The Dogs That Grew Wool and the People Who Love Them

"There was a time when the Indigenous women of the Pacific Northwest’s coastal regions paddled their canoes to small, rocky islands once a day or so to care for packs of small white-furred dogs. The dogs would greet them, yelping and pawing as they implored their keepers for food. The women, in turn, would pet the dogs and dispense a stew of fish and marine mammal bits—not scraps, but quality food. Once the dogs (most of them perhaps females, probably in heat) had eaten their fill, the women might linger awhile to sing to them and brush their long white fur. The dogs—and their fur—were the women’s source of wealth, and the women kept watch to ensure that no village cur crept onto the islands to taint the breed.

"Once or twice a year, the women arrived as usual with a supply of food, but also brought mussel-shell knives. The dogs knew the routine: settle down and relax so that the women could cut away their white tresses, shearing the dogs as closely as shearers do sheep.

"Back in their village longhouses, the women transformed that fur into yarn, spinning it and mixing it with the wool of mountain goats and adding plant fibers and goose down to make the thread strong and warm. They beat the yarn with white diatomaceous earth to deter insects and mildew. They dyed some of the yarn red with alder bark, tinted it a light yellow with lichen, and produced blue and black threads using minerals or huckleberries. The rest—an ivory-hued yarn—they set aside. Then the women set up their looms and began to weave, turning out twill-patterned blankets of various sizes, some with elaborate and colorful geometric designs, others with simple stripes. The dogs did more than provide fur. They were also part of village life: sometimes, a favorite wooly dog would keep a weaver company.

"The finely woven blankets symbolized wealth, and also a connection to ancestors and the spirit world. They represented a person’s generosity, too—great numbers of blankets were given away at potlatches, gift-giving ceremonial feasts. The blankets had other uses as well. Sometimes they wrapped together a couple in a marriage ceremony, or adorned a chief, while smaller ones might swaddle a newborn, or were worn as garments. People used blankets to negotiate the purchase of brides and slaves or to settle disputes. Blankets cloaked chiefs and other members of the nobility for burial. Proud owners stored their blankets in scented cedar boxes.

"Indigenous oral traditions attest to a robust weaving industry in some coastal nations—such as the Cowichan on British Columbia’s Vancouver Island and the Squamish on British Columbia’s southern coast—that endured for thousands of years."

Photo above: Paul Kane painted this scene of a Coast Salish weaver with a wool dog in the 1840s, "in either Saanich or Songhees territory on Vancouver Island, British Columbia."

"Eighteenth-century European explorers wrote about seeing flocks of wool dogs and observing people robed in blankets partly woven from the canines’ 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.

"But new avenues of research have merged to underscore the presence, and importance, of the dogs and their wool. Over the years, scientists have employed new techniques to study coastal peoples’ blankets in museum collections—and discovered some that do contain dog hair, although blankets woven entirely from our best friends’ 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—wolves, coyotes, foxes, and dogs—were 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. ...

"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—he’d not encountered such an industry elsewhere in North America. He wrote about the animals, struck by these dogs that resembled large Pomeranians. “They 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.” Indeed, he noted the dogs’ “very fine long hair [was] capable of being spun into yarn.” And the captain quickly put two and two together. “This 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 …”

"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’s also sheared and made yarn from her own dog, a mutt. Like others who’ve worked with dog hair, Olsen says that the yarn “doesn’t bind like sheep’s wool; it lacks the nubs and hooklike fibers.” 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.

“They 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,” Olsen says. That was a lot of fur."

Photo below from the 1840s showing young women with a wool dog. The species that had been so carefully bred for its wool was lost at colonization, since the women could no longer keep these dogs separate from the hunting dogs.  

"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—and 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.

"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’s territory. Even collecting goat fur in the spring as the animals sloughed off their winter coats required lengthy journeys. Maybe that’s 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—islands provided a perfect solution.

"But at Hudson’s 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."

Shown below: Salish blanket in U of Washington Burke Museum with dog wool blend twill.

"In academic retrospect, it makes sense that Indigenous peoples zeroed in on animal breeding early on. Coastal communities cultivated plants and practiced mariculture. They built clam gardens and managed salmon fisheries. “These were not subsistence cultures,” says McKechnie. “The people were thriving, and they had ample free time to develop arts and add cultural material to their lives. Some of that time they invested in dog husbandry.” The only other domesticated species in North America prior to the arrival of Europeans was the turkey, Meleagris gallopavo, bred by Indigenous peoples in central Mexico about 800 BCE. The Indigenous peoples in the Pacific Northwest did not breed dogs to eat, McKechnie says.

"Dogs were so important to people on the coast that the canines were sometimes buried in association with humans—a practice not extended to other animals. The anthropologist William Elmendorf, who studied linguistics of the Coast Salish peoples, noted in his studies, which began in the 1930s, that especially valued dogs were typically wrapped in blankets prior to being buried. More recently, Washington State University graduate student Matthew Marino analyzed numerous such burials and concluded that some dogs operated as persons in the Coast Salish world, a conclusion that echoes Indigenous elders.

"Chief Janice George, who resurrected the art of weaving in the Squamish Nation has written about this special relationship. “You should think about blankets as merged objects,” she wrote in the opening paragraph of Salish Blankets: Robes of Protection and Transformation, Symbols of Wealth. “They are alive because they exist in the spirit world. They are the animal. They are part of the hunter; they are part of the weaver; they are part of the wearer.”

"Coast Salish and Nuu-chah-nulth narratives are also rich with stories involving dogs—describing dog-human marriages, supernatural sexual relations and conception, and the passage of names and wealth from people to their dogs. One such narrative tells of a female dog and male human mating; their offspring become a new human community after a flood.

