Steve and I cut our deal for exclusive publishing rights to Dick’s photos and stories and left Montana making plans to publish some sort of magazine for serious whitetail hunters centered around trophy bucks. What we had not yet decided was whether this new publication was going to be an ongoing periodical published several times a year or an “annual type” publication printed once or twice each year during peak season. We just weren’t sure if the interest in trophy whitetails was sufficient to support an ongoing magazine devoted entirely to whitetails.
With that concern in mind, we hedged our bets. We assembled the first issue and put it on the newsstands in the fall of 1982, without a date or edition designation. If it sold well, we had another edition in the hopper and were prepared to make the magazine a regular periodical. If it didn’t sell well, we would let the first magazine stand alone as a special publication or an annual.
The answer came very quickly as the magazines flew from the racks. We hastily completed the second installment and got it to the newsstand with date and edition designation (February 1983). And thus North American Whitetail magazine was born!
WHERE HAS THE TIME GONE?
Now, 25 years later, I can only shake my head at the doubt we had about whether the market was large enough to support a deer-only magazine about big whitetails. The answer, of course, is a resounding “Yes!” — far beyond anything we could have imagined. Today, countless deer magazines adorn the newsstand racks, and whitetail hunting has emerged as the largest hunting interest in the world. It supports the U.S. hunting industry almost single-handedly.
Nobody could have predicted the explosion that has taken place in the whitetail world during the last 25 years. Where the once familiar cosmopolitan whitetail was practically taken for granted, it’s now revered by countless hunters and considered to be “the greatest game animal on earth.” Certainly, it is the most popular and most plentiful big game animal on earth. No other animal on the planet has the following that whitetails have . . . not even close! Nor is there any other big game animal anywhere that can rival its numbers — some 20 million strong at this writing.
And I don’t know of any other animal that inspires so many to such passion as does the whitetail, especially big, mature bucks. Dick Idol said something to me at that first Dixie Deer Classic that rings true today for not only me but also for countless other hunters. “You may hunt all the other great game animals of the world once or twice, and you’ll love the experience, but once you’ve hunted big whitetails, it’s them that you’ll keep coming back to again and again.”
REACHING NEW PLATEAUS
What has been the reason for this meteoric rise in the whitetail’s popularity? Several things. One is the fact that whitetail populations have grown and spread into virtually every available niche over the last 25 years. Whitetails are everywhere — from city suburbs to the wild, remote places, from the tip of Florida to the forests of New Brunswick, and from Mexico to the vast wilderness of northern Canada . . . and everywhere in between.
North American Whitetall North American Whitetail is designed for the serious trophy hunter. It provides authoritative coverage of world-class whitetails, the latest approaches to deer management and advanced hunting techniques.
