You Can Blame Garrison Keillor's Grandfather

The Minnesota WTCD may have gotten its distinctive coat pattern
from the American Barbet, a Special Breed intended for Very Special People.

In the past I have written a bit about the lost histories of the "Kill Devil Terrier" and the "Shenandoah Mountain Cur."

More recently I got a note from Sara at the Lessons from Layla blog.  

Would I support her push to get the Minnesota White-Toed Chipmunk Dog into the AKC?


Of course!   I clicked over to her blog and found an excellent breed description, but sadly it was short on  history.

Being a famous researcher, I flipped through the historical record and found a volume, printed in 1934, which had what I was looking for. 

I encapsulted a short thumb-nail history of the breed in the comments:

A rare dog, and a find!

I believe they were first bred by Garrison Keillor’s grandfather who wanted a Lutheran hunting dog. The dog was not designed for big game, as Lutherans are a modest people who only need enough meat for the Powdermilk Biscuit gravy, and the dog could not be too flashy because, well, Lutherans are not flashy people like the Episcopalians.

Hard to believe you found a pure Minnesota White-Toed Chipmunk Dog!

Terrific news and new hope for the breed!

A few minutes more, and I found a bit more of the story (and an illustration, see below) in a book entitled Famous Dogges and Dogge Men printed in 1923 by Alexander Ruttridge.

I did some more research and it appears this dog, while initially created by Garrison Keillor’s grandfather, was brought into an intensive breeding program funded by the Powdermilk Biscuit Company which, at one time, had 600 dogs and 10 kennel maids to take care of them.

As you may recall, the slogan of Powdermilk Biscuits is “Made from whole wheat raised in the rich bottomlands of the Lake Wobegon river valley by Norwegian bachelor farmers, so you know they’re not only good for you, but also (mostly) pure.”

It turns out the “mostly pure” line came to be after two dogs escaped their kennel and were found rolling in the flour and licking the edges of the bagging equipment at the Washburn A Mill where the flour for Powdermilk Biscuits was once ground.

They threw out the ruined flour, of course, and hosed off the bagging machinery too, but being Lutherans they figured they had to qualify the purity thing after that, and hence the modifier phrase.

Tragically, all but two of the Minnesota White-Toed Chipmunk Dogs were destroyed in a horrible flour mill fire at the Washburn A Mill. 

This was the 1928 fire, not the 1878 explosion at the same mill.  Some more history can be found here.

Clearly a gene pool worth preserving!

Exhausted from my research, I forgot about the Minnesota White-Toed Chipmunk Dog until, earlier today, when I was reminded of this lost breed while reading another friend's blog.

You see, among some of the readers of this blog, dogs like the Minnesota White-Toed Chipmunk Dog are NOT SPECIAL because they are not registered with the AKC and they do not carry a fancy provenance that can be read in an AKC all-breed book or on a breeders web site.  

And so they are not suitable companion animals.

I get it. 

Special people have special dogs, and common people have common dogs, and who wants to be common? 

No one!

When it comes to companion dogs, so many of us are "Special Needs."

And so the Minnesota White-Toed Chipmunk Dog has fallen out of favor because no one knows their story, and it has been deemed not a special breed suited for Very Special People.

This seems a tragic shame to me, and quite unfair.

You see what makes a dog special is not its size or its temperament. 

After all, every size and temperament of dog under the sun is available within an hour or two of your house.  Just check Petfinder if you don't believe me.

And of course it's not what the dog actually does either. 

I have checked around, and none of the AKC Rhodesian Ridgebacks are actually hunting lions, and none of the Portugese Water Dogs are actually herding fish into nets as some claim they once did.  No one who owns a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel is actually a royal person named Charles.  The Irish Wolf hounds are not racing down Irish wolves -- or even Minnesota wolves for that matter.

But it does not matter.  These dogs have provenance.  They have story. 

The poor rescue dogs at Petfinder are not special dogs suitable to be companion dogs for Special People because they do not have provenance.  

