Sallie Ann Jarrett, the mascot of the 11th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, and the dog of the 1st (now 2nd) Maryland Battalion, known as “Grace,” who was a casualty of the fighting in Pardee Field, are the best-known dogs to have accompanied soldiers at Gettysburg. But other dogs, including some whose names are lost to history, also appear in soldiers’ accounts of the battle. Here are two of them.
In his history of Company G of the 147th Pennsylvania Infantry, M.S. Schroyer recounts the brief military career of “a large, long-haired, yellow dog [who] came to our company from one of the Maryland homes, became a pet and stayed with us on the march.” “The long haired yellow dog that followed the company from Maryland was with us all thru the Gettysburg battle and when a shell dropped near us and exploded, the dog, who had found a cool place under the rocks, would come forth and bark at the bursting shells. The dog stayed with us until our return march thru Maryland when he left us and we never saw anything of him again.”
Apparently, Gettysburg was all he needed to know of army life.
Another Maryland dog joined a New York regiment and might have died at Gettysburg, although his soldiers never knew his actual fate. He was recalled by Thomas Edwin Vassar of the 150th New York Regiment (the Dutchess County Regiment): “…do the boys remember that big brindle dog the regiment adopted in Baltimore, so curiously marked, and which, all over the camp, was such a pet? He was tattooed like a Modoc Indian, or the Ancient Mariner, and how he clung to the command and followed its fortunes! The last that I ever heard of him was during the second day’s fight at Gettysburg. Did he fall among the dead men that littered those plains and slopes, and did his blood with theirs crimson the trampled sod? We never knew.”
Loyalty Of Dogs 