MINNEAPOLIS — Walk into the Moccasin Bar in Hayward, Wis., and along with sipping a tall, cool one you can gawk at a mount of Cal Johnson’s record 1949 muskie. At 67 1/2 pounds and a tad longer than 60 inches, Old Cal’s memorable catch occurred on Lac Courte Oreilles near Hayward.

Not far from the Moccasin, at the Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame, entombed like an ancient treasure is a replica of another record muskie, this one taken in the Chippewa Flowage, also near Hayward, later in 1949.

Nicknamed “Chin Whiskered Charlie,” this trophy was caught by the famous, and also infamous, Louie Spray, onetime owner of the Moccasin, then known as Spray’s Cafe and Bar.

Weighing 69 pounds, 11 ounces and measuring 63 1/2 inches, Spray’s whopper, unlike Johnson’s, which was beached, was plugged twice in the head with a handgun at boatside, a common Wisconsin practice until it was outlawed in 1966.

Tourist attractions that these two outsized specimens remain, some 77 years after they first rose from the depths of Wisconsin’s most celebrated muskie waters, they nevertheless swim in timeless controversy.

Perhaps, as some claim, instead of catching his record muskie, Spray bought it for $50 from Joey “The Doves” Aiuppa, the alleged head of Chicago’s crime syndicate.

And maybe Johnson’s 60 1/4-inch muskie actually measured only 54 inches, as a team of photogrammetry specialists concluded in 2008.

Regardless, thanks to Hannah Hartman, age 11, and her sister, Norah, 9, of Chippewa Falls, integrity has been restored to Badger State muskie fishing.

“The girls go fishing with me a few times a year,” said Ryan Hartman, Hannah and Norah’s dad. “We keep a seasonal RV lease on the Holcombe Flowage, which is downstream from the Chippewa Flowage. Last year, we bought a golf cart to get us to our boat. On the day the girls caught their muskies, I told them if they went with me, one could drive the cart to the dock, and the other could drive back.”

Once on the lake, Ryan tied crankbaits onto the girls’ lines. He doubted a muskie would bite, or even a northern. So he knotted the lures directly onto the lines, without leaders.

“I placed the rods in holders and we started trolling. In a short time, the line on one of the rods tightened and the rod bent,” Ryan said. “I handed the rod to Hannah. We could tell it was a pretty big fish, and I figured it was either a northern or a muskie. Or maybe a catfish.”

Said Hannah: “When I got the fish close to the boat, and it dove under the boat, that’s when we saw it was a muskie, and I got real excited.”

Ryan had only a small net, suited for walleyes and panfish. So he needed a couple stabs at the muskie before he could corral it.

Respectable at about 32 inches long, and probably about 6 years old, the muskie was a memory maker, for sure.

“A little while later, rain started to fall, so we ducked under an overpass,” Ryan said. “After the rain stopped, I told the girls we’d troll back to the dock and be done fishing.”

En route, a second fish hit one of the girl’s baits, and Ryan handed the rod to Norah.

Leaping into the air, and tail-walking, this fish, also a muskie, was obviously bigger than Hannah’s.

“I worried about whether the rod Norah was using would hold up, because it was just a cheap one we won at a campground picnic,” Ryan said.

His concerns were justified. As Norah reeled the muskie closer to the boat, it dove. When it did, the tip of her rod snapped. Then a line guide on what was now the end of the rod popped off.

“This was a big fish and I knew I would never get it into my net,” Ryan said. “When I saw a couple guys passing by in a boat, I waved them down to help.”

As one of the good Samaritan anglers held his boat alongside Ryan’s, the other produced a net large enough to hold Norah’s catch.

But when Ryan reached for the fish with the borrowed net, hauling it over his boat’s gunnel, the net broke, spilling the muskie onto the boat’s floor.

“My tape measure only went to 4 feet. So we measured the fish in two parts,” Ryan said. “It was 51 1/2 inches.”

This being a Wisconsin muskie story, there’s a tavern angle.

Not far from where Hannah and Norah caught their big fish is Flater’s Resort, a hangout that welcomes anglers and other yarn spinners.

The resort is owned by “Musky Joe” Flater. A storied muskie guide, Joe is enshrined in the Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame.

Appropriately, various dead stuff decorates the walls of Flater’s Resort.

A whitetail buck, a bear, a beaver, a bobcat and three very large muskies peer down on patrons as they imbibe Leinenkugel’s and trash-talk the Vikings.

“What do a wrecked car and the Vikings have in common?” one Cheesehead might say to another.

“I don’t know, what?”

“Neither has a title.”

And so on.

“Ryan,” I said, “you might want to take Hannah and Norah over to Flater’s. You could order them a couple of lemonades. They’ve got some muskie stories to tell, and who knows, they might be truer than Louie Spray’s and Cal Johnson’s.”

A long moment passed.

Then Ryan said, “I might want to see what their mother says about that.”

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