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A Dog's History of America

North Point Press

Chapter One

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The Inuit hunter's dogs, hitched in a fan formation to his sled, caught scent of Nanuq, the polar bear, and broke into a run across the rough snow-sheeted ice. Cawing like a raven, he urged them forward. As they drew within sight of the big white bear-a demon waiting to cause them harm-the hunter reached across his sled and unloosed one dog. Closing on his prey, he unloosed another, then the third and the fourth, so that he was dashing forward now on foot, spear in hand. His cousin joined him and soon they were upon the bear, brought to bay by several growling, snarling dogs, pumped full of rage and fear, dodging his massive paws. Snapping at his rear, other dogs prevented Nanuq from turning on the men. As one hunter feigned an attack from the bear's right, the other in a quick motion thrust his spear up under the demon's ribs and deep into his heart before somersaulting away. The bear died almost instantly, and after appropriate observances to appease his spirit, the hunters butchered him. The dogs hauled the meatand hide back to camp.

That same day, thousands of miles to the south, a small group of Assiniboin hunters on the Great Plains, near the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers, hitched their dogs to sledges and sent them toward a herd of bison. Drawing near, the dogs broke into a sprint, sending the bison into a stampede. It was a dangerous, bone-rattling ride, requiring balance, skill, courage, and luck-or good medicine, derived from proper observance of bison hunting ceremonies. Kneeling in the sledges, dependent on the steadiness of their dogs, the Indian hunters shot their arrows into the flanks of the bison, bringing down a score before they were done. Soon women, dogs, children, and wolves-the bison's "shepherds," Meriwether Lewis called them-came to the field, to slaughter and feast. Battles ensued, as women beat back their dogs from stealing the prime slabs of bison. After hauling the meat home on their backs, the dogs raced to join their cousins the wolves in scavenging what remained.

These were versatile, often abused animals, according to many European chroniclers, who reported that the dogs shared a life of toil, drudgery, and mistreatment with women-only they got less to eat and were beaten more frequently. Among the Inuit, Athabascan Indians, Plains Indians, and several other groups, women managed and trained the dogs, packing the household goods on their backs or on the sledges or travois they pulled as they moved in search of prey-be it seal, walrus, caribou, polar bear, or, on the plains, bison. In many cases, they knocked out or broke the shearing carnassial teeth of their dogs to prevent them from chewing precious harnesses and leads.

A Plains Indian village on the move was a riot of sound, motion, and color. Women loaded the dogs who would carry a pack or pull a travois, exempting puppies and assorted adults never broken to work. Then, shouldering their own heavy burdens, the women would drive their dogs forward, keeping them in line and breaking up fights, while the warriors walked or, after the arrival of the horse, rode as guards, guides, and hunters. Dogs were beaten to make them move or to break up fights. The whole column pressed forward for hours, sometimes an entire day, before resting, with dogs that bore no packs darting in and out of the fray to the amusement of children and warriors, the consternation of the dog drivers.

A dissenter from the view that the dogs were sorely abused was George Catlin, who in a remarkable span of seven years, 1832 to 1839, visited, by his estimate, forty-eight Indian tribes with a combined population of 400,000 people. Along the way, he produced more than 500 paintings, providing the most complete visual record of the Indians of the United States at a time when war, whiskey, religion, and smallpox were decimating entire tribes and cultures. Catlin sought to create something permanent against their destruction, which accelerated over the next fifty years. "The dog, amongst all Indian tribes, is more esteemed and more valued than amongst any part of the civilized world," Catlin observed. "The Indian who has more time to devote to his company, and whose untutored mind more nearly assimilates to that of his faithful servant, keeps him closer company, and draws him near to his heart; they hunt together, and are equal sharers in the chase-their bed is one, and on the rocks and on their coats of arms they carve his image of fidelity."

In his search for a Northwest Passage across the continent, which took him, through bad navigation, to the Arctic Ocean in 1789, Alexander Mackenzie encountered the Athabascan people and dogs along the Mackenzie River (named for him), between Great Slave Lake and Great Bear Lake to its north. At one landing-he doesn't specify the location or the tribe, because both were unknown to him-he killed a dog that was getting into his baggage and threatened to kill more if the people did not tie up the dogs. The woman who owned the dog became distraught after its death, "crying bitterly, and said she had lost 5 children last winter for whom she was not so sorry as for the Dog." Mackenzie appeased her with "a few Beads and an Awl."

