OCR'd, but not corrected or formatted much yet.

Contents

Foreword by Melvin M. Belli ix 
Acknowledgments xiii  
Prologue xvii  
Chapter 1 Death of a Guttersnipe 1 
Chapter 2 The Tailor's Tale 9 
Chapter 3 Boy on a Broomstick Horse 14  
Chapter 4 The Oof Bird's Nest 26 
Chapter 5 Perchance to Dream 35 
Chapter 6 The Edge of Hell 43 
Chapter 7 Over the Edge 51 
Chapter 8 Pitch the Kingmaker 57  
Chapter 9 Thunder in the East 64  
Chapter 10 Colonel Moustache 69  
Chapter 11 The Bummers 80  
Chapter 12 Fifty Cents a Night 87  
Chapter 13 Emperor of the West 96 
Chapter 14 The Feud 103 
Chapter 15 The Emperor's Secretary 110 
Chapter 16 Lazarus Redivivus 120 
Chapter 17 In Durance Vile 124 
Chapter 18 Railroad to Renown 130 
Chapter 19 The Bridge to Nowhere 140  
Chapter 20 Possible Dreams, Reachable Stars 148 
Chapter 21 Birth of a Legend 158  
Chapter 22 Old Queen Cole 165  
Chapter 23 Don't Call It 'Frisco 172  
Chapter 24 Captain Stormfield's Daughter 180  
Chapter 25 Emperor of the World 188 
Chapter 26 The Palace of Truth 194  
Chapter 27 The Controversy .02 
Epilogue 205 
Appendix A The Clampers 207  
Appendix B The King and Huck Finn 214 
Sources 221 
Bibliography 223 
Index 227

 Foreword

by

Melvin M. Belli

In the turbulent days of the Gold Rush, when an Englishman called Joshua Abraham Norton arrived in San Francisco to be a landowner and a merchant prince, his first place of business was an adobe cottage at the corner of Montgomery and Jackson streets. The cottage vanished in the fire that ravaged the city in 1851, and a banker named William T. Sherman, better known today as the Civil War general who put Atlanta to the torch, bought the site in 1854 and built his bank on the spot, a solid structure of granite and brick that fire could not easily destroy.  Just fifty paces to the south of it, another building was erected at the same time, also of brick.  Both were built to last; even the terrible earthquake of 1906 could not topple them. They stand there still. Sherman's bank now houses several small business enterprises, and the building nearby, at 722 Montgomery Street, has been my office for years.

My building and Sherman's are almost the oldest in the city, but there is one even older, adjoining Belli's Building at 728 Montgomery, and that, too, is part of my law office. It is called Caesar's Annex, named for my grandfather, Caesar Belli, and it was put up in 1849, the year that Norton came to town with the gold miners, when it served as the birthplace of Freemasonry in California, as a plaque on its facade attests. That brick building also escaped the fire that demolished so much of a city largely constructed of wood.

But some parts of Belli's Building itself date back to an earlier day, when it was a warehouse.  The architects who restored it for me-keeping everything of historical value intact-found traces of loading docks, doors, and windows, scorched by the flames of 1851. 1 have a photograph that shows the walls still standing after the fire and before the builders of 1854 put up the walls that surround me now. In December 1857, the new structure became a music hall, known as The Melodeon. A theatrical journal, Variety, said of it then:

The Melodeon, with songs, dances, recitations, good wines, cigars, brandy and "lager" for such as like it, is the most attractive place of amusement in San Francisco. The winning sweetness of the Misses Mandeville on the stage holds even the ruder portions of the audience spellbound, save when applause must follow their vocal efforts; whilst Johnson's rollicking humor would cause a dying miser to smile, or make a Turk leave his prayers at "Muezzin Call."

San Franciscans had need of Johnson's rollicking humor in those days to heal their cares, having just come through the second vigilante uprising in five years, which was caused when a County Supervisor shot and killed the editor of the Evening Bulletin not far from the door that is now mine. For that he was lynched by the vigilantes. Joshua Norton, who had been a vigilante in 1851 (albeit a reluctant one), took no part in this second rebellion, for by then he was well on his way to madness and so perhaps had more sense.

Three years later, having lost his reason completely, he proclaimed himself Emperor of the United States.

When I sit at my desk I am conscious of history, knowing that the old brick walls around me have heard the voices of men discussing the latest outrage by the Committee of Vigilance of 1856 or possibly laughing together over some story in the Alta California about Norton the First.  However, I must confess that, until Bill Drury placed the manuscript of this book before me to read, practically all that I knew about the Emperor consisted of legends of dubious veracity. We who live in San Francisco know those legends well, but Drury's biography really opened my eyes.

 It does not surprise me in the least that the author had more than a passing interest in the Emperor of the United States. Bill had been a daily columnist for the old Call-Bulletin, an amalgamation of the Morning Call that had employed Mark Twain as a reporter in the Emperor's day and the Evening Bulletin that first printed His Imperial Majesty's " royal proclamations" and started him on the road to fame. Everybody I knew read Drury's column until the Call- Bulletin finally succumbed to the perils of publishing after more than a hundred years. He wrote about the city's screwballs, people who lived in a world of their own, most of them in the gutter. Bill dragged them out of the gutter and gave them a place in the sun. So it seems inevitable that he would one day write about the man of substance and wealth-Norton once owned land where skyscrapers now stand-who became the best-known guttersnipe of all. Life magazine once acclaimed me "The King of Torts," which proves that almost anyone can aspire to be royalty in this delightfully crazy city of ours, but Emperor Norton-well, he was something special.

William Drury, like Norton the First, was born in England, lived in South Africa in his youth and came to San Francisco when he was roughly the same age as the Emperor (though there all similarity ends). But the English seem to understand eccentricity better than anyone else-that island breeds tolerant men-and perhaps that is why he was able to lay bare the Emperor's soul to show us, quite clearly, that he was not nearly the clown everyone has always supposed.

Laughter abounds in this book, but it is not aimed at the remarkable ragamuffin who strolls through its pages in a shabby uniform. Instead, Drury has fun with those who made sport of the Emperor. In those unenlightened times any reporter who held the "Emp" up to ridicule in the public prints was considered a wit, and his newspaper's circulation increased in proportion to his reputation as a humorist, which often depended upon how many tales about Emperor Norton he could tell, even if he had to make them up. And Drury shows us here, the newspapermen invented many a tall tale. Some of their stories became the legends that still make us chuckle.  The author demolishes the fables, however, and gives us a story that I suppose will unsettle the reader who would rather cling to the myths. I sincerely hope not, because the facts about Emperor Norton seem stranger than the fiction.

This biography holds many surprises. Mark Twain, who knew His Majesty, said in a letter to William Dean Howells, a major novelist and Twain's good friend, that he felt there was a lot more to Norton's story than had ever been told. Well, here at last is a really marvelous book that tells us more than even the Emperor's next-door neighbor, Mark Twain himself, ever knew. Few of us living today could have imagined just how much of His Majesty's strange life has been forgotten since he left us for a kindlier world. 

It took Bill Drury, a diligent researcher, to dig up a multitude of facts about the Emperor that posterity has never heard of, feats he found in archives that nobody else had explored.

One thing this book reveals is the astonishing extent of the Emperor's former fame. Those who visit San Francisco today may stay at the Emperor Norton Inn, lunch in the Emperor Norton Room at the Sheraton-Palace Hotel, cruise the bay in the Harbor Emperor with its figurehead of Norton I, dine in restaurants that display his portrait, or munch Emperor Norton Sourdough Snacks if lunch is not enough, but very few tourists seem to have any idea who he was. His face on the bow of a boat or a packet of snacks means nothing to visitors now. Yet in the 1870s his name was known to travelers even before they boarded the train that brought them to California; they had read about him in their hometown papers and fully expected to see him when they arrived. Indeed, as the author points out, when he died on a street corner, the story was carried in newspapers all over the land.

Many people, mainly newspaperfolk, have written about Norton the First, but Bill Drury is the only writer who has recognized the Emperor's value to the tourist industry of his time-which may be the real reason he was so popular with San Francisco's business community-and he feels that the city should honor him for that. Bill may be right. It would not come amiss if we were to remember His Late Majesty with an official state plaque on some place connected with the Emperor, much like the plaque that adorns Caesar's Annex, the building that is part of mine, and the one on the wall of William T. Sherman's bank (which is there to commemorate the soldier- banker who built it but says nothing about the Englishman who dreamed an impossible dream in the adobe cottage that stood there first).

But read this enjoyable book. You, too, may think that the Emperor of the United States deserves to be remembered for all time.

Acknowledgments

My search for the Emperor proved fruitless in London, where most Californian newspapers of his day had said he was born, and it was not until I rummaged in South Africa's files that I struck gold, thanks to a clue in the San Francisco Chronicle, which claimed that he was born at the Cape of Good Hope in 1817 and spoke fluent Dutch (meaning what is now called Afrikaans). A wealth of information existed there about the settlers who sailed from Britain in 1820. The efficient colonial government of that time had carefully kept track of the family fathered by John Norton, whose name is still honored by Jews at the Cape for his role in bringing Judaism to that land. Dr. A. M. Lewin Robinson of the South African Public Library in Cape Town and Ms. Joan Davies of the Cape Archives supplied me with so many details that I was able to reconstruct much of Joshua Norton's life that had always been a riddle to Californians. It is worth noting that he was thirty-one when he left the Cape and sixty-two when he died, so that half of his years had been shrouded in mystery until these two South African archivists ferreted out the facts.

Those who helped me most in California were: Judy Sheldon, California Historical Society, San Francisco; Grace Baker, Society of California Pioneers, San Francisco; Gladys Hansen, San Francisco Public Library; and Irene Moran, Bancroft Library at the University of California in Berkeley. Foremost among those repositories that provided evidence of his widening fame in the 1870s were the public libraries of New York, Boston, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Denver. 

 Yet no matter how deeply I dug in San Francisco's archives, it was impossible to learn everything about the Emperor because the fire of 1906 had destroyed so many old newspaper files, leaving gaps in his story that probably may never be filled. Any biographer who hopes to describe the last few years of his life, for instance, must rely chiefly on copies of the Pacific Appeal in the California Historical Society's collection. Fortunately, this was the weekly that His Majesty trusted enough to make it his " imperial gazette," so that the proclamations found within its pages are numerous and likely to be genuine. As for the decrees published in other papers that still exist, notably the Alta and the Bulletin, most of them try so hard to be comical that they cannot be anything but pranks. A comparison of those spurious edicts with several of the Emperor's handwritten letters, preserved in the Bancroft Library (including one to General William T. Sherman's brother, Senator John Sherman, penned on the engraved stationery of the Mechanics' Institute), quickly reveals that his own style was superior to that of any joker and his messages only unconsciously funny; after all, they were meant to be serious. I am quite convinced that Emperor Norton owed his fame rather more to proclamations he did not write than to those that he did.

I must express. my appreciation to Judge Malcolm M. Champlin of Oakland for the stories he heard from his grandfather, Asa Champlin, who was in his teens when the Emperor came calling at the Champlin Ranch in the Sonoma Valley, bound for Petaluma to " straighten " a creek that had too many bends. Judge Champlin still owns the ranch, though the house in which His Majesty slept and supped has gone, leaving only the memories of those evenings when Asa and his parents sat under an oil lamp in the parlor, listening to the Emperor's plans for bridging the bay. Those memories, passed from one generation to the next, are too firmly embedded in family lore ever to perish. Nor should I forget Dr. Charles A. Shumate, ex-Sublime Noble Grand Humbug of E Clampus Vitus and a former president of the California Historical Society, who is inclined to see some merit in my theory that His Majesty became a Clamper one day without knowing it.*(* See Appendix A)

My gratitude also goes to Jean Wilson for her skill with a word processor in putting the manuscript together. And to Jerry Gross, my editor, whose encouraging letters and telephone calls from New York, often offering valuable suggestions, were always welcome to a distant author in the throes of creation.

 Prologue

Mark Twain wrote to William Dean Howells, the novelist, after Joshua Norton's death in 1880: "What an odd thing it is that neither Frank Soulˇ, nor Charley Warren Stoddard, nor I, nor Bret Harte, the Immortal Bilk, nor any other professionally literary person in San Francisco has ever 'written up' the Emperor Norton. "

What sort of a " write-up " did he have in mind 'I An article for The Atlantic Monthly? Howells was editor of the Monthly, and Twain usually sought his opinion of a story he wanted to offer the magazine before tackling the task of writing it. His letter had all the earmarks of a fishing expedition for approval of a biographical sketch about the famous guttersnipe who imagined he was the Emperor of the United States. Knowing that Howells, an exacting editor, would expect something more substantial than a whimsical tale about a king of shreds and patches, Twain made it clear that there was a lot more to the royal ragamuffin than had ever been told.

"Nobody," he pointed out, "has ever written him up who was able to see anything but his grotesque side, but I think that with all of his dirt and unsavoriness there was a pathetic side to him. "

Sixteen years earlier, in San Francisco, no writer had been closer to Joshua Norton than Twain, Harte, and Franklin Soulˇ. Twain and Soulˇ had shared a newspaper office adjoining the Emperor's fleapit lodgings; Bret Harte, the " Immortal Bilk" (Twain had come to despise him), worked in the room below them, editing a new literary weekly, The Californian. Any one of them could have interviewed Norton "in depth".----as reporters say today--simply by climbing the stairs next door. If they didn't do it then, when they had the chance, presumably it was because the "Emp" was a relatively minor celebrity in those days, known in California and Nevada but practically nowhere else. Twain himself was no better known in 1864; he was still Sam Clemens of the Morning Call, and the pen name he had begun to use as a contributor to Harte's Californian never appeared in the " Morning Squeak. " Sometimes, to enliven a dull local item, he would drag in His Imperial Majesty, whose name guaranteed a chuckle, but it could never have entered his head that the guttersnipe next door might one day be worth a lot more than a squib in the Squeak.

