E Clampus Vitus: the complete record

The whole order, on paper. On the morning of 17 March 1853, in the capitol at Benicia, a California senator asked his colleagues to lend their chamber to the “E. Clampsus Vitus” Society (Sacramento Daily Union, 19 March 1853⁶²). One senator said he would rather cut his right arm off. Another answered that the objector had been “black-balled” by the society. Probably the next day, the Senate voted 10 to 7 to strike the whole affair from its journal (Daily Alta California, 19 March 1853⁶⁴), and it worked: the printed Journal has not a word of it. E Clampus Vitus has been slipping out of the record ever since. In 1966 its own historians closed their history with a wish: that “some day someone will attempt to research and compile a complete list of the number and location of the lodges formed during this earlier period.” The register below answers that wish as far as the surviving record allows, building on the chronology in Seth Slopes’s anthology of 2000.

No one has ever agreed on the order’s name or its spelling, and no one outside it knows what happens at its initiation. But it can be followed. Its first trace in print is a joke in an Indiana newspaper in February 1846; by that spring a lodge at Cassopolis, Michigan, had four founders named (Part 1); within twelve years it had reached the gold camps of California and the islands of Hawaii. This page is the whole record, from the order’s first appearance in print, in 1846, to its fifty-one chapters today.

New, 2 November 2026: the long goodbye now has a section of its own; the order in Oregon in 1858 is read on the page, and its teller named; the 1847 initiation at Bedford retold; the boosters’ revival of 1915–1920 set out as a research note; and, from 1 November, seven more places in the register, among them Lafayette, Indiana, in 1848 and the order’s first records in Oregon and New Mexico, and the march west in 3D.

• 89places on record before 1905
• 10senators who voted to strike it from the record
• 22charter members of the revived order
• 51chapters today

• Feb 1846 Connersville, Indiana: the earliest dated mention of the order yet found.
• Spring 1846 A lodge at Cassopolis, Michigan, with four founders named (written down 1875).
• Jan 1847 The Indiana House puts off the Jackson Lodge bill with a joke.
• Apr 1852 Stockton: the first California notice yet found.
• Mar 1853 The California Senate debates the order, then strikes the debate from its journal.
• 1855–56 The great years in the gold camps.
• 1858 Bee initiating at Richmond; a branch forming at Honolulu.
• Feb 1862 A lodge at Port Douglas, British Columbia.
• 22 years later
• 1884–1904 Sierraville sounds the Hewgag, and is still initiating in 1904.
• 1915–1920 The boosters’ revival, from Marysville to Quincy; the war takes its Grand Lodge.
• Dec 1931 Wheat calls a lunch at the Clift Hotel, San Francisco, for 18 December, to revive the order.
• 35 years later
• 1966 Then and Now asks for a list of the early lodges.
• 60 years later
• 2026 51 chapters; this register, 89 places.

Book oneThe story, 1845 to todayFrom the first record in print to the order of today.

Watch it spread, 1845–1905

Be initiated: Bedford, 1847

No ritual of the 1840s survives, but one member wrote down exactly what happened to a candidate. Step inside.

East of the Rockies, 1846–1880

New findingThe order’s earliest appearance in print yet found is a joke in a newspaper letter from Connersville, Indiana, in February 1846. By the spring of 1846 a lodge was meeting at Cassopolis, Michigan, with four charter members whose names survive; by July a “Tent No. 43” was meeting at Indianapolis; and in the winter of 1846–47 a Centreville lodge came before the Indiana legislature for a charter, and in one week, from 30 December to 6 January, was refused with a joke. The whole Indiana and Michigan record, with the House Journal pages, is in Part 1.

DocumentedIn 1847 a travelling agent for a patent cutting-box came to Bedford, Pennsylvania, “from the west,” and founded a lodge that met in the grand jury room by the light of one tallow candle. Judge William M. Hall, a member, wrote it all down in 1890, down to the names of the officers; his scene is told above, and printed in full under The documents, all but the oath and the signs, which we leave to the order. A record book described in 1938 and again in 1941 shows a lodge at Metropolis, Illinois, as “Division No. 53” (or, in the later account, “No. 110”) in 1849, and an account of 1896 says the ritual was printed at the office of the Bowling Green Journal in Missouri.

DocumentedBy March 1852 the order had reached Alexandria, Virginia, where a correspondent of the Gazette “exposed” its initiation as a hand put in a vice. A travelling card of “San Antonio Sanhedrim No. 21,” Texas (“No. 22” in the reprint of 1916), is dated 30 May 1852, and a lodge room at Columbus, Georgia, was described in December 1852. Ephraim Bee’s town of West Union is first tied to the order in the Weston Herald of November 1853, known online only from a quotation of 1931 (a typescript of selected articles from the paper, beginning with that issue, is at West Virginia University); in April 1855 a Clarksburg paper names Bee “the Gwand Iwiseutis of the Eclampus Vitus” (so printed), the earliest record of him in the order that can be read; by February 1858 he was lecturing on the order at Richmond, where initiations were “nightly performed”; New findingand by 1867 the Wheeling Intelligencer could call Bee “the recognized American head” of the order.

New findingA lodge with a standing notice: Bardstown, Kentucky, 1852. On 14 October 1852 the Bardstown Herald printed, among the town’s Masonic and Odd Fellows lodges, a notice that reads in our copy of the worn scan: “E Clampsus Vitus. Wapsipinico Lodge meets regularly on the first Monday in each month at 9 o’clock, P. M. Transient brethren are invited to attend.” It ran again on 18 November. The same 14 October issue speaks of “the venerable and majestic order of the Eclampsus Vitus.” The Wapsipinicon is a river in Iowa, which is the joke: a Kentucky lodge named for somewhere else entirely, inviting “transient brethren,” the drummers and travellers the order lived on. It is the earliest standing notice of a lodge of the order we have found, printed with a name and a meeting day like any real lodge, and Kentucky is a state no history of the order has listed.

New findingMississippi, Maryland and Tennessee. On 8 August 1853 the “Supreme Grand High Council of the Ancient and Independent Order of Old Eclampsus Vitus of the United States of America” granted a charter for a lodge “in the town of Columbus and State of Mississippi”: “BALAAM, Lodge No. 1,” under the Great Seal of the Order, affixed by “the Grand Giasticutis.” The mock charter ran as a notice in the Southern Standard of Columbus; the issues of 10 and 17 September 1853 are the only ones carrying it that survive online. It is the earliest lodge of the order named Balaam that we have found; the Balaam Lodge of the California camps is named only in accounts written years later. In February 1855 the Fredericksburg Herald, copied in the Alexandria Gazette, found the order “flourishing in Baltimore from the number of meetings that are held,” and printed a call from the Baltimore Clipper, signed “B. W. Vick, N. G. H.,” for a lecture by “the Grand Master of Georgia” on “the Rise and Progress of the order in Ancient Greece” and the report of the committee on the “Second Grand Banquet.” Of its own town the Herald added: “It had its day here, and we suppose numbered almost as largely as the Know Nothings do at this time.” And in 1874 a letter to the Morristown Gazette, looking back to “ante bellum days,” remembered “the rollicking fellows who introduced it in Knoxville,” Tennessee: “The first initiations took place in an office on Main street but the applications for membership became so numerous, and the attendance of members so large, that it was found necessary to remove to the Court House.”

