Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  Trading vessels from many nations visited the California ports, paying duties that provided a $75,000-a-year income for the provinces. American ships were the most frequent and active traders and brought every conceivable commodity from the United States, from brooms to cookstoves, pianos to kegs of nails. The Californios manufactured nothing and were therefore needful of everything. As Dana recorded in his journal, even the soap and candles made from their own tallow were traded to them, as were boots and shoes and saddles made from their cowhides.

  A typical cargo of trade goods out of Boston and a return shipload of hides brought a three-hundred-percent profit to the trading company.

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  In 1786, the first non-Spanish visitor since Drake made a call at the Pacific coast of North America. This was the French explorer Compte de Lapérouse, who spent ten days in Monterey Bay before sailing on to Kamchatka, the Philippines, and Australia, and to being swallowed up by the Pacific and never seen again. Neither Drake, nor Lapérouse, nor the American adventurer John Ledyard—who, in the service of the illustrious English explorer Captain James Cook, came to the north California coast in 1778—made a significant impression on the Spanish throne or its viceroys in the New World.

  They continued to come, increasingly bothersome intruders: by the 1790s, Russian and British ships were in the North Pacific killing sea otters, seals, and whales—sperms, graybacks, humpbacks, rights, and blues. By 1801, some eighteen thousand sea otters had been slaughtered in California waters, their pelts worth three hundred dollars each in Canton. By 1820, this animal, which had flourished from the Aleutians to Baja California, had been virtually extinguished.

  In 1818, Monterey and San Juan Capistrano were plundered and burned by pirate patriots from two privateers sailing under the Argentine flag and commanded by a Frenchman, Hippolyte de Bouchard, a freebooter fighting against Spain in South America. So distant was the Pacific outpost from the main theaters of action in South America and Mexico that Bouchard’s foray was California’s only brush with the wars of independence from Spain.

  Russians came to San Francisco Bay from Sitka in 1806, sent in the brigantine Juno by Aleksandr Baranov, head of the Russian American Fur Company, to buy supplies for his scurvy-plagued and starving colonists in Alaska and to trade cloth, agricultural implements, tools, and furniture. The Russians, dreaming of a trans-Pacific empire, gained from Spanish authorities a temporary trading concession, and fifty miles north of San Francisco Bay they built a timber palisade and blockhouses slotted with rifle loopholes—sixty buildings in all—and armed the place, which they called Rossiya, or Fort Ross, with cannon. Soon afterward, the Russian fur traders built another post at Bodega Point, eighteen miles south of Fort Ross, and stationed eighty trapper-traders and fifty Aleut Indians there.

  Even though the Spanish, and later the Mexican, authorities in California were confident that the Russians would make no advances closer to San Francisco Bay, as a precaution, the mission town of Sonoma was garrisoned and armed with nine brass cannons.

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  The original American resident of California, a genuine Boston man and merchant seaman named Thomas W. Doak, came to Monterey in 1816 on the trader Albatross. He may have been sent ashore to recover from some illness, or may simply have deserted his ship. Not much is known about him except that he married into a Spanish family, worked as a carpenter, and died in about 1848.

  A few other Americans ventured to California in the dying years of Spanish hegemony, but most of them arrived after Mexican independence.

  Jedediah Strong Smith, born in the Susquehanna Valley of southern New York, became the first American to cross into California by a land route. So respected in the mountaineer fraternity that he was called “Captain Smith” and “Mr. Smith” by men who rarely deferred to anyone, he carried a butcher’s knife in his belt and a bible in his bedroll and was described as “half grizzly and half preacher” by his comrades.

  In November, 1826, Smith led a party of beaver trappers across the Mojave Desert and into the San Bernardino Valley of California, completing the first overland crossing of the southwestern route to the Pacific. At the San Gabriel Mission near Pueblo de Los Angeles, he and his men were at first welcomed and treated cordially by the village alcalde (magistrate) but soon fell under suspicion. Fur traders were unknown in the province at the time and Smith had difficulty in explaining his purpose and profession. The Mexican authorities ended up calling him a pescador (fisherman) and considered imprisoning him in San Diego until they could figure out what he and his ruffian-like crew were up to. Only the intervention of the master of an American trading ship anchored in San Diego Harbor kept this from happening, but in the spring of 1827, Smith and his men were ordered to leave California.

