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As some may know, my family has been involved in livestock for many generations.  My father is Austrian and his grandfather (my great grandfather) was a livestock dealer who used to go from Austria into Italy and Germany to buy cattle.  My grandfather (my father’s daddy), Jacob Hartnagle interpreted for him. As was traditional, he started out as a boy herding goats for the local village.  Later, he tended sheep and finally graduated to herdsman by tending cattle.  He came to the United States in 1904 and bought the farm property in Boulder Colorado my father grew up on and first started using stockdogs.

My mother’s people who are Scottish and Irish were pioneers that traveled out west in covered wagons to Wyoming when it was still a territory, where they ranched.  That is where her father, Neville “William” Zorne Gibson first became acquainted with bobtailed shepherds in the 1920s.

For over a half a century, my family has searched the history and origins of the strain of bobtailed dogs that eventually came to be called Australian Shepherds.  Over time, we have been able to verify the explanation we have been told over the years about the origin and history of the breed.

In 1990, I was invited to judge the Continental Sheepdog Trials in Germany.  While I was in Europe, I had a wonderful opportunity to travel throughout the countryside and document actual shepherds who used their dogs daily tending sheep in the fields and mountains. 

While I was there, I saw a strain of Old German Shepherds (Altdeutscher Schaferhund), called Tigers in southern Germany.  They looked like old foundation working Aussies. The shepherds (stockmen) referred to them simply as sheepdogs.  No different than ranchers here who call their stockdogs regardless of the breed: cowdogs or sheepdogs.

Although these dogs were not registered with any association at that time, a group of shepherds were in the process of developing a society, Arbeitsgemeinschaft zur Zucht Altdeutsche Hutehunde (A-A-H) for the preservation and registration of the old German herding strains that were in danger of extinction.

While growing up, my parents took us all across the country in search of the elusive “Australian Shepherd.” They sought out elders of different Indian Nations to check out the legends they heard about Australian Shepherds being held in reverence by Indian tribes because of their unusual and often blue eyes that came to be called ‘ghost-eyed ones” or spirit dogs.

They didn’t research the breed from a book, nor was it their mission to offer a reasonable explanation of the breed’s history. Mom and Dad were searching for bloodstock to continue the strain.

They followed a line of investigation for decades to document the history from the people who brought the ‘little blue dogs’ with them from their homeland. They also had access to Mrs. Ely’s files filled with letters, shipping documents, photographs, etc.  As I have pointed out before, Juanita Ely is the oldest documented breeder in the country.  She knew the value of recording ancestry and was integral in getting the first Australian Shepherds registered with IESR.     

In tracking the breed’s past wanderings, the Merino sheep provided a key to discover much of history that is so closely linked together.  Throughout the world, the Spanish Merino was known for its very fine wool and fleece. They were developed in Spain.  The Saxony Merinos are a strain that originated from Merino sheep taken from Spain in the 1700s across the Pyrenees Mountains to Germany and then later on to Australia with German settlers.

Eliza Forlonge who is considered to be the mother of the Australian Fine Wool Industry, made several walking journeys (averaging 10 to 12 miles a day) throughout Germany and one to the top Merino breeding farm in Rambouillet France.  On her journeys she purchased the finest sheep she could find.  Later, she retraced her journey, collected the sheep and drove them to be shipped to New South Wales Australia.

In 1796, John and Elizabeth Macarthur, pioneers and founders of the Australian Wool Industry imported their first flock of Spanish Merino sheep.  The Merinos thrived in Australia because the dry, hot climate was very comparable to Spain’s.

Records indicate in 1825, Elizabeth transported Joseph Pabts, a German to New South Wales to care for her flocks.  It has also been suggested that when he arrived he brought his German herding dogs with him, very possibly the German Tiger.   And yes, some of these blue dogs accompanied boatloads of sheep to America from Australia hence the name we know the breed by.  Other little blue dogs such as Ely’s Feo, one of the first dogs registered as an Australian Shepherd (forming the foundation of the breed) came directly from the little country of Andorra in the Pyrenees Mountains (between Spain and France) and arrived in the United States when Basque sheepherders were imported by the Western Range Association to ease the acute labor shortage felt by the sheep industry at the end of WWII.

Each region of the Pyrenees (often remote from one another) developed sheepdogs that best suited the needs of the people in the valley where they were used.  It was difficult to trace the exact origin of the breed, because the Basques had no written language.  Many could not speak English, and their language was neither French nor Spanish.  This was long before the time of the Internet.

While the Australian Shepherd bears resemblance to the blue merle, smooth faced or "Face Rase" Berger des Pyrenees, better known in English speaking countries as the Pyrenean Shepherd, breed fanciers are often confused by modern representatives of the usually shaggy coated breed; and the lack of certain traits in Pyrenean Shepherds such as tan or copper trim. In 1920s, a Breed Standard for Pyrenean Shepherds was developed by a famous show judge in France.  For whatever reason, he decided traits such as tan trim were frowned on, thus discouraged and bred away from. Furthermore, the a^y gene that produces sable (black tipped tan) color of the hair coat commonly associated with Pyrenean Shepherds is dominant to the a^t gene that produces tan trim, so it would not be produced thus purged from the genetic makeup.