Pittsburg, H.H. — Pittsburg, N.H. In 1918, the Spanish flu decimated this tiny town in the northernmost reaches of the state.
Among the victims was a lonely Eskimo, an unlikely transplant from Greenland who spent his youth as the pawn of a museum that cared more for cultural conquests than for the well-being of a child.
By his mid-20s, Minik had escaped that world to the anonymity of what then was a logging community tucked away along the Canadian border. But he couldn't escape his vulnerability to American diseases. He died Oct. 29, 1918, of bronchial pneumonia.
No one in Pittsburg remembers Minik. But a few people in this community of 900, where tourism has supplanted logging as the dominant industry, know the Eskimo's story and say it's no mystery why he was happy here.
"If the people then were like the people in town now, then he would have been received very well," says Sharon Kouble, who retired to Pittsburg in 1992 and is something of a Minik historian. "People here go out of their way to accept you."
Indian Stream Cemetery is at the base of Comstock Hill on the outskirts of town. The only reminder of Minik's presence is a moss-covered gravestone that sits flush with the ground. It wrongly lists his birth date as 1887.
Robert Gray, 73, whose father worked with Minik, helped place the stone about 20 years ago. Afton Hall, a logger and friend of Minik who later knew Gray, left money for the marker.
Despite a childhood well-chronicled by the press, Minik's end remained mostly a mystery until the 1970s, when Arctic historian Kenn Harper heard tales of the so-called "New York Eskimo" and started asking questions.
His answers are laid out in "Give Me My Father's Body," an account of Minik's voyage to the United States, his mistreatment by the American Museum of Natural History and his quest to give his father a proper burial.
Unrealized promises
Minik was born around 1890 and became famous in 1897 when Arctic explorer Robert Peary, who was searching for a practical route to the North Pole, made his fourth voyage to Cape York in northwestern Greenland. The polar route remained elusive, but he found something nearly as good six Eskimos to bring back to New York.
Among them were Minik and his widowed father, Qisuk.
"They promised us nice warm homes in the sunshine land, and guns and knives and needles and many other things," Minik told the World newspaper in a January 1907 article quoted by Harper. "So one day we all sailed away for New York."
They arrived in September 1897. For two days, the Eskimos endured oppressive heat while being made to parade around in their fur clothing for the more than 30,000 people who clambered aboard the ship to see them.
Eventually, the group was taken to live in the basement of the museum, whose officials had sponsored many of Peary's expeditions and had requested live Eskimos to study.
By November, all six were hospitalized with pneumonia; their bodies couldn't adapt to the climate and germs of the United States. All died except Minik and Uisaakassak, an adult male who returned to Greenland in July 1898.
Following his father's death, the boy was sent to live with William Wallace, the museum's superintendent of buildings. Wallace was to receive a stipend from the museum's president in exchange for caring for Minik.
The Wallaces gave the boy their surname, treated him like a son and considered adopting him. Despite repeated bouts of illness, Minik attended school, learned English and spent summers at the Wallaces' country home in Cobleskill, N.Y.
"I want to stay here," Minik told the World. "And when I get to be a man, I want to be a farmer and grow things. All Esquimaux (sic) just love to grow things because in our country nothing grows."
A battle breaks out
The happiness was short-lived. In November 1900, Wallace's personal finances crumbled, and a year later he was forced to resign from the museum over allegations he had mishandled its money.
Making matters worse, museum President Morris Jesup stopped contributing to Minik's care, eventually denying he ever had agreed to do so.
Wallace, now a widower, was forced to take Minik out of school, ending plans to train him to be an explorer or missionary who someday would return to his people. And from 1901 to 1907, Minik and Wallace lived a quiet and impoverished life in New York. With Wallace's money gone, the family's prominence faded, as did the media's fascination with the boy.
By then, Harper wrote, museum officials had disowned Minik, even denying one of their anthropologists ever had requested that live Eskimos be brought to this country. Peary also refused to take responsibility, saying the Eskimos had asked for passage to New York.
Then things got worse.
Sometime in 1907 Minik learned that museum officials had deceived him when his father died. Instead of burying the father's body, they kept it to study and, Minik contended, display it. The burial Minik had witnessed actually was of a log wrapped in furs.
"Unexpectedly one day I came face to face with it," Minik told the Examiner of his father's skeleton. "I threw myself at the bottom of the glass case and prayed and wept. I went straight to the director and implored him to let me bury my father. He would not. I swore I would never rest until I had given my father burial."
Minik's battle with the museum and Peary began in earnest.
"Here I am, a prisoner in this country. Everything, my home, my father, all has been taken from me," he told the Examiner. "I ask that they pay back Uncle Will what he has spent on me, return my father's body, and give me preparation for northern work."
He got none of that. Returning home would not be easy. Few ships ventured that far north, and those that did were under Peary's command.
In 1908 Minik asked the explorer if he could join a planned trip north. Peary said maybe next time.
Minik responded in the Sun in 1909: "You found room enough to bring me. ... Why can't you take me back?"
Peary not only refused to take Minik to Greenland, but refused to even meet with him.
Minik even petitioned President Theodore Roosevelt to get back his father's remains, but Peary persuaded the White House to ignore the request.
"I would shoot Mr. Peary and the museum director, only I want them to see how much more just a savage Eskimo is than their enlightened white selves," Minik told the Examiner.
Such comments angered Peary's supporters, including Peary's wife. To avoid further abuse in the press, she and others raised the money to send Minik home.
In the fall of 1909, after 12 years in the United States, Minik left for Greenland.
Longing for the U.S.
Minik adapted well to life among the Eskimos, though he had long ago forgotten their language. A year after he returned, he married an Eskimo. The marriage soured, however, as did his pleasure at being home.
Minik romanticized life in the United States and longed to return. In July 1916, he found a ship heading to New York.
"Was I satisfied with the crude life there? Yes and no," Minik told the New York Tribune upon his return. "The climate suited me and my health was better than when here.
"But the hard, dreary life of the people and the conditions under which they live are very monotonous to one who knows of the high state of civilization here."
Minik tried various schemes to capitalize on his strange life, including a book proposal. But interest in his story had faded. Late in 1917, he traveled to Boston and sought work through an employment agency. Soon he was on a train to New Hampshire and a job as a logger. The harsh environment suited Minik, and for the first time in this country, he no longer felt out of place.
"Life here was different from anything Minik had ever known," Harper wrote. "The lumbering crews were a mixed bag of French Canadians, Poles, Finns, Swedes and local Yankees, and among them were a fair sampling of misfits, rejects and the plain unfortunate. Minik was not a freak here, unless they were all freaks together."
As before, Minik's happiness was short-lived. In 1918, the flu struck, wiping out much of the community. Minik was buried in the Indian Stream Cemetery on Oct. 30, 1918.
Setting things right
It wasn't until 1993, following unflattering press accounts based on then-self-published copies of Harper's book, that the museum returned Qisuk's bones to his homeland. The museum denies the bad press had anything to do with it.
"At the end of 1980s we did an audit of our collections to see if we had anything in our collection that we would consider out of scope because of the way it was acquired," said Ian Tattersall, a curator in the museum's department of anthropology. "This was one of a small number of collections that was identified at the time."
He also said that Qisuk's bones never were on display, as Minik contended.
Tattersall said it's important to view Minik's life and treatment by the museum in context.
"The standards that applied 100 years ago were very different than the standards that apply now," he said. "Many people did business 100 years ago in ways we would find not very desirable."
What was done then cannot be changed, he said. "We can only do what we can to set things right, and I think we did that in the case of the Eskimos."
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