Bummer and Lazarus Turned to Dust a Little Later Than Believed

Discovery of Newspaper Accounts from 1910 and 1917 Overturns Conventional Wisdom of the Last 25 Years

Museum Confirms That Its Records Show No Date — Or Reason Why — The Taxidermies of the Two Dogs in Its Collection Were “Destroyed”

FOR SOME DECADES NOW, it has been a favorite pastime of certain San Francisco history buffs to try to figure out what ultimately happened to the legendary “not Emperor Norton’s dogs” of the 1860s, Bummer and Lazarus.

In 1984, Malcolm Barker published his little book Bummer & Lazarus: San Francisco’s Famous Dogs and noted in the book that the two dogs were taxidermied after their deaths and displayed in San Francisco bars for many years.

By mid 1986, Barker was able to confirm that the remains of Bummer and Lazarus were donated to the Golden Gate Park Museum — the future de Young Museum — in 1906 and ultimately destroyed.

Here’s how Barker put it in a piece he wrote for the San Francisco Examiner magazine in August 1986:

Excerpt from Malcolm Barker’s article, “Two Stray Dogs That Made the Headlines,” San Francisco Examiner magazine (This World), 10 August 1986, p. 16. Source: Genealogy Bank

Two key phrases in the final paragraph of Barker’s piece are “displayed briefly at the museum” and “then finally destroyed.”

• When were the dogs “displayed briefly”?

• When were the dogs “finally destroyed”?

Here is the February 1906 article that a tipster sent to Barker in 1906:

Article, “Bummer and Lazarus in the Park Museum,” San Francisco Call, 2 February 1906, p. 5. Source: California Digital Newspaper Collection

According to this account, D.B. White “gave ‘Bummer’ and ‘Lazarus’ to the Golden Gate Park Museum” — after which…

Commissioner Reuben H. Lloyd…accepted the donation on behalf of the commission, and Professor Gruber at once installed the new exhibit.

This suggests that, initially, the preserved remains of Bummer and Lazarus were displayed on an “as is” basis.

By the time Barker published the second edition of his book in 2001, he had discovered that, in early 1910, the Museum had announced a plan to have the dogs restuffed.

In fact, this was reported in both the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner on the same day: 11 April 1910.

Here’s the Chronicle:

Excerpt from article, “Museum Visited By Many Pupils,” San Francisco Chronicle, 11 April 1910, p. 14. Source: Newspapers.com

And here’s the Examiner:

Excerpt from article, “Park Museum Honors Bummer and Lazarus,” San Francisco Examiner, 11 April 1910, p. 3. Source: Newspapers.com

In 2004, Barker penned a brief entry on Bummer and Lazarus for the (now archived) online Encyclopedia of San Francisco. In the entry — later added to the digital history archive FoundSF — Barker writes that the hides were destroyed later in 1910.

Since 2020, San Francisco walking tour guide Joseph Amster — who has made the Bummer and Lazarus story one of his set pieces — has concluded his presentations and interviews about the dogs on a note showing that his own research efforts basically has dead-ended in confirming Barker’s earlier findings.

Amster adds the claim that the dogs were destroyed in 1910 when they were sent out to be restuffed and found to be filled with bugs.

In a March 2023 appearance on the podcast of the Western Neighborhoods Project, Amster said (in the course of remarks from 29:35 to 31:35):

I was able to get ahold of the de Young, had them go through their ledgers from 1910, only to discover that, when they'd been sent out to be restuffed when they were gonna be in the natural history section, they were full of bugs and had to be destroyed….I was really hoping to find them…but the ledger says it right there that they were destroyed.

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BUT, as anyone knows who has done much research involving the late 19th and early 20th century acquisitions of the museums, libraries, and historical societies of that era, the institutional record keeping of the era is notoriously spotty, incomplete, or just plain wrong.

Which means that such an institution’s “last word” on a given artifact often is “last” only in the sense of “most recent” — not in the sense of accurate or final.

Here’s an excerpt from the first of three newspaper articles I found recently that I’ve not seen reported elsewhere in connection with the question “Whatever happened to Bummer and Lazarus?” The article, from the 13 November 1910 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle, reports on expanded offerings in the Pioneer Room at the Golden Gate Park Museum.

Excerpt from article, “Pioneer Room: Memorial Museum Golden Gate Part,”San Francisco Chronicle, 13 November 1910, p. 2. Source: Newspapers.com

The Chronicle reported [emphases mine]:

Bummer and Lazarus…have been restuffed by a professional taxidermist, and now add their kindly presence to this room of memories. The entire body of Bummer has been preserved, but only the head of Lazarus remains. Moths got into his shabby old black and tan coat to such an extent in the storeroom where the two have lain for years, it was impossible to save anything but the head.

The paper even carried this photograph…

…which would seem to provide further proof of new taxidermy.

It does not compute that the dogs would have been destroyed in 1910, if they had just been restuffed and re-exhibited in the Museum in November of that year.

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AS IF TO answer this, the second excerpt — also from the San Francisco Chronicle and also, I believe, previously unreported in this connection — is from nearly seven years later, 4 June 1917, when the Chronicle noted that Golden Gate Park Museum curator William “Altmann has resurrected from a storeroom the stuffed skins of Bummer and Lazarus,” going on to say that “[a] taxidermist will restore these old-time canines to life-like appearance.”

