99% Invisible - 509- Tale of the Jackalope

Episode Date: September 28, 2022

The magical mythical "jackalope" is a essentially a horned rabbit, with antlers of different sizes and shapes. The jackalope is a mascot of the American West – inspiring an absolute river of trinkets and songs and whiskies and postcards and tall tales.Tale of the Jackalope

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. There's a place in South Dakota just off Interstate 90. That's one of those tourist attractions that you see hundreds of signs for as you approach. They count down the miles and list the reasons to stop in. Cowboy boots, donuts, cheap coffee, 60 miles ahead, souvenirs, fun for the whole family. That's reporter Phil Corbett from a podcast called The Wind. In a few months ago, while driving across the wide stretching grasslands of South Dakota,

I aimed the wheel off the freeway and followed the signs to the ultimate roadside stop, Wall Drug. We are a fun roadside attraction. We're a slice of Americana, you know. This is Sarah Hustead. Sarah owns wall drug with her dad, and she is the fourth generation of Hustead to run this place. It's in the small town of Wall South Dakota,

which sits right at the spot where the bad lands crumple up. Above, the Great Plains silently sprawl toward a distant horizon. Sarah's Great Grandfather bought this place as a simple small town pharmacy during the Great Depression, and over nine decades the family expanded this small drugstore to take up an entire city block. And in addition to its restaurant, soda fountain, donut shop, and traveler's chapel, it is a remarkable purveyor of Western Ketch. And that is why I stopped. Not for the cheap coffee, but because wall drug is synonymous with one of my favorite examples of Western Kitch.

We are looking at a full wall of jackalopes. The jackalope. Looks like we've sold some here, but we have four rows of solid jackalopes and they have their nice wood planks and the beautiful jack rabbits with the real antlers. If you're not familiar with the jackalope, this magical mythical creature is a horned rabbit. And though I've seen many lone mounted jackalope heads, I am struck by the variety,

seeing them side by side in rows. Oh, I think his lips are kind of perched and he's looking quite perky here. I would call this guy a little more wierry. And then you have the nice kind of more wintery jackalops that are nice and white, super fluffy. And I think those ones are extra cute. The antlers are of different sizes and shapes. The rabbits all have different expressions.

Some rye and knowing, others calm and wide-eyed, but all of them with a certain straight-faced charm. died, but all of them with a certain straight-faced charm. Do you have a jackalope? At home? Yeah. Of course. For the past 70 years, wall drug has been central in the spread of this iconic creature. I wouldn't want to say wall drug is responsible.

I wouldn't want to get too big of a head, but we do see a ton of people from all over come through, and here is probably the first time that they're seeing the Jackalope. But the story of how the Jackalope became a mythical mascot of the American West, inspiring an absolute river of trinkets and songs and whiskeys and postcards and tall tales, that story goes back much further than Wall Troc. The way most people encounter the jackalope is not in the wild, but instead on a wall. Yeah, pool hall, a bar, a greasy spoon diner, and maybe your grandfather's basement.

This is Michael Branch, who wrote a book called On the Trail of the Jackalope. He spent years driving around the American West, talking to everyone who knew anything about jackalopes, in a quest to understand where this creature came from, and why it stuck around for so long. According to Mike, the first documented taxidermy jackalope was made by two young brothers in the early 1930s. Ralph and Doug Herrick lived on a little homestead outside of a tiny town called Douglas Wyoming out on the edge of the prairie, and those kids had been taken a taxidermy course as a correspondence course through the mail. Like many depression era families, the young herix hunted and fished to help stock the family dinner

table. And they had been out hunting one day and they'd bagged a jackrabbit. They came back and threw it on the floor of their shop. And as the story goes, it slid up against some deer antlers from a deer that had been dressed out not long before. I'm not totally understanding the physics of this scene, but it's okay. Let's continue. And that gave them the idea in that moment when they saw that weird hybrid thing sitting on the floor of their shop, let's mount that thing. And that was the first jackalope head mounted on a plaque. This was the hoax mount that started it all. These two kids taking a taxidermy class

