About the authors

It was in 1987 that my good friend Pieter Keijzer and I, Sarah de Monchy, decided together to take a dog, ending up with both having a Samoyed puppy, two males of the same litter. Neither of us had experienced a Samoyed before. We selected this breed, as we wanted a dog that was friendly to strangers and fit to accompany us when camping and hiking in the mountains. So it had to be a good walker, protected by an all-weather coat. These little white bears developed into beautiful wolfish dogs, easy to take everywhere, great company on winter and summer holidays and a feast for the eye when playing with each other or running and hunting through fields and woods, now and then checking in with me, their eyes shining of sheer joy in live.

Today, I share my live with two sons of the last litter sired by one of these two dogs. Now, as the second generation I owe has turned seven years old, and if reaching the same age as their father, I will be enjoying their company for seven more years to come. But the looks of these dogs, that have become so familiar to me, appear to be getting pretty rare. And I have become more and more aware of the fact that the chances for obtaining such dogs ever again, are diminishing every day.

Through the years the interest in the breed grew with both of us. In Pieter»s case, it became a hobby to find out more about the background of the breed, triggered by the dive he took in the library of the University of Amsterdam, in search for Samoyedic names for the pups. The fruit of several years reading and collecting books, articles and pictures of early Samoyeds is now gradually to be found on the website on the history of the Samoyed dog that he is building. This website, www.oldsams.info, is still under construction and in Dutch only, but a translation in English is on its way and many pictures are yet to be viewed.

Part I: A short history of the Samoyed dog in its home country

Introduction

To write a history of the Samoyed dog one has to consider that the live and tasks of the aboriginal Samoyed dogs, the dogs living with the Samoyed peoples, differ considerably with that of the Samoyed dogs now living in the Western civilized world. The modern Samoyed dogs have, thanks to the ever increasing demand to score on dog shows, even undergone a considerable change in exterior compared to the aboriginal Samoyed dogs.

The Samoyed dog is originally an all white dog with long standing fur and a vivid and athletic appearance. The name of this breed is derived from the Samoyedic speaking peoples living on the tundra»s and in the taiga»s of Northern European Russia and North-west Siberia, globally stretching from the White Sea in the West to the Taymir Peninsula in Siberia. As the history of aboriginal dogs is linked with that of the peoples - as Vladimir Beregovoy already pointed out in his article in the first issue of R-PADS newsletter - we must, in order to be able to sketch a background picture, turn our attention a little towards the Samoyed peoples first.

Language and culture

The Samoyeds are not one people but a group of peoples speaking Samoyed languages, languages that are distantly related to the Finno-Ugrian languages, such as Finnish, Hungarian, Komi, Permian Khanty, Mansi and other languages.
Both the Samoyed and Finno-Ugrian languages belong to the Uralic language group, the Uralians being the far forefathers of the peoples speaking these languages. These Uralians are thought to have lived in what is now called European Russia, near the Ural Mountains.

The Samoyed language group now encompasses the languages of the Nenets, Enets, Sel»kup and Nganasan, the latter being the northernmost living peoples of the world. All of these names refer to our word for «Man».

The Nenets are the most numeral of the Samoyed peoples, numbering about 30.000 people. The smallest group of Samoyeds are the Enets, numbering 209 Enets speaking people counted in 1989 and listed as endangered peoples beyond the point of no return. More Samoyed peoples, like the Kamasin, Motor etc., have existed but are now extinct. One of them as recently as 1919, when the last Kamasin died.

Although already in the 17th century the Englishman Peter Mundy and the Dutchman Nicolaes Witsen had published several Nenets words, a real study of the languages was only published in the 1820»s by the Finnish linguist Mattias Alexander Castrén.

At the time of the first imports of Samoyed dogs (the last decennium of the 19th century) the Nenets were living in the broad area from the White Sea in the West to the mouth of the Yenissei river in the East. The Enets were then living on the Eastern shores of the Yenissei river from about Golchika in the North down toward the town of Turuchansk. The Nganasans lived (and still live) on the Taimyr Peninsula. Another part of the Samoyeds remained living in Southern Siberia and the Sayan mountains. Their languages, most of them extinct nowadays, are called the Southern Samoyed languages. Of these, one group - the Sel’kup (Söl’kup or Shöl’kup as they call themselves) - also went northward to finally end up living near the mouth of the river Taz. Because of their cultural resemblance with the Ostyaks (Khanty) they were called «Ostyak-Samoyeds» by the Russians.