Excerpt from article, “26,989 Visit Park Museum in Last Month,” San Francisco Chronicle, 4 June 1917, p. 7. Source: Newspapers.com

Six weeks earlier, on 21 April 1917 — the third buried piece of evidence — the San Francisco Bulletin ran a full-page feature on Bummer and Lazarus, which includes the following photograph:

Photograph of the taxidermied Bummer and Lazarus from article, “Two Familiar Boulevardiers of the Famed Ambrosial Path,” San Francisco Bulletin, 21 April 1917, p. 15. Source: Newspapers.com

The writer, Pauline Jacobson, concludes her feature by observing: “The skins…of both dogs, to be seen at the Park Museum, are almost fallen to pieces.”

The photo of Bummer and Lazarus is captioned “What is left of the two dogs that were once characters in San Francisco life” — suggesting that this is how the dogs appeared at the time of the Bulletin’s publication of the feature.

But, this seems unlikely if the Museum curator “resurrected” the dogs “from a storeroom” 6 weeks later. Plus: The photo is pretty obviously from an exhibit.

It seems that this photograph is from earlier than 1917.

Too: Placing this photo alongside the one that the Chronicle published in November 1910 shows that the dogs are differently positioned. This raises a number of questions:

• Does the photo published in 1910 show the new taxidermy that was exhibited in November 1910 — or does it show the dogs as they were received and exhibited in February 1906?

• Does the photo published in 1917 show the taxidermy of November 1910 or, possibly, a later taxidermy done in the intervening 7 years?

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HERE’S the original February 1906 “Stuffed Dogs” entry to the Catalogue of the Collections in the Golden Gate Park Museum, San Francisco. Cal. This resurfaced in February 2020, when now-retired de Young Museum registrar Douglas DeFors came across it serendipitously and shared his find with his de Young colleague Lars Nylander, who posted about this on Facebook. The entry later made its way into Joseph Amster’s January 2023 presentation on Bummer and Lazarus for the San Francisco History Association.

The entry is spread across two pages of a large-format logbook. The first image, below, is the left side of the entry; the second image is the right side; the third image shows the full spread — with the location of the entry marked by a pink tab.

Above: Three images of the 5 February 1906 accession entry for the Bummer and Lazarus taxidermies (“Stuffed Dogs”) in the Catalogue of the Collections in the Golden Gate Park Museum, San Francisco. Cal. Courtesy of Lars Nylander.

In both the left and right margins of the entry is penciled the word “Destroyed.”

But, note that there is not a date for either of these notations. This introduces the possibility that the notations were added at some later unspecified date after — long after? — the dogs either

(a) were in fact actively “Destroyed,” whether by the Museum itself or by order of the Museum, or

(b) were discovered disintegrated or were deemed lost when someone at the Museum went to look for them but could not find them — in either of which cases “Destroyed” was used in the passive sense as an administrative euphemism.

When I asked the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF), the institutional parent of the de Young Museum, last week if there was a record of the date when the Bummer and Lazarus taxidermied were “Destroyed,” FAMSF Senior Registrar Julian Drake responded via email:

According to our collection database, the Stuffed Dogs were destroyed. Unfortunately, the disposition date isn't noted in our accession file, so we don’t have a record of it.

Drake goes on to say:

The "Destroyed" notations in the margins of the handwritten catalog were clearly added at an unspecified later date. The entry reflects the accession date of February 5, 1906. I would suggest the items likely arrived at the museum sometime before that date.

Later, the objects were transferred to the History Department on April 1, 1910. At the time of the transfer, they were labeled “in storage” and deemed “unsuitable for exhibition.” As a result of this transfer, I doubt they were destroyed in 1910. It’s unclear when they might have been destroyed afterward, but I cannot determine the exact timing.

Responding to my follow-up as to whether bugs played a role in the demise of the taxidermies, Drake writes that “I don’t have any record of that” — but notes that “an educated guess…that the items were infested with bugs and had to be destroyed [for that reason]” would not be out of bounds, “as this was a common issue with taxidermied specimens at the time.”

As we’ve seen, there are contemporaneous newspaper reports of Bummer and Lazarus being exhibited at the Museum in November 1910 and being there in storage in June 1917.

Referencing the handwritten catalog entry for the “Stuffed Dogs” logged 5 February 1906 with the undated “Destroyed” notations added later, Drake points out:

The handwritten catalog of that specific type was phased out around 1939–1940.

This strongly suggests that the dogs were “Destroyed” no later than 1939–1940.

Given the presence of two newspaper articles placing Bummer and Lazarus at the Museum in 1917, it is reasonable to speculate that the taxidermies were “Destroyed” sometime in the 23-year period between 1917 and 1940.

Newspaper accounts suggest that, at least twice in the short 7 years after the Bummer and Lazarus taxidermies were donated to the Golden Gate Park Museum in 1906, the dogs were rediscovered only by happenstance — once in 1910, while then-curator George Haviland Barron (1869–1942) was “rummaging in the storeroom”; and again in 1917, when Barron’s successor, William Altmann (1877–1917), was making his own storeroom rounds.

This suggests that — beloved though the dogs may have been — no particular care was being employed to keep track of them.

The June 1917 news item promised that “[a] taxidermist will restore these old-time canines to life-like appearance.” Did this happen? If so, evidence is elusive.

What is apparent is that Bummer and Lazarus were hanging out, and hanging on, at the Golden Gate Park Museum at least through mid 1917 — not 1910, as previously claimed.

Absent any later reference to the dogs that has a date attached — and especially given the silence of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco’s own records on the question — it appears that the true date when Bummer and Lazarus were destroyed — or found disintegrated — or deemed lost — is lost to time.

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