Early Years of SF Morning Call Newspaper Now Online in Project Jump-Started by The Emperor Norton Trust

October 26, 2025 / John Lumea

Researchers of early San Francisco are well served by historical newspaper clearinghouses like Newspapers.com, Genealogy Bank, and the California Digital Newspaper Collection (CDNC).

Between these three databases, historians can find nearly-complete collections of the earliest mid-to-late-19th-century decades of the Daily Alta California, Daily Evening Bulletin, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner, and others — in the case of the Alta, dating back to 1849.

A notable outlier has been the Morning Call.

Founded as the Daily Morning Call in December 1856 and simplifying a bit to The Morning Call in December 1878, the Call has been available online at Newspapers.com and CDNC — starting with the edition of 1 April 1890.

But the only way to access earlier editions of the Call has been via microfiche or the original deadwood.

The culmination of a digitization project that was jump-started by The Emperor Norton Trust a year ago — in September 2024 — the following 26 years’ worth of the early Call arrived on Newspapers.com last month:

Daily Morning Call — 8 December 1863 – 20 December 1878
The Morning Call — 21 December 1878 – 31 December 1889

This

closes a significant longstanding documentary gap in the online historical newspaper record;
opens up a new avenue of research into the life of Emperor Norton — and early San Francisco history more broadly; and — a notable bonus…
creates new access to the editions of the Daily Morning Call that carried Mark Twain’s writing between June and October 1864.

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categories / Research, Original sources, News
tags / newspapers, database, public access, Daily Morning Call, The Morning Call, Morning Call, San Francisco Morning Call, Newspapers.com, California Digital Newspaper Collection, Brian Geiger, Mark Twain, 1856, 1863, 1889, 1890

Emperor Norton and the Art of Adaptive Begging

October 24, 2025 / John Lumea

In general. the question of how Emperor Norton raised money to help support himself is answered with reference to two imaginary-yet-real projects of world making:

collecting from specific friends and former business associates “taxes” due the Imperial Government of Norton I
“selling” to the general public promissory notes backed by said Government

Rarely if ever mentioned is the possibility that the Emperor also, at times, was reduced to garden-variety street panhandling.

But there is at least some anecdotal evidence to suggest that he was.

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categories / Research, Original sources
tags / begging, panhandling, tax collecting, promissory notes, charity, San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, The Argonaut, Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, William Drury, 1863, 1880, 1986

Emperor Norton at Sorbier's

June 16, 2024 / John Lumea

The San Francisco Examiner's 9 January 1880 obituary of Emperor Norton noted that "[h]is living was very inexpensive. He occupied a cheap room and boarded at cheap restaurants."

We recently discovered two sources that point to what appears to be a generations-forgotten association of the Emperor with such a spot: his breakfast patronage of Sorbier's Restaurant, on Commercial Street, less than a block from his own residence on Commercial.

Both sources are written by people who were in San Francisco during Emperor Norton's lifetime: The first is the Japan Weekly Mail's February 1880 obituary of the Emperor — the second, an article of reminiscences published in a San Francisco-based scientific journal in May 1910.

Read on for the full story.

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categories / Research, Original sources, Places
tags / Sorbier's Restaurant, Jules E. Sorbier, Jules Sorbier, International Restaurant, Occidental Restaurant, Commercial Street, Sacramento Street, Washington Street, Merchant Street, breakfast, Louise Bacon Sorbier, menu, photograph, Japan Weekly Mail, Mining and Scientific Press, San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, Samuel Williams, 1862, 1863, 1867, 1868, 1869, 1870, 1871, 1872, 1874, 1875, 1877, 1880, 1910

Emperor Norton's Pipe Dreams

May 12, 2024 / John Lumea

In…

Directory listings showing one of his business interests;
A number of stories about him from his lifetime;
At least one Proclamation by him; and
At least one painting of him done during his life

…there are clues that Emperor Norton had an abiding fondness for cigars and for pipe smoking.

Here, we line up in one place all the evidentiary “dots” we’ve located so far.

