Probably the most notorious contemporaneous fabricator of fake proclamations and fake tales of Emperor Norton was Albert S. Evans — editor of the Daily Alta California newspaper from 1863 until his death in 1872.
We've unearthed a previously unreported little cache of Evans's Norton tales which never appeared in the Alta — but which did appear in Evans's late 1870 Mexico travel memoir Our Sister Republic.
By way of hedging bets on the reliability of the book's content, the Alta's own review of the book noted that "[t]he author has a lively sense of the grotesque and humorous, which finds ample opportunity for gratification wherever he goes."
One question that hovers over our discovery...
Did Emperor Norton see Evans's misrepresentation of him in this book — and, if so, did this play a role in the Emperor's decision, a couple of months later, to designate a different paper, the Pacific Appeal, as the official platform for his public communications?
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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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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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