When was seaman the dog born

At the end of a day's fishing, the day's catch was loaded into a cart, and the dog was hitched up to haul the load into town. Other Newfoundlands pulled wagons to deliver milk and mail throughout the island. There are many legends of Newfoundlands saving drowning victims by carrying lifelines to sinking ships. The dogs were kept in the "dog walk" on early sailing ships. If the sea was too choppy when land was sighted, the dog carried a line to land.

The origin of this working breed is disputed. Vikings and Basque fishermen visited Newfoundland as early as AD and wrote accounts of the natives working side by side with these retrieving dogs. The breed as we know it today was developed in England, while the island of Newfoundland nearly legislated the native breed to extinction in The Newfoundland has a stiff, oily outer coat of moderate length and a fleecy undercoat to adapt to the harsh climate of its home island. The oil repels water.

A Newfoundland can swim for hours, yet remain completely dry and warm at the skin. Still more alarmed, he now took his direction immediately towards our lodge, passing between 4 fires and within a few inches of the heads of one range of the men as they yet lay sleeping.

When he came near the tent, my dog saved us by causing him to change his course a second time, which he did by turning a little to the right, and was quickly out of sight, leaving us by this time all in an uproar with our guns in our hands, inquiring of each other the cause of the alarm, which after a few moments was explained by the sentinel. We were happy to find no one hurt. On June 19, , Capt. Lewis wrote that: "After dark my dog barked very much and seemed extremely uneasy which was unusual with him; I ordered the Sergt.

And on June 27 he added: "A bear came within thirty yards of our camp last night and ate up about thirty weight of buffalo suet which was hanging on a pole. My dog seems to be in a constant state of alarm with these bear and keeps barking all night. Seaman was also quite a hunter. On July 15, Capt. Lewis mentioned that the hunter George Drouillard "wounded a deer which ran into the river. My dog pursued, caught it, drowned it and brought it to shore at our camp.

Seaman was bothered by cactus spines which became embedded in his paws. Lewis noted: "The highlands are thin, meager soil covered with dry low sedge and a species of grass, also dry, the seeds of which are armed with a long twisted hard beard at the upper extremity. These barbed seeds penetrate our moccasins and leather leggings and give us great pain until they are removed.

My poor dog suffers with them excessively. He is constantly biting and scratching himself as if in a rack of pain. The prickly pear also grow here as abundantly as usual.

Seaman even served as an "ambassador" of sorts with Indian nations, like the Shoshone, who were completely unacquainted with Anglo-American culture. Michael Haynes. Used with permission.

Your browser does not support the HTML5 audio: download instead mp3. Barking—"giving tongue"—just for the noise of it did not come naturally to the breed. Nevertheless, it is still very difficult to tease a Newfoundland into barking for no apparent reason. Knight, only five months old when this photo was taken, would sound a full-throated woof when the doorbell rang, or when someone unfamiliar entered his environment, but his master was present here today, so he was fully at ease and making friends with the stranger.

We can only surmise that Seaman's "note" was similar to Knight's, and if so, that his gruff, resonant voice would have startled most Indians, as well as their characteristically quiet dogs.

Canis familiaris , Var. Hand-colored lithograph "From Nature and on Stone by T. Equally sagacious as persevering, he never relinquishes an undertaking as long as there remains the most distant hope of success. The great pliability of his temper, peculiarly fits him for the use of man, as he never shrinks from any task that may be assigned him, but he undertakes it with an ardour proportioned to the difficulty of the execution.

Those must have been the qualifications Lewis recognized and felt assured of when he bought Seaman. Thomas Doughty was a well-known Philadelphia artist whose landscapes were especially popular, though some critics dismissed him as "a leaf painter. It was neither an institution nor an organization but a view of nature common among a number of different artists, most notably Thomas Cole and Asher B.

Durand Typically, they placed their subjects in imposing wild settings beside noble rivers. Their towering mountains were chiefly based on sketches made among the palisades on the Hudson River, but conceived in the rarified atmospheres of their respective imaginations within the sanctuaries of their studios.

W ith the arrival of Clark and his party at the "forks of Jefferson's River" on Saturday morning, 17 August , and the erection of a shady canopy of sails supported by willow poles at the site the party would call " Fortunate Camp ," the stage was set for the reunion of Sacagawea with her people, and the mutual embraces of two cultures, old Shoshone and new American.

Following Lewis's long harangue about the purposes of their visit, to which Chief Cameahwait cheerily responded with promises of friendship and cooperation, came the visitors' honorific gifts—peace medals, fine clothing, tobacco , and "some small articles" for the chiefs—followed by presents for others, a mixture of familiar Indian favorites such as paint, moccasins, and beads, along with tokens of some of civilization's benefits—awls, knives, and mirrors.

The whole affair came off as a rousing success. The Shoshones seemed duly impressed. The Shoshones , like all other Indian people, had owned, bred, trained, used, and loved dogs from the dimmest days of their own origins. What was it, then, about "our dog" that thrilled them so?

Certain it is that they recognized an ineffable quality that Seaman seemed to possess, both in his attitudes and his actions. We don't know whether the Indians had a name for it or not, but Lewis called it sagacity. N oah Webster's definition of that word in his Compendious Dictionary 5 tersely specified the two connotations it bore in Lewis and Clark's day: "quick of scent or thought; acute.

Throughout the late 18th and early 19th centuries, writers were quick to notice those attributes in any animal. Indeed, for some years the sagacity of a wide variety of wild animals had been studied in order to measure their position in the Great Chain of Being by identifying evidence of seemingly rational—i.

William Clark , without bringing up the word, admired the intricate engineering of a beaver dam 2 August : "the brush appear to be laid in no regular order yet acquires a strength by the irregularity with which they are placed by the beaver that it would puzzle the engenuity of man to give them. For some reason or other the word sagacity must have been on Lewis's mind during the days he spent among the Shoshones , for he invoked it three times within two weeks, and never before nor afterwards.