Rare caribou rack ripped off

Rare trophy antlers from a mountain caribou shot by an Idaho hunter in 1892 have been stolen from a cabin north of Priest River.

Vandals who accessed the cabin by snowmobile in December smashed the old head mount and packed off the antlers, which had been considered special enough to tour in the Idaho exhibit to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.

Selkirk Mountain’s caribou are the nation’s rarest mammal. The handful that still exist are protected by the Endangered Species Act.

In the 1800s, however, they were fair game, although they were a virtually inaccessible trophy for anyone but the most determined hunters in this region.

J.M. Jeannot, a businessman in Hope, teamed with a friend in October 1892 and vowed to explore high in the Pack River drainage until they found the elusive caribou. They went as far as possible by horse, and then even higher by foot until they found an area he described in a newspaper story as pounded by so many tracks it “looked like a Texas roundup.”

He eventually shot two bulls, the largest of which he estimated at 600 pounds. He had the head mounted and showed it off on the walls of his Hotel Office Saloon in Hope. When it came to a Spokane sport shop on Riverside Avenue, a newspaper clipping dubbed it “one of the largest pair of caribou antlers ever seen in Spokane.”

While the antlers were likely the biggest from a caribou ever taken by a hunter in Idaho, Western caribou were never given a trophy category by the Boone and Crockett Club because their antlers don’t grow to the trophy proportions of their eastern Canada cousins.

“The head you possess has great historical value and surely needs to be preserved with precise data,” said Phillip Wright of the Boone and Crockett Club and University of Montana Zoology professor in a 1983 letter to the owner of the mount.

Wright said he couldn’t rank the trophy status of the Selkirk mountain caribou antlers because no category had been established to recognize them. “I doubt that animals from the Selkirk herd ever grew antlers to compete with the Newfoundland class,” he said.

Before the current owner bought the antlers, they were brought to Spokane and displayed at the annual Big Horn Show by Guy Neyman of Hope. However, the antlers apparently were not officially measured on the Boone and Crockett scale, said Larry Carey, who does the official measuring at the show and has records dating back through the ‘80s.

Regardless of the trophy status, the antlers are of priceless historical significance, said the owner, who asked to remain annonymous.

“This mount is from an endangered species,” he said. “They ain’t making them no more.”

Mountain caribou populations in the Selkirks were set back by major forest fires in the 1900s, followed by logging in their old-growth habitat, road access and the completion of Canada Highway 3 through the heart of their migration route.

The owner, who asked to remain anonymous, was planning to donate the Jeannot trophy antlers to the Burke Museum of Natural History in Seattle, which recognized their historical value in a letter written in 1999.

The owner is offering a $500 reward.