Jim Jordan and his wife Lena lived in a homey
dwelling on the fringe of the St. Croix river valley
east of Hinckley. Jordan was a woodsman most of
his life, logging trapping, stump-blowing and farming.
He enjoyed deer hunting and several good-sized
buck racks hung from the rafters of Jordan's home.
On the morning of November 20, 1914, Jim, at the
age of 22, shot a huge buck that weighted nearly
400 pounds. The Jordans were living in Danbury,
Wisconsin, at the time, and the news of his
mammoth whitetail spread quickly.

Neighbors and town folk rode out to take a look. One of them was George
Van Castle, who lived in Webster, about 10 miles south of Danbury. He worked on the Soo Line Railroad but he also did taxidermy work in his spare time. He greatly admired Jordan's trophy and offered to mount the head for $5. Jordan accepted.

Shortly thereafter, Van Castle's wife became sick and died. Troubled by the loss of his wife, Van Castle decided to move to Hinckley. But he never told Jordan, who waited for months but heard no word about his mounted trophy. Finally Jordan made a trip to Webster, where he learned that Van Castle had gone to Hinckley, eventually remarried and moved to Florida. Jordan gave up all hope of ever seeing his whitetail trophy again.

One day in 1964, a Minnesotan by the name of Robert Ludwig, a shirt-tail relative of Jordan's who also collected antlers, was strolling down Main Street in Sandstone (a town north of Hinckley) when he came to a rummage sale on a vacant corner lot. An item that caught Ludwig's eye was an old dusty mounted deer head, which, despite its mothy head sewed up with twine, possessed a magnificent rack. Ludwig, a forester for Minnesota's Department of Natural Resources, paid $3 for the rack and took it home.

He later became curious about the antlers, obtained an official form for measuring typical whitetail racks and measured the huge rack himself. He sent the results of an Official measurer for the Boone and Crockett awards program. The official thought Ludwig's measurements must be wrong. If they were right, the rack qualified as a new world-record typical whitetail buck.

He contacted Ludwig and arranged to see the big rack and to take his own set of measurements: an unbelievable score of 206 5/8, a world record. The score was submitted to Boone and Crockett officials, who asked for measuring by a panel of experts. The experts came up with the same score. Ludwig had indeed found the new world-record typical whitetail rack. He couldn't wait to tell his friends and relatives - particularly Jim Jordan.

When Jordan looked at the record rack he was stunned. It was the same rack he had lost 50 years ago to Van Castle the taxidermist. Ecstatic about the discovery, Jordan had a picture taken of himself with the record antlers. He showed it to old friends who had seen the head five decades ago. The agreed it looked like the same buck. Ludwig, however, disagreed and four years later, in 1968, he sold the record head for $1,500 to Charles T. Arnold, a deer antler collector from Nashua. New Hampshire who still owns the record rack.

So Jordan was separated from his trophy, although he continued to insist it was the same buck he killed in 1914. Eventually, the record was set straight when the Boone and Crockett Club credited Jordan with killing the world-record whitetail buck. But the long hunting adventure took one more bizarre twist when the announcement was made in December 1978: Jordan never heard it. Less than two months before his record claim was officially accepted, Jordan died at the age of 86.