The Emperor Norton Trust

TO HONOR THE LIFE + ADVANCE THE LEGACY OF JOSHUA ABRAHAM NORTON

RESEARCH • EDUCATION • ADVOCACY

Filtering by Tag: 1848

Charting a Path to "Frisco" in 1849

In 1939, David Warren Ryder published a brief “book,” San Francisco’s Emperor Norton, in which Ryder claimed — without any evidence — that Emperor Norton issued a proclamation against the use of the word “Frisco” for San Francisco. According to Ryder, the Emperor wrote that “Frisco” had “no linguistic or other warrant.”

Leaving aside Ryder’s contentious — and still unproven — claim of imperial authorship for this so-called proclamation, the embedded claim that “Frisco” has no “linguistic warrant”…warrants scrutiny.

Recently, I uncovered the ship journal of Isaac Wallis Baker, who captained the bark San Francisco on its Gold Rush voyage from Beverly, Mass., to San Francisco between August 1849 and January 1850.

In one entry from December 1849, written aboard the San Francisco when the ship was in the Pacific off northern Mexico, Baker pens a poem in which the opening verse rhymes “Francisco” with a riff that points to an obsolete 16th-century word, “frisco,” that the Oxford English Dictionary gives two meanings: (a) “a brisk movement in dancing; a caper,” and (b) “a term of endearment.”

Baker’s journal was documented in 1923 — but it appears that this entry has remained buried and unnoted for the last century.

If you like “Frisco,” you’re gonna love this.

Even if not, you’ll learn something new!

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Joshua Norton First Set Foot in the United States in 1846 — in Boston

In the United States, the prevailing narrative about Joshua Norton, for 80 years and more, has been that

  • Joshua did not leave Cape Town until late 1848 or early 1849 — prompted by the deaths of both parents and his two nearest siblings between May 1846 and August 1848, and possibly also by news of the California Gold Rush.

  • He sailed directly from Cape Town to Rio de Janeiro, arriving in Rio early to mid 1849, and from Rio to San Francisco.

  • He may have spent a few months in South America between his arrivals in Rio and San Francisco.

  • His introduction to the United States was his arrival in San Francisco in late 1849.

But a persuasive body of evidence — including a passenger list, a disembarkation ticket and two newspaper arrivals notices — points to a different reality: Joshua Norton initially sailed from Liverpool to Boston, arriving in Boston in March 1846.

This means that Joshua probably left Cape Town no later than November 1845 — and that the reasons for his departure had nothing to do with family deaths or the Gold Rush.

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