New findingBee in his own country, 1855–1856. The earliest record of Ephraim Bee in the order that can be read today is a paragraph in Cooper’s Clarksburg Register of 25 April 1855, headed “Know-Nothingism in Gilmer”: “We are informed that since Ephraim Bee, the Gwand Iwiseutis of the Eclampus Vitus, has declared that Know-Nothingism is a branch of his ‘ancient and honorable order,’ that the society has been quite flourishing in Glennville. A large number of gentlemen have been initiated into the secret order, according to the most approved forms of the Eclampus.” The next summer a letter from Glenville in the same paper reported the campaign opening, with “the renowned Ephraim Bee, the Grand Hote Tote of Eclampus, Vitus, on the part of Know-Nothingism”: “The Grand Syrus Cutus, said that he had recently received despatches from the Emperor of China, ordering him to make the ‘grand rounds’ of the State of Virginia, and excommunicate all members from the Eclampus, who had not given in their adherence to Know-Nothingism” (15 August 1856). The letter goes on that Bee “proceeded to pass sentence upon the venerable Colonel, who had formerly been a disciple of Ephraim’s”: “the venerable Col. Joel Yancey, of ‘Upper Egypt,’” who spoke for the Democracy. He is very likely the “Colonel Yancey” whom the 1853 Weston Herald is quoted as calling “legally deputized and commissioned by the Grand Lama, Ephraim Bee.” So China was in the joke by 1853 (a “Grand Hotetote of China” appears in the Weston Herald as Stutler quotes it) and the Emperor himself by 1856, and the order was part of the politics of the Know-Nothing years in Bee’s country. Each telling gives Bee a new title, and none of these papers is cited in any history of the order we have found.

DocumentedBee and slavery. One modern story about Bee, that his parties gave cover to Luke Jaco while Jaco moved freedom seekers through his cave on Jaco Hill, is oral history, and Bee’s own record sits awkwardly beside it. The 1840 census lists two enslaved people in his household, a woman of 24 to 35 and a girl under ten, and a profile of him in the Wheeling Daily Intelligencer in 1863 said he had “always until recently been a strongly pro-slavery man” before “his convictions underwent a complete change” (both as quoted by Jennifer Wilt of the Doddridge County Heritage Guild). He was a churchman too: in 1831 Bee became the first clerk of what would be the Middle Island Seventh Day Baptist Church.

New findingThe Grand Ariscutis at the capital: Richmond, 1858. Every story of Ephraim Bee working the order was written down long after the fact, except one. In February 1858 the Parkersburg Gazette printed a squib headed “Great Excitement,” and the Winchester Republican of 26 February 1858 copied it: “Ephraim Bee, ‘Grand Ariscutis of the E Clampus Vitus,’ is delivering a course of lectures, in Richmond, on the rise and progress of this noble institution. The solemn and impressive ceremony of initiation is nightly performed, and, so great is the rush for admission into the order, that many of the applicants are ‘put through by daylight.’” The paper rejoiced that the “Celestial Order” had “so distinguished a representative at the Capital of Virginia, as the gentleman from Doddridge. ‘Long may he wave!’” A profile of Bee printed in the Wheeling Daily Intelligencer in 1863 says he “spent the winter of ’57–8 at Richmond, and while there initiated the greater part of the Legislature”; the Parkersburg State Journal of 1896 says he “converted nearly all the members of the Legislature and even the mayor of the city of Richmond.” Bee was not a member of the legislature: Swem’s register of the General Assembly lists John McKay as the delegate for Doddridge and Tyler in the session of 7 December 1857 to 8 April 1858, and we find no Ephraim Bee in its index. He was in Richmond on business. About 1 February 1858 the Senate took up a joint resolution for a committee to report “a bill to release Ephraim Bee from the payment of a part of the purchase money of certain lands purchased by him at a sale of forfeited and delinquent lands in the county of Jackson” (Kanawha Valley Star, 9 February 1858), and on 18 February the House of Delegates passed the Senate bill authorizing Jonathan M. Bennett to convey to him by deed certain forfeited lands in Jackson County, now Roane (Richmond Enquirer, 19 February 1858). The 1863 and 1896 accounts are memories, and Boyd Stutler and the order’s later histories built on them. The 1858 squib is the record of the time for Richmond, and it carries yet another form of the title: not Grand Gyascutis or Grand Lama, the titles the 1853 Weston Herald is quoted as giving him, but “Grand Ariscutis.”

DocumentedA Wood County history of 1899 is a memory too, and it puts him at work nearer home: it is “asserted,” Alvaro Gibbens wrote, that Bee “in the midnight hour oft gathered the dignified and sedate novitiates of local prominence and the legal lights of other counties” in the jury hall of the old court house at Parkersburg, “to enjoy the mysteries and deep secrets veiled in the order of E. Clampus Vitis.”

New findingAfter the war. The order outlived the war in Bee’s country. In January 1866 the Wheeling Daily Intelligencer welcomed “our old friend Ephraim Bee, ‘the member from Doddridge,’” and reminded newcomers that he was “the American Head Centre” of the order: “When he was here two years ago he founded a branch order in this city, but how it has flourished in his absence we do not know.” In July 1870 the Parkersburg Times, reprinted at Wheeling, in a mock report headed “Reduction of the Grand Llama,” told of a “Great Revival at Parkersburg,” with applications reported on “the day fixed for the reopening of the Parkersburg lodge,” and remembered “the glorious revival held … at Wheeling, in 1866.” In January 1874 the Grafton Sentinel reported the order “revived at that place.” Farther west it went into politics: “The Society of Old Eclampsus put a ticket in the field at Newport,” in Vermillion County, “… and elected it,” the Chicago Daily Tribune reported in May 1875, adding: “Now will somebody tell us what the Old Eclampsus is?”

Did you know? When Ephraim Bee died in 1888, at eighty-seven, the Point Pleasant Weekly Register remembered him as the founder of “the celebrated ‘E Clampus Vitas’ fraternity” at Jackson Court House, and “the Grand Ho-te-tote of the order,” which, “so Mr. Bee said,” had come from Hong Kong. It “had quite a run in Meigs county” across the Ohio, “and it is said that no man who once had been initiated was ever scared again in all his life” (Weekly Register, 7 November 1888).

California and the Far West, 1852–1904

New findingThe first California notice yet found was printed in the San Joaquin Republican at Stockton on 14 April 1852, calling “THE MEMBERS of the E. C. V.” to their hall on the corner of El Dorado and Centre streets. That is a month before the notices of 14 May 1852, at the Angelo House, that Seth Slopes’s anthology of 2000 cites, and earlier than the September 1852 date usually given; Slopes also cites an 1850 Stockton Journal for the order. By July the paper called the order “recently established in this city,” and its lodge, David Lodge No. 1, gave money to the Carson Valley road fund. In San Francisco the order met in the District Court room that summer, and in September gave $100 to the firemen. At Murphys in February 1853 it gave $150 toward a school, and met in a room over Buffum’s saloon “built expressly for the purpose.”

DocumentedThe great years were 1855 and 1856. Lodges, “Sanhedrims” and “encampments” opened at Sacramento, Marysville, Weaverville, Nevada City, Shasta, Downieville, Yreka, San Andreas, Knight’s Ferry, Spanish Flat and Placerville. Members included lawyers and legislators: David S. Terry was Noble Grand Humbug at Stockton in 1855. By 1857 the ritual was sold by mail at five dollars a set. Brigham Young, the Shasta Courier reported on 22 December 1855, from another paper, “has thundered an anathema” against the order.

