LEGENDS / Bummer and Lazarus / As Pogo once said: every day has its dog
Long before contemporary anxiety over vicious mutts with names like Bane and Hera (whose masters are on trial in the death of a San Francisco woman), two stray curs entered a whimsical city's folklore as memorable icons of esteemed doghood.
"It is 142 years since Bummer and Lazarus roamed the streets of San Francisco," we are told by their latest biographer, a Mill Valley author whose name -- perhaps a coincidence -- is Malcolm Barker. "Yet their names are still recalled with affection by local citizens. They have become legends."
Many a legend, like the oft-told friendship of Bummer and Lazarus with Emperor Norton, disappears under scrutiny. But their loyalty to each other, their resolute independence and their ferocity toward rats won them honor and glory in a time when most dogs were even less popular than Frisco's crooked aldermen.
Bummer and Lazarus were publicity hounds. The strays filled a need in San Francisco of the early 1860s, when the rowdy young city's seven broadsheet newspapers needed light-hearted diversion from the ups and downs of Comstock silver shares and grim reports of Civil War carnage.
With help from a gifted caricaturist, Edward Jump, journalists of the day gave the curs celebrity status, official exemption from the poundkeeper's murderous attentions and an abundance of table scraps from the saloons of Montgomery Street.
The Daily Alta California reported in April 1860, "The city is infested with thousands of worthless mangy curs of dogs, whose numbers have at last become intolerable. We never knew a city in America so cursed with the canine nuisance as San Francisco. . . ."
But only a year later, the same paper reported: ". . . 'Bummer' one day defended a poor, lame dog -- a mangy cur named 'Lazarus' -- from the attack of a larger animal, and thenceforth the 'two dogs' traveled in company -- 'Bummer' making him his protege, sleeping beside him on the sidewalks and protecting him from all assailants . . ."
Bummer was part Newfoundland; Lazarus was described as yellowish with black spots. They were so devoted to each other's company that newspapers called them "the four-legged Damon and Pythias."
Nonetheless, vexation with other homeless mutts led the Board of Supervisors to decree in May 1862 that dogs in public without muzzles would be grabbed by the city poundkeeper, kept for 48 hours and, if not redeemed for $5 (a considerable sum at a time when theater tickets cost a quarter), would be destroyed.
But a month later, the two activist pooches crouched in a City Hall doorway.
They watched, according to the Alta California, as the lawmakers solemnly approved a petition to anoint the popular rat catchers as official city property, "to wander unmolested in pursuit of their daily food." Thereafter, the poundkeeper left them alone.
Typical of the town's admiration was this unsigned eulogy in the Call on July 31, 1864:
"The lamented Lazarus departed this life about a year ago, and from that time until recently poor Bummer has mourned the loss of his faithful friend in solitude, scorning the sympathy and companionship of his race with that stately reserve and exclusiveness which has always distinguished him since he became a citizen of San Francisco . . . "
The best legends about the two pooches are summarized nicely in "Tales of San Francisco" (Stanford University Press, 1957) by the late Samuel Dickson. He wrote, "No theatrical performance in San Francisco from 1855 to 1880 that three complimentary tickets for the first row of the balcony were not put aside for Bummer and Lazarus and Norton I, Emperor of the United States. It was a custom that held until that tragic day when his beloved mongrel, Lazarus,
died, and thousands of San Franciscans followed it to its grave where it was buried as a ward of the city."
It's official dogma, and not a word is true.
The legend of Norton's "beloved mongrels" emerged directly from Jump's satiric cartoon showing the hungry dogs at the heel of the demented, penniless but colorful Joshua Abraham Norton, who is helping himself at a saloon's free- lunch counter in his uniform as Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico.
Norton despised the dogs, according to Barker, and the story of the theater seats was concocted many years later.
Lazarus died in 1863 after eating poisoned food. Bummer died two years later after a drunk kicked him.
The huge funerals were further products of Jump's artistic imagination. In fact, neither dog was ever buried. The evidence includes a clip in October 1863 from the Bulletin, a story that began with one of journalism's greatest first paragraphs:
"Lazarus has risen, and is stuffed . . . "
Preserved by taxidermy, Bummer and Lazarus became melancholy saloon exhibits for many years before being reunited as late as 1910 in the displays of oddments and curiosities at the old Golden Gate Park Museum. When it became the de Young Museum of Art, their pathetic pelts finally disappeared.
It was an ignoble end for two legendary strays who had died, as Mark Twain wrote about Bummer, "full of years, and honor, and disease, and fleas."