This is a Lakota woman and her travois dog.
This photo was taken on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota.
I don’t know the date on which this was taken, but her dog is not a traditional travois dog.
It appears to be heavily derived from the Newfoundland/St. John’s water dog type.
These dogs were brought into the interior of North America by fur traders, and the Native Americans adopted them as working animals.
They bred with the indigenous dog, and because they were more resistant to disease and were not shot because settlers mistook them wolves or coyotes, they largely replaced the travois dog type.
This dog looks almost like a golden retriever that has been hooked up to a travois.
funny you should post that piccy here as ive just seen it in the book im reading, “in defence of dogs” by john bradshaw.
There’s a lot of good in that book, which is ‘Dog Sense’ in America.
Hi Scottie,
This photo reminds me a whole lot of another I once found of a Cree dog, which I thought I’d share here (sorry for the long URL):
http://ww2.glenbow.org/search/archivesPhotosResults.aspx?AC=GET_RECORD&XC=/search/archivesPhotosResults.aspx&BU=&TN=IMAGEBAN&SN=AUTO810&SE=668&RN=0&MR=10&TR=0&TX=1000&ES=0&CS=0&XP=&RF=WebResults&EF=&DF=WebResultsDetails&RL=0&EL=0&DL=0&NP=255&ID=&MF=WPEngMsg.ini&MQ=&TI=0&DT=&ST=0&IR=19886&NR=0&NB=0&SV=0&BG=&FG=&QS=&OEX=ISO-8859-1&OEH=ISO-8859-1
I always found it really intriguing because the dog looks to me like one of the big, modern Newfoundlands. In any case I thought you might find it interesting as well :)
In 1906, there were lots of large Newfoundland dogs.
There were a lot of big ones throughout North America by the mid 1800′s.
What i question is whether such dogs were the actual working dogs of Newfoundland.
I find sources that talk about large dogs from there, but they rarely give scale.
At any rate, by the end of the twentieth century, the only working dogs on Newfoundland were the St. John’s water dogs, which were Labrador size.
That they used the large Newfie types for pulling is not surprising as Saints, & other large Swiss dogs actually pull sledges & carts in competition. They seem to love it.
The problem is whether these dogs existed in Newfoundland, and the evidence isn’t that great. One thing they often did was increase the size to appeal to English and American buyers. Usually, they’d cross a mastiff with a water dog.
This is a typical St. John’s water dog, the original Newfoundland working as a cart dog:
http://retrieverman.wordpress.com/2011/05/26/st-johns-water-dog-working-as-a-cart-dog/
http://books.google.com/books?id=3NIWAAAAQAAJ&dq=peter%20hawker&pg=PA176#v=onepage&q&f=false
I don’t know what this large Labrador is. There is a Labrador husky-type dog that would meet some of the description.
But this is the first mention of what the true Newfoundland actually was.
As the “large Labrador” Hawker describes — just another term for the sort of “Newfoundland dog” portrayed in Taplin’s “Sportsmen’s Cabinet” shortly after 1800. There are other contemporary depictions of similar dogs, either white with black (or red) spotting, or black with white markings.
A Newfoundland as we know it today is just a giant retriever. The St Bernard is something else entirely. I don’t think they have a lot of Newfoundland in them– just a little bit.
As far as I can tell, this is the kind of dog that was on Newfoundland: http://archives.cbc.ca/arts_entertainment/literature/clips/14934/
The dog named Albert was of “pure breeding.” The dog named Vicki was half Labrador retriever.
Some of the earlier dogs had feathering, and these were exported big time because they weren’t of much use in the ice and snow. Those that weren’t supersized for the pet market were kept smaller to work as retrievers. The ones that were kept as retrievers were rarely over 85 pounds, and by the 1880′s, they were in the 55-65 pound range.
But even a dog of this size is a good hauling dog. It also has the advantage of maturing earlier and not having joints that must be watched all the time as it matures. It also has an average life expectancy greater than ten years.
Richard Wolters was able to track down which came first and what actually existed on Newfoundland in his history of the Labrador retriever.
[...] A Newfoundland-type travois dog « The Retriever, Dog, & Wildlife BlogDec 29, 2011 … This is a Lakota woman and her travois dog. … I don’t know the date on which this was taken, but her dog is not a traditional travois dog. [...]