145 AT THE PAINTED WOODS. 
hunters, yet these animals held their own in a remarkable 
manner during the two decades from 1870 to 1890. 
In the early seventies Reynolds the hunter estimated 
that nearly every timber point between Fort Stevenson 
and Heart river contained from fifty to one hundred deer. 
This seemed a fair estimate judging from the amount 
slain every season. Ranchman Merry and his three 
boys killed on an average about one hundred deer a 
season between the years 1875 and 1885, around the 
Painted Woods Lake, and the hunters in other points 
were almost equally destructive to these animals. 
For many years dating from 1870 until about the year 
1876 there lived and flourished an animal variously 
known as the Hiddenwood buck, ghost deer, phantom 
deer, etc. 
The deer was a large ten pronged buck with a never 
changing hairy coat of iron gray. He ranged back and 
forth between the Missouri bottom, and Hiddenwood 
Creek, a branch flowing into Painted Woods Creek 
from the South. 
Although adroit in his movements the color of his 
hair made the deer an easy mark, and yet strange to say 
with the hundreds of shots fired at him by expert hunters 
none of them seemed to have taken effect as he always 
turned up regularly in his old haunts. For this he be- 
came famous to the hunters—many of whom believed 
it was really a deer’s ghost and was impervious to hunt- 
er’s rifles. Some of them averred that he drew the shots 
from the huntsmen,which would alarm the real flesh and 
blood deer and permit them to escape the stalking hunter. 
Be his fate what may, he disappeared about the time of 
the Custer massacre, and while we have no record of his 
death neither have we any record of his reappearance. 
