History
The feist is not a new type of dog. Written accounts of the dogs go back centuries, with several spelling variations seen. Abraham Lincoln wrote about them in a poem, "The Bear Hunt," spelling feist as fice. Reference to them is included in the diary of George Washington in 1770 in which he wrote, "A small foist looking yellow cur." William Faulkner employs the spelling fyce in "Go Down Moses" in the line "a brave fyce dog is killed by a bear," as well as in his short stories "The Bear" and "Was." In her 1938 novel The Yearling, author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings uses the spelling of feist to refer to this dog. Claude Shumate, who wrote about the feist for Full Cry magazine, believed that the feist was descended from Native American dogs, mixed with small terriers from Britain, and was kept as early as the 17th century. (Full Cry, December, 1987).
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