Boundaries
by Jack Nisbet

Jack Nisbet is the author of The Mapmaker's Eye, Sources of the River, Purple Flat Top, Singing Grass, Burning Sage and Visible Bones. His newest, The Collector, is due out in October.

Dog Days I
August 2008

Daniel Harmon, the son of Vermont innkeepers, chafed at the restrictions of small-town life. In 1800, at 21 years of age, he signed on with the North West Company in Montreal as a fur trade clerk. Over the next 16 years he worked at numerous posts in the Prairies, the Peace River country, and the New Caledonia District of the upper Fraser River. Although he never rose to any position of command, Harmon kept a meticulous personal journal during all those years. In it he included details of food consumption, tribal ethnography, social practices, and his company's stuttered expansion over the Rocky Mountains. All of these traits make him a natural fountain of dog stories, and an excellent lead-in for anyone curious about this month's Boundary question: What was it like to be a dog in the north Columbia country two centuries ago?

Any answer to that has to begin on the Prairies, where Harmon's journal makes two things very clear:

1. dogs were hanging around every fur trade post and every tribal encampment he ever saw, and

2. even in a land of 50 million buffalo and 50 million pronghorn antelope, dogs were occasionally pressed into service as food. (Harmon makes this point easier to understand when he calculates that in 1805 the 70 workers at his post in Saskatchewan required at least 450 pounds of buffalo meat each day to keep them going). 'The Indians frequently eat the flesh of the dog;' he wrote in his journal, 'and our Canadian voyagers are as fond of it, as of any other meat. I have frequently eaten of them myself; and have found them as palatable as a young pig, and much the same flavour. These dogs are small; and in shape, very much resemble the wolf.' But there was more to Harmon's dog world than small, wolf-shaped, pork-succulent pooches. 'The large dogs are of a different breed,' he noted, 'and their flesh always has a rank taste; but this is never the case with the small kind.'

This idea of big dogs and small dogs is repeated in many fur trade accounts and tribal stories of the contact period. The small ones look like little wolves or huskies, and, besides being succulent, Harmon said many were trained by different tribes 'to assist their master in the chace.' These duties ranged from elk-hunting on the coast to the Kootenai specialty of training dogs to swim underwater into beaver lodges and chase them out for waiting spearmen.

According to Harmon, the big dogs did their share of work as well.

Those Indians, who live in a woody country, make use of horses, but employ their large dogs, to assist in carrying their baggage from place to place. The load is placed near their shoulders, and some of these dogs, which are accustomed to it, will carry sixty or seventy pounds weight, the distance of twenty five or thirty miles in a day.

Harmon not only split man's best friend into large and small categories, but said they were viewed different on the west and east sides of the Rocky Mountains -- that tribes on the west side treated them more like pets, chattering with their animals in much the same way that many fond dog owners do today. At least some Plateau or Carrier people buried their animals with full ceremonial rituals, and parted with them only with the utmost reluctance.

--All Indians are very fond of their hunting dogs. The people on the west side of the Rocky Mountain, appear to have the same affection for them, that they have for their children; and they will discourse with them, as if they were rational beings. They frequently call them their sons or daughters; and when describing an Indian, they will speak of him as father of a particular dog which belongs to him. When these dogs die, it is not unusual to see their masters or mistresses place them on a pile of wood, and burn them in the same manner as they do the dead bodies of their relations; and they appear to lament their deaths, by crying and howling, fully as much as if they were their kindred. Notwithstanding this affection, however, when they have nothing else with which to purchase articles which they want, they will sell their dogs.

The whole idea of big dogs and little dogs is a little fuzzy in Harmon's writing -- many tribal stories involve small dogs carrying loads because they were the only beasts of burden availale Ð but anyone who has watched dogs in rural settings can get a feel for what he's talking about. The small dogs do indeed look like little wolves, and there are several species that retain the short snout, thick hair, short upright ears, black and white colors, and sturdy build we associate with wolves and sled dogs. The Canadian artist Paul Kane depicted exactly this kind of dog in sketches around encampments such as 'Cree or Assiniboine Lodges at Rocky Mountain Fort' or scenes of animals pulling travois across the prairies. If you remove the horses from Kane's 'Cree Indians on the March,' you are suddenly watching the truly old way of Plains life: people walking after buffalo, using dogs to pull all their worldly belongs, trying to drive bison off cliffs to provide nourishment, tools, cordage, and clothing. It was a culture that lasted many thousands of years, and only ended with the arrival of Spanish horses on the Prairies less than three centuries ago. This old way, at least in Kane's sketches, was built around small dogs.

But there were big dogs around as well. When Karl Bodmer came up the Missouri River into Montana in 1834, he sketched Blackfeet men and their dogs hanging around a post. Bodmer's animals have more of the coyote's look: longer-legged, floppier-eared, more variable in color and form than the dogs in the Kane drawings. They are big dogs, seemingly related to the mongrels that creep around the borders of towns and encampments all over the world. They may be the result of European species mixing with native huskies or wolves, or there may be something else at work here. We'll take up the question of their origin next month.

Illustration: Paul Kane 1846: Cree Indians on the March. Courtesy Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto.

Jack Nisbet Homepage