Who could have guessed that, in good time, Norton would actually become something of an American legend, a living folk hero, known the length and breadth of the land? Certainly the Emperor was enough of a celebrity to merit the attention of newspapers far from the Golden West (which should explain how Twain came to read of his death in Elmira, New York, probably in The New York Times).

Norton fascinated Twain. Having told Howells that the Emperor deserved to be immortalized by the best of pens, he went ahead and did it-in his own fashion. He put aside the novel he was writing, The Prince and the Pauper, and unearthed from a drawer the bothersome manuscript he had been struggling with, off and on, for longer than he cared to remember. Then, freshly inspired, he began a lively new chapter, introducing a princely pauper who would turn out to be the funniest of all the characters in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Twain said he drew his fictional characters from real life. Scholarly sleuths who have studied his works, hoping to pinpoint a prototype, are satisfied that no less than three characters- Captain Stormfield of Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven, Captain Hurricane Jones of Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion, and Captain Ned Blakely of Roughing It-were all based upon that swashbuckling old mariner, Captain Ned Wakeman of San Francisco, who also has a part to play in the story of Emperor Norton. Naturally, scholars have also searched for a flesh- and-blood counterpart of the "King" in Huckleberry Finn, although no one has yet thought to look at another acquaintance of Twain's in his newspaper days, his eccentric next-door neighbor.*(*See Appendix B)

 Still. that's who he is, as you will discover if you stay the course. Long after a disguised Norton appeared in Twain's most popular novel, Robert Louis Stevenson put him in one of his own, wearing no disguise at all. In Stevenson's The Wrecker the Emperor is allowed to be his unmajestically scruffy self.

Now, by all the rules of fiction writing, Norton I really has no business being in that novel at all. He plays no part in its plot, merely wanders into the story, utters a few lines, accepts a snifter of brandy, and then wanders out with a nod of his plumed head, leaving a modern reader to wonder just who the devil he was. Few readers in Stevenson's day would have wondered, however. Indeed, they would have expected to find Norton in the book and might even have felt cheated if he was not. The Wrecker begins in San Francisco in 1879, by which time San Francisco and Emperor Norton had become so inseparable in American minds that to write about one without mentioning the other would have been rather like describing the city today without mentioning its cable cars or its Golden Gate Bridge. And that is obviously why RLS put him in the novel undisguised; it would have been utterly pointless to give him a fictitious name, since the only purpose he could possibly serve in that book was to be himself, the Emperor everyone had heard about.

Perhaps the best proof of Joshua Norton's fame lies in the fact that he had been dead and buried for all of twelve years when The Wrecker was published in 1892. One would think that the public's interest in him should have waned considerably by then, which would have been excuse enough for any publisher to delete him from the manuscript. But no, Charles Scribner's Sons left him in the story intact, making no effort to explain him either by footnote or foreword, which suggests to me that he was still too well remembered to require an explanation, even though a dozen years had passed since his death on the other side of the continent.

To test that possibility, I wrote to cities all over the country, asking librarians whether they had anything in their archives about the Emperor of the United States. Back came the replies: many of them had found mention of him in local nineteenth-century newspapers, enough to justify my theory.

From other clues that began to emerge as I dug deeper, I learned why the Emperor had been so widely known: San Francisco's boosters had little else to talk about when they sought to lure tourists west in the early days of the transcontinental railroad. There was no bridge to brag about in the 1870s, and the cable ears of that time, unlike those now featured in every television show about San Francisco, were rattletrap contrivances that apparently nobody thought deserved a paragraph in another city's papers. The sheer audacity of San Francisco's claim that a ragamuffin was a tourist attraction worth seeing actually got the city all the publicity it needed.

Emperor Norton exists in a dozen books of that bygone day, besides Twain's and Robert Louis Stevenson's. And yet, except in the West, where his fame still lingers, very few Americans today may have heard of the Charlie Chaplinesque tramp (the comparison is inescapable) who kept their great-grandparents laughing for twenty incredible years. The passage of a century has finally dimmed the nation's memory of one of America's most colorful eccentrics.

It's time he was resurrected.

Californians may complain, with some justification, that I have omitted a great deal of the Emperor's story in this biography. I can only plead that it would have taken another volume, possibly thicker than this one, to tell all that is known about him as well as everything I discovered in archives hitherto unexplored.

Something had to go to make room for this new material, so I decided not to rehash what is already familiar to those who love the Emperor (except when it is just too good to ignore), but confine myself to things that will add to their knowledge. Much of what you will read here, therefore, will be new even to California's historians (for example, that Joshua Norton was an inventor, a gifted man whose only idiosyncrasy was that he imagined himself to be the nation's ruler).

To those who have never heard of His Imperial Majesty, this book must read like a work of fiction. But it should be remembered that Norton the First himself lived a life of fiction (although he never suspected it), believing until the end of his days that he was the Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico.

William Drury San Francisco, 1986

NORTON I

Emperor of the United States

Chapter 1  Death of a Guttersnipe

O, dear, it was always a painful thing for me to see the Emperor begging, for although nobody else believed he was an Emperor, he believed it. -Mark Twain

The Emperor of the United States died in the street on the night of January 8, 1880, in the rain that streamed through the gleam of a gas lamp. His uniform was soiled and sodden and the plumes on his hat wilted in the downpour.- He died oblivious to the throng gathering about him in the dusk, his breath slipping away in the bubbles of froth that dribbled down his damp gray beard. A clattering cable car, clanging its bell as it breasted the crest of San Francisco's steepest street on its way from the bay to Nob Hill, drowned the sigh that signaled the end of an extraordinary era and the flight of an uncommon soul.

The police arrived with a wagon and carted his corpse to the morgue, where His Imperial Majesty was laid on a marble slab and stripped of his dignity. Some telegrams were discovered in his bedraggled blue tunic. One, bearing the exalted name of Alexander II of Russia, complimented the American sovereign upon his impending marriage to Queen Victoria. Another cable beseeched him to consider the political consequences of such a union. "No good will come from it," warned the President of France, ever ready to distrust the motives of monarchs. 

An old purse, removed from his rain-soaked trousers, yielded unexpected treasures: a gold piece worth two and a half dollars, three dollars in silver, and a French franc dated 1828. It was rather more than the mortuary workers usually found on a body brought in from the streets. Had this been an ordinary stiff, they might have pocketed the coins and glibly declared him penniless, but word of the Emperor's death had swiftly reached the newspaper offices, and reporters had already assembled to witness and record every detail, even to the date on a franc.

A bundle of papers found in his tattered uniform coat was unfolded and examined. They proved to be his Imperial Government bonds, each valued at fifty cents but really worth no more than the telegrams that wags had sent him in jest. The newspapermen read the fraudulent messages, making note of their contents, stole a few of the Emperor's bonds to keep as souvenirs, and then went off to break the sad news to the nation.

All night the sky wept. So did the papers next day.

"On the reeking pavement, in the darkness of a moonless night, under the dripping rain, and surrounded by wondering strangers," the Morning Call told a waking city, " Norton the First, by the grace of God Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico, departed this life. "

"Le Roi Est Mort, " mourned the Chronicle.

Many columns were squandered that weekend on Joshua Abraham Norton, the bedlam beggar who thought he was royalty. The story was splashed on every front page. Nothing else seemed to matter. California's new governor, George C. Perkins, searching the newspapers in Sacramento for some word about his inauguration the day before, must have been humiliated to discover that the death of a guttersnipe was considered much more important. One paper he had thought he could count on, the influential Alta California, his stoutest supporter during the election campaign, had actually dismissed his Inaugural Address in thirty-eight words, a mere four and a half lines, insultingly squeezed into a column of bad jokes and other trivia under the heading " Brevities. "It gave the guttersnipe thirty-four inches.

But the beggar's name, unlike the governor's, was known the length and breadth of the land. " His eccentricities made him almost world-famous, " the Alta said, with little exaggeration. Editors in cities that did not care a hoot who governed California would pick up this story and print it. Cincinnati's Enquirer, Cleveland's Plain Dealer, Seattle's Intelligencer, Denver's Rocky Mountain News, Philadelphia's Public Record, Portland's Ore gonian, and The New York Times had already plucked it from the telegraph wires and sent it to their compositors.

In Cincinnati the Enquirer devoted sixteen inches to the Emperor's passing under what must have been the longest-winded headline in the history of American journalism:

LAID LOW

Emperor Norton Gives Up the Ghost and Surrenders His Scepter to the Man on the Pale Horse. The City by the Golden Gate Mourns Her Illustrious Dead. An Emperor Without Enemies, a King Without a Kingdom, Gone to Kingdom Come. Supported in Life by the Willing Tribute of a Free People, He Drops Dead at a Street Corner and Now Knows What Lies Beyond.

Mark Twain read of the Emperor's death in Elmira, New York, and it brought back memories. Long before, when he was a reporter in San Francisco, he had scribbled news items about Norton I for the Morning Call. The reporter and the Emperor had come a long way since then.

For twenty years Joshua Norton had trudged the city's sloping streets in broken boots and comic- opera uniform, a sword at his belt and a ridiculous hackle of peacock feathers and rooster quills in his hat, God's fool in tatters and tinsel, utterly convinced that he was destiny's choice to rule an American empire.

He was San Francisco's most popular tourist attraction. Those who came West on the transcontinental railroad knew all about the mad monarch from the travel books they had read. They bought picture postcards of Norton the First, Emperor Norton dolls in feathered hats, Emperor Norton Brand cigars with his portrait on the label, and colored lithographs of the Emperor to display beside the Currier prints in Victorian parlors. Plays and operettas were written about him, cartoonists caricatured him for the magazines, and tradesmen with a covetous eye on a wayfarer's wallet hung signs in their windows to boast that they enjoyed his royal patronage, even when they did not. " Fine Wines and Spirituous Liquors by Appointment to His Majesty, Norton I" lent a touch of distinction to a tavern that no East Coast hostelry could hope to match with a simple " George Washington Slept Here. " The tourists chuckled and slapped their thighs, then went home with their souvenirs to add their own embroideries to the story that San Francisco's boosters were spreading far and wide.

They told how the city paid the Emperor homage, how fawning bankers bowed and scraped before him, how the politicians groveled for his favors, how the magnates and millionaires humbly bent the knee, how even the surly policeman on his beat respectfully saluted as he passed. He dined in the best of restaurants, they said, and never paid a bill; attended the theaters without a ticket; traveled his realm as an honored guest of the railroads; and entrusted his wardrobe to tailors and haberdashers who charged him not a penny. Ambrose Bierce could not resist a cynical parting shot in his weekly Argonaut when he heard that Norton lad died of sanguineous apoplexy (in a gutter, as guttersnipes are supposed to die)

In his own opinion he had a divine right to be maintained at the expense of others; to lead a useless, vagabond life, like other imperial mendicants; to get money and be supported like other kings out of a place. And who shall say that the Emperor was not right? Who shall presume to question the sanity of a mind that for twenty-three years enabled its body to live in luxury and idleness without physical or mental toil?

Despite his reputation as the city's gadfly, quick to prick her fibbers and fools, even " Bitter " Bierce was not above embellishing a bedtime story upon which her tourist trade thrived, though he must have raised a few eyebrows when he declared that the vagabond king lived in luxury, since it was common knowledge that he lived in a flophouse.

Robert Louis Stevenson gilded the lily, too, in the book he wrote years later with his Californian stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, who grew up in a time when children saw Emperor Norton as a fairy- tale character they could actually talk to and touch (which gave him a decided edge over Mother Goose and Jack Horner). But fairy-tale characters belong in fairy tales, so bear in mind that The Wrecker published when Stevenson was at the height of his fame and could afford to share a title page with a young relative itching to see his own name in print-was a novel only very loosely based upon what the Scot saw and heard.

Of all our visitors, I believe I preferred Emperor Norton; the very mention of whose name reminds me I am doing scant justice to the folks of San Francisco. In what other city would a harmless madman who supposed himself emperor of the two Americas [the United States and Mexico] have been so fostered and encouraged? Where else would even the people of the streets have respected the poor soul's illusion? Where else would bankers and merchants have received his visits, cashed his cheques, and submitted to his small assessments? Where else would he have been suffered to attend and address the exhibition days of schools and colleges? where else, in God's green earth, have taken his pick of restaurants, ransacked the bill of fare and departed scathless? They tell me he was even an exacting patron, threatening to withdraw his custom when dissatisfied; and I can believe it, for his face wore an expression distinctly gastronomical.

The novelist, who had arrived in San Francisco just two weeks before the Emperor's demise (in pursuit of Osbourne's mother, whom he married) knew only the fable, not the facts, and had to rely heavily on the stories he heard from Harry Biggelow of the Examiner and little Jimmy Bowman of the Chronicle, who showed him the town, two of the very boosters who had created the legend of a great-souled metropolis that so loved a pauper it treated him like a prince.

