Old Abe the War Eagle: Bought for Corn, Shot at Corinth, Killed by Smoke

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Old Abe was a bald eagle taken from a nest near the Flambeau River in Wisconsin in the spring of 1861 by a young Ojibwe man known as Chief Sky, who cut down the pine tree to reach the fledglings. That summer he traded the eaglet to Daniel McCann for a bushel of corn, and McCann offered it to a new volunteer company, the Eau Claire Badgers, for $2.50. After soldiers surrounded civilian S. M. Jeffers until he paid with a quarter eagle gold coin, the bird was named for Abraham Lincoln and the unit became the Eagle Company, later part of the Eagle Regiment, the 8th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry.

Carried on a shield-shaped perch by a series of eagle bearers, Old Abe went through more than 30 battles and skirmishes, including Farmington, the Vicksburg campaign, and the Red River campaign of 1864. Grant and Sherman reportedly took off their hats to him, while Confederates called him the Yankee buzzard and were ordered to kill or capture him. After the war Wisconsin kept him in a two-room apartment in the Capitol in Madison and sent him on tour, including the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. In 1881 he raised the alarm over a basement fire, inhaled smoke, and died about a month later.

• At the Second Battle of Corinth in October 1862, a bullet clipped three of his flight feathers and another cut his tether, while bearer David McLean was wounded.
• Newspapers claimed he soared over both armies at Corinth, but McLean said the bird only fluttered about 50 feet down the line.
• Soldiers foraged small game for him and sometimes gave up their own meat rations.
• His mounted remains were destroyed in the 1904 Capitol fire, a year after Theodore Roosevelt visited to see them, and a DNA test on saved feathers later confirmed he was male.
• The J.I. Case company of Racine adopted him as its logo in 1865, and his profile appears on the 101st Airborne Division's Screaming Eagles patch.