The Indestructible Spring Chicken
A satirical look at local wildlife hunting and the legendary toughness of the American barnyard bird.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
In an article intended for the instruction of bird hunters, Derrick Dodd writes: 'The vicinity of all our Pacific coast towns affords the finest kind of rifle practice in the shape of small birds, many of which, though unknown to the kitchen, are delightful eating. Among these the woodpecker, jaybird and kingfisher admit of enjoyable sport. The hedge sparrow is also finely flavored, two thousand of them making a meal for an ordinary sized family. All indispensable articles of the country shooter's outfit is a loose, baggy ulster, which will be found useful in carrying ducks, pullets, etc., home from the vicinity of farmhouses. There is no use, however, in shooting at the spring chicken of commerce—it simply results in flattening the bullets and straining the gun. Nothing kills the average spring chicken but old age and earthquakes. It has been asserted that a spring chicken could be induced to resign by being rammed into a cannon and fired against a stone wall, but the odds are against it. General Sherman fed a spring chicken his troops captured on his famous march to the sea, which the boys kept chained in a camp kettle for five weeks, just pouring in water and hard tack and hanging it over the fire when they wanted chicken soup. At the expiration of that time it snapped, 'and I hope I may be paralyzed,' said the General, 'if, in the meantime, it hadn't gotten as fat as butter on the hard tack.''
“Nothing kills the average spring chicken but old age and earthquakes.”
While written as a piece of tall-tale humor, this reflects the era's transition from subsistence hunting in rural Washington to an increasingly commercialized food supply. Today’s obsession with hyper-local, farm-to-table sourcing provides a modern irony to these Victorian-era claims about 'sporting' for small birds in town.
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