The Vanishing American is a 1924 film and book by Zane Grey about the cruel and inevitable clash of conflicting cultures.
History, as portrayed in this film, has been a succession of conquests of stronger races over weaker ones. As played out on the stage of Monument Valley, long ago, tribes of Indians defeated the ancient cliff dwellers; then came the Europeans to conquer the Indians.
The film picks up at the start of WWI and the Indian’s horses are wanted for the war effort. After first being exploited for their naiveté by an unscrupulous horse broker, an honorable Army Captain convinces them with the help of the white school teacher to not only donate their horses to the war effort, but to enlist and fight for their new country. The Indians embrace this challenge but the world they return to doesn’t reward them for their service.
I can’t help but see parallels in the themes of this story and the fate of the working Border Collie. History is marching on and we’re leaving the agrarian lifestyle further and further behind. America was never a big sheep country and we’re becoming less of one every day. In a piece appropriately titled The Vanishing American, Derry Brownfield documents the tide going out for the American agrarian industry:
When I was growing up on the farm, there were very few farm families that didn’t have a few chickens, a few hogs, a few cows and maybe some sheep, ducks or geese. We grew most of our vegetables and all the feed for our livestock and poultry. The typical farmer was completely self sufficient. The chickens and eggs paid for the food items that were not grown at home: flour – bananas – coffee – sugar – salt. The hogs and cattle made the farm mortgage payments and paid for other farm expenses and living expenses.
Economies of scale, government handouts, mechanization, fashion, and specialization have lead to the death of the versatile farmer and the versatile farmer’s dog. Changes in the market also make it a steep uphill battle to preserve existing family ranching and farming culture, let alone grow it to a level that can be said to maintain a large enough Border Collie gene pool. It’s not that there aren’t enough working and trial people to justify them breeding their own flavor of Border Collie, it’s that the prevailing opinion from this group is that they want to be the only ones breeding Border Collies.
Since 1980, 32% of the nation’s sheep producers, 41% of the beef producers, 81% of the dairy producers and 91% of the hog producers have been forced out of business.
In the story, Indians have a technic–an object of technology that is well adapted to a particular task–that is still valuable in a modern world. They are also presented with a war that is perhaps greater than their own struggle to maintain a static cultural identity.
The Border Collie is likewise a technic that is well adapted to a particular task that is swiftly becoming obsolete and a valuable tool in new applications. The working community being asked if they want to join in and be relevant contributors to the new “wars”–in this case activities, sports, and new off-ranch jobs–being “fought” with Border Collies or if they are satisfied to build walls and exist as living museums on their reservations.
Jim Thorpe, football star
Critics have contended that The Vanishing American is a commentary on the life story of Jim Thorpe, and like Thrope’s life story, it doesn’t end well for the Indians despite them making a valiant effort to fight for America in WWI. The crucial difference today is that there’s no stigma against working Border Collies, no racism or breedism that prevents us from appreciating their accomplishments.
If anything, my own vision of the ideal Border Collie matches Jim Thorpe. He was a hybrid of several Native American and European bloodlines, born on the reservation but raised in the modern world. His first job was working on a horse ranch, but he would go on to be the most versatile athlete America, if not the world, has ever seen.
As a teen, he excelled at the high jump, track and field, football, baseball, lacrosse, and even ballroom dance. He played football under the famous Pop Warner while at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and lead his team to a national collegiate championship almost single handedly. He played running back, defensive back, place-kicker, and punter. In that season he scored 25 touchdowns and 198 total points.
It was during that season that Thorpe put an end to Dwight Eisenhower’s dreams of football success when Eisenhower busted his knee in a failed attempt to tackle Thorpe while playing for Army. The future president said of his rival:
There are some people who are supremely endowed. My memory goes back to Jim Thorpe. He never practiced in his life, and he could do anything better than any other football player I ever saw.
He won Olympic Gold in the Pentathlon and Decathlon, and was hailed by Czar Nicholas II of Russia as “the greatest athlete in the world.” He won the Amateur Athletic Union’s All-Around Athletic Championship. He played professional baseball in the major leagues, professional football and guided the American Professional Football Association into becoming the NFL, and he even played professional basketball.
He was called the most versatile athlete in the modern era, if not ever, and can that same honor not be given to the Border Collie?
Jim Thorpe, baseball star
The sheeple are essentially demanding that while they’re willing to send their dogs off the reservation to compete in silly activities like dog sports or goose patrol, SAR or pageants, but they don’t want the dogs bred for those activities by people involved in those activities. They contend that breeding a dog for anything other than stock work won’t create the best stock dogs. And this isn’t a point even worth debating, because no one is asking people with stock or who are in stock sport, to use dogs bred by someone else. And despite the continued decay of American agrarian culture and demand, no one is even contending that the sheeple shouldn’t breed their own dogs on their own standards.
This position of primacy and exclusivity of breeding rights is only held by the sheeple. This is their reservation, and I suspect this is going to play out long term just like the conquest of the American Indian did.
While it’s compelling to look at the downfall of Jim Thorpe as the result of latent bias against the Indians, racism, or some great conflict in culture, I don’t think history bears that out. Jim Thorpe was given every accolade they could throw at his feet and that some tried to profit off of his success without paying him his due is not unique to Native Americans. The greatest insult to him was by the IOC (decidedly NOT an American institution) when they stripped his Gold Medals over his accepting money to play baseball earlier in his career.
