In the 1930s, the only fox on the Outer Banks of North Carolina was the gray fox, and this is a photo of the Goosewing Club on a mounted hunt in an attempt to be subtropical English.
Red foxes did not become fully established in most of the South until well into the twentieth century, so when you read accounts of fox chasing south of Virginia and Kentucky and outside the Appalachian Mountains from an earlier time period, they are almost certainly running hounds on gray fox.
The gray fox is less suited for this type of pursuit because it doesn’t go to ground when pressed to hard. Its usual defense is to shoot up the nearest tree, and this behavior makes for a rather poor mounted hunt.
The Eastern Canadian red fox is much better suited to this sort of thing. The red fox of the Eastern and Midwestern US is derived from that animal. It is not an import from England as was once commonly believed. The red fox came south after the clearing of the forests created better habitat for this more open land species. They were the first canids to expand their range dramatically after European contact and colonization. The coyote was the second.
Gray foxes are the most divergent species of canid still in existence. Their exact lineage split off from the rest of the dogs some 8-12 million years ago, and they are the only species of dog still in existence that has a fully North American evolutionary history. Everything else, including the coyote, has derived from Eurasian ancestors that came back into the continent.
They are truly America’s most special dog, one that really doesn’t get much attention, but the history of foxhunting in what became this country was largely based upon this animal in the early years.
If I were to choose my own animal totem, it would be a gray fox. It lurks in the deep thickets on far distant ridges. It lives in defiance of our world, unsullied and unfettered by our desires. A wild dog that is truly out on its own journey, one that began millions of years ago in the ages before their were truly things called wolves or modern humans.
Remote and distant goes the gray fox.
