Three Dogs Who Traveled Farther Than Most People
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Long before road-trip playlists and travel bowls, these three dogs racked up miles that would impress any traveler.
Owney, the Railway Mail dog (1888–1897)
Owney was a scruffy terrier mix who wandered into the Albany, New York post office in 1888 and started following mail bags onto wagons and railway mail cars. Clerks along the way attached metal tags to his collar to record the lines he rode. He collected so many that Postmaster General John Wanamaker gave him a jacket to spread the weight.
Owney traveled across the US and as far as Canada, Mexico, Japan, China, Singapore, Suez, Algiers and the Azores. Today he's preserved at the Smithsonian's National Postal Museum in Washington, DC, and in 2011 he got his own US postage stamp.
Bobbie the Wonder Dog (1923–1924)
In August 1923, Bobbie, a Scotch Collie and English Shepherd mix, was on a road trip with his family from Silverton, Oregon when he was chased away from a gas station in Wolcott, Indiana. His family searched, then sadly drove home without him.
On February 15, 1924, about six months later, Bobbie walked up to the family home in Silverton, thin and worn out. His route was later estimated at 2,551 miles, about 14 miles a day through winter. He was featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!, starred as himself in a 1924 silent film, and is still honored in Silverton with a mural and an annual children's pet parade.
Charley, John Steinbeck's co-pilot (1960)
In 1960, the author John Steinbeck set off on a road trip around the United States in a camper truck. His only companion was Charley, his standard poodle. Steinbeck turned the trip into the 1962 book Travels with Charley: In Search of America, and Charley became one of the most famous road-trip dogs in American writing.
The lesson for the rest of us
Bobbie's story is amazing, and it's also a reminder of why ID matters on the road: a collar tag with your phone number and a registered microchip are the easiest way to get a lost dog home in hours, not months.