Stevenson's stepdaughter, Isobel Field, added to that legend with a book of her own. " He was a gentle, kindly man," she remembered in This Life I've Loved, "and fortunately found himself in the friendliest, most sentimental city in the world, the idea being 'let him be emperor if he wants to.' San Francisco played the game with him. "

San Francisco did play the game, not merely because it was friendly and sentimental (no one could quarrel with that), but because it had a good head for business. Those who bent the knee, addressing him as "Your Majesty" without a wisp of a grin, were not entirely altruistic. The politicians courted him, in public if not in private, because he was the people's mascot, and to have shown him disrespect would have cost them votes. Editors willingly pub- 

lished the " royal proclamations " that flowed from his pen because his name sold newspapers. Theater managers gave him free seats because no opening night was considered complete without the Emperor's presence; he was part of the show. Leland Stanford, the president of the Central Pacific Railroad (and founder of Stanford University), gave Norton a pass to travel because the press was accusing the railroad magnate of avarice and he hoped to offset this villainous image by posing as a benefactor to the needy. No other deadhead could repay a small boon with a profusion of favorable publicity.

Not all of them played the game. When Biggelow and Bowman showed Stevenson the shops that advertised they were " Gentleman's Outfitters to His Imperial Majesty," did the marveling visitor think to ask why the Emperor was such a scarecrow? Had he dared to enter a fashionable restaurant in "all his dirt and unsavoriness"--Mark Twain's words--a fastidious maitre d'hotel would have quickly shown him the door. That yarn was pure Biggelow.

In what other city would a harmless madman have been so fostered and encouraged? Well, perhaps almost any city that yearned for a tourist attraction as effective as Emperor Norton. Other cities, in fact, had tried to lure him away. What else but a bribe was the famous Serpent Scepter, an elaborately carved walking-stick presented by "his faithful web-footed subjects" in Portland, Oregon? And what but the fear of losing him prompted San Francisco's leading daily paper to remind His Majesty that to forsake California for web-footed Oregon would be to swap sunshine for rain! Walking-sticks were favorite gifts; the reporters who searched the Emperor's lodgings, within an hour of his death, found more than a dozen from cities anxious to have him.

He had his imitators, of course. One, King Stellifer the First, turned up in New York City and briefly captured the nation's attention, but lacking the Emperor's flair for publicity, failed to win the support of the business community and was exiled to a lunatic asylum. New York did not believe in fairy-tale characters who could not promise a pot of gold at both ends of the rainbow.

Once the Emperor was wealthy. That was back in the Gold Rush years, when the world was mad and he was presumed to be sane. Twain's old paper, the Morning Call, which had been digging into city and county records, revealed that he was "one of the largest land speculators in those early times. " Some of the tallest buildings in the financial district now stood on land that used to be his.

Jimmy Bowman went to the Pacific Club, an exclusive haunt of the rich, to interview its president, Joseph G. Eastland, who had been a business associate of Norton's in palmier days. Eastland told the man from the Chronicle that the ragamuffin had then been worth at least a quarter of a million dollars.

"What brought him down so low?" Bowman asked.

A rice deal, Eastland said. The Emperor had tried to corner the rice market, a disastrous venture in which he lost everything-lost his real estate, lost his riches, lost his reason.

Eastland, a founding partner in the San Francisco Gas Lighting Company, should have known the exact location of one valuable piece of land that had once belonged to the pauper. His own gasworks stood on it, his company having purchased the property in the hour of Norton's ruin from the banker who held the mortgage, William T. Sherman, the Sherman who nine years later would march a plundering Union army through Georgia to humiliate the South. A bankrupted Joshua Norton might have understood why his land was seized to settle a debt, but a "gentle, kindly man" like the Emperor would never have understood why the banker had burned Atlanta to settle a conflict already won.

That was insane.

Ten thousand came, the newspapers said, to see him lying in state. They came from the suburbs in streetcars pulled by plodding horses, in the crowded cable cars that swooped down the city's hills, in drays from the wharves and the markets, on foot from the slum, in carriages from the palaces of the rich. A platoon of police struggling to clear a passage for vehicles trapped in the crush, coaxed and prodded the multitude into a ragged queue, four abreast and two blocks long.

The peddlers were busy, selling souvenirs.

"Picture postcards of the Emp! Every one a living likeness!

"Emperor Norton dolls! "

"Cigars! Emperor Norton cigars!"

Policemen stationed at the door of the morgue marshaled the mourners into a single line, admitting them one by one.

"The visitors included all classes, " Jimmy Bowman wrote, " from the capitalist to the pauper, the clergyman and the pickpocket, 

well-dressed ladies, the bowed with age, and the prattling child. " For hours they filed past the casket, covering it with wreaths and bouquets. " Some of the choicest floral tributes came from childish hands, for the kindhearted old man had ever a cheerful smile for children, with whom he was a favorite. "

But the fairy-tale character they could talk to and touch had no smile for the children who came to him now. Somehow he looked different. Without his funny old uniform and his funny old hat with its feathers, all the magic had gone.

"Mama, why won't he speak to me?"

"Hush, child, the Emperor is sleeping.

One day they would tell his story to wide-eyed children of their own, proudly saying that they really knew him, that he used to shepherd them into candy shops and command the people behind the counter to give them bonbons that nobody ever had to pay for, because the shops all had signs in their windows to say that they were Confectioners by Appointment to His Imperil Majesty, Norton I. And then there would come a time when no parent could boast of things like that, because there was no one living who had known him, and children would hear only fables about Mother Goose and Jack Horner.

Chapter 2 The Tailor's Tale

Careful now, We are dealing here with an illusion.

-Ambrose Bierce

Who was he? Where did he come from? Nobody seemed to know. Joshua Norton had been maddeningly mysterious about his origin. His accent was decidedly English, his diction precise and refined, his bearing ponderously dignified, his face that "of a gentleman" in Robert Louis Stevenson's opinion. And to the Bowmans and Biggelows who made up fairy tales, no better evidence was needed to sustain a rumor that he was a secret child of William IV of England by the Irish actress Dorothea Jordan. According to the Morning Call:

It is related that an English visitor who saw Norton, being informed of the story that he was a son of William IV, exclaimed, "Yes, yes, I thought I had seen that face before. Why, he's so much like His Majesty that forty years ago he would have been taken for the King. Just his figure, just his walk, and just about as shabby; just as I have seen him come to the theatre to draw Mrs. Jordan's salary before he became King.

The English visitor, if he really existed outside of a journalist's imagination, must have been incredibly old to remember a royal love affair that had withered seventy years before. He was an unreliable witness, in any event. William Henry, Duke of Clarence, who had ten children by Mrs. Jordan before he became William IV, was certainly no dandy, but he could hardly have been "just about as shabby" as a tatterdemalion whose dirt and unsavoriness were enough to wrinkle Mark Twain's nose. Nor could he have ever been so short of a shilling that he had to beg for his mistress's wages at a stage door in Drury Lane. One could always send a footman for that.

The Call changed its tune, in fact, when its reporter saw Norton in his casket after the undertakers had cleaned him up, suggesting that he might have been an illegitimate son of Napoleon III of France: "There was the same lofty forehead, aquiline nose, and short imperial [beard]." But Jimmy Bowman quickly scotched that, pointing out in the Chronicle that Norton was much too old to be a son of the late Emperor of the French, if the age inscribed on the silver plate attached to his coffin lid was correct: "Louis Napoleon, who was born at the palace of the Tuileries on April 20, 1808, if still living, would be his senior by only six years. "

The age on the coffin lid, however, was merely a guess. At the inquest, Eva Hutchinson, the landlady of Eureka Lodgings, the cheap hotel that was the Emperor's home for seventeen years, had testified that to the best of her belief he was " a Jew of London birth. " And his age? Oh, about sixty-five. The coroner, lacking a birth certificate or any other material evidence, had simply accepted her word. And so the plate on his casket had been inscribed:

JOSHUA A. NORTON DIED JANUARY 8, 1880 AGED 65 YEARS

But a Jew? Surely not. For the Reverend William Githens of the Episcopal Church of the Advent, who had conducted the funeral service at the morgue, had sent him on his way to a Christian's reward with an Episcopalian prayer and a children's choir singing " Jesus, Savior of my Soul. "

In the little town of Vallejo, north of San Francisco Bay, lived a man who knew the truth. Or thought he did.

Nathan Peiser was a tailor, an Englishman aged about sixty. After reading all the wild theories about the Emperor's birth in the metropolitan newspapers, he went to see the editor of the Vallejo Chronicle and told him a tale he had sworn never to tell. And here is the tale he told that paper:

In 1842 I was one of the crew of the English transport ship Waterloo, on our way from London to Australia with 300 persons on board, consisting of officers, sailors, soldiers and transports [convicts bound for Botany Bay]. Becoming short of water, the ship put into Cape Town on the coast of Africa on the 25th day of August of that same year. While riding at anchor in Table Bay, three days later, a terrific north-easter swept over the water and caused the anchors to drag until the ship ran upon a reef of rocks and was dashed to pieces. A hundred and ninety-seven were drowned and many severely injured. Some of the men managed to save themselves by being taken ashore in lifeboats. I was among the unfortunate ones who received severe injuries and was taken to the English hospital on the outskirts of the town.

In Cape Town there was a number of merchants of Jewish extraction, and fearing that some of their friends might be among the injured at the hospital, a party called one day; among the number was a Mr. Norton, an Englishman, who was keeping a ship chandlery store in Cape Town. I, being a Jew, attracted his attention and we formed an acquaintance, and as luck would have it, I chanced to know his brother and several of his friends in London. Mr. Norton immediately had me taken to his residence and introduced me to his wife and children. The eldest of the children was Joshua Norton, the late "Emperor" Norton, then a young man between twenty- five and thirty years old. I was two or three years younger. At that time he talked freely of his birthplace as being in London.

While enjoying the hospitality of Mr. Norton, Jewish prayers were frequently said, which was always a source of amusement to Joshua. One day he provoked the father to such an extent that, old as he was, he received a castigation. While at Cape Town we were both very intimate, and Joshua assisted his father in the ship-chandlery store as a clerk, and had a keen, business-like air, and was much admired by the young as well as the old people in the settlement.

Peiser remained in Cape Town eleven months, living with the Nortons, then shipped out in a German vessel bound for Hamburg, eventually making his way to the United States, where he enlisted in a New York regiment and fought in the Civil War. When the war ended he sailed for San Francisco, where he wandered into a lodging house, looking for a place to stay. As he was talking to the landlord, he heard a heavy tread on the stairs and the thump of a walking-stick.

In a moment in walked a man wearing a faded uniform with tarnished epaulets, a Kossuth hat with gold cord and an ostrich's plume on his head, and a twisted, knotted stick under his arm. As he entered the room, he raised the hat and, taking a red silk handkerchief from his pocket, wiped the perspiration from his brow. As he raised the hat from his head, it flashed across my mind that the man before me was my old friend, Joshua Norton, for there was the same stout figure, though bent with age, and the same striking countenance I had seen so often in the ship chandler's store on the African coast.

The landlord, David Hutchinson, introduced an astonished Peiser to His Imperial Majesty, Norton 1.

He at first did not seem to recollect me, until I called to his mind the wreck of the Waterloo and my being at his father's house. All at once he said, "Why, yes, Nathan, I distinctly remember you, and the correction I received for raising a disturbance at a Jewish prayer meeting."

A strange way to greet a friend one has not seen for about a quarter of a century. To remind Nathan, immediately upon meeting him, of a reprimand that he himself had once received, fully twenty-five years before, seems oddly out of place in a salutation. Most people would have said, " Why, yes, I remember you. It's been such a long time! How are you? I'm very glad to see you," or words to that effect, and not even thought of mentioning a scolding from an angry parent until much later, when sitting down to discuss old times together at leisure. But Joshua was not like others, and he must have been momentarily stunned to encounter the one man in America who knew all about his past life as a chandler's son in Cape Town and might very well reveal it.

It's possible, of course, that Joshua did mention the incident of the prayer meeting in later conversation and that Peiser actually quoted him out of sequence when he talked to the editor in Vallejo. But let it pass, because what His Majesty said counts more than when he said it. And we shall return to this later, for it happens to be more significant than at first appears. Meanwhile, Nathan still has the floor and is about to be flabbergasted further.

I was then invited up another flight of stairs to his room, and we had a long conversation about his father, mother and sisters. I asked him, on the score of old friendship, to tell me how it was that he came by the title of Emperor, and why he wore the uniform he then had on. For some cause or other, the demeanor of the old man changed all of a sudden and he raised himself from the edge of his single bed and went to the door and turned the key, then stepped to where I was sitting in amazement at his strange proceedings, and stooping down almost whispered that before he would tell me he would fir8t impose a silence upon my lips never to reveal to anyone about his folks at Cape Town. I thought it strange but, being interested, readily gave the promise.

My old friend then told me that he was not the son of Mr. Norton of Cape Town, but a crown prince to the throne of France; that he had been sent to Cape Town to save himself from being assassinated; that he was adopted by Mr. Norton and had retained his name for the love he had for him, and taken the title " Emperor, " which he was rightly entitled to bear; that the uniform was presented to him by Queen Victoria; and all the people, here and in Mexico, were his subjects.

I looked at the man a moment and then told him I thought he was crazy; to which he replied, "And so do a good many others. "

Shortly after His Majesty's encounter with Nathan Peiser, the sailor turned tailor, a Jewish newspaper in Cincinnati got wind of the story. The American Israelite, published by the famous Reverend Isaac Mayer Wise, the founder of Reform Judism, asked the Emperor if it was true he was a Jew.

