Move over Elvis: History hopping with jackalope sightings

If you spend much time roaming around the Rocky Mountains states - the part of America I've come to think of as Jackalopistan - you've probably developed a weird fondness and obsession, as I have, for this rare and secretive cross between a jackrabbit and an antelope. Like the yeti and sexy teenage vampires, we root for them to exist; the world would be duller without them. John Colter, a member of the Lewis and Clark expedition, is the first American to claim a jackalope sighting. His announcement drew mostly bemused shrugs. Compared with his tall tales of spouting geysers and bubbling mud pots along the Yellowstone River, a horned rabbit wasn't exactly front-page news. The creature probably would have bunny-hopped off into the mists of mythology had it not been for Douglas Herrick, a young rancher in Douglas, Wyo., with a mail-order taxidermy degree. According to his obituary in the New York Times, the big moment came in 1932 (or 1934, or 1939, or 1940 - the stories vary), after Herrick and his brother Ralph had returned from a hunting trip. "We just throwed the dead jack rabbit in the shop when we come in, and it slid on the floor right up against a pair of deer horns we had in there," Ralph Herrick told the newspaper. "It looked like that rabbit had horns on it." According to the story, his brother's eyes grew wide with inspiration. "Let's mount that thing!" he said. Someone proposed calling it a "deerbunny," and if that name had stuck we probably wouldn't be talking about it today. Fortunately it was vetoed in favor of the more marketable "jackalope." (Somewhere along the line it also acquired a Latin name, Lepus-temperamentalus.) The Herrick family began mass-producing them - by one estimate Ralph's son Jim ships 1,200 a year to Wall Drug alone - and a tourism icon was born. Seeing a rare opportunity, Douglas, a pretty little town along the North Platte River, proclaimed itself the world's jackalope capital and installed an 8-foot-tall statue in the town square...read more