A Funeral Cortege "Two Miles Long"? Not Really.
Another Example of a Norton Biographer’s Penchant for Connecting Dots That Don’t Exist
I LONG HAVE CREDITED William Drury’s Norton I: Emperor of the United States (Dodd, Mead & Company, 1986) — regarded as the “standard biography” — as being one of the most historically minded accounts of Emperor Norton.
More than any chronicler of Emperor Norton before him, Drury was able to situate the Emperor in his time and place — to make the Emperor a flesh-and-blood character by showing how he interacted with his historical contemporaries and how he dealt with the social, economic, cultural and political San Francisco (and California) of the 1850s, ‘60s and ‘70s.
For all of that, the modifiers are important: “One of the most.” “More than.” Most who have written about Emperor Norton since his death in 1880 have traded heavily in oral tradition, lore, hearsay, and other undocumented claims.
Drury resists this temptation more than most — but, not entirely.
Quite often, in fact, Bill Drury so much wants X to be true — or needs X to be true, to serve the story he wants to tell — that Drury simply asserts it to be true, even when more reliable documentation contradicts his claim — or when there apparently is no documentation at all.
Among Drury’s claims that don’t check out:
Joshua Norton received “a princely inheritance” from his father.
Joshua Norton owned and operated businesses on three of the four corners of Sansome and Jackson Streets.
Joshua Norton was a “charter member” of Occidental Lodge No. 22 of Free and Accepted Masons.
Emperor Norton issued a Proclamation against use of the word “Frisco.”
The City of San Francisco bought Emperor Norton a new uniform.
Emperor Norton met with Pedro II during the Brazilian emperor’s 1876 visit to San Francisco.
These are just a few. There are others.
Here’s one that has found its way into the conventional wisdom:
The final sentence of a brief obituary of Emperor Norton that ran in the Seattle Daily Intelligencer of 15 January 1880 claims that “[t]he funeral cortege that followed his body to the grave was two miles long.” Here’s the original obit:
Obituary of Emperor Norton, Seattle Daily Intelligencer, 15 January 1880, p. 2. Source: Newspapers.com
Emperor Norton’s funeral, held at Lockhart & Porter’s (undertakers and casket makers), 16 O’Farrell Street, took place on 10 January 1880 — and, nationwide, virtually every obituary or other article reporting on the death, funeral and burial of the Emperor was published in the month of January, with a few trickling into February.
Within this period, a search of several historical newspaper databases using the terms “Norton,” “Norton I,” “Emperor Norton,” “cortege” and “two mile(s)” finds a small handful of reports using the term “cortege.”
Only one item — the obit in the Seattle Daily Intelligencer — makes any reference to “two miles.”
But, apparently, Drury liked the detail. So, he cherry-picked it and put it on page 201 of his biography.
Excerpt from William Drury, Norton I: Emperor of the United States (Dodd, Mead & Company), 1986, p. 201. Source: Internet Archive
For good measure, Drury — writing more than a century later — followed the 1880 Intelligencer line with his own: “Some traveled in carriages, some walked in the rain.“
Endlessly repeated in the decades since Drury’s book was published in 1986 and now fully embedded in the Norton myth as a staple of “pop” guidebooks and guided tours — as well as the “weird history” genre of web articles, podcasts and YouTube videos — Drury’s “two miles long” passage conjures the image of a train of carriages and mourners-on-foot so vast as to snake for two miles from front to back.
Indeed, the Intelligencer phrase that Drury quotes — “[t}he funeral cortege that followed his body” — reinforces what a cortege is: a collective organism that moves.
Drury “lays in” the “two miles long” claim just after quoting the San Francisco Chronicle’s report that the number of people who came to view the Emperor’s body at Lockhart & Porter’s in the hours before the funeral was “estimated at fully 10,000.“
The juxtaposition of “two miles” and “10,000” makes it easy for Drury’s readers to connect those two dots — based on the assumption that all 10,000 joined the cortege and witnessed the burial.
