Tales From the Trail
The Origin of “Village Huskies”
In the beginning, there was the “Malemute”…
…except that it wasn’t called that. Malemuit is the name of a particular kin group of Inupiat Eskimo people from the northwestern part of Alaska, but somehow the name of the breed was registered with the AKC.
Before contact with Europeans, there was widespread use of small teams of sled dogs throughout the Arctic, usually heavily furred, heavy boned haulers with a variety of fur markings.
When the gold rush to the Yukon developed momentum after 1898, suddenly sled dogs were in huge demand, and dogs of any large, well-furred breed were scarce and expensive in Seattle, San Francisco, and other west coast ports serving the Yukon and Alaskan gold fields.
Jack London’s novel White Fang features a dog kidnapped under just such conditions of market scarcity.
The same scarcity provided a big incentive to breed and sell dogs in the gold fields, and given what was available, mushers experimented with mixing whatever canine breeds that were availble. Portraits of dogteams from that era show the wide variation in size and shape that you would expect from this free experimentation.
As an interesting sidelight, regardless of what writers may invent for the purposes of local color, wolf/husky crosses were not generally successful. The wolf blood made the hybrids skittish and agressive with each other, and they didn’t really like to pull or to please humans. At all.
By the 1920’s, the breed was “settling out”, genetically speaking. Leonard Seppala of Serum Run fame and others in the Nome area had introduced Siberian Huskies into the breed, and from the twenties up through the 70’s, this mongrel - village husky moved the mail, firewood and freight, ran traplines, and won races throughout the north. The fur colors varied widely, but the size and slim, deep-chested configuration stood the test in the villages and bush of Alaska. Resources were tight, and no one fed a dog that was slow or that wouldn’t pull or eat well.
Then, in the late eighties and early nineties, with the incentive of very close and competitive sprint races with big purses, some mushers began introducing more hound blood (German short-hair, and English pointer) into the village husky, and trial and error revealed that about a quarter to an eighth hound and the rest husky produced a dog that was just smoking the competition. They were faster for both the sprint races (up to 4 miles per hour faster), and were being sucessfully adapted to distance races like the 1000 mile Iditarod Race, at least the better-furred of the bretheren.
Alaskan villagers are nothing if not pragmatic, and that is why the hound cross arrived in Tanana (a big and well known reservoir of village husky bloodlines), and why we use them in our own sled dog lot.
The village huskies bring good fur, and good feet and mental toughness to the mix. the hound brings a seeming imperviousness to joint injuries, and a great willingness to please.
The traditional husky says, “Okay, I see you are the boss, so lets get on with it and get to work.” The hound/village husky cross just looks at you in the morning and says, “I love you! What are we doing today and how can I please you?!”
Newcomers to Alaska sometimes look at a dog lot of these flop-eared, multicolored mutts and go, “… This is an Alaskan sled dog? Or did someone forget to latch the gate at the dogpound?”
But, as one finds out forty fast miles later, appearances count for nothing in dog mushing. When they are still jumping and leaping to go after a fast forty miles, who cares about the flop ears!
(Permission is granted to reprint this article with credit to the author, Charlie Campbell, and a link to this site.)