What Did Andrew Smith Hallidie Know About Joshua Norton's Original Funding?
We know that Joshua Norton arrived in San Francisco in late 1849 with a certain amount of money. And, we know that, over the next three years, he was able to parlay this into a much larger amount of money, property and business assets.
One of the abiding mysteries, however, is: Exactly how much money did Joshua Norton have when he arrived — and, how did he get it? The Emperor Norton Trust addressed this question in some detail, in this April 2017 essay.
The familiar story is that Norton arrived with a $40,000 bequest from the estate of his father, John Norton, who had died in 1848. But, if Norton had $40,000, he almost certainly didn’t get it from his father, who had died insolvent and broke.
Moreover: In 1844, John Norton had written two letters to Joshua’s older brother, Louis, lamenting in angry desperation that Joshua would be the “ruin” of the family. From this, it sounds like John Norton would not have been disposed to leave Joshua 400 dollars, much less, 40,000 — even if he had it to leave.
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It appears that Emperor Norton claimed to have arrived in San Francisco in November 1849 on a vessel that stopped (or originated) in Rio de Janeiro and pulled in at Valparaiso (Chile) before continuing on its last leg to California.
This opens up the possibility that Joshua “laid over” in South America for several months, on his way from South Africa to California — even that South America was his originally planned destination, and that he didn’t learn of the emerging California opportunity until he was in South America.
In this scenario, Joshua could have established business relationships and made business deals — i.e., money — in South America that enabled him to move confidently to California.
Rio–Valparaiso–San Francisco was a well-established passenger route by late 1849. Joshua could have been based in Rio and boarded a vessel there — or based in Valparaiso and boarded there.
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Andrew Smith Hallidie in 1876. Collection of the California State Library.
In 1888, Andrew Smith Hallidie (1834–1900) teased a more detailed explanation of Joshua Norton’s original funding sources.
Through his role as a partner and the chief promoter of San Francisco’s Clay Street Hill Railroad, Hallidie — an innovator in the design and manufacture of wire rope — is best known as “the father of the cable car.”
Hallidie initially arrived in San Francisco from London, with his father, in May 1852. This was at the high-water mark of Norton’s prosperity and influence.
Although Hallidie — who was 16 years Joshua Norton’s junior — was only 18 in 1852, it’s not impossible that he could have met Norton during this period. Norton and Hallidie (with his father) could have been on one another’s radar. And: Both were making frequent trips to Sacramento, where they are documented to have stayed in hotels that were only a couple of blocks apart.
It seems more likely, though, that Norton and Hallidie would have encountered one another later, in the 1860s and ‘70s, when Hallidie’s rise as a technological, business and cultural influencer in San Francisco coincided with Joshua Norton’s transformation and rise as the Emperor of the United States.
Specifically: Both Norton and Hallidie were members of the Mechanics’ Institute. The Institute was a regular afternoon haunt of the Emperor’s. And, Hallidie, during Emperor Norton’s lifetime, was vice-president of the Institute 1864–68 and president 1868–77.
Especially given Norton’s past distinction as an industrial leader of Gold Rush San Francisco, it stands to reason that Hallidie — who was something of a scholar of the city’s business history — would have had the elder Norton in his sights and might have taken a certain pleasure in seeing the Emperor in the rooms of the Institute
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There are indications that Andrew Smith Hallidie and Emperor Norton might have had a number of encounters and engagements during the period of the Emperor’s reign, 1859–1880. This is a subject that merits its own article.
But, there’s at least one important sign that Hallidie thought that the place of Joshua Norton — i.e., the place of the “pre-imperial” businessman Norton, 1849–1852 — in San Francisco’s industrial history deserved to be remembered and preserved: Hallidie included Norton in an influential article, “Manufacturing in San Francisco,” that he penned for the June 1888 issue of The Overland Monthly magazine. *
Here’s the passage:
Passage from Andrew Smith Hallidie, “Manufacturing in San Francisco,” The Overland Monthly, June 1888, p. 637. Source: Hathi Trust.
Corners were made in stoves, in rice, in flour, and in everything that had a corner in it, even in cannon-ball Dutch cheeses, without corners. Irregularities in arrival facilitated such speculation, and the operators of those days were as keen as the stock jobbers of later times.
Curbstone brokers did not exist simply because there were no curbstones, but every other window on Montgomery Street bore a sign, Aqui se compra oro [Buy gold here].
Emperor Norton, who came in 1849 from the Cape of Good Hope, as the representative and confidant of some English capitalists, built in 1851 a mill for the cleaning of rice, and speculated heavily in this product. His last corner proved disastrous, for the rice cleaned him of his last dollar, dethroned his reason, and made him Emperor.
“The representative and confidant of some English capitalists,” you say?
Do tell, Mr. Hallidie. Do tell.
Indeed, it’s not much to go on. But, the truth is, when Andrew Smith Hallidie publishes something about Joshua Norton as a matter of fact, it probably is worth paying more attention to and putting more stock in than the speculations of the Emperor’s latter-day mythologizers.
It will be fascinating to see if there is anything more under this particular stone.
We’ll keep looking.
* Special thanks to Taryn Edwards of the Mechanics’s Institute for bringing this to our attention. Taryn — an Advisor to the Trust — is working on a book about Andrew Smith Hallidie.
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