The Silver Medal Squabble of 1899

For your reading pleasure, I have another dramatic saga which played out in the pages of The Breeder and Sportsman in March and April 1899. It began when the paper published a list of special prizes for an upcoming dog show. Such a list was, and I can not stress this enough, a routine item in the kennel papers of the era and hardly one that would generate controversy. But then there’s the idle rich:

The following week, this reply:

And of course, it didn’t end there. The next week:

All this because of one line in a newspaper, not besmirching anyone’s character or calling someone’s mother a rude name, but listing a small prize at a dog show. I wonder whatever happened to that cursed medal. Perhaps it was beheaded, staked, and buried in a field where nothing now grows and birds who fly over drop from the sky.

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