Douglas: The Jackalope Capital

Douglas, Wyoming was founded in eighteen eighty-six as a railroad town on the Chicago and Northwestern line and named for Stephen A. Douglas, Abraham Lincoln's debate opponent and the Illinois Senator who championed popular sovereignty on the slavery question. The town grew as a supply point for ranches along the North Platte and became the seat of Converse County.

Douglas claims the title of Jackalope Capital of the World. The jackalope, a mythical creature combining a jackrabbit and a pronghorn antelope, was supposedly first commercialized here in the nineteen thirties by Douglas Herrick, a young man in his family's taxidermy shop who mounted rabbit bodies with small deer antlers as a novelty and sold them to tourists. The legend spread through roadside gift shops across the West, and Douglas embraced it as its defining identity.

A life-size jackalope statue stands downtown, and the town issues novelty jackalope hunting licenses.