DocumentedTwo stories from the great years. At San Francisco the lodge met in the District Court room, upstairs from the city’s aldermen, and one evening, probably in September 1852 (the clipping is undated), the aldermen sent the police to stop the noise. The officers “succeeded in reaching the door of the room and disturbing the session of the ancient and venerable order of ‘E. Clampsus Vitus,’ who adjourned for the time being.” The order sent a Mr. Van Buren to the Council Chamber to ask “by what authority their proceedings were disturbed by an armed force”; the aldermen called it a mistake, “the delegation from the Lodge then withdrew and order again reigned in Warsaw.” At Shasta the order announced a grand complimentary ball for 26 December 1855, for Col. James Reuben Searcy, “the pioneer of the Order in this and Siskiyou counties.” Two members’ wives had slipped into the lodge one evening before the meeting and seen an initiation, and since the order admitted no women, “the members for self preservation had to initiate the ladies referred to, and administer the pledges of secrecy” (Weekly Humboldt Times, 29 December 1855, from the Alta’s Shasta correspondent). In February 1856 the Shasta Courier had scores joining “from among the most respectable circles of society,” who “promise to be husbands to the widows, and fathers to the fatherless,” and Weaverville claimed to be the “Mother Lodge” of the northern part of the State, though since the fire it was “minus a hall to meet in” (Shasta Courier, 16 February 1856; Weekly Trinity Journal, 23 February 1856). All from clippings in Jim Cirner’s album “ECV ® Back in the Day” #3.

DocumentedThe charity was real. Under the jokes, the lodges gave. At Weaverville in June 1856 “an assembly, graced by the ‘beauty and strength’ of the town, was given at the Hall of the E Clampsus Vitus, for the benefit of a newly erected school house” (Sacramento Daily Union, 26 June 1856). In February 1856 “Rev. W. Hurlburt and wife gratefully acknowledged a donation of $20. from the Placerville Lodge of this venerable order” (San Joaquin Republican, 28 February 1856). Adam Lee Moore, looking back, put it simply: when people “called on the Clampers they got help, and without any red tape.” In 1866 the order subscribed fifty dollars toward a trail from Humboldt Bay to Weaverville: “even that Ancient and Honorable order of E Clampsus Vitus, forgetting for the nonce its mission of philanthropy and benevolence, subscribed fifty dollars” (Sacramento Daily Union, from the Humboldt Times). And when the Native Sons dedicated their monument at Rich Bar in August 1915, Lewis F. Byington said of the old order: “No widow or orphan ever suffered want” (Plumas Independent, 9 March 1922). All from clippings in Jim Cirner’s albums.

New findingMore camps. The Library of Congress’s California papers add three places and an earlier date. At Oroville the Weekly Butte Record of 19 July 1856 called “the ancient and honorable order of E Clampsus Vitus” to “their regular meeting … at the Hall of the Temple of Honor,” five months before a Chico paper found the lodge “about being revived.” Georgetown, in El Dorado County, had “Knights” enough to help organize the Sanhedrim at Spanish Flat that May. In October 1859 the order was “about to establish a Lodge at Petaluma,” and in December 1860 the Horsetown Argus said it was “about to be established in that town.”

New findingRed Bluff, from 1858. Albert Shumate’s keepsake of 1960, ECV News from the Miners, printed the Red Bluff Beacon’s notices of 1859 and 1860. The Beacon has an earlier one. On 28 April 1858 it reported that “the ancient and honorable order of E Clampsus Vitus of this place, has placed upon the subscription list, to defray the expences of the May-Day Festival, the sum of $20. Will not our other numerous benevolent orders follow the example” (Red Bluff Beacon, 28 April 1858, p. 2¹⁶⁸). Then it went quiet. On 2 February 1859 the paper reported that the order, “after a year or two’s suspension, has resuscitated, and judging from the noise they make each Friday Evening, immediately over our office, are in a flourishing condition” (2 February 1859, p. 2¹⁷⁰; both read on the page). On 23 February 1859 the Mountain Messenger, also in Shumate, found the order “prospering finely in several of the mountain towns. At Downieville and Red Bluff, two Lodges are now in successful operation.” That November the order asked for sealed proposals to build “a Brick Hall, on Clay Square, Red Bluff,” eighty feet square and two stories high, the lower story “intended by the Order for a public schoolroom,” the upper “for the sole use of the Order” (16 November 1859, as Shumate printed it; the scan’s machine-read text agrees).

DocumentedOver the mountains, and up the valleys. Five more places come from clippings found through Jim Cirner’s albums “ECV ® Back in the Day,” and each is marked in the register for how far we have seen it ourselves. At El Dorado (Mud Springs), the Mountain Democrat of 23 February 1856 reported that “on Tuesday last a new Lodge of the E Clampus Vitus Society was instituted.” At Carson City, then in Utah Territory, posters called the order to meet on Monday, 13 February 1860, and the Territorial Enterprise of 18 February overheard a “slab-sided Yankee” read the letters as the “Elite Circle of Virginia.” Shumate printed the same joke from the Red Bluff Beacon, dated “May 7, 1860”; that was a Monday, and the Beacon came out on Wednesdays. At Forest City, a letter from Wet Ravine of 14 June 1860 told the Downieville Sierra Democrat that “the E.C.V.’s had a meeting Saturday night,” and that a spark from where “they had heated the iron” may have set Fashion Hall alight; the Democrat of 1860 is not online. The Reno Crescent of 20 March 1869 called members “in good standing” to Jack Holmes’s saloon, “preparatory to establishing a ‘Grand Lodge’ in Reno,” and on 30 January 1883 a Reno paper proposed a lodge of “Clampers” once more: “In Modoc county there is a flourishing lodge.” And at Loyalton, the Feather River Bulletin remembered in 1924 that “the most flourishing of all the fraternal societies in Loyalton, in the seventies, was the Clampers’ Lodge” (21 February 1924, p. 2¹⁷⁸; we have read the whole piece in the collection’s machine-read text, not on the page image). The other four we know from the clippings, and the register marks them as cited.

New findingOut to sea, and over the border. Two records carry the order past California. At Honolulu the Pacific Commercial Advertiser of 22 April 1858 ran a notice headed “E Clampsus V.”: the “Mystic Emblem of the Ancient and Honorable Order” had “been received per bark Yankee,” and E. J. Smith, of King Street, had been “duly appointed … for the purpose of forming a branch … in Honolulu.” “Resident and transient brothers” were to report themselves. The notice ran for weeks after, and by the new year the missionary paper The Friend, in its list of the town’s societies (in the issue headed “Honolulu, January 1, 1859”), names “E Clampsus V.,” with L. F. Beatty as “N. G. H.,” the Noble Grand Humbug: “Lodge meets on Queen street over Dr. McKibbin’s Drug store.” The order’s historians, Albert Shumate in 1991 and Seth Slopes’s anthology of 2000, say a meeting was called at Honolulu in 1858, and these are the records of the time. And on 11 February 1862 the Weekly British Colonist of Victoria reported: “A lodge of the Ancient and Honorable Order of E. Clampsus Vitus has been organised at Port Douglas, B. C. Members are initiated nightly, and the lodge is in a flourishing condition.” Port Douglas, at the head of Harrison Lake, was where the Douglas Road to the Fraser and Cariboo gold fields began, and the miners took the order with them. Bruce Ramsey’s Ghost Towns of British Columbia (1963) knew of the lodge, without a date, and the order’s histories place it in 1858, the year of the Fraser River rush. The Colonist is the only record of the time we have found, and it points to 1862.

New findingNorth to Oregon, south to New Mexico. Two more clippings stretch the map. In 1895 an Oregon pioneer, Major W. V. Rinehart, remembered riding through the Josephine County mines in June 1858 with George H. Williams, “Old Flaxbreak”; after a speech “to the boys on Canyon creek,” they did him honour by “conferring on him the secret order of the ‘E. Clampsus Vitus’” (Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 5 June 1895, p. 3²³⁸). Williams went on to be Ulysses S. Grant’s Attorney General. And on 4 October 1871 The Borderer of Las Cruces printed word that the order’s ball “at the democratic hall at Rio Mimbres,” in the mining country of southern New Mexico, was put off to 15 October and moved to the Academy of Music, “By order of the N. G. H. I. Bolivar, Grand Scribe.” They are the first mentions of the order yet found in Oregon and New Mexico, the second more than sixty years before the revived order’s Quivira chapter at Santa Fe. Both are clipped in Jim Cirner’s album “ECV ® Back in the Day” #3 and marked in the register below.

