In February 1868, Emperor Norton issued his first extant Proclamation in defense of the Chinese.
A year before that, in February 1867, an anti-Chinese riot in San Francisco prompted a San Francisco correspondent to a paper in Stockton — 60 miles to the east of San Francisco — to suggest that Emperor Norton was better-positioned than the San Francisco Mayor to lead on the Chinese question.
Did the Emperor and the correspondent know one another from before?
Had they traded their views on the Chinese question?
Did they influence one another on this issue?
Very likely, both men were regular visitors to the same building on Post Street between 1862 and 1867. This would have created the opportunity for them to meet and befriend one another.
If so, the operative question is: What did they talk about?
Read More
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.
Read More
For years, the popular narrative of events leading up Joshua Norton's fateful rice contract of December 1852 has followed the claim of William Drury, in his 1986 biography of Emperor Norton, (1) that Joshua and his partners had connected to the only rice cargo in San Francisco harbor, and (2) that, before that, no rice had been arriving in the city at all.
But, this version of events is not reflected in the daily and weekly reports of rice cargoes that were published in the "Importations" column of the Daily Alta California, one of the city's leading newspapers during this period.
These reports show that the rice cargo that Joshua Norton & Co. contracted for was the largest shipment that had been seen in San Francisco in about a month — but not the only one. In fact, three rice shipments totaling well over 100 barrels had arrived over the previous 10 days. And, shipments of varying sizes had been coming in all along — generally three or four per week.
In other words: There had been a "slow flow" of rice coming in to the city — but not "no flow."
William Drury hyped the severity of the shortage for dramatic effect.
To illustrate the point, the following article includes, from the Daily Alta's "Importations" column, a comprehensive listing of rice cargoes arriving in San Francisco from September 1852 through January 1853 — the period from four months before Joshua Norton, on 22 December 1852, inked his deal with Ruiz, Hermanos, to buy their 200,000-lb. shipload until the Ruiz brothers sued him for non-payment and breach of contract on 21 January 1853.
To our knowledge, this is the first such listing that has been compiled and published in the context of Norton studies.
Read More
Much of the relevant background is in the title.
The rare, fine-grained, wonderfully textured photograph, a stereoview, is by J.J. Reilly.
It's beautiful.
What's left is to get your bearings and see the view — which you can do by clicking below!
Read More
Much is made of the parenthetical designation of "(Emperor)" that appeared after Joshua Norton's name in the San Francisco city directories compiled by Henry G. Langley. But there was another directory that went a good bit further in explaining exactly who it was that lived at 624 Commercial Street between Montgomery and Kearny.
Read More
Join The Emperor's Bridge Campaign as we kick off our occasional series of Field Talks with a visit to the block of Commercial Street, between Montgomery and Kearny Streets, in San Francisco, where we'll explore the histories of the site (and its surroundings) where Emperor Norton lived from 1863 until he died in 1880.
Read More
