The origins

Capt. J. Ross, 1819

"Genus-Canis, a variety approaching to the wolf in many points of external character and in voice was found in a domestic state amongst the inhabitants of Baffin's Bay."

Captain J. Ross' Journal, 1819

Capt. William Edward Parry, Igloolik, 1824

The dogs of the Esquimaux, of which these people possessed above a hundred, have been so often described that there may seem little left to add respecting their external appearance, habits, and use. Our visits to Igloolik having, however, made us acquainted with some not hitherto described, I shall here offer a further account of these invaluable animals. In the form of their bodies, their short pricked ears, thick furry coat, and bushy tail, they so nearly resemble the wolf of these regions that, when a light or brindle colour, they may easily at a little distance be mistaken for that animal. To an eye accustomed to both, however, difference is perceptible in the wolf, always keeping his head down, and the tail between his legs in running whereas the dogs almost always carry their tails handsomely curled over the back.

A difference less distinguishable, when the animals are apart, is the superior size and more muscular make of the wild animal, especially about the breast and legs. The wolf is also, in general, full two inches taller than any Esquimaux dog we have seen; but those met with in 1818, in the latitude of 76 degrees, appear to come nearest to it in that respect. The tallest dog at Igloolik stood two feet one inch from the ground, measured at the withers; the average height was about two inches less than this.

The colour of the dogs varies from a white, through brindled, to black and white, or almost entirely black. Some are also of a reddish or ferruginous colour, and others have a brownish-red tinge on their legs, the rest of their bodies being of a darker colour, and these last were observed to be generally the best dogs. Their hair in the winter is from three to four inches long; but besides this, nature furnishes them during this rigorous season, with a thick undercoating of close soft wool, which they begin to cast in the spring.
While thus provided, they are able to withstand the most inclement weather without suffering from the cold, and at whatever temperature the atmosphere may be they require nothing but a shelter from the wind to make them comfortable, and even this they do not always obtain. They are also wonderfully enabled to endure the cold even on those parts of the body which are not thus protected, for we have seen a young puppy sleeping, with its bare paw laid on an iceanchor, with the thermometer at -30 degrees, which with one of our dogs would have produced immediate and intense pain, if not subsequent mortification.

They never bark, but have a long melancholy howl like that of the wolf, and this they will sometimes perform in concert for a minute or two together. They are besides always snarling and fighting among one another, by which several of them are generally lame. When much caressed and well-fed, they become quite familiar and domestic; but this mode of treatment does not improve their qualities as animals of draught. Being desirous of ascertaining whether these dogs are wolves in a state of domestication, a question which we understood to have been the subject of some speculation, Mr. Skeoch at my request made a skeleton of each, when the number of all the vertebrae was found to be the same in both, and to correspond with the well-known anatomy of the wolf."

From: Journal of a Second Voyage of Discovery,
Capt. William Edward Parry, 1824;

Capt. G.F. Lyon, 1824

These useful creatures being indispensable attendants on the Eskimaux, drawing home whatever captures are made, as well as frequently carrying their masters to the chase, I know of no more proper place to introduce them, than as a part of the hunting establishment. Having myself possessed, during our second winter, a team of eleven very fine animals, I was enabled to become better acquainted with their good qualities than could possibly have been the case by the casual visits of Eskimaux to the ships.
The form of the Eskimaux dog is very similar to that of our shepherd's dogs in England, but he is more muscular and broad chested, owing to the constant and severe work to which he is brought up. His ears are pointed, and the aspect of the head is somewhat savage.
A walrus is frequently drawn along by three or four of them, and seals are sometimes carried home in the same manner, though I have, in some instances, seen a dog bring home the greater part of a seal in panniers placed across his back. This mode of conveyance is often used in the summer, and the dogs also carry skins or furniture overland to the sledges, when their masters are going on any expedition.
It might be supposed that in so cold a climate these animals had peculiar periods of gestation, like the wild creatures; but on the contrary, they bear young at every season of the year, and seldom exceed five at a litter. In December, with the thermometer 40 degrees below zero, the females were, in several instances, in heat. Cold has very little effect on these animals, for although the dogs at the huts slept within the snow passages, mine at the ships had no shelter, but lay alongside, with the thermometer at 42 degrees and 44 degrees, and with as little concern as if the weather had been mild.
I found, by several experiments, that three of my dogs could draw me on a sledge, weighing 100 pounds, at the rate of one mile in six minutes; and as a proof of the strength of a wellgrown dog, my leader drew 196 pounds singly, and to the same distance in eight minutes.
At another time seven of my dogs ran a mile in four minutes thirty seconds, drawing a heavy sledge full of men. I stopped to time them; but had I ridden they would have gone equally fast; in fact, I afterwards found that ten dogs took five minutes to go over the same space. Afterwards, in carrying stores to the Fury, one mile distant, nine dogs drew 1,611 pounds in the space of nine minutes! My sledge was on wooden runners, neither shod nor iced; had they been the latter, at least 40 pounds might have been added for every dog."

