Canines To Canaan (February/March 1981 | Volume: 32, Issue: 2)

Canines To Canaan

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Authors: Clark C. Spence

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February/March 1981 | Volume 32, Issue 2

Until recently the history of the American West has been dominated by the elite, the spectacular, and the gaudy, not by the ordinary folk—the “little people with dirty faces,” who are only now beginning to get their due. The same generally has been true of canine history. Where dogs have been mentioned in the winning of the West, they have for the most part been the glamourous, highly trumpeted few: the intrepid Newfoundland explorer, Scannon, who sniffed his way to the Pacific with Lewis and Clark; San Francisco’s early favorites, dudes at that, Lazarus and Bummer; or Balto, the Northern sled dog who carried diptheria serum to Nome in 1925. Unsung are the average dogs of Western America who faithfully followed their masters and mistresses on the Overland Trails, sometimes limping, coats unkempt, with noses eagerly testing the breeze.

Mongrels and purebreds alike, these trail dogs left few tangible monuments. Census takers ignored them; their names are not carved on Chimney Rock or Independence Rock, that “great register of the desert,” as Father De Smet once called it. Neither the august Dictionary of American Biography nor Howard Lamar’s fine Reader’s Encyclopedia of the American West contain entries for them. Observers might count men, women, children, livestock, and occasionally even turkeys, ducks, and guinea fowls as they passed in procession across the prairies, but rarely did they add up the number of mongrels yelping underfoot. But they were there, unenumerated perhaps, yet often noted by contemporary travelers and artists, and even mentioned in popular California Gold Rush songs:


Oh, don’t you remember sweet Betsey from Pike, Who crossed the big mountains with her lover Ike, With two yoke of cattle, a large yellow dog, A tall shanghai rooster and one spotted hog.

Some travelers doubted that the dogs they saw could survive the desert, but many believed that with due care they could reach the Pacific Coast. Countless dogs did indeed leave their bones to bleach along the Platte or the Humboldt. Forty-niner Charles Hinman wrote cautiously to his wife: “I have seen a great many dead Dogs by the way. And am told that but few live to travel over 600 miles, but I dont allow Chum to run about. [I] tie him under the Waggon every night and I think he will stand it through.” Chum lived to “see the elephant,” but it was nip and tuck across the Nevada desert. “He lay down to Die one night and howled for some time,” Hinman reported. “I tried to coax him along but he would not get up.” Hinman’s last pint of water revived Chum momentarily and he traveled seven miles before collapsing again. Another pint, borrowed, gave him strength to finish the ordeal, although later he lost his master in Sacramento.

Travelers on the Hastings Cutoff told of a “big, beautiful black dog,” desperate with thirst, who