Live-style and economy

By origin all the Samoyeds were hunters, but changes in their live-style made most of them turn into reindeer herding peoples. Only the Nganasan, living extreme North and isolated, kept up their reindeer hunting live-style even in the 20th century. Other means of economy still had a neolithic hunting-gathering character: they were fishing, they were hunting squirrels and sables in the forests, seals, walruses, ice-bears in the Polar Sea and they gathered different eatable plants and berries on tundra and in taiga. Their main food supply though has always been the meat of reindeer.

At the time of the late 19th century, the time of the first imports of Samoyed dogs, the Nenets and Enets still could be divided in Tundra-Nenets and Tundra-Enets on the one side, and Forest-Nenets and Forest-Enets on the other, having developed dialectical forms of their languages. Nowadays this division remains only within the group of Nenets-speaking peoples.

The Samoyeds had to pay taxes in the form of skins (mostly sable skins, later also squirrel skins) to the Russian Tsar. For paying their tribute to the local tax collector, they had to travel to the nearest town during the annual fairs being held there. Besides the fact that the skins were used as means for paying taxes, they were also used as commercial trade commodities enabling these people to buy common house-keeping things and tools. The demand for skins was so big that the rich population of sables and squirrels nearly reached the point of extinction in the whole of Siberia.

Marriage and family live

Finding a husband or wife was a complex matter in Samoyed live: bound by rules of exogamy, Samoyed men and women were not allowed to just marry the one they loved. They probably understood inbreeding earlier than anyone in the West or at least they must haven known the consequences by experience. For example, the Enets tribe of Baggo were not allowed to marry with members of the Masodaj, Lodoseda, Bunala, Dekutan, Sado and Sonuko tribes.

They lived in family tribes in tents made of birch-rind, many times covered with reindeer skin in the winter. Differences in possession of numbers of reindeer could be big: ranging from just a few reindeer for poor families to several hundreds or even thousands for rich families.

All the Samoyed peoples had a nomadic life-style, except from those who had lost their reindeer by epidemics of anthrax and therefore were forced to live a more sedentary life near Russian towns and villages. The reindeer being driven northward by raising temperatures in spring, the families had to follow their herd, reaching in summertime the shores of the Arctic Ocean, where they lived hunting seals and walruses. In autumn they returned south, living during the wintertime along the fringe of the taiga. Dependent of the width of the tundra, they sometimes had to travel for several hundreds of kilometres before reaching the shores of the ocean.

War and peace

The Samoyeds were not so peaceful as is generally thought. It is true that alcoholism kept them down, but reports from Nicolaes Witsen in the late 17th century show us that they were involved in wars towards their Russian neighbours and even attacked the town of Pustozersk, located in the delta of the Petchora river.

A poem of a Dutch 18th century Navy officer describes the attack on his vessel which was anchored in the frozen White Sea. These attacks may have been caused by famine in order to get food. Remarkable in the mentioned poet is the description of «whistling» arrows. 20th century anthropological research showed that indeed they were using these types of arrows among other types.

Wars between Samoyedic tribes and other peoples, like the Ostyaks, seem also to have been quite common. Many times the goal here was to obtain the other tribe»s wives. Another reason for tribal warfare was the illegal use of the tundra pastures. The tundra was not common ground, but tribes «owned» their pastures and the boundaries were marked by marking stones.

Disputes among clan members were solved by the head of he clan, sometimes also referred to as the «king».

Much, much more can be said about these peoples, but that would be outside the scope of the article. From here on then we shall turn our attention towards the aboriginal Samoyed dogs.

The Samoyed dogs

Aboriginal Samoyed dogs do resemble the white Arctic wolf strongly. Of course, depression caused by domestication has altered the morphology from that of the original in the wild living animal, just like it happened to many other domesticated animals like sheep, goats, cows and also the cat.

As Vladimir Beregovoy in his article «Primitive Aboriginal Dogs» has already mentioned in R-PADS Newsletter #1, domestication of the dog took place in Asia about 15.000 years ago. But that of course does not mean that all aboriginal dogs were domesticated at that time.

The determination of the time of the first domestication of the dog is based on findings of animal remains and the results of zooarcheological research.

But to find an answer on the question since when the Samoyed peoples used dogs, leaving out the question whether they have domesticated the wolf themselves, one cannot base himself on zooarcheological findings, as those findings never could be connected to a certain people. Instead, one has to turn towards linguistics.

From etymology there is no indication that the Uralics knew the dog. Neither is there any indication that the Proto-Finno-Ugrians knew the dog. An etymology for dog appears only in the Proto-Samoyed language, the language that all Samoyed peoples once spoke before they split up in the peoples known today.

