{"id":1669,"date":"2017-08-04T06:36:03","date_gmt":"2017-08-04T11:36:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/chief-paduke-the-secret-of-duck-island-complete\/"},"modified":"2023-03-12T15:49:39","modified_gmt":"2023-03-12T20:49:39","slug":"chief-paduke-the-secret-of-duck-island-complete","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/chief-paduke-the-secret-of-duck-island-complete\/","title":{"rendered":"Chief Paduke & The Secret of Duck Island"},"content":{"rendered":"

A long time ago, before it was the Atomic City or the home of the world\u2019s biggest quilt show or the place where you could see the nation\u2019s only statue of Bruce Willis as Emmett Smith from In Country<\/em>, Paducah was a simple Native American trading post on the banks of the Ohio. This was the era of our city\u2019s namesake, Chief Paduke. Though out-of-towners may be more familiar with native sons like humorist Irvin S. Cobb, Vice President Alben W. Barkley, \u201cYakety Sax\u201d composer Boots Randolph, or even world-famous dead guy Charles \u201cSpeedy\u201d Atkins, the most well-known and beloved Paducahan among the locals is undoubtedly Chief Paduke. Tales of the Chief are passed down from generation to generation like a fertile piece of farmland or a well-constructed mobile home and shared among friends in schoolyards, barrooms, and duck blinds all over western Kentucky.<\/p>\n

I first heard the story about Chief Paduke and his role in the creation of Duck Island from a one-armed funnel cake vendor named Gus at Barbeque on the River sometime in the late 2000s. Gus swears the the story I\u2019m about to relate is absolutely true, but there is reason to doubt the tale\u2019s veracity, and not just because it was told to me by a carnie who was almost certainly high on meth at the time. The biggest hurdle to believing the story is the fact that most historians agree that Chief Paduke never actually existed.* Also, the story has giant ducks and a demon and magical barbeque sauce. I guess there could have been giant magical ducks in those days, but we probably would have found some giant duck fossils or something by now.<\/p>\n

When most people hear the name \u201cChief Paduke,\u201d they assume that Paduke held a leadership role in the tribe, similar to a mayor or king. In reality, \u201cChief\u201d was just an honorary title that anyone could get simply by being nominated by someone who was already a Chief. It was a lot like being a Kentucky Colonel. Paduke was from a very prominent family, so he\u2019d probably been a Chief since childhood. His actual role in the tribe is a source of some debate. Some say he was a shaman, others say he was the village idiot, and one story names him \u201cVice President In Charge of Getting The Mail.\u201d The overall consensus, though, is that Paduke\u2019s primary role was to be as uninvolved as possible with anything even tangentially related to the material survival of the tribe.<\/p>\n

One day while Chief Paduke was walking through the forest, he met an unusually large frog smoking a cigar. At first he thought it was Irvin S. Cobb, but then he remembered that Cobb hadn\u2019t been born yet. Before Chief Paduke had time to come up with another guess as to the creature\u2019s identity, the frog spoke. The creature, which Chief Paduke had no way of realizing was an evil demon called The Boondoggle, complemented Paduke on his tribe\u2019s \u201cnice little trading town,\u201d but offered to reveal the secret of turning the village into one that would rival the world\u2019s \u00a0greatest metropolises, \u201clike Rome, London, or Possum Trot.\u201d Chief Paduke liked the idea of turning his village into a magical place like Possum Trot, but couldn\u2019t help but suspect that such an offer would come at a great price (probably involving butt stuff). He tried to politely decline the offer, but the Boondoggle kept pressing, eventually winning our hero\u2019s confidence.<\/p>\n

As he drifted off to sleep later that night, Paduke was already thinking about how to follow the frog creature\u2019s recipe for success: build a riverfront hotel. The frog demon had assured him that once a town had a riverfront hotel, Target and Ruby Tuesday\u2019s were sure to follow. That night Chief Paduke dreamed a beautiful dream where gold rained from the sky and people from around the world flocked to his luxurious riverfront hotel. He also dreamed about butt stuff, but that was probably unrelated.<\/p>\n

Chief Paduke knew that the men of his tribe could easily build a riverfront hotel, and building materials were plentiful in the lightly-settled wilderness of early Kentucky, but location was a problem. A riverfront hotel needed to be on the riverfront, and back in those days \u00a0the riverfront was controlled by the ducks. This may not seem like an insurmountable obstacle, but in Chief Paduke\u2019s time ducks were the size of Buicks and could swallow a man whole. Chief Paduke would need an ingenious plan to secure a location for his riverfront hotel. For the next three days, he sat on a rock and pondered.<\/p>\n

Obviously, he eventually came up with a plan, or else this story would be completely pointless. It wasn\u2019t long before Chief Paduke arranged for an audience with The Duck King. [Author\u2019s Note: The Duck King\u2019s real name is unpronounceable by humans, but \u201cYakety Sax\u201d is a reasonable approximation.] After the the standard introductions and pleasantries, Chief Paduke got right down to business and challenged Yakety Sax for control of the riverfront. Yakety Sax, in accordance with sacred duck code of honor, agreed to hear Chief Paduke\u2019s proposal.<\/p>\n

