This old photograph is being marketed that of an Irish water spaniel, but it’s actually something much cooler.
Irish water spaniels were commonly used as retrievers in the US, but the McCarthy type of water spaniel was invariably liver in color.
And it never makes one double click on an image to make one wonder if a dog is actually a golden retriever.
Here’s a close-up of the dog’s head. It’s very retrievery:
I think this animal is a red Winchester retriever, a type of long-coated retriever derived from the St. John’s water dog. It was said to have come from Ireland, but it may have been nothing more than a regional Irish variant of the early curly-coated retriever. Such dogs were in demand among waterfowl hunters in America, and retrievers that were born liver or gold/red in color got exported to fuel the market hunters’ demands on Chesapeake Bay.
This red Winchester type is sometimes regarded as a type of long-haired Chesapeake or a breed that got absorbed into Chesapeakes, which occasionally do have long-coated pups.
We could have made at least three breeds out of the types of retrievers out of what became the Chesapeake Bay retrievers.
This particular dog was photographed by Edward Payson Butler in Reno, Nevada in 1886. People settling in the West in those later days liked to hunt. The Frontier was just about to close off entirely,and people who had made their fortunes in places like Nevada were eager to get improved hunting dogs from back East or Europe.
This red Winchester retriever would have been a prized possession and obviously cherished member of the family,
I should note that there were several names for this dog: brown Winchester, red Chester, and brown Chester.
One story is that the retrievers that founded this strain came from a British ship called the HMS Winchester that was said to have brought the red, long-coated retrievers out of Cork to America’s Eastern Seaboard.
Which of course, brings us back to the Duggan family water spaniels, which were also from Cork.
Maybe this type of water spaniel is the ancestral red Winchester type that was then crossed with the endemic Chesapeake duck dogs to found the red Winchester, which then got absorbed into the modern Chesapeake Bay retriever.
America’s retriever culture relied much more heavily on water spaniels and regional variants than the UK retriever culture. We preferred liver and yellow/red/gold dogs over black ones, while in Britain, the preference was for black ones. Golden, Labrador, and flat-coated retrievers have long, carefully documented pedigrees, but you will not find these documents in regard to curly-coated retrievers, Chesapeakes, or any breed of water spaniel.
We produced dogs like this one.
Just as our coonhounds were likely mostly drawn from the rejects English Old Southern hound packs, which were deer and hare specialists, our native retriever was drawn from the rejects of a culture that was obsessed with producing black retrievers.
Our hunting and shooting culture is very different from the Motherland. We are a nation born of conquering pioneers, not of decaying feudalism.
We were once a nation filled with game, and compared to the British Isles today, we are still teeming with wild beasts.
We didn’t need a dog to say that we were up-and-coming. We needed a dog that had a purposed.
Until the frontier closed.
And well-to-do people began to sport hunt as a homage to a past that once included a Davy Crockett, a Daniel Boone, and a Lewis Wetzel.
This is where we are now.
Sport-hunting begat the modern conservation movement and then the science of wildlife management, and as America has grown wealthy, we’ve been able to save many species. We’ve been able to keep a bit of the frontier wildness about.
We may not have the zapovedniks of Russia, but we still have enough wild or even “feral” places about.
And here, people can keep dogs like this red Winchester’s descendants and take him or her into the places that remind one of that storied past.
It’s never going to be the same, but it is a reasonable enough facsimile.
I love historic photos like this one,especially when there’s an interesting story attached. Ever since I got my first bearcoat about 15 years ago, I’ve been fascinated with the longcoats that occasionally are born to breeds that are classically smooth coated. Everybody knows about longcoat GSDs, but not everybody knows that akitas, mastiffs, rotties, shar-pei and many other breeds have their equivalent “fluffies”.
Totalmente de acuerdo con usted, pero no tenéis la autentica y genuina perdiz roja salvaje (alectoris rufa) la misma que dio origen a toda la base genética de los perros de muestra en la antigüedad en la Península Ibérica.
Possibly the dog pictured is a Red Chester, also equally possible that it is a long-coated curly (not uncommon back then), or a composite of two or more breeds. The light nose indicates that it is a liver, or brown-skinned red (given the lighter shading on legs, I’d guess the latter).
The ancestry of retrievers/water dogs/water spaniels/spaniels/setters is so interwoven, there’s really no way to separate the strands that resulted in the dogs we have today, let alone those of so many years ago. But it is fun to speculate.
Wow! You have found yet another great photo from the past. I had missed the linked water spaniel story that you wrote in June… very good reading!
In the book, “Iron Men and Their Dogs” by Ferdinand C Latrobe, he mentions the 1877 meeting in which a group of those involved with the Chesapeake dog determined three “classes” of said breed: the Otter dog, of a tawny sedge color and wavy hair; the Curly dog, and the Straight-haired dog, both of these a red-brown color. “Mr Foulk represented the straight-haired dog”.[ The Otter dog has “short fur under its long wavy hair”, Long in this case probably meaning longer than a pointer and with a bushy tail and slight feathering. Then in “The New Complete Chesapeake Bay Retriever” by janet Horn and Dr Daniel Horn, “The family of O.D. Foulks had purchased a dog “of the straight-haired class in 1825, known at the head of the Bay as the ‘Red Winchester”. So taking these two references together, we have the Red Winchester noted as a straight-haired dog.
Which corresponds with an old painting I’ve seen, said to represent the Red Chester (another name for the Red Winchester, there were several variations) which showed a red-coated dog with a thick, relatively straight coat.
It seems likely that these American references would be closer to the mark than Walsh (Stonehenge) who was British and likely knew little about American dogs. It was in a quote from Walsh that the notion of the Red Winchester as a curly-coated dog may be found. Latrobe, the author of “Iron Men and Their Dogs”, bore the same name as Gen. Ferdinand C Latrobe, one-time “major of Baltimore and head of the Carroll Island kennels” where Chesapeake Bay ducking dogs had been bred since very early years.
Great picture and interesting read since I own and breed Chesapeakes. Have a great day.
Nothing can be cooler than an Irish water Spaniel – sorry!