Owney the Post Office Mascot

Owney was a puppy who appeared at the Albany, New York, post office in 1888. He loved the texture or scent of the mailbags and began to  follow them onto mail wagons and then onto mail trains. Owney rode with the bags on Railway Post Office  train cars across the state, the country and even around the world. Although train wrecks were common in those days, no train Owney rode on was ever involved in a crash.

Railway mail clerks considered the dog a good luck charm and adopted Owney as their unofficial mascot, marking his travels by placing medals and tags on his collar. Each time Owney returned home to Albany, the clerks there saved the tags. 

The Postmaster General at the time gave Owney a harness on which to display his tag collection. Like many of us the dog grew a little ornery as he grew older and died of a bullet wound in Toledo in 1897. He was stuffed and put on display at the Smithsonian Museum where he remains to this day.
Link - Via Mark's Scrapbook of Oddities & Treasures.