"How can I be a Jew," he had answered, "seeing I am so nearly related to the Bourbons?"

Odd that no one noticed the significance of the 1828 franc found in his purse at the morgue. It bore the face of Charles X, the last of the Bourbons, a King of France whose portrait any man might have been proud to keep if he believed himself to be a Bourbon. 

Chapter 3

Boy on a Broomstick Horse

"Yes, my friend, it is true-your eyes is lookin' at this very moment on the pore disappeared Dauphin, Looy the Seventeen, son of Looy the Sixteen and Marry Antonette you see before you, in blue jeans and' misery, the wanderin', exiled, trampled-on, and sufferin' rightful King of France."

-The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Joshua Norton was born in the London borough of Deptford on a day lost to mortal memory. No trace of a birthdate can be found in England's incomplete files, but there is one broad hint in the archives of a land far from England. On May 2, 1820, when John and Sarah Norton arrived at the Cape of Good Hope with three small children, one a babe in Sarah's arms, John told an immigration clerk that the boy they called Joshua Abraham-that one there, clutching his mother's skirts and gaping fearfully at the Hottentots who handled their baggage-was two years old. So there you have it from a father's lips; he was born in 1818. No one can say more than that. If the circumstances of his birth are obscure, it was surely not because there was a French prince to hide, as he told Nathan Peiser. Britain was brimming with misplaced Bourbon princes in 1818, the children and grandchildren of royal refugees from the guillotines of the French Revolution, but there is no factual, historical reason to suppose that he was one of them.

Still, Joshua himself thought there was good reason to believe it, as we shall see in this chapter.

John Norton was twenty-five, Sarah twenty-two, when they disembarked from the vessel La Belle Alliance. Their eldest child, Louis, was four years old, and the infant, Philip, born at sea, was quite possibly the youngest of all the five thousand immigrants who swarmed ashore from a score of ships anchored in Algoa Bay. South Africa knows them as the 1820 Settlers, the Cape's first British colonists. Among them were eighteen Jews, the only Jews in that historic exodus from a Britain impoverished by war to the promised land called Good Hope, a Dutch possession until it was wrenched from Napoleon Bonaparte's grasp. The land that London had promised John Norton proved to be a hundred barren acres on the Great Fish River in Albany, a wilderness long known to the Dutch as Die Zuurveld, the sour field. Across the river lay Kaffraria, the hostile land of the Xhosa.

The Boers of the Zuurveld nicknamed the 1820 Settlers "Cockney gardeners. " When flood, drought, and blight, one after the other, destroyed their crops during the first three years, many settlers turned to occupations for which they were better suited. One Jewish couple, Morris and Phyllis Sloman, farming on the Fish near the Nortons, moved to Cape Town after losing their son, Mark, age eight, to a Xhosa spear while the boy was tending cattle. John kept a wary eye on the border river for clay-daubed raiders who might harm his own family, which now included a teething daughter named Esther. He must have envied a young friend from Deptford, Benjamin Norden, who had prospered rapidly as a businessman in the growing settlement of Graham's Town, where he was now Commissioner of the Municipality (town council member). If a sympathetic Norden had not advanced John the capital to open a general store in Graham's Town the son called Joshua Abraham might have lived out his days on the Fish with a plough, and no one would ever have heard of him.

Madness was waiting in Graham's Town.

Psychiatrists today generally agree that schizophrenia, a mental disorder characterized by private fantasy and unrealistic behavior, germinates in the springtime years between puberty and early adulthood. If that is so, then Joshua Norton did not go mad in California because of business losses, as everyone said, but was already half-mad when he got there.

It all began in Graham's Town when he was a boy.

In the beginning his grasp on reality was probably no weaker than any other small boy's, no weaker and no stronger. Children play games in their heads, indulging in delightful daydreams that can easily transform a wooden sword into Excalibur and a broomstick into a prancing steed. Such illusions normally vanish with the approach of adolescence, but for Joshua that would be the time when the seeds of more peculiar notions would start to sprout.

To explain why he later thought he was royalty, some curious facts about his childhood must be brought to light.

When Jewish historians pay tribute to the pioneers who carried the sacred Torah from England to the Cape and built the first synagogue there, they speak of Benjamin Norden and John Norton. But these two did something that endeared them to Gentiles, too. An Anglican bishop's plea for funds to give the settlement a church, to be known as St. George's, touched these men of another faith and both responded at once, passing the hat to every Jew in Albany. So it can be said that, long before they built a Hebrew temple, they helped to build the first Christian church on the f rontier. (It stands there still, as St. George's Cathedral, a time-honored monument to the brotherhood of men of different faiths who joined hands to make a holy place for the God that both revered, though some would never pray there because their way of worship was not the minister's.)

John's store flourished to such an extent that soon he could afford to send his oldest son to college. When the South African College-now the University of Cape Town-opened its doors in 1829, Louis was enrolled among its first students. Eleven-year-old Joshua watched his brother's ox-wagon disappear in dust across the veld, then went back to his desk in the crude little schoolhouse called Grubb's Academy, where he received the rudiments of an education from a Cockney gardener who had decided it might be more rewarding to plant ideas in fertile young minds than crops in a sour field.

C. C. Grubb was his name. The early chroniclers, who found him worthy of mention because he was the only teacher on the frontier, neglected to say whether he was tall or short, stern or mild, or even whether he was christened with anything more than two initials. But they did leave an example of his thriftiness. To save money on pencils and paper, he made his pupils write and do their sums with their forefingers in boxes of sand. Precious little expense was wasted on the education of a future emperor.

That Mr. Grubb attended St. George's goes without saying. He could never have mustered enough pupils to open an academy in that solidly Anglican community if he had not demonstrated his allegiance to the Church of England, for he was expected to follow the practice of schoolteachers in the mother country, beginning each day with a passage from the Bible-Authorized Versionand a recitation from the Book of Common Prayer.

This daily instruction in Christianity would have a telling effect on a boy who had to chant prayers in Hebrew at home, a language he did not understand. There was no rabbi to teach him the ancient lessons of his people, none in all of South Africa. John would have to fi11 that role as best he could. He was doomed to fail, though. Joshua was growing up in a society completely dominated by Christians. The Nortons and the Nordens were the only Jews in Graham's Town, the only Jews he knew, and the only house of worship was a church with a Protestant clergyman whose stipend was paid by the government (to ensure that the King's religion would reign supreme in his African eolony). Joshua's immature mind was bound to bend under the combined weight of church and state. Soon he would begin to question his father's faith. Then he would reject it.

His given names may have embarrassed him. A boy called Joshua Abraham, in a town of Georges and Jameses, must have seemed a bit of an oddity to his playmates, and they, as children will, would have been quick to poke fun. Why was he, and he alone of John Norton's three sons, chosen to bear such obvious Old Testament names? Why were his parents so anxious to emphasize his Hebrew heritage more than that of his brothers?

Actually, the greater mystery lay in John and Sarah's choice of names for their first child and their third. Louis and Philip were Bourbon names, royal Catholic names. And that's a mystery worth exploring.

In September 1792, when the first aristocratic refugees came streaming out of France with the staggering news that Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had been imprisoned with their two children, they were coldly received in England, where there was little sympathy for a Catholic king whose aid to the rebels in America had cost a Protestant king thirteen colonies. Fanny Burney, the novelist, who was Mistress of the Robes to George III's queen, caustically described the boorish treatment accorded a daughterin-law of the Duke of Broglie. Madame de Broglie and her small son, after a stormy Channel crossing in a cockleshell boat, had tried to rent a house in an English village but were rebuffed "upon the Christian-like supposition that, being nothing but French papishes, they would never pay. "

France's declaration of war on England, following the execution of Louis XVI, did much to change that attitude. Twenty-one years later, with Napoleon's defeat at Leipzig and the capitulation of Paris, Miss Burney was happy to report the vastly different feelings of those who crowded London's streets to cheer the brother of the guillotined king when he returned to France s Louis XVIII. In his farewell speech he delighted the British by praising them for the part they had played in the Bourbon restoration:

"It is to this glorious country, and to the confidence of its citizens, along with Providence, that I attribute the re-establishment of our house upon the throne of our ancestors. "

After that encomium the entire island kingdom of an aged and insane George III broke out in a veritable rash of British babies named Louis. No one could have guessed that, in less than a year, Louis XVIII would again be in exile, at least for a hundred days, until British and Prussian armies at Waterloo thrashed Bonaparte for the Iast time and shipped him off to St. Helena. That was in 1815, the year that John Norton married Sarah Simmonds, who gave him the son they named Louis.

It probably pained the young couple's parents that John and Sarah did not observe the Jewish custom of naming their child after a deceased relative or friend. Family disapproval may have prompted them to make up for it by naming their second son Joshua Abraham. But what about their third? All one can say is that in 1820, when Philip was born in La Belle Alliance, the Nortons were far at sea with no one to object if they gave him a Bourbon name, too.

For one so deeply concerned about the preservation of his own religion in a colony with so few Jews that it was not yet possible to build a synagogue or support a rabbi, it must be admitted that John Norton's interest in perpetuating the memory of a Catholic royal family did seem strange. Even the newest infant at Sarah's breast was named Louisa, a feminine version of Louis. It was enough to puzzle any son named Joshua Abraham.

Perhaps it was now that Joshua began to toy with the notion that he might be of exalted birth. At first it would be no more than a schoolboy's idle fancy, the sort of fantasy that fits in nicely with wooden swords and broomstick horses, but as he matured his imagination would build it into a tower of truth.

Meanwhile, when he was twelve, hovering on the very brink of that dangerous season when schizophrenia begins to bud unnoticed in an unwary young mind, a dramatic event occurred that was the talk of Graham's Town. The crown of France was again snatched from a Bourbon head.

England had made it a condition of the Bourbon restoration that Louis XVIII must rule under the terms of a charter, such as the Magna Carta, which restricted the powers and privileges of her own royal sovereigns. This appalled the new king's brother, Charles, Count of Artois, who had seen Britain's constitutional monarchy at work during his years of exile and wanted no part of a system that dared to clip the wings of a king.

"I would rather saw wood than be King of France under the conditions imposed upon the Kings of England," he had scoffed.

Charles sincerely believed that Bourbons were chosen to rule by God and so could do as they pleased. When he succeeded the childless Louis, as Charles X, he commanded France to march backward to the absolute monarchy of the past. Hostility grew with every step. In July 1830, he dismissed the Chamber of Deputies and sent police to smash the presses of those newspaper editors who most vigorously opposed him. That did it. Up went the barricades, out came the pistols and pikes. Within a week Paris was in the hands of the insurgents and the King's guards were on the run.

Charles offered to abdicate in favor of a grandson, the Count of Chambord, age ten, but the French would have nothing further to do with Bourbons, great or small. They offered the crown to his more liberal cousin, Louis Philippe, Duke of Orleans, proclaiming him " King of the French by the Grace of God and the Will of the 

People, " as if to remind him that in modern France the people did the choosing and God merely rubber-stamped their choice. That, to the departing Charles, was heresy. Wearily he crossed the Channel again to England, where he had spent so many years, banished by the first Revolution, and where he would now end his days (which would not be many, for he was seventy- three). So passed the Bourbon king whose coin would be found in a pauper's purse in California fifty years later.

One day, when he is old and gray, Joshua will tell a man who had known his parents that he was not the son of John Norton but a crown prince of France who had been sent to the Cape " to save himself from being assassinated. "

"I think you are crazy," Nathan Peiser would say.

"And so do a good many others," the Emperor would calmly reply, as if to imply that he knew something about French history that the historians would never know.

For where better to hide a French prince, Josh.jia must have 'reasoned, " than in the home of English Jews who had already shown their devotion to the Bourbon cause by giving their firstborn a Bourbon name? John and Sarah, having perhaps thoroughly displeased their kinfolk by naming a Jewish child after a Bourbon king, had placated them-and fooled them-by naming a Bourbon child Joshua Abraham.

A bit farfetched? Oh, absolutely. But it might have been the only sort of explanation likely to satisfy a mind that could build an empire out of nothing but dreams.

Royal changelings were not a bit uncommon when Joshua was growing up. Cape Colony's newspapers seemed to be fiIled with stories about people who claimed to have been robbed of a crown. Kaspar Hauser astounded Europe in 1828 when he limped into history by way of Nuremberg, a stumbling, mumbling, bumbling young vagrant with an incoherent yarn about his being kept in a dungeon for all of his sixteen years. Many thought his imprisonment pretty strong evidence that he was really the Grand Duke Stefan of Baden, who was kidnapped from his cradle when hardly more than a fortnight old. (His mysterious murder in 1833 caused even the staid London Times to look askance at the reigning Grand Duke Leopold, whose right to rule had been in serious dispute while the boy was alive). Then there was Maria Stella, Countess Newborough, the Italian widow of an English peer, whose autobiography in 1830 declared Louis Philippe, the new King of the French, to be the humble son of a village constable in Tuseany, supposedly swapped at birth for a daughter inconveniently born to the wife of that Duke of Orleans known as Philippe Egalitˇ, who needed a male child to carry on his line (the unwanted daughter being Lady Newborough).

But, without any doubt, the most famous of all was the Prussian clockmaker who professed to be the long-lost son of Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette, the crown prince who should have been Louis XVII.

