American Game
From the Spanish Main to the Carolinas

date: 2026-06-01

The American Game is the bird of the Southern cockpit — a blend of the Spanish gallo fino brought to the Caribbean in the sixteenth century, the English gamefowl of the colonial tidewater, and a substantial infusion of Oriental (chiefly Asil and Shamo) blood from the late nineteenth century onward.

The result is a bird of remarkable gameness and extraordinary line diversity: within the breed, distinct and well-documented family strains have been bred for over a century, each with its own devotees and its own particular qualities.

From the Spanish Main

The first gamefowl in the Americas came with the Spanish — Cortés’s chronicles note that his soldiers brought fighting cocks to Mexico as early as 1528, and the practice of gallos finos had been established in the Caribbean and Central America before any English colony existed. The English colonists brought their own birds from Virginia’s founding; over the next two centuries, the Spanish and English stocks intermingled in the rice country and the low-country backcountry.

The result was the “Old Southern Game” — a vigorous, dark-coloured, straight-combed bird with a temperament arguably unmatched in the breed’s worldwide range.

The Famous Lines

By the late nineteenth century, Southern breeders had developed a series of well-known family lines — each in the hands of a particular breeder or family, each with its supporters and detractors, each famous enough to be the subject of regional betting. The most celebrated include:

• Kelso — developed by Walter A. Kelso of Galveston, Texas, in the 1940s. Famous for speed and cutting. Most modern American gamefowl carry some Kelso blood.
• Hatch — bred by Sanford Hatch of Albany, Georgia. Power and gameness. Famous for the “Hatch twist.”
• Roundhead — a long-standing line, mostly yellow-legged and white-breasted.
• Sweater — bred by Carol NeSmith of South Carolina. Famous for its unyielding gameness and quick strike.
• Brown Red — a colour variety, also a famous family of strains.

“A good Kelso cock is a thing of beauty. He is fast, he is cutting, he is relentless. He does not stop.” — Gamecock magazine, vol. 12 (1948)

The Modern Legal Situation

The federal Animal Welfare Act (1966, as amended) does not specifically prohibit cockfighting, but the practice is illegal in 42 of the 50 states, in the District of Columbia, and in the U.S. territories of Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. As of 2025, only Louisiana and Puerto Rico retain legal cockfighting under territorial law. The blood-sport of sabong continues in much of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and Latin America.

Conservation

The American Game is listed by the Livestock Conservancy as vulnerable — fewer than 1,000 annual registrations in the United States, with most breeders in Louisiana and the Southern states. The breed is preserved primarily by exhibition fanciers, who keep the lines distinct as a matter of breed history rather than for the pit.