A Brief History
I have tried to keep this a brief as possible as it can be quite detailed and go off in many different directions, but I find the history of the Samoyed's absolutely fascinating.
I hope that the brief glimpse may excite you into doing your own research on the breed and finding where they came from, I have also included a couple of old pictures of Samoyed's found online.
Samoyed's are named after the tribe of people found in Russia. The "Samoyede" people (or Nenets, there were many different tribes mingling in the region, so naming an exact group is difficult) were peaceful nomads, who used their dogs for herding reindeer across the vast tundra. They where less of a sledging dog with the reindeer pulling the tents and possessions (though I imagine on occasion that they would have been used to pull sledges as they were sold to the explorers to do just that). The Samoyede people were different in how they raised their dogs to most nomadic tribes, their dogs were very precious to them, they treated their dogs like family, they slept in the tents and even in their beds as they were a great way to keep warm, it is said that they would even leave them with their children to be looked after, this is where the breed's fantastic temperament comes in, their loving and soft nature, and it is good that we have been able to keep it. The coat can be the pure white, white and biscuit, cream or all biscuit now, but then it came in a variety of colours including browns and blacks, as you can see in the photo of Whitey Pechora below. The long silver white guard hair is tough and the coat is soil and water repellent. Snow cannot accumulate on this coat and the dog can easily shake it off. The Samoyed dog sheds so much of this warm woolly hair that the Samoyede people (and others still today) spun and wove it like sheep wool. It was then and is still used to make clothing, making it doubly useful to the tribe. The coat has no “doggie” odour. The only scent the Samoyed has is the musk exuded between the pads for scent marking.
The Samoyede lived by hunting and fishing and their existence depended upon their dogs who fought off wolves and hunted bear, the dogs were also excellent fishermen and were used at times for towing boats and sledges, when it was impossible to use the reindeer.
The Samoyed breed might have stayed hidden from us if it was not for Arctic explorers. There were a couple of different explorations of the arctic regions that used what we would know as our Samoyed dogs on their expeditions, the dogs left over from these expeditions have made up our breed around the world today. Samoyed teams have made glorious history with Borchgrevink, Amundsen, and Shackleton in the Antarctic and with Nansen and Abruzzi in the Arctic. The American explorers Fiala and Baldwin also used Samoyed teams.
In Britain, it could be said the Samoyed's started off with Mr Ernest Kilburn-Scott and his Wife.
Kilburn-Scott brought a little puppy home from one of his travels from a tribe of Samoyeds in Archangel province in northwest Russia, this little puppy was not a white Samoyed puppy but a Samoyed of colour, this dog was named Sabarka, it is said Kilburn-Scott gave the present name of Samoyed to the breed (pronounced with the accent on “SAM”). From there, their love of Samoyed obviously started, and if not for the Kilburn-Scott's, the white Samoyed might not have happened. Back at the beginning, Mrs Kilburn-Scott found a picture of a almost pure white Samoyed and she was said to have written the words 'the type I want' on the back of the photo and from there they brought more selective imports and selective breeding, Mrs Kilburn-Scott had her white Samoyed's and with more importation, the famous Farningham Kennels was founded.
It was the Kilburn-Scott's who wrote up the breed standard that we have for our Samoyed's today.
One of the very interesting imports that the Kilburn-Scott's bought over was Antarctic buck, on a trip to Australia they saw him in the Sydney Zoo and endeavoured to free him from the zoo and to bring him back to the UK with them, after some time they managed to do so, Antarctic buck only managed to Sire a couple of litters before dying of distemper. Their daughters carried on the Kilburn-Scott's breeding and their dogs became the foundations for many kennels. The first official standard for the breed was adopted in England in 1909.The Kennel Club initially allowed them to be shown in the "Foreign Class" at English shows. In 1909 the Kilburn-Scott's founded the first Samoyede Club, and Samoyede became the official name of the previously called "Bjelkier", naming the dogs after the people they came from. The Samoyede was first shown in its own classification in 1912.
This is only a very little of the history and does not full explore the beauty behind the breed but I am hoping that maybe I have sparked an interest for you to look further into the history of the breed for yourself.