Some years ago, I happened upon a lengthy newspaper article — from the 1890s, if memory serves — with a list of honorarily named California redwoods. One of the trees carried the name “Emperor Norton” — so, I made a mental note and resolved to return to this “detective ground” in the future.
Recently, I was delighted to find photographic evidence of an “Emperor Norton” tree: an apparently unpublished stereocard by Eadweard Muybridge, dated 1868, showing a man in a deep bow before a redwood with an "Emperor Norton" sign affixed to it.
The Bancroft Library, which has the card, identifies the site of Muybridge's scene as "Probably in the Mariposa Grove, near Yosemite Valley."
In my effort to confirm this detail, I found multiple references — from the period between 1867 and 1910 — to "Emperor Norton" trees in both of the noted redwood sections of Yosemite: the one in Mariposa County and another in Calaveras County.
The evidence strongly suggests that the tree in Muybridge's stereograph is in Calaveras.
High-resolution image included.
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Surely, one sign that a person has achieved the level of “cultural saturation” that we sometimes call “fame” is when when independent sources start using that person’s name as a shorthand to characterize other people.
Here are three stories of people not Emperor Norton who — during Emperor Norton’s lifetime — were labelled in the California press as various kinds of "Emperor Norton":
an “Epistolary Emperor Norton” in 1867;
“the Emperor Norton of the News” in 1869; and
the “Healdsburg Emperor Norton” in 1878.
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Ask any careful student of the Emperor Norton story to name the most famous early cartoonist of the Emperor and they are likely to single out Edward Jump (1832–1883). They would be right about that.
They might go on to credit Jump as the first artist to depict Emperor Norton with the dogs Bummer and Lazarus. About this they would be wrong.
It's true that, in the early 1860s, Jump created three cartoons that featured the Emperor and the dogs in the same scene — and that these cartoons have been influential in associating the Emp with Bummer and Lazarus in the popular imagination.
But, Jump was not the first artist to make this connection.
That distinction goes to someone who was not even a cartoonist by profession — but whose lithographed and published cartoon, apparently sold as a standalone sheet, showing Bummer and Lazarus sitting near Emperor Norton predates by as much as a year or more Jump's earliest cartoon showing these characters together.
This is the story of the artist and the cartoon that appear to be Edward Jump's conceptual influencer.
That we are aware, this is the first time the story has been told.
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In September 1864, a San Francisco correspondent’s letter that included a brief description of Emperor Norton was published in a New York–based Unitarian weekly, then was reprinted 10 newspapers across 9 states.
Eleven years later, in July 1875, another New York publication, Scribner’s Monthly, published a lengthy article by a veteran columnist of the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin. This piece included a snapshot of the Emperor that was excerpted and reprinted in no fewer than 26 papers across 10 states.
We find only one other “write-up” of Emperor Norton published during his lifetime that was reprinted in more than 5 papers.
The description originally appeared in a 2-column-long San Francisco correspondent’s letter published in the Chicago Tribune of 26 February 1877.
An abridged version of the letter that includes the thumbnail sketch of the Emperor was reprinted in 7 newspapers in Kansas, Minnesota, and Missouri.
Appraisals of Emperor Norton penned by short-term correspondents often were less generous than those of San Francisco’s own journalists. Happily, the correspondent of 1877 was more sympathetic than the one of 1864.
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Even at the most storied research libraries and historical societies, the catalog records for artifacts like early photographs — including basic details like the date and the photographer — can be notoriously unreliable.
Often, these records were created decades, even a century or more, ago — long before the advent of library science as a professional research discipline — and have not been reassessed or updated since then. Digitized, perhaps, but basically fossilized and forgotten. What this means for researchers is that catalog info can be little more than a starting point.
For the last decade, The Emperor Norton Trust has used 1864 as the date for two photographs of the Emperor that appear to have been taken during the same sitting. The date was from the catalog record of a major research institution — and, based on a variety of contextual factors, it was the only credible citation we were able to find.
Recently, we noted that the institution has removed this citation. This, together with our discovery of a new piece of evidence potentially relating to the photographs, prompted us to take a second look at the date question.
As a result of our investigation, we have revised our date for these photos.
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Although Joshua Norton was perfectly serious in declaring himself Emperor in 1859, it generally is agreed that the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin published his original Proclamation as a joke.
It didn’t take long for other newspapers — in San Francisco, yes, but eventually across California and Nevada — to get in on the game of burlesquing the Emperor with fake stories about — and fake proclamations by — him.
William Drury may have been the first, in his 1986 biography of the Emperor, to point out that the Daily Alta California — in particular, the Alta’s city editor Albert S. Evans, pen name "Fitz Smythe" — was the real "pacesetter" in this, taking the mantle from the Bulletin and fully milking the comic potential of the Emperor’s persona.
Recently, I stumbled upon a couple of pieces of evidence — not mentioned in Drury’s account — that other newspapers at the time recognized the Daily Alta and Evans as tops in the field!
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For many years, Italian produce farmers in San Francisco had set up a vegetable market on Sansome Street between Clay and Washington. But, in late 1873, things were coming to a head in a long-simmering public dispute about whether the market should be allowed to stay there — and, if not, where it should go.
