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Will sell or trade.... at least until Saturday
by Stephanie Hemphill, Minnesota Public Radio
April 1, 2004

A stuffed bear is one of the more conventional items in Tony Sheda's collection. (MPR Photo/Stephanie Hemphill)

Here's your chance to get that stuffed beaver you've always wanted. Of course, you'll have to drive to Duluth to get it. But where else are you going to find a wax statue of gunslinger John Wesley Hardin in his coffin? Tony Sheda is closing down his Trading Post, and he's auctioning off most of his treasures.

Duluth, Minn. — If you ever walked in downtown Duluth, you couldn't miss the old trapper sitting on a chair on the sidewalk outside Tony's Trading Post. The trapper wore a beaver skin hat and cowboy boots. Sometimes one foot was hoisted over his knee. He looked so relaxed, you had to look twice to see he wasn't real.

Downtown Duluth isn't exactly elegant. But still, an old mountain man sitting on the sidewalk was something to notice. He was a whiff of what Tony Sheda had to offer.

"Our motto was, and still is: if you absolutely positively don't need it, we got it," Sheda says.

	Mastodon tusks

Tony Sheda built up his collection over a lifetime. Just about everything's for sale. His trading post is packed with stuffed animals, old guns and knives, Indian beadwork and baskets. He did good business at state fairs and sports shows. Now he's packing it all up and getting ready to auction it off.

He works his way past piles of antlers, points out a pair of mastodon tusks, and stops at a mounted catfish the size of a grown man's leg.

"Something like that, I don't really want to get rid of it," he says. "For one thing, you're never going find it a catfish. Nobody mounts them!"

Sheda also has a mounted carp. "Everyone wants walleyes and northerns, but who mounts carp? I've got a 40-pound carp," he says with a laugh.

And then there's the boar with three heads. Tony Sheda says that one's not real.

	Snapping turtle walking stick

"From what I understand when I bought it," he says, "it was made for one of those - I don't even know if you could call it a B-rated movie - maybe a C-rated thriller. Kind of an awesome thing, isn't it?"

Tony Sheda grew up in Iowa. He learned about collecting and dealing from his dad.

"Farmers knew we were slightly odd, maybe, or eccentric," Sheda says. "I like eccentric, that's a little better. But a farmer once brought in a pig born with one body and two heads. And then a couple of years later another farmer brought in the opposite. So Dad put it in formaldehyde, and we've still got it. That's over 50-some years old," he says.

Sheda married a woman from Duluth, and brought the collector's bug north. He started the store as a museum to display his collection. But people kept asking to buy things. And now everything's for sale.

He's looking for offers on a bison head.

	Bison

"The price tag on it is about $2500," Sheda says. "Somebody will come in and say, 'Boy, I sure like that buffalo, but I've only got $1500, and I've got - who knows what - to trade.' And right away when I hear 'trade,' I say, 'Tell me what you got," and we'll go from there.

"So it ends up, I might sell a buffalo head but I got 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 things in partial trade, and maybe someone will come in and trade for them, so then you've got to get rid of that stuff. It goes on and on and on. If you make a trade and the two people walk away satisfied, it's a good trade. But by the same token, if somebody walked away and wasn't satisfied, that's good too," he says, laughing.

Sheda and his sons are auctioning off most of his stuff this weekend. He's closing the store because the landlord wants to remodel the building. Sheda says he's about ready to retire anyway. But he says he'll probably still do a little trading from home.

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