjacks.

  “Well, boys, it sounds like a three-way tie to me,” Numminen said. “So I’m going to give the whiskey to all three of them to share… and I hope they’ll be generous enough to spread some good cheer around the bunkhouse.”

  It didn’t seem possible for the shanty boys to shout any louder than they had for the storytellers, but at that last statement, they did. And so the lumber crew went from enjoying its second-favorite pastime—storytelling—to its favorite pastime of all. The next morning, everyone was an hour late for work, and many of the boys clutched their heads at the sound of falling trees. Shot Gunderson couldn’t reprimand them, for he, of course, had drunk more than anyone.

  THE HODAG: TERROR OF THE NORTH WOODS

  erhaps only Loch Ness, Scotland, is more closely identified with a creature whose existence has never been verified by science than is Rhinelander, Wisconsin. Rhinelander, an old North Woods logging town, was the home of the hodag, a creature whose purported discoverer described it as “a terrible brute who assumes the strength of an ox, the ferocity of a bear, the cunning of a fox and the sagacity of a hindoo snake, and it is truly the most feared animal the lumberman come in contact with.” Although more than a century has passed since the last reported hodag sighting in Rhinelander, a fiberglass hodag statue squats outside the Rhinelander Chamber of Commerce, in a pose of imminent attack. Rhinelander High School’s sports teams are nicknamed the Hodags. The Hodag Country Festival takes place every summer at a campground outside town. Hodags adorn Rhinelander police cars, while Rhinelanders play softball in Hodag Park, finance their car purchases at Hodag Auto Loans, and get the oil in those cars changed at Hodag Express Lube.

  Some people insist that the hodag never existed, that it was a hoax concocted to lure visitors to Rhinelander’s county fair. But to his dying day, the only man to capture and display a hodag would never admit his quarry wasn’t real. Eugene Shepard was a timber cruiser, an agent hired to inspect and buy woodland for investors looking to get rich in the logging business. He also speculated in land himself, which had made him one of the wealthiest men in Rhinelander. It did not follow, however, that he was one of the most respected. Shepard was notorious for practical jokes, which usually ended up filling his purse: charging tourists a quarter to smell an exotic “scented moss,” which was ordinary moss he had dosed with perfume; devising a mechanical muskellunge to leap out of Lake Ballard, thus convincing summering anglers the place deserved the title “The Greatest Muskellunge Fishing in the World.” But it was precisely because of this reputation as a self-promoting mountebank that the publicity-hungry mayor of Rhinelander invited Shepard to a meeting to plan the town’s first fair.

  “Rhinelander,” the mayor told the civic leaders gathered in his office, “is the boomingest town in northern Wisconsin. We’re right in the middle of one of the biggest stands of Norway and jack pine in the country. We’ve got half a dozen sawmills running day and night. We’ve got paper mills. The Soo Line and the Wisconsin River deliver millions of logs a year. So we need to boost ourselves. Chicago had a World’s Fair just three years ago. The least we can do is throw a county fair. I asked you fellows here because I’m looking for an attraction that will draw a crowd. Not just from the county, but from all over the Middle West.”

  Gideon Marshall, the sawmill owner, suggested a half-mile clay track to race harness horses.

  “I doubt we can get Star Pointer up here,” he said, mentioning the horse who had just broken the world’s record by pacing a mile in under two minutes, “but we can bring in horses from all over the state.”

  “Green Bay’s starting a new semi-pro football team,” noted Adolph Gritzmacher, superintendent of one of the paper mills. “We can get them up here to challenge our boys.”

  Then Eugene Shepard spoke up.

  “Any town can put on a horse race or a football game,” he declared. “We need an attraction that can only be found in Rhinelander. We need to capture a hodag and put it on display.”

  The hodag, for those unfamiliar with North Woods lumbering, was a sharp-fanged, sharp-clawed, scaly beast that emerged from the ashes of a cremated work ox. Oxen led hard lives in the lumber camps. They hauled backbreaking loads under the prodding goads of skinners who swore at them in French, or Swedish, or English, or German. Driven to the limits of its strength, a work ox seldom lived longer than six years. Even in a life so brief, it absorbed so much profanity that loggers believed its carcass had to smolder for seven years, to burn away all the curses. At the end of this period, when the pyre finally guttered out, there arose a hodag, a distillation of—and a revenge for—all the cruelty the ox had suffered in its working life.

  A primordial saurian in miniature, the hodag was seven feet long and fought the world with sharp horns and a set of spikes running from neck to tail. The hodag was so fierce that it once took an entire party of lumberjacks all day to kill one. Their shotgun shells bounced off its hide, so they attacked their prey with dynamite, setting the hodag on fire. The flaming creature ran through the woods for nine hours, burning down so many trees the lumber camp had to relocate to Minnesota.

  “There is no such thing as a hodag,” protested Mr. Gritzmacher from the paper mill. “That’s just a tall tale you heard from those drunken, lice-infested shanty boys in the camps.”