In November 1873, Emperor Norton weighed in with a Proclamation calling for the market to be moved from Sansome, a public street, to a new purpose-created public square next door.
In effect, the Emperor was seeking to establish the farmers market as a public institution in San Francisco.
This is one of many reasons why the San Francisco Ferry Building clock tower — which rises above what today is the city’s flagship farmers market, at the Ferry Building — should be named EMPEROR NORTON TOWER.
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In 1872 — two years before the first commercially retailed photographic portrait of Emperor Norton — an editor in Oakland wondered whether there might be a market for photographs of the Emperor and how much collectors might be willing to pay.
Five years later, in 1877, a San Francisco paper carried an editorial on the prices paid at a recent New York sale of autographs of U.S. presidents, European monarchs, and other notables. The writer observed that Emperor Norton's signatures were "going at a low rate" and suggested that this would remain the case with the Emperor’s ongoing sales of signed promissory notes continuing to glut the market — but that, in the future, the Emperor’s signature could become a more precious commodity.
In light of the four- and five-figure sums now commanded by photographs and signed promissory notes of Emperor Norton, it’s worth noting these two early — and, we believe, previously unreported — indicators that, even during the Emperor’s lifetime, there were those who saw that the Emperor eventually could find his way to the collector’s market.
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In February 1868, Emperor Norton issued his first extant Proclamation in defense of the Chinese.
A year before that, in February 1867, an anti-Chinese riot in San Francisco prompted a San Francisco correspondent to a paper in Stockton — 60 miles to the east of San Francisco — to suggest that Emperor Norton was better-positioned than the San Francisco Mayor to lead on the Chinese question.
Did the Emperor and the correspondent know one another from before?
Had they traded their views on the Chinese question?
Did they influence one another on this issue?
Very likely, both men were regular visitors to the same building on Post Street between 1862 and 1867. This would have created the opportunity for them to meet and befriend one another.
If so, the operative question is: What did they talk about?
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In June 1849, English-born composer, singer, dramatic recitalist, impressionist, travel writer, and humorist Stephen Charnock Massett (1819–1898) gave a performance at a schoolhouse on Portsmouth Plaza, San Francisco, that is credited as the first professional show in the city.
Twenty-two years later, Massett was a bonafide national, international — and San Francisco-identified — celebrity who went by his pen and stage name “Jeems Pipes, of Pipesville.”
In April 1871, while Massett was living in San Francisco, the city’s Daily Alta newspaper published a column of his, in which he characterized the Emperor Norton as one of “the geniuses that Frisco has sent broadcast to the world.”
The other cultural exports on Massett’s list include Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Charles Warren Stoddard.
Read on to learn more about the fascinating Stephen Massett and his 1871 column giving props to the Emperor.
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From the time that Joshua Norton publicly declared and signed himself “Norton I, Emperor of the United States” in his Proclamation published in the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin of 17 September 1859, there was a more or less steady pulse of newspaper publications of his subsequent Proclamations — as well as newspaper reports of activities and sightings of the new Emperor.
But, at what point was there evidence of a separate public consciousness that this “Emperor Norton” might be a new character that was here to stay — a public awareness of the Emperor’s early ubiquity and fame?
When did Emperor Norton start to go meta?
Here, we document the earliest signs of local awareness that a new player had arrived on the urban stage.
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Contemporaneous reports of two visits of Emperor Norton to Sacramento, separated by a decade — one visit in January 1864; another in December 1873 — point to the Emperor’s abiding and strengthening belief in the power of national government to produce national unity — to the point of making state governments, and states themselves, irrelevant.
On the 1864 visit, the Emperor issued a Proclamation that The Emperor Norton Trust has not seen mentioned elsewhere. We’ll call it a discovery!
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By 1861 — and for the 18-plus-year remainder of his reign — Emperor Norton was a favorite and enduring subject for San Francisco cartoonists and theater troupes, who found that local audiences enjoyed the good-natured lampooning of their Emperor.
The Emperor himself was less amused — and, there are a couple of oft-cited examples of the Emperor’s expressing his royal displeasure over how he was portrayed in these contexts.
Recently, we uncovered an “episode of displeasure” that is even better documented than the familiar examples.
The occasion was the mounting of an advertisement using Emperor Norton’s image on a construction fence at Montgomery and California Streets. The Emperor borrowed a jackknife; cut out the image of himself; and sliced the image to shreds.
The crowd, as they say, “went wild.”
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Although national awareness of Emperor Norton did increase during the 20-year period of his reign — especially after 1870 — it remains the case the virtually all of the press mentions of the Emperor between his self-declaration in September 1859 and his death in January 1880 are from newspapers in California and Nevada.
It appears that fewer than 100 mentions of Emperor Norton during this 20-year period were published in papers outside these two states.
But, within this “national” group of papers outside California and Nevada…
Some 20–25% of the newspaper coverage of the Emperor can be attributed to reprints of an excerpt from a single article in 1875.
The article — written by a New York transplant and veteran editorial staffer of the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin who had arrived in San Francisco 10 years earlier — was published by New York-based Scribner’s Monthly.
