Few animals are more deeply woven into America’s outdoor story than the white-tailed deer. As the nation celebrates 250 years, it’s fitting to honor the biggest known free-ranging typical whitetail ever to walk the earth: the General.
There are a handful of legendary bucks whose names are burned into the memories of old-school whitetail hunters. The Hanson Buck, the Jordan Buck and the Mel Johnson Buck are arguably the three best-known hunter-taken whitetails of all time.
But there are a few equally recognizable names that never wore a hunter’s tag: the Hole in the Horn Buck, the Missouri Monarch and … the General.
The General sheds were already among the most famous whitetail antlers ever known, but even that legendary status didn’t prepare the deer-hunting world for what happened in 2025.
That's when the General became even more famous, or perhaps infamous, when a whirlwind of events brought this incredible whitetail back into the spotlight. It’s a story 67 years in the making, and one that includes $1 million, intrigue and possible deception. But it’s also a story about faith—faith in sticking with your gut instinct, and faith in trusting God’s plan.
The General Sheds and the Birth of a Legend
The legend of the General began in 1959 in the small Nebraska town of Sargent. That’s where rancher Ben Barnhart was tending a newborn calf when a gleam of antler caught his eye. After picking up a giant shed, he soon found its mate nearby. The antlers had likely dropped when the big buck jumped a fence and jarred them loose on the landing.
Barnhart was intrigued, but what he did next shouldn’t come as a surprise. He tossed the giant sheds onto the dirt floor in the corner of his barn.
Keep in mind, this was before deer hunting was even allowed in many states. Ironically, 1958 was the first year Nebraska’s Zone 7 offered a gun season for whitetails. There was no social media, very few cameras and certainly no hunting television to stoke the popularity of giant whitetails.
The sheds remained in that little corner of the barn for more than a decade. Then, sometime in the 1970s, Barnhart’s son put them on a wall, sawing off part of the bases so they would fit on a mounting board.
All those years in the barn were hard on the antlers. In addition to the sawed-off bases, rodents had chewed into the calcium- and phosphorus-rich sheds in several places.
How the General Sheds Became a World Record
A European mount was out of the question for obvious reasons. The General’s sheds, mounted on a small wooden plaque covered in green velvet as though they were attached to a complete skull plate, eventually caught the ear, and then the eye, of former Oklahoma deer outfitter Tim Condict.
Condict heard about the sheds while searching for new hunting ground in the Midwest, and curiosity led him to see them for himself.
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That was in 1995, when deer hunting had started to become “a thing.” Condict knew he was looking at something special, and he soon contacted antler collector Brad Gsell and helped broker a sales agreement.
A few months later, Gsell returned the antlers to Condict. About a year after that, in 1996, legendary whitetail hunter and artist Dick Idol helped arrange the sale of the sheds to outdoors superstore Cabela’s for $63,000.
It was Idol who gave the sheds their famous name. Asked about it recently, Idol said he doesn’t recall exactly what prompted the General moniker. But the sheds were found near the town of Sargent and in Custer County, so the name fits.
In 1998, a measuring tape was applied to the General’s sheds for the first time. The North American Shed Hunters Club, one of the few official measuring organizations that puts a tape to shed antlers, came up with scores of 108 inches for the left shed and 103 2/8 inches for the right.
Deductions, don’t get me started on those, cost the deer 16 1/8 inches and brought the set’s official score down to 195 1/8. Even so, the General became the largest set of typical sheds ever recorded: a new world record.
To put that into perspective, if those antlers had been on a skull plate with a reasonable corresponding spread of 25 inches, the General would have surpassed the current hunter-taken typical world record, the Hanson Buck, by about 10 inches.
Keep in mind, however, that because they’re sheds, the General’s antlers were never in competition with hunter-taken typicals like the Hanson Buck.
The $1 Million Deal That Brought the General Back
The next time the General changed hands was in 2018, when collector Keith Snider bought the sheds from Bass Pro Shops for an undisclosed price. Bass Pro Shops had purchased Cabela’s in 2016.
Snider remained the happy owner of the rack until 2025, when deer hunter Josh Duncan came into his life. Josh doesn’t describe himself as an antler collector. He’s just a guy who bought some hunting land and missed the incredible ambiance the property’s lodge once had.
“After I closed on the property and was able to go back and visit, all the taxidermy was gone, and the great room lost its aura,” Josh said. “I asked myself what I could do to bring the aura back and, just crazily, I thought, ‘Man, if the General was hanging right above the fireplace and you walked in this room, the aura would be back with one animal.’ So that’s really what spurred me to think about trying to obtain the General.”
Josh is a smart businessman with the drive, determination and means to pay $1 million for a set of antlers. But he did so as an investment, one that also happened to double as an instant room-aura restorer.
And he pulled it off without getting divorced!
“It was weird,” Josh said. “I knew I had to buy the deer. I just knew that. I didn’t want to negotiate on price. I knew $1 million was kind of … I just had to figure it out. It was a weird, gut intuition, God, I don’t know. But I knew I had to acquire it.”
More General Sheds Come to Light
Next came a chain of events almost too crazy to believe. Melissa Miller had found a large whitetail antler shed while going through her grandparents’ estate. Curious whether it had any significance, she took it to the Iowa Deer Classic in March 2025.
Shane Indrebo, who was manning the NASHC booth, stopped Miller and asked about the shed. She said it had been found near Sargent, a little town in Nebraska.
