The Plymouth Canines That Sat Down and Grinned
The record of the encounter is brief and strange. John Goodman, a Mayflower colonist, was out for a walk around Plymouth Colony with his spaniel when two big canines came bounding up. His “little Spannell” panicked, and Goodman fended the animals off with a “paile bord,” according to Mourt’s Relation.
Then the two “sat both on their tayles, grinning at him, a good while, and went their way.”
Historian Strother E. Roberts argues they were not wolves but dogs — domesticated Native American dogs. On that reading, the scene is not a wilderness encounter at all; it is a meeting with domesticated animals.
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The grin is the giveaway. Roberts’s case turns on behavior: a canine that sits down and grins at the man it just met does not read as a wolf.
And the mistake was not one walk’s worth of confusion. The article describes an “almost universal tendency among English writers to misidentify Indigenous dogs as either wolves or some separate race of wild dogs” — a habit that turns domestic animals into wildlife in the written record.