6/23/2024 - Old Abe the War Eagle
I’d like to tell you a story today:
Okay so. In 1861 there was an eagle. An Ojibwe man named Ahgamahwegezhig (or “Chief Sky”) saw the eagle in a nest in a tree, cut down the tree, and kept the eagle for a pet. That summer, Chief Sky and his father canoed down the Chippewa River to Jim Falls, Wisconsin and traded the eagle to a couple named Margaret and Dan McCann for a bushel of corn.
Margaret and Dan raised the eagle as one of their own, along with their actual children. Dan McCann would play the fiddle (specifically Bonaparte’s Retreat) and the eagle would dance! Every day, the human McCann kids would hunt for rabbits and partridges for the eagle to eat. Sometimes, the eagle tried to escape! But he always returned.
Eventually, it became too hard to keep the large and spirited eagle as a family pet. It was August 1861, and the Civil War was newly underway. Dan McCann unsuccessfully tried to sell the eagle to a militia in Chippewa Falls, WI, and then tried again with another group of men at a bar in Eau Claire, WI. The members of the “Eau Claire Badgers” each chipped in a quarter to meet Dan’s asking price of $2.50. One guy refused to add his share of the donation, so everyone else in the bar beat him up until he agreed to pay for the whole thing1. Captain John C. Perkins named the eagle Old Abe, after Abraham Lincoln. Francis Billings built Old Abe a perch, and James McGinnis volunteered to be his caretaker.
About a month later, the Badgers and Old Abe headed off to war (on a steamboat named the Stella Whipple) and became Company C of the 8th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment. As they fought, through Missouri and Arkansas and Mississippi, the soldiers would carry Old Abe with them on his perch. During battle he would spread his wings and scream! He’d fly in circles over the field. He boosted the morale of the Union soldiers (who would wave their hats and cheer) and infuriated the Confederacy (who called him a Yankee Buzzard and put a bounty on his head!!).
In 1864, Old Abe got to retire. He (and the rest of Company C) returned to Wisconsin to huge fanfare and celebration2. They built a home (a two-bedroom apartment with a custom bathtub) for Old Abe in the capitol building in Madison. He would go out on various meet and greet tours across the country, including the 1876 Centennial Celebration in Philadelphia where he signed autographs by pecking a photo with his beak3. He was a war hero and a national celebrity.
In February 1881, disaster struck when the Wisconsin capitol building caught on fire. Old Abe sounded the alarm! He cried: ca-caw! Ca-caw! Or whatever sound eagles make. Everyone escaped and the fire was put out. But poor, sweet, heroic Abe suffered from smoke inhalation and died a month later in the arms of his caretaker, George Gilles. :(
That September, they stuffed Old Abe’s remains and put his taxidermied body back on display in the Capitol. Many visitors came to see him, including President Theodore Roosevelt, who was a big fan of Old Abe’s work. But then, in 1904, the building caught on fire again. This time everything burned down, including Old Abe’s remains and the glass box he was displayed in4. Now, a replica of Old Abe sits perched over the Wisconsin State Assembly Chamber, where generations of children can see him on a field trip to Madison after reading his story in their 4th grade Wisconsin History textbooks.
Old Abe’s legacy lives on in other ways, too. He’s the inspiration for the 101st Airborne Division screaming eagle insignia (you’ve seen it). There’s a high school in Eau Claire with an eagle mascot named “the Old Abes.” There’s a vegan cafe in Rochester, MN called Old Abe and Co. that sells “War Eagle Cold Brew.”
Why am I telling you about this? Why do I care so much about this inspirational eagle? Mostly because it’s a great story, with twists and turns and not one but two fires. I love a famous animal and obscure local history.
But I’m also telling you this because Dan McCann, the guy who bought Old Abe from Chief Sky for a bushel of corn, who sold Old Abe to Company C for $2.50, who played the fiddle for Old Abe around the family campfire, was…
my…
great great great grandfather.
And I didn’t know that until a couple of years ago. My sister was doing some genealogy stuff, clicking backwards through our family’s generations on an ancestry website, when she got to Daniel McCann Sr. and saw his name was hyperlinked to a wikipedia page, where the whole connection was written out right in front of our eyes.
I was an Old Abe enthusiast and evangelist long before I found that the war eagle is my uncle. (That’s how I refer to him; my uncle-eagle). I was breathlessly telling bored strangers about Old Abe on first dates over a decade ago, and I didn’t even know the story’s best and final plot twist: he’s my direct ancestor. All of the things I already felt about Old Abe—the curiosity, the amusement, the admiration, the pride—soared (pun intended) after I found out we’re related. The discovery is one of my favorite things that’s ever happened to me.
I’ve been dog-sitting at my parents’ house in Eau Claire for the past week or so, and used some of my abundant free time to visit a few Old Abe landmarks, as pictured throughout this piece. I took a little pilgrimage to visit Dan McCann’s grave, drove past Memorial High School (home of the Old Abes), and stopped by the educational plaque and statue in Wilson Park.
And so there you have it. The story of Old Abe the War Eagle, my valiant aquiline uncle, my family’s very own Civil War Mulan (it has been said that Dan was “pleased to think they were going to take the bird to war in his place because he was crippled and unable to serve.”5).
I hope you’ve enjoyed this brief foray into photojournalistic storytelling; thank you for indulging me. I’ll be back soon with more typical Reply Ali content: I used the rest of my abundant free time while dog-sitting to read 16,000 library books, and I’ll tell you all about them.
Ca-caw!!!
Ali
Great substack. I was on the edge of my seat. I love this line!!! "I was breathlessly telling bored strangers about Old Abe on first dates over a decade ago."