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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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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Joshua Norton made many visits to Sacramento in the early 1850s.
But, after declaring himself Emperor in 1859, his first imperial visit to California’s capital was in December 1863.
By 1863, Emperor Norton already was becoming a legend.
And, on this 1863 visit, he is reported to have dined at a restaurant run by someone who was becoming a legend of his own.
The restaurant was the Cincinnati. The proprietor was William Swimley. And the eatery — known locally as “Swimley’s” — was half-way through a 20-year run as “oldest, neatest, best and cheapest” food spot in Sacramento.
The building where Swimley’s was located from c.1861 until its closing in 1871 occupies a fascinating place in the history of early Sacramento.
In the course of researching this wonderful story, we’ve found evidence that the building is older than has been believed.
Deep documentation and rare photographs included.
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Documentation is elusive for those Proclamations of Emperor Norton that were published in the mid to late 1860s — the period in between (a) the few years after Joshua Norton declared himself Emperor in 1859 and (b) Emperor Norton’s adoption of the Pacific Appeal newspaper as his “imperial gazette” in late December 1870.
So, it’s gratifying to have discovered a “new” Proclamation from this period — especially one that
has resonance for our current public health crisis brought on by COVID–19; and that
adds to the body of evidence strongly suggesting that Joshua Norton thought of himself as being Emperor long before he declared it publicly in 1859.
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When one reads that Emperor Norton lived in "the Eureka Lodgings" at "624 Commercial Street," it's tempting to imagine that the Eureka was in a building with one address and one use — and that the Eureka was it.
In fact: There were two buildings on the Eureka site between c.1850 and Emperor Norton's death in 1880, with the Eureka building arriving in 1857. Both buildings had three addresses and a variety of business tenants — with the second of the two buildings hosting the Eureka and two previous hotel/lodging establishments that each occupied only a portion of the top two floors.
At various times during the 1860s ― including while the Emperor was living here between 1864/65 and 1880 — the second building was home to some of the best-known and -respected businesses in early San Francisco history.
Both of the buildings on the Eureka site were located between Montgomery and Kearny Streets, with frontages on both Commercial and Clay Streets.
What follows is, we believe, the first published attempt to establish a "tenant timeline" of the Commercial Street frontages of these buildings between c.1850 and 1880.
Read on for some fascinating history — and some terrific advertisements!
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The new HBO series The Gilded Age, from Downton Abbey creator and writer Julian Fellowes, is introducing a new generation to the historical figure of Ward McAllister. Famous for being an arbiter of New York’s “high society” of the 1860s–90s, McAllister used his list of “the 400” to advise Caroline Schermerhorn Astor a.k.a. “Mrs. Astor” on whom should be “in” and whom should be “out.”
But, before arriving in New York in 1858, Ward had spent the dawning years of the 1850s in San Francisco, where he lived in the same house with his older brother Hall McAllister, who arrived in the city in 1849 and remained until his death in 1888 — a period during he which he became of the most eminent and respected attorneys of his generation.
It’s very likely that, in the early 1850s, Joshua Norton — then at the height of his prosperity and influence — socialized with the brothers McAllister in their home, together with his friend Joseph Eastland, a founding partner of the company that went on to become PG&E.
In fact: It was Hall McAllister who — in 1853–54 — represented Joshua’s opponents in the rice affair.
It’s a fascinating set of connections that (a) reveals Joshua Norton to have been a guest — but never really a member — of a world of privilege and power that would become closed to him once his life took a different turn, even as it (b) shines new light on one member of that world who never forgot him.
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For years, the popular narrative of events leading up Joshua Norton's fateful rice contract of December 1852 has followed the claim of William Drury, in his 1986 biography of Emperor Norton, (1) that Joshua and his partners had connected to the only rice cargo in San Francisco harbor, and (2) that, before that, no rice had been arriving in the city at all.
But, this version of events is not reflected in the daily and weekly reports of rice cargoes that were published in the "Importations" column of the Daily Alta California, one of the city's leading newspapers during this period.
These reports show that the rice cargo that Joshua Norton & Co. contracted for was the largest shipment that had been seen in San Francisco in about a month — but not the only one. In fact, three rice shipments totaling well over 100 barrels had arrived over the previous 10 days. And, shipments of varying sizes had been coming in all along — generally three or four per week.
In other words: There had been a "slow flow" of rice coming in to the city — but not "no flow."
William Drury hyped the severity of the shortage for dramatic effect.
To illustrate the point, the following article includes, from the Daily Alta's "Importations" column, a comprehensive listing of rice cargoes arriving in San Francisco from September 1852 through January 1853 — the period from four months before Joshua Norton, on 22 December 1852, inked his deal with Ruiz, Hermanos, to buy their 200,000-lb. shipload until the Ruiz brothers sued him for non-payment and breach of contract on 21 January 1853.
To our knowledge, this is the first such listing that has been compiled and published in the context of Norton studies.
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Popular accounts of Emperor Norton — including the respected 1986 biography by William Drury — have Joshua Norton as a “charter member” of Occidental Lodge No. 22 of Free and Accepted Masons.
This is inaccurate. It also is not the point.
For what bears real consideration is that Joshua sought and was granted membership in the Occidental Lodge between May 1854 and May 1855, the very moment when — at every professional, legal, financial and personal level — he was approaching the depths of his instability, vulnerability and failure.
Also documented here: Two illustrious San Franciscans who were members of the Occidental Lodge at the same time that Joshua Norton was.
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Two of the most basic modern assumptions about the locations and business enterprises of Joshua Norton in 1852 San Francisco appear not to bear scrutiny.
The assumptions — that Joshua Norton held forth from facilities that he “built” on 3 of the 4 corners of Sansome and Jackson Streets, and that one of these facilities was a rice mill — were espoused and may, in part, have been created by Norton’s 1986 biographer, William Drury.
But, Drury’s claims were undocumented. A deep-dive into the documentary record points to a different picture.
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