The Hugag: A Fearsome Critter of Western Wisconsin

In logging camps across Western Wisconsin and northern Minnesota, the hugag entertained lumberjacks in the early twentieth century as one of a tradition of “fearsome critters”, tall-tale beasts invented for entertainment and to haze newcomers between camps.

The first mention of the hugag as an imaginary animal, and as a myth among loggers, is in S.W. Brown’s 1900 book In the Limestone Valley: Pen Pictures of Early Days in Western Wisconsin. Brown spelled it “hew-gag” and gave it round feet surrounded on all sides by claws to conceal its direction of travel, and beyond that said only that it was not as “ferocious” as other woods beasts. The word is older than the critter. It shows up as a variant spelling of “hewgag,” a woodwind instrument akin to a kazoo, in the June 20, 1846 issue of the American Republican and Baltimore Daily Clipper, which urged readers to “blow the hugag! whistle the fife, and chastise the drum!”

The modern version of the creature comes mostly from William T. Cox’s 1910 Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods. Cox put its range in northern Minnesota, western Wisconsin and “the Canadian wilds towards Hudson Bay,” and described an animal about the size of a moose that “somewhat resembles that animal,” except for two things: “joint-less legs, which compel the animal to remain on its feet, and its long upper lip, which prevents it from grazing.” If it tried to graze, he wrote, “it would simply tramp its upper lip into the dirt.” Cox has it eating twigs or bark instead, and adds that “its head and neck are leathery and hairless; its strangely corrugated ears flop downward; its four-toed feet, long bushy tail, shaggy coat and general make-up give the beast an unmistakably prehistoric appearance.”

Henry H. Tryon’s 1939 Fearsome Critters leans on Cox but adds warts on the snout, bumps on the head and pine needles instead of hair, and says “a steady diet of pine knots makes the pitch ooze constantly from his pores.” The Lumberwoods version files it under Reclinor rigidus and calls it “the biggest animal in the Northern forest,” about thirteen feet tall when full grown. It isn’t dangerous: “when aroused he merely bristles up and looks like a heap of pine slash.” It does little harm except when it leans against buildings.

Since it can’t lie down, the hugag sleeps standing, leaning against a tree. The Pine Barrens Institute says lumberjacks described it as always on the move, so woodsmen who followed its tracks were often gone for days or weeks and sometimes never came back. The way to catch one was to saw a few of its favorite sleep-trees two-thirds through. When it leaned in, the tree went down and the hugag went with it, and it “can’t get up any quicker than a greenhorn on skis.” The last one reported killed was up on Turtle River, “a young one, weighing barely eighteen hundred pounds.”

Folklorist Richard Dorson and author Daniel Cohen both tied the animal that can’t lie down to classical antiquity. Dorson, in Man and Beast in American Comic Legend, cited Horace Beck’s article “The Animal that Cannot Lie Down” and held that Julius Caesar’s report of an elk that could not lie down closely compares in language to Cox’s. Cohen, in his 1975 book Monsters, Giants, and Little Men from Mars, pointed to Pliny the Elder’s account of a creature called the Achlis with the same trait, though he seems to have confused the hugag with the similarly named Hodag.