Carolina Dog

The Carolina dog, also known as a yellow dog, yaller dog, American dingo, or Dixie dingo, is a breed of medium-sized dog occasionally found feral in the Southeastern United States, especially in isolated stretches of longleaf pines and cypress swamps. Efforts to establish them as a standardized breed have gained the Carolina Dog breed recognition in two smaller kennel clubs and full acceptance into the breed-establishment program of one major kennel club.

Originally a landrace breed, the Carolina dog was rediscovered living as a free-roaming population by I. Lehr Brisbin Jr., though originally documented in American dog-related publications in the 1920s. Carolina dogs show admixture with dog breeds from east Asia.

Despite the name, it is not the state dog of North Carolina (Plott Hound) or South Carolina (Boykin Spaniel).

One of the earliest publications to document the "Indian" dogs of North America was an article by Glover Morrill Allen in 1920. Allen postulated that these "Larger or Common Indian Dogs" were descended from Asian primitive dogs:

The probability therefore is, that the Domestic Dog originated in Asia and was carried by ancient peoples both east and west into all parts of the inhabited world. That this migration began in late Pleistocene times seems highly probable.

Allen cites late nineteenth-century studies of skeletal remains of dogs that could be found from Alaska to Florida to the Greater Antilles and westward to the Great Plains, and were excavated from Indian mounds as well:

Cope (1893) was the first to describe the jaw of this dog from a specimen collected by Moore from a shell-mound on the St. Johns River, Florida. He was struck by the fact that the first lower premolar was missing and appeared not to have developed. He also noticed strong development of the entoconid of the carnassial.
Moore, in the course of various explorations in Florida and Georgia discovered many remains of dogs, apparently of this type. In a large mound on Ossabaw Island, Georgia, he (1897) found several interments of human and dog-skeletons, the latter always buried separately and entire, showing that the dogs had not been used as food. Other dog-skeletons of a similar sort were found by Moore (1899) in aboriginal mounds on the South Carolina coast ... Putnam considered them the same as the larger Madisonville (Ohio) dogs.

These dogs were publicized by I. Lehr Brisbin Jr., a senior research ecologist at the University of Georgia's Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, who first came across a Carolina dog while working at the Savannah River Site, which was depopulated and secured of all trespass and traffic for decades beginning in 1950.