The excerpt reached readers in 10 states.
Details and documentation inside.
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Between 1853 and 1859 — a period during which the courts handed him a series of crushing legal defeats that ultimately forced him to declare bankruptcy in 1856 — Joshua Norton engaged in a pattern of making bold public moves that belied — and defied — the harsh facts on the ground.
We recently discovered two early markers in this pattern that appear to have gone undocumented before now:
1) In August 1853 — on the eve of his first major court loss — Joshua offered himself as a Whig candidate for California State Assembly.
2) Under the terms of the Fourth District Court’s ruling of August 1853, the Court ordered the San Francisco sheriff to seize and sell two of Joshua Norton’s properties. In November 1853 — three days before the sale — Joshua took out a newspaper ad seeking a loan for $7,500, possibly part of a gambit to buy back the properties.
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For some eight decades, maybe more, the story has circulated in Emperor Norton biographies and in Nortonland more broadly that Joshua Norton owned the Genessee — the storeship that “received” the hundred tons of rice that Joshua’s firm bought off a ship in San Francisco Bay in December 1852.
According to this story, the Genessee was a major asset of Joshua Norton & Co., with the firm using the storeship as a warehouse and doing a brisk business in renting out space in the ship to other merchants.
In fact, the only contemporaneous documentation of a connection between Joshua Norton and the Genessee makes it very clear that Joshua was the renter. He did not own the Genessee — he simply rented warehouse space there, as many other traders and merchants did.
However, we recently uncovered a previously undocumented newspaper ad which suggests that — more than two years earlier, in August 1850 — Joshua Norton did lease space in a different storeship, the Orator, with the intention of sub-leasing this space to others.
Read on for documentation of the original arrivals of the Genessee and the Orator in San Francisco — of when these cargo / passenger ships were sold and converted into storeships — of how Joshua Norton’s path intersected with the Genessee and the Orator — and of these ships’ later fates.
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Conventional wisdom holds that, when Joshua Norton arrived in San Francisco, he immediately found a business partner and established Joshua Norton & Co. — and that this firm operated continuously until the legal and financial fallout from Joshua’s prolonged rice contract dispute left him deserted and on his own.
But, a close reading of the newspaper record indicates that, during his first 3½ years in San Francisco, Joshua Norton alternated between periods of working with a partner (“& Co.”) and working as a sole proprietor — and that there were three distinct business partnerships that operated under the name “Joshua Norton & Co.”
The primary 20th-century biographers of Emperor Norton identify Joshua’s first business partner as Peter Robertson. But, our recent discovery of details that apparently were missed by these authors suggests that Joshua and Peter did not meet until nearly a year into Joshua’s San Francisco sojourn — and that they met at a time when the “original” Joshua Norton & Co. already had disappeared from view and Joshua was once again working solo.
The circumstantial evidence points to Peter Robertson as the partner in the second Joshua Norton & Co — not the first.
Read on for the full story.
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Emperor Norton claimed to have arrived in San Francisco in November 1849, on a ship from Rio de Janeiro.
After the Emperor’s death, Theodor Kirchhoff — a friend of the Emperor’s who was a German poet and essayist — supplied a name for the ship: the Franzeska. (Actually, Kirchhoff said “Franzika” — but, that’s a small point.)
All of the Emperor’s major and minor 20th-century biographers ran with this narrative — even though it never has been independently documented.
Norton's San Francisco arrival narrative remains undocumented — BUT...
Here, we present our discovery of two previously unreported episodes from Joshua Norton’s first several months in San Francisco that appear to support his claim to have arrived in San Francisco in November 1849 — even if they don’t put him on the Franzeska:
Norton’s paid notice of a temporary business address in early May 1850, a few weeks before he arrived at what usually is regarded as his first recorded business address, and — even earlier —
what may be Norton’s signature on a February 1850 open letter published in the Daily Alta newspaper.
Joshua’s signature on the open letter would make this letter the earliest known newspaper reference to Joshua Norton in San Francisco.
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The period between October 1854 and June 1855 has been an underexplored moment in the Joshua Norton story. But, it's a moment that found Joshua at his steeliest.
He had no choice, really. In October 1854, the California Supreme Court ruled against Joshua in his rice appeal. Foreclosures on his real estate interests were immediate. But, he knew that it was only a matter of time before the Court lowered the heaviest boom — which the Court did when, in May 1855, it ordered Joshua to pay the plaintiffs $20,000.
And yet, during this most precarious of 8 months: Joshua Norton attached himself to the most prestigious new business address in the city. And, he found friends to help him stay afloat and, in one case, to take a crack at launching a major civic infrastructure project — not a bridge, but at the time even more necessary — that the state legislature would not catch up to authorizing for another 5 years.
This is not a man who was going down without a fight.
Read on for a deep-dive into a previously unreported key episode that foreshadowed the Survivor-Emperor to come.
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Announcement and details of the official dedication and celebration of “Emperor Norton Place” as the City and County of San Francisco’s commemorative name for the 600 block of Commercial Street, between Montgomery and Kearny Streets — where Emperor Norton is documented to have lived from sometime between summer 1864 and summer 1865 until his death in January 1880.
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