Some rare finds here.

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categories / Research, Places, Proclamations, Original sources
tags / tobacco, smoking, cigar, pipe, importing, Sutliff Tobacco Company, Modoc War, art, painting, sculpture, Virgil Williams, Ruth Asawa, Parc 55, 1849, 1851, 1852, 1853, 1863, 1873, 1984

The Emperor Norton Cartoon That Got the Jump on Jump

March 28, 2024 / John Lumea

Ask any careful student of the Emperor Norton story to name the most famous early cartoonist of the Emperor and they are likely to single out Edward Jump (1832–1883). They would be right about that.

They might go on to credit Jump as the first artist to depict Emperor Norton with the dogs Bummer and Lazarus. About this they would be wrong.

It's true that, in the early 1860s, Jump created three cartoons that featured the Emperor and the dogs in the same scene — and that these cartoons have been influential in associating the Emp with Bummer and Lazarus in the popular imagination.

But, Jump was not the first artist to make this connection.

That distinction goes to someone who was not even a cartoonist by profession — but whose lithographed and published cartoon, apparently sold as a standalone sheet, showing Bummer and Lazarus sitting near Emperor Norton predates by as much as a year or more Jump's earliest cartoon showing these characters together.

This is the story of the artist and the cartoon that appear to be Edward Jump's conceptual influencer.

That we are aware, this is the first time the story has been told.

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categories / Research, Original sources, ARENA
tags / Art, artist, comic, cartoon, caricature, R.M. Evans, Edward Jump, Benjamin Franklin Butler, Benjamin F. Butler, B.F. Butler, Tompson in a Quandary, lithograph, lithographer, Bummer & Lazarus, George Washington II, Frederick Coombs, James Tompson, 1861, 1862, 1863

A Better Date for Two Photographs of Emperor Norton

March 10, 2024 / John Lumea

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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categories / Research, Original sources
tags / photograph, date, Bradley & Rulofson, Daily Alta California, Albert S. Evans, 1859, 1860, 1863, 1864, 1867, 1869

The Daily Alta's Emperor Norton Well

March 06, 2024 / John Lumea

Although Joshua Norton was perfectly serious in declaring himself Emperor in 1859, it generally is agreed that the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin published his original Proclamation as a joke.

It didn’t take long for other newspapers — in San Francisco, yes, but eventually across California and Nevada — to get in on the game of burlesquing the Emperor with fake stories about — and fake proclamations by — him.

William Drury may have been the first, in his 1986 biography of the Emperor, to point out that the Daily Alta California — in particular, the Alta’s city editor Albert S. Evans, pen name "Fitz Smythe" — was the real "pacesetter" in this, taking the mantle from the Bulletin and fully milking the comic potential of the Emperor’s persona.

Recently, I stumbled upon a couple of pieces of evidence — not mentioned in Drury’s account — that other newspapers at the time recognized the Daily Alta and Evans as tops in the field!

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categories / Research, Original sources
tags / Daily Alta California, Albert S. Evans, Fitz Smythe, editor, Daily Dramatic Chronicle, San Francisco Chronicle, Placer Herald, 1862, 1863, 1864, 1868, 1870, 1872

Emperor Norton Was a San Francisco Fixture Within 3 Years of Declaring His Reign

January 16, 2024 / John Lumea

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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categories / Research, ARENA, Original sources
tags / fame, reputation, newspaper, report, editorial, humor, Art, cartoon, sketch, lithograph, T. Grob, Edward Jump, 1859, 1861, 1862, 1863

Emperor Norton Does Art Criticism With a Borrowed Jackknife — And the Crowd Loves It

December 28, 2023 / John Lumea

By 1861 — and for the 18-plus-year remainder of his reign — Emperor Norton was a favorite and enduring subject for San Francisco cartoonists and theater troupes, who found that local audiences enjoyed the good-natured lampooning of their Emperor.

The Emperor himself was less amused — and, there are a couple of oft-cited examples of the Emperor’s expressing his royal displeasure over how he was portrayed in these contexts.

