Only known woolly dog pelt returns to B.C. after more than 160 years

The only known pelt from an extinct woolly dog has returned to British Columbia for the first time in more than 160 years. The pelt, from a dog named Mutton, is on display at the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver until next summer.

Mutton was a canine companion of American naturalist George Gibbs. After the dog died in 1859, its pelt was held by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. It is unclear how Gibbs obtained the animal.

Coast Salish and Makah peoples bred woolly dogs for thousands of years for their thick, white coats, which were shorn like sheep and used in ceremonial blankets and textiles. Musqueam weaver and artist Debra Sparrow said her grandfather told her every village once had the dogs, whose hair was valued like gold and spun with mountain goat wool.

Jordan Wilson, the museum’s curator of Pacific Northwest and contemporary Indigenous art, said the pelt speaks both to extinction and to the profound effects of settler colonialism, while also reflecting ancestors’ relationships with the more-than-human world and knowledge still passed forward.

Gibbs took part in a four-year northwest boundary survey in the late 1850s that mapped the international land boundary between British Columbia and the U.S. Pacific Northwest. UBC says renewed Salish weaving has increased interest in woolly dogs and prompted research into their role in Salish and Makah textile traditions.