The Emperor Norton Trust

TO HONOR THE LIFE + ADVANCE THE LEGACY OF JOSHUA ABRAHAM NORTON

RESEARCH • EDUCATION • ADVOCACY

Filtering by Tag: Emile Grisar

Joshua Norton on the Sacramento River

Among the buildings destroyed in the San Francisco fire of May 1851 was James Lick's adobe at 242 Montgomery Street, where Joshua Norton's office had been located since May 1850. 

In the wake of the fire, Joshua made at least two trips up the Sacramento River and met with prominent Sacramento auctioneer and commission merchant James Blackwell "J.B." Starr (1810–1862). In June 1851, Starr and Norton started offering a packet service between Sacramento and San Francisco using a schooner apparently brought to the table by Starr. 

It was a very brief arrangement, lasting about long enough for Joshua to regroup and find new office space in San Francisco. 

Four years later, in early May 1855, the Fourth District Court of California set the financial terms of Joshua's California Supreme Court loss in his rice contract dispute with the consignment firm of Ruiz Hermanos: $20,000. 

Two weeks after this, J.B. Starr joined a wool-buying promotion that included Joshua Norton — and that appears to have been designed by former business associates of Joshua to help him through a difficult time and to show that he was not friendless. 

It was the second time that Starr had thrown Joshua a lifeline. 

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Joshua Norton at the Merchants' Exchange

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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