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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Between July 1865 and November 1867, Western Union ventured a project to lay telegraph cable under the Bering Strait that would connect Russian America (R.A.) — which became the U.S. territory of Alaska in October 1867 — with North East Siberia (N.E.S.).
A cultural by-product of this effort was The Esquimaux — a monthly journal/newspaper published in Port Clarence, R.A. (10 issues), and Plover Bay, N.E.S. (2 issues), between October 1866 and September 1867. The Esquimaux generally is credited as being the first newspaper published in Alaska.
The Western Union staffer who was The Esquimaux’s editor and proprietor had spent the previous five years (1860–65) working in various capacities at the San Francisco Daily Morning Call — which in early 1863 located to the 600 block of Commercial Street, where Emperor Norton took up residence sometime between summer 1864 and summer 1865.
Perhaps this made it inevitable that the Emperor would find his way into the pages of this little “tabloid of the tundra.”
Still. It’s a fascinating story.
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From the time that Joshua Norton publicly declared and signed himself “Norton I, Emperor of the United States” in his Proclamation published in the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin of 17 September 1859, there was a more or less steady pulse of newspaper publications of his subsequent Proclamations — as well as newspaper reports of activities and sightings of the new Emperor.
But, at what point was there evidence of a separate public consciousness that this “Emperor Norton” might be a new character that was here to stay — a public awareness of the Emperor’s early ubiquity and fame?
When did Emperor Norton start to go meta?
Here, we document the earliest signs of local awareness that a new player had arrived on the urban stage.
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