Dreams of El Dorado

by H. W. Brands

  The Sydney Ducks ruled Sydney Town, a neighborhood of bars and brothels. They extorted protection money from the bar owners and madams; they robbed non-customers reckless enough to be passing through. They killed any who challenged their right to engage in nefarious activities. The police steered clear of Sydney Town, judging that those who ventured there were up to no good and deserved what befell them.

  Reputable San Franciscans ignored the Ducks as long as they stayed in Sydney Town. But when the activity of the Ducks began to touch the rest of the city, and especially when evidence of arson in the later fires pointed toward the Ducks, civic leaders mobilized again.

  This time their vigilance activity was better organized. A mass meeting was advertised; those who attended drafted a charter for a formal “Committee of Vigilance.” The charter avowed its signees’ devotion to the rule of law but complained that the law was being suborned by bribery of the police, intimidation of witnesses and other modes of malfeasance. The committee would fix that. “We are determined that no thief, burglar, incendiary or assassin shall escape punishment, either by the quibbles of the law, the insecurity of prisons, the carelessness or corruption of the police, or a laxity of those who pretend to administer justice,” its charter said.

  The committee soon had a chance to show its resolve. A storeowner reported a small safe missing. Shortly thereafter, a Duck named John Jenkins was seen exiting the waterfront neighborhood with something heavy and awkward under wraps—something that looked like a safe. Confronted, he stole a boat and made off into the bay. Several men pursued him in boats of their own. As they closed in, he dropped his burden into the bay. But the water was too shallow for concealment, and the object was retrieved. It was the missing safe.

  That evening the bell of a fire company was rung to summon the Committee of Vigilance. Eighty members appeared. John Jenkins was brought in. Evidence against him was presented and evaluated. After a trial of two hours a verdict was handed down: guilty. The sentence: death.

  By now it was past midnight. A large crowd had gathered outside the room where the trial had been convened. Sam Brannan, speaking for the committee, announced the verdict and sentence. The crowd shouted its approval.

  The prisoner was brought out for execution. At this point the sheriff half-heartedly tried to intervene. He was let to know that if he valued his own life he should step aside. He did.

  Jenkins’s arms were tied behind his back. A noose was lowered over his head and adjusted to fit his neck. The other end of the rope was tossed over a sturdy timber standing out from the building. A few vigorous yanks by several strong men lifted Jenkins, swinging, off the ground. He struggled briefly and died.

  The next day, the sheriff, emboldened by the dawn and the breakup of the crowd, ordered an inquest. Sam Brannan was questioned. He defended the work of the committee. “I believe the man had a fair and impartial trial,” Brannan said of Jenkins. “He was tried before from sixty to eighty men. I believe the verdict of guilty was unanimous, and they came to the conclusion unanimously to hang him.” The sheriff asked for names of those involved. Brannan declined to tell. “I have understood that threats have been made against their property and lives. I have heard the threats made, have heard it said that my own house would be burned. Threats have come to me from the prisoners in the county prison that I should not live ninety days.”

  The inquest board was satisfied. Its report described the events leading to Jenkins’s execution, and it identified Brannan and other leaders of the Committee of Vigilance. But it declined to recommend action against them.

  Yet even this meddling angered the committee and its supporters. Another mass meeting was held; the 184 men present condemned the inquest report and claimed equal responsibility with Brannan in the execution of Jenkins.

  The committee dared the inquest board and the sheriff to come after them. It commenced another case, against a Sydney Duck named James Stuart, infamous for murder, extortion and other crimes. He was arrested, tried and sentenced to hang. “He did not struggle much,” wrote Frank Soulé, who had mixed feelings about the vigilance phenomenon. “After hanging a few seconds, his hat fell off, and a slight breeze stirred and gently waved his hair. This was a sorry spectacle—a human being dying like a dog, while thousands of erring mortals, whose wickedness only had not yet been found out, looked on and applauded! But necessity, which dared not trust itself to feelings of compassion, commanded the deed and unprofitable sentiment sunk abashed. Reason loudly declared—So perish every villain who would hurt his neighbor! and all the people said Amen!”

  29

  THE SPIRIT OF ’87

  SAN FRANCISCO’S STRUGGLE TO CREATE ORDER OUT OF THE chaos of the gold rush was paralleled by California’s efforts to form a state government. By the late summer of 1849 California had more inhabitants than some states, and more people were arriving every day. The military government of the occupation couldn’t keep order, let alone address the myriad civilian functions of state governments. Personal security depended on vigilante action, which was haphazard at best, alarming at worst.

  Californians and friends of Californians pleaded with Congress to take action. At the least, they said, California should be given a territorial government. Because California lay beyond the bounds of the Louisiana Purchase, the Missouri Compromise didn’t apply, leaving Congress without guidance on the slavery question. Most observers supposed California wasn’t suited to slavery, but Southerners, having received nothing for giving Oregon a territorial government that didn’t guarantee slavery, refused to do the same for California. The ensuing deadlock left California in limbo, neither territory nor state.

