Man’s affection for dogs was on full display one recent evening as Bigfork bar-goers shifted focus from live-streaming basketball to the “Best in Show” final round of the Westminster Kennel Club.
Rather than rooting for NBA favorites like Stephen Curry and LeBron James, the grown men were spontaneously shouting support for endearing canines like “Bourbon” and “Comet” as they competed for the ultimate pooch prize.
Which isn’t surprising. Consider that an impressive 52 percent of Montanans own one or more dogs, putting this state high on the list for such deep symbiotic relationships.
Yet talk about timing. No sooner did the Westminster judge crown giant schnauzer Monty as top dog and an email pinged in my mailbox from the Montana Historical Society, its headline: “Forever Faithful: Dogs in Montana History.”
“If it happened in the Treasure State’s past, dogs were there. But they haven’t always been given their due. Join retired MTHS historian Kirby Lambert as he seeks to remedy this oversight in a presentation illustrating just why dogs have always been Montanans’ best friends.”
Let me be clear, there’s not a bigger dog lover than yours truly. But to load my sizable best friend into the car and drive to Helena — in February — for an otherwise compelling lecture goes beyond what’s expected of a semi-retired newspaper columnist.
Not to worry. The esteemed Mr. Lambert is kind enough to recite his entire lecture — by telephone — all over again for an audience of one, assured of course that his intriguing presentation will appear in this very column.
Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?
“The first people who started to come across the Bering [Land] Bridge and settle in [today’s] Montana had dogs with them,” the historian begins. “Everybody agrees that by the time people started coming to the Americas they brought dogs with them.”
Which is how long ago?
“It’s pretty safe to say 13,000 years ago people had dogs in Montana,” Lambert replies, pointing out that all dogs (Canis familaris) are direct descendants of the gray wolf (Canis lupus).
“And, for say 10,000 years, dogs were the only domesticated animal in North America,” the lecturer educates. “Certain native peoples relied on them. I mean they kept them as pets, but they relied on them [prior to the horse] as beasts of burden here in Montana. They either pulled sleds in the winter or a travois [sledge] in the summer.”
All of which changed in April 1805, when explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark first crossed into present day Montana. That shall we say is when dogs began to look over their shoulders.
“One thing people don’t know is [the] Lewis and Clark [expedition] ate a lot of dog on their trip,” Lambert recalls, especially when favorite go-to meals of elk, buffalo and beaver tail ran empty.
“They started out of necessity because they didn’t have any other meat,” he explains. “Once they tasted [dog] they decided that they really liked it. One historian that has gone through the Lewis and Clark journals estimated they ate approximately 200 dogs while they were on their trip west.”
“Nez Perce,” the researcher adds of one nearby tribe, “didn’t eat dogs and gave Lewis and Clark a hard time … made fun of them.”
On the heels of the famous explorers Montana’s first settlers began arriving, my Norwegian ancestors (Larsons) among them. And yes, they owned dogs.
“There are pictures of cowboys on horses holding puppies and train crews building railroad tracks and somebody has a dog,” Lambert points out. “There are lots of [Montana] studio portraits at the end of the 19th century when having your picture made was a big deal; it was expensive, something you just didn’t do every day.
“And a family would go to a studio with a professional photographer and take their dog as part of the family—they’d be part of the family photo. Even more surprising than that … taking their dog to the photographer to just get their dog’s picture taken, without anyone else in there,” he says.
“I was just amazed at how many of the photographs — regardless of when they were taken, or where they were taken in the state, or who the people were, or what the subject was — how many of the photos had dogs in them. A lot of the pictures were of things like a family going fishing. And there’s one nice photograph where the women are actually doing the fishing and the man is standing there with his gun and there’s a dog, kind of on guard duty, protecting the women, perhaps from bears. Dogs have always been there for protection.”
