The 27th Annual Piedmont Mini-Course

Reprinted from Fair Chase Magazine, Winter 1999
TROPHY TALK
Stolen Mule Deer Returned
to National Collection
BY JACK RENEAU
Director, Big Game Records Boone and Crockett Club

ON NOVEMBER 9, 1999, FRED King, chair of the museum committee that oversees the Boone and Crockett Club's National Collection of Heads and Horns, delivered a truly spectacular non-typical mule deer head, taken by Andrew Daum, to the club's Missoula office. This spectacular head was not an addition to the National Collection--it was being returned.

It was stolen, along with 12 other specimens, from the National Collection in November 1974 when the Collection was still owned by the New York Zoological Society and housed at the Bronx Zoo.

This exceptional head was taken in 1886 by Mr. Daum at Elk Creek, Colorado. Scoring 299-⁵Ž^₈ points, it is still one of the finest specimens of North American big game ever recorded by the Club. It was the first World's Record in its category when the Club adopted and copyrighted its scoring system in 1950. It was listed as the World's Record in the 1952 and 1958 editions of the all-time recordbooks and dropped to fifth place in the 1964 edition. It currently ranks 20th in the 11th edition of Records of North American Big Game, published earlier this year.

The story of its return is quite simple. It is interesting to note, however, that it was the returned on the 25th anniversary of its disappearance from the Collection

Tom had mounted many a fine trophy mule deer in his thirty years as a taxidermist, and in his studio in Rawlins, Wyoming, he had endured endless re-tellings of how they were taken by hunting prowess, fortuitous circumstances, or simple blind luck. But when he removed...

...Continued in the Summer 2002 Issue of Breakthrough.

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