Emperor Norton: The Self-Declared Emperor of the United States

On September 17, 1859, a man walked into the offices of the San Francisco Evening Bulletin and handed over a proclamation declaring himself “Norton I, Emperor of these United States.” The paper printed it. For the next 21 years, San Francisco treated Joshua Norton as if the title were real: restaurants seated him, the city accepted his self-issued currency, and when he died, thousands of people came to pay their respects.

The Fortune

Joshua Abraham Norton arrived in San Francisco in 1849 with money from his family’s business in South Africa, and he multiplied it in Gold Rush real estate and commodities. By the early 1850s he was one of the city’s established merchants.

Rice ended that. In December 1852, with rice prices in the city up sharply because of a famine-driven export ban in China, Norton put a deposit on an incoming shipload of Peruvian rice, betting he could corner the market. Within days, more Peruvian rice ships sailed through the Golden Gate and the price collapsed. Norton fought the contract in court for years, lost in the California Supreme Court in 1854, watched his real estate get foreclosed, and declared bankruptcy in 1856.

The Empire

Three years later came the proclamation. Norton followed it with decrees over the years: he ordered Congress dissolved, and later styled himself “Protector of Mexico” as well. The city’s newspapers printed his proclamations, sometimes writing fake ones of their own when news was slow, which is why historians are careful about which decrees are authentic.

The decree that aged best is real: in 1872, Norton ordered that a suspension bridge be built across the bay between San Francisco and Oakland by way of Goat Island, now Yerba Buena Island. Sixty-four years later, the Bay Bridge opened along essentially that route. There have been repeated campaigns to name part of the bridge after him.

Norton spent his days inspecting the city in a secondhand military uniform with gold epaulets, often with a beaver hat and a cane. He checked sidewalks, streetcars, and police conduct. He printed his own promissory notes in small denominations, and some merchants and saloons accepted them. When a young officer arrested him in 1867 for involuntary commitment, the city’s papers erupted, the police chief released him with an apology, and the story goes that officers saluted him on the street afterward.

The Death

On the evening of January 8, 1880, Norton collapsed at California and Dupont streets (Dupont is now Grant Avenue) on his way to a lecture at the California Academy of Sciences. He died on the sidewalk before a carriage could reach him. He had a few dollars in his pockets and his imperial bonds in his room at a boarding house on Commercial Street.

The Pacific Club, an association of the city’s businessmen, paid for a proper casket and burial. Contemporary papers reported some 10,000 people filing past the body at the morgue, though the funeral cortege itself was modest, about three carriages; the story of a giant procession is later legend. The Chronicle’s headline read “Le Roi Est Mort.” He was buried in the Masonic Cemetery, and when San Francisco moved its cemeteries out of the city, his remains were reinterred in 1934 at Woodlawn in Colma, where the gravestone reads “Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico.”

Where to Stand Today

The corner where Norton collapsed is at California Street and Grant Avenue, on the edge of Chinatown, two blocks from the Dragon Gate. His daily inspection rounds ran through what is now the Financial District, where his original commission house stood near the waterfront. The Bay Bridge he decreed is best seen from the Embarcadero.