Dan posted this enormous rack on Facebook yesterday and asked: Has the mystery of the Minnesota Monarch been solved?
The Minnesota Monarch was a legendary buck that roamed the remote woods of northern Minnesota in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A man picked up his fresh sheds (picture below) in 1990; they had 39 points and net-scored around 334 inches. If somebody had shot this deer in the fall of 1989 it would have been the highest-scoring wild buck ever killed by a hunter. Those antlers still rank #1 in the shed record book.
But then the Monarch vanished. There is no evidence that a hunter ever shot him. People speculate that the deer died of old age…or was eaten by wolves…or maybe fell through thin ice on a lake and drowned. But nobody knows for sure, and this massive rack has never been seen again.
Still hasn’t. Come to find out, the rack that Dan posted is not from the Monarch, though it has some similarities, especially if you envision it as a rack several years later as the buck was going downhill. But the top rack is apparently off a game-farm deer, and the story goes it sold at an Iowa antler auction this spring for $1,100.
Twenty-five years, and the mystery of the Minnesota Monarch lives on.
Man that’s neat. I still go into the woods hoping to catch an old tine poking out of the earth or grass from a buck that was killed here in ’94. Called the Blank buck for the trad bowman that killed him. At the time he was #2 nontyp bow kill in MT. He scored aroun 210 or something like that. The year before, my brother missed him and other hunters tried hard to tag him. They estimated him to be 30-40 inches larger the year before as he was really going downhill when he was killed. I still look for those sheds. We have found sheds that are decades old here so maybe someday…. I hope that find the monarch someday. Our river swallows up sheds and dead bucks. The oldest shed I truly now how long ago it was she’d is seven years old.
Saw a presumed replica of the sheds on a mount in a taxi. shop during a fishing trip one year. Guy played it off like I didn’t know what I was talking about; nor that he knew of any “Minnesota Monarch”. Truth is my Uncle owns a cabin not too far from where that buck was living. Never know what might show up in the great Northwoods.