As the division of the Uralians into Proto-Finno-Ugrians and Proto-Samoyeds is thought to have taken place about 3000 BC, that must then be seen as being the earliest possible date for the use of dogs by the Proto-Samoyeds.

Where exactly the Proto-Samoyeds started to use dogs is of course not known, but at that time they most probably lived near the sources of the rivers Ob and Yenissei in the neighbourhood of the Sayan Mountains in Southern Siberia. The Proto-Samoyeds being neolithic hunters-gatherers, it is most likely that these dogs served them in helping to catch prey, a task which the dogs in one way or another have kept until recent times.

Due to circumstances not known to us, a part of the Proto-Samoyeds moved northwards leaving the regions in and around the mountains of Central-Asia to finally settle down in the Polar Regions. Probably they were then already speaking different dialects, which would later develop into separate languages. They were the early Nenets, Enets and Nganasan. Their languages are now called the Northern Samoyed languages.

The language of the Sel»kup belongs to the group of Southern Samoyed languages. The Sel»kup people followed the above mentioned three later in moving northward.

Of course, we do not know how the dogs of the Proto-Samoyeds looked like. We do not even know whether they domesticated the wolves themselves, but as all Northern-Samoyeds were using the same type of dog, it may be considered that indeed they domesticated the white wolf during the time they still formed one people.

Such domestication can not have taken place in Northern parts of Siberia as, on arriving there, they were already split up. It may even be considered that an eventual domestication might have taken place from a population of Arctic wolves driven South by the last Ice Age. But these are, of course, all speculations.

Early Western descriptions of exterior and use of dogs

The early travellers were probably not so much interested in the Samoyed dogs they must have seen together with the Samoyed people. Men like the Dutchman Jan Huygen van Linschooten (companion of Willem Barentz during his journey to find a Northern route to India) in the 1590th, the British Peter Mundy, the Dutchman Nicolaes Witsen and the German-Dutch Evert Ysbrandt Ides in the 17th century and later travellers from 18th and early 19th century all described the Samoyed people in their journals without mentioning dogs.

It is first in the last quarter of the 19th century that Western travellers turned their attention towards the looks and use of the Samoyed dog. By that time hundreds of years of contacts with Russians and non-Samoyed peoples had caused a diversion of dog types, at least on the westernmost tundra»s and taiga»s of European Russia. On these stretches, dogs that accompanied the Nenets were not all of them pure white, but could have any colour and be of any type!

Descriptions of pure white dogs reaches us from travellers visiting the Bolshezemel»skaya tundra, the biggest tundra in European Russia which stretches from the Petchora river in the west to the Ural mountains in the East, called Arka-ya by the Nenets.

One of these men was the British ornithologist Henry Seebohm from Sheffield. He saw in 1875 the dogs being used for herding:

The Samoyedes proved themselves expert in throwing the lasso. In the left hand they held a small coil of rope, in the right hand the larger half. The lasso was thrown with an underhand fling, and generally successfully over the horns of the animal at the first attempt. The left hand was then pressed close to the side so as to bring the shock of the sudden pulling up of the reindeer at full speed against the thigh. When a reindeer found itself caught, it generally made desperate efforts to escape, but was usually on its haunches gasping for breath in a few seconds. The Samoyede then hauled in the rope, or, if it was nearly out at full length, another Samoyede came up and began to haul it in nearer to the animal. When he was close to it he took hold of the horns, and with a side twist, brought the reindeer down on to the snow. The Russian to whom the fifty reindeer belonged then approached, and taking a thong of three-plait matting from a bunch at his belt, tied one of the animal»s forelegs to the hind leg on the same side; crossing the feet, but keeping the legs parallel at the point of ligature.

As soon as the reindeer was left, he made wild efforts to rise and walk; and sometimes succeeded in hobbling a few paces. Finding his strength give way with his frantic efforts to escape, he generally rested with his foreknees on the snow for a time; and finally lay down quietly. A dozen reindeer were soon on the ground. The scene became quite exciting; the reindeer were wheeling round and round in circles. The dogs tied to the sledges barked furiously, and evidently wished to have a share in the sport. The dogs selected by the Samoyedes to help them to get within lasso range of the deer, rushed frantically about at the command of their masters, whose loud cries added to the excitement of the scene. Sometimes a herd of reindeer ran over a place where the snow was unable to bear their weight; and it was interesting to watch them snorting and plunging. As the number caught increased, the difficulty also increased of identifying and catching the remaining few of the fifty that belonged to the Russian, and the Samoyedes with the lassos were driven about in sledges at a rapid pace to get within reach of the animals they wanted. The deer kept together; if one ran out of bounds a dog was sent after it and soon brought it back again. In one respect the reindeer resemble sheep; wherever one goes, the rest try to follow.