Lyon, Capt. G.F., The Private Journal of Capt. G.F.Lyon, 1824;

Franz Boas, 1888

"If food is plentiful the dogs are fed every other day, and then their share is by no means a large one. In winter they are fed with the heads, entrails, bones, and skins of seals, and they are so voracious at this time of the year that nothing is secure from their appetite.
Any kind of leather, particularly boots, harnesses, and thongs, is eaten whenever they can get at it. In the spring they are better fed and in the early part of summer they grow quite fat.
In traveling, however, it sometimes happens at this time of the year, as well as in winter, that they have no food for five or six days.
In Cumberland Sound, Hudson Strait, and Hudson Bay, where the rise and fall of the tide are considerable, they are carried in summer to small islands where they live upon what they can find upon the beach, clams, codfish, etc.
If at liberty they are entirely able to provide for themselves. I remember two runaway dogs which had lived on their own account from April until August and then returned quite fat."

Boas, Franz, The Central Eskimo, 1888;

Donald B. McMillan, 1927

"These dogs are supposed to be the direct descendants of the northern gray or white wolf, which they greatly resemble, with the exception of the tightly curled tail.
They are of various colors - black, white, brown, brindle, and gray - and they weight from 60 to 100 pounds.
A team consists of from eight to twelve, each attached to the sledge by a sixteen-foot rawhide trace. The advantages of this arrangement are obvious. Seated on the sledge with a 25-foot whip, one can reach out and touch the back of every dog, thereby keeping him in his place and exerting him to keep his trace tight. The disadvantages are the indirect pull of the dogs at the tips of the fan and the inevitable braiding of the traces into a rope as large as one's arm, the untangling of which at low temperatures necessitates hours and hours of extreme discomfort."

"Eighty pounds to a dog is a good load for the average sledging surface encountered on a long spring trip. The strength of the driver is to be equally considered with that of the dogs.
Very often - a dozen times a day - one is called upon to wrestle with his sledge to save it from destruction. The load must be lifted bodily again and again in endeavoring to extricate the sledge from a troublesome crack in the ice or from the depths of a deep hole; while the dogs are wagging their tails or sitting on their haunches, much interested in the whole proceeding.
Given the smooth, hard surface of a fiord, and my ten dogs could easily pull two thousand pounds. But at the first obstruction, such as rough ice, the sledge would go to pieces; and if a hill or glacier was to be negotiated, then it would be necessary to unload and carry the cargo to the top piece by piece. Therefore, the question as to how much dogs can pull is a difficult one to answer, depending upon the qualities of the sledge, upon the distance to be travelled, upon the strength of the driver, upon the strength of the dogs, and again and always upon the sledging surface.

"On the 1914 trip my ten dogs were pulling, upon leaving home, 625 pounds; on the 1917 trip they were handling 850."