The clockmaker, Karl Wilhelm Naundorf, f, arrived in Paris shortly after the July Revolution that unseated Charles X and elevated Louis Philippe, insisting that the crown was his. Naundorff claimed to be none other than Louis Charles de Bourbon, Duke of Normandy, the Dauphin of France, who at the age of eight became king in the eyes of all French royalists the instant the guillotine blade kissed his father's neek.

Louis Charles, caged alone in the ancient Temple, was supposed to have perished in prison of a wasting disease, but there was mystery surrounding that death. No one who could identify the Dauphin was permitted to see the body, which was buried at night in a hidden grave, thus lending an air of credibility to Naundorff's story that he was spirited out of the Temple by his jailer, who had locked a deaf mute in his room, a,child who could not protest. To prove he was Louis Charles he produced a variety of witnesses who had served the royal family in happier days at Versailles, all of whom swore that he was the Dauphin. When he sued the government of Louis Philippe for the return of the Dauphin's estate, he was expelled from the country. In London he turned inventor and published his memoirs, the sale of which must have been helped enormously by newspaper accounts of several attempts made on his life. His workshop was set ablaze and he was badly burned. A second fire destroyed his home, but he escaped the flames. And once, in the backyard lavatory behind his house, where he was literally a sitting target, he was shot in the breast with a bullet fired through the door.

Naundorff was possibly the most plausible of some thirty " lost Dauphins" who plagued Louis XVIII, Charles X, and Louis Philippe. The press reports of their escapades, arriving at the Cape with every ship, kept English and Dutch Afrikaner tongues wagging from Table Bay to the Fish. In a frontier town like Graham's Town, where the only diversion after sundown was to sit on the stoop and swap stories, many an evening must have been spent discussing the claims of Karl Naundorff, Kasper Hauser, and Lady Newborough. And all of this gossip about royal infants abducted and reared as commoners was sure to impress a country shopkeeper's son already dreaming an impossible dream.

Six of Sarah's nine children were born on the border. After Esther and Louisa came Selina, Mary Ann, Henry, and Benjamin John, all named for friends or relatives long gone. No more Bourbon names for small English Jews. There were no more Bourbon kings.

And far too few Jews in Albany for growing Nortons to marry; almost all would marry Gentiles. When Louis and Philip took Scottish brides, John made Louis a partner in the store nd bought Philip a farm. He was also generous to a son who would never marry. In 1839, when Joshua was twenty-one, his father gave him the capital to open a ship chandlery on the coast in partnership with Henry Kirch, a young Afrikaner who had just married seventeen-year-old Esther, and a happy Mrs. Kirch bounced off in a stagecoach to Algoa Bay with her Gentile husband and the brother who was no longer certain what he was.

Benjamin Norden, just twenty-two when he disembarked from La Belle Alliance with the Nortons in 1820, had built a wharf at Algoa Bay on the site where the settlers had landed. Now a fine harbor flourished there, Port Elizabeth. Joshua rented a warehouse, close to Norden's Wharf, and over its door painted the sign "Joshua Norton & Company." It was April the first, hardly an auspicious date. Within eighteen months he was bankrupt.

And that, too, may have helped unhinge him.

Norden was now Commissioner of the Municipality in Cape Town. On September 27, 1841, the eve of the Day of Atonement, seventeen men met in his home to read the Kol Nidre service. It was the first meeting of Jews for public worship in South Africa. A week later he founded Tikvath Israel, the Jewish Community Society of Cape Town. John and Sarah Norton moved to the capital with Joshua and their five youngest children, John to open a ship chandlery, Joshua to be his clerk, John to build a synagogue, Joshua to renounce Judaism.

Joshua's growing apostasy may have troubled John for some time, but he could hardly have guessed the awf ul extent of it. It came to light at a prayer meeting in their home on Bree Street and a shocked Nathan Peiser was there to witnOss it. This young sailor, hurled out of the sea on the wind to be a guest of the Nortons for almost a year, has already told the story but it now becomes important to reiterate:

"While enjoying the hospitality of Mr. Norton, Jewish prayers were frequently said, which was always a source of amusement to Joshua. One day he provoked the father to such an extent that, old as he was, he received a castigation. " And, according to Peiser, the very first thing Joshua said to him when they met again in San Francisco, twenty-five years later, was: "Why, yes, Nathan, I distinctly remember you, and the correction I received for raising a disturbance at a Jewish prayer meeting. "

What a whale of a correction that must have been to have remained in his memory a quarter of a century!

Peiser probably thought Joshua richly deserved it, but the sailor did not know the whole story, and neither did good John Norton, for both were quite unaware of the real reason for Joshua's impious behavior at family worship and the cause of his disgraceful disruption. What they saw and heard that day was almost certainly the first outward sign of the madness that had been festering in his brain since childhood. By 1842, at the age of twentyfour, after a decade of doubt about his identity, he had traveled too far along a twisted path to follow a faith to which he had never really felt he was born.

Cape Town was theatrically beautiful; the sun-splashed face of Table Mountain towered over the town like a painted backdrop while the picturesque castle on the beach, facing the harbor, might almost have been a stage prop, placed there by early Dutch settlers merely to enhance the decor. Indeed, the Castle of Good Hope looked much too civilized to be a fortress, a reputation it had managed to preserve for the better part of two hundred years by never firing a cannon except to salute a ship. Officially, it was the home of the Governor of Cape Colony. Unofficially, and to His Excellency's own continual amazement, it served as the home of Old Moses. 

Isaac Moses was one of the sights of Cape Town. Joshua must often have seen him grumpily stomping through the Heerengracht in his wide-brimmed hat, his faded army uniform, and his cloak of camel hair and silk, puffing on his Meerschaum pipe and glaring balefully at the shopkeepers who called " Good day, mijnheer" as he passed. The cantankerous old German, a former captain of the 60th Regiment, now living on an army pension, still occupied a room in the castle barracks and dined in the officers'mess. When he was retired from duty, so long ago that nobody could remember, he had simply refused to move out. A succession of British governors had closed their eyes to his unauthorized presence, not knowing quite what to do with him. Despite his disposition, which was as foul as his pipe, he became the castle's mascot, regarded with affection and treated with respect. The sentries at the gates presented arms when he approached-' ' Gawd! Here comes his bloomin' lordship!"--and any soldier who failed to salute could expect a tongue-lashing. Old Moses would accept no excuse for insubordination.

"Homboggery!" he would growl. "Alles flaussen and homboggery!" It became Cape Town's favorite catchphrase. Everybody used it to express disbelief.

Years later, in a city that never knew Old Moses, Joshua would parade the streets in a faded army uniform, demanding respect for a wholly imaginary rank. Whether he borrowed the idea from the crotchety old man in Cape Town no one will ever know, but it does seem worth considering. Of course, he thoroughly upstaged Old Moses when he called himself Emperor of the United States. Captain Isaac Moses would have thought that sheer homboggery.

Sarah died shortly after Nathan sailed away, and soon after that Louis was killed by a fall from his horse in Graham's Town, in Church Square, before the door of the Christian church his father had helped to build. Then, a year later, a sad letter from a Scottish daughter-in-law on a farm in Albany told John that Philip had succumbed to an illness. John himself was failing in health when he returned to England in 1848 to find a rabbi for Tikvath Israel; ten days after his ship docked in the Thames, he died in Deptford, leaving the bulk of his estate to his oldest surviving son, the one who believed he was not the child of John and Sarah Norton (though that did not deter Joshua from accepting a princely inheritance).

In the spring of 1849 the Reverend Isaac Pulver sailed from Deptiord to be the colony's first rabbi, arriving twenty years too late to stop a boy on a broomstick horse from a mad ride down a road that a frontier schoolmaster had shown him in the sincere belief that there was no other way to reach the kingdom of glory but the Christian way.

At the Cape of Good Hope there's a legendary bird called the Oof Bird. Its eggs are nuggets of purest gold, and those who hope to rob its nest must listen for its song and follow it. In 1849 Joshua heard the Oof Bird's song, and it came from out of the West. He followed it across the South Atlantic to Rio de Janeiro, and from there to California. 

Chapter 4 The Oof Bird's Nest

There's a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will.

-Hamlet, Act V, Scene ii

Late in the afternoon of November 23, 1849, a tall German ship appeared at the entrance to San Francisco Bay. Her spars creaked and her canvas shuddered, smacked by the buffeting wind, as she turned her stern to the sullen Pacific and ploughed through the Golden Gate. Captain Nicholas Deach gazed with dismay upon the great bay that now stretched before him. For more than three months, since Rio de Janeiro, he had battled gales and misfortune; yet even now, safe inside the sound, his troubles were far from over. The ships in the bay told him that. More than four hundred rusted at anchor, abandoned by crews gone in search of gold. His own men could not be trusted. Most, perhaps all, would probably desert.

The seven passengers he carried were all on deck with their baggage, eager to land, the perils of the voyage almost forgotten as they scanned the sand and scrub on shore for some sign of a port not yet in sight, hidden by a distant headland from which a mirror flashed.

"N"at ship?" asked the heliograph.

The incoming German winked a reply.

"Franzeska, Deach, Hamburg. "

Some boats came out to guide the creeping vessel through the forsaken fleet of brigs and barks. As she rounded the headland San Francisco suddenly appeared, a dense cluster of wooden buildings on the edge of a cove surrounded by hills, its muddy streets climbing steeply from the water to the sky.

The mirror on Telegraph Hill blinked a Iast message, reflecting the glint of a setting sun. For Joshua Norton the golden gleam signaled the end of an odyssey. He had found the Oof Bird's nest.

Peter Robertson, a young shipping clerk from Baltimore with money to invest, agreed to join him as the junior partner of Joshua Norton & Company, General Merchants. They searched the teeming town for an office and found one on the waterfront, a room in a cottage made of adobe bricks beside a busy wharf. It wasn't much of a place, but the commission agents and auctioneers who leased its mud-walled chambers probably would have paid an exorbitant rent to the skinflint who owned it.

James Lick has gone down in history as California's most eccentric millionaire. He ate frugally, dressed in rags, and drove about in a creaking cart, collecting bones from butcher shops, which he ground into dust to enrich his orchards in the Santa Clara Valley, south of the bay. A visiting nephew confirmed all this after Lick's death, complaining bitterly that he was made to sleep on top of an old piano. But others had good reason to remember the miser more fondly, for he sleeps today high on a mountain overlooking his valley, entombed beneath the splendid Lick Observatory that was only a part of his generous bequest.to the University of California, whose regents never had to lie on his piano and so bore him no malice.

Lick, a Pennsylvanian, arrived in San Francisco when it was still a sleepy trading village of less than five hundred people before the Gold Rush increased that handful to more than thirty thousand within a single year and the price of land soared beyond all reason. His offer of three thousand dollars for a lot beside the cove, therefore, seemed fair enough to Alfred J. Ellis, who had built the cottage on it. When Norton and Robertson came to its door, seeking a room, it's possible that neither partner had yet heard the macabre story told about that cottage when it was a tavern called The Points.

Alfred Ellis had named it because of the view. From its windows could be seen the headlands, Clark's Point and Rincon Point, between which lay the crescent cove. Both points were probably lost on Ellis's customers, roistering seamen more interested in liquor than landscape. Apparently they never suspected the innkeeper of diluting his whiskey, although after a while they did notice a marked change in its flavor. Some said it tasted abominable; others commended it highly, declaring that it improved as it aged. In time its taste became so strong that only a true connoisseur would drink it. Ellis himself was greatly puzzled until he explored the well in his yard and fished out the remains of a Russian sailor.

San Francisco had no water system in 1849, which suggests that Ellis's well would have still been there, serving James Lick's tenants. If Norton ever learned its history-and there were many who'd have been delighted to tell it-he must have thought twice before lowering a bucket.

The town, enclosed on three sides by hills and needing space to grow, was crawling into the bay on soil dumped into the cove. When this "made-ground" was offered at public auction, Norton bought three lots, and in choosing them showed considerable foresight, for he now owned three of the four corners of Sansome and Jackson Streets, soon to be one of the busiest intersections in San Francisco. He also bought two water lots near Rincon Point. These, marked off by stakes driven into the mud, possessed one asset of immediate value. An abandoned brig, the Genesee, had been fenced in by the surveyor's stakes. She was an ugly old derelict, rusted and scarred, but her holds were sound, so Norton removed her masts, roofed her deck like the biblical ark, and used her as a storeship. No longer would he have to pay excessive charges to warehouse the cargoes he bought.

He lived at the Jones Hotel, a four-story "portable" on Sansome Street, built in Boston or Baltimore and shipped in sections around the Horn, as were many of San Francisco's wooden buildings. From a balcony that skirted the top floor it was possible to see, across the roofs slanting up the hill on which the town was built, the frame hotels and gambling hells around the plaza, Portsmouth Square, and it's not unreasonable to suppose that on May 4, 1851, at four o'clock in the morning, Norton would have been on that balcony with other half-clad residents who had been aroused from sleep by the clanging of firebells. An orange glow above the plaza meant that a gaming house was ablaze.

The flames spread swiftly, fanned by a Pacifie wind, eastward toward the waterfront and north to Telegraph Hill. It was the fifth great fire in eighteen months, and by far the worst. The Alta California performed a heroic feat to describe it; its compositors, snatching up the pages of copy that poured from the editor's pen, were feverishly setting type as block after block burned and tumbled about them. Almost the last words written concerned Norton's lodgings:

All of the buildings about the Jones Hotel had been consumed when we went to press, and it is thought the hotel itself will burn, although the firemen were making extraordinary exertions.

