What Douglas is known for

Douglas is a high plains town of about 6,500 on the sagebrush edge of the Thunder Basin, known for the jackalope. It sells itself on a jackrabbit with antlers that two brothers screwed together as a joke. Wyoming named Douglas official home of the jackalope.

A town like other towns

Douglas sits on the sagebrush steppe at the edge of the Thunder Basin, a ranching and railroad town on the North Platte. It has cattle, coal, the state fairgrounds and long distances in every direction, and Casper, the nearest city of any size, is still about an hour away. This was Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho country.

What Douglas had, other towns had too. Emigrants detoured to Ayres Natural Bridge, the army built Fort Fetterman eleven miles northwest, and the state fair came every August. Forts, trails and fairgrounds are common currency out here.

A joke taken seriously

In the 1930s brothers Douglas and Ralph Herrick mounted a jackrabbit on antlers as a taxidermy-shop joke, sold for ten dollars. The town took it seriously: Wyoming trademarked the word Jackalope, Douglas raised a statue on the square, the town holds Jackalope Days, and thousands of hunting licenses are valid only on June 31, midnight to two.

What the prank earns

The prank became the brand, the brand the town. The animal went onto signs, murals and shop windows. It never displaced the older draw: the state fair, whose 2012 centennial edition drew 60,000 visitors, still fills the town every August.

Why it worked

Douglas treated a joke as infrastructure. A town with real but ordinary assets, a fair, a fort, a sandstone arch over LaPrele Creek, picked one improbable identity on top of them and committed without irony: raising the statue, staffing the festival, licensing an animal that does not exist.

The commitment is the product. Horned rabbits are old, from Gessner’s Historiae animalium to the Wolpertinger of German folklore; what Douglas owns is not the idea but the follow-through.