When Arctic explorer Robert Peary came home in September 1897, he brought with him a thirty-ton meteorite, an ethnological collection, and a group of Polar Eskimos for the American Museum of Natural History, which were immediately put on display. No matter that four of the six Eskimos died: the Museum just removed them from temporary exhibits and catalogued in them permanent collections. Of the two surviving, one returned to Greenland the following summer, the other remained in the household of a Museum administrator, William Wallace. This little orphan named Minik became the "New York Eskimo" of the title, and the phrase aptly summarizes his oxymoronic life.