454 bulletin: museum of comparative zoology. 



kept apart by a crosspiece and trailing behind. A leather collar served 

 to keep this frame in place for dragging the goods piled upon it. In 

 this way entire villages moved, the dogs dragging the household 

 effects. The contrivance seems not to have been used west of the 

 Rocky Mountains. Perhaps the earliest mention of the use of these 

 dogs as pack-animals is found in Coronado's account of his journey 

 in 1540 to 1542, from the City of Mexico to the Texas plains (see 

 translation l)y Winship, G. P., 1904). When some ten days' march 

 from the present Rio Pecos, Texas, Coronado and his followers came to 

 Haxa, where the natives were found to have "packs of dogs." In 

 moving camp, these Indians started off "with a lot of dogs which 

 dragged their possessions." "They travel like the Arabs, with their 

 tents and troops of dogs loaded with poles and having Moorish pack 

 saddles with girths. When the load gets disarranged, the dogs howl, 

 calling some one to fix them right." A letter from one of Coronado's 

 men further describes the dogs. "These people," he writes, "have 

 dogs like those in this country [Spain], except that they are somewhat 

 larger, and they load these dogs like beasts of burden, and make saddles 

 for them like our pack saddles, and they fasten them with their leather 

 thongs, and these make their backs sore on the withers like pack 

 animals .... When they move — for these Indians are not settled in 

 one place, since they travel wherever the cows [i. e., Bison] move, to 

 support themselves, these dogs carry their houses, and they have 

 the sticks of their houses dragging along tied on to the pack saddles, 

 besides the load which they carry on top, and the load may be, accord- 

 ing to the dog, from 35 to 50 pounds." Evidently these were the 

 carrier-dogs of the Plains Indians, and the method of packing with the 

 tent poles used as travois seems to be here first described. 



As pack-animals, for moving camp in their pursuit of the Bison, 

 these dogs were of great service to the Indians of- the plains country, 

 and every village was provided with troops of them. 



As an article of food, the dog seems to have been somewhat analo- 

 gous to the fatted calf. George Catlin (1841, 1, p. 14) writing of the 

 Upper Missouri Indians, says: "We are invited by the savages to 

 feasts of dog^s meat, as the most honourable food that can be presented 

 to a stranger." 