New findingThe town’s own paper puts the order at Monterey, and at San Juan Bautista, by July 1855. The Monterey Sentinel of 14 July 1855 printed, and on 21 July repeated, a notice headed “E Clampsus Vitus”: “[Th]ere will be a grand gala festival in [.]n full regalia—on the first of August [.] in this place. [O]ur San Juan brethren, of special de[gree] of B. A. H. & P. in good standing, [are r]equested to attend. By order of the M. G. H.” The Monterey columnist Mayo Hayes O’Donnell quoted it more than once, as a “meeting of E. Clampus Vitus on the first day of August, 1856,” and placed it anywhere from February to July 1856; two of his columns spoke of “the notice in the Monterey Sentinel of July 1855,” and the page shows that was right. We read it on the page image in the Monterey Public Library’s digital newspaper archive⁵⁷; letters in brackets are lost in the binding.

DocumentedSteamboat Jake. The order’s best-loved story comes from Yreka in 1856, and its earliest source is Harry Wells’s History of Siskiyou County (1881). Jacob Ehrenbacher, a dry-goods man, wanted to join the Odd Fellows. Three practical jokers of the town, Pembroke Murray, George W. Stilts and Wiley Fox, offered him the Odd Fellows, the Masons and the “Eclampus Vitus” together “for the modest sum of fifty dollars,” and took his cash. Each time the crowded hall gave “a sepulchral groan,” he was to answer “Timbo”; the more frightened he grew, the less distinct the word, “until nothing could be made of it but ‘Steambo,’ and he became ‘Steamboat Jake’ upon the spot” (p. 111). That year, Wells adds, “the ancient and honorable order of Eclampus Vitus celebrated the day with a procession” on the Fourth of July, in a town full of miners in from Greenhorn, Hawkinsville, Deadwood and Humbug (p. 108).

DocumentedFrom the lodge rooms, 1855–1865. The gold-camp papers let the old order speak for itself:

• 1855 Placerville: E Clampus Vitus, “a benevolent society, organized in Placerville on November 28, 1855,” with D. K. Newell as Noble Grand Humbug; “it was a point of honor to obtain admission,” and its Grand Consistory chartered lodges at Coloma, El Dorado and Georgetown (Paolo Sioli, History of El Dorado County, 1883, p. 215).
• 1856 The actor McKean Buchanan, given a benefit by the Placerville brethren, was “proud to acknowledge myself a member of the ‘Ancient and Honorable Order of E Clampus Vitus,’” and played London Assurance in “the Regalia presented to me by the Parent Lodge at Stockton” (Mountain Democrat, 19 April 1856).
• 1858 Mokelumne Hill: a New Year’s Eve procession, orations, barbecue “and a bountiful supply of egg-nog,” and a printed card of thanks from a widow to “the E C V’s” for thirty-seven dollars (Tuolumne Courier, 9 January 1858). The widows and orphans were no joke.
• 1861 Downieville Lodge No. 14 paraded on Christmas Eve “in compliance with the mandate of the Grand Lodge at Mokelumne Hill”: fifty-four knights in black masks and gowns, the Noble Grand Humbug in pink, carrying “the magnificent sword presented by Sam Brannan” (Sierra Democrat, 28 December 1861).
• 1865 Downieville’s new hall on Pearl Street, twenty-eight feet by seventy, was dedicated; the lodges at Sierra Buttes, Morristown, Port Wine and St. Louis were ordered to report; and because of “the Southern Rebellion” the order moved its anniversary from “the first Saturday after the first snow” to the Fourth of July (Mountain Messenger, 17 June 1865).

Did you know? In the summer of 1854 the Sonora Herald took a head count of the crowd at a political meeting at Columbia: “Whigs 200; Senatorial Democrats 450; Bolters 2; Know Nothings 19; Clampus Vitus 10; Denver Democrats 47.” The Clampers came as a party of their own (Sacramento Daily Union, 15 August 1854).

Fly over the Clampers’ Gold Country, in 3D › The Sierra foothills raised from the government’s elevation survey, from the Feather River to the Stanislaus, with every camp where the order is on record rising in the year of its first record. Press Play, and follow the order up the canyons.

Did you know? The order’s cry outlived its lodges. In January 1869 two men exchanged shots near the Mission graveyard in San Francisco without hitting each other, “whereupon they exclaimed, in the language of the ancient and honorable order of E Clampsus Vitus, ‘Satisfactory, No Blood!’” (San Francisco Chronicle, 9 January 1869, as clipped in Jim Cirner’s album “ECV ® Back in the Day” #3).

The order and the lawmakers

DocumentedThree times in its first decade the order came before an American legislature, and each time it ended in a joke. The first time was at Indianapolis. In the winter of 1846–47 a bill to incorporate the Jackson Lodge of Centreville came before the Indiana House, and the committee on corporations reported that it was “for the benefit of a species of animals with which the country is now abundantly supplied, and of which it is not desirable either to increase the number or improve the breed.” The bill lived a week (the whole story is in Part 1). The second time, six years later and half a continent west, the joke was on the California Senate; the third, two years after that, on its Assembly.

New findingIn the Senate, March 1853. On the morning of Thursday, 17 March 1853, at Benicia, then the state capital, a resolution came before the California Senate “praying that body to grant the use of their chamber for the meetings of the ‘E. Clampsus Vitus’ Society.” It was “supported seriously and earnestly by many Senators” (Sacramento Daily Union, 19 March 1853⁶²). The San Joaquin Republican⁶³ names its mover: Antonio María de la Guerra, the senator for Santa Barbara. Senator M. M. Wombough of Yolo and Colusa (the Union spells him Wambaugh, the Alta Wambough) called the order “nothing more than a burlesque upon secret societies,” and said “he would rather cut his right arm off than vote for the resolution.” James W. Coffroth of Tuolumne answered that among its members were “one Senator, who was the head and front of the association in the State,” and “the eloquent and accomplished Chairman of the Committee on Personal Beauty, the editor of the San Joaquin Republican, besides high and low, all over the country.” There was no such committee.

New findingBlackballed. Then, the Union’s correspondent wrote, “the Senator referred to,” the head of the order in California, rose and said that the opposition of the member from Colusa “was attributable to the fact ef [sic] his having been ‘black-balled’ by the society.” The member from Colusa was Wombough himself. And “the member from Mariposa, although a member of the renowned ‘E Clampsus Vitus,’ was opposed to granting the use of the hall to any societies, of any description.” The resolution, the Union says, “was, very properly, laid on the table.”

New findingA second report. The Republican’s own Benicia letter, written the same day, gives the debate at more length (San Joaquin Republican, 19 March 1853¹⁶⁶). It names the member from Mariposa outright: “Mr. Wade, although a member of the order, was opposed to the resolution.” James H. Wade sat for Mariposa and Tulare. It gives the speech for the order to a “Mr. Colgrove,” a name no senator of 1853 bore; the Union gives it to Coffroth. “Looking around the Senate chamber he discovered a number of honorable senators who were ornaments of the order, and outside the bar were also several members of the press, belonging to the society.” A motion to lay the resolution on the table was lost, and “on motion of Mr. Wombough, the resolution was indefinitely postponed—ayes 9, nays 7.” Then a postscript: “I should tell you that the N. G. H. of the State was present and gave the Grand Sign.”

