| To tell the truth...
You will hear all kinds of talk about how long northern people have been using sleddogs to help them survive in the harsh higher latitudes. It is said that Europeans first reported whitnessing sleddogs in harness around 1600 and that they had been used as draft animals for around 3000 years before that ("Origins of the Alaskan Husky," Joe Runyan) But as Joe Runyan points out dogs must surely have been used as work animals long before that, for even a 3 year old will take his little plastic sled and hook it to Fido for a fun ride! So it is hard to imagine that dogs haven't been used as pack animals for as long as the first wolf was domesticated! |
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| Whenever dogs were first used as draft animals, it is for certain that the birth of the modern sleddog came about do to the boom of the Klondike Gold Rush in 1898.
Thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people flooded north into the Yukon and Alaska seeking gold, their fortunes, and one last gasp of the Wild West and Frontier/Pioneer spirit before the toxic breath of the industrial revolution encompassed the globe (okay that might just be my own personal opinion about the toxic breath thing...but you get the picture!) And all these people needed STUFF! And they needed a way to move their stuff around the 9 months of the year when the rivers were frozen solid and the steamships couldn't supply them! Enter the Dog Freighter... driving huge sleds and hauling even bigger loads they supplied the people of the north for years from the Gold Rush all the way into the 1940's and 50's when small durable Bush Airplanes took over. |
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| The problem was that durring the Gold Rush there just wasn't enough North Country dogs around to handle all the freight the Dogmen had to haul. So they started shipping up any dog they could find from Seattle, San Fransisco, and even as far away as Chicago. These dogs weren't really cut out for the job so they were bred with the northern breds... Particularily the Malamuit. The Malamuit was a large, strong dog that the Malamuit people of Norton Sound on the Bering Sea Coast had developed. Bred to Hounds, Pointers, and Setter (to name just a few) these dogs became the foundations of the modern sled dog!
To learn more check out the links and book refrences on the side bar! |
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