E Clampus Vitus revived, 1931 to today

San Francisco. In 1936 a brass plate turned up near San Francisco Bay, cut with the words Francis Drake was said to have left in 1579 to claim the land for his queen. For forty years most of the experts believed it was his. Who cut it, and why, is a story that begins five years before the find, over lunch at a San Francisco hotel, with an order whose horn had been silent since 1920.

It begins with a diary. On 25 November 1930 a lawyer named Carl Wheat stood up at a luncheon of the California Historical Society, in the Clift Hotel, and read from the journal of a gold-rush storekeeper, Charles E. De Long. On 27 April 1856, at Young’s Hill in Yuba County, De Long had written that he “helped organize the E Clampsus Vitus Order on the hill.” The Society’s report of the meeting noted that De Long “joined the ‘E Clampus Vitus Society’”¹²⁷. The order’s horn had been silent for ten years. By Wheat’s own later account, the idea of bringing it back had come to him and a friend that spring. How they did it ›

A year later, on a Friday in December 1931, Wheat called a small group to the Clift Hotel “to ‘discuss’ ways & means for the revival of the Ancient & Honorable California Order” of E Clampus Vitus. He promised his guests nothing but “large ideas.” Five months later the revived order made its first pilgrimage into the gold country. Within a decade it had books, chapters, plaques and that hoax. Today it has 51 chapters across the eleven western states it counts as its own, and the Historical Marker Database lists close to nineteen hundred of its markers. This is how that happened, from the record.

This is the second part of the series. Part 1 is a lodge at Cassopolis, Michigan, in 1846, the earliest yet found with its charter members named; this part takes up the order’s revival in 1931 and follows it to today.

• 22charter members of the revival
• 40years the plate of brass was believed
• 1,877entries in the order’s marker series
• 51chapters today

The re-founders

DocumentedHow it began. By Wheat’s own account in the order’s history of 1966, “it was along in the spring of the year 1930 that it dawned upon the minds of two men,” Wheat and Leon O. Whitsell, to bring the old order back; G. Ezra Dane gave “an agreement to do all the dirty work necessary for this great revival.” “Conceived in 1930, reborn in 1931” (Then and Now, 1966, p. 19). The first chapter was Yerba Buena No. 1, at San Francisco.

DocumentedThe order was already in Wheat’s work. That same March, the California Historical Society Quarterly carried Wheat’s edition of the journal of Charles E. De Long, a Yuba County storekeeper who rose to be United States Minister to Japan. On 27 April 1856 De Long wrote that he had “helped organize the E Clampsus Vitus Order on the hill,” at Young’s Hill; in May he recorded its first initiates, “by way of experiment.” Wheat’s note on the entry ran to two pages: the order “was one of the most ludicrous sideshows of life in the mines of California,” its founding place disputed, “some say at Sierra City, others at Downieville, and still others at Hangtown”¹²⁶. On 25 November 1930 Wheat read from the diary to the California Historical Society, at a luncheon at the Clift Hotel, the hotel where the order would be brought back thirteen months later; the Society’s report of the meeting noted that De Long “joined the ‘E Clampus Vitus Society’”¹²⁷.

DocumentedClamptonville, 1932. The first pilgrimage set out on Saturday, 28 May 1932, in three automobiles and “one of the heaviest rains of the winter.” Eleven men went, each with an office of the old order: Moore, Wheat as Noble Grand Humbug, Ernest A. Wiltsee, Dane, George D. Lyman, Edwin Grabhorn, Whitsell, Douglas S. Watson, Francis Farquhar, Edgar B. Jessup and Thomas W. Norris. At Sierra City Moore went up to the attic of his old home and found the gray plug hat he had worn as a Clamper, “buried in attic dust for 35 years.” Of the eleven, only Moore had worn the hat before. At Camptonville, rechristened Clamptonville for the night, they were welcomed by Bill Meek, “pioneer member of the society of this place,” and “the sound of the Hewgag from the porch of the Meek store called the wayward Clampers together,” every man an officer and “all officers of equal indignity.” There Moore, “last N.G.H. of Balaam Lodge No. 107,304,” gave the new chapter, Capitulus Redivivus No. 1, its Great Charter, and was made Clampatriarch; Meek was made Grand Honorary Humbug. The old lodge’s blunderbusket, with “a barrel six feet long and a two inch bore,” went home with them to San Francisco (Appeal-Democrat, 2 and 6 June 1932; Sacramento Bee, 1 June 1932; Morning Union, 29 May 1932). Wheat was the revived order’s first Noble Grand Humbug; Douglas S. Watson followed him, and on 16 June 1934, at Auburn, Thomas W. Norris.

CWCarl I. Wheat 1892–1966 · the reviver

Lawyer and historian, born at Holliston, Massachusetts; chief counsel of the California Railroad Commission; author of the five folio volumes of Mapping the Transmississippi West, 1540–1861 (1957–63). The third President of the order, 1954–55. His plaque on the Wall of Comparative Ovations at Murphys, by William Gordon Huff, was dedicated in 1964.

EDG. Ezra Dane 1904–1941 · the researcher

Born at Pasadena; a lawyer and a writer of folklore, western history and humour, educated at Pomona College and Harvard. Wheat set him to research the order’s history (Wilson, 1995); his notes for a dissertation on the order are among his family’s papers at the Huntington Library. He wrote Ghost Town (1941) with his mother, Beatrice (Jodon) Dane, and died that October. His plaque at Columbia was dedicated on 21 September 1947.

LWLeon O. Whitsell 1876–1966 · the co-founder

Lawyer, admitted to the Iowa bar in 1900; citrus farmer and supervisor in Orange County; a member of the California Railroad Commission from 1925 to 1938, its president from 1928; Grand Master of the Masons of California, 1938–39. The second President of the order, 1945–54. His scrapbooks are at the University of the Pacific (Mss186).