New findingStruck from the record. The Senate was not finished with it. Probably the next day, “Mr. Wambough moved to strike from the journal all proceedings had in relation to the ‘E Clampsus Vitus’ Association,” the Daily Alta California reported. “Carried, 10 to 7” (Daily Alta California, 19 March 1853⁶⁴). Jim Cirner found the report and sent it to us. It worked. The printed Journal of the Senate⁶⁵ for 1853 has not a word of the debate, and the next day’s entry opens, “The Journal of Thursday was read, corrected, and approved.” Seth Slopes’s chronology gives Benicia “March 1853” without a source; this is the record behind it, and it moves Benicia in the register from 1857 to 1853.

Step into the Senate at Benicia, in 3D › The lower hall of the capitol of 1852, its six columns cut from ships’ masts, on the morning of 17 March 1853. Play the debate in the papers’ own words, to the vote that struck it from the journal.

New findingA dollar a member, 1855. Two years later, with the capital moved to Sacramento, the order was back on the floor. On Monday, 30 April 1855, “while the house was enjoying an interregnum ‘under a call,’” a resolution was introduced in the Assembly “to the effect that a tax of one dollar be levied on each member for the benefit of the renowned order of E Clampsus Vitus; that association being compelled to rely upon its own resources at present, and its charitable acts having exhausted its exchequer. The Speaker pro tem. reluctantly declared the resolution out of order” (Sacramento Daily Union, 1 May 1855¹⁶⁷).

ReadingWithin a year of its first notice at Stockton, the order had members in the state Senate, enough of them to bring a resolution to the floor, and a “head” for the whole state. The papers never name him; the Republican’s letter says only that “the N. G. H. of the State was present.”

The long goodbye, 1860–1920

DocumentedThe fun had a long tail. Lodges opened at Susanville in 1860, Napa in 1862, Colusa in 1878 and Cedarville in 1879, Bear Valley and Coulterville reorganized theirs in 1867, and in 1884 the Feather River Bulletin reported that at Sierraville “the Royal Platrix has sounded the hewgag.” It reached the mountains of Idaho too: Boise City had a lodge “in a flourishing condition” in 1868, and New findingat Idaho City in September 1880 “a revival of the ancient order of Eclampsus Vitus, known here as the T. T.’s,” had “been having a successful run for the last two or three months.”

DocumentedThe old order faded camp by camp, and the papers enjoyed it. At Alturas in December 1882 “the young ladies … organized a society, the object of which is to annihilate the order known as the E Clampus Vitus”: the Young Ladies’ Independent Association. At Tuscarora, Nevada, in February 1883: “The order of E Clampsus Vitus has no existence in Tuscarora. The old members have all joined dancing school.” Yet on the Fourth of July 1883 Downieville still had a Clamper orator, William J. Holmes, “Grand Segnieur,” who hailed “fellow Clampers, female suffragists, hoodlums and miners from every part of the compass” and “the vast and stupendous benefits that have accrued to the widows and orphans of this great State” (reprinted in the Feather River Bulletin, 26 April 1917). Adam Lee Moore, taken in at Downieville in the late 1860s, told how it ended: “When the placer mines gave out and most of the mining was in quartz mines, a different class of men came into the mines and the Order died out and only a few lodges survived. Those were Downieville, Marysville, Sierra Valley and Sierra City. The last two survived to the last” (Mountain Messenger, 31 May 1941). Downieville still marched on the Fourth of July 1885, with “a grand torchlight procession by the E Clampus Vitus.” And far to the east that April a lodge at Jackson, Ohio, “with headquarters at the Mayor’s Office,” was “doing a brisk business, having taken in several dollars within a few hours. The boys are having a jolly time” (Jackson Standard, 2 April 1885). All from clippings in Jim Cirner’s albums “ECV ® Back in the Day” #1–3.

Did you know? By 1875 the order was a byword. When the Sacramento Bee listed a thief’s stolen goods that January, it included “one dark-lantern (probably stolen from an E Clampsus Vitus Lodge room)” (20 January 1875, as clipped in Jim Cirner’s album “ECV ® Back in the Day” #2). The name kept turning up as a joke: a Grange letter of 1873 wanted a man initiated “as a high private in the Eclampsus Vitus”; in 1886 the Shasta Courier pictured riches “far more brilliant than an E Clampus Vitus lodge”; in 1889 the Alta supposed a New York colonel “got steered into an Eclampsus Vitus lodge and is trying to play even”; and as late as 1903 the Louisville Times said a great joiner “will be an ‘E Clampsus Vitus’ yet” (all as clipped in Jim Cirner’s albums “ECV ® Back in the Day”).

DocumentedThe monkey of Marysville. At Marysville the order was still initiating in 1891. That August W. T. Ellis Jr., “one of the wealthiest men in Marysville,” turned up in San Francisco to buy a monkey. “I’m president of the ‘Clampers,’” he told the Chronicle. “It is a great order. … The Masons and Odd Fellows ain’t near it.” The Clampers, he explained, “were organized especially for the purpose of initiating new members,” and “every fellow initiated, as soon as he got well enough to hobble around, sought out some other fellow to initiate so he could get even.” Their goat had turned on the members, so “we amended the constitution and by-laws, and in future the monkey … will fill the position heretofore occupied by the goat” (San Francisco Chronicle, 3 August 1891, as clipped in Jim Cirner’s albums). Five years later the same lodge took in Lord Sholto Douglas. In 1893 the hewgag still greeted visitors to Camptonville on Admission Day, and Marysville fielded a baseball team called the Clampers (Marysville Daily Democrat, 11 September 1893; Marysville Evening Democrat, 18 September 1893).

DocumentedStill, the lodges were thinning. The Calaveras lodge “only slumbers,” a Stockton paper wrote in 1871, its properties lost to fire; at Oroville by 1892 the order was “a thing of the past”; and at Marysville in 1899 “the paraphernalia has been stored away.” It would be Marysville that took it out again.

The boosters’ revival, 1915–1920

DocumentedMarysville’s paraphernalia stayed stored away for sixteen years. Then, on the night of 22 October 1915, “no less than one hundred and seventy Clampers were in line. They followed ye ancient ‘Hew Gag’ …” The lodge was organized, the headline said, “with assistance of enthusiastic old members of former organization,” and all were “given password.” L. B. Crook was Worthy President; the mayor, Harry Hyde, was Grand High Priest; Chester Smith was Grand Treasurer; and Charles A. Wetmore was the legal adviser (Marysville Daily Appeal, 23 October 1915¹⁷⁹). The order was incorporated on 9 November 1915 (Then and Now, 1966), and four days later the Sacramento Union had “this new organization” at 900 members and looking to lease the old woollen mills for a lodge room (13 November 1915¹⁸⁰).

DocumentedBury the Hammer and Blow Your Horn. Their first big show was a funeral. On Friday, 10 December 1915, Marysville dedicated its new $150,000 reinforced-concrete bridge over the Yuba, and the “celebration held here today” was “under the auspices of the Clampers.” Five hundred of them paraded “dressed in linen dusters” under the slogan “Bury the Hammer and Blow Your Horn,” and a coffin with a hammer in it went over the railing into the river: a booster’s joke, for the hammer was the knocker’s tool. The man in charge was “L. B. Crook, president of Marysville lodge, No. 1, E. Clampus Vitus” (Sacramento Union, 11 December 1915¹⁸¹). The next morning’s Union had the sequel in a headline: the boys had resurrected the hammers (12 December 1915¹⁸²).