In Montana, he educates, there were “work dogs, cattle dogs and sheep dogs. Most fire stations had dogs. I didn’t see one in a picture that was a Dalmatian, but definitely there were dogs there guarding the wagons and equipment. They also often rode the wagons and barked to help clear the traffic — you hear horses’ hooves and the bark of a dog and you know to get out of the way pretty fast. Any town of any size had a fire station as soon as they could because fire was such an early problem when so much was built of wood.”
Dogs as companions were also found at Montana’s distant military forts, “a lot of military officers brought their own dogs with them,” according to Lambert’s lecture. “Custer was a big dog person and according to his wife he always traveled with dogs. He sometimes had as many as 40 dogs he traveled with. He had one that was a [Scottish] staghound named Blucher that would leap up and join him in his saddle.”
During harsh Montana winters early settlers “relied on dog sleds for transportation,” adds the historian. “And of course hunting was huge. In the early days, if you wanted meat, you had to go hunt it and kill it yourself, and dogs were a central part of that. They’ve always been used for tracking [whether] a bad guy or people who were lost.
“In the 1950s,” he reveals, “there was a man name George Talbot who lived in Corvallis and he owned a trio of the finest bloodhounds in the northwest, named Joy, Happy and Gay – named by his four daughters. Happy was blind, but could still smell and track with uncanny skill.”
During World War II, at an old mining site in the mountains west of Helena, the Camp Rimini War Dog Reception and Training Center was established to ready military mushers and teams of sled dogs for eventual wartime missions in Greenland and northern Europe, whether it be transporting needed materials to American forces or assisting with rescues.
“There are also lots of stories about dogs missing for several years and then coming back and finding their owners,” Lambert continues, as well as heartbreaking stories of dogs that would never see their owners again. Among the latter pack was Shep, a forever faithful sheep dog from Fort Benton.
Back in the 1930s, the lecturer tells it, a sheepherder tending to his flock became gravely ill. He was taken to a Fort Benton hospital, where for several days Shep kept a strict vigil at the door [a hospital nun provided the dog nourishment] until such time his owner died.
“So in 1936, they loaded the casket of the sheepherder onto an eastbound train to ship the body home for burial,” says the historian, leaving the “whining” Shep with his “puzzled eyes” alone on the platform.
The sad story doesn’t end there.
“So began a long vigil that would last for five-and-a-half years,” Lambert reveals. “Shep would come back and meet the train every day, expecting his master to return,” fed the whole time by railroad workers until a frigid morning in 1942, when the stiff-legged, hard-of-hearing herder slipped on the icy rails and got struck by a train.
“His funeral was a big deal,” the lecturer recalls. “The Boy Scouts turned up as pall bearers, a sermon by the local preacher, a big crowd.”
Better yet, along a scenic levee of the Missouri River, there exists today a bronze statue of Shep, his ears cocked and two front paws resting on a rail, gazing expectantly down the railroad tracks for his master’s return.
Butte, the historian points out, has no less than three bronze statues memorializing Auditor, a shaggy feral dog that spent 17 years — since 1986 — wandering through the massive Berkeley Copper Pit.
Lambert, however, leaves perhaps his best story for last.
“In my talk I spoke of an old time cattleman named Ott McEwen [b. 1876] and his beloved dog that somehow became separated. The dog was gone for four years,” he says. “And four years later they were having a stock growers meeting at the Bozeman Hotel in Bozeman when a dog came to the door and was kind of scratching on it until somebody let him in.
“And the dog went around the room and was sniffing at the different cowboys in there,” the lecturer reads from his notes, until such time it “leapt upon an old geezer.”
Yep, you guessed right.
“Old Ott McEwen couldn’t believe it,” Lambert says. “He put down on his knees and threw his arms around the dog while tears ran down his cheeks.”
The historian doesn’t hang up before telling me that his “research made me realize, in a nutshell, if it happened in Montana’s past, dogs were there. They may not have always been front and center, but they were at least witnesses to what was happening in Montana’s history.”
John McCaslin is a longtime journalist and author who lives in Bigfork.