AMAdam Lee Moore 1847–1946 · the link

Born at Rahway, New Jersey, on 5 May 1847; “taken in” to the old order at Downieville in 1867, by Dane’s account, and later Royal Platrix and Noble Grand Humbug of Balaam Lodge at Sierra City. He “proved to be a ‘gold mine’” of the old ways (Then and Now, p. 20). A mining man at Gold Creek and a stage driver, he married Miss Larrieu at Downieville in 1879; in 1935 a handbill billed them as “the oldest married couple who sing for the radio.” When he fell ill at ninety-six, with no income, “the Clampers of the bay region rallied to his assistance” (May 1943). He died on 13 November 1946, as his grave at Downieville records; his plaque at Downieville was unveiled on 4 July 1953 (Then and Now; the list of William Gordon Huff’s plaques gives 1955).

DocumentedThe twenty-two. The order’s own list of the charter members of the revival (Tom Barry, Hewgag Monitor, October 1986): Adam Lee Moore, Carl I. Wheat, Francis P. Farquhar, Edgar B. Jessup, Ernest A. Wiltsee, Leon O. Whitsell, George D. Lyman, Thomas W. Norris, Douglas S. Watson, James D. Stewart, Edwin Grabhorn, Charles P. Cutten, Jesse M. Whited, Lee L. Stopple, Frederick C. Clift, William T. McSorley, Henry R. Wagner, Phil T. Hanna, G. Ezra Dane, William Bull Meek, John McSorley and George N. Napoleon. Edwin Grabhorn, the San Francisco fine printer, was the first Poor Blind Candidate of the revived order (Charles Camp, in Then and Now, p. 20).

Did you know? In September 1937 Adam Lee Moore, at ninety, flew from San Francisco to Newark on an inaugural airline run with other pioneers, and in New York danced with the chorus girls at the French Casino (International News Service, September 1937). In June 1946 the Auburn chapter, Lord Sholto Douglas No. 3, gave Governor Earl Warren, later Chief Justice of the United States, a life membership. Both as clipped in Jim Cirner’s albums “ECV ® Back in the Day”.

Did you know? When the Mariposa Gazette printed the whole revived order’s roster on 4 June 1936, Yerba Buena’s forty-odd members included the director of the Bancroft Library, Herbert E. Bolton, and a young San Francisco photographer listed as “Ansel E. Adams, P.B.C.”: a Poor Blind Candidate.

DocumentedThe lunch at the Clift. Asked in the 1960s for the date of the revival, Wheat answered, through his wife, only “1931” (Then and Now, 1966). His own invitation gives the day. On 11 December 1931, on the letterhead of his law office in the Balfour Building, he wrote to Francis P. Farquhar that a few of them were going to get together for lunch at 12:15 on Friday, 18 December, at the Clift Hotel; Farquhar came, and is one of the twenty-two. So did the hotel’s owner. The Nevada City Nugget of 20 May 1932 named “Fred Clift, proprietor of the Clift hotel,” with Wheat, Whitsell and Ernest Wiltsee, among “the membership chartering the revival of the order,” and its notice of 8 April 1932 called the brethren back to the Clift at noon “for business important to the organization.”

DocumentedThe sources differ on the year. The order’s history of 1966, the University of the Pacific’s finding aid and Barry give 1931; the Huntington Library’s finding aid for the order’s records gives 1932, and the Joaquin Murrieta Chapter’s history has Wheat as Yerba Buena’s first Noble Grand Humbug in 1932. ReadingBoth fit the record: the lunch was called for December 1931, and the first pilgrimage went out in May 1932.

The handover at Marysville, 1940

DocumentedThe Clampers of 1931 were not the only E Clampus Vitus in California. The Marysville boosters had incorporated theirs on 9 November 1915, for a period of fifty years. On 18 May 1940 “a historic meeting was held in Marysville between the few remaining directors of the 1915 incorporation” and the revivers, who came with proxies from Leon Whitsell, Thomas Norris, G. Ezra Dane, Charles Camp, Ed Jessup and V. L. Van der Hoof; Lee L. Stopple was elected President, Ronald L. Olson Vice-President and Van der Hoof Secretary of the corporation (Then and Now, pp. 20–21). The revivers had found, Eric Falconer remembered in 1950, that “State Senator W. P. Rich and a group of Marysville Clampers had beaten them to the punch. … They supplied the organization and we threw in the enthusiasm.”

DocumentedWhat the order was for. Six years earlier the revivers had put their purpose in their own words: “To foster and perpetuate the glamour of the Days of Gold, to pass the staff of relief to those anxious to receive it, to keep a friendly eye upon the widows and orphans especially the widows” (Appeal-Democrat, June 1934). The order tied itself to history, too: “All PBC’s must prove an interest in California history,” and in 1963 the Argonauts were chartered, a chapter “restricted to members or those eligible for the Society of California Pioneers”; its delegate, Hobart Lovett of Berkeley, became the order’s Clamparchivist when the office was created (Then and Now). The chapter was dissolved in 1972, still in good standing; Ken Castro’s plaque book of 1981 records it. As Sedley Peck of Platrix put it in 1940, “In addition to a little horseplay, its members are engaged in protecting and preserving the archives and historical spots and monuments which are about to be engulfed by an ignorant and unfeeling generation.”

DocumentedThat September, at Sonoma, the new board made Adam Lee Moore its Honorary President: “the oldest Clamper and the only surviving Noble Grand Humbug of the Gold Region,” Clampatriarch for eight years, and for two years “the accredited successor of his late majesty Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico, under the title of Adam I.” He signed the charter of North San Juan that day as “Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico.”

DocumentedBurying the oil lamp. North San Juan already knew the Clampers. When electric light reached the old mining town in May 1939, they came up to hold a funeral for the oil lamp. The motto for the day was “Fiat Lux!”, “Let there be light”; Moore, at a reported 100, was to arrive from Nevada City by stagecoach; there would be two parades, one by torchlight, and about a hundred new members initiated. Clyde Gwin of Nevada City, Grand Humbug of the William Bull Meek chapter, arranged the program (“Clampers Will Bury San Juan’s Oil Lamps at Fiesta,” Sacramento Bee, 8 May 1939, as clipped in Jim Cirner’s album).

Did you know? The revived order went to Washington twice. On 18 March 1937 a “Grand Triumvirate” of Dane, Whitsell and Moore gave Carl Wheat and Milford Springer plenary power for “Cherry Tree Chapter, No. 11,” to meet “within the shadow of that vast symbol” erected to George Washington; the Booke of Brasse announced the infant chapter “obstetrically delivered in the Roosevelt Hospital.”