The firemen, furiously pumping water from the cove, succeeded in saving the hotel, but when an anxious Norton stumbled through smoking ruins to find out what had become of his office, there was no sign of Lick's adobe.

"Little doubt, if any, remains that this city was set on fire by some fiend for the purpose of robbery," declared the Alta, ignoring the fact that a town constructed almost entirely of timber- a tinderbox town with no water system-was likely to burn without an arsonist's help.

The press knew where to point the finger. Immediately behind the blackened rubble of Lick's cottage, on the lower slope of Telegraph Hill, was the thoroughly disreputable quarter called Sydney Town, believed to be infested with escaped convicts and ticket-ofleave men from Britain's penal settlements in Australia. These rogues rejoiced in such florid nicknames as Bungaraby Jack, Jemmyfrom-Town, Big Brummy, Billy Sweet Cheese, and Tommy Round Head, and were known collectively as the Sydney Ducks.

The Daily Herald wanted to stretch their neeks. "If two or three were caught and treated to Lynch Law," the paper thundered, " their fellows would be more careful about future depredations. " And it counseled those. "who are interested in the welfare of this community" to do just that. Thus the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance was born, a fraternity devoted exclusively to the sport of Duck hunting.

On the night of June 10, a hundred merchants met in a storeroom on Sansome Street to draft a constitution and elect officers. It was not the best hour to commit a burglary, but John Jenkins 

was not the brightest of Sydney Ducks. He stole a safe from a shipping agent's office on Long Wharf and was surprised in the act. Some watermen, alerted by the agent's cry, pursued the skiff in which the thief was making his escape. After overtaking him, they towed him to shore, thrashed him soundly, and bundled him off to face a kangaroo court. Sentenced to hang that same night, he was marched in shackles through crowded streets to meet his doom on the moonlit plaza. A flagpole, some forty yards in front of an old adobe customhouse, was chosen for a gallows. The noose was dropped over his head and a man began to climb the pole, intending to slip the rope through the tackle block, when someone suggested it might be in poor taste to hang a thief from a staff dedicated to the nobler purpose of flying the nation's flag, whereupon an impatient executioner snatched up the loose end of the rope, ran to the customhouse, tossed the line over a beam, and shouted, "Haul away!" Two score of hands instantly seized the rope and pulled, jerking the manacled Jenkins o9 his feet. Then they dragged him by the neck to the portico of the adobe, heaved him off the ground, and hoisted him up to the beam.

The man who slung the rope over the beam was Captain Edgar Wakeman, the "burty, hairy, sunburned, stormy-voiced old salt" so extravagantly admired by Mark Twain, as much for his colorful cussing as anything else.

In 1851 the stormy-voiced "old salt" was thirty-three years old and had yet to meet the author who would immortalize him as Captain Stormfield in Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven. He was "profoundly and sincerely religious," according to Twain, though his chances of entering Heaven must have been somewhat slim if one can believe his own boastful book, The Log of an Ancient Mariner. When he strung up John Jenkins he already had a record of piracy and barratry that made the Duck's theft of a little safe-which the owner got back intact--seem a trifling offense. At that moment, as a matter of fact, a glowering sheriff in New York was asking every skipper who sailed into port where he might find the master of the New World. The sheriff, it seems, had gone aboard the steamer with a writ of attachment, forbidding her to sail until a certain large debt was paid. Ned Wakeman's reply was to kidnap the lawman, leaving him marooned on a sandbank in the East River before sailing on to California.

The New World was now the fastest side-wheeler on the Sacramento River, and her captain was the Vigilance Committee's lawless chief of police.

Norton was in a dilemma. The vigilantes were urging "all men of good moral character" to join them. He had no stomach for violence, but a refusal to enlist would have angered those who knew that he had suffered little in the fire. His goods were in the Genesee, beyond the reach of the flames, and he may even have profited from the misfortunes of his competitors by renting space in the storeship to those whose warehouses had been destroyed. The loss of his offiee was only a temporary inconvenience; a single line in the Alta California-" Joshua Norton & Co., Box 612, Post Office"--told customers where to pay their bills during the two weeks it took James Lick to erect a portable on the site of his burned cottage. The leaders of the Vigilance Committee were powerful men who enjoyed the support of a lickspittle press; any merchant who remained unmoved by their call for recruits--especially an English merchant, a compatriot of the Sydney Ducks-ran a grave risk of being ostracized by the entire business community. And ostracism meant financial ruin. He had no choice but to join.

At the Committee's headquarters on Battery Street, where Norton was sworn to secrecy and enrolled in the Book of Names, his photograph was taken so that his face might be kept on file. An old daguerreotype still in existence may have been the one provided. It shows a bald, broad- shouldered Norton with a mustache and thick muttonchop sideburns, fashionably attired in the black broadcloth suit and studded shirt of a prosperous businessman. There is a -strange, faraway look in his eyes, perhaps the hint of a glint of madness, though it may only have been due to the strain of gazing stiffly into a primitive camera for the length of time needed to capture an image on a copper plate.

Norton's true opinion of vigilante justice was clearly revealed in the affair of James Stuart, alias English Jim, wanted for murder in Marysville, for robbery with violence in San Francisco, and for roadside banditry all over the map. Only an unusually generous heart would have tried to obtain a fair trial for that unmitigated scoundrel.

Norton was dismayed to learn that even the right to plead guilty or innocent was denied a prisoner of the Committee, who was also not permitted to be present when he was tried. Under such eircumstances, no defense was possible. At a general meeting he pointed this out and moved that the rules be amended so that the accused might be heard. This did not suit some hard-liners, but he stood his ground until he got a majority vote on at least a diluted version of his proposal. The resolution, as it was written by the Committee's secretary, Isaac Bluxome, plainly showed what he thought of it:

On motion of Mr. Norton. Resolved: that no criminal shall be sentenced until he or she shall have an opportunity of pleading guilty or not guilty and assigning his or her reasons why judgement should not be passed.

The word " she " may be safely ignored, since there is no evidence that a Duck of tender gender ever nested in Sydney Town (at least, none was arrested by the Committee), but the rest of that paragraph deserves to be studied under a microscope; any student of jurisprudence would have thrown up his hands in horror upon reading it. That " no criminal shall be sentenced" until after he had pleaded could only mean that in Bluxome's mind the accused was guilty no matter what his plea; he would be sentenced anyway. It was a pitifully small victory for Norton and of little comfort to Stuart, whose plea of innocence was heard by a stony-faced court that had reached a verdict without the disturbing influence of his presence before bringing him in to spout the few words that would have no bearing anyway on those uttered by the " j udge. " On July 11 the tolling of a firebell beckoned the town to a hanging, and at two o'clock in the afternoon, on the Market Street Wharf, Captain Edgar Wakeman dangled English Jim from a derrick.

There was more to come. Two of Stuart's accomplices, Sam Whittaker and Bob McKenzie, were already serving time for their crimes in the County Jail on Broadway, but that did not satisfy the Committee. One sunny Sunday, while the Reverend Albert Williams was preaching to the prisoners in the jail yard, a raiding party burst through the gates, plucked the Ducks from the captive congregation, hustled them into a carriage, and galloped off to Battery Street, where a " profoundly and sincerely religious" man was waiting with his rope.

The Committee's headquarters was a long room above a store. Two windows, wide and tall, looked down upon the street, a stout beam projecting from each, equipped with iron pulleys for hauling goods in and out of the storeroom, ideal for hanging men in a hurry. All the church bells that chimed in the city that Sunday could not attract the vast crowd that one firebell could summon. Several thousand jeering, cheering spectators watched Whittaker and McKenzie take the single faltering step that carried them straight to hell.

It was more fun than going to church.

The Committee never formally disbanded; it simply petered out. A printer marked its passing by producing a certificate of membership, an ornate diploma that any vigilante might purchase to frame and hang in his home. Norton may have been too ashamed to buy one; though the contents of his lodgings would be amply described by visitors in years to come, even to the pictures on his walls, nothing would ever be said about a certificate of membership in the Committee of Vigilance.

Ned Wakeman received a handsome reward for performing his grisly duties. At a banquet given in his honor, he recalled in his Log of an Ancient Mariner, " nine large diamonds, elegantly set, were pinned to my breast, a large and heavy silver speaking trumpet, appropriately inscribed, was tucked under my arm, and a fullchronometer watch of solid gold with double cases was placed about my neck by a heavy chain, seven feet four inches long, to which were attached a massive anchor and large ring of California gold. "

Then, because he was such a fine fellow, he was given command of a side-wheeler bound for Sydney, Australia, where he ran full tilt into a squall much heavier than any he might have encountered during the crossing.

"Captain Edgar Wakeman of the American steamer, lately arrived, assisted in murdering some of Australia's finest citizens, is a most dangerous person, and will have but twenty-four hours in which to leave the country," the Sydney Herald warned.

A mob went down to the docks, intent upon avenging the deaths of Australia's finest, but failed to receive any response from the American ship to their reasonable request that the captain come out and be hanged like a man. They contented themselves with swearing mightily at the armed seamen posted about her decks to repel boarders. Good thing nobody knew that a heavy chain seven feet long, with golden anchor attached, now reposed in Wakeman's sea chest, or he might have wound up in Sydney Harbor with San Francisco's gift around his neck as a sinker.


Chapter 5 Perchance to Dream

"If I were Emperor of the United States.

-Joshua A. Norton

A new San Francisco rose from the ashes of a timber town, a city of brick and stone, with water piped from a distant lake to cisterns under the streets. Joshua Norton moved from James Lick's portable to No. 110 Battery Street, a substantial granite building that housed the offices of some of the most influential men in the state, men of the stamp of Sir William Lane Booker, the British consul, whose immense wealth came from his New Almaden quicksilver mine near San Jose. Norton was on-familiar terms with this tall, distinguished Englishman, recently knighted by Queen Victoria for his services to the Crown; both were Freemasons, charter members of Occidental Lodge No. 22.

On his made-ground at the southwest corner of Jackson and Sansome Streets, Norton opened a cigar factory. On the southeast corner he put up a large frame building, renting its rooms to businessmen. Then, on the northwest corner, he built a rice mill. It was crude-a mule provided the power, plodding endlessly around a ship's wheel-but it was the first on the Pacific coast. He did nothing to improve his water lots at Rincon Point. There was no need; their value inereased immediately when the Pacific Mail Steamship Company built a passenger terminal and a warehouse alongside. When a big side-wheeler from Panama berthed beside the Genesee, the warehouse was crammed with cargo and so was his storeship. 

The steamers brought wealthier immigrants, and a society of sorts began to emerge; men who had " made their pile" sent home for their wives, who had their own ideas as to how the rich should live. The Jones Hotel was no longer socially acceptable, so Norton moved to the newer, more prestigious Rassette House. A good address was important these days, for he was walking with gods. That is to say, he knew the MeAllisters.

Hall McAllister, an urbane lawyer from Georgia who would reign over San Francisco's fashionable set for more than thirty years, lived in a cottage on Pike Street with a younger brother who was about to return East. A day would come when New York's aristocrats would gladly surrender an eyetooth for a nod of recognition from the arrogant Ward McAllister, who created the privileged order known as "The Four Hundred" by pruning Mrs. William B. Astor's guest lists of names he considered unworthy to associate with the cr¸me de la cr¸me. In the San Francisco of the 1850s, this social arbiter would have found it immensely tryin to think of even forty names he would have dared recommend to an Astor. He had to be content with the company of merchants like Norton, who came to Pike Street to discuss business ventures with Hall over brandy and eigars. Dinner with the brothers was something to brag about, particularly when their witty cousin, Sam Ward, was on hand to supervise the menu and select the wines.

Sam Ward is remembered in half a dozen books as the short, slight, irrepressibly cheerful bon vivant who taught America how to dine; the "King of the Lobby" whose political string-pulling saved President Andrew Johnson from impeachment by a single vote; a patron of poets and publishers, whose very least claim to fame was that he happened to be the brother of that Julia Ward Howe who wrote "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." In 1852 much of that still lay ahead, though he was already far better known among the literati than his sister; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow called him "the best of Sams," and Ward called the bard "Longo." Even the Astors had found him eligible enough to be admitted into the family; some fifteen years before, when he was a banker in New York, he had won the heart and hand of William B. Astor's lovely daughter, Emily, only to lose her in childbirth. Now he was married to Medora Grymes, a pampered beauty whose wifely devotion, sad to say, had proved too fragile to survive the failure of his Wall Street bank. Promising to do better in future, he had sailed with Hall and Ward MeAllister to California, jauntily convinced that he would return with gold enough to satisfy even the spoiled Medora.

Ward had just returned from the Merced River, where he had staked out a gold-bearing quartz mine, and was lodging with his MeAllister kinsmen while he rounded up the capital to work his claim.

"Hall, " he said to his cousin when he moved into the cottage, "give me the run of the kitchen and you shall have the feast of your life. "

Hall MeAllister was never one to stifle genius.

"Go to it, old fellow," he said, " and hang the expense.

Sam took him at his word. Dismissing the cook for the day, he brought in some workmen and tore down the entire kitchen. Then he built one more to his liking.

Among the guests were two rough diamonds who probably would never have been invited if Ward MeAllister had been the host. William Sim and Alexander Sibley had been on the Merced with Sam and had some gold to invest. Hence the dinner party; Sam needed some of that gold for his quartz mine. But Bill Sim, an amiable giant from Glasgow, was tired of mining and not much interested in Sam Ward's quartz. He wanted to go into the mercantile business, and Hall MeAllister knew just the thing. Joshua Norton happened to be in need of a partner; Peter Robertson, after two years of fires and lynch mobs, was yearning for quieter parts. A meeting was arranged and a deal was made. Robertson relinquished his interest in Joshua Norton & Company to the burly Scot and sailed away.

