How To Breed Chickens In Iowa: Includes bonus title: The Gold Star Kid

By Jonathan R. P. Taylor

Chandelle, a young girl from Cardiff, South Wales, leaves home behind for the US frontier in 1851. As a cowgirl -she soon finds herself falling for the local doctor, Owen. A wholesome 'Western' love story akin to Mills & Boon, and one with a fairy tale ending.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Feb 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9781329254978

Book preview

‘HOW TO BREED CHICKENS IN IOWA’

Includes your bonus title

‘THE GOLD STAR KID

& THE DREAM ANGEL’

Jonathan R. P Taylor

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

©Brittunculi Records & Books 2023

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Print, Audio and eBook License Notes

LULU PUBLISHING – FRANCE

ISBN: 978-1-329-25497-8

Imprint: Lulu.com

This Book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This publication may not be resold or given away to other people without the express consent of the publisher. If you would like to share this publication with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased or supplied for your use only, you should return it to the publisher and purchase your own copy. The audio/musical works that accompany this publication and the illustrations used herein are also protected by copyright law. They must not be shared and/or copied without the direct consent of the publisher.

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HOW TO BREED CHICKENS IN IOWA

A Bird in the Hand

The mind can achieve any mental-state it desires if you so want it to. We all make the most of life and lie to ourselves when needs must, to create our own false sense of happiness and to twist and contort our own sad realities; all to make life just that little bit more bearable. If this is you, then do continue to dream, go on, get on with it and bury your head in the sand for all eternity. I have no need of escape or of dreams and false hopes. I do have nightmares, why yes of course I do, we all do - but my life is already beautiful and the sunshine of California is something to be most desired. My dreams are my reality and life is wonderful.

Leaving South Wales as a child with my mother and father, an older sister and just three old trunks could have led to disaster, this is true, but it did not. Our feverish voyage to America, as so many others did during the Californian Gold Rush, was quite the experience. Dad didn’t really stop to think about the negative consequences. He had dreams and now he had hope of achieving them. Strange thing was that we never actually made it to California. We went northward to Iowa in the end.

We left Cardiff on the 24th January, 1851, aboard a fine wooden sailing ship called the Adventurer, the name most appropriate to us. Dad had just lost his job. He was a printer for a publisher on South Street, overlooking the docks. He would look out of his workshop window and see the ships come and go.  He’d watch the cargo unload and the people board most curiously as people never seemed to arrive, they just left, one after the other. ’51 was a bitterly cold year and Dad’s aged boss was selling up to retire. No offers to purchase the Blakeley’s firm had been placed and there was to be no more work.

One of the shipping companies which transported the printed books overseas was keen to use the warehouse space for cargo storage, and as a joke Blakeley had suggested that they take the old printers’ shop workers back to New York with them. The next shipment outward was a mere two days away. Although folly at first, Dad now immediately acted on the idea of a fresh start overseas. He knew that printers were in demand, but he also knew that gold had been found too. What was initially just a joke was now within a day, our reality. Blakely happily signed the rental papers over to Meridian Shipping Corp. only on the strict understanding that the rent included a one-way ticket for four.

With the bitter cold British winter behind us, we arrived in New York just 7 weeks later, and to a new form of weather, it felt much colder. From there we took an ice-cold and most torturous railway journey, slowly winding our way across four more states;

Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. Our final leg and fifth state, Iowa now concluded by wagon trail, as the railway companies had not extended that far west as yet. Compared to this, our confined sea passage now felt like an absolute luxury. Explorers and soldiers came and went. So too the prospectors and all other manner of workers, but we were settlers, we were now here to stay. There was no going back now. We all knew this… and it had all started with chickens.

Dad being the canny Welshman that he was, had sold our winter coal supply to raise money for food on the trip, and we had plenty. During this fun, but very over-tiring sail, we had become very close friends to a native born American man called Archie Barnes. Archie was a chicken farmer and was introducing good laying breeds to the new found lands he occupied. Anyone can keep chickens, he would say, but breeding them successfully, well that’s a completely different concern. This is what Archie did. He bred laying hens and sold them out to numerous states, if not to them all. He had travelled back to Great Britain merely to collect six breeding pairs of Australorps as they were known. Their docility and hardiness was an excellent addition to any ranch or homestead flock. With this in mind you will be amazed at how much I came to know about breeding chickens in Iowa, during my sea voyage west.

School had taught me many things about Australia and one of my favourite books, printed by my father whilst at Blakeley’s, was the story of ‘Kingston, the Friendly Kangaroo,’ - though I suspect now, well out of print, for many years. But I had never thought of or read anything to suggest that Australia was becoming famous for its chickens. The Australorps were bred from original Orpingtons that were exported to the colonies from England. Australians were most impressed by its egg-production traits, and following on from outcrossing and selected breeding, the Black Orpington soon began to produce a fine quality meat yield. Another strain however was the Australian Laying Orpington. This breed was, by 1820, divergent enough to have its own classification, the all new super laying Australorp. The bird had become so successful. The American Poultry Association accepted it as a standard breed into the country in 1829.

Archie had a plan. "I have personally travelled the Atlantic