The Dog Who Slept on the Mailbags

In 1888, a scruffy dog began sleeping on the mailbags inside the Albany post office.

The clerks called him Owney.

No one appointed him to anything. He simply decided that wherever the bags went, he should go too.

First he followed them onto mail wagons. Then he climbed aboard the railway post-office cars that carried letters across New York. Before long, Owney was riding the rails across the country, sleeping among the sacks while postal clerks sorted the mail around him.

At every new stop, workers fastened another tag or medal to his collar. He collected so many that the Postmaster General had a harness made to carry them.

Then, in 1895, the mailbags carried Owney farther than ever: across the Pacific, through Asian ports and the Suez Canal, across the Atlantic, and back through America.

He had no ticket. No timetable. No single person waiting at every station.

He belonged to the route.

And all along it, the people who moved the mail kept passing him safely toward home.