The Great Tacoma Chicken Heist
A witness in the theft trial of a local gang describes how hundreds of chickens were lured and captured under the cover of darkness.
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.
The manner in which several thousand chickens were stolen and disposed of in Tacoma during the past few months was told on the trial by Mrs. T. J. Johnson, one of the persons arrested. Mrs. Johnson testified that she resided on Eighteenth and L streets; she had been acquainted with Woodward, Davis, and the two Walkers for some time. Woodward, specifically, had brought chickens to her place six or seven times. He told her the way he caught them was to burn brimstone under their noses, and when they fell, wring their necks and put them in a sack. Woodward would never come until after 12 o'clock at night. Mrs. Johnson claimed she generally paid the boys so much, according to the price she received for them. The chickens were brought after midnight, sometimes dressed and sometimes undressed.
“He told me the way he caught them was to burn brimstone under their noses, and when they fell, wring their necks and put them in a sack.”
While chicken theft feels like a quaint, rustic crime, it speaks to the desperation and informal economies of the 1880s boomtowns. Today, supply chain concerns in Seattle are dominated by high-tech theft and corporate logistics, but the shadow economy of the late 19th century reminds us that even then, every goods-producing industry had a 'second market' operating in the dark.
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