In this herd the greater number were females (vah»shinka), with good horns; these they do not cast till they drop their young. A few were males (horre), their new horns just appearing. Those chiefly used in the sledges were cut reindeer (buck), also without horns. Some of the hornless animals leaped right through the lasso and others were caught by the leg.

The lasso is a cord about one hundred feet long, made of two thongs of reindeer skin plaited together, so as to make a round rope three-eighths of an inch in diameter. The noose is formed by passing the cord through a small piece of bone with two holes in it. The lasso passes freely through the hole, while the end is fastened to a little bone peg with a bone-washer to prevent it slipping through the other hole.

The dogs were all white except one, which was quite black. They were stiff-built little animals, somewhat like Pomeranian dogs, with fox-like heads and thick bushy hair; their tails turned up over the back and curled to one side. This similarity between the Pomeranian and Samoyede dogs is a rather curious fact, for Erman mentions a race of people who, he says, resemble the Finns, both in language and features, in a district of Pomerania called Samogitia, inhabited by the Samaites. (Henry Seebohm, Siberia in Europe. London,1880, p. 65-67).

Though not completely misplaced, we shall leave the last remark of Seebohm for what it is, as an historical explanation of it would bring us far outside the scope of this article. With regard to the Samoyed dogs on the European tundra»s, the existence of white dogs only on the Bolshezemel»skaya tundra, is confirmed by L.S. Berg, President of the All-Union Geographical Society of the U.S.S.R. somewhere in the first half of the 20th century.

The situation on the Siberian tundra»s differed from the European tundra»s: from the Yamal Peninsula in the West to the Taimyr Peninsula east of the mouth of the Yenissei river, white dogs could be found. Here it must be mentioned that the white aboriginal Samoyed dogs were not only used by the Samoyeds but also by the Reindeer-Khanty, whose summer pastures reached as far north as the Southern part of the Yamal Peninsula. In the East, some Dolgan tribes – neighbour to the Nganasan-Samoyeds - used to have white dogs as well.

The Russian anthropologist A. A. Popov researched the Nganasan-Samoyeds in the 1930»s. On their dogs he writes:

«Reindeer herd dogs are a great help in gathering the herd and in catching individual domesticated reindeer. They are a breed of short-legged, Arctic, white dogs [known elsewhere as «Samoyed» dogs] which somewhat resemble polar foxes. All a herdsman has to do is give a shout, and the dogs will drive all the scattered reindeer to one spot at once. The Nganasan supply their neighbours, the Dolgan and the northern Yakut, with herd dogs, and they fetch high prices. These dogs are usually kept tied inside the tent or to a sledge with adjustable blocks» (A. Popov, The Nganasan, The Hague, 1966. p.76)

The dogs are tied on each sides of the entrance and behind the hearth. In cold weather they are not let out of the tent at all. They put the puppies, which are allowed to walk on the beds during the day, into a bag at night, so that they will not disturb people»s sleep. In the morning, they shake the bag and let the puppies out. (ibid. p. 96)

The Nganasan had an economy based on both the herding of domesticated reindeer and the hunting of wild ones. He describes the use of dogs in helping to catch wild reindeer:

«Certain types of collective hunting which had in the not too distant past great economic significance, and have been preserved until our times among the Nganasan, are of great interest. These are the slaughter and penning of wild reindeer in nets.

«Flags»(labaka) used to be indispensable appurtenances of summer stalking of wild reindeer. They were long stripes of skin, decorated with black, or else white fans of partridge wings, hung on the ends of long sticks.

Hunters following a herd of wild reindeer would plant the flags in the form of two diverging rows, leaving between them a space of 4 to 6 metres. «Signalers» (seriti) would hide near one row of flags, at the wide end of the lane.

The cleverest hunter, driving a sledge drawn by two domesticated reindeer, would drive a herd of wild reindeer into the lane. The signalers then would spring up, crying out and waving garments about, thus driving the reindeer further. At the narrow end of the lane the reindeer would be met by the arrows of two or three hunters armed with bows. The flags served as a sort of hedge keeping the reindeer from running aside. This method of hunting was called «ngatangiru». If the reindeer were near a lake, then the flags were planted in a single row. Opposite from this line, at some distance of it, people would station themselves in place of the second row of flags. Then the reindeer would be driven into the water by dogs along the lane thus formed. Then the hunters on the other side of the lake would at once go out in their canoes to kill the wild reindeer with long shafted spears. This method of hunting was called «suodisiti bantanu».