through the mail apparently did a pretty good job because they brought the mount down to the local pub where the bar owner paid them 10 bucks for it. To that particular first jackalope, hung in the old LaBonte hotel in Douglas, Wyoming over the bar from the 1930s all the way through the 1970s and that was the rock that got thrown in the pond and the jackalope ripples went out from there across the country and across the whole world really. The Herrick Brothers kept making these things and they probably would have remained just a local Wyoming oddity, if not for Waldrug,

which has been selling jackalopes for at least 70 years. The reason Waldrug is such a vital part of the story of the jackalope is that it was probably the first place that ever commercially sold jackalopes, and they have never stopped since. Long before the internet, Waldrug helped the jackalope go viral. Tourists and road trippers from all over the world would stop in at this roadside in Poryom and see on the wall this rabbit with antlers. As more people came into contact with the antler rabbit, a torrent of tall tails followed, an elaborate mythology sprung up around the creature dreamed up by many different storytellers.

Nobody owns the jackalow. No corporation or person is entitled to control its distribution, its consumption, its interpretation. It is truly part of the folk process. According to Jackalob lore, the creatures are smart and considerably dangerous. They only mate during lightning storms, and if you put out a bowl of whiskey at night, a passing jackalob may finish it off, and in his drunken bravado, he'll believe he can catch bullets in his teeth, which is the only way a hunter's can manage to bag them. Also, Jacklope Milk is supposedly a powerful aphrodisiac, and even though the Jacklope sleeps on its back, it's incredibly dangerous to milk on. And finally, the Jacklope is the only animal that can throw its voice like a ventriloquist.

If you're out camping and you're singing around the campfire, you'll hear that voice coming in from the sage of the jackalope harmonizing with you. Throughout history, people have told stories about chimera. The original chimera, from Greek mythology, was a fire-breathing monster with a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail. Over time, the word has come to mean any hybrid creature made up of different animal parts. Horses with wings, cats with eagle heads, fish with fur. When inventing something new, the oldest trick in the book is to smash two existing things together.

But the jackalope chimera distinctly fits into the American West, and it emerged at a particular moment in the West's history. Early in the country's Western colonization, Frontiersmen and settlers were often seen from the East as bumpkins, uncultured and immoral people living in a wild land. But going into the 1900s, pop culture started to romanticize the West. People loved stories about heroic cowboys living on the prairie, the stuff that you'd see in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. Over time, the diverse and complicated reality of the West was slowly flattened into a simpler and more

whitewashed myth. Part of that romantic retelling included an interest in the actual Western tradition of tall tales. That language of hyperbole, of exaggeration, of larger than life, so that's part of what we associate with the American West, right? Is this wonderful tradition of extravagant folk humor? Settlers as early as the mid-1800s used humor and embellishment to subvert the narrative that they were ignorant. I think the tension between the East and West in the United States from the 19th century forward is a really important part of the story. You know, people in the American West who may be are seen as frontiersmen or bumpkins

or uneducated, they say, oh, yeah, well, guess what? I know more than you do about something, and it's this. I'm going to fool you with this jackalope. There's a great satisfaction in taking someone who is condescending or elite and exposing their ignorance when they're busy trying to expose yours. Some of the jackalops allure is that it sets up this ruse. There are people who know, and people who don't. And a lot of the satisfaction comes from playing with that line.

