Canada's Salish women and their amazing wool dogs

What do you do when there are no sheep or goats, they live so far up the mountain it's too dangerous to catch and shear them, or the local tribes herding them are not keen to sell you the wool? You get creative. You make your fabrics out of dog fur.

The Salish Wool Dog was also called the Comox dog or Woolly dog. Now long extinct, it was a small, white, long-haired dog rather like a Spitz, bred by the native people who lived in what is now Washington State and British Columbia. So far, so ordinary. But the extraordinary thing about these dogs was their fur, which was unusually beautiful, soft and pale. In fact it was so good the tribe wove it into a beautiful, soft fabric.

The Salish Wool Dog was kept in packs of as many as twenty animals and fed on luxurious raw and cooked salmon, a precursor of a modern scientific discovery. These days we know for sure that fish oils are really good for a dog's coat. It's used widely by breeders and people who show dogs.

To keep their coats pure and white the dogs were prevented from cross-breeding, confined on islands and kept in gated caves, then sheared like sheep in May or June every year.

Incredibly thick wool and a strong fleece

The Wool Dog was selectively bred to create wool, while other dogs kept by the tribe were treated the same way we treat dogs today, as companion animals and hunting partners. In fact their 'wool' was so thick that the explorer Captain George Vancouver reported one could pick up an entire dog fleece by one corner and it would still hold together, something a sheep fleece just wouldn't do.

No wonder Salish blankets, made by the tribe from the fur of their dogs, were so highly prized by Native American tribes. In fact they cost almost as much as a slave, the ultimate in luxury. While the yarn quality of the pure dog wool was pretty good, the tribe often improved its quality and made short supplies go further by blending it with mountain goat wool, feathers and plant fibres.

Goodbye to the wool dogs

When the Europeans finally arrived in North America, the Salish Wool Dogs started to decline. There was better access to sheep. Hudson Bay blankets became a popular staple, sold widely across the new nation. And the Native American tribes were destroyed, displaced, forced to leave their homelands. The Salish Wool Dog eventually interbred with other dogs and lost the precious traits that made it so popular. By the mid-1800s there were no pure bred wool dogs left. And in 1940 the breed's last known descendent died.

All this happened so long ago that people eventually started to doubt the Salish tribe's oral history. But recent DNA analysis has proved dog hair is an ingredient in historic fabrics made by Salish weavers. Today all that remains is a strong oral tradition commemorating the dogs. A wool dog pelt was found in Washington D.C's National Museum of Natural History, a dog called Mutton who accompanied a scientist studying the tribes long ago. And a few photos of Salish people with their dogs have been unearthed. Other than that they're a lost doggie tribe all of their own.

Could you knit with your dog's fur? Have you tried? If so, what breed are they? We'd love to know!