Discovery: Episode That Brought an End to the Emperor’s Fruitful 4½-Year Run of Proclamations in the San Francisco-Based Pacific Appeal Began With a Proclamation in an Oakland Paper

ON 8 MAY 1875, the following stack of three Proclamations of Emperor Norton — each individually signed — appeared on the front page of the weekly Pacific Appeal newspaper:

The Emperor had designated the Black-owned Pacific Appeal as his official gazette in December 1870. Since the fall of that year, the paper — edited and published by Peter Anderson — had run some 250 Proclamations penned by the Emperor: more, by far, than any other single publication.

On page 2 of the 8 May 1875 issue — tucked in to the bottom of the third column — carrying no heading and no signature — was a fourth Proclamation:

As president of the recently established Newark Land Company, the venture capitalist Charles Rollo Peters (1826–1881) was the spearhead and chief public cheerleader of a speculative real estate project to build a new town on swampy land along the eastern edge of the narrow southern tip of San Francisco Bay.

In order to fund the project, Peters needed to sell lots — and his primary sales targets were immigrants flooding into the Bay Area from the East Coast and Europe.

But, in May 1875, sales of the lots were not going well.

This may help to explain why — as we document in this April 2022 article — the thin-skinned Charles Peters responded to Emperor Norton’s 8 May 1875 Proclamation against his scheme by suing Peter Anderson for libel two weeks later, on May 25.

After being arrested and quickly released on bail, Anderson published a retraction on May 29 — and Peters dropped his lawsuit on June 2.

It’s not clear whether Charles Peters stipulated as a condition of dropping his suit that Peter Anderson cut the Emperor loose — but that is what Anderson did, writing in his retraction: “[W]e take this occasion to retract the said article by Emperor Norton, and forbid him hereafter bringing any thing to our office for publication.”

A Proclamation of Emperor Norton never again appeared in the Pacific Appeal during the Emperor’s lifetime.

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THE ABSENCE of a signature on the Proclamation against Charles Peters published in the Pacific Appeal on 8 May 1875, together with the Proclamation’s curious placement on a different page separate from other signed Proclamations that appeared in the same edition, has left this Proclamation with a small asterisk — a whisper of a doubt as to whether Emperor Norton was the author.

But both the style and the substance of the Proclamation — calling out a fraudulent real estate scheme designed to prey, in particular, on unsuspecting immigrants — is so consistent with Emperor Norton and his concerns that The Emperor Norton Trust long has regarded it as being authentic.

Comes the Trust’s discovery of the following earlier Proclamation, signed “Norton I,” that removes any doubt. This Proclamation, published in the Oakland Tribune on 3 May 1875 — five days before the unsigned Proclamation that appeared in the Pacific Appeal — is not part of the brief one-page account of the Charles Peters episode that William Drury includes in his 1986 biography of Emperor Norton. And, we don’t find the Proclamation documented elsewhere.

**Proclamation of Emperor Norton, *Oakland Daily Evening Tribune*, 3 May 1875**, p. 3. Source: California Digital Newspaper Collection

It appears that this is the Emperor’s original Proclamation on the subject — and that the Proclamation published five days later in the Appeal is his more detailed elaboration of the same.

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THE OAKLAND TRIBUNE, for its part, initially adopted a posture of humored bemusement with respect to Charles Peters’ “Newark” venture — as seen in the following item that ran on 15 May 1875:

**Item on “Crazy Charley” Peters**, *Oakland Daily Evening Tribune*, 15 May 1875, p. 3. Source: California Digital Newspaper Collection

Bemusement turned to mockery in the Tribune’s 26 May 1875 response to Peters’ lawsuit against Peter Anderson:

**Item on Charles Peters’ lawsuit against Peter Anderson**, *Oakland Daily Evening Tribune*, 26 May 1875, p. 2. Source: California Digital Newspapers Collection

