Even at the most storied research libraries and historical societies, the catalog records for artifacts like early photographs — including basic details like the date and the photographer — can be notoriously unreliable.
Often, these records were created decades, even a century or more, ago — long before the advent of library science as a professional research discipline — and have not been reassessed or updated since then. Digitized, perhaps, but basically fossilized and forgotten. What this means for researchers is that catalog info can be little more than a starting point.
For the last decade, The Emperor Norton Trust has used 1864 as the date for two photographs of the Emperor that appear to have been taken during the same sitting. The date was from the catalog record of a major research institution — and, based on a variety of contextual factors, it was the only credible citation we were able to find.
Recently, we noted that the institution has removed this citation. This, together with our discovery of a new piece of evidence potentially relating to the photographs, prompted us to take a second look at the date question.
As a result of our investigation, we have revised our date for these photos.
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In February 1868, Emperor Norton issued his first extant Proclamation in defense of the Chinese.
A year before that, in February 1867, an anti-Chinese riot in San Francisco prompted a San Francisco correspondent to a paper in Stockton — 60 miles to the east of San Francisco — to suggest that Emperor Norton was better-positioned than the San Francisco Mayor to lead on the Chinese question.
Did the Emperor and the correspondent know one another from before?
Had they traded their views on the Chinese question?
Did they influence one another on this issue?
Very likely, both men were regular visitors to the same building on Post Street between 1862 and 1867. This would have created the opportunity for them to meet and befriend one another.
If so, the operative question is: What did they talk about?
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From the time that Joshua Norton publicly declared and signed himself “Norton I, Emperor of the United States” in his Proclamation published in the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin of 17 September 1859, there was a more or less steady pulse of newspaper publications of his subsequent Proclamations — as well as newspaper reports of activities and sightings of the new Emperor.
But, at what point was there evidence of a separate public consciousness that this “Emperor Norton” might be a new character that was here to stay — a public awareness of the Emperor’s early ubiquity and fame?
When did Emperor Norton start to go meta?
Here, we document the earliest signs of local awareness that a new player had arrived on the urban stage.
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Contemporaneous reports of two visits of Emperor Norton to Sacramento, separated by a decade — one visit in January 1864; another in December 1873 — point to the Emperor’s abiding and strengthening belief in the power of national government to produce national unity — to the point of making state governments, and states themselves, irrelevant.
On the 1864 visit, the Emperor issued a Proclamation that The Emperor Norton Trust has not seen mentioned elsewhere. We’ll call it a discovery!
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Between 1853 and 1859 — a period during which the courts handed him a series of crushing legal defeats that ultimately forced him to declare bankruptcy in 1856 — Joshua Norton engaged in a pattern of making bold public moves that belied — and defied — the harsh facts on the ground.
We recently discovered two early markers in this pattern that appear to have gone undocumented before now:
1) In August 1853 — on the eve of his first major court loss — Joshua offered himself as a Whig candidate for California State Assembly.
2) Under the terms of the Fourth District Court’s ruling of August 1853, the Court ordered the San Francisco sheriff to seize and sell two of Joshua Norton’s properties. In November 1853 — three days before the sale — Joshua took out a newspaper ad seeking a loan for $7,500, possibly part of a gambit to buy back the properties.
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Edward Payson Hammond was a celebrity preacher — a Billy Graham of his day.
Today, Hammond is much less well-known in the annals of American religion than his crusading contemporary, Dwight Lyman Moody.
But, in the 1860s and 1870s, E.P. Hammond was a phenomenon.
In February 1875, Hammond brought his traveling revival road show to San Francisco for what turned out to be a two-month stand.
To get preaching gigs like this, Hammond claimed to produce hundreds — even thousands — of “conversions” everywhere he went.
To gin up these numbers, Hammond’s stock-in-trade was badgering tiny children into believing that they were evil sinners in danger of hellfire.
Emperor Norton was not down with this — and, he found a way to say so in a Proclamation that was published on both sides of San Francisco Bay in March 1875.
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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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For some 35 years, students of the Emperor Norton story have followed William Drury’s account, in his 1986 biography of the Emperor, of the events surrounding Joshua Norton’s declaration of himself as Emperor on 17 September 1859.