"And a Nuu-chah-nulth narrative explains the origin of the Broken Group Islands in Barkley Sound (off the southwest coast of Vancouver Island), says Denis St. Claire, an independent archaeologist, coauthor of the new study, and representative of the Tseshaht, a Nuu-chah-nulth nation. According to this supernatural tale, a chief’s daughter gives birth to four curly, white-haired dogs, leading her people to abandon her. The four puppies transform into four strong young men who avenge the spurning of their mother when they spy their kin’s canoes approaching—they wash their long hair in the sea, creating whitecaps that cause all the canoes to capsize. “All the peoples’ boxes and goods were left floating in the sea; they turned into the Broken Group Islands,” says St. Claire. “The dogs were not just cute and cuddly, they play a major role in spiritual beliefs.”

Detail below from the blanket shown above, with a closer view of the twill.

"As persons and ancestors, dogs were entitled to a better life than other animals. And since wool dogs provided wealth via their fur, they were accordingly well fed and treated kindly. The dog bones that Marino examined showed little damage, although some puppies may have been sacrificed to accompany the burial of a child; one adult dog had a healed broken vertebra, indicating it had been cared for long enough to recover from an injury. The wool dogs, in particular, ate well. According to another new paper by McKechnie and led by University of Victoria graduate student Dylan Hillis, dogs from sites in the Tseshaht Nation territory dating to 2,900 to 300 years ago were fed a rich mixture of salmon, herring, anchovies, and marine mammals—a diet likely similar to that of their human companions. The researchers teased out this information by analyzing chemicals in the dogs’ bones.

"Christyann Darwent, a zooarchaeologist at the University of California, Davis, who studies animal remains, including those of sled dogs in the Arctic, says the existence of such a unique breed says a lot about the people. “These dogs weren’t simply scavenging for scraps at the margins of a village; they were being cared for,” Darwent says. To create such a dog, she says, “takes effort, a surplus of food—and a love of dogs.” In the broader story of dog domestication, Carly Ameen, a zooarchaeologist at the University of Exeter in England who has studied the Inuit peoples’ sled dogs, points out that the new research focuses on a different part of the narrative about humans and dogs: what happens after dogs’ initial domestication.

“Studying domestic dogs in the Americas is interesting because—unlike in Eurasia—we don’t have the [puzzle] of figuring out their actual domestication,” she says. In Eurasia, the long-standing riddle facing archaeologists is determining when and where dogs were first domesticated. Instead, the dogs that arrived in the Americas with humans were already dogs. The new research “explores … how they’ve evolved and adapted alongside their human companions to fit into a wide range of roles,” Ameen says.

"In his 1994 study, Schulting had identified one blanket as having dog fur. Pieces of a blanket donated to British Columbia’s Simon Fraser University in 1978 provided the clue. The blanket had wrapped an infant laid to rest sometime between 1770 and 1860 and was found in Yale, British Columbia, along the Fraser River. The tightly woven fabric features a diamond twill pattern, and though stained, it was probably originally white, off-white, or brown. Schulting tested the stable isotopes in the fibers and found they contained a high percentage of protein derived from primarily eating marine animals—likely salmon. It “would be a strange mountain goat indeed” that lived on such a diet, he noted in his study. The fabric had to be from the elusive Salish wool dog."

shown, North American Inuit dog

Makah weavers in NW Washington: "There is no doubt wool dogs underpinned a robust weaving industry on the coast, an activity noted in archaeological digs. For instance, excavations in the 1970s at the Makah village of Ozette on the westernmost point of today’s Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, *uncovered wooden looms, spinning whorls, combs, and beaters, as well as miniature looms for training children.* A landslide—probably caused by an earthquake on January 26, 1700—had destroyed the village and buried several cedar longhouses beneath a three-meter wall of mud.

"The disaster preserved numerous belongings of the people—kin to the Nuu-chah-nulth—including one blanket containing dog fur that was largely intact, as it was stored in a cedar wood box. They were very productive weavers. “They built 25-foot [7.5-meter] longhouses of cedar,” says Dale Croes, an archaeologist at Washington State University, who helped on the excavation. “They could easily fit three to four looms inside. We calculated they could have easily had nine weavers per household. It was an absolute industry.”

"The discoveries are paying off for the Coast Salish people. Once again, women are picking up the ancient craft, albeit without the fibers of dog wool, and galleries and museums have held exhibitions of their weavings. The art of weaving is “the heartbeat of our nation,” wrote Squamish elder Joy Joseph-McCullough or Siyaltenaat (her ancestral name) in Salish Blankets: Robes of Protection and Transformation, Symbols of Wealth. It’s fine to have it beating again—even without the wool dogs’ assistance."

Shown, example of the expert Coast Salish tapestry weaving, probably from B.C. These weavings were admired and some ended up in museum and royal collections in Europe. 

One of the finest surviving examples of classic Coast Salish weaving, 18th century. 

Musqueam spinner. Their blended yarn was often very thick and they used the biggest spindles in the world to twine it. The turning spindle whorls had sacred significance and were engraved with symbols. Musqueam artist Susan Point has elaborated on the whorl theme in diverse media. (Look for her name 

Mary Peters of Seabird Island Reserve was one of the elders who kept this knowledge going during a pivotal period of intense colonization. Teaching the young.

Coast Salish Country. Squamish, Nooksack, S'Klallam, Quileut, and other nations.

Oh, one more, the cover picture for the article by Jeffrey Veregge, showing the spinner in her longhouse village on the Mainland, and the dog in its island home.