Early European travelers frequently accused the Inuit-whom they called Esquimaux, or Eskimo-of abusing their dogs despite relying on them for pulling speared walrus and seals from the water before they could sink, for hunting polar bears, and for hauling their goods from camp to camp. Most of those travelers were abusing themselves, dogs, and natives-literally starving to death in many cases-in what the Inuit saw as a mad quest for a Northwest Passage and the North Pole, and so should have understood the harshness of Arctic life. But they did not. Few noticed that the Inuit would sometimes bring puppies or nursing females into their homes as pets, or fathomed the interdependence of dogs and people.

These different views of the relationship of Indians and their dogs are explained in part by the biases of the observers and by variations between cultures and tribes in the treatment of dogs-not to mention people, horses, and wildlife. But it is also true that the treatment of dogs varied within tribes and from season to season. When winter lay long and cold on the land and food grew scarce, Indians and dogs suffered. Along the upper Missouri, a favorite stopping-off place for travelers wanting a "wilderness adventure," winters grew more lean during the 1830s because of the steady depletion of game to feed the markets for fur and food, as well as the unending flow of whiskey and smallpox that killed thousands of people. The dogs were left to fend for themselves.

Into the Americas

No one knows when dogs first came to the Americas, or even whether they arrived by land or sea. Suggested dates range from roughly 35,000 to 12,000 years ago, with most experts contending that the first immigrants crossed the Bering land bridge, called Beringia, the 55-mile-long, 1,000-mile-wide expanse of tundra-not unlike that found today in the far north-linking Siberia and Alaska. Periodically exposed during the Pleistocene from 1.6 million to 10,000 years ago, Beringia served as a convenient mixing zone for plants and animals passing from Asia to North America and back-the way the gray wolf returned to its ancestral home after migrating to Asia and Europe. At the height of the Ice Age, glaciers reached south to the Ohio River and east to Long Island, while covering western Canada, Alaska, Washington, Idaho, and Montana. Sea levels were some 300 feet lower, making for much more extensive coastal plains than exist today.

The best guess among some experts, based on linguistic, genetic, and archaeological evidence, is that the "first" Americans crossed Beringia in two to five migrations, which could each have lasted several years. They moved south along the coast, meaning whatever record they left of their presence now lies underwater; or, spreading south and east, they followed inland game routes between ice sheets. Within several thousand years, one group, broadly referred to as American Indians, passed from Beringia to Tierra del Fuego, the tip of South America. Na-dene speakers, usually called Athabascans, probably crossed into North America around 10,000 years ago in another wave of migration and settled inland in the Arctic and sub-Arctic. Some 6,000 years ago, the Inuit and Aleuts island-hopped the Bering Strait in their skin kayaks and settled along the coasts of the far north, to southern Alaska for the Aleuts and to Greenland for the Inuit.

Even with the powerful tools of genetic analysis, considerable disagreement remains over the origins of Native Americans. Some American Indians appear to be related to the Ainu (the aboriginal people of the Japanese island of Hokkaido), ancient Polynesians, and ancient Australians, while others have much in common with the ancient people of southern Siberia, near Mongolia. The Aleut and Inuit still have counterparts in northeastern Siberia. Whatever their origin-and there is still much to learn-the bet here is that all of these newcomers traveled with dogs.

A decade ago such a notion would have been dismissed as heretical fantasy. But some controversial genetic evidence has pushed the split of dogs from wolves to around 135,000 years ago in perhaps as many as four different locations. More recent studies have placed the origin of the dog in southern China and Southeast Asia, somewhere around 40,000 to 15,000 years ago, a spread that points to the crudeness of current genetic dating. On the whole, the dates indicate that dogs were probably abundant at the time of the first migrations to the New World, because of their usefulness to hunters and gatherers as companions, guardians, food, beasts of burden, and hunters.