The books of the revival

DocumentedThe revived order announced itself in print, in small, limited editions full of mock scholarship.

• 1934 Carl I. Wheat, The Enigmatical Book of Vitus (Yerba Buena): the first, a small brown book of about forty pages.
• 1935 The Curious Book of Clampus, or Gumshaniana, “the second official publication”: how California was first discovered by a Chinese navigator, Hee Li.
• 1936 My Darling’s ECV: The Esoteric Book of E, from Ward Ritchie’s press for the Platrix chapter, with Boyd Stutler’s article on Ephraim Bee.
• 1937 Ye Preposterous Booke of Brasse, “the fourth booke,” bound to look like the plate itself: Drake’s plate claimed for the order (below), and the charter of a chapter at Washington. Jim Cirner’s copy was Ed Grabhorn’s own.
• 1939 What Was Your Name in the States? The Clampers’ Book of Balladry, or Hewgagiana.
• 1949 Credo quia absurdum (Placerville): the order’s anthology of its own history; and Wheat’s “The Clampers” in the Pacific Historical Review.
• 1957 Fool’s Gold (Los Angeles: Platrix Chapter), 300 copies, with a facsimile of an old gold-camp lodge’s ritual.
• 1961 The Clamper, the order’s paper, edited by Coke Wood, in print by May.
• 1966 E Clampus Vitus: Then and Now, 1852–1966 (Stockton), the order’s history of itself.

First editions of several of them are at the Huntington Library and the Sacramento Public Library.

DocumentedThe Clampers call the revived order the New Dispensation, and these were its scriptures. “In The Enigmatical Book of Vitus the story of the resuscitation of the Order has been told,” Wheat wrote in 1949, “and the spirit of Credo quia absurdum has been outlined in The Curious Book of Clampus. Later, The Esoteric Book of E and Ye Preposterous Booke of Brasse carried the tale farther.” In 2009, seventy-five years after the first of them, Thomas Duncan, a Berkeley professor emeritus and an initiate of the Matuca chapter, gathered six of them into one volume, E Clampus Vitus: Anthology of New Dispensation Lore: “For Clampers, this anthology is essential for a more complete understanding of their society. For non-Clampers, this anthology provides a new perspective on the Gold Rush.”

Drake’s Plate of Brass, 1936–2003

DocumentedIn 1936 a brass plate was found near San Francisco Bay, inscribed as the plate Francis Drake was said to have left in 1579 to claim the land for Queen Elizabeth. Herbert E. Bolton, director of the Bancroft Library, announced it as genuine in 1937, and the plate went to the University of California. The Clampers claimed it at once: “we should now re-claim [the plate] as the rightful property of our ancient Order” (Ye Preposterous Booke of Brasse, 1937).

DocumentedForty years later the Bancroft had the metal tested. Its report, The Plate of Brass Reexamined (1977), found the brass too even and too rich in zinc for Drake’s time. Who made it was told in 2003. An article in California History, made public in 2003 in the issue dated 2002, by Edward Von der Porten, Raymond Aker, Robert W. Allen and James M. Spitze showed that “the playful E Clampus Vitus historical fraternity, also known as the Clampers, was responsible for the prank,” as the University of California put it on 18 February 2003. By their account G. Ezra Dane instigated it; George Haviland Barron designed the plate; George C. Clark cut the letters; Lorenz Noll and Albert Dressler are believed to have helped; and someone painted “ECV” on the back in fluorescent paint. Of the makers, only Dane is known to have been a Clamper, and the order’s leaders “did not sanction the joke.” The Bancroft’s officials called the article “very persuasive,” and said the plate would remain on display; today the Bancroft shows a facsimile of it in its third-floor foyer.

DocumentedA hoax before the hoax. The plate was not the first joke of Dane’s circle. At a dinner at Sutter’s Fort early in 1936, Harry Peterson, the fort’s curator and “a new member,” showed the brethren an “original Bear Flag” said to have been saved from the fire of 1906; it had been “made ‘of whole cloth’ by the curator,” and “some of those who were present still think Peterson should have been ducked in the river” (a Sacramento paper, 8 March 1936). “It is the custom at a meeting of E. Clampus Vitus for each chapter to present some hoax,” the Sacramento Union explained, and some forty-six of forty-eight members “swallowed it whole” (5 April 1936). Both as clipped in Jim Cirner’s albums “ECV ® Back in the Day”.

DocumentedThe joke that told the truth. In 1937 the Clampers’ own Booke of Brasse hailed the find by “our brother clampers, Bolton and Watson,” as “authentic beyond any shadow of suspicion,” then went one better. Under ultraviolet light, it reported, the plate showed “the faint phosphorescent outline of an earlier inscription,” three letters, “E.C.V.”: “indisputable proof” that Drake’s chaplain had been Noble Grand Humbug of a Clampchapter aboard the Golden Hind. Sixty-six years later the investigators of 2003 told of “ECV” painted on the back of the real plate in fluorescent paint. The joke had been in print all along: the investigators of 2003 counted the Booke’s “E.C.V.” among the hints the plate’s makers left.

DocumentedDrake on the menu. The Booke keeps the minutes of the Clampers’ meeting of 6 February 1937, at the Wells Fargo museum and then dinner at the Ellis Saloon, with Dane, as Noble Grand Humbug, for toastmaster. Among the speeches: “Bolton expostulated at some length on Drake.” That was the month the plate reached him, and two months before he announced it to the California Historical Society, on 6 April 1937. Bolton, by every account, was the joke’s target, not one of its makers.

DocumentedThe answer from Tuolumne. The Clampers also gave Drake a reply. On 29 May 1937, at their sixth annual pow-wow, held at the invitation of Chief William Fuller of the Me-Wuk at the tribal roundhouse on the rancheria above Tuolumne, Chief Fuller, the order’s Grand Honorary Humbug, revoked Drake’s grant of 1579, “in virtue of his authority as the legitimate successor of the original Great Hi-Ho,” and a counter-plate “of similar size and shape to that left by Sir Francis Drake” was unveiled on a stone monument beside the roundhouse. G. Ezra Dane, as Noble Grand Humbug, wrote the notice; the anthropologists Ronald L. Olson and Edward W. Gifford of the University of California arranged the day with Chief Fuller (Tuolumne Prospector, 21 May 1937; The Banner, Sonora, 27 May 1937; United Press, 27 May 1937). The Matuca chapter later honored Chief Fuller with plaques of its own: at Mi-Wuk Village in 1963, five years after his death, and at Bald Rock Ranch, his birthplace and the old pow-wow ground near Twain Harte, in 1967.

