Reality show

When Cabela’s opens in Post Falls next month, the outdoor retailer will display four antique bear traps from Paul Snider’s collection. One 50-pounder dates to the 1870s. “You can always tell the handmade traps, because you can see hammer marks,” said Snider, a gun show promoter from Lewiston. “Every one of those teeth was made by hand, and riveted in.”

Snider, 70, spent 30 years assembling one of the Northwest’s largest collections of Newhouse bear traps, which were used by trappers across the western frontier and Canada. Earlier this year, he sold 80 of the traps to Cabela’s. The traps – valued from $600 to $12,000 each – would have fetched more if they were sold individually to other collectors. But Snider likes the idea of putting the traps on display.

“I told them that I wanted the best ones going to Cabela’s in Post Falls,” he said.

Mark Dowse often hears requests like that. A former Forest Service biologist who now works for the Sidney, Neb.-based outdoors retailer, Dowse is in charge of acquiring the mounts and artifacts that go into each Cabela’s store. His budget varies based on store size, but typically runs in the $1 million range.

Trophy mounts and hunting artifacts are common décor for sporting goods retailers, but Cabela’s has made its museum-style displays a central part of its marketing plan. According to company estimates, the 125,000-square-foot Post Falls store will attract 2 million visitors annually from the Inland Northwest, plus parts of Canada, Montana and Oregon. It opens on Nov. 9.

Some of the exhibits — such as African dioramas, mountains featuring North American wildlife, and models of world-record catfish — are generic to Cabela’s stores. Others are intensely regional.

“We try to get local things from around that area,” said Dowse, Cabela’s taxidermy product manager.

The Post Falls store will also display a mountain caribou shot in the Yukon Territory in 1965 by the Rev. Russell Mercer of Coeur d’Alene, which is ranked 9th in the Boone and Crockett Club’s record book. Dowse, who was busy setting up a new store in Reno, couldn’t remember exactly how he acquired it, but said he bought it from a local collector.

The 100-year-old Hayspur trout hatchery near Sun Valley will also be featured in an exhibit at the Post Falls Cabela’s, along with photos of the late outdoor writer Jack O’Connor, a longtime Field and Stream editor who hunted for Stone sheep in British Columbia.

Cabela’s officials like to say that the elaborate displays in the firm’s 21 retail stores bring the company’s catalogs to life. “You could go to many warehouse-style stores to buy fish hooks and hunting boots, but when you come to Cabela’s you get inspired,” said John Castillo, Cabela’s spokesman.

Cabela’s is one of the few stores that men will shop in for hours, noted Patricia Johnson of Seattle’s Outcalt & Johnson: Retail Strategists.

“There’s a tremendous ‘wow’ effect when you walk into these stores,” she said. “The Cabela’s customer is looking for a collection of merchandise that has to do with that outdoor lifestyle. What Cabela’s does in their stores is try to recreate that kind of outdoor experience.”

Dowse starts collecting the items for each store about a year before it opens. For mounts, he uses a network of taxidermy shops to spread the word on whether he needs mule deer, whitetails, cougar or pronghorn antelope. He also advertises in outdoor magazines.

The number of mounts varies by store size. Post Falls, which is a smaller format, will have 350 to 400 animals on display. A Cabela’s in Hamburg, Penn., which is twice the size, has nearly 900 mounts.

A rhinoceros is part of the African savannah exhibit in Post Falls. “If the store is large enough, it supports an elephant,” Dowse said.

Exotic and endangered animals are harder to acquire, because international law restricts their sale.

“You can’t sell, but you can always donate,” Dowse said. “We get lots of calls from hunters who are just back from Africa…Ninety-five percent of our stuff comes from hunters who’ve gone on the hunt of a lifetime.”

About 80 percent of the wildlife mounts in each Cabela’s are authentic, according to Dowse. The remainder feature real animal skins, but reproductions of trophy-sized racks. However, nearly all of the fish are reproductions because it’s hard to acquire quality skin-mounted fish, he said.

A 37,000-square-foot warehouse in Nebraska stores the mounts and display items until Dowse and his assembly team need them. For the eight Cabela’s stores opening this fall, the team loaded 30 semi trucks.

Some of those semis transported the Newhouse bear traps that were once part of Snider’s collection. Like many of Dowse’s best finds, he acquired the traps after Snider contacted him.

A mutual friend made the introduction. Snider was looking for a good home for the collection, which has both historic and sentimental value.

“My dad was a person who loved to hunt. He left me two guns and that bear trap,” said Snider, whose father drowned in a duck hunting accident when his son was 14.

As an adult, Snider bought Newhouse traps whenever he came across them at gun shows. First designed in 1823 by New York blacksmith Sewell Newhouse, the traps applied the idea of interchangeable parts to animal snares. They quickly began staples of frontier life, Snider said.

Now they’re prized as collector’s items — showing up as décor for trophy cabins. Using a foothold to trap bears has been outlawed in most states.

“Even though I love to hunt and fish and I love traps, that was a good decision,” said Snider, who recently returned from bear hunting in Alaska. “I wouldn’t want to shoot one in a trap.”