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.

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)