At least in the national consciousness, Colorado is a state with two reputations. There is its historic, pioneering side, which conjures visions of wide-open space and libertarian freedoms and cowboys on horseback ranching sheep and cattle.  And there is its modern-day connotation, of ski slopes and national parks and progressive idealism, where healthy, attractive men and women in microfiber garments jog and bike trails and appreciate the state’s natural beauty in more recreational fashion.  And there, connecting these two worlds, is the Australian shepherd.

The Aussie, America’s 26th most popular breed, isn’t Colorado’s official state dog, but it really should be.³  Considered a midsize dog of prodigious energy and high intelligence, its general appearance, according to the official American Kennel Club (AKC) breed standard, “is well-balanced, slightly longer than tall, of medium size and bone, with coloring that offers variety and individuality.”  Unlike the standards for many of the fussier breeds, which focus largely on physical characteristics, the Aussie’s official definition is as much about its personality and agility:  “He is attentive and animated, lithe and agile, solid and muscular without cloddiness.”

“The Aussie was selected specifically as a generalist,”⁴ says Carol Ann Hartnagle, Ernie’s youngest daughter, and she would know.  No family has held more sway over this breed than the Hartnagles of Colorado.  The primary reason the Australian shepherd has become both the world’s best herding and adventure dog—as well as an excellent companion and a capable guardian—is that the Hartnagle family, and the handful of others who helped shape the breed over the past 75 or so years, embraced its intelligence, drive, and adaptability to create a dog that can and will do just about anything.  “The Australian shepherd’s hallmark is its versatility,” Carol Ann, who’s 48, explains. “These dogs just have a high desire to please.”

It’s hard to imagine now, but for nearly 70 years the Hartnagles owned and grazed flocks of sheep inside Boulder’s current city limits.  A blue heron rookery was just east of the ranch, and both Boulder and Dry creeks passed through the property.  It was in large part on this land, which was also home to a 53-acre reservoir (known today as Hartnagle Lake), that the little blue bobtailed sheepdogs of the American West -- defined, in look and character, by Rover, and others like him—became the breed we now know as the Australian shepherd.

There were dogs that looked and acted very much like today’s Aussies a long time before Rover, and certainly before the dogs bred by the Hartnagles.  But you won’t find much unanimity in the Aussie community over the breed’s precise origins before the 1940s, at least in the distant sense.  Everyone agrees that the dogs are not actually, despite their name, a product of Australia, but beyond that there’s little agreement.  What is likely is that the breed as we know it arose semi-organically on sheep ranches in the middle and far West of the United States over a period of many years starting in the mid-1800s.

The best guess of what happened with the Aussie is that a variety of shepherd dogs were working in the western United States -- Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, and California in particular -- interbreeding with whatever other herding dogs happened to be working nearby.  The gene pool further diversified when dogs from Europe began to arrive in the late-19th century, along with reinforcement flocks meant to replace sheep that had originally arrived with the Spanish conquistadors, but which became lunch during the California gold rush and Civil War.  These dogs accompanied sheep that may have been imported from Australia -- which is one good guess as to how the name arose.  Other shepherd dogs that existed in the West originated specifically in Spain -- these were larger dogs -- and so the argument can be made that Australian shepherds are largely Spanish, and specifically Basque.⁵

The reality is that it’s impossible to reconstruct an exact history of the Aussie.  It’s not uncommon for dog breeds to lack a succinct, annotated history.  Although many were very specifically engineered from a traceable set of forebears,⁶ others -- like the Aussie -- just sort of happened by circumstance.  The Australian shepherd isn’t Australian, or English, or Spanish.  It’s all of the above.  Though the best answer of all is that it’s American, with the West, and Colorado in particular, at its core.

By the mid-20th century, around the time Ernie was first smitten by Rover, it had finally occurred to people to start writing things down, and the story of the Australian shepherd began to crystallize.  Before that, dogs that appeared to be Aussies were doing their jobs all over the West, but no one seemed interested in documenting their provenance.  It didn’t matter to most owners where a particular dog came from, or who its sire was; it only mattered that the dog was good at its job.  Very often you will find these dogs referred to in old texts as “little blue dogs” or “little blue bobtails” or, especially among natives in Colorado, “ghost-eye dogs,” and it’s pretty clear that the three common physical characteristics of the Australian shepherd, as it developed organically, were a blue coat, a bobbed tail, and a high occurrence of blue eyes.

DOG DAYS:

Ernie and Elaine

Francis, a male Aussie, on the ranch

Three Aussie pups

FAMILY TRADITION:

Carol Ann and Jimmy

Hartnagle family award and
memorabilia collection

Ernie’s Dorset sheep

The characteristic that led to these dogs becoming a formal breed, however, was the thing that struck Ernie: their ability to “work” livestock -- at first sheep, but also horses, cows, ducks, geese, or any other animal a farmer might need to tend to.⁷ And because of their remarkable abilities, bobtails began to show up in and around Colorado.

Rover was the dog that first caught Ernie Hartnagle’s eye, but it was a pair of dogs he encountered at a local stock show in 1952 that forever changed the course of his family’s history.  There, Ernie met Jay Sisler, a rodeo star whose act starred Stub and Shorty, a pair of blue bobtails who performed dozens of remarkable tricks and became so beloved and famous while part of a touring show that they went on to star alongside Slim Pickens in a 1956 Disney television show titled Cow Dog.