Apparently chafing against the Tribune’s public shaming, Charles Peters teased the possibility of a lawsuit against the Tribune with the following “card,” published in a different Oakland paper — the Transcript — on 28 May 1875:

**“Card” from Charles Peters**, *Oakland Daily Transcript*, 28 May 1875, p. 2. Source: Genealogy Bank

In a sparring mood, the Oakland Tribune clapped back in that evening’s edition. In response to Peters’ “characteristically silly card,” the Tribune wrote:

We regret to see the founder of even a chimerical city so terribly touchy. This Bombastes Furiso Peters, being possessed of such a sensitive cuticle, should not venture in the vicinity of the cow pastures of the “Green Point Dairy,” as the mosquitos, which breed in the marsh lands, are very thick this year, and may annoy him even more than newspaper paragraphs.

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IN LIGHT OF Charles Peters’ veiled threat against the Oakland Tribune — and given that three days later, on May 31, Peters had yet to withdraw his May 25 lawsuit against Peter Anderson of the Pacific Appeal — Emperor Norton might have had both the Tribune and Anderson in mind as “adherents” when he issued the following Proclamation published in the Tribune on the 31st.

Either way, it seems clear that the Emperor here is owning his Proclamations against Peters:

**Proclamation of Emperor Norton, *Oakland Daily Evening Tribune*, 31 May 1875**, p. 3. Source: California Digital Newspaper Collection

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IN MID JUNE 1875, the Oakland Tribune still was keeping it light:

**“From Mosquitoburg,”** Oakland *Daily Evening Tribune*, 15 June 1875, p. 3. Source: California Digital Newspaper Collection

But it may be that — from the outset — the Tribune was hedging its bets against the real possibility that Charles Peters would pull the trigger and file a libel suit against the paper, just as he had done against Peter Anderson of the Pacific Appeal.

One possible tell: In the Tribune’s coverage of Peters’ suit against Anderson, the paper disappeared its own earlier publication of Emperor Norton’s Proclamation against Peters.

Here’s the Tribune’s first story about the Peters lawsuit:

In the Tribune’s version of events, a “spirited rivalry between [Emperor Norton and Charles Peter] has developed an apparent bitterness on the part of the Emperor, a feeling which first cropped out…in a recent number of the Appeal” [emphasis mine] — an argument the Tribune goes on to press further by reprinting the entire anti-Peters Proclamation of 8 May 1875.

As we have seen, this is demonstrably untrue: Emperor Norton’s “first” Proclamation against Charles Peters was published by the Oakland Tribune on 3 May 1875.

Perhaps by keeping the focus on Charles Peters’ libel suit against Peter Anderson and omitting mention of the Tribune’s role in publishing the Emperor’s warning before the Pacific Appeal did, the Tribune hoped to keep Peters’ litigious impulses at a safer distance — even as the paper continued to cast doubts on the Newark project; continued to publish the Emperor’s Proclamations on this and other subjects; and affected sympathy for the Appeal.

Cynical much?

The truth is: It probably is unlikely that Charles Peters would have risked making an enemy of the Oakland Tribune by filing suit against the paper. Far easier, to borrow the Tribune’s own phrase, for Peters to make his point by pinning a small Black newspaper and its editor “to the wall.”

After losing his platform at the Pacific Appeal in May 1875, Emperor Norton never again found a paper to publish his Proclamations with the same regularity and front-page visibility.

The silver lining — and, indeed, the irony — of this episode: During the last 4½ years of the Emperor’s life — the period from June 1875 to January 1880 — the paper that published as many, probably more, of his Proclamations than any other was the Oakland Tribune.

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The Emperor Norton Trust

In 1875, Local Papers Said Emperor Norton's Fateful Proclamation Versus Developer Charles Peters Was His Opening Salvo Against Peters. It Was His Second.

Discovery: Episode That Brought an End to the Emperor’s Fruitful 4½-Year Run of Proclamations in the San Francisco-Based Pacific Appeal Began With a Proclamation in an Oakland Paper