Canis lupus hominis

This picture comes from Grenfell:  Knight-Errant of the North by Fullerton Waldo (1924). The book is an account of Wilfred Grenfell in Labrador. Grenfell was a physician who practiced with The Royal National Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen, and part of his service took him to the Great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland and also to Labrador. To reach his patients in remote locations during the winter, Grenfell had a sled team.

The dogs that comprised his team were mostly “Labrador huskies” and what appear to be crosses between that dog and the St. John’s water dog, which was a fine hauling dog in its own right.

At least one of these dogs appears to have been totally of this ancestry. The dog, who was named Jack, can be seen pulling in the foreground of the image above.

Jack is described as follows:

“Jack,” a black dog with the looks and the ways of a retriever, had “Moody’s” [a husky cross] good habit of going straight on without turning to see who followed, and he was put in the position of trust nearest the sledge. He liked to run with his nose close to the ground, and nothing that the trail or the snow-crust could tell any wise “husky” dog was a secret to the busy nose of this gentle-natured fellow.

It is mentioned that Jack was used as retriever to Grenfell’s gun during the seasons he wasn’t used as a sled dog:

He was so small that he was not taken very seriously for his hauling power—but when it came to hunting, he was there with all four paws, and he was used as retriever when Dr. Grenfell went out with a gun.

Jack would use his water dog skills to guide the team after they got mired in some melting mush and had to swim out before they all drowned.

Here is a better photo of Jack. He is lying down int he foreground, looking very Labradorish. One can see that the other dogs are mostly of a kind of husky/Labrador cross.

St. John’s water dogs were used to haul loads in Newfoundland.  They probably weren’t as good at it as the husky-type dogs on the mainland were, but they were utilitarian dogs that had to be able to do lots of different things. One couldn’t keep a lot of specialized dogs, as the nobles in England and later their pretenders in the United States would later do.

The versatility of golden and Labrador retrievers comes from their old water dog ancestor. It was the multipurpose water cur of Newfoundland.

And that is who Jack truly was.