Until the Last Dog is Hung

I love finding out about new expressions that have been around for a while but that somehow have escaped my radar. A friend of mine from church wrote this recently and I loved it and thought I'd share it with others who may not have seen it before (or perhaps I'm the only one who somehow missed this growing up).

Researching this a bit ... the phrase is now used in reference to persisting or persevering or hanging on until the very end, fighting until all the guns are fired and the supply of ammo is exhausted.

It also apparently is used - or was? - to refer to those party goers who are among the last two or three guests to leave ... staying "until the last dog is hung."

But what of its origins? (For some odd reason, 'Twas the Night Before Christmas' is going through my head at this moment, only the words are being changed: The puppies were hung by the chimney with care.)

Googling around, there are a couple of plausible stories that make sense, one more probable than the other.

There is speculation that out in the old West (back when men were men and all the cool guys could ride a horse, shoot a pistol, and play the tuba), the bad guys (cattle rustlers, bank robbers, stage coach bandits, and woodwinds) were referred to as dogs, and these "dogs" were sometimes subject to lynch parties that occurred outside of the general scope of the law. It's conceivable that when a few such dogs were apprehended, the festivities (i.e., the hangings) went on until the last dog was hung.

My only real problem with that is that if dogs referred to people, then shouldn't the operative word be hanged and not hung? Things are hung, people are hanged. But what if the person being hanged is referred to in a non-person euphemistic sort of way? Or is this even euphemistic?

Indeed, I think in our modern society people would get more upset at a "dog hanging" than a "criminal hanging." I love dogs, but ... anyway, I digress.

I can envision a scene like that below:

"Chester, I been gittin' ready for this here lynching fer day 'n night, and I is so glad that you is gonna string up this varmint. I is gonna stay and watch 'till the whole kitten kaboodle is done, until the last dog is hung."

"Lester, I be ashamed of you. You just used hung and ain't it the truth that you should've used hanged?"

"Chester, forgive this old cooter. Don't tell Mama. She ain't gonna take to it."

"Lester, I be promisin' I won't say a word. Ain't I told you afore, though, you gots to be careful how you use this speakin' stuff."

Okay, anyway, yeah, it seems unlikely that on the prairie frontier of this great land we would be so incorrect in our language. So that's not the origin of the phrase.

Something I found, even more interesting, is that the Iroquois Indians - namely the Seneca tribe in the Iroquois league - used to celebrate the annual winter New Year festival by sacrificing an unblemished white dog. I won't go into the details here, but the reference "until the last dog is hung" may very well be associated with this.

I also found speculation that "until the last dog is hung" may be analogous to one of my favorite phrases, "until the cows come home," which I picked up in college, and it generally means very late at night.

"Until the last dog is hung" refers more to the finishing of something, rather than the fact that it's in the wee hours.

There are things in life that really are not worth fighting for, but there are things in life that are worth fighting until the last dog is hung.