Telling people a long, just barely plausible story, all the while pointing to the evidence right there on the wall. Like all good humorous, the Jackalope always keeps a straight face. It refuses to acknowledge that it's funny in any way. It takes itself perfectly seriously. But there's a curious thing about horned rabbits. While we know the origin story of the jackalope, Douglas Wyoming, 1932. There are illustrations and descriptions of this specific creature going back much, much further. For instance, there's a Renaissance illustration of a squirrel and three rabbits, the central one sporting a crown of antlers. Or there's a Flemish painting from the 17th century that shows a wreath of fruit and flowers

surrounded by birds, deer and a small horned rabbit. And this is not just in Europe. Horned rabbits show up all over the world. Indigenous people from Mexico and the Americas, there are horned rabbit tails in the folklore of many African peoples, certainly all across Europe, and then in Asia. A horned rabbit is even invoked in early Buddhist texts, as a way to talk about the very nature of reality. Basically, the Buddha says to his students, If you think a horned rabbit exists, then you don't understand anything about the world

or about human consciousness because obviously it doesn't exist. And then he'd ask his students to picture a horn rabbit. And he'd say, well the horn rabbit is real to you now, isn't it? So if you think the horn rabbit doesn't exist, you don't know anything about reality or the nature of the mind. So he used it as a tool to kind of break down this binary thinking the specific lesson was that the horn rabbit both does and doesn't exist. And that line between real and not real blurs with the horned rabbit because they don't only show up in art and mythology. Early cosmographies and natural histories will depict the horn rabbit and

then throughout the late medieval and Renaissance periods in Europe, the horn rabbit was actually taxonomized as a unique species. It was called lepus cornudus. And so if rabbits with horns are depicted all over the world in art from nearly every continent and in natural history, is there actually a lepus cornudus? A taxonomized distinct species? No, they were wrong on that. But... Horned rabbits actually exist in nature. The horned rabbit is real, sort of. Most of what we know about the existence of Hornrabbits is thanks to a pioneering

virologist named Richard Schoep. Schoep was born in Des Moines, Iowa in 1901 and by the 1930s he was working at the Rockefeller Institute at Princeton University. That's where he discovered what caused the pandemic of 1918 by linking the influenza virus to one he observed in pigs. Shope was well-established in his field and he was an expert on animal-to-human disease transmission. Shope has two living children, and though neither could do an interview for this story, his daughter Nancy shared some of her dad's unpublished letters, which were incredible

to read. Here is Richard Schoep describing his own work, in a letter he sent in 1932 to his mom. February 22, 1932. You asked what to tell people that asked you what my work was. Just tell them that I work with diseases, the causes of which are unknown, trying to find the cause, and to study the pathology. At this time, a show had conducted research that convinced them that viruses could cause certain kinds of cancer in mammals. The scientific community hadn't caught up with them yet, but

that would change, starting in 1932. That year, the same year the Herrick Brothers mounted their first jackalope in Wyoming, Shope started hearing about some strange horned rabbits in the Midwest. Not the ones the Hericks were making, but real rabbits that hunters had come across on the Great Plains. And so he asked these hunters to essentially start mailing him these weird rabbits from the Midwest. When the rabbits arrived at his lab, Shope could see that the rabbits didn't actually have

horns. They had these gnarly disturbing growths that were caused, Shope thought, by some kind of disease. Shope collected samples of the growths. Then he pulverized them, did some, you know, science stuff, and as a result, he would get a mix of organic material all contained in a fluid. That fluid would be strained through a porcelain filter. When it was strained through that filter, lots of genetic material and lots of bacterial material would

be filtered out. Shope applied that filtered fluid to healthy rabbits, who then developed the same growths. So whatever this disease was, it was transmissible. But because of this filtration process, he was able to prove that all the other things it might be had been filtered out, and the only thing small enough to go through that porcelain filter was a virus. That virus that show up extracted is what's called a papilloma virus. And that can cause these really grotesque growths on the animal's head, which can look a lot like horns. They are pretty terrible to look at. I do not recommend googling it. But basically these growths