  “There is INDEED such a thing as a hodag,” retorted Mr. Shepard, who didn’t mind being thought of as a charlatan, but hated being called a liar. “I saw one just last week. I was out inspecting a stand of pines north of town, when I smelled something I can
only describe as a combination of buzzard meat and skunk perfume. I looked down, and sure enough, there was a hodag. As soon as he saw me, he ran off and hid behind a pine tree. I know where he is, and I can capture him and put him on display for ten cents a peek.”

  “If you capture a hodag, I’ll pay a hundred dollars to see it,” Mr. Gritzmacher challenged.

  With that pecuniary incentive in mind, Shepard enlisted the aid of the Ancient Order of the Reveeting Society, a group of local sportsmen who fought bears with their fists, out of a sense of fair play. Since a hodag had never been captured alive, the society agreed to the challenge, and helped Shepard dig a pit fifty feet in diameter and thirty feet deep, near the spot where he had seen the hodag. They covered it with poles, hidden under leaves and grass.

  “Here’s my plan,” Shepard explained to the Reveeters. “Now, as you all know, hodags only eat white bulldogs, and only on Sundays. So I’m going to take a white bulldog out to the woods, and when the hodag chases after it, he’ll fall right into this pit.”

  The only white bulldog in Rhinelander belonged to Mrs. Adalbert Weiss, a widow who would never have allowed her sole companion to be used as hodag bait. Fortunately, Mrs. Weiss was a weekly congregant at the Lutheran Church. At noon that Sunday, Shepard lured the dog from its house with an ox steak, attached him to a leash, and spirited him into the woods. There, Shepard walked him around and around the pit. Sure enough, the hodag caught the scent of its favorite prey and came racing through the pines on its short but swift legs. The hodag leaped toward the bulldog and crashed through the poles, into the pit that had been prepared as its prison.

  But the hodag’s reputation was so fearsome that once it was trapped in its pit, not even the bear fighters of the Reveeting Society had the courage to chain it up and force it into the cage in which it would be displayed at the fair. The hodag ran around and around the margins of its prison, emitting a furious roar of a volume last heard on this continent when the wooly mammoth roamed. A number of Reveeters were overcome by the hodag’s breath: black tar coal smoke scented with bulldog carcasses.

  The hunting party agreed that only an unconscious hodag could be confined to a cage, and that only chloroform would be potent enough to disable such a vigorous creature. One of the Reveeters, the town’s doctor, agreed to fetch a month’s supply from his office. While he ran this errand, the hunters laid the logs back over the pit, so the hodag couldn’t see his way to freedom. In the darkness, the beast was silent, and remained so until the doctor returned, with a jar of choloform under each arm.

  “This’ll be enough to knock out a dozen hodags!” he predicted.

  But when the logs were rolled away, the hodag was gone. Angrily—and against the advice of the Reveeters—Shepard clambered down into the pit to find out what had happened to his prize. At the bottom, he discovered a hodag-sized hole. With its long, spiny claws, the hodag had tunneled its way to freedom.

  Shepard was not so easily defeated—especially when civic pride and a hundred dollar reward were at stake. He ordered the Reveeters to dig up a tree stump and load it into the wagon he had hired to carry the hodag back to Rhinelander. With the help of Luke Kearney, an artistic friend, he spent the next four months chipping and carving the stump into a life-sized replica of the escaped hodag. When the sculpture was finished, he covered it in an ox’s hide and fitted it with bull’s horns.

  Like his idol, the recently deceased Phineas Taylor Barnum, Shepard was a master at deceiving the public for personal profit. On the day the fair opened, he set up his wooden hodag in a tent illuminated only by the sunlight that leaked through the seams. The sculpture was concealed behind a velvet curtain. Outside the tent, he erected this hand-painted sign: SEE THE HODAG, THE FEARSOME NORTH WOODS LEGEND. CAPTURED AND ON DISPLAY FOR THE FIRST TIME ANYWHERE. 10 CENTS.

  When fairgoers paid their dime, they were allowed to peek through the curtain. Unbeknownst to anyone outside the Shepard family, Eugene’s sons Layton and Claude had concealed themselves inside the tent. Whenever the curtain parted, they shook the “hodag” via a system of hidden wires, while growling and roaring in an imitation of the cry their father had described for them.

  The hodag exhibit earned Shepard hundreds of dollars in admission fees. It was such a hit in Rhinelander he took it to the state fair, in West Allis. When fair season was over, Shepard set up the hodag in his shed, advertising it at the railroad station as a local attraction. When visitors came within earshot, he called to his sons, “Boys, make sure the hodag is tied up so he doesn’t get loose.” This was their signal to run to the shed, hide behind hay bales, and shake the hodag.

  The one man who wasn’t fooled was Adolph Gritzmacher. As a businessman, Mr. Gritzmacher did not part lightly with a hundred dollars. Before he would grant Shepard the reward money, he asked a zoologist from the state university to verify the hodag’s authenticity. Fascinated by this possible discovery of a species unique to Wisconsin, the zoologist took a train up from Madison, paid a dime to enter Shepard’s shed, and pronounced, “That’s just a block of wood.” Mr. Gritzmacher never paid Shepard that hundred dollars.