Recently, we uncovered an “episode of displeasure” that is even better documented than the familiar examples.

The occasion was the mounting of an advertisement using Emperor Norton’s image on a construction fence at Montgomery and California Streets. The Emperor borrowed a jackknife; cut out the image of himself; and sliced the image to shreds.

The crowd, as they say, “went wild.”

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categories / Research, Places, Original sources, ARENA
tags / Art, cartoon, comic, caricature, photograph, theater, depiction, portrayal, Safe Deposit Building, Montgomery Street, California Street, advertisement, ad, George Frederick Keller, Eadweard Muybridge, Edward Jump, San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, San Francisco Chronicle, Michael Reese, 1861, 1863, 1869, 1873, 1874, 1875

Joshua Norton, Pioneer

August 08, 2023 / John Lumea

In Colville’s San Francisco directory of 1856, Joshua Norton listed his “office” address as Pioneer Hall — the Society of California Pioneers’ headquarters and clubhouse on Portsmouth Square, San Francisco.

Joshua declared bankruptcy in 1856, so his living arrangements might have been unstable. But, he was affiliated with a Masonic lodge during this period — while he was not a member of the Pioneers.

So why did he list himself at Pioneer Hall rather than Masonic Hall (on Montgomery Street)?

Here’s a closer look at this episode, in which — apparently — Joshua Norton and the Pioneers were drawn into one anothers’ orbits and revealed things about one another in the process.

Includes a rarely seen 1861 photograph of Pioneer Hall after the Society had added “Pioneers” signage to the top of the building.

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categories / Research, Places, Original sources
tags / Society of California Pioneers, Pioneer Hall, Portsmouth Square, James Lick, Samuel Colville, address, directory, photograph, Overland Monthly, George R. Fardon, 1850, 1855, 1856, 1857, 1858, 1862, 1863

Emperor Norton vs. the Rev. Mr. Hammond

July 12, 2023 / John Lumea

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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categories / Research, Proclamations, Original sources
tags / Edward Payson Hammond, preacher, revival, conversion, children, child, San Francisco, San Jose, Sacramento, Oregon, Andrew L. Stone, Peter Anderson, Pacific Appeal, Oakland Tribune, 1858, 1859, 1860, 1861, 1862, 1863, 1867, 1868, 1874, 1875

Emperor Norton at Swimley's

February 24, 2023 / John Lumea

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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categories / Research, Original sources, Places
tags / Sacramento, Cincinnati Restaurant, Charles Franklin Swimley, Charles F. Swimley, Swimley's, Swimley's Boarders, 21 K Street, 25 K Street, Second Street, Verandah Hotel, Union Hotel, James Lansing, Union Hotel annex, restaurant, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, 1850, 1852, 1853, 1855, 1856, 1858, 1859, 1861, 1863, 1864, 1865, 1866, 1867, 1871, 1873, 1879, 1940, 1960, 1980s

Joshua Norton and the McAllister Brothers

July 15, 2022 / John Lumea

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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categories / Research, Original sources
tags / Hall McAllister, Ward McAllister, Matthew Hall McAllister, Pike Street, attorney, lawyer, judge, The 400, Caroline Schermerhorn Astor, Mrs. Astor, Joseph G. Eastland, Joseph Eastland, Ruiz v. Norton, 1849, 1850, 1852, 1853, 1854, 1855, 1863, 1865, 1879, 1888, 1895, 1904

Did San Francisco City Government Really Buy Emperor Norton a New Suit?

May 18, 2022 / John Lumea

For nearly a century, one of the favored “chestnuts” served up in biographical accounts of Emperor Norton has been the claim that, when the Emperor’s uniform became tattered, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors — the City’s elected government — bought him a new one.

It now appears that this undocumented story may have gotten its start in a little book about the Emperor that was published in the late 1920s — nearly 50 years after his death.

But, during the period of Emperor Norton’s reign, 1859–1880, neither San Francisco’s newspapers nor the City’s own Municipal Reports have any record of such official government largesse.