That Sim and Sibley lacked the polish that might have endeared them to the younger MeAllister is obvious from Sam Ward's account of their adventures on the Merced in a New York weekly, Porter's Spirit of the Times. It contained an anecdote that neatly captured Sim's rich Glaswegian accent and made Sibley sound like a tobacco-chewing prairie scout in a dime novel by Ned Buntline.

Bill Sim was not accustomed to roughing it. After an evening's drinking and yarning with miners in a small hotel near Quartzburg, he viewed with dismay the hard bunks provided by the innkeeper and hurried outside to appropriate the only comfortable couch available, a hammock slung between two trees. Alex Sibley, who coveted the hammock himself, decided to get it by fair means or foul. Arousing the drowsing tenderfoot, he inquired whether his pistol was loaded.

Sim, who was unarmed, asked why.

"Thar's b'ars about," said Sibley. " Couple of nights ago, they stole a mutton that was hung out to cool. "

The trick didn't work. Sim, saying only that he would be tickled to meet his first grizzly, borrowed a revolver from the hotelier and settled down again. Refusing to give up, Sibley hid in a thicket and waited for the Scot to fall asleep. Inside the crude hotel, Sam Ward and his bunkmates listened gleefully for the next move. Suddenly they heard a growl outside, then a great roar and a tremendous crashing in the bushes. A moment later came a sharp rap at the door.

"Halloo, " called Ward, trying to smother his laughter. " Is that you, Sim"

"Aye, " came the reply. " I find it ower caud [a bit cold I oot here in the dew. I think I'll sleep  in the hoose after all.

So much for Norton's new partner.

One thing about Americans amused Norton. During those Gold Rush years, following the acquisition of California and other Mexican provinces by conquest, they described their greatly expanded land as an "empire" just as a Briton might speak of Victoria's far-flung possessions. Newspapers used the word constantly in editorials, poets in patriotic verse, authors in books (the most suecessful best-seller in 1852 was Bayard Taylor's El Dorado, or Adventures in the Path of Empire). Almost every town and mining camp in the Far West boasted an Empire House hotel. San Francisco had an Empire House, an Empire Saloon, an Empire Brewery, an Empire Oil Works, and a volunteer fire company called Empire Engine Company No. 1. Norton thought all this foolish. Empires, he pointed out, were ruled by emperors, not elected politicians.

One member of the MeAllister coterie, Joseph Eastland, would remember this years later, telling the Alta California:

Norton was a strong anti-Republican, advocating England's system of government, and insisting that that of the United States was infamously crude and should be reconstructed. What it wanted was an emperor, and he would add.- "If I were Emperor of the United States, you would see great changes effected. "

He must have become a bit of a bore about this, because the Pike Street crowd gave him a nickname; they called him " Emperor. " But what Eastland did not know, what nobody knew in those days, was that Norton had already crossed the fine line dividing sanity from madness-and was perfectly serious.

On the sandy shore of North Beach, facing the stark rock of Aleatraz, a city alderman named Henry Meiggs built a wharf, thrusting it far into the bay where a captain in search of a berth needed no spyglass to see it as he sailed through the Golden Gate. To develop the property surrounding his wharf, he borrowed heavily, confidently predicting that San Francisco must soon stop creeping into a cove already choked with landfill and start crawling north, where there was more room to expand. One could easily believe a man whom the newspapers called " Honest Harry," and there was a rush to buy the beach lots he offered for sale in the area now known to every tourist as Fisherman's Wharf. Norton bought eight, four in his own name and four in partnership with Judge Lansing Bond Mizner.

The books that have been written about the Mizners have largely been concerned with the madcap antics of two of Judge Mizner's tall sons. Wilson Mizner, the artful dodger who staggered Ward McAllister's privileged Four Hundred when he married the widow of Charles Tyson Yerkes-"the second richest woman in the world "-began his gaudy career selling Dr. Slocum's Sweet Vermifuge Mastodon Medicine at a tent show in Spokane. He went on to be a Klondike gold miner, a gambler, a prizefighter's manager, a Broadway playwright, a screenwriter, and finally the well-known restaurateur whose Brown Derby was the favorite haunt of movie stars in the 1940s. His brother, Addison, the architect who put Palm Beach on the map of Florida and kept New York in stitches with epigrams that Oscar Wilde might have envied, was unconventional enough to go shopping in his dressing gown and sometimes in his pajamas.

"And I thought they were going to be at least bishops or ambassadors, " their mother sighed before she died. Ella Watson Mizner had good reason to expect better things of children whose father had been the United States Minister to Guatemala and Envoy Extraordinary to Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Honduras.

Lansing Bond Mizner was twenty-seven, still unmarried, and an Associate Justice of the First Court of Sessions in Solano County, across the bay, when he went into partnership with Joshua Norton. But Franklin Pierce had just been elected President and was about to push Judge Mizner one step further up the political ladder by appointing him Collector of Customs for the Northern District of California. It would do Norton no harm to be associated with a customs chief whose jurisdiction extended from the Bay of San Francisco to the Oregon border.

Mizner's uncle was Dr. Robert Semple, the lanky dentist from Illinois who rode into Alta California with John Charles Fremont, the Pathfinder, to play a cloak-and-dagger role in the revolt by American settlers that raised the curtain on the conquest of Mexico's least prepared province. It was Semple, a conspicuous conspirator in buckskin, seven feet seven inches tall from his moccasins to his Davey Crockett cap, who had imprisoned the local Mexican commandante, General Mariano Vallejo, leaving an unguarded Golden Gate wide open to invading U.S. marines.

General Vallejo, a practical man, accepting defeat with a shrug, had gone into partnership with his former captor in a scheme to build a new town on a corner of his estate beside the Carquinez Strait, the channel through which the riverboats passed on their way to Sacramento, the gateway to the goldfields. They had proposed to call the settlement Francesca, after the general's lady, Donna Francesca Benicia Vallejo, but decided to honor her by calling it Benicia, thinking her first name too closely resembled that of San Francisco, which might confuse visiting ship captains and cause them to deposit their cargoes in entirely the wrong spot. When Semple's nephew Lansing arrived, in 1849, they set out to make the little port the busiest on the bay.

Judge Mizner was in a jubilant mood when he crossed the water to buy land with Norton that autumn. For two years, since the new territory was granted statehood, while its legislators hemmed and hawed about where the state capital should be, wandering from one idyllic town to another, finding fault with each, Dr. Semple had lobbied ceaselessly to have the seat of government transferred to Benicia. Now he had just learned that the Legislature had voted to move there in February. Benicia's future was assured. The United States Arsenal was already located there and Pacific Mail was even now building docks and machine shops for the maintenance of its steamships. There was little doubt in Mizner's mind that a capital city with a harbor that could accommodate steamers, strategically placed to capture the traffic of both river and bay, must soon dislodge San Francisco as the center of trade.

He was due for a shock. The legislators would move to Benicia in February, only to move out again at the end of the year, having decided that Sacramento would make a much better capital.

"Papa Mizner was the best wrong guesser the world had probably ever produced," Addison Mimer wrote in his book, The Many Mizners.

The world's best wrong guesser certainly proved his right to that title when he threw in his lot with Joshua Norton.

Disaster struck almost at once. China, which supplied the rice that California consumed, suffered a terrible famine and banned the export of grain. Norton's mule ceased to plod, the ship's wheel ceased to turn, and the price of rice climbed from four cents a pound to thirty-six. That would mean a windfall for the trader who could supply it, but there was none to be bought. At the Merchant's Exchange, where Norton went daily to bid for cargoes, he anxiously watched the board for news of a shipment. Then, one day, a shipping agent took him aside to whisper the word that would dramatically change his life.

The German firm of Godeffroy & Sillem was the largest mercantile banking house in the city. Alfred Godeffroy and Willy Sillem were members of the McAllister set, and not at all averse to doing a friend a favor that would also benefit themselves.

Sillem showed Norton some rice.

"That's from Peru, and there are two hundred thousand pounds of it in the Glyde. "

Capital news! Where was the Glyde!

"In the bay. She cannot discharge because of the weather, but you may have the whole of her cargo if you buy it before anyone else gets wind of it.

And the price!

"Twelve and a half cents a pound.

Twenty-five thousand dollars was an enormous amount to risk on a venture in those days, but the rice would be worth seventytwo thousand at the current retail price (and to arrive at a better understanding of today's value, simply multiply by ten).

Sillem, acting for the consignors, Ruiz Brothers of Lima, Peru, agreed to accept two thousand dollars as a down payment with this proviso written into the contract: " Payment to be made cash before delivery of any portion, and the whole to be taken away and paid for within thirty days. " The date was December 22, 1852. Norton signed the agreement, paid the deposit, and told his stockman in the Genesee to clear the decks for rice.

And then the blow fell.

Next day, the Syren sailed into port with 218 barrels of Peruvian rice. And the day after that, Christmas Eve, the Merceditas arrived with two hundred thousand pounds. Then came the Dragon with two hundred and fifty thousand, followed by ship after ship with barrel upon barrel until the market was glutted and the price just three cents a pound.

When Norton tried to nullify the contract, claiming that the grain in the Glyde was inferior to the sample that Sillem had shown him, Ruiz Brothers took him to court, seeking to attach his property. It was all too much for Bill Sim. The embarrassed Scot threw up his hands and went off to join Sam Ward on the Mereed. He would rather face a hundred bears than one sheriff armed with a writ.

The same sheriff, it so happened, was looking for little Sam Ward. A banker named William T. Sherman had set the law on him for issuing bad cheeks.

Chapter 6 The Edge of Hell

"Ay, but thou talk'st as if thou wert a king." "Why, so I am-in mind; and that's enough."

-King Henry the Sixth, Part Three

Captain William Tecumseh Sherman, who had soldiered in California before the Forty-Niners came, had returned as a civilian to build a bank for Lucas, Turner & Company of St. Louis, in which he was a partner. Searching for a suitable location, his eyes fell on James Lick's property at Montgomery and Jackson. The miserly millionaire, who had bought the lot from a saloonkeeper for three thousand dollars, was perfectly williug to sell half of it for thirtyone thousand. Lick's portable was demolished and a fine brick building, three stories tall, rose on the site of Norton's old office.

So much had changed in the six years since Sherman's last visit in 1848. Montgomery Street, once a wisp of a track fronting a muddy beach, was now a busy thoroughfare of banking houses, shipping companies and brokerage firms, throbbing with traffic. Streetlamps had just been installed along its sidewalks by the San Francisco Gas Lighting Company. Sherman's new Lucas- Turner Building was one of the first in the city to be lighted with gas,

Sherman's bank was founded on faith in San Francisco's economic stability, which was ironic considering that when he lighted his gas mantles and opened his door, in 1854, the city was already teetering on the brink of a severe depression. This would not be known until Alderman Henry Meiggs-Honest Harry--secretly chartered a ship and sailed for Peru, leaving his stunned investors to discover that he had financed his wharf and the entire North Beach development with forged city warrants. Banks and reputations toppled together in '55. San Francisco, almost two million dollars in debt, managed to avoid bankruptcy only by repudiating the warrants. In a letter to his partners in St. Louis, Sherman noted the plight of Godeffroy & Sillem: "The German house, which was humbugged, were heavy losers and failed." One asset they sold before they crumbled was the mortgage on Norton's land at North Beach. The title deeds were now Sherman's.

Norton had trouble making the payments. His legal battle with Ruiz Brothers was swallowing up too much of his capital. Time and time he faced the rice shippers in court as first one side and then the other appealed a ruling. The final judgment, in May 1855, awarded the plaintiffs twenty thousand dollars and costs. When Norton failed to meet his obligations to Lucas, Turner & Company, Sherman foreclosed and the beach lots were lost. That same month he was suspended from his Masonic lodge for failipg to pay his dues.

The depression finished him. Cargoes, going begging for buyers, were left on the wharves to rot. Unable to recover his losses through trading, he ventured into stock brokerage with Isaac Thorne, an attorney and state assemblyman. Norton & Thorne, Stock & Gold Dust Brokers, 120 Montgomery Street, Iasted only three months. Norton opened a real estate office at the same address, but money was scarce and buyers interested only in bargains. Ris property at Sansome and Jackson went at a loss-land, mill, mule, and eigars.

Worse, he was accused of embezzlement.

In '52, when he was still in McAllister's good graces, a Pike Street architect, Norman Bugbee, who was planning a protracted visit to the East, had given him power of attorney to manage his financial affairs while he was gone. Now, three years later, Bugbee was back and wanted an accounting. Norton made excuses, stalling for time, possibly hoping to turn a profit on some transaction to rescue him from his predicament, but the architect became convinced that he had misappropriated his money, using it and losing it in that foolish venture with Thorne.

Embezzlement, now a felony, was then a civil offense. Bugbee engaged a lawyer and sued. Norton must have been hQrrified when the newspapers reported it. He went to see Captain Sherman, offering his water lots at Rincon Point as security for a loan, but the banker would not lend more than would satisfy Bugbee. At least it would stave off another embarrassing court appearance, one that would surely have destroyed his reputation, which had already been called into question by press accounts of his attempts to wriggle out of a contract by accusing Willy Sillem of deceiving him with a handful of rice. Bugbee was paid, the suit was dropped, and the papers said no more about it. But Norton was no longer welcome in Pike Street. When Lansing Mizner married Ella Watson, an event that ranked high on the social calendar of 1855, it's unlikely he was invited.