are carcinomas, that sometimes grow quite large and often on the rabbit's face and head. I would definitely say that a rabbit stricken with papilloma virus is likely to look more grotesque and less stylized than an actual jackalote. In most cases, growths emerged from the rabbit's face or the back of its head, but in some instances, they grow right out of the rabbit's forehead and look uncannily like antlers or goat horns. It's hard to say for sure, but it is certainly possible that these rabbits with horns and antlers that were showing up in renaissance paintings and naturalist field books were depictions of this disease observed in nature. Now, at the time, the scientific community didn't believe that viruses could cause cancer, as Chopra wrote in a letter to a colleague. If it's true, the observation would hurt lots of people's feelings that have for a long time

considered tumors as invariably a non-infectious nature. Cancer isn't contagious, right? Well, show by studying those horned rabbits was able to prove that those weird growths were caused by a virus. And that was a major breakthrough because proving that a virus could cause cancer in a mammal opened the way to all kinds of research that was going to turn out to be important to human beings.

By the 1970s and 80s, researchers were starting to explore the link between papaloma viruses and humans and certain kinds of cancer. It took years to prove the connection, but eventually researchers did, and they won the Nobel Prize for the discovery. We now know that HPV can cause various types of cancer in people. But the most prominent example is cervical cancer, which was a huge, huge killer. Over 90% of cervical cancer is caused by HPV infection, but decades after the work on papilloma viruses by Richard Shope, scientists use that early research to develop a vaccine. If you connect the dots, this leads eventually to development of the human papilloma virus

vaccine, the HPV vaccine, which is the safest, most effective anti-cancer vaccine we have ever created. It saves millions of lives every year, and it would not exist without horned rabbits, and without a person who was curious enough to ask, how did these weird rabbits come to be the way they are. Mike lays out in the book that there is something charming and inexplicable.

That Richard Chopes' work on horned rabbits began in 1932. 1932 is the year that the Herrick Brothers, in that little town in Wyoming, claimed that they made their first jack-o-lope hoax mount. I don't think there's any relationship between those two things, but I love the idea that, in the same year, this river forks, and one fork is a kind of hoax that is going to become a staple of popular culture,

and the other fork is this legitimate scientific research that is going to lead to the saving of millions of lives. So the jackalope story turns out to be so much more complicated than we would ever guess when we stick a stamp on a tacky postcard or we see a taxidermy mound in a pool hall. The jackalope so artfully inhabits this space between the fake and the real. It is a true boundary crosser. Name your incongruity, right? Is it a rabbit or deer? Is it timid or vicious?

Is it funny or serious? Is it ironic or genuine? Back at Waldruck, I amble across the courtyard. I pass a taxidermy buffalo and the threshold of the back building and duck into a hallway filled with remarkable historic photographs. Young cowboys on the Great Plains hold tight to bucking Broncos, settlers traverse the windswept grasslands, indigenous families and chiefs posed together in traditional garb, standing on the land they've inhabited for millennia.

And this sincere, quiet collage of deep American history is interrupted every 12 minutes by a giant animatronic T-Rex. The American West can be a weird place. Beautiful and ugly, sincere and commodified serene and absurd. And overseeing all of it, up on the wall, is the antler drabbit, always with a straight face. Alright, I think just one final question, is the jackalope real or is it myth? Yes. Coming up after the break, I talked with Phil about the jackalope in pop culture and how it connects with the long tradition of the trickster. So, Phil, you're back to talk with us a little bit more about the Jackalope and its relationship with arts and culture.

And since your own podcast, The Wind is about listening and sound and music, let's start with some examples of the Jackalope in music. Yeah, the Jackalope has inspired a ton of pop culture. In Mike Branch's book, he devotes about two pages to listing music that mentions the Jackalope. So I just started listening through all of those bands. Okay, great. So what did you find? There are a ton, but just a couple quick highlights

to play for you. One is Creepy Jackalope I by Arizona Cow Punk Band Super Suckers. Or here's one from Your Nick of the Woods. This is an extra noisy track called Jackalope Rising by the Phantom Lins. And they're from beautiful downtown Oakland, California? Maybe not downtown, but they're from Oakland, California. Exactly.