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categories / Research, Original sources
tags / uniform, regalia, regimentals, suit, coat, clothes, clothing, wardrobe, Board of Supervisors, Albert Dressler, Herbert Asbury, Allen Stanley Lane, William Drury, 1863, 1865, 1868, 1869, 1872, 1927, 1933, 1986

Did Emperor Norton Really Live at the Eureka Lodgings on Commercial Street for 17 Years?

January 14, 2022 / John Lumea

The received wisdom, since the time of Emperor Norton’s death in January 1880, has been that the Emperor lived at his final and most famous San Francisco residence — the Eureka Lodgings, at 624 Commercial Street between Montgomery and Kearny — “for seventeen years.”

That was the phrase that a number of San Francisco papers used in their obituaries and funeral notices. The most influential Norton biographers of the twentieth century extrapolated from this that the Emperor lived at the Eureka from 1863 to 1880. And, now, this claim is firmly ensconced as one of the most oft-invoked tenets of the biographical catechism of Norton I.

But, the directories of the period don’t support an 1863 arrival date.

Rather, they suggest that the Emperor might have taken up his room at the Eureka Lodgings as late as summer 1865.

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categories / Research, Original sources, Places
tags / San Francisco directories, Metropolitan Hotel, Benton House, Eureka Lodgings, 624 Commercial, Felix Hanlon, Aaron Babcock, David Hutchinson, obituaries, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Morning Call, Daily Alta California, Robert Ernest Cowan, Allen Stanley Lane, David Warren Ryder, William Drury, E Clampus Vitus, 1861, 1862, 1863, 1864, 1865, 1867, 1868

Emperor Norton's Sister, Aficionado of Anemones

August 26, 2021 / John Lumea

Pull up a chair for the fascinating and enigmatic story of Emperor Norton’s younger sister, Selina Jane.

Born on the Cape of Good Hope in 1824, when Joshua, the future Emperor, was 6 years old, Selina “married Scottish” and married well — twice.

Selina had moved to England by age 20. She had four daughters with her first husband, a MacLeod, living first in Kent, then near Glasgow, then back down in Devon.

Shortly after her first husband died, Selina married a Mackenzie, whose prominence as a Scottish lawyer brought her to Edinburgh.

Two years later, this second husband died. A few years after that, Selina moved from Edinburgh to the North Sea cloister of St. Andrews and was gone herself within a year or so — at 45. But, her three surviving daughters continued to live in, and next door to, the St. Andrews house for another 20 years.

Along the way, Selina in 1861 wrote and published a lovely, finely observed article about her sea anemones — whom she called her “drawing-room pets.”

The article — and many, many other details — are documented here thoroughly, if not very deeply.

It’s tantalizing evidence that makes me want to learn more of the Emperor’s little sister.

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categories / Research, Original sources
tags / Selina Jane Norton, Selina Jane MacLeod, Selina Jane Mackenzie, Donald Hume MacLeod, Emmeline MacLeod, Louisa MacLeod, Lavinia MacLeod, Frances MacLeod, James Hay Mackenzie, Kent, Devon, Dawlish, Glasgow, Edinburgh, St. Andrews, St. John's Episcopal Church, anemones, Once A Week, writing, writer, 1824, 1843, 1861, 1863, 1869

Emperor Norton at the Metropolitan Hotel

April 01, 2015 / John Lumea

This day in 1863 saw the auction of the furnishings and other contents of the Metropolitan Hotel at the southwest corner of Sansome and Bush Streets, in San Francisco. Emperor Norton had lived here for the past two years. A year or two later — between late summer 1864 and late summer 1865 — the Emperor began living at his best-known residence: the Eureka Lodgings, at 624 Commercial Street. Almost certainly, it was the closing of the Metropolitan that prompted the move towards Commercial Street. But this was not the first time Joshua Norton had lived at this corner.

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categories / Original sources, Places, Research
tags / Metropolitan Hotel, Rassette House, Newspaper ads, San Francisco directories, 1861, 1862, 1863

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