Douglas Herrick had been drinking. He came home with a dead jackrabbit, tossed the carcass onto the floor of the family taxidermy shop, and watched it slide to rest beside a rack of mounted deer antlers. He was nineteen, maybe a little younger; the family later disagreed on the year. What the brothers always agreed on was the moment - rabbit, antlers, side by side. Douglas turned to his younger brother Ralph and said something like, 'Let's mount it that way.' They did. They sold the result to Roy Ball, who ran the LaBonte Hotel a few blocks away, for the not-small sum of ten dollars. Roy hung the chimera behind the bar, where it stayed for decades, and where every traveling salesman who passed through eastern Wyoming demanded to know what kind of animal that was. That, more or less, is how the jackalope came to live in Douglas, Wyoming, population six thousand, give or take. The town has been the self-appointed Jackalope Capital of the World ever since.
Douglas and Ralph Herrick learned taxidermy from a mail-order course their father bought during the Depression. They were good at it - good enough that the practical-joke mount they cobbled together in 1932 looked uncannily believable. The seam where antler met rabbit skull disappeared under the fur. The proportions, somehow, worked. After Roy Ball bought the first one, the brothers kept making them, sometimes one a week, sometimes more. They sold to bars across the West, to curio shops along the highways, to anyone willing to pay for a fake animal that delighted people the moment they spotted it. Ralph kept making jackalopes well into his nineties. Douglas, who gave the creature its name (jackrabbit plus antelope, no committee required), died in 2003 - by which point his rabbits had escaped Wyoming and gone everywhere.
Douglas's chamber of commerce declared the town the Jackalope Capital of the World in 1965, and then - because there is no point in a half-committed bit - built an eight-foot fiberglass jackalope downtown. The statue wears a saddle so children can ride it for photos. Around the corner, the city clerk's office issues official jackalope hunting licenses for one dollar each. The fine print specifies that hunters must possess an IQ no higher than seventy-two and may only hunt between midnight and two in the morning on June 31. June 31 does not exist. That is the joke. Every summer the town stages Jackalope Days with a parade, a rodeo, a craft fair, and a rubber-chicken tossing contest, because a town that has decided to be the Jackalope Capital does not do these things sheepishly.
By the 1940s, postcards showed cowboys lassoing jackalopes. By the 1960s, every truck stop bathroom from Cheyenne to Reno had one mounted above the sink. Folklore accreted around the animal the way barnacles accrete on a hull. Jackalopes, the stories went, could mimic human voices to throw hunters off their trail. They bred only during lightning storms. Their milk, which could only be collected while the animal slept, was both nutritious and intoxicating. They had a particular weakness for whiskey, which is how cowboys recommended catching one - leave a pan out and wait. Biologists eventually offered a tidy explanation: rabbits infected with the Shope papilloma virus develop horn-like growths, which homesteaders had likely been spotting for centuries. But the Herricks built the jackalope America recognizes. That one has antlers, not horns, and the seam is invisible.
What is delightful about Douglas is that the town never breaks character. The clerk hands you the hunting license with a straight face. The statue downtown is not winking. The Converse County Museum a few blocks away houses several of the Herricks' jackalopes alongside actual local history - Fort Fetterman, the cattle drives, the coming of the railroad - and treats them all with the same matter-of-fact respect. The jackalope is American folklore now, but it is American folklore with a single hometown that knows the exact addresses involved. You can stand on the corner of Third and Center streets and look at the spot where Roy Ball's old hotel served drinks to ranchers, eight blocks from the shop where two brothers turned an idle moment into a national tall tale.
Douglas sits on Interstate 25 in eastern Wyoming, about an hour east of Casper. The eight-foot jackalope statue stands at the corner of Third and Center streets downtown. Jackalope Days runs in late June each year. The Wyoming State Fair takes over the fairgrounds every August - Douglas has hosted it since 1905, which is older than the jackalope by a fair margin. Casper-Natrona County International Airport is the nearest commercial service, about fifty miles west. The drive in from any direction crosses high plains, brown grass, antelope grazing in the distance, the occasional pronghorn that has clearly never grown horns of any size. The town does not look exotic. It looks like exactly the kind of quiet, dignified, slightly stubborn western settlement that would invent a fake animal and then never, under any circumstances, take it back.
Coordinates 42.7597 N, 105.3822 W in eastern Wyoming, along the North Platte River. Best viewed from 7,000-9,000 feet AGL. From altitude, Douglas reads as a small grid town flanking I-25, the North Platte curling past to the south, the Laramie Range a dark line on the southern horizon. The terrain is high plains - brown grassland, occasional buttes, irrigated alfalfa fields tracing the river bottoms. Casper is fifty miles to the west; Cheyenne about a hundred and sixty miles southeast. Nearest commercial service is Casper-Natrona County International (KCPR). Weather here is windy almost always and clear most days, with summer afternoon thunderstorms over the Laramie Range that visibility-wise are easy to see coming. The isolation is total. Hours from any major city, exactly the geography where a tall tale can take root and never be questioned by anyone who matters.