They have no fabled story.

To be a special companion dog for a Very Special Person, you have to have come from somewhere special, and have a little mystery and romance attached to you.  

A geographical region should be given a nod, and perhaps a specialized or arcane task, and maybe an odd color. 

And, of course, it never hurts to have a once-famous, but now-obscure person attached to the breed as well.

And so we have the French Bulldog and the Irish Terrier, the Parson Russell Terrier and the Gordon Setter.

We have the Chinese Crested and the Neopolitan Mastiff, the Inca Orchid Dog and the American Pit Bull Terrier. 

We have the Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, and the West Highland White Terrier, the Rhodesian Ridgeback and the Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever. 

Not a common dog among them, and never mind if not one of them actually works for a living or does a single thing better than any dog down at the pound.   

No, a special dog does not actually have to DO anything special; it is enough to claim that some ancestor, lost in the mists of time, might have done something special (at least once).

What makes these AKC dogs special is not what they actually ARE or what they actually DO, but what people SAY they are, and what they say they might be able to do.  

It's a bit like art.  

The major difference between a painting you can get for free from the art therapy room in a mental ward, and the high-class stuff they sell for thousands of dollars in the fancy galleries in New York, is that the latter is featured in a catalogue and has a few notes written about it in an obscure book about modern neo-fascist impressionism. 

What a world of difference that seems to make!

And so it is with dogs. 

It's all about the provenance. 

It's all about making people feel special so that someone else can charge them more for the priviledge. 

Then the newly-made "special person with a special dog" can go to the local dog park and make other people feel less special because their less-exclusive dogs probably do not have as interesing a story and as cool a provenance as this new dog which this new owner drove over three states to acquire. 

Nice!

But, of course, none of this is new.  

Some years back I wrote about the early dog shows of the late 19th Century:

[T]he attraction of dog shows was that people who themselves were as common as a turnip top could now fancy that they were among the social elite. They did not have to have real knowledge of animals, or have an important job or title or large estate -- they just had to purchase a dog from a "reputable" show breeder and put on airs.

And that's still true today!

For it all to work, of course, there must be "standards" to help keep the market up and the riff-raff out.

The standard says that the dog has to registered, and the dog can only be registered if it is racially pure. 

"Not one drop of foreign blood" is the rallying cry of the Kennel Club as well as the Ku Klux Klan. 

The breed has to have a history, and that history should be gilded pretty thickly.

The dog must have both a Call Name and a Kennel Name, because one name is simply not enough.

And, of course, the dog must have a pedigree with five generations of multi-syllable names typed in, each with their own registration numbers afixed below. 

Which brings me to where we are today.  

You see, Garrison Keillor's grandfather made a serious mistake when he did not rush to get the Minnesota White-toed Chipmunk Dog on to the rolls of the Kennel Club as soon as the breed was created. 

If Olaf Keillor had registered his dogs with the Kennel Club (and if the Washburn A Mill had not caught fire) then the Minnesota White-Toed Chipmunk Dog might be a Top Ten AKC breed right now.

But it was not to be.  

The breed was never registered, the provenance was broken, the history lost, and the luster tarnished. 

Today only a handful of Minnesota White-Toed Chipmunk Dog exist at all.

And so Minnesota, while inhabited by many good Norwegian bachelor Lutheran farmers, remains a state without a state dog.  

Maryland has the Chesapeake Bay Retriever, Massachusetts the Boston Terrier, Texas the Blue Lacy, Virginia the American Foxhound, Louisiana the Leopard Dog, and South Carolina the Boykin Spaniel.

But Minnesota?

Minnesota has nothing.   And that, my friends, is a shame.

So please join with me today in pushing for belated AKC registration of the Minnesota White-Toed Chipmunk Dog and, also please join with me in asking that this dog, above all others, be declared the State Dog of Minnesota.  

Sara and Layla are asking for our support..

Not Layla, but another MWTCD dog discovered near Bemidji.