Jim Thorpe was undone by the Great Depression and his own alcoholism, the later of which could be easily ascribed to his Irish and Native DNA. A predisposition for alcohol intolerance and addiction. Will the working Border Collie community be undone by their own DNA as well? Do they have it in themselves to change or will they become morbidly obsolete and irrelevant?
Related Posts:
* * *
Comments and disagreements are welcome, but be sure to read the Comment Policy. If this post made you think and you'd like to read more like it, consider a donation to my 4 Border Collies' Treat and Toy Fund. They'll be glad you did. You can subscribe to the feed or enter your e-mail in the field on the left to receive notice of new content. You can also like BorderWars on Facebook for more frequent musings and curiosities.
* * *
Excellent writing Christopher and point well made. Reminds me of my recent post Rural Decay.
I recently toured a friend on mine’s farm here in Oklahoma, I can’t remember exactly how big it is, somewhere around 700 acres. While driving around he pointed out several old homesteads where families had once supported themselves on around 40 acres each, today it would be hard to support a family on 700 acres and most people who raise cattle around here also have a day job to make ends meet with the agriculture just helping out or paying the taxes. Back in the 1920s my great-grandparents were sharecroppers in this area, they were dirt poor but they raised 8 kids off of what this land produced, a small piece of land by today’s standards. Back then everybody needed a good farm dog, heck, back then everybody needed a good plow and a good chamber pot too.
The working farm-dog is a vestige of a bygone era, valuing them for their ability to herd sheep is signing their death warrant as this skill becomes less and less in demand, like encouraging your kid to go to school to become a wheelwright, not a good way to ensure their success. Instead value them for their superior intelligence and usable skills like search and rescue, things that they could become valued and appreciated now and in the future. Take the German Shepherd Dog as an example, they were originally bred for herding but they have moved beyond that role to be appreciated for other abilities that come from their shepherding background. Growing up in Arizona I have seen the results of the reservation system and it is not pretty, I would not wish that fate on my farm collies.
Strong post- based on writing and a creative, solid comparison- I enjoyed reading. Interesting to keep in mind.
My grandpa used to take us on long trips way back in the woods to place where he grew up. When we were kids, he’d take us in one of his reliable Ford pickups, but a few years ago, he took us on his “workhorse” or “mule” (a kind of all terrain golf cart).
He would always point out who lived where, including were the old family homestead was
But he’d always point out that at one time, there were 30 families living back along that dirt and gravel road. They didn’t live back in the woods; where there was now a dense forest, there were once pastures and cornfields.
Today, it is mostly wildernesses and old farmhouses and barns that are slowly decaying into the ground.
This story can be repeated all over rural America. We are not an agrarian people anymore.
America tried being a sheep producer. The West was largely settled by shepherds opening up trails that the mountain men trappers had originally surveyed.
But we have things like coyotes, cougars, wolves, and bears and weeds that are so poisonous they can wipe out a whole flock. We’ve also had a rural culture of keeping free-roaming dogs, which also do some damage to flocks. We don’t have the Southern and Eastern European culture of tending flocks or having large guard dogs to protect them.
Sheep require a lot of dog control if they are to be successfully managed. That’s why Newfoundland charged such a punitive dog tax to protect its shepherds and encourage more of its rural population to take up pastoral pursuits. Dogs are always a big problem with sheep.
It goes back to the law of comparative advantage. Our geography via our natural history is not good for widespread sheep production.
Australia has us beaten. Not only did they have strict laws on dog imports; They had essentially no other terrestrial predators but the dingo. That’s very good for sheep production.
McCaig and others would be advise to read a little of what said David Ricardo on this issue.
retrieverman recently posted..Geoffroy’s cat
Hang on- Irish and Natives have a genetic predisposition to alcohol tolerance and addiction?
Nothing to do with the disenfranchisement and poverty, then? Or the drinking culture and traditions?
Sure, a genetic predisposition seems to exist, but there’s a huge variation in the distribution of these genes among the populations you mentioned- and genes which reduce risk of alcoholism found mainly in Natives and Africans. Even within populations of relatively similar people (genetically), you’ll have groups with higher or lower alcoholism rates, depending on their culture.
The border collie should be a flexible and multipurpose dog- that’s the kind of stock it came from in the first place. Farm dogs frequently have more than one job (usually watch or guard dogs as well as other tasks), no matter how much herding there is to do.
That’s exactly my point! Nature and Nurture. Genes and Culture.
Genetics isn’t always destiny, but it is a reality. Certain Pacific Islander populations come to mind. Historical depictions show them as very lean and muscular, but under the “western diet,” obesity rates are astronomical. I guess it’s possible that culture could once again dominate here and they could chose to abandon the western diet and gain back the health benefits. I think that there’s a similar theory about Native American populations and ability to process alcohol. Their cultural traditions might have been less harmful when the strength of their pre-Columbian brews (if they even had them) was less than the wide variety of weak to strong liquors brought over by Europeans.
If anything, I strive to look at both culture and genetics and how they relate on this blog.