DocumentedTown to town. This was a boosters’ club in a miner’s duster, and it said so: “the boost spirit,” the Union wrote, “is the chief aim of the lodge.” On 7 January 1916 Marysville No. 1 granted Oroville “lodge No. 2,” where “there are 500 people ready to be made Clampers,” and “Chico, Grass Valley, Woodland and several other towns” were thinking it over (Sacramento Union, 9 January 1916¹⁸³). Oroville was instituted on 27 January, after a parade of 400 Clampers from Marysville and 600 men of Oroville (Sacramento Union, 29 January 1916¹⁸⁵, machine-read text). Chico came next, on Thursday, 23 March: “Chico lodge, No. 3, E. Clampus Vitus, was instituted last night in a ceremony of frolic and frivolity, in which about 900 yellow ribboned northern Californians participated,” in the Armory hall, and the roll went “up to nearly seven hundred” (25 March 1916¹⁸⁶). In May the Chico men were invited by special excursion to the installation at Willows (Chico Record, 16 May 1916¹⁸⁹), and on Saturday, 20 May, seven hundred people from Chico, Marysville, Oroville and Willows packed the Willows armory and four hundred were taken in (Sacramento Union, 22 May 1916¹⁹⁰). Colusa followed on 29 June, with “1400 visiting Clampers from Marysville, Oroville, Chico and Willows” at the opera house (1 July 1916¹⁹²); on 6 November Marysville voted “Red Bluff lodge No. 7” its charter (8 November 1916¹⁹⁵); and on Sunday afternoon, 11 February 1917, “Quincy Lodge No. 8, E. Clampus Vitus was organized … with a membership of seventy-five citizens,” installed by Grand President L. B. Crook of Marysville to the tones of “the monstrous ‘hew-gag’ brought by the visitors” (Feather River Bulletin, 15 February 1917, p. 1²⁰⁸).

DocumentedThey boosted. The Willows Clampers headed a movement to reopen the sugar refinery at Hamilton City (Sacramento Union, 9 August 1916¹⁹³) and voted Clarence F. Lea, candidate for Congress, “a good fellow” (17 September 1916¹⁹⁴); Oroville Lodge No. 2 wanted a row of electrically lit arches over the town’s streets (12 July 1918¹⁹⁹). Roseville asked for a charter in January 1916 (21 January 1916¹⁸⁴), and Woodland, Grass Valley and Sacramento talked of lodges of their own; the papers do not record any of them instituted.

DocumentedA grand lodge, 1916. On Saturday, 11 November 1916, the lodges met at Marysville for “the first annual grand lodge of E. Clampus Vitas.” They re-elected L. B. Crook of Marysville Grand President, filled the old offices from Colusa, Willows, Oroville, Chico and Marysville, a Royal Platrix, a Clampus Petrix, a Clampsus Vetrix and a grand surgeon among them, and chose Oroville for the grand lodge of 1917, in “the ‘bury the hammer and blow the horn’ spirit” (Tehama County Daily News, Red Bluff, 14 November 1916, as clipped in Jim Cirner’s album “ECV ® Back in the Day” #3). At Oroville that April the Clampers had buried a 350-pound hammer in the Feather River, and it “floated for a time on the water of the Feather River,” and then, “weighed down by its many evil deeds,” went under (Oroville Daily Register, 20 and 21 April 1916, also in the album).

DocumentedBoosters at large. The new lodges did what boosters do. In October 1916 the Oroville Clampers, with B. B. Meek on the committee, welcomed home I Company from the Mexican border (Oroville Daily Register, 12 October 1916). At Chico they met their match: Annie Bidwell, the town’s founder’s widow and a temperance woman, rented the pavilion herself to stop the Clampers’ Sunday ball (as told by Millie Robbins in the San Francisco Chronicle of 31 October 1963, from the Chronicle of 29 May 1916). The war did not end the fun at once: some seven hundred came to Oroville Lodge No. 2’s masquerade ball in December 1917 (Oroville Daily Register, 15 December 1917), and Willows kept a “Clamper Birthday” on 21 May 1918. As late as 1925 a Florida columnist, Willis B. Powell, called himself “a life member of E Clampsus Vitus” from “a north California city” (Tampa Tribune, 29 October 1925). All from clippings in Jim Cirner’s albums “ECV ® Back in the Day”.

ReadingThe numbers do not quite add up, and the papers knew it. Willows was No. 4 in one paper and No. 5 in another, and Colusa No. 5 and then No. 6; the Appeal announced a “Sacramento Lodge No. 5” to be installed in May (22 April 1916¹⁸⁷) and three days later called it “Sacramento Lodge No. 4” (25 April 1916¹⁸⁸; both machine-read text), which may be the lodge that took a number and never met. We give each lodge the numbers the papers gave it.

New findingLost to the war. The revival had a grand plan, and the war took it. “There was to have been a Grand Lodge held in Oroville in October, 1917,” the Colusa Daily Sun wrote on 27 January 1920, “but about that time the men in the towns mentioned were either in France, on their way, or scheming up some plan to be on their way, so the Grand Lodge fell through.” E Clampus Vitus, “revived a few years ago with such enthusiasm in Colusa, Marysville, Oroville, Chico and Quincy, seems to have died a natural death,” and “the American Legion is taking the place of the old order.” The headline wrote its epitaph in the order’s own dog Latin: “E. Clampus Vitus Very Deadibus Aroundaboutibus” (Colusa Daily Sun, 27 January 1920²⁰⁰). The Colusa Clampers’ money went to the new Legion post (Colusa Daily Sun, 28 January 1920²⁰¹; Colusa Herald, 29 January 1920²⁰²).

DocumentedOne last blast of the Hewgag. Quincy had other ideas. That same week “Quincy lodge No. 8, E. Clampus Vitus, a pioneer order of California, has been revived and reorganized,” by “15 or 20 former members who had an initiation of candidates Sunday when the Hew-gag was sounded and there was a parade in which the linen duster and straw bonnet were prominent” (Colusa Daily Sun, 2 February 1920²⁰⁴, from Quincy, 31 January). The Sunday was 25 January 1920. A Clampers’ Ball was set for 22 February. Quincy’s own Plumas Independent had the story first, on 29 January, under the headline “Clampers Lodge Revived Sunday” (29 January 1920, p. 1²⁰³).

ReadingSo the order Carl Wheat brought back in 1931 had been brought back before: sixteen years earlier, at Marysville, by men who wanted their towns to grow. When Wheat’s Clampers went looking for their legal standing, it was the Marysville corporation of 1915 they found (Then and Now, 1966).

The second revival, 1931

DocumentedIn the spring of 1930, by the order’s own history, the idea came to Carl I. Wheat and Leon O. Whitsell; with George Ezra Dane they revived E Clampus Vitus at a luncheon at the Clift Hotel in San Francisco in 1931, with some ten men present. The first chapter was Yerba Buena No. 1. The link to the old order was Adam Lee Moore, an old member of Balaam Lodge at Sierra City, who “assisted and furnished much information on the ritual and general procedure in vogue during the mining days” (Credo quia absurdum, 1949) and was installed as Clampatriarch.

DocumentedThe luncheon 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 date he set for it. On 11 December 1931, on the letterhead of his law office in the Balfour Building, he wrote to the historian and mountaineer 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, to “‘discuss’ ways & means for the revival of the Ancient & Honorable California Order,” and closed: “It will be a small group, but we have large ideas.” The letter, in the Marsh Fey Collection, was reproduced with Alan L. Wilson’s history of the order (1995); Jim Cirner shared it with us. Farquhar joined: he is one of the twenty-two charter members of E Clampus Vitus Redivivus in the order’s own list, and in 1948 it was his idea to carry Clamper covers to Coloma for the gold-discovery stamp. 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 Hotel at noon “for business important to the organization.” The first pilgrimage reached Camptonville on 28 May 1932.

