It's likely that not all of Emperor Norton the First's decrees have come down to us. Moreover, the corpus of proclamations we have contains pretenders. It's believed contemporaneous publishers exploited His Majesty by printing bogus decrees for Him, doing so to sell papers, poke fun, satirize, disown political views, or just onna counta they could. We include those fabrications because they're telling. They explain that His Highness was important enough to tempt imitation. They also suggest faking his royal signature provided the writer some protective cover. Thus the full body of Proclamations printed under Norton's name comprise a popular image of His Excellency during his life, albeit less than true.

Our collection comes from a number of color coded sources. Sometimes different collections give different dates for the same Proclamation. We have included all dates (whether in agreement or not) credited by color.

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Color Code:
This WebMinister found the majority of proclamations collected by Joel Gazis-Sax [printed in black text]. It appears that his current list has shrunk from its original volume (which we collected years ago). We encourage all Nortonians to visit Mr. Gazis-Sax's many authoritative and interesting websites.

The Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco lists only the Imperial Decrees they could authenticate [in true blue].

Proclamations in red are attributed to Norton-1 in:
The Forgotten Characters of Old San Francisco
by Robert Ernest Cowan, Anne Bancraft, & Addie L. Ballou, The Ward Ritchie Press.