What is a “dogie,” and how did the term come about?
Robert “Curly” Flanagan
Phoenix, Arizona
Historian Ramon Adams has a couple of versions. In one, dogies were calf yearlings that weren’t fat enough to drive to market. The other: the word originated during a severe winter in the late 1880s when a large number of mother cows died off, leaving a bunch of skinny orphans. With their bellies resembling a batch of sourdough stored in a sack, cowboys called them “dough-guts,” and it was later shortened to dogie.
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Marshall Trimble is Arizona’s official historian and the Wild West History Association’s vice president. His latest book is 2018’s Arizona Oddities: A Land of Anomalies and Tamales. Send your question, with your city/state of residence, to marshall.trimble@scottsdalecc.edu or Ask the Marshall, P.O. Box 8008, Cave Creek, AZ 85327.