According to Drury: George Fitch was editor of the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin on that day. Fitch’s office was in an upstairs room at 517 Clay Street. Joshua Norton marched his Proclamation into Fitch’s office that morning, and Fitch published it that afternoon.
But, that’s not how it went.
The Bulletin didn’t have an outpost on Clay Street until 1861. In 1859, the paper’s only offices were on Montgomery Street — on a site now occupied by the Transamerica pyramid.
And: Although George Fitch was a partner at the Bulletin in September 1859, he didn’t emerge as “the editor” — as the one with the power to decide what would and would not be published in the paper — until later.
That power resided with the person who actually was the editor on the day Joshua Norton appeared: James W. Simonton.
Read on for another course correction from The Emperor Norton Trust.
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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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An invitation and a challenge for Empire Day 2022 — the 163rd anniversary of Joshua Norton’s declaration of himself as Norton I, Emperor of the United States, on 17 September 1859.
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On 5 July 1859, Joshua Norton took out a paid ad in the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin. The ad was a brief “Manifesto” addressed to the “Citizens of the Union.” It outlined in the broadest terms the national crisis as he saw it and suggested the imperative for action to address this crisis at the most basic level.
This was a little more than two months before Joshua issued his Proclamation — published in the same paper — declaring himself Emperor of the United States on 17 September 1859.
Together with what we already knew — that Joshua Norton continued to run business ads for nearly a year after his insolvency of August 1856; that the San Francisco directories of 1858 and possibly 1859 included listings for him...
The Manifesto is one of three additional pieces of evidence that Joshua Norton remained on the scene — and in San Francisco — in the period between his insolvency and his installation as Emperor.
One of these three traces is an historical “rescue” — reported by Allen Stanley Lane in his 1939 biography of Emperor Norton but apparently forgotten and possibly never documented before now.
The other two — including the Manifesto — are, we believe, discovered, documented and published here for the first time.
This new information should put to rest the conventional wisdom that Joshua Norton "disappeared" for X number of years only to "reemerge" fully transformed on a beatific day in September 1859.
No, there was a process and a path from fall to rise — from Point A to B.
These are three more of that path's public signposts.
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Ostensibly, this is a piece about our recent discovery of a Proclamation in which Emperor Norton, in 1867, prohibited unauthorized stage depictions of himself.
But, a theater’s offending play and the Emperor’s response are the bread of the sandwich on offer here. The real meat is a brief history of the varied theatrical/“amusement” enterprises and their producers/impresarios that, over the course of a decade or so in the 1850s and ‘60s, occupied the second floor of the building where the play was staged — a building just around the corner from the Emperor’s imperial digs on Commercial Street in San Francisco.
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Emperor Norton biographer William Drury made the grandiose claim, in 1986, that the first theatrical depiction of Emperor Norton took place on 17 September 1861 — the second anniversary of the Emperor’s self-declaration in 1859 — and that this was the inaugural production of the theater itself, which opened on this date.
This isn’t true. And, that’s putting it mildly.
But, as born out by historical newspaper documents from 1860 and 1861 — probably getting their first truly public broadcast here — what is true is interesting on its own.
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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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It appears that the earliest known photograph of Emperor Norton is a little earlier than we thought — and earlier than anyone else has said.
The case for the time frame that we focus on here draws on early artistic depictions of the Emperor and on one of the Emperor’s earliest sartorial choices, which is documented in an easy-to-miss newspaper item from May 1860.
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On the morning of 17 September 1859, Joshua Norton delivered to the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin his Proclamation declaring himself Emperor of the United States. The declaration appeared in that evening's edition. Who'd have guessed that, within a month, a newspaper in Mississippi would have printed the decree in full on its front page?
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Here's a "mystery" about Emperor Norton that may be less mysterious than many seem to think. Despite persistent speculation that Joshua Norton left San Francisco for a period of months or years just before declaring himself Emperor in 1859, the available evidence points to a narrative in which, most likely, the eventual Emperor remained a resident of the City from his arrival until his death.
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