SILVERTON, MARION COUNTY; 1920s:
Bobbie the Wonder Dog put Silverton on the map
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By Finn J.D. John
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Only, he wasn’t. The Braziers took an extra day or two to search for Bobbie. They called around town, advertised in the local newspaper, and drove around hollering for him. Still no Bobbie. So, leaving instructions to hang onto him if he reappeared, they continued on their trip. They’d pick him up on the way back home, they figured. They figured wrong, though. Bobbie still wasn’t around when they came back through. So, regretfully, the Braziers continued on their way, leaving instructions to send him home on a rail car at their expense if he should turn up. This has to have cast a pretty awful pall over the rest of the Braziers’ road trip. Anyone who has ever had a beloved pet disappear knows that feeling: hoping for the best, but fearing the worst. And, a week or two later, the Brazier family was back home, helping cook stacks of hotcakes and slabs of beefsteak for hungry loggers and millworkers in the Reo Lunch.
Sure enough, it was Bobbie — sore of foot, matted of coat, badly underweight, his toenails worn down to the quick. Bobbie had spent half a year walking (or dogtrotting, as it were) the 2,300 miles from Indiana to Silverton. Actually, if he’d had a way to count, his true mileage was probably closer to 3,500 miles, counting the time he spent casting around for the Braziers’s scent and picking up their trail along the way. He’d crossed the Continental Divide in the dead of winter, and he’d had to swim rivers and run from dogcatchers in at least eight different states on his westward journey. Nova, of course, brought Bobbie to the Reo for a joyful reunion with her sister, mother and stepfather. He was promptly furnished with a luxurious meal of sirloin steak and whipping cream. This happened during the lunch rush, and the place was packed with mill workers (possibly including Clark Gable, who had not yet been “discovered” and was working a shift in a local sawmill at the time). It was a matter of minutes before word of Bobbie’s amazing journey was on everyone’s lips, all over town. Within a week or two, word had leaked out to the national press, probably through coverage in the Silverton Appeal-Tribune. Friendly people with whom Bobbie had stayed for a night or two on his journey started writing letters to tell their stories. Soon there was enough information for the Humane Society of Portland to piece together a surprisingly precise account of Bobbie’s journey. After coming back to Wolcott and finding the Braziers gone, Bobbie first followed them northeast, farther into Indiana. Then he started striking out on what must have been exploratory journeys in various directions, probably trying to pick up a familiar scent to give him a sense of what direction he should take. Eventually, he found what he was looking for, and struck out for the West Coast. On the way back, Bobbie visited every one of the service-station-cum-livery-stables that the Braziers had garaged their car in on the way out. He also visited a number of private homes. Along the way, he spent some time in a hobo camp; and in Portland, he stayed for some time with an Irish woman, who nursed him back to health after some sort of accident left his legs and paws gashed up. (As a side note, this injury may be the source of two of the more farfetched claims about Bobbie: one that he actually rode the rails like a real human hobo, and one that his paw pads were “worn down to the bone” upon his return. Neither of these claims is in any of the 1924 newspaper articles I found, though.) “Poor Bob was almost all in,” Frank Brazier said. “For three days he did little but eat and sleep. He would roll over on his back and hold up his pads, fixing us with his eyes to tell us how sore his feet were. His toe-nails were down to the quick, his eyes inflamed, his coat uneven and matted, and his whole bearing that of an animal which has been through a grilling experience. When he first came back he would eat little but raw meat, showing that he had depended for sustenance chiefly on his own catches of rabbits or prairie fowl.”
For Bobbie, the best was yet to come. He was featured in the “Ripley’s Believe it or Not” comic strip and, last time I visited (although it’s been many years), his story was part of the exhibit at the Ripley’s Believe it or Not museum on the Newport bayfront. He became a movie star later in 1924, starring as himself in the silent film The Call of the West. And, of course, the Braziers made sure he never had to hunt for meals again! Alas, Bobbie had not much time to enjoy these perks. He died in 1927 after falling ill. Veterinarians suggested it might have been the strain of his journey catching up with him; but this seems unlikely coming three symptom-free years later. In any case, he was buried with maximum ceremony at the Humane Society’s pet cemetery in Portland, and Rin-Tin-Tin — the first movie-star dog of that name — was coached to lay a wreath on his grave.
And, of course, Bobbie has been an inspiration for plenty of tellers of tall tales such as Hathaway Jones ... but they’ve really had to bring their “A game” to come up with a lie that’s a bigger whopper than the real thing. I would argue that no one has yet managed it — not even the great Hathaway Jones.
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