"dogs as scouts?" Topic

Yes as sentries and trackers and not so much as scouts:

Have we any records of Texans or other frontier whites using dogs away from home, as trackers or scouts? It would be uncommon, I assume, but might be remembered and recorded for that very reason?

GROK:

Yes. The practice was uncommon enough as a formal military method against Plains raiders that it stands out when it appears, but it was not rare in the wooded East Texas and slaveholding settlements, and frontier memoirs do record dogs taken away from home as alarms, hunting partners, and man-trailers.

The clearest Texas man-tracking case is Civil War East Texas. In November 1864 a Walker County correspondent of the Houston Tri-Weekly Telegraph described a sweep of deserters and "jayhawkers" holed up in the Big Thicket canebrakes on Winter's Bayou. The reserves were accompanied by Richard Williams, "that redoubtable old bear hunter and soldier" and an 1835 veteran, "who, with a pack of negro dogs, was impressed for the occasion." Williams tracked footprints through a mile-wide canebrake; the dogs' cry marked the camp, and the party took twenty-four men. "Negro dogs" were the packs bred and trained to trail runaway slaves. Their use on a wilderness manhunt away from any plantation was recorded precisely because it worked.

That trade already existed in antebellum Texas. A February 1856 Bastrop advertisement offered "a No. 1 pack of Hounds well trained for catching run-away negroes." Those dogs were commercial tools meant to be taken onto the trail, not yard dogs.

Dogs also appear in frontier memoirs as scouts and night alarms, which matches the "away from home" part of the question more closely than formal trailing. In The Partisan Rangers of the Confederate States Army, the author recalls sleeping out on the Texas frontier as a boy, revolver and gun ready. About four in the morning "a fierce but low growl of my little dog" woke him. The dog "was my constant companion, following me everywhere," and "had an instinctive knowledge of the approach of Indians, even at a considerable distance." Horse and dog both smelled the party creeping through the thicket; the Indians broke off. He credits the dog (and the horse) with preventing the camp from being killed in its sleep, and says the lesson stayed with him as a scout. That is a remembered, specific case of a dog used as an outlying sensor on the trail.

Other recorded uses sit between hunting and campaigning:

East Texas "Dog People" of the Neches bottoms and Big Thicket hunted deer, hogs, and other game with local curs for subsistence, a method already established by mid-nineteenth-century settlers in that wilderness and continued for generations. That was ranging with dogs, but for meat, not for scouting enemies.
On the Rio Grande border, hunting parties took packs broken to javelina into the chaparral, riding to the cry of the hounds.
Later, Texas Panhandle outfits (Charlie Clement's deerhounds and greyhounds are the best-known) ran staghounds against wolves on the open range; the same class of dog was taken on Plains campaigns elsewhere, as with Custer's staghounds Blücher and Maida on the Washita expedition.
What is scarce is the silent, long-distance trailing of Comanche or Kiowa war parties by white-owned dogs. Ranger and Army pursuit accounts (Sowell, Wilbarger, Ford, Mackenzie) emphasize human trailers—Tonkawa, Lipan, Black Seminole scouts, and a few skilled whites—because a baying dog gave the quarry warning and because sign-reading on hard ground was a specialist skill. Dogs were more often camp alarms, hunting partners, or the specialized slave-catching packs of the timber country, pressed into service when the quarry was a man on foot in thick cover. Those last cases were unusual enough to be written down.

Unfortunately, they can't really pull off the three-finger handsign, and teaching them to say the motto is a non-starter— but they've got the loyalty bit down pat!

Most of the rest of the law, too, in my experience