ReadingIt was a Clamper’s joke at the expense of a fellow Clamper: Bolton was a member too, and the plan, by its makers’ account, was to end it with “a good laugh over a dinner table.” The dinner never came. Dane died in October 1941, with the plate still in the Bancroft’s keeping as Drake’s, and his part in it was not told until 2003. No hoax in American history has a better claim to the motto Credo quia absurdum.

DocumentedThe plate’s long career as the real thing. For forty years the plate was California’s, and its story only grew. Jim Cirner, who collects every telling of it that takes the plate at its word, keeps these in his album of the hoax:

1. 1937The Pony Express Courier tells how a chauffeur, William Caldeira, said he had found the plate near Drakes Bay in 1933 and tossed it from his car near Greenbrae, where Beryle Shinn picked it up in 1936; the California Historical Society rewarded Shinn with $2,000. Already there were “rumors that the metal is of a type later than Drake’s time.”
2. 1948The state’s Centennial Caravan carries it as an exhibit: “The brass plate affixed by Sir Francis Drake on California shores in 1579.”
3. 1950A state schoolbook, Irmagarde Richards’s Early California, pictures it with its words for children to read.
4. 1965A teacher’s manual assures teachers that “scientists are sure” it is the one Drake left.
5. 1977The Bancroft’s tests find modern brass.
6. 2003The makers are named.
7. 2017The Grand Council publishes the whole joke itself.

DocumentedThe order has since told the story itself, and with relish. In 2017 its Grand Council published An E Clampus Vitus Hoax Goes Awry: Sir Francis Drake’s 1579 Plate of Brasse, by Robert J. Chandler, James M. Spitze, Stephen Zovickian and David Holmes; Spitze was one of the four who had named the makers in 2003. Its cloth cover is stamped in gold with “Portus Novae Albionis,” the little view of Drake’s harbor in New Albion from Jodocus Hondius’s map of about 1595.

The plaques

DocumentedThe plaques came early. The first, by the Platrix chapter’s own history, was unveiled on 15 September 1934 at Roger Dalton’s ranch in Glendora: “This monument, dedicated by E Clampus Vitus, September 15, 1934, to the memory of the forgotten miner, marks the place of discovery of gold in San Gabriel Canyon, 1854.” On Washington’s Birthday, 22 February 1936, Yerba Buena and Platrix together set one at Sutter’s Fort, where “James W. Marshall on January 28, 1848, here disclosed to Capt. Sutter his discovery of gold made at Coloma four days before”; that June came Moffat’s Mint at Mariposa, and on 29 January 1938 a plaque on the old Montgomery Block in San Francisco to Duncan Nicol, who “invented and served Pisco Punch,” benefactor humani generis. The James W. Marshall chapter was chartered at Placerville on 30 April 1938 “with the dedication of a plaque to Hank Monk,” the stage driver (Then and Now, p. 20): “the world’s greatest reinsman,” the plaque says, who drove Horace Greeley over the mountains from Carson City in 1859. It went up on the Raffles Hotel, as the old Cary House was called from 1926 until 1979, and the city’s list of markers now places it inside, in the hotel’s dining room. William Gordon Huff’s plaque for the “Grand Procrastination” of Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat was dedicated the same year, though, as its own text admits, “It took 47 years however, to get around to mounting it”: it went up in 1985. John M. Studebaker’s followed at Placerville in August 1939. Emperor Norton’s had a harder road. It was unveiled at the San Francisco terminal of the new Bay Bridge on 25 February 1939, with Charles Camp as Humbug, on the day the Clampers on Treasure Island were feting Adam Lee Moore, but “something got fouled up, and we were denied permission to place the plaque in the terminal,” Yerba Buena’s Humbug Eric Falconer said in 1950, when Lee Stopple still had the bronze and the chapter set out to honor the Emperor “eleven years late.”

DocumentedHonors and plaques, 1936–37. One of the earliest is still where they put it. On 6 February 1937, at the Chinese telephone exchange on Washington Street in San Francisco, Ad Schuster gave an oration on Sam Brannan and unveiled the plaque “placed by the Clampers on the site of the Office of the California Star” (the Booke of Brasse’s minutes). Its words are short: “On this site January 9, 1847 the California Star, the first newspaper in San Francisco, was published by Samuel Brannan.” It is set in the porch of the old exchange, now a bank, at 743 Washington Street. In April 1936 the Clampers rode out to Camp Cady and Calico, where they made Bob Greer, the last surviving miner of the Calico boom, a Grand Honorary Humbug. In October 1937 at Fort Tejon they unveiled “a plaque bearing the names of all the soldiers buried in the little cemetery,” seven privates and Lt. Thomas F. Castor. Their meetings, the Los Angeles Times said, were “odd mixtures of roistering horseplay and serious purpose. They always meet at some historic spot, and usually unveil a plaque” (Lee Shippey, 20 October 1937). The Camp Cady and Fort Tejon reports as clipped in Jim Cirner’s albums.

DocumentedThe forgotten, remembered. Many of the order’s plaques honor people the histories left out. In 1956 the Clampers set a plaque to the Chilean miners carried off by an epidemic near Placerville in 1852. In 1966 the James Savage chapter set a plaque at the Chinese cemetery at Borden. For the golden spike centennial in May 1969 a plaque at the Confucius Temple in Sacramento honored “Central Pacific’s Other Big Four,” the Chinese railroad workers, and in 1976 Platrix set one beside the Chinese Historical Society’s marker to “over three thousand Chinese who helped build the Southern Pacific Railroad.” In 2007 the Clampers gave Juana Briones, the Californio pioneer of San Francisco, a new headstone at Holy Cross Cemetery. All from clippings in Jim Cirner’s albums “ECV ® Back in the Day”.

