Dear Dede,

My interest in the gopher and The Gophers began as an eight year old. This was when I learned that a bounty of two cents was being offered by many Minnesota counties for the tail of a striped gopher. And the U of M football team entered a decade with powerhouse teams that gave them a national reputation, with genuine heroes, like Bronko Nagurski, who became legends of the game. And homegrown too; these were Minnesota men playing old fashioned single wing football. With their size and strength they dominated. There were a couple of imports, from North Dakota and Wisconsin, as I remember. It's little wonder that Gopher football was the only game in town. There was no major league team of any kind. So the only sport that I was interested in was football. Gopher bounty hunting was another story that was never successful for me!

The U of M did not choose the lowly gopher as its mascot. That decision dated to quite a few years ago. It seems that there was some discussion in the middle of the 19th century, before Minnesota became a state, about whether to call Minnesota "The Gopher State" or "The Beaver State." Opponents of "The Gopher State" called the striped gopher an insignificant animal with a destructive nature. The striped gopher was too useless and undignified to represent the future great state of Minnesota. Opponents of "The Beaver State" argued that the beaver, while numerous in streams, was not abundant enough to represent the whole of Minnesota. A political cartoon, widely circulated throughout the territory, gave wider exposure to the gopher and "The Beaver State" faded into history.