McMillan, Donald B, Four Years In the White North, 1925, Etah and Beyond, 1927;

D. Jennes, 1928

There were two ringleaders, an old dog so peaceable that we had thought him cowardly, and my goodnatured team leader, Tellurak, whom I had never known to start a fight.
Tellurak, unlike the other dogs, incurred no risk of injury, for the matted coat of long frizzly hair that enveloped him from head to foot, almost concealing his beady eyes, made him invulnerable to every adversary.
If an unfortunate dog did pounce upon him it backed away immediately with a mass of hair between its teeth, and disturbed the camp for several hours with its violent coughs and sneezes.
Tellurak was my team leader, from necessity only, not because of his outstanding qualities. In dogs as in men, the true leader is born, not made; training may increase his gifts, it cannot produce them.
He must possess the intelligence to understand his master's commands, and the will to obey them without question; for the dog that understands, but hesitates to obey, causes more calamities than the numskull.
He must be strong and brave, ready at all times to discipline his own team and to champion it against its enemies. More than all, he must possess, both in harness and out of it, a natural authority over the other dogs.
Tellurak was strong and brave; he understood, partially at least, the words of command, though from sheer rascality he often disobeyed; but he had no prestige among his teammates, and wielded less authority than the old bull Caribou in the herd.
Jumbo, my leader on the trip up the Coppermine River, was a dog of another calibre. In the heat of a chase he halted at my command and checked the whole team behind him, and at feeding time, when every other animal was fighting for its portion, he would quietly devour his share on the outskirts of the fray, growling away marauders twice as powerful as himself.
Dogs that had not seen him before recognized his authority.
He followed me once to the snow hut of an Eskimo, whose five dogs, the fiercest in the camp, rushed out to drive him away. Jumbo stood tense, his head and tail erect, his fangs bared in a warning snarl, When they checked their wild onrush in surprise, he disdained even to glance at them, but marched haughtily through their midst into the sanctum of their home."

Jenness, Diamond, The People of the Twilight, 1928;

Stuck Hudson, 1929

"The Malamute, the Alaskan Esquimau dog, is precisely the same dog as that found amongst the natives of Baffin's Bay and Greenland.
Knud Rasmunsen and Amundsen together have established the oneness of the Esquimaux from the east coast of Greenland all round to Saint Michael; they are one people, speaking virtually one language.
And the Malamute dog is one dog.
A photograph that Admiral Peary prints of one of the Smith Sound dogs that pulled his sled to the North Pole would pass for a photograph of one of the present writer's team, bred on the Koyukuk River, the parents coming from Kotzebue Sound."

"There was never animal better adapted to environment than the Malamute dog. His coat, while it is not fluffy, nor the hair long, is yet so dense and heavy that it affords him a perfect protection against the utmost severity of cold.
His feet are tough and clean, and do not readily accumulate snow between the toes and therefore do not easily get sore which is the great drawback of nearly all 'outside' dogs and their mixed progeny.
He is hardy and thrifty and does well on less food than the mixed breeds; and, despite Peary to the contrary, he will eat anything.
"He will not eat anything but meat" says Peary "I have tried and I know."
No dog accustomed to a flesh diet willingly leaves it for other food the dog is a carnivorous animal. But hunger will whet his appetite for any thing that his bowels can digest.
Muk, tne counterpart of Peary's "King Malamute" has thriven for years on his daily ration of dried fish, tallow and rice, and eats biscuits and doughnuts whenever he can get them.
He has little of the fawning submissivness of pet dogs "outside", but he is independent and self-willed and apt to make a troublesome pet.
However pets that give little trouble seldom give much pleasure."

"His comparative shortness of leg makes him somewhat better adapted to the hard, crusted snow of the coast than to the soft snow of the interior, but he is a ceaseless and tireless worker who loves to pull.
His prick ears, always erect, his bushy, graceful tail, carried high unless it curl upon the back as is the case with some, his compact coat of silver-gray, his sharp muzzle and black nose and quick narrow eyes give him an air of keenness and alertness that marks him out amongst dogs.
When he is in good condition and his coat is taken care of he is a handsome fellow, and he will weigh from 75 to 85 or 90 pounds."

Stuck, Hudson, Ten Thousand Miles With A Dog Sled, 1929.

