Maybe you’ve noticed, if you live in the Northern Hemisphere, that lately it’s feeling like the middle of winter. If so, good for you for being sensitive to the world around you, because today, February 4, really is the middle of winter. That is, as long as you use the December solstice to mark the start of the season. If you live in the Global South, then good for you for another reason — you’ve reached midsummer!
Midwinter used to be its own holiday. By “used to be,” I’m talking about roughly a thousand years ago in northern Europe. That’s when the Yule holiday was celebrated. It was a celebration of the Wild Hunt and Odin, the god who appears in lots of different myths and ancient texts. In Old Norse (and Marvel comics) he’s the ruler of the gods living in Asgard. In Old English, he’s a supernatural ancestor. And we meet him, in a sense, every week; One of Odin’s other names is Wotan, and “Wednesday” means “Wotan’s day.”
Yule was a three-night celebration; three nights of feasting, animal sacrifices, and ale. Lots of ale. The Yule log was burned each night, and in the telling of the old stories, if you counted the sparks rising from it, you could foretell your future. There must have been a bit more to it than has survived in the lore, because knowing that there was a 27 or a 34 in your future probably wouldn’t be much help. On the other hand, if you managed to attach an event or a meaning to the number of sparks, you might manage to get a handle on what was to come.
That would have been a great help to Joshua Norton, who was born on February 4, 1818, in Kent, England. His family emigrated to South Africa when he was a boy, and he grew up in Cape Town. He left around 1845 and made his way to Boston, and finally, in 1849, to San Francisco, where he prospered as a trader of various commodities and a speculator in real estate. It was a few years after his arrival that he would have done well to attend a Yule festival, count the sparks from a Yule log, and notice the numbers 12 and 3. With the right inspiration, he would have foreseen that he was fated to buy a shipload of rice from Peru for 12 cents per pound, only to have the price crash to just 3 cents when several other ships loaded with Peruvian rice arrived in port.
Norton tried to sue to get out of his contract, claiming the dealer had lied to him about how much rice was due to arrive. After several years of litigation, the California supreme court finally ruled against him, and so he was financially ruined. So in 1859 he resorted to the thing you naturally do in such a circumstance. He declared himself the Emperor of the United States (and at some point also included Mexico). His declaration was in a hand-delivered letter to the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin. The editor, George Fitch, must have been faced with a slow news day, because he printed it.
In the letter, which became a public announcement after it was printed, Emperor Norton I called upon authorities to assemble and receive their orders. He continued in this for the next 21 years. Among other things, Emperor Norton abolished Congress, declared the Constitution null and void, and dissolved the entire republic — replacing it, of course, with a monarchy led by him. in 1862 he ordered both Catholic and Protestant churches to ordain him Emperor, explaining that this would end the Civil War and resolve all the related disputes.
Emperor Norton demanded that his city of San Francisco, as the Empirical seat of power, be accorded proper respect, and decreed that anyone referring to it slangily as “Frisco” was to be assessed a $25 fine. And in those days, $25 was a considerable sum. But some of his commands and edicts were spookily prescient (or maybe he really was counting Yule log sparks), because he commanded that a suspension bridge be built between San Franciso and Oakland (and now there is one exactly where he decreed), a tunnel for train travel (along the same route now used by the Bay Area Rapid Transit Transbay Tube tunnel), and directed that a League of Nations should be created — and a few decades later, that’s exactly what happened.
You might be wondering about the daily routine of an emperor, since there aren’t very many around these days. Emperor Norton got dressed every morning in a blue uniform with gold epaulettes on the shoulders. The army officers posted at the Presidio had given it to him. He wore a beaver hat decorated with a peacock feather and an elaborate rosette, and carried a cane or umbrella. Thus bedecked, he issued forth to inspect his city, particularly the conditions of the sidewalks, the cablecars, and the adherence of his police officers to the dress code he had issued.
One of those officers, probably some slob who couldn’t dress himself properly, got frustrated enough to arrest Emperor Norton and attempt to have him committed to a mental institution. The Emperor’s public protested at length, and luckily the police chief, Patrick Crowley, was a loyal subject who ordered Norton released, and issued a public apology. Emperor Norton was magnanimous enough to pardon the officer who had arrested him. Following that incident, every officer in the city saluted the Emperor if they encountered him along the way. He was always in evidence somewhere in the city, often delivering philosophical lectures to anyone in the vicinity. Rumor has it that if there wasn’t anyone nearby, the Emperor continued his lecture undaunted.
As befits an Emperor, Norton was certainly not called upon to do anything as common as paying for the meals he ate at the many lunch counters in the city. He typically shared his meals with the two royal dogs, Bummer and Lazarus. The dogs were city celebrities in their own right, and were exempt from any local ordinances so mean as to attempt to capture “stray” dogs. They were, of course, completely independent of Emperor Norton and only dined with him because they enjoyed the simpatico company of a fellow monarch.
You might be thinking that this was all nonsense, but I’ll have you know that there is official, written documentation supporting Norton’s claim. If you consult the 1870 Census of the US, you’ll find an entry for Joshua Norton, 50 years of age, residing at 624 Commercial Street, San Francisco. His occupation? “Emperor.” Emperor Norton also issued his own currency; promissory notes in various amounts from fifty cents to ten dollars. These were accepted by San Francisco restaurants as readily as any other US banknotes, and some still survive. They’re quite the collectors’ items, by the way — if you can find one, it’s worth thousands. And the Emperor Norton was recognized by foreign powers, too. He became Protector of Mexico when Napoleon III tried to invade it (he later relinquished this title), and his rule was officially recognized by King Kamehameha V of Hawaii as the rightful leader of the US.
Emperor Norton collapsed and died in early 1880, and his funeral was fit for a ruler. It was paid for by the Pacific Club, and the headline in the San Francisco Chronicle was “Le Roi Est Mort,” and reported that 10,000 mourners had lined the streets as his funeral cortege passed by. Some conflicting stories from other sources are probably just jealous distortions. And if you remember Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the King in that story was based on Emperor Norton.
Finally, who knows? Maybe Emperor Norton did count 20 and 3 sparks emanating from a Yule log, and maybe he really did see what was going to happen to his investment. And maybe that was perfectly fine with him.