Hall MeAllister married too, and moved into a mansion on fashionable Stockton Street. Pike Street was no place to take a bride, having become the resort of prostitutes. The notorious Belle Ryan had her bagnio there, next to Ah Toy's and Irene MeCready's. The papers, ever alert for a scandal, were telling an improbable story about a house on that street.

Judge Edward McGowan, a walrus-mustached Justice of the Court of Quarter Sessions, had deeded his own Pike Street cottage to a French courtesan, Fanny Perriere, on the reckless understanding that she would share her favors with no one else. One evening, dropping in without thinking to knock, he found the lady entertaining a more attractive visitor, Alfred Godeffroy, who dived for the door when he heard the judge roar and was speeding for cover like a startled gazelle by the time McGowan drew his fivebarreled Colt and fired. Godeffroy.escaped unhurt, but any suggestion that McGowan must have missed him was quickly corrected by the judge, who rather prided himself on his marksmanship. Not at all, said he, Godeffroy moved so fast that he almost outpaced the bullet; so swift was his sprint that the leaden ball was spent when it reached its target and merely flattened itself against his bottom without penetrating. McGowan swore to the truth of this and for proof pointed to the fact that the German could still sit down. Thereafter, Willy Sillem's partner would always be known in the less polite sections of the press as " Old Cast Iron Posterior. "

Norton wrote to Ned McGowan, seeking his help. The judge was County Chairman of the Democratic Party, and on May 20 the Democrats would hold a convention to choose their candidates for city and county elective positions. This year's election would be a milestone in San Francisco's history; under the terms of a new charter the city and the county would become one, incorporated as the City and County of San Francisco, administered by a mayor and a Board of Supervisors. In his letter, as cool as you please, the monarchist who deplored republican polities asked the chairman to nominate him for the post of County Tax Collector!

Since an alien would not have been eligible for public office-indeed, could not even vote- Norton's request would seem to suggest that he had recently become a United States citizen (a possibility that cannot now be determined, all Immigration and Naturalization records for the San Francisco area having disappeared in the fire and earthquake of 1906). Federal law required then, as it does today, that an applicant for citizenship must have resided in the States not less than five years. He could have applied in December 1854, five months before the Democratic convention, but his own country would still have considered him British, since Britain did not yet recognize the American naturalization of British-born subjects. There is the chance that he sought election without bothering to apply for citizenship, in which case his letter to McGowan could be a clue that his mental processes were not functioning properly. However, the fact that he was not considered as a candidate does not necessarily mean that the Democrats dismissed him as a crank. Actually, he hadn't a chance of getting on the public payroll as long as David C. Broderick was running the city.

Broderick, a burly, redheaded New York Irishman, was president of the State Senate. It was said that he " looked upon the state as an oyster. " If California was his oyster, San Francisco was the pearl. And that precious gem was in his hands before he became a state senator, thanks to the shipload of Tammany Hall henchmen he had imported from New York. Even his most ardent admirer, Jeremiah Lynch, had to admit in his biography of Broderick, A Senator of the Fifties, that his methods were hardly in keeping with the golden rules:

At a forthcoming election a number of offices were to be filled. Several of these positions were very lucrative, notably that of sheriff, tax-collector, and assessor. The incumbents received no specified salary, but were entitled to all or a portion of the fees. These fees occasionally exceeded $50,000 per annum. Broderick would say to the most popular or the most desirable aspirant: "This office is worth $50,000 a year. Keep half and give me the other half, which I require to keep up our organization in the state. "

A tax collector's lucrative post might have solved all of Norton's problems, but he was not the sort of candidate Senator Broderick was inclined to favor, the Irishman's idea of "the most desirable aspirant" being another Irishman. Ned McGowan was certainly what the press called "one of the B'hoys." David Scannell, Broderick's choice for sheriff, and Billy Mulligan, his nominee for Keeper of the County Jail, were both Irish. Empire Engine Company No. 1, the volunteer fire brigade founded by Broderick, supplied the muscle that kept the city under his control; its red-shirted heroes bore names that smacked strongly of their Hibernian origin: Tom Mulloy, Billy Mulligan, Jim Henessey, Rube Maloney, Jack McGuire, Marty Gallagher, Francis Sullivan. An Englishman would have been about as welcome in the Broderick camp as a teetotaler at a wake.

It was about this time that William T. Sherman had occasion to speak sharply to a tenant of his Lucas-Turner Building. James P. Casey, a Broderick man newly elected to the Board of Supervisors, edited the Sunday Times in a room on the top floor. An article he had published, accusing the banking fraternity of collusion in the Meiggs fraud, angered Sherman, who stormed upstairs and "told him plainly that I could not tolerate his attempts to print and circulate slanders in our building, and if he repeated it, I would cause him and his press to be thrown out of the window.

The politician wisely vacated the premises.

Casey's wayward pen aroused the ire of another editor, the oddly named James King of William, a banker himself until the crash of 1855, now owner of the Evening Bulletin, a lively new daily that specialized in exposing the sins of Broderick's B'hoy's. Casey's attack on the banks sparked an explosion in the Bulletin, which accused the new Supervisor of political fraud. One thing led to another, with accusations flying back and forth. When the Bulletin alleged that the politician had once served time in Sing Sing for stealing a prostitute's furniture, Casey went to King's office on Montgomery Street to demand a retraction, only to be advised that he could expect further revelations in the next issue. At five o'clock that evening, when King left his desk in the Montgomery Block to go home, Casey was waiting on the sidewalk with a Derringer.

The shot that rang through Montgomery Street echoed next day in the newspapers, and within hours a second Committee of Vigilance was born. Casey, who had sought sanctuary from a sympathetic Irish sheriff, heard the news in prison. His victim, shot in the breast, was still breathing four days later when three thousand vigilantes wheeled a fieldpiece up Broadway, aimed it at the door of the County Jail, and ordered Sheriff Scannell and Keeper Billy Mulligan to surrender the prisoner.

That Sunday noon, May 18, 1856, William T. Sherman was on the roof of the International Hotel with the Governor of California, who had just appointed him major-general commanding the San Francisco division of the California Militia. From this position he could see the jail and the rooftops surrounding it. "All of the houses commanding a view were covered with pep1e," he wrote some two hours later to his partners in St. Louis. " Telegraph Hill was black with them. "

Norton was on that hill. His bank balance having dictated a move to humbler lodgings, he now lived in the boardinghouse of a Mrs. Rutledge on Montgomery Street, overlooking the County Jail. Here, where the street crossed Broadway and suddenly climbed like a roller coaster, the shoulder of Telegraph Hill had been excavated to make room for the jail, leaving the Rutledge house perched on a man-made clif f thirty feet above the prison yard. Few could have had a better view than Norton. If his room was on the south side of the house, he had no need to climb to the roof with the other lodgers; he had only to step to his window.

Sherman knew all about the view from Mrs. Rutledge's windows. He had already reconnoitered the area and seen for himself " how utterly indefensible the jail-yard was, open to the rear, overlooked on all sides by brick houses with parapet walls, no part of the interior safe from shots. "

But there was no need of snipers in Norton's lodgings. The Vigilance Committee had promised there would be no violence if the sheriff would give up Casey, and Scannell had no choice, being helpless against three thousand men with a -cannon. In his letter to St. Louis, Sherman described exactly what Norton would have seen from his window. Casey was taken from the jail and put into a waiting carriage, which bore him away "with two files of armed men on each side, followed by a promiscuous crowd. "

Then another carriage was brought to the jail and a second prisoner was removed--Charles Cora, a gambler who had shot and killed a drunken U. S. marshal for insulting his mistress, Belle Ryan, the parlor-house madam of Pike Street. James King of William had been demanding his execution for months.

Cora and Casey were taken to the Committee's headquarters, a warehouse known as Fort Gunnybags because of the barricade of sandbags the vigilantes had put up to protect it from attack. Sherman would have stormed that redoubt if the Governor had not stayed his arm, but lacking the order-and the bullets--all he could do was knock on the door and ask that the captives be fairly tried, a futile request as Norton had discovered five years earlier. Word of the editor's death sealed the fate of both. As James King's funeral cortege crawled through the streets to Lone Mountain Cemetery, Casey and Cora stepped from the windows of Fort Gunnybags with rope about their neeks.

Norton soon moved from Mrs. Rutledge's boardinghouse on Montgomery Street. He was earning a living as a commission agent, and an advertisement in the Herald showed he was able to afford slightly better quarters:

"100,000 pounds China rice; 2,090 gallons Boiled Linseed Oil in tins. For sale by Joshua Norton, Tehama House. "

The Morning Call would later say: " Some businessmen tried to help him by entrusting him with the sale of a quantity of goods on commission. The result was disastrous and unsatisfactory to all concerned and Norton was censured for bad faith with both sellers and purchasers. He is reported to have cleared considerable money in the transaction and left his lodging-house, taking a room at the lnternational Hotel, one of the leading hotels at the time. "

Well, it wasn't the International but the Tehama House, as Norton's own advertisements indicated, and he would not have needed " considerable money" to live there, since the Tehama House was merely the old Jones Hotel under new ownership and possibly a new coat of paint, hardly " one of the leading hotels. "

But few would remember this period of his life. There were more pressing matters to think about in 1856. Guns were blazing in Kansas and there was seareely a soul in San Francisco who did not think that the fighting there might suddenly erupt into a full- scale revolution that could dismember the empire state by state.

"But if thou be a king, where is thy crown?" "My crown is in my heart, not on my head; not deck'd with diamonds and Indian stones, nor to be seen. My crown is call'd content; and a crown it is that seldom kings enjoy."

-King Henry the Sixth, Part Three

For thirty-five years, since the admission of Missouri into the Union as a slave state in 1821, it had been the custom to admit slave states and free states in pairs to maintain the balance of political power between North and South. This had worked well enough until California was admitted as a free state at a time when there happened to be no slave territory that could be granted statehood, and the South was greatly perturbed by the prospect of two antislavery senators taking their seats in Washington with no new proslavery senators to offset their influence. To placate the South, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law, which held that a slave who escaped to free soil must be returned to his master and commanded all citizens to assist in his capture, providing heavy penalties for those who helped him. That law infuriated the North, for it meant that the sovereignty of the states had been superseded by a federal government dominated by Southerners. To many the burning issue now was not the plight of the rlave so much as the inviolability of states' rights.

The Fugitive Slave Law split the Democratic Party, many joining with M%igs and Free-Soilers to found the Republican Party, which gained immediate strength when President Pierce, a proslavery Democrat, angered the North still further by signing the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which permitted the settlers of Kansas and Nebraska to decide by ballot whether they wished their territories to be slave states or free. Republicans saw this as a Southern trick, protesting that it would be an easy matter for the slave state of Missouri to fill neighboring Kansas with enough voters to bring it into the proslavery fold. Abolitionist societies provided funds to send settlers into Kansas who would vote to keep its soil free, while the South sent settlers to enslave it. Guerrilla bands on both sides, Border Ruffians from Missouri and Jayhawkers from the North, rode from farm to farm, terrorizing the homesteaders into voting their way. With ballot and bullet the Missourians fiIled every public office in the territory and established a government in Lecompton that outlawed the Abolitionist movement and made it an offense worth five years in prison even to voice an opi,iion against slavery. When rebellious Free-Soilers formed their own legislature, in Lawrence, an army of Border Ruffians attacked and sacked the town.

"The Rape of Lawrence" reaped a terrible revenge. An aging religious fanatic named John Brown, riding at night with four of his sons along the banks of the Pottawatamie, aroused from their beds five settlers known to have voted for slavery-though too poor to own a slave-and butchered them with broadswords for the greater glory of God. Then he carried his holy war into Missouri.

"Should desperate men bring about civil war, an awful calamity, you in St. Louis will be the first to feel the blow," Sherman warned his partners in Missouri.

He was already thinking that perhaps he ought to be back in uniform, with the Army in Kansas. Which reminded him: "We are under the government of the Evening Bulletin, edited by my old clerk, Thomas King, whom I hope some Casey will dispatch." James King of William's brother, who had inherited the Bulletin, had soldiered in Kansas with Sherman, chiefly by writing his letters.

Thomas Sim King called the vigilantes " San Francisco's Purest and Best" and urged them on to further excesses. Two more men were lynched, others marched aboard ship and deported. But the Purest and Best went much too far when they arrested the Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court.

Judge David S. Terry, trying to rescue a friend from a posse of vigilantes, had stabbed their leader in the neck with a Bowie knife. The wounded man, Sterling Hopkins, had assumed the role that would surely have been Ned Wakeman's if the captain of the New World had not grown tired of riverboating and gone back to sea. It was Hopkins who knocked out the pegs supporting the hinged platforms on which Casey and Cora had stood to be hanged. The Bulletin called him the "sheriff" of the Vigilance Committee possibly hoping to justify the arrest of the Chief Justice on the grounds that his victim was also a man of importance, but the comparison was patently ridiculous because everyone knew that he was a pimp for his prostitute sister.

The Committee announced that Judge Terry would hang if Hopkins should die of his wound. This was a crass mistake, for though the press might applaud the lynching of a gambler and an unpopular Irish politician, no paper other than the Bulletin was prepared to condone the murder of the state's chief justice. Some editors found the courage to urge restraint, and the tide