  The military governor, General Bennet Riley, took matters into his own hands. Tired of bearing blame for not doing what he had no power to do, he called a constitutional convention. He lacked the authority to summon such a convention, but perhaps he remembered that the convention that wrote the federal Constitution in Philadelphia in 1787 had lacked authority to do what it did. Its work was made good in the denouement: the Constitution’s ratification. Riley assumed, or at least hoped, that California’s constitution would receive ex post facto approval too. “As Congress has failed to organize a new Territorial Government, it becomes our imperative duty to take some active measures to provide for the existing wants of the country,” he said in the notice summoning the convention.

  Corralling delegates wasn’t easy. Most Californians were too busy seeking their fortunes to spare time for constitution-making. And most considered California their current place of work rather than their permanent home. What did they care how California developed over the next decade or the generations to come? They would be gone by then.

  Nonetheless, forty-eight delegates gathered at Monterey in September 1849. Among them were seven native-born Californians, including one Indian, Manuel Dominguez of Los Angeles. Thirty-five had been born in the United States. Six had been born in Europe.

  The Monterey convention adopted the Philadelphia convention as its model, augmented by experience. A first order of business was a bill of rights, which the Philadelphia convention had neglected. Significantly, the California bill of rights included a ban on slavery.

  The significance of this provision lay in two facts: that it was the first pronouncement on slavery in the trans-Louisiana West, and that it was approved unanimously—by the delegates from America’s slave states as well as those from the free states. More than a few Southern gold-seekers had brought slaves, whose status was ambiguous after they set foot on California soil. American law at the time allowed slaveholders to take slaves, typically as personal servants, to the free states of the North without jeopardizing the owners’ legal title to them, so long as the stay in the North was temporary. America’s courts had never ruled definitively on how long a temporary stay could last. And most of the Southerners in California didn’t know how long they would be staying.

  But the sentiment in California and at the Monterey convention was decidedl
y against slavery. Slavery stigmatized manual labor, and manual labor was the occupation of nearly all Californians. No free Californian wished to incur that stigma. Put otherwise, as one Californian did, “In a country where every white man makes a slave of himself, there is no use in keeping niggers.”

  Even while the convention voted to keep slaves out, several delegates wanted to keep blacks out, too. One delegate, formerly of Kentucky, considered free blacks a bane on a community. “They are idle in their habits, difficult to be governed by the laws, thriftless, and uneducated. It is a species of population that this country should be particularly guarded against,” he said. Another delegate, lately from Louisiana, concurred, saying, “The free negro is one of the greatest evils that society can be afflicted with.” Yet the proposed ban failed, stymied by a combination of egalitarian conscience and concerns about the constitutionality of such a ban, in a convention of dubious constitutionality itself.

  The convention concluded with a grand celebration of its labors. The delegates and their guests feasted on beef, pig, turkey, tongue and pâté; toasted one another with wines of several varieties; and danced till dawn. Then they signed their names to the document, and cannons at the fort of Monterey fired thirty-one times, saluting California as the thirty-first state of the Union.

  BUT BECOMING A STATE WASN’T AS EASY AS THAT. CONGRESS still had to approve. And any modestly knowledgeable observer of national politics could tell this was hardly guaranteed.

  To carry their precious document, duly ratified by California voters, to Washington, the Californians chose John Frémont. “The Pathfinder of the West,” as he was commonly called, had been lurking in Oregon and California ahead of the war with Mexico; when that conflict broke out, he raised the American flag over California, inspiring Jessie Frémont to employ a new sobriquet for her husband, “Liberator of California.” They aimed to settle in San Francisco, but a land swindle left them holding an apparently valueless tract on the Mariposa River, which turned out to sit atop the Mother Lode, the great ore body from which the Sierra gold had been eroding out all these eons. By dumb luck the Frémonts became fabulously wealthy. They were, metaphorically and almost literally, the golden couple of American national life in the early 1850s.

  Congress was suitably impressed by Frémont on his arrival, California constitution in hand, in the late winter of 1850. Yet Southern members of the Senate were still loath to accept California’s admission as a free state, which would tip the balance of states against their section. They dug in their heels.

  The California question triggered a titanic political battle. On California’s behalf arose Kentuckian Henry Clay, the author of the Missouri Compromise, who came out of retirement to fashion another compromise, lest the Union fall to pieces in the twilight of his career. John Calhoun of South Carolina, equally venerable and a legislator of no small gifts himself, would have stood toe-to-toe against Clay, if he could have stood at all. Calhoun was dying of consumption—tuberculosis—which had silenced his stentorian voice. Others had to read his speeches for him. But his fierce will was as strong as ever, and his eyes blazed with contempt for everything Clay was trying to accomplish.

