Indigenous oral traditions attest to a robust weaving industry in some coastal nations\u2014such as the Cowichan on British Columbia\u2019s Vancouver Island and the Squamish on British Columbia\u2019s southern coast\u2014that endured for thousands of years.<\/p>\n
Eighteenth-century European explorers wrote about seeing flocks of wool dogs and observing people robed in blankets partly woven from the canines\u2019 fur. The material remains, however, are scant. Many scientists doubted the existence of wool dogs and the fabric. If it had been such a large-scale enterprise, then where were the textiles? Or the dogs, or their bones? A researcher who, in the 1970s, studied more than 100 weavings made during a time when using dog hair was plausible could not find a trace.<\/p>\n
But new avenues of research have merged to underscore the presence, and importance, of the dogs and their wool.<\/p>\n
Over the years, scientists have employed new techniques to study coastal peoples\u2019 blankets in museum collections\u2014and discovered some that do<\/em> contain dog hair, although blankets woven entirely from our best friends\u2019 pelts have yet to be found. Just last year, archaeologists and experts on animal remains reexamined thousands of mammalian bones collected from archaeological sites along the west coasts of Canada and the United States. Their analysis reveals that canids\u2014wolves, coyotes, foxes, and dogs\u2014were ubiquitous across the sites, making up nearly 10 percent of all mammalian bones. Further, domesticated dogs proved to be the most common type of canid.<\/p>\n This image of a Coast Salish weaver and a wool dog was captured by Canadian artist Paul Kane. Kane traveled from Ontario to British Columbia and Washington State in the 1840s, where he sketched and painted in numerous Indigenous communities, including this one in either Saanich or Songhees territory on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Photo courtesy of the Royal Ontario Museum \u00a9 ROM<\/p><\/div>\n \u201cThat was one of the problems,\u201d says Iain McKechnie, a zooarchaeologist with the Hakai Institute* and University of Victoria in British Columbia, and the lead author of the new study. \u201cAny doglike bones were put in a catch-all category: canid.\u201d Until now, nobody had embarked on the time-consuming challenge of identifying such a large collection.<\/p>\n But McKechnie and his colleagues drilled even further into the data, far enough to find that in southern British Columbia, small-sized domestic dogs were particularly abundant. The weight of evidence points to one overwhelming probability: wool dogs. They played an important role in the social and economic practices of Pacific Northwest peoples, and they\u2019re a testament to a remarkable accomplishment\u2014using selective breeding to invent a wool dog. \u201cIt was likely unique in the world,\u201d McKechnie says.<\/p>\n Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest\u2019s coastal regions have a deep and rich history with dogs. Wool dogs have been elusive, but they were part of communities that lived in the areas around Puget Sound, Vancouver Island, and the BC Lower Mainland for thousands of years.<\/p>\n Elders from the Nuu-chah-nulth communities on Vancouver Island\u2019s west coast and Coast Salish elders on the island\u2019s east coast and the province\u2019s mainland have described the care of these unique canines. They\u2019ve told stories of how women weavers groomed and tended the dogs; never fenced or restrained them, but kept them isolated on small islands so that they would not breed with the hunting dogs; and fed them special diets. For anyone who breeds dogs today, that kind of effort speaks to the importance of the animals.<\/p>\n McKechnie and his colleagues went to great effort to support what they long suspected. The team analyzed data on 175,000 mammalian bones collected at 210 sites from southern Oregon to southeast Alaska over the past five decades. Of those sites, 173 had canid bones, and nearly 54 percent were identified as dogs. Domestic dogs were obviously a significant animal. \u201cThey were part of these Indigenous communities for at least 5,000 years,\u201d says McKechnie.<\/p>\n The scientists found that the second most common type of canid was the wolf, although wolf bones were found at only 19 of the sites\u2014perhaps because the Indigenous people in this area believed it was spiritually dangerous to kill a wolf, says McKechnie. Coyote and fox bones were even rarer. But prior to the 18th century, wolves probably kept out coyotes, and foxes may have been restricted to the eastern Cascade Range.<\/p>\n Susan Crockford, a coauthor of the new study, first began to tease apart the canid bone collections in the 1990s. Because dogs descended from wolves, the two share many skeletal similarities, though dogs are typically smaller. Domestication adds other differences. In general, domesticated animals retain more juvenile features\u2014as seen in dogs\u2019 shorter snouts and narrower skulls. Using these and other differences, Crockford revealed that many canid bones were those of domesticated dogs. Further, she found that these could be easily separated into two sizes: large and small, reflecting what the Indigenous peoples and early European explorers had reported. The coastal peoples had a large dog for hunting and a smaller one that they bred specifically for its long, white spinnable fur.<\/p>\n The new study supports Crockford\u2019s findings and further shows that these small dogs outnumbered the larger ones\u2014especially on the south coast of British Columbia and in Washington State\u2019s Puget Sound. Coastal peoples had developed the wool dog as a separate breed.