DocumentedFunny, and true. The plaques keep the order’s sense of humor. In 1957 the Clampers “set out to dedicate a memorial plaque on a ghost town and couldn’t find the place”: Mormon Island lay under Folsom Lake, so the plaque was to go on a hilltop nearby (Oakland Tribune, 11 April 1957). At Placerville in 1959 “the gentle hearts of many Clampers” were “distressed that these gents, who gave so much to publicize Hangtown,” the three men whose hanging gave the town its name, “appear to have been hanged in their underwear and that their grave is unmarked.” In 1972 a plaque at Chester saluted the lumberjacks: “At work they were prodigious, at play preposterous, and although their skid road became skidrow, they gave the forest to our nation.” In 1973 Las Plumas del Oro set the “World’s First Underwater Plaque” for drowned Prattville, the “Atlantis of Almanor,” by heaving it into Lake Almanor. In 1992 more than a hundred Clampers dedicated a plaque at the Transamerica Pyramid to Bummer and Lazarus, the dogs of Emperor Norton’s San Francisco, and gave $111.11 to the SPCA; and in 1993 the Julia C. Bulette chapter raised a monument to Mary Jane, a Comstock mine mule: “The within was only a mule. Still, she was nobody’s fule. Stranger, tred lightly.” All from clippings in Jim Cirner’s albums “ECV ® Back in the Day”.

DocumentedBy 1995, Alan Wilson wrote, the Grand Council’s plaque books covered “nearly seven hundred plaques”; a further book, of 2009, records those of 1994 to 2007. The Historical Marker Database lists 1,877 entries in the order’s series (31 October 2026), counting markers the order shares with others; a 2025 study found its hand in at least 149 California Historical Landmark plaques.

Find a plaque near you. The Historical Marker Database keeps a list of the order’s plaques, with photographs and maps: E Clampus Vitus on HMDB ›¹⁶

The chapters, one by one

DocumentedYerba Buena sponsored the first chapters: “Amatuca [Matuca], like all other chapters up to this time, was organized or sponsored by Clampers from Yerba Buena” (Then and Now, p. 22, writing of 1948). After the first few, the chapters stopped numbering in order and took jokes and dates for numbers instead: 49, 1849, 64, 1004, 54-40.

DocumentedEleven cases of beer. A chapter could fall asleep and be woken. Sam Brannan No. 1004, one of the four chartered at Murphys in 1963, began at Yuba City, with Yolo, Colusa, Glenn and Sutter counties for its territory: its first plaques went up at the entrance to Sam Brannan Park in Yuba City in 1963, “dedicated to Sam Brannan, founder of Yuba City,” and in front of the post office at Dobbins, in Yuba County, in 1966. After 1969 it went quiet, and its territory was held in trust by Chapter No. 10 of Nevada City, William Bull Meek–William Morris Stewart. Over the Memorial Day weekend of 1973, at Murphys, Ed Hawkins Jr. put a petition to reactivate it before the Board of Proctors. It carried an offer of eleven cases of beer for the territory, and Chapter No. 10 accepted, so ending its trust. The Proctors approved on the motion of Earl Schmidt, seconded by Louie Beaupre. The chapter was reorganized at Napa, with Hawkins as its first Noble Grand Humbug; it celebrated its re-chartering on 23 March 1974 and set its first new plaque that year at Knights Landing. Its territory now runs over Glenn, Colusa and Napa counties and part of Yolo, and it calls itself, with no one’s leave, the Protector of Solano County. In 1988 the two chapters rededicated the Yuba City plaque together, and Sam Brannan is still going strong, from a Santa Rosa address. (Sam Brannan Chapter No. 1004, Book of Plaques, compiled by Loren A. Wilson, from Jim Cirner’s collection; Then and Now, 1966; the plaques at Yuba City and Dobbins, in the Historical Marker Database.)

DocumentedChristmas at Downieville, 1937. On 10 December 1937 the Yuba flooded Downieville, the old order’s mountain stronghold. The Clampers answered within days: Auburn’s lodge held “a meeting extra-ordinary” at the Freeman Hotel, the order asked Congress for $250,000 to rebuild the town, and at Christmas a caravan of a hundred cars brought “$400 worth of gifts” for “the 98 children in town,” with Santa Claus from Auburn and Adam Lee Moore, ninety, leading the drive (the Auburn Journal, 16 December 1937 and 10 February 1938; Associated Press, 19 December 1937). Radio made it a Christmas story: in 1964 KNBC broadcast it “for the 21st time” (Phil Hindley, Christmas editorial, 24 December 1964).

DocumentedAuburn’s chapter went public with a fanfare. “Hark! No, it has not sounded yet, but it will sound on May 30 at Auburn,” the San Francisco Chronicle announced on 23 May 1935: “the mysterious hewgag, secret and summoning trumpet of the honorable order of E. Clampus Vitus. This old time fraternity of miners, created for hokum and fun, will be revived at the general Auburn celebration, to last four days.” That was the town’s public Gold Rush Revival, three weeks after the charter night. Jim Cirner found the clipping.

Did you know? Auburn’s chapter had a goat, and the Auburn Journal followed its career like a serial. It escaped in March 1936; it turned up at Loomis that May with “a new coat of gilt paint … on his horns,” and stampeded loose again; a borrowed stand-in put “his mistress up a tree,” so the Clampers bought him; “Clamper Goat Number One” came home from Penryn in May 1937. On 2 February 1939 the paper reported, “The Clamper Goat is dead.” Its head was mounted, and led the parade that May, “followed by the male kid.”

Dates from Then and Now (1966) to 1966, from the newspapers of the time, and from the chapters’ own histories and plaques after. Where the sources disagree, both dates are given; where no public source gives a year, none is shown.

DocumentedToday E Clampus Vitus recognizes 51 chapters in what it counts as eleven western states. By its own list, thirty-four are based in California, seven in Nevada, two each in Colorado and Washington, and one each in Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Utah and Wyoming; and New Mexico, the eleventh, has its Clampers in Arizona’s Lost Dutchman Chapter, whose number, 5917+4, once counted four of them: “The +4 is the number of NM Members at that time.” Each chapter runs its own affairs, led by a Noble Grand Humbug who serves for one year.

