What artifact to counterfeit, I thought to myself. Something that could plausibly be found around here. A piece of local history. Obscure enough that its value would not be immediately obvious, and therefore its existence (or discovery) outside of a museum collection not too implausible to believe. Like many San Franciscans and other fans of the eccentric, I've long had a fascination with Emperor Norton, and I considered and rejected a number of possible Norton artifacts before settling on the perfect one: Bummer's dog tag.

There's no historical evidence to suggest that Bummer ever had a tag, but in 1862 the Board of Supes declared him and his friend Lazarus exempt from city ordinances against stray dogs, so it's plausible that they might have received some sort of licenses and tags to make it official. Research into 19th-century dog tags suggested that hand-stamped copper disks wouldn't be too far off the mark, so I found someone on Etsy who does that type of work and secured a shiny new tag:




I tried to make it look a little more well-worn by putting it in a jar of rocks and shaking it around for a while, but to really make it look more than a century old I would need to do some more intense aging.

I had this task in mind when I did my earlier research into accelerating the aging process, and I took this opportunity to continue to refine my verdantification technique. To avoid the problem of inadvertantly cleaning the verdigris off, I suspended it inside a jar of steaming vinegar:



I found that this had a flaw, though, which was condensation running down the tag and leaving suspicious clean streaks. Gravity was not my friend.



Resting it on a solid surface had a similar problem, where condensation would form on the surface and wipe the bottom side clean. After a lot more trial and error, I hit upon this method of suspending it horizontally over the vinegar steam bath:



Success!

I am open to suggestions as to what to do with this artifact; the new museum of San Francisco history hasn't opened yet or I'd try to slip it into their collection. Currently planning to give it as a Nice Thing at an upcoming event.