Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Jackalope

Episode Date: August 25, 2021

Jackalopes aren’t real, right? Wouldn’t you like to know, city slicker. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. Hey and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and this

is short stuff, the shortest stuff of all about Jackalopes. Do you hear that siren? No. Do you hear it now? No. Do you hear it now? No. I do.

Yep. Do you remember, Chuck, there was a period of time where the fire department would layer down the street every time we recorded at the same time too. It was weird. Like there was either somebody who kept like faking a sprained ankle at the same time on the same day every week or they were testing something out that we're not familiar with, but it happened a lot. Yeah.

That was when we just started podcasting and they were like, I'll go in that closet and then it got to be a little bigger and they were like, well, I guess you guys should at least be in that dumb office. And then after a little while longer, eventually they were like, okay, I guess we'll put up a studio. Yeah. They said it just like that too, they're so upset. And now look at us.

Yeah. Now we're like podcasting from home. Speeding towards 20 years in our basement. Yeah, that's right. All right. So Jackalopes, if you listen to our taxidermy episode, it was road taxidermy. No, no, no, it was regular taxidermy. Oh, well we've done one on road taxidermy too, haven't we?

We covered that in taxidermy. I don't know if we did a standalone. We may have. All right. Okay. But you go ahead. I'm sorry. But either way, it was in both then.

This might be take three. But if you've never seen a jackalope, just pull your car over. If you're at home, just type in jackalope. They're fairly familiar here in the United States as sort of kitschy art that you can hang on your wall. Jackalopes are not real. They're a combination, a taxidermy combination of a rabbit or a hare with antlers. And I grew up seeing them here and there at roadside diners or if you travel out west

or something, like maybe a hotel lobby wall. And the whole thing with jackalopes is always that you try to convince somebody that it's a real thing. Yeah. It's very annoying. Like that's a really annoying, unnecessary part of the whole thing. But it's a Wyoming tradition from what I understand. Yeah.

It's a tradition of wall art. That's exactly right. And there's lots of legends and tall tales about the jackalopes that they have really nice singing voices and that in particular, if you're out on the range and you have a campfire going, you start singing cowboy songs that from out in the bush and the brush, they'll start singing in. They'll join in on the chorus and everything, which is kind of adorable. They're also supposedly cousins to Bigfoot.

They're pretty great and probably the cutest mythical creatures there are. But they actually, as far as the New York Times, I think, reported in 1977, there's actually like a real life origin story to them that we may or may not have discussed before, but we're definitely going to again here. That's right. The origin story is, I think, very well vetted. This is the kind of thing where it seems like it could be because there's just so much, so many tall tales surrounding jackalopes.

This seems like the kind of thing where the origin could be very highly suspect. But it seems like this is totally real in the Herrick brothers, H-E-R-R-I-C-K in Wyoming. And we should mention Wyoming is very much into their jackalopes because of this, because they were where it all started. Yeah. If you look at the Wyoming Lotteries logo, there's a jackalope on it. Seriously? Yeah.

It's a big deal in Wyoming. As a matter of fact, there's at least five times the Wyoming legislature has tried and failed for some reason. I don't get it. To make the jackalope, Wyoming's official state mythological creature. Maybe they're trying to really govern and do something that matters. I guess so. I suspect Liz Cheney is killing this every time.

Oh. I don't know why, but I do. So the Herrick brothers, you know what? Maybe we should take a break and leave a cliffhanger as to what they actually did. Yep. Okay. It's short stuff. Why not?

Well now, when you're on the road, driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck. It's stuff you should know. Stuff you should know. All right. Hey, everybody. When you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb?

And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren and Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough

or you're at the end of the road. Okay. I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God.

Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. And so my husband, Michael, um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right. Quite a cliffhanger about the Herrick Brothers. Right.

Uh, Douglas Herrick, he was born in Douglas, Wyoming in 1920. He was in the air forest during World War II and then worked as a pipe fitter and was a big hunter because he is in Wyoming and there's, there's a lot of people that are into that there. And his brother Ralph, uh, they got into taxidermy at an early age and had their own taxidermy shop. And as legend goes, one day, uh, one of these brothers and it was the year is kind of, um, debatable.

It could be 32, 34, 39 or 40 is what I've heard. Uh, one of them came back from a hunt, had this jackrabbit, slid it across the table and it hits little dead head, slid and perfectly met a pair of antlers. And one of them said, Hey, check that out. And the other one said, that's awesome. And that was it. Yeah. That was it.

They said, well, we're taxidermists. We might as well make this happen and they did. It's a very sad origin story because of the dead rabbit, but other than that, it's pretty cool. They, they made one. They actually just made one. That's from that rabbit and those antlers. And um, there was a guy named, uh, Roy Ball, who, uh, had a hotel in Douglas, Wyoming

who got wind of the brother's little invention and he bought it off of them for 10 bucks back in again, 1930s, 1940 at the latest, which is substantial. Um, and he put it up in his hotel and it became, uh, basically a little legendary piece of like you call it wall art, uh, and it stayed there for a good three, maybe four decades. And then someone actually stole it off of the wall and it was never, never found out who did it. It was never recovered. The original jackalope may be in somebody's garage or attic or even maybe on their wall

somewhere out there. And they may not even know that this is the original jackalope that the Herrick brothers created. So this is where I have to confess because every time I was researching this, when we got to this part, I kept thinking of the story in college, uh, I stole something with my friends and I in college one time when we were out doing bad things and a night out in Athens. We took a stuffed porcupine from a bar that was hanging on the wall and that porcupine

lived in our apartment for about six months before we returned it. Oh, you did return it, huh? Yeah. We, well, when we moved out, we were like, what do we do with porcupine? What bar was it? Uh, I want to say it was Gus Garcia's. Do you remember that place? No.