Hearing that name immediately made the hairs on the back of Indrebo’s neck stand up. Could it be another shed from the General?
Indrebo posed that very question to his friend and fellow antler collector Ryan Pellersels, who happened to own a large set of sheds also found in central Nebraska. Pellersels said not only was it possible the Miller shed was from the General, but it also made him wonder whether his own set might be from the famous buck.
The two had to know. After he got home, Pellersels shared a video of his sheds with Indrebo. They immediately agreed: Those sheds had to have come from the General. Miller’s shed quite possibly could have as well.
The Pellersels set, found in 1964, and the Miller shed, thought to have been found in 1961, were both smaller than the original 1959 sheds, indicating an older buck that was starting to decline.
Nevertheless, three newly discovered possible sheds from the world-record typical were too big to keep under wraps. Avid shed collector Mike Charowhas posted about the potential discovery on his Facebook page. And that’s when things got really interesting.
READ MORE: 18 Facts About Whitetail Buck Biology
The Photos That Changed the Story
Newly discovered sheds from the General were big news in the whitetail antler world, and Charowhas’ post was seen by Bill Saner, the neighbor of Ben Barnhart, the original finder of the General.
Saner had some old photos of the General that Barnhart had given him long ago, so he innocently shared them on Charowhas’ Facebook page.
Those photos, which clearly showed two additional sticker points that are no longer on the rack, changed everything. While two relatively small missing points might not sound like a big deal, in the world of whitetail records, it was a bombshell.
Exactly 41 days after the sale of the General, Charowhas called Josh and told him he needed to go to his Facebook page immediately.
“I saw the stickers, and it was … it was rough,” Josh said. “I thought, ‘What do I do now?’ It was a problem, because in the contract, I was purchasing the number one set of sheds as recognized by the North American Shed Hunters Club.”
Why were the stickers a problem? Antlers that have been altered are not accepted into most official record books. Josh knew what was coming, and he was fully expecting the text he got from NASHC telling him the General was no longer the club’s world-record typical.
He had just spent $1 million on a very large whitetail rack that had suddenly lost its official status, and with it, a huge piece of what made it worth seven figures.
Why the General Lost Official Record Status
As we leave Josh pondering his $1 million dilemma, you’re probably wondering when and why those sticker points were removed. Thanks to Josh’s fine detective work, we know the answers to some of those questions.
The rack suffered rodent damage during its time in the barn, and you can clearly see in the old photos where the third point on the right shed was gnawed about halfway up the tine. Therefore, it’s no surprise restoration work had been done.
Josh found the man who performed that work: Iowa’s Tom Sexton. Sexton not only remembered working on the General, but he even had the letter from Tim Condict detailing what Condict wanted done to the rack.
Of particular interest, Condict’s letter called out two spots, “one G2 and the other G3,” that he himself had worked on because they had been “mouse chewed.” He asked Sexton to blend in those spots to match the rest of the rack.
There are reasons someone might remove sticker points from a rack. Non-typical points are deducted from the score of typical racks, so those stickers would have lowered the General’s score.
But whatever the reason they were no longer there, the most important point was that the rack had been altered, leaving Josh with a major decision.
“What do I do, you know?” Josh asked. “I had to do a lot of soul searching to find out.”
Record Books Aside, the General Is Still the Biggest Typical Ever
Call him crazy, but even though he would have been within his rights to kill the sale (he had made just one of the installment payments agreed to in the contract), Josh said to hell with the records.
He loves the General, loves the story and has fully embraced the rack both as it is and as it was. He has doubled down on the General, literally, spending another $1 million to produce a documentary on the buck that will premiere July 4, 2026.
“I saw an opportunity to say, ‘Even though many collectors think this deer is worthless now, I still see the value in it,’” Josh said. “But it’s kind of the Christian story as well, right? Even though we’re sinners and even though we do stupid things, God still puts a lot of value on us. I saw this as an opportunity to share that message.”
Josh still proudly shows off the original General sheds, but he’s also had several replicas made that include the sticker points, as determined by exhaustive scans of the old photos. He calls the replica sheds the OG General, for Original by God.
He has also launched a line of OG General replicas and artwork to celebrate what is still the biggest known wild typical whitetail ever to walk the earth.
What Happened to The General?
There is one more thing that separates the General from many of the most famous whitetails in history: Nobody knows how he died.
The Hole in the Horn Buck was hit by a train in 1940, and the Missouri Monarch was hit by a car in 1981. But nobody ever found the General’s body.
We know him only through his antlers. For decades, that meant the original 1959 sheds found by Barnhart. Now the story includes more.
Josh purchased the Pellersels sheds and sent material off for DNA testing. They are, in fact, from the General.
Miller recently got her results back, and her shed has also been verified as belonging to the General. That gives the buck two complete verified sets of sheds and one additional verified shed, spanning the final years of his life.
What we don’t know is where he spent his final days, or exactly how his story ended.
What we do know is that no hunter ever harvested the buck. Although it spent time in places frequented by humans, it lived to at least 10 years old and died in the wild, adding even more to its legend.
Editor’s Note: The legendary bucks mentioned in this article weren’t high-fence animals, pen-raised specimens or products of controlled genetics. They were wild, free-ranging whitetails, whether taken by hunters, found after death or known only through the antlers they left behind.
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