And How to Judge Them- A Thorough Description of Color and Shape— Defects 



of All Varieties, With the Correct Valuation of Same— How and When 



the Several Varieties Originated. 



By THEO. HEWES. 



HEN by accident the blood of several breeds 

 of fowls was mingled, each adding a lit- 

 tle and losing much of its own strength 

 in the offspring, there was none to pre- 

 dict that these crosses, brought together 

 no doubt by merest accident, would give 

 to the poultry fanciers a foundation for 

 one of the most popular breeds of fowls 

 the world has ever known. But such is 

 true, and there is not today, nor never 

 has been at any time, a single person that could give 

 an absolutely correct account of the crosses that produced 

 the first Wyandottes. 



Hundreds, yes, thousands, of pages have been written 

 concerning the origin of this breed, but they contain nothing 

 that can be taken as positive facts. It was the general 

 make-up of the original Silvers and the peculiar shape and 

 color as found in them years ago that gave a sort of solu-' 

 tion to the puzzle. 



Certain breeds entered into them; this we know, be- 

 cause crossing of these breeds has given us something that 

 very much resembles the original birds. We say resem- 

 bles, but not exact counterparts, and we know that one or 

 more outside crosses was bred into them, but what these 

 crosses were no one can tell. It might have been one 

 breed, or it might have been another, as several outside 

 crosses have brought about practically the same result; 

 but the chances are that the cross that brought them 

 nearest to perfection was none other than some common 

 barnyard fowl that years before may have had some full- 

 blood crosses in its ancestors. 



We have read theories by the hour — in fact, until we 

 have had the headache,, but in nine cases out of ten the 

 writers were not heard of until ten years after the breed 

 was established, and in the niajority of cases they are from 

 men who have never bred a good Silver Wyandotte in their 

 lives and are only guessing or trying to make others be- 

 lieve something they do not believe themselves, or tell us 

 as fact something that was told to them as theory. 



Doubleday, Page & Co. made the strongest effort of 

 any publishing house to get at the facts of the breed's 

 origin, but after reading their book and weighing all the 

 evidence submitted we must agree that it is all guess work 

 after all and the writers are simply stalling or willfully 

 misleading. 



It is now more than a quarter of a century since the 

 writer first became interested in this breed of fowls. They 

 were then known as the American Sebrights, and their 

 origin then, as now, was surrounded by darkness. It was 

 clearly evident at that time that the blood of the Dark 

 Brahmas and the Silver Spangled Hamburgs was m a great 

 measure responsible for the color. Whether the Hamburg 

 cross was from a full-blooded fowl or from a fowl that had 

 been formerly crossed with a Hamburg, we could only 

 guess. And it is well to mention a fact here that many 

 writers seem to have overlooked, i. e., the color of Ham- 

 burgs as bred twenty-five or thirty years ago. We did not 

 find the elegant spangles on them that we do today but 

 many— in fact, nearly all— of the females were decidedly 

 laced or crescentic in marking, .especially in breast, back 

 and wing bows. A cross of this variety with a com- 

 mon white fowl would no doubt have given us a fowl tnat 

 again crossed with the Dark Brahmas would produce ott- 



spring that would show a number of laced females and 

 dark-breasted males, and the early Silvers gave us many 

 birds of this kind, the male running nearly solid black 

 in breasts, with very small diamond-shaped centers, while 

 the female, no mater how well laced in other sections, was 

 Invariably crescentic on breast. 



The top color of both sexes shows undisputed traces of 

 Dark Brahma blood — the silver surface of male with dark 

 stripe in neck and saddle and the natural tendency to 

 double or triple lacing in the female, and this defect, or 

 characteristic, is not entirely bred out of the females yet, 

 as two careless matings will demonstrate to the satisfac- 

 tion of any one who wants to experiment. 



First to See Their IVierits. 



No one man did more to create and piaintain an inter- 

 est in this valuable breed of fowls when they were first 

 introduced than the late B. N. Pierce, who, by the way, was 

 one of the first juages to recognize the merits of the fowl, 

 and did much to shape its future, both as to color and 

 outline. 



When the writer was but a boy he had many conversa- 

 tions with Mr. Pierce in regard to the Silvers. The color 

 fad in those days was a very dark bird with small, narrow 

 centers. Mr. Pierce always argued against this. His idea 

 twenty yfears ago was that the bird should have clean, 

 open centers, with narrow lacing of black, but the breeders 

 who tried to produce them were disappointed in finding an 

 outside lacing of white, making a sort of triple-laced feather. 



When I explained this to Mr. Pierce his remark was: 

 "Keep on trying; some one will get it right, and you might 

 just as well be that breeder as not. It's coming to it In 

 time, and if we can't do it our English cousins will." And 

 they. did. 



While the breed is American in origin, it was the Eng- 

 lish breeders who first got the open centers fixed, but what 

 they did to shape in getting this color was awful. The 

 open-center birds imported from England resembled a 

 cross between a crane and an ostrich, and the males had a 

 brassy, copper surface that we had been discarding as 

 worthless, but they did possess the clear, open centers, and 

 from the cross of the long-backed, long-legged males on our 

 best American-bred females we were able to produce a fair 

 per cent, of good-shaped specimens, with grand open cen- 

 ters on both sexes. 



While we will not concede anything to our English 

 cousins in the way of origin, we will have to admit that we 

 took them into partnership to fix the color, and, so long as 

 we are in the dark as to how the breed was first produced, 

 the less we boast about the origin the better. 



But as a final shot on the breed's origin, we will refer to 

 a few statements made by men who tried to learn years 

 ago where and how the breed did originate. 



In June, 1886, the Rev. Charles L. Ayers, then a promi- 

 nent breeder of Silver Wyandottes and a close student, had 

 this to say of their origin: 



"It is somewhat singular that the origin of so popular 

 and meritorious a fowl as the Wyandotte should be so 

 obscure. 



"After a diligent inquiry I can find no witness ready to 

 testify relative to Cochin, Bantam or Hamburg-Brahma 



