156 
FOREST AND STREAM 
MARY MONTROSE 
THE GREATEST BIRD DOG OF HER DAY 
AND THE BLOOD SHE SPRANG FROM 
I T is a far cry from the All America 
Trials on the prairies of Dakota, to the 
National Championship in Tennessee. 
And from those historic fields, where all 
great bird dogs must qualify for field trial 
premiership, to the New York Dog Show, 
was long an untraveled route, but at last 
a bird dog, Mary Montrose, a pointer 
derby, has blazed the trail. During the 
season of 1916-17 she has won the prairie 
chicken trials in Dakota and the world’s 
championship on quail, and has closed her 
career with first in the winner’s class at 
the New York Dog Show. 
She has been crowned the greatest bird 
dog of her day. We have searched the rec¬ 
ords of the past. We have talked with the 
greybeards and historians of 
field trials. We have asked for 
the name of a greater bird dog. 
History and historians remain 
silent. Mary Montrose is the 
greatest bird dog that has ever 
lived. This wonderful pointer, 
a daughter of the greatest of 
pointer sires, Champion Co¬ 
manche Frank, and L o r n a 
Doone, is owned by William 
Ziegler, Jr., of New York, and 
was trained by Robert Arm¬ 
strong, of Barber, N. C. Mary 
Montrose is not an accident. She 
is the culmination of careful ob¬ 
servation, patient study and the 
intelligent application of the 
laws of breeding by two genera¬ 
tions of men devoted to the 
pointer. These men have finally 
succeeded in crowning their 
favorite breed with premier 
honors. Mary Montrose’s first 
win was in the Derby of the All America 
Club the first week in September, 1916. The 
week that followed she won the Continental 
Derby. This finished her career on prairie 
chickens, for there were no more prairie 
honors to be won. Her start on the quail 
circuit was at Sparta, Ill., in the Futurity. 
In this stake she was unplaced, nor did she 
win the Derby of the independent trials; 
but the week following in the all age stake 
she was second to her half brother, Co¬ 
manche Rap. In the Georgia trials she 
ran unplaced, but in the Continental Derby 
was second to, another brother, Royal 
Flush. Early in December she won third 
in the great Southern trials while her 
brother, Comanche Rap, was first. Next 
she won the United States Derby, the 
classic of the year. And there was a Derby 
Championship at Vinta, Okla. It was a 
wonderful stake, and Mary won it. She 
had gone the Derby route. 
The greatest event in the bird dog world 
is the National Championship. Its emblem 
is the Edward Dexter cup—twenty-six 
pounds of solid silver—that fortunes have 
been spent to win. To win the National 
Championship is the ambition of every man 
interested in trials. The conditions of the 
race are the severest, and only fully ma¬ 
tured and carefully prepared dogs are en¬ 
tered. The day that Mary Montrose was 
started in the championship she was only 
a few days past her puppy form. She had 
completed what was probably the longest 
campaign that a bird dog has ever been 
called to run, but she won the cup after 
one of the most brilliant races that has 
ever been seen on the National Champion¬ 
ship preserve. 
At every angle of the field trial game, 
Mary Montrose has set a new mark. She 
has made history faster and brighter than 
it was ever written before. The greatest 
setter that modern field trials remember was 
Little Sioux. Sioux tried for the cham¬ 
pionship and failed—-Mary Montrose won. 
There is a note of human interest in the 
story of this marvelous little pointer. It is 
a story of failure after failure, accepted 
with patient fortitude, and then this tri¬ 
umph. Twenty-five years ago a question 
frequently discussed was whether or not 
pointer breeders would ever be able to 
bring out a short-haired dog that could 
compete on terms of equality with the set¬ 
ter family. 
Fifteen years ago the National Cham¬ 
pionship was considered beyond the point¬ 
er’s aspirations. For years separate stakes 
were provided for pointers, as they were 
admittedly incapable of competing on terms 
of equality with setters. The friends of 
the pointers, fortunately, never wavered 
in their allegiance. Goedfroy, McMurdo, 
Buckell, Seitner, Stoddard, Nesbitt, Wise. 
Gar, and a host of others, some living and 
some dead, bravely contested the setter’s 
honors at the trials and sent their dogs on 
to almost certain defeat. 
And then a new champion of the breed 
arose. It was a quarter of a century ago, 
way back in the days when they were run¬ 
ning field trials at Bicknell, Ind., that there 
appeared at one of these events a stripling 
youth with a motherly old pointer. She 
had been entered in the trials and the boy 
produced the money for the starting fee. 
It looked like hard-earned money. The boy 
started his dog, and she, like many a pointer 
of her cfey, went down early to defeat. 
The lad’s disappointment was keen. His 
dog was beaten; his money was gone. But 
his faith remained unshaken, and his only 
answer to the good natured raillery of the 
setter men was: “I am coming back and I 
am going to beat you with a pointer.” 
That boy was U. R. Fishel, of Hope, Ind. 
A few years later this boy became famous 
in the poultry world for having molded a 
breed of famous chickens that bears his 
name. But his dogs remained in obscurity, 
and his threat—or prediction; 
name it what you will—*was for¬ 
gotten. For years and years, 
however, there were few field 
trials run, either north or south, 
on quail or on chickens, in which 
among the list of contestants 
there did not appear the names 
of a pointer or two owned by 
the chicken man of Hope, Ind. 
And then one year there ap¬ 
peared a dog named Fishel’s 
Frank—a bold fellow with clear" 
brown eyes and long graceful 
neck, straight-limbed and clean, 
with shoulders free from lum¬ 
ber and along whose back and 
loin the muscles rippled with life 
and intensity. Fishel’s Frank at¬ 
tracted attention from the first. 
He won trial after trial with ' 
consummate ease- He defeated 
setter after setter and seemingly 
was never called upon to extend 
himself. Eventually he was started in the 
National Championship. The race he ran 
is one that will be long remembered by 
those who were fortunate enough to see 
it, and although the cup was not awarded 
to him, he raised the curtain on the scene 
of the demise of the setter supremacy. And 
then, another year, there appeared one of 
his sons, Comanche Frank—a bold, power¬ 
ful dog of masterful self-confidence and 
tireless energy. Comanche Frank was the 
first dog to win the All America Cham¬ 
pionship on chickens and the National 
Championship on quail. The Hoosier boy 
who went down to defeat a quarter of a 
century before had come back, and made 
good. 
And that blood has gone triumphantly 
on. For Mary Montrose, Royal Flush and 
Comanche Rap, the greatest trio of bird 
dogs that have ever gone down the field 
trial line, are all sired by Comanche Frank. 
And Comanche Frank is a son of Fishel’s 
Frank, the dog that men talked themselves 
hoarse over, and fought and quarreled over 
in the old hotel at Grand Junction the night 
of the day he lost the Championship in 
Tennessee. 
Copyright by William Ziegler, Jr. 
Mary Montrose, the National Champion. 
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