<\/p>\n Wool dogs were rarely included in the first photos taken of Indigenous peoples in the late 1800s. Photo courtesy of the Chilliwack Museum and Archives, 1963.015.025<\/p><\/div>\n The first Europeans to visit the region seemed intrigued by the numerous little white dogs. In May 1792, Captain George Vancouver noticed the dogs and weavings\u2014he\u2019d not encountered such an industry elsewhere in North America. He wrote about the animals, struck by these dogs that resembled large Pomeranians. \u201cThey were all shorn as close to the skin as sheep are in England; and so compact were their fleeces, that large portions could be lifted up by a corner without causing any separation.\u201d Indeed, he noted the dogs\u2019 \u201cvery fine long hair [was] capable of being spun into yarn.\u201d And the captain quickly put two and two together. \u201cThis gave me reason to believe their woolen clothing might in part be composed of this [dog] material mixed with a finer kind of wool from some other animal \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n Sylvia Olsen, a historian and wool worker on Vancouver Island, has studied a few of the remaining samples of dog hair and goat wool blankets. She\u2019s also sheared and made yarn from her own dog, a mutt. Like others who\u2019ve worked with dog hair, Olsen says that the yarn \u201cdoesn\u2019t bind like sheep\u2019s wool; it lacks the nubs and hooklike fibers.\u201d The coastal weavers mixed their dog hair with the wool of mountain goats, another highly prized commodity that was difficult to harvest, Olsen says, and would have been acquired through trading or by making long journeys to mountain goat territory far from Vancouver Island.<\/p>\n \u201cThey were making blankets up to 10 to 20 feet [three to six meters] long and very heavy, because of the many materials, including diatomaceous earth in them,\u201d Olsen says. That was a lot of fur.<\/p>\n Imagine a fine September day in 1828. Coast Salish people from Cowichan on eastern Vancouver Island are traveling down the Fraser River on mainland British Columbia, paddling a flotilla of 160 canoes, returning from a fall fishing trip. A formidable armada from a distance, perhaps, but the cedar-trunk carved boats are full of mothers, fathers, children\u2014and dogs. The dogs are shorn; their remaining white fur just stubble. About half a dozen dogs are tucked in each canoe, making up a flock of nearly 1,000 dogs on this trip across the sea. It is likely a merry voyage, as the people sing and the dogs yip and yodel. European explorers noted that the wool dogs did not bark, but howled.<\/p>\n Perhaps the women brought with them baskets filled with dog fur to trade with other Indigenous communities for mountain goat fur. Some researchers think that it was the love of mountain goat fur that led to the wooly dog breed. Hunting the goats, which live in precipitous, rocky mountains on the mainland, was dangerous and time consuming, and not necessarily feasible if in another nation\u2019s territory. Even collecting goat fur in the spring as the animals sloughed off their winter coats required lengthy journeys. Maybe that\u2019s why some enterprising women hit on the idea of breeding dogs for their similarly colored hair, suggested Oxford University archaeologist Rick Schulting in 1994. If they were to keep their breed pure, they knew they had to devise a way to keep their female wooly dogs from mating with the village or (later) European dogs\u2014islands provided a perfect solution.<\/p>\n But at Hudson\u2019s Bay Company trading posts, an insidious economic threat awaited the dogs and weavers: stacks of inexpensive, manufactured woolen blankets. They could be easily purchased for sea otter skins, and in general, the company and Indigenous communities engaged in a brisk trade.<\/p>\n Despite the wool dogs\u2019 abundance in the early 18th century, they were almost extinct by 1858, anthropologists say; the blankets, too, were increasingly scarce. It was far easier to acquire a ready-made woolen Hudson\u2019s Bay blanket than to go to all the trouble of caring for dogs, bargaining for mountain goat fur or traveling to distant mountains to search for it, cleaning and spinning the fur into yarn, and then producing the weavings. The wooly dogs disappeared, too, as the women ceased isolating them and they interbred with village and European dogs.<\/p>\n As the wool dogs disappeared, so too did the prime evidence for the Pacific Northwest peoples\u2019 invention. Because the dogs as a distinct breed no longer exist, scientists cannot easily trace their evolution. They do know that the earliest dogs in the Americas were a lineage of now-extinct Arctic dogs. They were probably used for hunting, hauling supplies, and guarding camps\u2014not unlike some breeds today\u2014and traveled with their human companions from Eurasia some 10,000 years or more ago.<\/p>\n It\u2019s likely some type of dog traveled with human migrants into western North America from Siberia and other parts of Asia and did not go extinct. At some point, over 10,000 years ago, people and their dogs settled the Pacific Northwest coastal regions. Scientists don\u2019t know when people began selectively breeding the wool dogs, or what type of dog they used. But they likely started their wool dog breed by working with a spitz-like dog\u2014dogs that have thick, dense fur; pointed ears and muzzles; and fluffy tails that curl up and over their rears. A spitz actually describes several such breeds today, including the Samoyed, American Eskimo dog, Shiba Inu, and chow chow\u2014all of which descend from ancient breeds that evolved in Arctic regions and fit early European explorers\u2019 descriptions of the wool dog.<\/p>\n![\"painting](\"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/painting-wool-dogs.jpg\")
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