  We will never know whether Eugene Shepard actually captured a hodag, or even whether hodags ever existed. They certainly don’t today. Andy W. Brown, a friend of Shepard’s, invented a steam-driven log hauler which he christened “The Hodag,” in honor of the animal whose extinction it would cause. With machines to haul logs, oxen were no longer needed in the lumber camps, and once oxen were no longer burned after short lives of hard toil, hodags ceased to emerge from their ashes.

  Shepard was unembarrassed by the discovery of his hoax. For years afterward, he displayed his wooden hodag at his resort on Ballard Lake. He also gathered the Ancient Order of the Reveeting Society for a photo with the “hodag.” Whether or not it was real did not matter to Shepard. What was important was that he had fulfilled the task the mayor had assigned him: drawing attention to Rhinelander, which grew so greatly in size and stature that it’s now the county seat.

  “By no means is all the progress to be credited to the hodag, but the hodag did his bit,” Shepard wrote in New North, the local newspaper, where he published numerous stories of his hodag encounters. “Not only hundreds, but thousands of people came to view the hodag…and not one of them went away without having learned a little more about north Wisconsin and it is safe to guess that each of those thousands told others what they had seen and heard and in this way the beauties, opportunities and resources of north Wisconsin spread, and many who came out of curiosity only, have come to make their home with us, either permanently or for a few weeks or months of the year. Long live the hodag!”

  And indeed, as any casual drive around town today reveals, the hodag is still very much alive to Rhinelanders.

  JOE MAGARAC: MAN OF STEEL

  hough Pittsburghers may not see themselves as Midwesterners, their city was once the steel-making capital of the world and thus closely aligned, economically and culturally, with the Middle West. The furnaces of Andrew Carnegie’s mills, heated with coal from West Virginia’s mines, melted down iron ore from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and Minnesota’s Iron Range. Pittsburgh was where the Great Lakes met Appalachia, the two regions combining their riches to produce the world’s strongest alloy.

  At the time, America’s steelmaking heartland stretched eastward to Allentown, and westward to Cleveland, Gary, and Chicago. Like the rest of those cities, Pittsburgh attracted immigrants from Eastern Europe, who didn’t speak English, but were willing to work long days in the hot mills. The native-born Americans called the newcomers “Hunkies” — short for Hungarian, even though many came from Poland, Bohemia, Slovakia, Serbia, and Croatia.

  Steve Mestrovich came over from Croatia and went to work in a steel mill that smoked and steamed on the banks of the Monongahela River. Along with all the other immigrant steelworkers, Steve lived in Hunkietown, on the flat plain between the hills and the water. His two-story brick house, which was a short walk from the
mill gate, had no porch and no front yard. The door opened right onto the sidewalk. When Steve stepped inside every evening, after finishing his shift at the mill, he walked into a house packed with heat from the stove and the smells of his wife’s pierogi and polana kapusta—lamb and rice wrapped in cabbage.

  Steve was the best cinderman in the mill. He swept ashes from underneath the soaking pit, the hot furnace where ingots remained soft until they were ready for rolling. His greatest pride, though, was his seventeen-year-old daughter, Mary. With eyes as blue as the ocean Steve had once sailed across, hair as gold as wheat, and skin fairer than the noblest Old Country ladies, Mary was the most beautiful girl in the Mon Valley. All the young men in the mill talked about her. When Pete Pusic from Homestead ate supper with the Mestroviches after work, his eyes always strayed to Mary, but she was too shy to meet his gaze.

  Steve, though, was determined that his daughter should marry the strongest steelworker in the Valley. And so he announced to his besotted co-workers that he was going to hold a contest for her hand: whichever man could lift the heaviest dolly bar would win Mary.

  Pete Pusic was already confident that he was the strongest man in the mill, but he began building up his muscles by carrying rails across the shop floor, tucking them under his arms as though they were kindling. By the time of the contest, Pete could hold three in each arm.

  On the Sunday of the competition, which was held in a field by the Monongahela, Steve ordered two barrels of Iron City beer from Pittsburgh. His wife brewed prune jack, and cooked enough polana kapusta and spice cakes to cover two picnic tables. A truck delivered three dolly bars from the mill: the first weighed 350 pounds; the second 500 pounds; the third weighed more than first two together. It was so heavy that six men had to carry it.

  Hunkies gathered from all over the Valley that afternoon. Dozens wanted to compete for Mary’s hand, and hundreds more wanted to see who would be strong enough to win her. A gypsy band played Old World waltzes on fiddles and accordions. “Daj, daj srcek nadaj,” the gypsies sang. “Give back my heart, and give back a kiss.” On a platform draped with bunting sat Mary, wearing a red and green silk dress fringed with lace sewn by her babcia. On her hand was a ruby ring Steve had purchased from the company store. A babushka covered Mary’s golden hair. Steve oversaw the gathering in a necktie, suspenders, and bowler hat, challenging each man who believed himself strong enough for his daughter.