Where the letter lives. The Marsh Fey Collection was gathered by Marshall (Marsh) Fey (1928–2024), grandson of Charles Fey, the inventor of the Liberty Bell slot machine, who with his brother Frank ran the Liberty Belle saloon in Reno from 1958; a founder and the second Noble Grand Humbug of the Julia C. Bulette Chapter No. 1864 at Virginia City, Nevada. When he died, his papers went to his chapter, and they are kept in boxes at its hall, the E Clampus Vitus Building at 34 B Street, built in 1867. Jim Cirner, who knew him, told us so.

1. Spring 1930The idea comes to Wheat and Whitsell (Then and Now).
2. 11 Dec 1931Wheat writes to Farquhar: lunch at the Clift, “large ideas.”
3. 18 Dec 1931Friday, 12:15: the lunch Wheat called at the Clift Hotel.
4. Apr 1932The brethren called back to the Clift at noon (Nevada City Nugget, 8 April 1932).
5. 28 May 1932The first pilgrimage reaches Camptonville.

DocumentedThe revived order printed its own books, The Enigmatical Book of Vitus (1934), The Curious Book of Clampus (1935) and others; and in 1936 a few Clampers played the most famous joke of all: the brass plate “found” near San Francisco Bay and hailed as Sir Francis Drake’s was a Clamper in-joke, as Edward Von der Porten and colleagues showed in 2002. The revived order’s leaders found that E Clampus Vitus was already a corporation: the boosters of Marysville had incorporated it on 9 November 1915, for fifty years; a transfer attempted in 1948 proved difficult, and in 1963 they incorporated E Clampus Vitus, Inc., at San Francisco (Then and Now, 1966).

The Clampers today

DocumentedE Clampus Vitus recognises 51 chapters in 11 western states (October 2026), from Yerba Buena No. 1 to the Doc Maynard Chapter No. 54-40 in Washington, chartered in 2006 as the 42nd. Its Grand Council meets each May at Sonora. It publishes no total of members. The Historical Marker Database lists 1,876 entries in its E Clampus Vitus series (22 October 2026), counting markers the order shares with others; a 2025 study found its hand in at least 149 California Historical Landmark plaques. Each chapter is led by a Noble Grand Humbug, who serves for one year; the officers of its Grand Council are styled Sublime, and one of them, the Sublime Grand Noble Recorder, keeps track of the order’s copyrights and registered trademarks (Jim Cirner, 2026). The red shirts, the Hewgag and the cry of “Satisfactory!” carry on.

Book twoPlay alongA quiz, the order’s own words, and the questions readers ask.

Myth or record? Play along

Every old order gathers stories about itself, and the Clampers have always enjoyed theirs. Here are thirteen of the most often repeated. For each, make your call: true, false, or no record either way. Then see what the records show.

State outlines: U.S. Census Bureau, via us-atlas.

The words of the order

Every lodge had its titles, its objects and its catchwords, and most of them can be dated by their first appearance in print. Some are older than the gold rush. Two of the best known are not found until the revival of 1931.

Blow the Hewgag, in 3D › “A big horn that can be heard all over town”: turn it over, hold to blow, and watch the sound carry down a mining-camp street.

New findingThe spelling. The order’s historians credit Carl Wheat with choosing the spelling “Clampus” at the revival of 1931. Albert Shumate, the order’s historian, put it exactly: Wheat “selected” it, and it had been used “in Illinois in 1847.” He did not cite a source; these are the earliest printed uses we can document. The old order spelled itself every way at once (Eclampsus, Clampsus, Clampses, Eclampus), and “Clampus” was among them early and often. The Alexandria Gazette of 13 March 1852 already had “E. Clampus Vitas” (p. 2⁷⁶). The Spirit of the Times of 14 January 1854, in a report of trotting at San Francisco, has gentlemen clenching their canes with “an ‘E Clampus vitus’ grip.” In January 1856 Stephen Massett, writing as “Jeems Pipes” in the San Francisco Herald, called a muddled land title “sufficiently ‘satisfactory’ (as the noble order of E Clampus Vitus gentlemen observe)”; he reprinted the letter in Drifting About (1863, p. 234). The same spelling is in newspapers of California, Virginia and Ohio from 1857 to 1860: the Mariposa Democrat of 17 December 1857, the 1858 report of Ephraim Bee at Richmond, the Jackson Standard of Ohio on 29 April 1858 and the Shasta Courier of 8 October 1859. And in the election summer of 1864 two Democratic papers, the Cadiz Sentinel of Ohio on 24 August and the North Branch Democrat of Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania, on 7 September, printed a squib called “Monstrous Conspiracy” that mocked their opponents’ fear of secret societies by listing them all: the Golden Circle, the Sons of Liberty, the Sag Nichts, “E Clampus Vitus!!” It was the summer the Republican press exposed the “Order of American Knights,” and Democratic papers answered with ridicule; the same list ran in the Holmes County Farmer of Millersburg, Ohio, on 1 September. The 2003 marker in Ephraim Bee’s own town still reads “E Clampsus Vitus.”

• Feb 1846 Eclampsus Vitus (Indiana American, Brookville, 27 February 1846)
• Jul 1846 Eclampees Vitus (Indiana State Sentinel, Indianapolis: Tent No. 43)
• Jan 1847 Eclampses Vitus (Journal of the House of Indiana: the Jackson Lodge bill)
• 1847 Ecclampsis Vitis (Bedford, as Judge Hall wrote it down in 1890)
• Mar 1852 E. Clampus Vitas (Alexandria Gazette, 13 March 1852)
• Mar 1853 E. Clampsus Vitus (Sacramento Daily Union: the Senate at Benicia)
• Jan 1854 E Clampus vitus (Spirit of the Times, 14 January 1854)
• Apr 1855 Eclampus Vitus (Cooper’s Clarksburg Register, 25 April 1855)
• 1875 Eclampsus Vitus (Rogers, History of Cass County, 1875)
• 1931 E Clampus Vitus (standardised by Carl Wheat at the revival)

Questions people ask

Book threeThe recordEvery place, map, name and document, for readers who want to check the work.

The register of early lodges

How sure are we? Two kinds of mark run through this page. The first says what kind of statement it is: Documented (a source says so, and you can read it yourself), Reading (our interpretation, kept apart from the facts) or New finding (found by us in a primary source, and not in any earlier telling we could find). The second, in the register and on the maps, says how close the source is to the event: Record, written at the time; Reported, a record of the time that has been cited, or that we have seen only as a clipping, but not read on the original page; Remembered, written down years later; Legend, no record of the date at all. The two can combine: Judge Hall’s Bedford chapter is Documented (you can read every word of it) but Remembered (he wrote it in 1890, about 1847).

New findingEach place below has its earliest surviving record, marked Record, Reported, Remembered or Legend as explained above. Sort the table by place, date or tier.

ReadingRead down the dates and the shape of the story is plain. The order was on record in Indiana in 1846, and is remembered or reported in Pennsylvania in 1847 and in Missouri and Illinois in 1849; it was in print in Virginia, Kentucky and Georgia by 1852 (and a Texas lodge card of that year survives in a later printing), in Mississippi by 1853 and in Maryland by 1855, and in California from the spring of 1852; by April 1858 it was at Honolulu, and by 1862 across the border in British Columbia. In California it spread from Stockton and the southern mines in 1852 and 1853, boomed in 1855 and 1856, when Sacramento initiated “nearly five hundred persons … within three weeks,” and reached the northern camps by the end of the decade; by February 1860 it was calling meetings by poster at Carson City, over the Sierra. It was still meeting in the 1880s and was initiating candidates at Sierraville in 1904.

Maps: where it was, and where it is

Watch the order march west, in 3D › Every place in the register rises on a relief map in the year of its first record, from Indiana in 1846 to the gold camps, the boosters’ revival of 1915 and the lunch at the Clift Hotel in 1931. Press Play, or drag the year.

Who’s who

The people on this page, and where to find them.

