Raven's Roads
Living an interesting life: the travels and musings
of motorcycling author Linda R. Moore

Feb 1, 2007

History Nuggets: Two tails that wagged as one

Back in the 1860s, there was a city ordinance in place that banned all uncontrolled dogs from the downtown of San Francisco.

All except two.

On the 16th of June 1862, Bummer and Lazarus were specifically exempted from this rule.

Bummer and Lazarus were two stray dogs who, for whatever reason, made it into the collective hearts of San Franciscans. They were closely bonded, and expert rat killers–likeable both for their skills and for their friendship. Their territory was along Montgomery Street. Whatever they got up to was eagerly reported in newspapers of the time; presumably if they were around in this day and age they’d get a segment on the six o’ clock news. Ed Jump, a French artist, even made them the stars of a series of satirical cartoons that poked fun at notable characters of the day. The self-proclaimed Emperor Norton I of the USA was apparently so incensed to find himself depicted eating at a free-lunch table alongside the dogs that he broke a window to remove the offending picture. (A differing account states that it might have been the cane that broke instead.)

Their adventures were many and varied, captured in flowery prose and embellished, and included the dogs’ being shut up in a jeweler’s store one night. They might have been less popular if that had been a butchery.

In 1862, however, Lazarus lost the popularity game, and bit a boy. Someone poisoned him. A $50 reward was offered for news of the offender, but to my knowledge none was ever found. Ed Jump drew a cartoon depicting a formal funeral procession for the poor mutt, on his way to being buried with city notables. Bummer, who was no doubt bummed, died three years later when he was kicked to death by Henry Ripper, a drunk. Ripper, promptly arrested to bypass a lynching, nevertheless received a beating from his cellmate, popcorn vendor David Popley. (Was there ever a more apt name for a popcorn vendor?)

Mark Twain wrote a eulogy: “Full of years, and honor, and disease, and fleas.” Ed drew another cartoon, this time with Lazarus sponging off the feast as Bummer lay in state. Only Norton, whom phony legend would come to say had owned and loved the dogs, was not sad to see them go.

Lazarus was stuffed, and displayed in a bar, later given to the California Historical Society and destroyed around 1910. In 1992 a plaque to the two dogs was erected in a park behind the Transamerica Pyramid. Part of their obituary in The Daily Evening Bulletin noted that they had “two dogs with but a single bark, two tails that wagged as one.”