In mid August 1869, the transcontinental railroad had been completed for three months. The first passengers would not arrive in Oakland for another three weeks. But, with Oakland slated as the terminus, San Francisco was understandably nervous about the prospect of being cut off from the new railroad by a wide and bridgeless bay.
Seeking to exploit these anxieties, the Oakland Daily News published a satirical piece — in the form of a Proclamation of Emperor Norton, complete with a “Norton I” signature, but clearly a hoax and a prank — that had the Emperor calling for an absurd “bridge to nowhere” that not only bypassed San Francisco altogether but that pursued a meandering path “from…Oakland Point, from thence to the mountain range of Saucilleto and from thence to the Farallones” — a rocky outcropping of mostly uninhabitable islands and stacks 28 miles to the east of San Francisco’s Pacific coast.
This fake decree is the best-known example of a newspaper using “the Farallones” as a rhetorical device to skewer and scale down the empire of Norton I.
But it’s not the only example.
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Surely, one sign that a person has achieved the level of “cultural saturation” that we sometimes call “fame” is when when independent sources start using that person’s name as a shorthand to characterize other people.
Here are four stories of people not Emperor Norton who — during Emperor Norton’s lifetime — were labelled in the California press as various kinds of "Emperor Norton":
an “Epistolary Emperor Norton” in 1867;
“the Emperor Norton of the News” in 1869;
"the Emperor Norton of the California press" in 1873; and
the “Healdsburg Emperor Norton” in 1878.
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Students of Emperor Norton are familiar with his August 1869 Proclamation to “abolish and dissolve the Democratic and Republican parties.”
The Emperor Norton Trust has uncovered a previously unreported second Proclamation, from September 1876, in which the Emperor commands “the dissolution of the Republican and Democratic parties” — although for different reasons than he gave in 1869.
This second Proclamation further reinforces Emperor Norton’s longstanding antipathy to the major parties and to the U.S. party system — a posture which led Joshua Norton to declare himself an “independent candidate” for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1858 and to deliver a brief speech at a public “No Party” forum in 1875.
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