Fruita: The Chicken, the Canyon, and the Dinosaurs

The town of Fruita sits at the western edge of the Colorado Plateau, not far from where Interstate Seventy crosses into Utah and the landscape shifts from red canyon walls to salt desert. It is the kind of town that most people drive through on the way to somewhere else. But it has an unusual story.

On September tenth, nineteen forty-five, a Fruita farmer named Lloyd Olsen went to the chicken coop to prepare a bird for his mother-in-law's supper. He swung the ax. The rooster's head came off. The rooster did not fall down. It walked around the farmyard with the confident air of an animal that had not yet received the news. Olsen, astonished, decided to see what happened.

What happened was that the ax had missed the jugular vein and left enough of the brain stem intact at the top of the neck to keep the rooster's basic functions running. Olsen began feeding the bird, named Mike, with grain and water dripped through the neck hole with an eyedropper. Mike continued to live. Olsen took him to the University of Utah, where scientists confirmed the biology. The story ran in Life magazine. Olsen took Mike on a national tour, charging twenty-five cents for a look at the Miracle Chicken. Mike lived for eighteen months before choking on a corn kernel in an Arizona motel room in March of nineteen forty-seven.

Fruita has not let this go. The annual Mike the Headless Chicken Festival draws thousands of visitors and includes a chicken dance, a five-kilometer run, and a contest to eat chicken wings. A metal sculpture of Mike stands downtown, constructed from horseshoes and farm implements.

The town is also the western gateway to Colorado National Monument, twenty thousand acres of red-rock canyons and mesa walls just south of town, and it sits near some of the richest dinosaur fossil beds in North America. The bones of Brachiosaurus and Stegosaurus were excavated nearby in the early twentieth century. Fruita contains multitudes.