  California’s fate hung in the balance. Calhoun rejected the right of the Californians to write a constitution for themselves. California didn’t belong to them, he said. It belonged to the people of the United States, who had acquired it by war from Mexico. The people of the United States acting through Congress, not the people of California via illegitimate convention and bogus ratification, must determine California’s fate.

  Henry Clay riposted by wrapping California in a blanket of measures more acceptable to the South. Chief of these was a strengthened law governing the return of fugitive slaves. Northern abolitionists regularly subverted the clause of the federal Constitution requiring the return of fugitive slaves to their owners; Northern state legislators assisted by passing personal-liberty laws that forbade state officials from cooperating with slave-catchers. For years the South had been demanding a federal law with teeth to stop the practice. Clay proposed just such a law.

  Calhoun wasn’t satisfied. He demanded acceptance of the principle that slave-owners could take their slave property anywhere in the Union, just as owners of horses could take their horses anywhere. But Calhoun died amid the debate, and enough of his Southern colleagues yielded to Clay’s appeals—and to the deft floor management of Stephen Douglas, a talented and ambitious young senator from Illinois—for what came to be called the Compromise of 1850 to win approval. The compromise might have failed at the last moment if not for another death. President Zachary Taylor, a Virginian and a slave-owner, looked askance at Clay’s package and threatened a veto, but Taylor suddenly died in the final stages of the debate. His successor, Millard Fillmore of New York, favored the compromise and signed it.

  In California the cannons boomed again, this time with authority.

  30

  TO BE DECENTLY POOR

  SOME IN CALIFORNIA GROANED AT THE NEWS OF STATEHOOD. The treaty transferring California to the United States had specified that land titles acquired under Spanish and Mexican law be honored under American law. But California law, and especially California practice, diverged from American law, and in an age when no federal justice department even existed, local law and practice often trumped federal law. Many Mexicans in California lost their land through unfavorable statutes of the California government, adverse rulings in California courts, or outright theft.

  Mariano Vallejo, a Californio, or native-born Californian of Spanish descent, was one of the largest landowners in California at the time of the gold discovery. He was also a practical man and a forward-thinking individual. He endorsed American annexation of California even before the war with Mexico, predicting that American rule would allow California to thrive as it had never done under Mexico. “When we join our fortunes to hers, we shall not become subjects but fellow citizens, possessing all the rights of the people of the United States,” Vallejo told his fellow Californios. “We shall have a stable government and just laws. California will grow strong and flourish, and her people will be prosperous, happy, and free. Look not, therefore, with jealousy upon the hardy pioneers who scale our mountains and cultivate our unoccupied plains; but rather welcome them as brothers, who come to share with us a common destiny.”

  Alas, the Americans in California didn’t reciprocate the good feeling. In 1846, just as the United States was going to war with Mexico, a group of Americans in California launched a revolt against the Mexican government there, proclaiming what they called the Bear Flag Republic. They arrested Vallejo as a symbol of the old order. He was held as a prisoner for six weeks, and contracted malaria in detention. When he was finally released, he discovered that his ranch in the Sonoma Valley had been robbed of large herds of horses and cattle. His standing crop of wheat had been stolen or simply destroyed. “All is lost,” he lamented.

  In fact there was much more for Vallejo to lose. Gold-hunters took up residence on his property, helping themselves to livestock, crops and anything else not firmly tied down. Lusters after his land hired lawyers to assail him in court. Comparing the attorneys to the Sydney Ducks of San Francisco, Vallejo said, “The bandits from Australia stole our cattle and horses, but these thieves in frock coats, wrapped about with the mantle of the law, took away our lands and buildings and, with no scruple whatsoever, enthroned themselves as powerful monarchs in our houses.”

  Yet Vallejo redoubled his commitment to the American way of doing things. He joined the Monterey convention as a delegate, and after Congress approved the constitution and statehood, he served as a state legislator. He donated land and money toward the construction of a state capital on a northern arm of San Francisco Bay. His gifts were accepted, but his fellow legislators chose Sacramento for their home away from home.

  Vallejo’s largesse and adoptive patriotism availed him little. The courts and Congress redefined the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in a way that shift
ed the burden of proof of ownership to the Californios. Because records and titles under Mexican law differed substantially from their American counterparts, the Californios often found it impossible to fend off challenges. Vallejo spent many thousands of dollars in legal fees, ultimately in vain. Once a rich man, he found himself deeply in debt. Formerly the lord of a vast domain, he now held but a few miserable parcels.

  Yet Vallejo retained his dignity, or tried to. “I think I will know how to be decently poor when the time comes, just as I have known how to be rich,” he said.

  NOT ALL THOSE DISPOSSESSED BY THE AMERICANS WERE AS gracious as Mariano Vallejo. One who fought back violently was Joaquín Murrieta. So storied did Murrieta’s exploits become that many in California believed he was a composite of several men. He apparently didn’t mind having his powers exaggerated, the better to strike fear into the hearts of his enemies and tormentors.