By Will D. Jenkins, “The Chicken Fighters,” Last Frontier in the North Cascades. Mount Vernon: Skagit County Historical Society
One of my good friends at Darrington was Fred Griffith, whom I had known when my folks lived at Lake Whatcom. His father and brothers had built our original log house in Geneva, near Bellingham, in 1905. That’s where I got to know Fred. He played the fiddle and raised game chickens.
In 1917 when I was stationed at the Blue Bird with Ranger Eilert Skaar, Fred was running a little six-stool lunch counter in Dar- rington, called the White Horse Cafe, for the mountain of the same name. The patronage was mainly loggers from Sauk Valley and camps along the Stillaguamish.
Fred had an active sideline, however a surreptitious one, of fighting gamecocks. He owned some mighty fine birds, including Cu- ban Reds, Hatch Clarets, Blues, Grays, and English Games. He swore by his Cubans, especially, and claimed there was never a dunghill among them. Fred had collected quite a few good bets as evidence of his judgment of fighting quality. Read the rest of this entry »
