Alaskan settlers wanted to call their new town Ptarmigan cause there were plenty of those birds around.
But they didn’t know how to spell it, so they called it Chicken.
However, this is likely apocryphal, since it was popularized in the 1940s, almost 50 years after the town was founded. The most likely origin is from nearby Chicken Creek, as noted by Josiah Edward Spurr in 1896, “The creek is so named from the size of the gold, which is about that of chicken feed (corn).”
Alaskan settlers wanted to call their new town Ptarmigan cause there were plenty of those birds around.
But they didn’t know how to spell it, so they called it Chicken.