  The Yankee-trader captain took Smith north to San Pedro Bay. There he was reunited with his trapper party, equipped with new provisions and horses, and seemed to obey orders to quit the country when he retraced his route over the San Bernardino Mountains. But instead of returning east, he led his party north to the San Joaquin River Valley, which proved to be rich beaver grounds, and wintered there.

  In May, 1827, after trapping along the Stanislaus River and amassing a haul of fifteen hundred pounds of furs, the captain and his men tried to cross the mountain barrier east of their trapping camp but were turned back, losing five horses along the way, by the heavy snow and ferocious winds in the passes. His main party left behind, Smith and two others made a second push and succeeded in getting through, thus becoming the first white men to cross the Sierra Nevada range.

  The foray into California by Jedediah Smith and his trapper band set an ominous pattern.

  In 1830, working with a seasoned mountain man named Ewing Young and a party of forty fur men, a nineteen-year-old Kentuckian named Christopher Houston Carson made his first expedition to California, entering the San Gabriel Mission by Jed Smith’s Mojave route. The Ewing Young party, without sanction, trapped north as far as the Sacramento River, burned several Indian villages after a number of their horses were stolen, then ran into trouble upon returning to Los Angeles. There, pueblo officials demanded to know what authorization Young had to travel, trap, and kill Indians in California. When he could provide no papers, threats were made to jail him and his party. Kit Carson claimed that the Mexicans tried to ply Young and his men with liquor to make it easier to arrest them. In any event, Young wanted to get home before his furs were confiscated and so led his brigade out of the territory to the Colorado River.

  All this was precedent. Twenty years after Jed Smith and fifteen years after Ewing Young left their tracks in California, the process was repeated: an American, with a band of freebooters, Kit Carson among them, entered California uninvited, was ordered to leave, and refused.

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  The Californios

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  John Bidwell, a New Yorker from Chautauqua County and former schoolteacher who came to the Pacific coast in 1841, told of how a friend or stranger paid a visit to the home of a Californio and stayed overnight. All that was necessary, Bidwell said, was to bring your own blankets and a knife with which to cut meat from a common haunch. When you finished eating, you delivered your plate to your hostess and said “Muchas grácias, Señora,” and she would answer “Buen provecho.”

  This example of the gregariousness, generosity, and hospitality of the gente de razón (people of means) was echoed by many others in the dying days of Old California. Visitors wrote of being invited to picnics, lavish weddings, birthday celebrations, religious festivals, fandangos, rodeos, and amusements such as horseback grizzly-bear hunts, wild-horse roundups, and bull-and-bear baitings.

  Many of the American visitors bit the hand extended to them.

  In 1841, a United States Navy explorer named Charles Wilkes led a six-ship expedition to chart the Pacific coast, with particular attention given to San Francisco Bay. He had serious things to report to his superiors in Washington: he was amazed by the expanse of the bay, big enough, he sa
id, to shelter all the world’s navies, with prevailing winds that put it on sea-lanes linking ports in India, China, Japan, and Manila to the Pacific coast of North America. San Francisco was the potential key to the Orient trade, he said in his voluminous report, especially since the next significant harbor north, at Juan de Fuca Strait, was eight hundred miles distant, and San Diego Bay lay over five hundred miles to the south.

  Except for a cursory look at the village of Santa Clara, at the extreme southern tip of San Francisco Bay, Wilkes himself seems rarely to have gone ashore, but others in his expedition did and kept diaries and journals on what they saw and experienced.

