After a lengthy departure from North Platte, looping around the largest rail yard in the world and the Golden Spike Tower, this was another walk spent too much on the Lincoln Highway, though that wasn’t without some positives. The route passed through three towns–Hershey, Sutherland, and Paxton (my destination) and all three still possess independent, small town grocery stores. Dollar General has crept into Sutherland as well, but nonetheless, these supermarkets persist. I can’t stress how rare this is.
The most noteworthy sight on this day, though, was a saloon/restaurant in Paxton, Ole’s Big Game Steakhouse & Lounge. The history is hard to believe–the website shares that, “Prohibition ended on August 8 of that year [1933] and Ole opened for business after midnight,” and the restaurant has thrived ever since.
Its most notable characteristic, though, is the abundance of “trophies” on display. This all started in 1938, when the owner, Ole, shot a white tail buck and hung the mount on the wall. In the years that followed, Ole traveled to every continent, bagging one major animal after another. This culminated in 1969, when “Ole shot a polar bear on Russia’s Chukchi Sea while hunting on a 70-acre ice flow. A full mount of the huge white bear was brought back to the bar and put on display just inside the door.”
Paxton, Nebraska’s population today is just over 500. North Platte is the closest large town, more than 30 miles away, and this is hardly a population-dense area. And yet, Ole’s is open 364 days a year and employs 72 people. The small-town size and isolated location doesn’t matter. The people come. And while Google Reviews certainly speak positively about the quality of the food, it’s the ambiance–the looming animal heads–that draws the crowds.
To round out the post, here are some fun facts that I learned, while distracting myself from writing this last night by instead reading about taxidermy:
- First, a little etymology. The word comes from taxis (Greek), “arrangement”, and derma, “skin”. Or, to put it more creepily, as the Museum of Idaho does, “skin art”
- Ancient Egyptians were the first taxidermists. Predictably, one of the major motivating forces for this was to deck out pharaohs’ tombs with some of their favorite animals. They even managed to preserve a hippopotamus!
- The technique has come a long way. Eqyptians used spices and oils. Other early taxidermists literally stuffed the animals with straw, peat, sawdust, and hay. Arsenic was sometimes employed. Today, though, standards are much higher, leading first to the use of styrofoam and metal rods, and then “wood wool, PU foam and epoxy resins. New techniques such as dry-freezing have been developed”
- Of course, the most fascinating–and grizzly–practice involves the use of Dermestid (or flesh-eating) beetles to clean the flesh from the bones before moving forward with the stuffing process
- The Renaissance and the scientific revolution are to thank for the reemergence of taxidermy following a long decline over the Dark Ages. The first large-scale animal mounting was a rhinoceros at Florence’s Royal Museum in the 1500s
- While the display of hunting trophies could obviously be viewed as a threat to preservation efforts–and certainly, trophy hunting has plenty of blame in this area–taxidermy has also supported preservation efforts. When William Temple Hornaday was dismayed by the decline in American bison populations, he used taxidermied bison to display the animals, up close and personal, at the Smithsonian, raising awareness about the threat of extinction
- Head to New York if you want to see the largest taxidermy animal in the world. It’s an 8-ton whale shark at the Suffolk County Vanderbilt Museum
- The World Taxidermy Championship just happened. We missed it!
