Over the last few decades, it has become something of an historical parlor game among certain San Francisco history buffs to try to determine what happened to the serially taxidermied hides of the legendary San Francisco dogs of the 1860s, Bummer and Lazarus.

The originally taxidermied dogs were donated to the Golden Gate Park Museum — the future de Young Museum — a donation that was recorded in the Museum’s collections catalog on 5 February 1906.

By 1986 — shortly after publishing his well-known 1984 book Bummer & Lazarus: San Francisco’s Famous Dogs — Malcolm Barker had concluded that the dogs were “destroyed.” By 2004, Barker had put a date on this: 1910.

Since 2020, San Francisco walking tour guide Joseph Amster — who has hung out something of a separate shingle telling the Bummer and Lazarus story in settings outside his tour — has concluded his presentations and interviews about the dogs on a note showing that his own research has led him to the same conclusion as Barker: that Bummer and Lazarus were destroyed in 1910. Amster adds the claim that the dogs were destroyed that year when they were sent out to be restuffed and found to be filled with bugs.

But, we have found previously unreported evidence in the form of contemporaneous newspaper reports that Bummer and Lazarus were restuffed and exhibited in November 1910, and that they were hanging out — and hanging on — at the Museum at least as late as June 1917.

Plus: When we contacted the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF), the institutional parent of the de Young, last week to ask about all this, the Senior Registrar was unequivocal in confirming that, while FAMSF records do include undated notations that the Bummer and Lazarus taxidermies were “Destroyed,” Museum records do NOT include a DATE when the dogs were destroyed — or a reason why.

Lots of new documentation and detail in this deep-dive. Lots.