After the Hanson buck and the Rompola buck, the most famous (and now controversial) typical whitetail of all time is “the General.” As far as we know, this deer was never killed by a hunter. But its sheds were discovered by a Nebraska farmer in 1959. They have an estimated net score of an eye-popping 218⅛ inches, which is larger than the Hanson buck. The rack scored 195 ⅛ without a spread measurement.
Over the decades, the General antlers were sold several times and they eventually came to be owned by Cabela’s. (There’s a massive statue of the General outside of the Cabela’s store in Owatana, Minnesota). Amid the Bass Pro Shops acquisition of Cabela’s, the General was acquired by a well-known antler collector named Keith Snider.
Then Josh Duncan entered the picture. Duncan is a lifelong whitetail hunter and a former hunting guide who eventually made his fortune through some smart real-estate investments. Eventually, Duncan decided that he just had to own the General sheds, which he had read about as a kid.
So earlier this year Duncan bought The General for $1 million. And as he explains in this week’s episode of the Outdoor Life Podcast, he was thrilled.
But just over a month after he bought the antlers, a photo surfaced that showed the General sheds with stickers that did not exist on the sheds Duncan now owned.
“And so I went to [Mike Charowas’] Facebook page, went down in the comments, and saw the picture of the General with the stickers. And I basically fell on the floor,” Duncan says.
He eventually verified that the photo was legit, proving that at some point, someone had shaved off those sticker points, which would have counted as deductions from the overall score.
One of the craziest things about this story is that The General would still be a world record even with the few inches of deductions from those sticker points. But since the sheds were altered or tampered with, it likely won’t count as an official record, according to the North American Shed Hunters Club rules.
So who shaved those stickers off? Duncan narrows down the list of suspects in the podcast episode and explains what he has planned for The General in the future. There are a handful of wild stories about the General that Duncan describes in the episode.
And even through it all, he’s happy that he bought the set of sheds, which have now generated an incredible amount of intrigue within the whitetail world.
“Man, I’m telling you when I take these antlers out and I show them to somebody, half the people start crying,” Duncan says. “It is that emotional to hold something they’ve read about their whole life and actually get to hold it in their hand. It’s the feeling of being able to share these things and watching people’s reaction — it is absolutely priceless. It makes it worth it.”
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