Ephraim Bee

of West Union, Virginia: the order’s legendary founder. The earliest record of him in it that can be read is of 1855.

Caleb Cushing

the first American minister to China, said in 1867 to have brought “the secrets of the order to this country.”

Joseph Miles

Noble Grand Humbug at Stockton in 1852: the first California officer on record.

Antonio María de la Guerra

senator for Santa Barbara, who moved to lend the order the Senate chamber in 1853.

M. M. Wombough

senator for Yolo and Colusa, who opposed it, was said to have been blackballed, and had it struck from the journal.

James W. Coffroth

senator for Tuolumne, who spoke up for the order’s members “high and low, all over the country.”

James H. Wade

senator for Mariposa and Tulare, named in the Senate debate of 1853 as “a member of the order.”

Henry A. Crabb

senator for San Joaquin in 1853, on record in the Stockton lodge in 1855.

David S. Terry

Noble Grand Humbug at Stockton in 1855.

Joel Henry Zumwalt

1831–1906; “J. H.” in the papers of the 1890s; named with the Bowling Green ritual and the Mokelumne Hill lodge. Long called Joseph by the order, until the Grand Council’s plaque of 2021.

Jacob Ehrenbacher

“Steamboat Jake,” put through a mock initiation at Yreka in 1856.

Sam McCurdy

Noble Grand Humbug at Stewart Flat in 1859.

L. B. Crook

Worthy President of Marysville Lodge No. 1 in 1915, in charge of the hammer’s funeral in the Yuba.

Harry Hyde

mayor of Marysville and Grand High Priest of the revived lodge, 1915.

Clarence F. Lea

candidate for Congress, voted “a good fellow” by the Willows Clampers in September 1916.

Adam Lee Moore

an old member of Balaam Lodge at Sierra City, the living link at the revival of 1931, installed as Clampatriarch.

Francis P. Farquhar

historian and mountaineer, invited by Wheat to the Clift Hotel lunch of 18 December 1931; a charter member of the revived order.

Frederick C. Clift

owner of the Clift Hotel, where the revival was planned; a charter member.

Leon O. Whitsell

with Carl Wheat and G. Ezra Dane, a reviver of 1931.

Carl Wheat

prime mover of the 1931 revival, who settled the spelling “Clampus”.

Boyd Stutler, G. Ezra Dane and Mayo Hayes O’Donnell

the writers whose sources this page has gone back to check.

The documents

The founding texts, transcribed from the original pages. Spelling and punctuation are the originals’. Square brackets mark words the scan does not show clearly.

Where the rest lies

Every substantial source on the order we have found, grouped by what kind of witness it is, with where to read it.

The order’s histories: a reading list

Every history of the order we know of, oldest first, with a line on what each one covers. All are cited on this page where they are used; the order’s archives are listed under “Where the rest lies.”

1. 1931Boyd B. Stutler, “Ephraim Bee, Grand Gyascutis, and his Virginia E C V of 1853,” West Virginia Review, August 1931; reprinted in Credo quia absurdum (1949) and by Slopes (2000). Read or find it ›⁶⁷The founding legend’s first serious study, quoting the Weston Herald of 1853. Stutler’s papers are at the West Virginia State Archives (Ms78-1).
2. 1934Carl I. Wheat, The Enigmatical Book of Vitus (Yerba Buena, 1934). Read or find it ›¹⁵³The revived order’s first book: its spirit and its jokes, more than its history.
3. 1941G. Ezra Dane with Beatrice J. Dane, Ghost Town (New York: Knopf, 1941). Read or find it ›⁷⁵Columbia’s gold-rush tales; its bibliography records the Metropolis record book of 1849. Dane’s papers are at the Huntington Library.
4. 1949E Clampus Vitus, Credo quia absurdum (Placerville, 1949). Read or find it ›⁶⁷The order’s own anthology: Stutler on Bee, Dane’s essay on the origin (1938), Judge Hall on Bedford (1890) and the 1896 Bowling Green story. The single most useful book on the old order.
5. 1949Carl I. Wheat, “The Clampers,” Pacific Historical Review 18:1 (1949), 67–69. Read or find it ›¹⁵⁴The reviver’s own short account, in a scholarly journal.
6. 1960Albert Shumate, ECV News from the Miners, 1856–1860 (San Francisco: Lawton Kennedy, 1960). Read or find it ›¹⁵⁵Newspaper notices of the gold-camp lodges, printed as found.
7. 1961Albert Shumate, A Note on ECV in the Gold Fields (San Francisco: Lawton Kennedy, 1961). Read or find it ›¹⁰¹A short companion to the above.
8. 1966Dave Dunlap, R. Coke Wood and others, Then and Now: The Story of E Clampus Vitus (Stockton, 1966). Read or find it ›³⁰The order’s own history of itself, from the legend to the revival; it ends by wishing for a list of the early lodges. Online from Joaquin Murrieta Chapter No. 13.
9. 1980Lois Rather, Men Will Be Boys: The Story of E Clampus Vitus (Oakland: Rather Press, 1980). Read or find it ›¹⁵⁶A fine-press history in 150 copies; a copy is at the Huntington Library, her papers at the Bancroft.
10. 1991Albert Shumate, “The Mysterious History of E Clampus Vitus,” a talk to the San Francisco Corral of Westerners, 25 June 1991. Read or find it ›¹⁵⁷The order’s historian on the dated eastern lodges, Hangtown and Wheat’s spelling. Published online by the Julia C. Bulette Chapter.
11. 1995Alan L. Wilson, “A Short History of E Clampus Vitus” (1995). Read or find it ›¹⁵⁷With Carl Wheat’s invitation of 1931 reproduced. Published online by the Julia C. Bulette Chapter.
12. 2000Seth Slopes, E Clampus Vitus: Now & Then: The Replete History of ECV (Murphys: Old Timers Museum, 2000). Read or find it ›²²The modern anthology, with a chronology of places by year that this page builds on.
13. OnlineJennifer Wilt, “Ephraim Bee & E Clampus Vitus,” Doddridge County Heritage Guild. Read or find it ›²⁹Bee’s life in West Union, with the Parkersburg State Journal account of 1896 reprinted.

The poster

The whole story on one page, for a lodge hall, a classroom or a refrigerator door: “E Clampus Vitus on Paper,” 1846 to today, every date from the record. Letter size, landscape; it prints well larger.

The case file: what we asked, and what we found

Index of names

Add to the register

This register has grown with help. Jim Cirner sent us the Daily Alta California’s report of the Senate at Benicia, the order’s 1966 history Then and Now, clippings from his albums, a photograph of Joel Henry Zumwalt’s plaque and Carl Wheat’s invitation of 1931. Every one of them is on this page. If you have a lodge to add, an earlier record for one that is here, or a name, a badge or a photograph, write to research@projectscroll.com. Every addition is credited. The register is free to download and to reuse under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence: share it, republish it or build on it, with credit. Please cite it as: Michael Urbanski, “E Clampus Vitus: the complete record,” Project Scroll, first published 22 October 2026, https://projectscroll.com/news/e-clampus-vitus-the-complete-record/.

The old order’s last blast on the Hewgag was heard at Quincy in January 1920. Twelve years later the horn sounded again, from the porch of Bill Meek’s store at Camptonville, rechristened Clamptonville for the night, and the order that answered it is at work today in fifty-one chapters. A joke that the California Senate struck from its journal in 1853 has outlived the journal’s readers. Back to the first lodge with names: Cassopolis, 1846 ›

To cite this page: Michael Urbanski, “E Clampus Vitus: the complete record,” Project Scroll, first published 22 October 2026, revised 2 November 2026, https://projectscroll.com/news/e-clampus-vitus-the-complete-record/. To cite a single finding, use its own link on our Discoveries page. 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.