  A party of officers from one of his ships, the sloop-of-war Vincennes, examined the village of Yerba Buena, a woebegone settlement consisting of a few ruined adobes and a poop-deck cabin from a wrecked sailing ship serving as somebody’s home. They also visited Sonoma, the northernmost presidio of California, and were greeted by the eminent military commander of the northern frontier, Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, whom many believed to be the most powerful man in California. The commandante led the officers on a tour of Casa Grande, the Vallejo home adjoining the garrison’s barracks, and one of the Americans jotted a note describing the furnishings of the home as gaudy—in particular, certain chairs that had come from the Sandwich Islands. Colonel Vallejo was ill during the visit, but this did not diminish his hospitality and the visitors were invited to dinner. Some of the officers found the food execrable—served cold and every bite, one said, “poisoned” with red peppers and garlic.

  The colonel’s brother, Salvador, and three soldiers from the presidio, took the Wilkes party on a tour of the Sonoma countryside, a sportsman’s Eden with thousands of ducks and geese in the marshes and deer so plentiful they were killed for their tallow. In the presidio barracks, one of the American officers counted thirteen soldiers and described them as “mere boys with enormous swords and a pair of nascent moustaches, deerskin boots and that everlasting serape or blanket with a hole in the middle for the head.”

  The Americans also saw an Indian village of three hundred people and left with the image of naked savages living in hovels made of tree branches, eating bullock meat and acorns.

  The Vincennes men suffered another meal of chile and tortillas with the Vallejos and were later invited to a baile where they were shocked to see the ladies smoking cigarillos.

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  Most of the callers who left a record of their experience among the Californios ignored the naked Indian and his stick-and-mud hovel and the poor farmworker crowded with ten or fifteen others in a small one-room adobe. Most visitors wrote of California as the land of the Don, who, dwelling on his rancho, presided over his picturesque and spacious lands.

  The Don’s domain typically lay across rolling hills and creek-crossed valleys; his home was a whitewashed adobe structure with a red-tiled roof, and verandas shaded by sycamores and oaks. He might have a melon patch, grow corn, grapes, and olives for his own use. He had so many horses that he hunted and killed hundreds of them to preserve his pasturage for his cows, and let hundreds of others run free, trailing a rope for easy capture when needed.

  The ranchero’s source of income and his life’s passion lay in his cattle. They were wide-horned, long-legged, lean, and tough animals that roamed his unfenced estate at will and required little attention until the periodic rodeos (roundups), in which the ranch’s vaqueros would brand and notch the ears of the calves and record their numbers on tally-sticks—one notch per ten head.

  After the rodeo, the next and final time the animals were rounded up was for the matanza, the slaughtering. Since the cattle were valuable to the Californios principally for their hides and their fat by-products, only a few choice haunches were kept, together with some meat to be cut into long strips, soaked in brine and dried. This black carne seca (which American cowboys called jerky) was carried by the vaqueros in their saddlebags. The rest of the hide-and-fat-stripped carcasses were left to the buzzards, wolves, and coyotes.

  It never seems to have occurred to the rancheros to venture into the dairy business. “It was very common at many haciendas for the owners to say that while they had six or seven thousand head of cattle, they could not offer a traveler a glass of milk if he requested it,” the Monterey customs official Antonio María Osio wrote in an 1851 memoir. “They gladly would offer him a calf, but they only used the meat they could eat at one sitting. They would dump the rest out in the same fields where they would sleep or nap while their animals grazed and rested.”

  That there was very little money in California seemed unimportant to the Don. He lived content in the assurance that everything he needed was available from the traders, most of them Yankees, whose ships carried foodstuffs, drygoods, hardware, guns and powder, liquors, furniture—even pianos and billiard tables—to trade for “California banknotes” and tallow.

  Nor was education a matter of much consequence to him. Most of California’s native-born were illiterate. No system of education, and therefore no schools, existed in the province in the 1840s or at any time before that. For one thing, the Franciscan fathers feared education, convinced that reading and writing would foment such dangerous things as rebellion and godlessness, and only a few of the many governors who came to the province attempted to change the system.