After seven tense days of negotiations between tribal and duck lawyers, the conditions of the challenge were agreed upon. Chief Paduke and Yakety Sax would face one another in a barbeque challenge to be judged by a panel of ducks, humans, and assorted woodland creatures who had \u201cno dog in the fight\u201d (though dogs were specifically banned from being judges for reasons that are lost to history). If Chief Paduke won the cook-off, the ducks would cede the riverfront and live in exile in a place of Paduke\u2019s choosing. If Yakety Sax won, he got to eat Chief Paduke. Ducks were not known for being especially good and weighing risk and reward.<\/p>\n

When the day of the contest finally came, hundreds of men, women, children, animals, and waterfowl descended on the riverfront to see who would win. Some brought trade goods to sell, some entertained the crowd with singing and dancing, and one guy claimed that he had a wonderful elixir that cured everything from bad breath to \u201csin warts.\u201d It was a profitable day for some, an enjoyable day for all, and everyone agreed that they should do it again some time. The gathering has been known by many names since then: The Ducks Are Stupid Anniversery Hoe-Down, Eat Barbeque Until You Puke, The Cook Relocation Program, and many others. More recently, we\u2019ve called it Barbeque on the River. It\u2019s simple but informative, much like Shepard Smith.<\/p>\n

After Chief Paduke and the Duck King had presented their entrees to the judges, Chief Paduke suggested that, as a shows of respect, he and his tribesman would like to sample the delicacies that Yakety Sax had prepared. The Duck King was obligated to make the same offer to avoid seeming petty, and it was his downfall. Unbeknownst to the Duck King, Chief Paduke\u2019s barbeque contained a special sauce that would shrink any duck who ate it dramatically (to what we today consider \u201cduck-sized\u201d) on the night of the next full moon, which was just far enough away to shield the Chief\u2019s meat from suspicion.<\/p>\n

The story of how Chief Paduke secured the special sauce is fascinating in its own right, in part because it\u2019s indirectly related to the eventual mummification of Speedy Atkins, but we really don\u2019t have time to it here. The important upshot is that by the previously agreed-upon day of the duck exile, all the ducks were duck-sized. Chief Paduke named the place of the duck exile, a small pond not too far from the ghetto Shell. As a show of good faith, the humans built a modest palace for Yakety Sax on the small island in the middle of the pond. The island became known as Duck Island, and the descendents of Yakety Sax still live there today. According to local legend, there will be peace between humankind and duckkind for as long as the ducks control the island.<\/p>\n

Once the ducks were gone, Chief Paduke built his riverfront hotel, but it was a colossal flop that was eventually abandoned and taken over by racoons and hobos. Like all mortals, Chief Paduke died (which probably wasn\u2019t a big deal since he never existed in the first place) and passed on into legend. But they say that the Boondoggle still haunts that same section of former woods (now City Hall) and from time to time even manages to convince a particularly dim-witted city official to support a taxpayer-incentivized travesty based on failed economic models. Of course, it could just be the ghost of Irvin Cobb.<\/p>\n

*One historical clue to the Chief\u2019s folkloric status is that, while the early inhabitants of the area were Chickasaw (though many claimed that their meemaw was a full-blooded Cherokee), the Chickasaw language doesn\u2019t have any words that even remotely resemble \u201cPaduke\u201d or \u201cPaducah.\u201d Most historians believe that William Clark got \u201cPaducah\u201d from an early name for the Comanches. That being the case, it\u2019s extremely likely that \u201cChief Paduke\u201d is a conglomeration of the characters from may earlier stories, myths, and actual incidents. This could very well explain the nebulous quality of Chief Paduke as a character as well as the many contradictions between different Chief Paduch tales. Chief Paduke isn\u2019t a specific historical person so much as a mythic culture hero, like Heracles or King Arthur or William H. Macy.<\/p>\n

\u201cChief Paduke and the Secret of Duck Island\u201d is an excerpt from An Occasionally Plausible History of Paducah Kentucky<\/em>, a book that may very well be released at some point in the future by Brainfart Press, publisher of classics like Obscure Early Bluesmen (Who Never Existed)<\/em>, Dispatches from the MGT.: Curious Signs from the American Workplace<\/em>, and 21 Movies You\u2019ve Probably Already Seen Reviewed By Some Guy You Don\u2019t Know<\/em>. To learn more about Brainfart Press, visit www.brainfartpress.com<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A long time ago, before it was the Atomic City or the home of the world\u2019s biggest quilt show or the place where you could see the nation\u2019s only statue of Bruce Willis as Emmett Smith from In Country, Paducah was a simple Native American trading post on the banks of the Ohio. This was…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4434,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3569],"tags":[3577,3587,3586,3585,3584,3583,3582,3581,3580,3579,3578,2593,3576,3575,3574,3573,3572,3571,3570,3474,3378,3188],"class_list":["post-1669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-potpourri","tag-boots-randolph","tag-brainfart-press","tag-shepard-smith","tag-ruby-tuesday","tag-target","tag-possum-trot","tag-boondoggle","tag-kentucky-colonel","tag-duck-island","tag-chief-paduke","tag-yakety-sax","tag-bruce-willis","tag-speedy-atkins","tag-alben-w-barkley","tag-irvin-s-cobb","tag-barbeque","tag-lewis-clark","tag-william-h-macy","tag-king-arthur","tag-in-country","tag-hercules","tag-paducah-ky"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1669"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1669\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4435,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1669\/revisions\/4435"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4434"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}