Most of us familiar with the phrase, “Three Dog Night” associate it with the guys in the video below:

The song, “Mama Told Me Not To Come,” was written by Randy Newman and was the very first No. 1 song featured on American Top 40. The band, Three Dog Night, would go on to earn 12 gold albums, record 21 consecutive Billboard Top 40 hits, and have seven of them go gold. Band members were often asked during interviews how they got their name, and in the commentary included with their CD, Celebrate, came the explanation: Vocalist, Danny Hutton’s then girlfriend, June Fairchild, had been reading about Australian Aborigines who would sleep with one dog for warmth, and two dogs on cold nights. When it was absolutely freezing outside, it became a “three dog night.”

The true origins of the phrase, however, are revealed by a more academic source, Climate Change in Prehistory published by Cambridge University Press. The Chukchi people who lived in the far east of Siberia and developed the Chukchi dog, or Siberian Husky” were the originators. The phrase became cemented in American literature, when Jane Resh Thomas included it in her novel, Courage at Indian Deep: 

Here, Tongue.” Cass dried the dog and coaxed him under the open sleeping bag. “This is a three-dog night, for sure, but one dog will have to do.”
Answering the puzzled look on Torberg’s face, Cass said, “I read that frontiersmen slept with dog because their body temperature is higher than a human’s. A three-dog night was a night so cold it took three dogs to keep a man warm.”
“Tongue’s a living electric blanket,” said Torberg smiling.

We were hoping to find the phrase spoken in Chukchi, but while we couldn’t find it, we were able to find someone speaking the language which we thought you’d find interesting:

In one way, language is like our purebred dogs: Linguists say that of the estimated 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, almost half are in danger of extinction and are likely to disappear in this century. A look at the Kennel Club’s list of vulnerable dog breeds shows the unfortunate similarity.

Image: Only one of ‘Three Corgis” by Janet Ferraro remains available here.