New findingThe order lists its chapters with no dates, and no list of when each was founded could be found in print or online. The map, the chart and the table below are built from the first such list, compiled for this page from the order’s 1966 history, the chapters’ own records, dated plaques and newspaper reports.

The Grand Council

Did you know? Carl Wheat’s own plaque on the Wall of Comparative Ovations at Murphys was dedicated by the Grand Council on 30 May 1964, two years before he died.

DocumentedThe Grand Council “was actually organized at a meeting of the Directors of ECV at the Fair Grounds in Mariposa on May 8, 1954,” and Carl Wheat “was given the title of, ‘His Benign Austerity – In Perpetuity’” (Then and Now, 1966). Every Noble Grand Humbug of every chapter, past and present, sits on it. Before 1957 the order had Presidents: Lee L. Stopple (1940–45), Leon O. Whitsell (1945–54), Carl I. Wheat (1954–55) and Edgar B. Jessup (1955–57). From 1957 its head has been the Sublime Noble Grand Humbug, Jessup the first, as Albert Shumate remembered it: “In 1957, when the council met at Murphys, Ed Jessup became the first Sublime Noble Grand Humbug of the Grand Council.” The holders since include the order’s historians Albert Shumate (1963–65) and Alan L. Wilson (1981–82), and Jim Cirner (2023–24), who has helped with these pages.

DocumentedThe Council at Murphys. Through the 1960s the Grand Council met each spring at Murphys, and the Stockton Record reported it. On 1 June 1963 it chartered four new chapters at once (the Stockton Record counted three), one of them across the line in Nevada. In 1964, with Albert Shumate presiding, it resolved that the mint should go on coining silver dollars, threatening, “We will march on Washington in a body,” and the Clampers “went wild” at the news that a member of Matuca had found the recorded land description, dated 24 February 1853, of an “E.C.V.” saloon. In 1965, electing Sid Platford, it voted that charters would “not be issued to any chapters outside of California,” when, the Stockton Record said, the only one outside was at Virginia City (Stockton Record, 6 June 1963, 1 June 1964 and 5 June 1965, as clipped in Jim Cirner’s album “ECV ® Back in the Day” #3). That rule did not last: the order now has chapters across the eleven western states it counts as its own.

Did you know? Governor Ronald Reagan proclaimed 6 July 1968 “E Clampus Vitus Day,” so that “the Dumbellican Brotherhood of the mines may hearken to the braying of the Hewgag” at the California Exposition grounds. The Legislature took note as well: the index to the Statutes of California for 1968¹²⁵ lists “E Clampus Vitus Day” at chapter 164. Four years earlier, in January 1964, the Wm Morris Stewart chapter (by then Bull Meek–Stewart) demanded that Nevada rename itself “East California” and added “Courtesy of Nevada City, Nevada County, California” under the “Welcome to Nevada” sign on U.S. 40; Governor Pat Brown replied that “California could absorb the whole state of Nevada with far less pain than Nevada could absorb just one of our 58 counties” (Associated Press and United Press, 2–9 January 1964). That May, at the order’s first bi-state convention in Sacramento, Governors Pat Brown and Grant Sawyer sat for a mock hearing of the California–Nevada border dispute, and the Clampers “rolled up the state line.” Who kept the records? That was the job of “the Chairman of the Other Committee. Unfortunately, he was not present. Never has been since the society was organized” (May 1964). These as clipped in Jim Cirner’s albums.

DocumentedFar afield. The revived order reached past California early, and not always for long. At Santa Fe in 1935 the New Mexican greeted a returning archaeologist as “District Grand Klooper of the famous Pacific Coast fraternity of E. Clampus Vitus,” and Jesse L. Nusbaum of that city as its “Deputy Grand Valetudinarian”: the circle of the short-lived Quivira chapter. In 1942 a chapter for Nevada, to be called the “Carson county chapter of Utah territory,” was put off “until after the war is won,” for want of tires and gasoline. In August 1968 a Ned McGowan Chapter set a plaque to the gold-rush outlaw at Yale, British Columbia (Hope Standard, 7 August 1968), ten years before Athabasca. And some chapters came and went: Neversweats No. 1863, born in 1980, was declared defunct by the Board of Proctors in the late 1990s. The count kept climbing all the same: twenty-two chapters in California in 1966, twenty-three at the Council of 1968, and in November 1976 a party at Clayton for “the founding of the organization’s 29th chapter,” Joaquin Murrieta, “what may be the organization’s last new chapter” (Oakland Tribune, 3 November 1976). It was not. All from clippings in Jim Cirner’s albums.

DocumentedThe Grand Council is made up of the current and past Humbugs; a Board of fifteen Proctors manages its business, and its officers are styled Sublime, among them the Sublime Grand Noble Recorder, who keeps track of the order’s copyrights and registered trademarks. It met at Murphys over Memorial Day weekend until 1993, then at Mariposa (Wilson, 1995), and later at Antioch; in 1998 the annual meeting came back to Sonora, where the order’s officers had first met in 1947, as a plaque of 2023 records. It now meets each May, the weekend before Memorial Day, at the Mother Lode Fairgrounds, Sonora.

The order today

DocumentedFifty-one chapters and counting. The order that twenty-two men revived at a lunch table is bigger now than it has ever been. Its own list names fifty-one chapters and four outposts, groups working toward a charter, from San Diego to Spokane and from the coast to the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming¹²⁹. There were forty-two in 2006¹³¹; Doc Maynard, in Washington, was chartered that September as the forty-second¹⁸. Montana’s Four Georgians were setting up monuments at Helena by 2019¹⁶⁰, and a Wyoming chapter received its charter in 2022¹⁶¹. Each May some four or five hundred redshirts come to the Mother Lode Fairgrounds at Sonora for the Grand Council¹³⁰. A man still cannot ask to join: a Clamper, in the order’s own words, is a man “a brother has decided to invite”⁴⁶.