The transformation from wolf to dog is still locked in the canine genome and the archaeological record, which have recently disagreed over timing. Absent facts, we are left to conjecture. I subscribe to the notion that for many thousands of years dogs closely resembled wolves, breeding freely among themselves and probably with wolves, although the extent of that is open to debate. We can surmise that these wolfdogs, or proto-dogs, were more social and less fearful around people than "wild" wolves. Sometime around 15,000 to 10,000 years ago, when some groups of nomadic hunters became more sedentary, establishing semipermanent villages, their wolfdogs became genetically isolated and, through inbreeding, began to change physically-becoming slightly smaller and developing greater variations in coat color and a curled tail. Behaviorally, they might have become more tame and tractable, which would have increased their value to humans. In much of the New World, those few physical and behavioral changes remained the most significant differences between wolves and dogs until the arrival of Europeans. But even in the New World, with the development of agriculture and more organized societies, the gap between domesticated and wild wolves became larger, as different cultures began to raise their own types of dogs, including, it appears, some with floppy ears.

Despite tantalizing evidence that dogs and humans began arriving 35,000 to 20,000 years ago, the archaeological record has largely remained silent about the first Americans and their dogs until about 12,000 to 11,000 years ago, when they appear in Paleo-Indian sites in Alaska and Wyoming. These wanderers probably began crossing Beringia around 15,000 years ago, with their dogs and lethal weapons, including the atlatl, for throwing spears accurately and far. Whether they had bows and arrows is far less certain. Some archaeologists argue that the bow and arrow was invented around 20,000 years ago, while others hold to a much more recent date. In the New World, the oldest evidence for that weapon currently dates to around 11,500 years ago and was found in Alaska, but it is unclear how widespread the technology was. Conventional archaeological wisdom places adoption or independent invention of the bow and arrow in the New World sometime after 8,000 years ago. The question is far from academic, since the weapon would have significantly improved the Paleo-Indians' hunting abilities. In any event, people and dogs arrived at the end of the Ice Age, when North America was in the throes of a dramatic climatic change that transformed ecosystems across the continent and coincided with one of the greatest mass extinctions in the world's history.

In 1967, University of Arizona ecologist Paul Martin proposed that Paleo-Indians hunted to extinction many of North America's big herbivores, especially mammoths and mastodons and Bison antiquus and Bison occidentalis, as well as giant rhinoceroses, cave bears, giant ground sloths, camels, flightless rheas, tortoise-shelled glyptodonts, and the indigenous horse, in a Stone Age "blitzkrieg." In the last several decades that theory has gained more adherents, in part because of contemporary observations of how destructive humans are. Extirpation of these large grazing animals, the adherents of this theory argue, triggered the collapse of whole ecosystems and the extinction of other species, including the pumped-up predators-saber-toothed cats, giant lions, and dire wolves-who, along with humans, fed on them.

No one knows with certainty what happened, but it is hard to imagine that Paleo-Indians were so ruthlessly efficient with their stone, bone, and wood weapons (even if they had bows and arrows) that they destroyed animals ranging all the way to the tip of Florida, as much a winter resort during the Pleistocene as it is today. More plausibly, the Paleo-Indians helped nudge populations stressed by rapidly changing climatic conditions over the edge, by consistently targeting juvenile and breeding-female mammoths, for example, and by driving herds of bison off cliffs or into arroyos. There is also some speculation among scientists that new diseases and parasites, some brought by dogs, wreaked havoc among the larger animals, in much the same way smallpox would among Native Americans thousands of years later.

HABITAT DESTRUCTION is the greatest cause of extinction for many populations of animals, and the Pleistocene extinctions coincided with changes in ecosystems across much of North America. As glaciers retreated, the climate grew warmer and sea levels rose, reconfiguring coastlines and flooding Beringia. Ecosystems were transformed. Steppes and grasslands turned into forests. The inland sea of North America, with its lush marshes, dried into high desert. New lakes, marshes, and swamps appeared.



Continues...

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Excerpted from A Dog's History of America by Mark Derr Copyright © 2005 by Mark Derr. Excerpted by permission.
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