The list goes on and on and on, but I started realizing that a lot of these musicians were using the jackalope in their song titles and their lyrics, and they were bending genre in these really interesting ways. Okay, so what do you mean by that? Like a lot of the songs just don't neatly fit into pop or punk or black metal or whatever, but we're instead combining all of these different elements into one song. Like the Jackalope itself, this hybrid creature, it sort of evokes the kind of hybrid musical styles as well.

Exactly. And so one of the bands that caught my ear was simply called Jackalope. Okay. that caught my ear was simply called Jackalope. A lot of their songs have this kind of like 80s new age jazz fusion thing going on. And they describe themselves as, let's see, synth acoustic punk orachi Navajez. Okay. Okay.

You might need to break that down for me a little bit more, but yeah, go on. So it's co-fronted by a very prominent Native American flute player named R. Carlos Nakai. And like when I say prominent, I mean, you know, if you're imagining what Native American flute sounds like, there's a chance you're imagining his music. Yeah, it's like multiple gold albums, etc., etc. And so I called up our Carlos Nakai to talk about the image of the Jackalope and, you know, what it means to him.

I think the first time I was ever made aware of the jackalote was when I was visiting with friends down at the Mahaviri community in Parker, Arizona. And there was a rabbit with horns in one of the shops and I said, what is that? Nakae was immediately drawn to the jackalote precisely because it is a hybrid creature. It crosses the boundary between rabbit and deer, and there's something just compelling and playful about it for that reason. Also, Nakai's collaborator in the band Larry Jañez is an artist from Yuma, Arizona, and he works a lot with Chicano imagery and ideas of living on a border coming from a bilingual family. So we live in two worlds at once. All of us do. Jackalope is that mixture of cultural awareness.

This is something we can have a good time with. So for Naga, it's not just about mixing cultures. It's also about breaking down this line between what's funny and what's serious. Exactly. And this is the other thing about the jackalope that makes it so interesting. Is that it fits into this whole tradition of the trickster, which you know, you see in cultures all over the world. Yeah. I'm remembering from the main story, how the jackalope is itself this trickster with, you know, they drink whiskey and they catch bullets with their teeth and throw their voices and even the image of them is used to trick gullible easterners to thinking that they're real, but you're saying that trickster figures appear in lots of cultures. So what are some of those examples?

This type of character is common in indigenous stories in North America, specifically coyote and in the Northwest, the crow, who both have major roles in many creation stories, then Eshu in Nigeria, who is the trickster god of the Yoruba people, Hermes, in ancient Greece, Loki from Norse mythology. He changes form and gender. I mean, the definition is fluid, but the trickster just shows up everywhere. And so I'm familiar with some of those, but what makes a trickster? One thing is that they are constantly testing what is socially acceptable. Sometimes they bridge different realities as well. So in some stories, the coyote will be able to pass between the world of the living and the spirit world.

And they also often up-end power structures, usually through mischief. So Michael Branch told me that at the core of it, the trickster is all about crossing lines. Most of us live in worlds where boundaries are set out for us every day, and those lines have been drawn for us. And there's something exhilarating about breaking out of that, right? So illicit boundary crossing. That's the forte of the trickster. Okay, I'm starting to get some sense of what the trickster is all about.

But do you have other examples of how they operate? So it might help to talk about a couple examples from more contemporary culture. One would be George Clooney's character from Obrother Where Are Thou? I mean, that is contemporary in one sense, but also, isn't it based on the Odyssey, which is not very contemporary? Exactly. And Odysseus from the Odyssey is one of those ancient trickster figures. So, in Obrother Were at Thou, Clooney is constantly using his wit and embellishment and straight-up lives to get out of all these sticky situations.