DocumentedThe plaques, still going up. The Historical Marker Database counted 785 of the order’s markers in 2013; by November 2026 its E Clampus Vitus series held 1,877 entries, old plaques photographed late among them, and markers since lost¹⁶¹³². “This organization has researched and erected more historical markers in the American West than any other group,” the Pahrump Valley Times wrote in 2017, when the Clampers put up signs at the ghost town of Rhyolite; the Bureau of Land Management’s archaeologist, Jonah Blustain, said, “We hope they come and do a whole bunch more”¹³³. The stories they choose are the small ones. “We put up plaques of less known history because if we didn’t bring it up, it would pretty much be forgotten,” Ron Metzger, Humbug of the Robert Leroy Parker chapter, said at Grand Junction, Colorado, in August 2025, where about forty people came to see one unveiled¹³⁴. Chapters pay for them from their own dinners and with local sponsors, pour the concrete themselves, and dedicate them in public, with speeches and the families of the people remembered.

DocumentedThe widows, the orphans and the rest. The motto still puts the widows first, and the chapters still give. Some of it is money: a $1,000 scholarship from the Estanislao chapter for history students at Modesto Junior College¹³⁶; $1,864 from the Julia C. Bulette chapter to the valedictorian of Virginia City High School in 2019¹³⁷; $10,010.10 from Nevada County’s chapter to Sierra Services for the Blind in 2006, with two $500 scholarships a year for Nevada Union High School¹³¹; scholarships for students going to trade school, paid for by an oyster stand at a Labor Day festival in southern Oregon¹³⁸. Much of it goes to small museums: “by donating to our area museums we are helping to preserve and protect history which is what Clampers do,” said Jim Utterback of the Copper Queen chapter in Nevada in 2019¹³⁹, and the San Lorenzo Valley Museum, the Lyon County Museum, the Murphys Old Timers Museum and the friends of South Pass City in Wyoming have all had the Clampers’ checks.

DocumentedWork days. More of it is labor. Nearly twenty members of the Estanislao chapter mowed and trimmed the Oakdale Citizens Cemetery in 2025¹⁴⁴; in 2021 Clampers cleared fire-damaged brush, mended the rock steps and put in a bench at the Boulder Creek IOOF cemetery after the CZU fire¹⁴⁵; in Washington, fourteen members of the Doc Maynard chapter gave about fifty-four hours to restoring the chapel car Messenger of Peace at the Northwest Railway Museum in 2012¹⁴⁶; and in Nevada the Copper Queen chapter is raising money to put a new roof on the Copper Queen building of 1881 at Wabuska¹⁴⁷. Nevada County’s Clampers, for their part, helped persuade the state to buy the Malakoff Diggins, now a state historic park¹³¹. In 2009 the Nevada Legislature thanked the order by resolution for “providing protection and kindness”¹⁴⁸.

A Clamper’s glossary, revival edition

Chapter

A lodge of the revived order: the old order’s lodges are its chapters now. A group working toward its charter is an outpost; Matt Warner in Utah was an outpost from 1979 and a chapter from 1988.

Clampatriarch

The title given to Adam Lee Moore, the old gold-rush member who joined the revival (Credo quia absurdum, 1949); since 1954, every Noble Grand Humbug, past and present, is a Venerable Clampatriarch of the Grand Council.

Capitulus Redivivus

“The chapter revived”: the name the revivers gave their first chapter at Camptonville in 1932, and the root of Yerba Buena’s style, “Redivivus No. 1,” “founded in 4005 B.C., resuscitated in 1932 A.O.” (Redwood City Tribune, 25 July 1967).

His Benign Austerity

The title given to Carl Wheat in 1954, when the Grand Council was organized: “His Benign Austerity – In Perpetuity” (Then and Now).

Grand Honorary Humbug

An honor for a friend of the order: Bill Meek at Camptonville in 1932, Bob Greer, the last miner of the Calico boom, in 1936, and Chief William Fuller at Tuolumne in 1937.

Wall of Comparative Ovations

The wall of plaques at Murphys, among them Carl Wheat’s, dedicated in 1964.

Hewgag

The great horn that calls the Clampers together, sounded since the gold camps. The horn Chico brought to Oroville in 1916 was so long “that it took twelve men to carry it.”

Poor Blind Candidate

A candidate for membership, as the Clampers style him. Edwin Grabhorn, the San Francisco printer, was the revived order’s first.

New Dispensation

The revived order, from 1931 on, as the Clampers call it, against the Old Dispensation of the gold camps.

Noble Grand Humbug

The head of a chapter, for one year.

XNGH

A past Noble Grand Humbug, as the Clampers write it: Leon Whitsell was “XNGH No. 4” of YB1, Yerba Buena No. 1, its fourth Humbug. A past head of the whole order is an XSNGH.

Sublime Noble Grand Humbug

The head of the whole order, chosen by the Grand Council; Edgar B. Jessup was the first, in 1957, in the order’s own list.

Clamproctors

The board of fifteen, the corporation’s directors, who manage the Grand Council’s business; since 1957 elected by the Clampatriarchs (Proctors, for short).

Staff of Relief

Adam Lee Moore’s staff, the Grand Council’s gavel since 1955.

Satisfactory!

The order’s cry of approval, old and new: the answer to “What say the brethren?!”

Redshirt

A Clamper, for the red shirt he wears.

Noble Grand Recorder

The chapter’s secretary (also written Grand Noble Recorder). A chapter may also have a Noble Grand Historian, as Swift Berry was in 1957.

Widder

A redshirt’s wife or sweetheart, first in the order’s charity: per caritate viduaribus orphanibusque, sed prime viduaribus. In 1950, before Lake Isabella drowned old Kernville, the Clampers made Nettie Hight Yarbrough, born in a storm on Greenhorn Mountain in 1868, an Honorary Clamp Widow; she signed herself “Grand Honorary Widow No. 1 of Whiskey Flat.”

From the order’s 1966 history, Then and Now, the newspapers of the revival years, the order’s and its chapters’ public websites, and the Platrix chapter’s history.

