This fictional "first" is from Yankee in Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson. To the best of our abilities, we were unable to identify the first, if any, American dog in space. The first known dogs in space were Tsygan and Dezik, who made their journey in 1951 aboard the Soviet R-1. The first known dog in orbit was Laika, who rode aboard Sputnik 2 in 1957. She, unlike Tsygan and Dezik, did not return to Earth.↩