A ‘Gould’ Shot More Than a Century Ago: Maine’s Biggest Non-Typical Whitetail Deer Ever Harvested

With 3,500 miles of coastline, Maine often evokes images of lobsters, scenic ocean drives, and trips to Mount Desert Island to tour Acadia National Park. What is perhaps rarely conjured in the imagination when thinking of the Pine Tree State is hunting big game. It ought to be, however. The state, according to its Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, has “one of the biggest moose and black bear populations in the ‘Lower 48,'” and many people go there to hunt those animals as well as the whitetail deer.

The state is a literal 17-million-acre forested playground for hunters, with about 320,000 whitetail deer call Maine home. Most of them are situated in the central and southern parts of the state. Hunting is a favorite pastime in Maine, and the opportunity to bag a record whitetail deer might be reason enough to visit.

Maine’s Biggest Ever

The Boone and Crocket Club was established by Theodore Roosevelt and others in 1887 to prevent wildlife from being hunted to extinction. The club also sets guidelines for big game hunting records like whitetail deer. When it comes to determining what garners a trophy, the focus is not on the body size or weight of the animal but rather on its antler size and complexity through a scoring system. Records are kept in two categories to describe the antlers: typical and non-typical.

Scores are determined by counting the number of points on the antlers and measuring several elements: the width of the main beam spread of the antlers from tip to tip, the inside spread, the length of the main beam, the length of the points, and the circumference between points. These measurements are then calculated according to a formula developed by the Boone and Crocket Club. A minimum score of 170 is considered an all-timer in the typical category and 195 in the non-typical.

In Typical Fashion

According to the Boone and Crockett Club, Ronnie Cox bagged the record for the largest typical whitetail deer harvested in Maine’s history during a 1965 hunt. His trophy bucked scored 193-2/8. For comparison, the score for the world record for whitetail deer in the typical category is 213-5/8, which was set by Milo Hanson in 1993.

A Non-Typical Day

Fifty-five years earlier, a registered Maine guide and hunter Hill Gould shot a non-typical whitetail deer that would go down in history. During a 1910 hunt along Little River in northeast Maine, Gould came upon a deer for the ages. While perched beside the river after a long day of waiting, he noticed a whitetail buck appear from behind a grove of alder trees. It was so large, he almost thought it was a ghost. His hunting instincts kicked in, however, and he felled the massive buck with one shot.

Sensing this buck to be something special, he quickly sold the antlers to a nearby hunting camp owner for $50 ($1,570 today). From there, the antlers passed through more than a dozen hands over the next century. Word spread pretty quickly about the deer’s impressive and unusual rack, but it didn’t enter the Boone and Crockett record books officially until 1994. Once officially recognized, the score of 259 easily became the record holder for the largest non-typical whitetail deer harvested in Maine, bumping to No. 2 the previous score of 248-1/8 set in 1945, although it’s a bit “smaller” than the world record—333-7/8—which was found in 1981 in St. Louis County, Missouri.