Where the archives are

OpenClose the libraries and collections that hold the record

• Stockton University of the Pacific, Holt-Atherton Special Collections: the E Clampus Vitus Archives, from 1935 (Mss101), kept at the California Historical Society from 1961 and, when space ran short there, moved to Pacific in 1976 with the aid of its historian and Clamper Richard Coke Wood; and Whitsell’s scrapbooks (Mss186).
• San Marino The Huntington Library: the order’s records, 1933–1984 (mssEClamp), mostly from Sid Platford; the Dane family papers (mssDane).
• Berkeley The Bancroft Library: the plate itself; the Thomas W. Norris papers, with two scrapbooks of the early revival; Lois Rather’s papers.
• Los Angeles UCLA Library Special Collections (LSC.1796); USC Libraries, the Platrix Chapter’s records, 1994–2019.
• Virginia City The Julia C. Bulette Chapter, whose hall is the E Clampus Vitus Building at 34 B Street (built 1867), and whose second Noble Grand Humbug was Marshall (Marsh) Fey (below). The Marsh Fey Collection, by the credit printed with it, includes Carl Wheat’s invitation of December 1931 to the revival lunch (below).
• San Diego San Diego History Center: the Squibob Chapter’s historic site reports (MS 49).

DocumentedThe man who kept the letter. Marsh Fey (1928–2024) was a grandson of Charles Fey, the San Francisco mechanic who built the first slot machines in 1894 and invented the three-reel Liberty Bell in 1898. With his brother Frank he opened the Liberty Belle saloon and restaurant in Reno in 1958, named for their grandfather’s machine with an “e” added to make her a lady, and there, until it closed in 2006, they showed one of the finest collections of old slot machines in the world; Charles Fey’s own machines went on to the Nevada State Museum at Carson City. Marsh wrote the history of the slot machine, through six editions. He kept, too, the order’s papers that came his way, among them Carl Wheat’s invitation of 1931 to the lunch that began the revival. In 2026 Marsh Fey’s chapter, Julia C. Bulette, announced a plaque to the Liberty Belle in front of the Reno-Sparks Convention Center, where it stood.

Myth or record? Play along

Eight things often said about the revived order. Make your call on each, then see what the record says.

Go and see it

Most of the order’s history is still standing by the road. A few places to start:

Plaques worth a road trip

1. Emperor Norton San Francisco, Salesforce Transit Center. “Pause traveler and be greatful to Norton 1st,” who “decreed the bridging of San Francisco Bay.” First dedicated in 1939. See it on the Historical Marker Database ›⁶⁴
2. The California Star San Francisco, 743 Washington Street, in the porch of the old Chinese telephone exchange. Where Sam Brannan printed the city’s first newspaper in 1847; one of the order’s oldest plaques, unveiled on 6 February 1937. See it on the Historical Marker Database ›¹⁰⁸
3. The Hotaling Building San Francisco, 451 Jackson Street. The whisky warehouse that survived 1906, and the verse about why God spared it (Yerba Buena No. 1, 1992). See it on the Historical Marker Database ›⁶⁵
4. Francis Drake Point Reyes National Seashore. “On June 17, 1579, Francis Drake landed on these shores” (Yerba Buena No. 1, 1950). See it on the Historical Marker Database ›⁶⁶
5. Grand Procrastination Monterey, 99 Prescott Avenue. Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat honored in 1938, mounted in 1985: “It took 47 years however, to get around to mounting it.” See it on the Historical Marker Database ›⁶⁷
6. John Mohler Studebaker Placerville. “Wheelbarrow Johnny,” blacksmith of Hangtown, honored in 1939 (James W. Marshall No. 49). See it on the Historical Marker Database ›⁶⁸
7. Site of the E.C.V. Saloon Murphys, Main Street. “Believed to be the only E. Clampus Vitus … saloon officially recorded” (Grand Council, 1965). See it on the Historical Marker Database ›⁶⁹
8. Mokelumne Hill The Leger Hotel. Where, the marker says, Joe Zumwalt chartered a chapter in an unused jail in 1851; lost in 1990, found in 2009, rededicated in 2010. See it on the Historical Marker Database ›⁷⁰
9. Julia C. Bulette Virginia City, Nevada. “Angel of miners, friend of firemen,” put up by the chapter that bears her name in 1963. See it on the Historical Marker Database ›⁷¹
10. Snowshoe Thompson Genoa, Nevada. The ski-borne mail carrier of the Sierra: “The Bravest are the Tenderest” (1986). See it on the Historical Marker Database ›⁷²
11. Once a Saloon, Always a Saloon Tres Pinos. The 19th Hole Rendezvous, “an infamous Clamper watering trough” (Monterey Viejo No. 1846, 1981). See it on the Historical Marker Database ›⁷³

With thanks

This part has grown with help. Jim Cirner, Sublime Noble Grand Humbug No. 54, sent the order’s 1966 history, Then and Now, and opened his public albums of clippings, “ECV ® Back in the Day.” His term is marked on the leaders’ timeline above. The chapters themselves supplied much of the rest: the founding dates in “Find your chapter” come from their own histories and plaques, among them the Julia C. Bulette, Lost Dutchman, Queho Posse, Mountain Charlie, Grub Gulch, Joaquin Murrieta, De la Guerra y Pacheco, Irish Kate Barrett, Frank C. Reilly, Major William Downie and John A. Sutter chapters, and from Jim Reynolds’s ECV Gazette. If your chapter’s date is missing or wrong, or you can add to anything here, write to us; we will put it right and say who helped.

Index of names

Large ideas, small group

The Clift still stands at Geary and Taylor, a hotel to this day. In December 1931 a few men met there for lunch, called by a lawyer who promised “a small group,” with “large ideas.” They brought back an order that no one could explain, gave it books that made fun of books, a hoax that made fun of the experts, and, in 1934, its first plaque. Adam Lee Moore carried the old order across to them: taken in, by Dane’s account, at Downieville in 1867, he handed it on at Clamptonville in 1932 and lived to be ninety-nine. Today there are 51 chapters and close to nineteen hundred markers on the land, from a ghost town in the Sierra to a sidewalk in San Francisco. Most of them are a little funny, and every one marks a place someone thought worth remembering. Credo quia absurdum.

Where it all began › The earliest lodge of the order yet found with its members named met at Cassopolis, Michigan, in the spring of 1846. Walk its village in 3D: the Union Hotel, the court house and the square, rebuilt from the county histories.

To cite this page: Michael Urbanski, “E Clampus Vitus revived, 1931 to today,” Project Scroll, 31 October 2026, https://projectscroll.com/news/e-clampus-vitus-revived-1931-today/. Part 2 of 2; Part 1 is “A lodge of E Clampus Vitus, in Cassopolis, in 1846.” Corrections are welcome, and any we make are noted on this page.