Colonial America dog breeds: what dogs settlers actually kept

Part 1

What kinds of dogs lived in colonial America

Jamestown settlers referred to the Indigenous dogs they encountered as mongrels, and the record states plainly that there were no separate breeds until the colonists arrived.

Analysis of dog bones from early Jamestown suggests most of these working dogs weighed between 22 and 42 pounds, roughly the size of a modern beagle, bull terrier, springer spaniel, or standard schnauzer.

Part 2

Dogs settlers brought from Europe

Dogs crossed the Atlantic with the very first English colonists. A mastiff and a spaniel are said to have traveled aboard the Mayflower to Plymouth Colony. At Jamestown, the first recorded European dog was a white greyhound that Christopher Newport brought to Virginia in 1608 as a gift from King James I to the paramount chief Powhatan.

By 1619, more named breeds had begun to arrive in Virginia. That year, Virginia's General Assembly made it illegal to sell or give mastiffs, greyhounds, bloodhounds, or land and water spaniels to Native Americans, a law that names these breeds specifically because they had begun arriving by then.

These English dogs were not built for their new home. The English Foxhound, for example, had relatively heavy bone suited to hedgerow-dotted English countryside, not the open, vast landscape colonists found in America. That mismatch is part of why later breeders in the colonies started adapting these imports rather than keeping them unchanged.

Part 3

Dogs that took shape in the colonies

You can trace some of today's American hound breeds back to specific colonial imports. In 1650, a settler named Robert Brooke sailed from England to Maryland with his family, 28 servants, and a pack of hunting hounds. Dogs from this bloodline, later called Brooke Hounds, stayed within the Brooke family for nearly 300 years.

George Washington is credited as a key figure in developing the American Foxhound. He kept his own strain of hounds at Mount Vernon, which he called Virginia Hounds, and hoped to breed a dog with speed, sense, and brains. The Marquis de Lafayette sent Washington a group of French hounds, and Washington crossed these with his lighter Virginia pack, a combination that eventually developed, with later breeders, into the modern American Foxhound.

As hunters pushed west into places like Ohio and Tennessee, they kept adapting their hounds to new terrain and new game. The American Foxhound became the basis for several later Coonhound breeds, including the Treeing Walker, American-English, and Bluetick.

Part 4

Dogs and Native American communities

Long before any English ship arrived, Native American communities already kept dogs. To the English, these dogs looked something like foxes, and one colonist described them as unable to bark, only howl. Indigenous dogs were roughly the size of a modern beagle or springer spaniel, around 35 pounds, while the English brought dogs closer to the size of shepherds, around 50 to 70 pounds. Native communities in eastern Virginia are thought to have used their dogs as sentinels and hunting assistants, and English accounts from the time reported that they did not eat them, unlike the colonists.

Genetic testing tells a more tangled story about which dogs were actually living at Jamestown. Ancient DNA from dogs found at Jamestown, dating to 1609 to 1617, showed maternal lineages most closely tied to Indigenous dogs of North America, even though the site was a European colonial settlement. At least six of the dogs examined from the Jamestown site turned out to be genetically Indigenous.

Over the following decades and centuries, colonization changed the picture for good. Research shows that European colonization led to the loss of nearly all North American dog mitochondrial lineages, which were largely replaced by European ones sometime between 1492 and the present. One breed tracing back to older Indigenous dog lineages, the Carolina Dog, is still recognized today.

Part 5

How colonists used their dogs day to day

• Hunting dogs and small lap dogs were mainly owned by English nobility, so their presence signaled the owner's status.
• Hound-type dogs, including early ancestors of the American Foxhound, were used to track and hunt game across the new terrain.

Dogs also became a source of desperate emergency food. During the Starving Time at Jamestown in the winter of 1609 to 1610, colonist George Percy recorded that after eating horses and other animals, they were reduced to eating vermin, including dogs, cats, and mice. Archaeologists have found several hundred dog bones from this period bearing butchery marks.

Colonial law also shaped how dogs moved between communities. The 1619 law forbidding the sale of mastiffs, greyhounds, bloodhounds, and spaniels to Native Americans shows that officials were actively trying to control which dogs Indigenous communities could obtain. Trading in dogs later resumed; by 1698 the Fredericksburg Dog Mart let Native communities exchange furs and food for English hunting dogs.

Part 6

What record and artifacts tell us

John Smith's writings describe the white greyhound given to Powhatan, and George Percy's account names dogs as one of the animals colonists ate during the Starving Time. A companion of Pocahontas, Uttamatomakkin, even referenced that same greyhound years later while comparing his own reception in England to the dog's welcome from Powhatan.

Archaeology adds another layer. Excavations at Jamestown have turned up several hundred dog bones, and analysis suggests at least 16 dogs were present and became part of the site's refuse in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. Genetic testing of some of these bones confirmed that at least six of the dogs at the site were Indigenous.

Even with all of this, the picture stays incomplete.