Ernie couldn’t believe what he’d just witnessed at the show -- dogs walking for minutes on end on hind legs, or doing handstands atop broomsticks, and any number of other impressive, intricate tricks on command -- and after the performance he sought out Sisler, who told him that these off-the-chart smart dogs, which looked and acted like Rover and the other bobtails he’d seen working sheep, were known as Australian shepherds.  “We’d never heard that name before,” Ernie recalls, “but we decided then we’d get some of those dogs.”

One year later, in 1953, Ernie met and fell in love with an A&W Root Beer stand carhop named Elaine Gibson, who just happened to have grown up amongst these dogs herself.  Elaine knew them as “bobtailed shepherds,” and the Gibsons of Wyoming had owned them as far back as the 1920s, when her grandfather had one he called Bob (for its tail) that he used to bring his colts in from the range to prevent them from being attacked by mountain lions.  It’s a funny coincidence, Carol Ann says, “that both of my parents have a very unique history in parallel with these dogs.”

The Hartnagles acquired their first bobtail together the same year they met, a female named Snipper, and very quickly sought to add a second dog like her to the family.  In 1955, when Ernie spotted an ad in the Denver Post for “blue Australian shepherds” at an address outside Littleton, he drove down and met Juanita Ely, a “salty ranch woman from Idaho,” as Ernie describes her.  Ely got her blue dogs from Basque shepherds, and the animals looked a lot like Rover and Snipper. Ernie and Elaine were thrilled; they’d found their source.

The Hartnagles took home their second Aussie, Badger, and were so taken with his herding ability and courageousness that they went back to Ely again for Goodie, Badger’s half-sister.  Those two dogs became the foundation of the breeding program for all the family dogs that would follow.

It was Ely, Ernie says, who is probably most responsible for the Aussie getting its start.  Though Ely’s goal was never to open the pipeline, by breeding high-quality blue, bobtailed sheepdogs of Basque origin, Ernie says, “She was the fountainhead.”

Back home in Boulder, Ernie and Elaine began to mate one good bobtail to another with the sole criterion in selection being the dog’s aptitude to work, and the Australian shepherd as we know it today began to take shape.  The idea, at the time, wasn’t to build a kennel.  “We just liked the dogs.  And we liked what we had,” Ernie says.  “But I got to thinking, ‘Boy, everybody with livestock should have one of these dogs.’”

The Hartnagles started by breeding dogs for themselves in 1955, but word of the Hartnagles’ dogs soon spread across Colorado, and then across the entire western United States:  If you needed a good cow or sheep dog, you went to Boulder to see the Hartnagles.  Las Rocosa⁸ Kennel was christened in 1970, and by then the Hartnagles were averaging about eight litters a year.  Today there are four recognized colors for purebred Aussies: the blue merle, the red merle, the red tri, and the black tri, and among the landmark accomplishments to originate at Las Rocosa was the introduction of the red-colored Aussie (in 1970) and the recognition that black dogs, in addition to reds, were just as capable as the legendary blues.  “We lifted the black dog out of the cheap seats,” Ernie says.  “We said we believed that color doesn’t make any difference.  You may like one better, but the black dogs are just as good as the blue dogs.”

To make that statement as clearly as possible, the Hartnagles set a single price for their puppies, regardless of color.  This wasn’t just unprecedented; it was revolutionary.  Years ago, before the Hartnagles vouched for the quality of red and black Aussies, ranchers often killed the puppies to save themselves from having to raise a dog that couldn’t work. As Ernie explains it now: “People did not understand breeding these dogs.”

Jimmy in the dog training pen
on the ranch

Ernie with Brombie near the
ranch house

By the 1990s, the city of Boulder had grown so rapidly that it basically encircled the Hartnagle family ranch.  In 1997, Ernie and his family sold it to the city, and it became “open space.”  Now, pretty much every day of the year Boulder residents jog and hike on this land, often with Australian shepherds at their sides.  Bisected by Boulder Creek, and with sweeping views of the Flatirons, it is some of the most pristine land remaining in the city.

Ernie and Elaine relocated to a smaller, 78-acre ranch near the town of Kiowa, about an hour southeast of Denver, where, in addition to a couple of horses and a donkey named Lila Jane, the couple keeps a pair of Aussies that assist Ernie in his daily chores. Among their jobs: fending off coyotes, rounding up Ernie’s flock of purebred Dorset sheep¹¹, and separating specific animals when it comes time for vaccinations. Ernie, tall, broad, and ruggedly handsome, even in the second half of his 80’s, still shears the wool and on occasion ventures out to judge some of the Australian shepherd herding competitions.

Carol Ann (and her husband, Kenneth Madsen) and Jimmy (and his wife, Lisa) are now the primary torchbearers for the Las Rocosa brand.  Carol Ann and Kenneth own nine Australian shepherds ranging in age from three to 15, and the couple still breeds, but no more than one litter a year from their small Adams County farm.  She says she can’t remember any part of her life that didn’t prominently feature Aussies.  The dogs worked with her siblings in the pastures, and the family traveled to herding competitions¹² on weekends.  “I’ve known nothing else than having these dogs as part of our lives as companions and guardians and partners on the ranch,” she told me.

Working for a living -  One of the Hartnagles’ Australian Shepherds, Brombie, moves Dorset sheep to the ranch’s dog-training pen.

AMERICAN ORIGINAL:
Ernie Hartnagle on his ranch in Kiowa.