I'm on my hair. And Thornton! We got you surrounded! Damn, we're in a tight spot. That was my hair. And Thornton! We got you surrounded! Damn, we're in a tight spot. Get the gun out of the revenue! Don't try! You know, he starts off in jail, and he lies to his fellow

prisoners about hidden treasure, so they'll help him go on this big journey to break up his ex-wife's marriage. And throughout the movie, he's super smart and resourceful, but at the same time, he's super smart and resourceful, but at the same time, he is totally fallible, which is basically how the trickster works, like very clever, seemingly all-knowing, but then completely tripped up by lowly desires like hunger or sex or jealousy or even curiosity. Yeah. It's like the trickster is charming because of its fallibility.

I'm curious if you have a favorite trickster. So one of my favorite tricksters is one, everybody will be familiar with, which is Bugs Bunny. I never thought about that, but that seems, yeah, that's right on the money, that makes sense. Yeah, because Bugs is constantly defeating this bumbling human hunter, Elmer Fud. And he does it, you know, not through physical strength,

but by outsmarting him and basically playing these elaborate pranks. What's the punch? Uh-oh. Anywhere's words, Wabbit? Yeah. Those split laps have been at a style for at least three decades. Really?

In fact, I wouldn't be caught dead wearing those things. Oh, well, I was just about to take them off. Oh! Oh, question! Oh! The cement is wet hard! Yeah, Doc, that sonny is pulling around. Better put on some sunscreen! Ah, bye-bye! Oh, no, I can't see.

And if you think about it, Oh, no, I can't see. And if you think about it, like if Bugs loses in these episodes, he dies, right? Right, right. And yet he's just super cool, nonchalant, and he pretty much always comes out on top. Right, another thing about it, he's so much like the Jackalope. He's this trickster because he's constantly trolling

Elmer Fud, but he's also a bit of this chimera hybrid because he's this mix between a rabbit and a human. Exactly. Yeah, because he walks on his back feet, he has gloves. He breaks down that line between human and non-human. And like Loki Bugs also messes with gender in these really understated ways. Like, he'll just fluidly play a Fem version of himself

without making a big thing of it. Or sometimes they do make a big deal of it and he's like a Fem Faital, like really dolled up, as noted by Garth and Wayne's world. But he admits on a hood of a car that he's secretly attracted to Bugs Money. Did you ever find Bugs Bunny attractive when he put on a dress and play a girl bunny?

No. No. And he said, I, I was just asking. Yeah, and Bugs is just subversive. He's always upsetting power structures. And that's part of what makes him such a great example of a trickster. So yeah, I mean, if you haven't had a chance to visit Wall Drug or see a Jackalope on a wall, I mean, you've definitely got the vibe from Bucks.

That's fantastic. Well, this has been so cool. I really appreciate this deep dive into something that I just had no idea there was so much behind the faux mounted heads that you see in Kitchie Western shops. It's been so cool to go on this journey with you. Thank you, Phil. Really appreciate it.

Yeah, thank you, Roman. 99% of Vizbo was reported this week by Phil Corbett and edited by Executive Producer Delaney Hall. Phil makes a podcast about listening at a handmade desk in the mountains. It's called The Wind. And if you like this story, you might dig the episode Frontier Music, but start at the prologue. Listen and subscribe at thewind.org.

Mix this week by Mita Ganatra, fact checking by Graham Haysha, Music by Swan Rale. Kurt Colstedt is our digital director, the rest of the team, includes Christopher Johnson, Vivian Leigh, Chris Perroupet, Emmett Fitzgerald, Martin Gonzales, Joe Rosenberg, Jason De Leon, Jacob Moltenata Medina, Lashmondon, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. Special thanks this week to Alisa Sobo from San Diego State University and Rick Houston at Waldrug, who we also spoke to for this story. Thanks also to Tom Schoep and Nancy Fitzgerald, who shared their father's letters.

We are part of the Stitcher & Serious XM Podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building. And beautiful. Uptown, Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussion about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI org. Run Instagram and let it to. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love,

as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org. Your listening to a Stitcher, I'll get some serious exam!