The two methods of hunting described were used most often in the summer, at the time of the molting of the geese, by several hunters working together. For example, the slaughter might be accomplished by three or even two hunters. As one of them patrolled the lake, the other, aided by dogs, which are greatly feared by wild reindeer, would drive the wild reindeer into the water. When the reindeer reached the lake, the second hunter would quickly go out in his canoe and kill them with a spear» (ibid. p. 35)

We can clearly see that for hunting wild reindeer in fact no specific hunting qualities were required. On the contrary, in the hunt on wild reindeer, people made use of the herding and driving qualities of the dogs!

Such driving qualities were also needed for the hunt for geese:
«When there are only a few geese on hand, they are driven and hunted down by dogs along a lake or river bank. Using this method, several men with dogs lie around a lake on which there are geese. One or two hunters go about the lake in canoes and drive the geese to the bank. (…………). When the geese come out onto the bank, the hunters which are lying in wait for them hunt them down with dogs. Usually such hunting does not produce great results, since some of the geese almost always get away.» (ibid. p. 47)

Dogs were also used during the summer migrations:

«During the summer migrations, a man well acquainted with the region will walk, with his staff in his hand, at the head of the caravan. He is followed by several men on foot with dogs who drive the herds of freely roaming reindeer. ……..»(ibid. p. 102)

The first imports.

The first imports It is probably thanks to the English captain Joseph Wiggins that the first all-white dogs came to Europe. Joseph Wiggins was a ships captain who, after a career on the commercial ocean-going trade, decided to return to the old dream of his youth: the exploration of the northern sea-route. His goal was to find a route for commercial trade with Siberia, which was rich with minerals. Altogether he made in the period 1875-1895 six expeditions, which led him to the Yenissei river and even as far upstream as the town of Yenisseisk in Southern Siberia. He seems to have taken several dogs with him on his returns to England. Unfortunately there is no documentation on these imports.

A British timber merchant, E. Kilburn Scott, being on business trip to Archangelsk, bought a puppy as a present for his wife from Samoyeds living not far from that town. This dog, named Sabarka, was not at all white but brown with white at feet and tail. Another recorded import, Whitey Petchora, was also not pure white. The first known pure white dog was taken home late 1893 by Francis Leybourne Popham. Travelling with his own ship to Siberia in a convoy of other ships under the command of captain Joseph Wiggins, he bought a pure white dog from Tundra-Enets living at Golchika. A picture of this dog is abusively named «imported 1894 ……»

Thanks to personal connections of captain Joseph Wiggins - friendships made during his travels - it was possible for both the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen and the British explorer Frederick George Jackson in the 1890th to obtain dogs from Siberia for their expeditions. Dogs could be obtained from a dog merchant who bought them at the village of Beresowa during the annual fair. Of the dogs bought, most of them were pure white, but as Nansen complained, some of them were castrated. As the Khanty had the habit of leading the pulling rope of there sledges underneath the belly of the dogs and as this caused damage and infections on the testicles of the male dogs, and as these males were for that reason castrated, it might be presumed that the castrated dogs which the explorers had bought were of Khanty origin.

Some of the dogs G.F. Jackson used on his expedition have been brought home to England and formed, among other imported dogs, the start of the worldwide population of Samoyed dogs.

Three other famous imports were the dogs Antarctic Buck, Houdin and Ayesha. Houdin was presented to or bought by E. Kilburn Scott from the Duke of Abruzzi, commander of the Italian North Polar Expedition.

Ayesha was taken to Archangelsk from Novaya Zemlya by Nenets. She was pure white, though there must be doubts as to whether she was of a pure aboriginal Samoyed bloodline, as in the late 90»s of the 19th century the governor of the province of Archangelsk, Alexander Platonovich Engelhardt, had ordered to send each year mongrel dogs from Archangelsk to Novaya Zemlya to keep up the number of dogs living there. Dogs at Novaya Zemlya lived a short live due to fights, diseases and harsh circumstances, but they were of economic importance for the Samoyeds living there because dogs were used to haul their sledges in the absence of reindeer on these islands.

Of Ayesha exist only a few vague pictures. One of them is presented here.

The world population of Samoyed dogs can therefore be seen as having been derived from only a handful of imported aboriginal Samoyed dogs. What that meant and what it led to, can be read in Part II of this article.

(to be continued)