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  And so for three hundred years after Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo spied the sun-washed coast of Cathay from the quarterdeck of the San Salvador, Mexican California drifted, a remote, neglected satellite suspended in a governmental vacuum.

  Mexico may have regarded its Pacific “department” as the inestimably precious jewel in its colonial crown and dreaded the prospect of losing it, but Californios could not remember a time when the home country had made a demonstration of any such regard. Mexico City’s laissez-faire policy toward its possessions north of the Rio Grande, the product of its own incessant inner turmoil and of the two thousand miles of desert and mountain that separated it from the Pacific Rim, begat a similar policy in California. The gente de razón simply ceased worrying about their putative mother country. It had never seriously governed California to begin with, and the last fragile ties, those held by the church, were broken in 1834 when the missions, which had birthed such towns as San Luís Obispo, San Juan Bautista, San Juan Capistrano, and Sonoma, were secularized. Then, even the Indians were released from patronage and governance.

  After nearly a quarter-century of neglect, California had evolved into a semi-autonomous colony that regarded its home country as little more than an absentee landlord, a tax collector who contributed nothing to earn his revenue. Mexico supplied a string of nominal “governors” to mind the political affairs of its cherished department, but these affairs were elementary in nature and of little interest to the average Californio.

  Talk of a schism with Mexico was commonplace in the years between the 1834 secularization of the missions and 1845. Many Californios felt that a revolution would be easy, perhaps bloodless: the home country had no serious military presence there beyond four decrepit presidios along the coast, San Diego to Yerba Buena, each with a handful of slothful soldiers and some rusty cannons. In fact, in the period 1836–1845, there were four desultory revolts against Mexican authority, although none of them resulted in significant changes in the governance of California.

  Some Californios remained loyal to Mexico, others favored an independent state and opposed any foreign intervention; still others leaned toward annexation by England, France, or the most prominent of the trader-nations, the United States.

  By 1845, internecine rivalries and territorial jealousies characterized the politics of Mexican California. The province was unofficially divided into two regions, with San Luís Obispo the demarcation point at the approximate mid-coast. South of this tiny port town to the border with Baja California lived the southern populace, the abajeños (those below); north of San Luís Obispo to Bodega Bay and beyond lay the country of the northerners, the arribeños (those above). W
hat political guidance the province could claim was centered in the south at Pueblo de Los Angeles, an adobe village with a population of fifteen hundred, where the governor, a man named Pío Pico, resided. He had little influence among the far-flung arribeños: in Monterey, just four hundred miles north of Los Angeles, the senior military officer in California, General José Castro, served as quasi-governor; and in Yerba Buena and Sonoma, neither Pico nor Castro, who disliked each other and who were at odds over control of the departmental treasury and customs income, exerted any significant influence.

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  In 1845, Alta California had a population of about twenty-five thousand, of which perhaps fifteen thousand to seventeen thousand were Indians, a sad remnant, about a tenth of the number of native inhabitants there when Spain built its first mission on their lands in 1769. The eight thousand or so non-natives included as many as twelve hundred foreigners—Russians, British, Germans, Sandwich Islanders, and a smattering of other nationalities. Americans were by far the most numerous of the outlanders, numbering at least eight hundred of the twelve hundred, most of whom had settled in the northern Sacramento Valley.

  What lured the Yankees there probably began with the tales told by the Bostons—the sea captains and tars such as Ebenezer Dorr and, especially, Richard Henry Dana—who came to San Diego and Monterey and San Francisco Bay and departed in wonderment at the sheer immensity of the place, its salubrious climate, its primeval beauty, hidden riches, limitless potential.

  Since there is nothing like a financial disaster to create a migration, economic factors played a part in the luring. In the spring of 1837, just two months after the inauguration of Martin Van Buren as President, a panic erupted when New York banks suspended the conversion of paper money into gold and silver. The practice spread, nine hundred banks failed, there were marches by the unemployed, food riots erupted in many cities, and a six-year economic depression followed.