C.E. Whitaker, 1837

"The Eskimo or husky dog is a type by himself though of late years hard to find, as many dogs of many breeds have been brought in hoping to improve the strain. A pureblood husky dog is generally supposed to be closely akin to the wolf, indeed looks very much like a wolf, the Eskimo saying that a wolf is father to many families of puppies"

"When full grown and well fed, he will weigh in far northern Canada from 50-90 pounds and have even reached 125 pounds. They are of a grey color, some darker than others, with long straight hair and an undercoat of dense fur, enabling him to withstand severe cold.
The average husky dog is from 20 to 24 inches high at the shoulder, heavy in the chest, with rather short, strong legs; large wellpadded feet with abundant hair between the toes which in some cases protects the pad. In very soft snow this hair gathers balls of snow and causes sore feet. At a halt to rest, a good dog will at once chew out these balls of snow or ice.
On sharp ice it is necessary to put boots of leather on the dogs to prevent cutting the pads. In good spirits a dog will carry his tail curled over his back.
A dog's prime of life is from his third to his fifth or sixth year."

Whittaker, C.E., Arctic Eskimo, 1937;

David Haig Thomas, 1939

"I was perfectly convinced when we started out on our sledge journey that we were following the wrong technique of travel.
We adopted wholeheartedly neither what is now known as the 'Watkins method' of travel, with light sledges and small dog-teams, nor the Eskimo technique of travelling fast with big teams and living off the country.
However, I was not the leader of the expedition, and as I had had no more experience than the others, I didn't air my views very much."

"We started off with overloaded sledges and large teams. We were unable to travel fast, and merely wore out our dogs.
The length of a day's journey didn't depend - as it ought to have done - on reaching a good hunting spot where our dogs could be fed with plenty of fresh meat, We camped wherever we happened to be after the usual day's sledging, The Eskimos who accompanied us became extremely cross. They had advised us how to travel, and we hadn't taken their advice.
In consequence, their hearts weren't really in their jobs. I am afraid they thought that the expedition considered their methods of travelling outof-date compared with the modern technique which had proved so satisfactory in East Greenland, and it gave them no satisfaction when, in the end, they were proved right."

"We returned to camp and fed the dogs. There was now only one good feed left, and there seemed no chance whatever of finding game on Amund Ringnes, although we had seen a few ptarmigan droppings and the tracks of a fox on Giant's Castle Hill.
I could have gone on, had I wished to do so, but the chances were that I should soon have had to kill dogs; and though many explorers before have done so and fed them to their teams, and thereby greatly increased their range, it has always seemed to me an extremely callous, cold-blooded act.
I love the companionship of my huskies, and nothing would induce me to set out on an expedition during which I knew I must kill and eat my friends."

Haig-Thomas, David, Tracks on the Snow, 1939.

R.F. Spencer, 1959

The inland Eskimos raised dogs for food and parkas.
They were eaten when still in the puppy stage, boiled and the skin preserved for clothing. The maritime groups were less inclined to eat dogs, but had no strong feeling against it. The dog was economically too valuable to form a dietary staple. People without dogs were 'poor' and were obliged to depend on others for travel and often for meat."

"More dogs were owned by the maritime people than by the inland.
Shortages and the nomadic round apparently reduced the inland number. No one inland had more than six dogs. Actually, this number was sufficient for winter travel, since the sled with iced runners was extremely mobile and a few dogs could carry a great load.
On the coasts, fourteen to sixteen dogs in a team was not unusual. Here they were used with the heavier box sled, and for coastal travel the runners were not iced. Today, at Barrow, fourteen dogs constitute a large team. Anywhere from eight to sixteen dogs might be used. From personal observation, it may be said that the inland type dog is much larger. A team is regarded as valuable property. The trained lead dog would never be sold.
Indeed, there appears a feeling against selling or trading dogs, except puppies. Once one has trained a dog to one's own liking, it is kept.
It not infrequently occurs that a team is lost. When out on the ice, for example, a rift may occur which necessitates the abandoning of a team. Two teams were lost in this way early in 1952, one consisting of a sled and fourteen dogs.
This was a hard blow to the owner, who had then to begin working up a new team and buying puppies from others at about $5 an animal. He had before him the whole process of training and estimated that it would be at least three years before he could take his new team out. It is generally felt that a dog must be two years old before it is strong enough to work with a team.

Spencer, Robert F., The North Alaskan Eskimo, 1959.