I remember it was the same thing as Gus's. Maybe. I think so. I've only heard of it. It referred to as Gus's. Yeah. It's probably one of those things where you knew the cool kid name and I was older and more square.

So I called it by its given name. So how did you guys return it? We have to know. I believe it was like, um, you know, the fine, upstanding thing that you do when you go and throw it at the front door and run. Gotcha. With a note through one of the quills that said, like, you know, we took this six months ago.

Sorry. Signed anonymous. At least you, at least you gave it back to Gus Garcia. Yeah. So somebody stole that original jackalope and did not even have the, you know, the forthrightness to throw it on the front porch of that hotel. So it remains gone. Man, do you remember Uptown Lounge and their happy hour with fishbowl margaritas?

I don't remember going to the happy hour there. It was insane. Athens is a lot different now. Yeah. I know. Last time you were there. Oh, camera, what we passed through there for about three, four years ago. Oh, okay.

Not too bad. I still go occasionally and, um, yeah, it's a lot different. It's grown up a lot. Can't you steal porcupines willy-nilly anymore? No. There's no college shenanigans. There's like an activist and interested in like important things and we're like basically like animal house or something.

Yeah. Pretty much. Just buffoons. That was what we were like in college. Chuck buffoon. So yeah, this original jackalope was stolen and like you said, they never caught the thief, but this kind of kick started a thing for the Herrick family and they started making and selling these things.

I don't, I tried to find out if they held any kind of weird patent or not, or if they were knockoff jackalopes, but they sold tens of thousands of these, which I really have to point out here. We're talking about tens of thousands of dead rabbits and dead deer. Yes. Yes. Some of which may never have been otherwise dead had it not been for the jackalope craze. Yes.

I think it's worth remarking. I don't want to be a downer here because I know it's all sweet and cute and hot. No, I know. I'm with you. They like to, to put the hurting on tourists brains with, you know, talking about it's real or whatever, but a lot of rabbits and deer died because of this whole idea. Like it's real dead is what it is. Exactly.

Just for this rogue taxidermy. No, I agree. I love those rabbits. I don't want to see them hanging on a wall with antlers sticking out of their heads. No, let the rabbits live. But Douglas, I think a wall drug in Wyoming, which has a giant jackalope there. No, no, wall drugs in North Dakota. Oh, it is.

Okay. They became a distributor and they have a giant jackalope. So eventually when Douglas Herrick, the initial jackaloper died in 2003, I think his son was interviewed by the New York Times and said that they were selling, it looks like, you know, 15 to 2000 of these a year. Just a wall drug. Yeah. Yeah.

It's a lot of rabbits. It is a lot of rabbits. I feel like we've really kind of taken this thing on a nosedive, but I feel like we could also take it on an even bigger nosedive in a second, Chuck. Let's do it. With the Shope Papioma virus. It's so sad to look at these pictures. It is sad, but it's also fascinating.

It's much more gratifying to look at botanical, or not botanical, biological, yeah, botanist just plants biological or like nature illustrations of it. Yeah. It's related to HPV, it's an affliction that can cause rabbits to develop these horns, their tumors basically, and they can come out of their face looking like little horns. So there are pictures of rabbits with all these horny spikes thrusting from their face and heads. And it's just.

They look a lot like. Heartbreaking. Warthogs. Yeah, sorta. Like a rabbit warthog. And like what's interesting to me, there's actually one in the Smithsonian's collection, their animal collection, dead animal collection, I should say. And that doesn't seem to have informed the Herak Brothers creation of the Jackalope.

Those are two different things, but there was a period of time, I think the first sightings are described in the 16th or 17th centuries, yeah, the 17th century, that people wondered if there was a species of rabbit out there that had horns or antlers. And it's just totally tangential to the invention of the Jackalope. Nothing to do with it. Not even tangential, not even connected in any way. And that's Jackalopes. That is Jackalopes.

If you want to know, get to know Jackalopes, you could do worse than traveling to Douglas Wyoming, which is the official as proclaimed by Wyoming governor, Ed Herschler in 1985, home of the Jackalope. That's where they hail from. And again, you could go play some scratch offs in Wyoming with their lottery and see a Jackalope. Yeah. And you can even buy a little fun fake Jackalope hunting license.

Yeah. I thought that was kind of adorable. Yeah. Which is not real, obviously. I think they grant hunting from sunrise to sunset on one day a year. Yeah. But it's a day that doesn't even exist, June 31st. But it coincides with Douglas' Jackalope Days Festival, which I think is held in June

as well. So if you're all about the Jackalopes, yeah. Killing rabbits. Yeah, they do. And we also have to give a shout out, which we probably did in the taxidermy episode too, to our friend Van Nostrand, who once had a band called the Jackalopes. Remember? That's right.

And also shout out to one of the nicest hotels I've ever stayed in on our Australia tour, on our down days, the Jackalope Hotel. Oh, is that right? Yeah. It was amazing. I could see Australians loving the Jackalope, but it's probably actually real in Australia. That's right. I guess that's it.

Jack doesn't have anything more, I'm assuming. I don't either. So that means, of course, short stuff is out.