A much larger estimate of the number of people who came to pay their respects to Emperor Norton was floated a half-century after his death. On 19 December 1932 — two months after the Emperor’s remains were disinterred at the Masonic cemetery with a view to moving them Woodlawn cemetery, in Colma — the San Francisco Examiner ran an article (“Spirit of Emperor Norton Again Parades Through City in Splendor”) that concludes with the following paragraph:
Records in the library of the Pacific Union Club show that 10,000 persons attended the "Emperor's" funeral. Fully 30,000, it was estimated, filed by his coffin as he lay In state for several days.
Never mind that Emperor Norton lay in state for several hours — not several days. When the United Press ran its wire story on 30 June 1934 — the day of the Emperor’s reburial ceremony at Woodlawn — U.P. went with the larger number, writing that, when the Emperor died in 1880:
…30,000 San Franciscans gave him a public funeral in Masonic cemetery.
The fact that the “30,000” detail showed up in the main wire story about the reburial ceremony strongly suggests that the Emperor Norton Memorial Association — the ad hoc group of Pacific–Union Club members who coordinated the reburial and produced the event — included this detail in a press release, or at least used it as a talking point in interviews with reporters.
In any case: By the time William Drury resurrected the solitary “cortege claim” of a Seattle newspaper in 1986, those raised in the “30,000” tradition of the previous 50 years would have had no trouble imagining that the cortege was indeed “two miles long” — even though Drury doesn’t mention “30,000” himself.
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BUT, ALL OF THIS is to take poetic license many steps and leaps and bounds too far.
It was a little more than two miles from 16 O’Farrell Street, where Emperor Norton’s funeral was held, to the Masonic cemetery (on a site now occupied by the University of San Francisco), where he was buried — this much is true.
But, the San Francisco Chronicle, in its definitive “Le Roi Est Mort” account published the next day, January 11th (here) — the same place, by the way, where William Drury got his information that 10,000 viewed the Emperor’s body — notes that the cortege to the cemetery
was not large, only three carriages, and of all the curious throng at the Morgue none cared to follow on foot.
The Chronicle goes on to report that
[s]ome went to the grounds in the street cars and witnessed the last rites. In a little square formed by four graves, near the Superintendent’s house about the center of the grounds and within twenty feet of the road, amidst towering monuments and burial tablets, a grave was dug in which the remains of Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico, were committed to the earth in the presence of about thirty people, and with no stone of board to mark the spot in after times.
Drury doesn’t bother mentioning these key details. (More cherry-picking.)
But, when one does take these details on board, there’s only one conclusion to draw:
The cortege route was “two miles long.” Indeed, during this period, basically any cortege route from San Francisco’s urban core east of Union Square to one of the Big Four cemeteries — Laurel Hill, Calvary, Odd Fellows, Masonic — was “two miles long.”
But…
The cortege itself was a length of maybe a half-block.
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IT’S ONLY FAIR TO NOTE that William Drury’s biography of Emperor Norton was being published as his publisher — Dodd, Mead — was imploding and in full meltdown.
Dodd had overextended itself on speculative contracts with authors like Drury — authors of books for which there was no real business case.
In 1985 and 1986, the year Drury’s book was published, Dodd was feverishly trying to sell back literary rights and even warehoused stock — physical books — to Drury and other authors with whom it had contracted.
It stands to reason that, in this “triage” environment, corners were cut.
Was Drury under pressure to deliver a manuscript before it was ready?
Was the manuscript properly edited for content? Or was it mainly proofread?
Was the manuscript rushed to print before it was fully baked?
But, ultimately, Bill Drury is responsible for the content of his book.
And, nothing in the book reviews at the time — which were based, in part, on interviews with the author — or elsewhere indicates that Drury had second thoughts about any of his claims.
Which leads us to conclude that Drury wrote what he meant and meant what he wrote — including here.
That’s fair enough. But, so is the right and responsibility of succeeding generations of students of the life of Joshua Norton to place Drury’s often-wishful account under scrutiny rather than treat it as sacred, holy Writ.
God is in the details.
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