A Girl and her Dog, 30 Years Later

When I posted the image of Labradorean Inuit celebrity Nancy Columbia and her dog at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904, the post got quite a lot of views. Miss Columbia was indeed, as my friend Kenn Harper has aptly said, the "most famous Inuk in the world," the star of stage and screen (she wrote and appeared in "The Way of the Eskimo," produced by Selig Polyscope in 1911). But by the time this photo was taken sometime in the 1930's she'd married, had a daughter, and retired almost completely from public appearances; indeed, this may have been her last. By this time, she was living in the Santa Monica area in Los Angeles, and the photos above -- staged on a backdrop with a little "snow" on it -- appears to have come from some dog show; it's part of a sequence of dog show photos on glass plates that were part of the Security Pacific Bank Collection, and which are today -- happily -- available to the public via the digital photo collections of the Los Angeles Public Library, where I was able to help them identify the photo's subject in 2010.