Two things that have been on The Emperor Norton Trust’s radar for some time…
…don’t make the shortlist of highlights in most tellings of the Norton story.
It turns out that these are part of a larger focus on railroad safety that Emperor Norton had added to his portfolio of concerns by 1869 — the year of a Proclamation we discovered recently that we believe is previously unreported.
We document and provide context for the 1869 Proclamation here.
Also included is documentation of two other of our recent discoveries:
the first news report of Emperor Norton’s railroad switch invention, published in Mining and Scientific Press, a serious and well-respected San Francisco journal of technology-focused industry news, and
the second news report of the invention, which appeared in a Brooklyn, Calif., newspaper the day before the Pacific Appeal — the Emperor’s imperial gazette — published his own Proclamation about it.
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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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For many years, Italian produce farmers in San Francisco had set up a vegetable market on Sansome Street between Clay and Washington. But, in late 1873, things were coming to a head in a long-simmering public dispute about whether the market should be allowed to stay there — and, if not, where it should go.
In November 1873, Emperor Norton weighed in with a Proclamation calling for the market to be moved from Sansome, a public street, to a new purpose-created public square next door.
In effect, the Emperor was seeking to establish the farmers market as a public institution in San Francisco.
This is one of many reasons why the San Francisco Ferry Building clock tower — which rises above what today is the city’s flagship farmers market, at the Ferry Building — should be named EMPEROR NORTON TOWER.
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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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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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Addie Ballou is best known now — where she is known at all — as a women’s suffrage crusader, a rather bad poet, and a (probably overconfident) lecturer on any of the subjects she was game to talk about for an hour to any group who asked, provided they had a room and a podium.
But, Ballou also had a brief career as a minimally trained portrait artist.
A certain conventional wisdom holds that, in 1877, Emperor Norton sat for a portrait painted by Ballou — and that this is the only such portrait the Emperor ever sat for during his lifetime.
As ever with Emperor Norton, though, a look under the hood reveals that things probably are not quite as we’ve been led to believe.
Read on for some newly uncovered details about old art associations.
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Emperor Norton tried his hand at riding a bike — roller skating — even jumping rope.
Later, the Emperor was a regular attendee at everything from horse races to endurance walking marathons to wrestling tournaments.
Here’s a first effort at documenting an underappreciated “sporting” thread in the Emperor’s story.
This includes:
many new details about known episodes (velocipede; skating), 1869–72
several new episodes, 1873–79
Also includes documentation of what may be the last reported sighting of Emperor Norton.
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The Emperor Norton Trust previously has documented 16 Proclamations of Emperor Norton on various aspects of “the Chinese question” — the latest being published in April 1878, just 2½ weeks before the Emperor’s highly publicized sand-lot encounter that month with the anti-Chinese demagogue Denis Kearney.
But, we’ve discovered three new pieces of evidence, from 1879, indicating that — for nearly 2 years after his encounter with Kearny, and right up until his death in 1880 — the Emperor continued to make good on his 1873 pledge and warning that “the eyes of the Emperor will be upon anyone who shall council [sic] any outrage or wrong on the Chinese” [emphasis in the original].
This evidence includes:
a second encounter between Emperor Norton and Denis Kearny, in January 1879, in which Kearney snarkily addressed the Emperor from his sand-lot platform;
an anti-Kearney public comment by the Emperor on the same day, at one of the freethinking, reform-minded discussion forums he regularly attended — a discovery that provides an opportunity to add a pin to the Trust’s interactive Emperor Norton Map of the World; and
a September 1879 editorial comment in the Sacramento Daily Bee, bearing witness to the Emperor’s ongoing reputation as what the Bee disparagingly called “Protector of China”
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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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One of Emperor Norton’s most abiding concerns during his reign, 1859–1880, was the unjust treatment of the Chinese. For a period of more than a decade during the second half of his reign, the Emperor flagged his opposition to discrimination against the Chinese in the courts, the workplace and society — and to the physical violence that self-empowered demagogues and thugs on the West Coast meted out on Chinese during the 1860s and ‘70s.
Here, as a resource, are the published Proclamations of Emperor Norton on the Chinese that we’ve discovered so far — as they originally appeared in the papers of the Emperor’s time. There are thirteen Proclamations — plus a reference to a fourteenth.
Almost certainly, this is not an exhaustive list. Many, many issues of newspapers from this period are lost. And, even for the many scanned issues that are included in the current digital databases, the limitations of optical character recognition (OCR) technology mean that even searches on obvious terms like “Norton,” “Emperor,” “Chinese” and “China” don’t produce every possible result.
We’ll continue to add to this list as new information comes to light.
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In his 1986 biography of Emperor Norton, William Drury leaned heavily into anecdotal stories forging an association between the Emperor and Martin & Horton’s, a saloon at the southeast corner of Montgomery and Clay Streets, San Francisco, that was known as a hub for editors and reporters — and also for having one of the better free-lunch counters.
But, it turns out that, in addition to Martin & Horton’s, the building on this corner — which was directly across Clay Street from where the Transamerica pyramid now stands — housed a second saloon — a spot that also was known for its good food and drink, and for catering to the journalists and writers who covered the Emperor in their papers.
Which begs the question: Was Emperor Norton a regular at one saloon? — the other? — or both?
Jumping off from a well-known photograph of the Montgomery and Clay building after it suffered a fire in November 1862, the following research documents in some detail the overlapping histories of these two saloons and their proprietors — whose businesses had space in two different buildings on this corner between 1854 and 1887.
It’s a fascinating story.
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In 2015, we published a piece, “The Emperor of Brooklyn,” about Emperor Norton’s connection to Brooklyn, Calif., an area southeast of Lake Merritt, in Oakland, that was an independent township from 1856 until it was annexed to Oakland in late 1872.
The main documentary evidence for this connection was a couple of Proclamations that were published in the San Francisco-based Pacific Appeal. The Emperor had designated the Appeal his as his “imperial gazette” in December 1870 — and, ultimately, the paper published some 250 of his Proclamations. But, these particular Proclamations were datelined “Brooklyn.”
It turns out that these and other Proclamations were published simultaneously — sometimes originally — in a short-lived Brooklyn weekly called the Brooklyn Home Journal and Alameda County Advertiser.
Read on to learn about this newspaper; exactly where it was located; Emperor Norton’s visits to the paper’s offices; and the respect the paper paid to the Emperor in 1872.
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Over the course of several months in 1873, Emperor Norton issued a series of Proclamations calling out the exploitation of Native American people; urging a peaceable resolution to the Modoc War that was taking place at the time; and warning that the execution of Captain Jack and other Modoc leaders — a punishment mandated by an Army court-martial and eventually carried out — would only make matters worse.
The Emperor's Bridge Campaign has discovered a May 1873 diary entry — by a 13-year-old boy living in Oakland — that further illuminates the Emperor's take on the Modoc War and on Native Americans in general.
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