Joshua Abraham Norton arrived in gold-rush San Francisco around 1849 with an inheritance and a good head for trade, and multiplied it into one of the city’s respectable fortunes. In 1852 he bet everything on cornering the rice market ahead of a famine-driven shortage — just before shiploads of Peruvian rice sailed through the Golden Gate and collapsed the price. Litigation over the contract ran for years and ruined him. He faded from view.
He returned on 17 September 1859, delivering to the San Francisco Bulletin a proclamation declaring himself, “at the peremptory request and desire of a large majority of the citizens,” Norton I, Emperor of these United States. The paper printed it — good copy is good copy — and one of history’s gentlest reigns began. A later decree added “Protector of Mexico,” though he eventually let that title lapse on the humane grounds that Mexico was beyond protecting.
The reign
Norton ruled from a fifty-cent boarding-house room, inspecting his capital daily in a secondhand military uniform (replaced, when it wore out, by the Board of Supervisors), a beaver hat with a peacock feather, and a cane. He dissolved Congress by decree; Congress failed to comply. He abolished both the Democratic and Republican parties. He issued his own banknotes — and San Francisco’s saloons, restaurants, and shops honoured them. Theatres reserved him seats; the census of 1870 recorded his occupation as “Emperor”; and when a rookie policeman arrested him for lunacy in 1867, the city’s outrage forced his release, an apology from the chief — and thereafter, by tradition, salutes from officers on the street.
Two of his decrees aged remarkably. He repeatedly commanded that a bridge be built across the Bay from Oakland to San Francisco — roughly where the Bay Bridge now stands — and that a tunnel be bored beneath it, roughly where BART now runs. And in an era of anti-Chinese riots, Norton is credited with standing between a mob and its victims, head bowed, reciting the Lord’s Prayer until the crowd dispersed.
The funeral
Norton collapsed and died on a rainy California Street corner on 8 January 1880, en route to a lecture. He had about six dollars. The Chronicle ran the headline “Le Roi Est Mort”; businessmen paid for a proper coffin, and an estimated 10,000 people filed past or followed the cortège.
Mark Twain, who had known him, put a version of him into Huckleberry Finn’s royal frauds — affectionately. Campaigns to name the Bay Bridge after Norton continue to this day, on the reasonable grounds that he ordered it built.