The Sad End of Seattle's National Symbol
An American eagle, formerly an ornamental storefront display, escaped into the streets of Seattle, only to meet a tragic fate at the hands of those who couldn't handle its fierce independence.
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.
A peculiar incident occurred on one of our principal streets this morning which finds no parallel in the annals of history. The great American eagle, which has for some time adorned the portal of the Northwest Fruit Co.'s store on Mill street, was allowed to fly free, as it was just and proper that such a bird, our national emblem, should have its liberty. Finding himself once more free and unaccustomed, he quietly amused himself by roaming the street, being unable to rise and soar to his lofty height on account of a hermit-like broken wing which he received at the time of his capture in the territory of Louisiana, where it took the combined efforts of two men and a dog to defeat him. While he was in the street, he was set upon by two ferocious fellows of the canine species, and after defending himself against them for some time, they finally decided to give up the fight, fearing the mighty power in his terrible talons. Seeing the helpless condition of the bird and being in danger of getting run over, Mr. Horton thought it best to relieve it of its life. He did so by a blow of a club, and after striking it upon the head seven successive times, the bird still lived and only gave up the last breath of life at the expiration of nine and one-half hours. It measured seventy inches from wing tip to wing tip and the talons eight inches. It weighed nine pounds.
“Finding himself once more free and unaccustomed, he quietly amused himself by roaming the street.”
In 1884, Seattle was a frontier town where the boundary between ‘ornament’ and ‘wildlife’ was blurred. Today, while we have evolved our protections for national symbols, the story of an eagle struggling to navigate the urban sprawl of Mill Street (now Yesler Way) resonates with the ongoing, difficult tension between Seattle’s rapid development and the local wildlife we displace.
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