The Texas example also provided a precedent in propelling Americans to the Pacific.
When Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821, several hundred Americans had been permitted—welcomed, in fact—to “colonize” the Mexican state of Texas y Coahuila, requiring only that the settlers convert to Catholicism and take Mexican citizenship. Then, with Mexico’s attention diverted by internal revolutions, counterrevolutions, coups, and insurrections, the American Texans, employing the old lie of being deprived of religious and economic freedom, of being oppressed by a cruel and despotic regime, began talking of independence, of revolution. In 1836, after defeating a Mexican army sent to quell the revolt, the Texans proclaimed themselves a republic and began to work toward winning annexation by the United States.
On December 29, 1845, Texas became the twenty-eighth state of the Union.
The trails broken, the Oregon Trail in particular, were another factor in California emigration. These breakthroughs rose from the explorations of men such as Jedediah Smith, Ewing Young, Joseph Reddeford Walker, James Clyman, Tom Fitzpatrick, and army explorers such as John Charles Frémont.
The Oregon experience certainly heightened “California fever.”
By 1845, the American population in Oregon territory was nearing ten thousand, an astonishing number considering that the first real overland covered-wagon migration to Oregon had taken place only four years previously when a pioneering party of seventy emigrants left Westport, Missouri, and joined up with a group of Catholic missionaries headed for the Columbia River. Within three years, these pioneers had built seventeen flour and sawmills, were raising twenty thousand head of cattle, and had harvested a hundred thousand bushels of wheat.
Congressman William Gilpin of Missouri told his congressional colleagues in 1846: “Half a dozen years ago, the Willamette was occupied by beaver and eagles; it now exhibits an American republic, with a government, agriculture, mills, and commerce.”
* * *
Of that original 1841 Oregon-bound emigrant party of seventy people, thirty-two turned southward at Fort Hall on the Snake River in Idaho. This group made its way to the fertile, isolated Sacramento Valley, close to Sutter’s Fort, the perfect place to be left alone.
4
Nueva Helvetia
1
Those who journeyed for the first time down the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada and followed the American River into Mexican California must have stopped and rubbed their eyes as they reached the slight bend in the river near its joining with the Sacramento. Before them lay a wonder of the West: an immense, tawny fortress, its adobe walls fifteen feet high and three feet thick, its corner bastions protected by twelve brass cannons, all surrounded by tilled, plantation-like fields.
Sutter’s Fort, as significant a wilderness sentinel as Bent’s Fort on the Arkansas, lay at the center of a much larger and even more impressive enterprise. This was John Augustus Sutter’s “Nueva Helvetia”—New Switzerland—a fifty-thousand-acre empire that in peak times employed five hundred workers: Indian field hands, who were paid in special coins redeemable only at Sutter’s stores, and vaqueros, farmers, gardeners, blacksmiths, gunsmiths, carpenters, tanners, blanket-weavers, hunters, trappers, sawyers, shepherds, millwrights, and distillers. There were even hired hands to run a launch down the Sacramento to the bays of San Pablo and San Francisco carrying loads of hides, furs, wheat, and produce, returning with lumber from the coastal redwood groves and other supplies.
The visionary, and at times improvident, lord of this spectacular domain was an amiable and hospitable entrepreneur born in Baden, Germany, of Swiss ancestry. Sutter had had a fecund marriage but an unhappy one, perhaps because of his extravagances, meager earnings, and business failures in Switzerland. Whatever the cause, he deserted his wife and five children and emigrated to the United States in 1834. He settled in St. Louis and for a time entered the Santa Fé trade and trapped beaver in the Rocky Mountains. In 1838, he removed to Oregon territory, and in July of the next year, after a circuitous voyage to Sitka in Russian Alaska, Vancouver, and the Sandwich Islands, arrived in San Francisco Bay as a self-proclaimed former captain of the Swiss Guards.
A charming, ambitious dynamo who had learned the Spanish language in his Santa Fé days, Sutter quickly became acquainted with influential provincial authorities, and in 1840 he secured from Governor Juan Bautista Alvarado permission to establish a rancho in the unsettled Sacramento Valley. He began with trapping and wild-grape brandy making, employed Indians, Kanakas, Californians, and vagabond foreign settlers, and expanded into cattle raising and wheat farming. He cleared land, built an irrigation system and a mill. In 1841, when he swore fealty to Mexico, he was granted a parcel of land eleven square leagues in size. So rapidly did he rise in wealth and influence that he was able to purchase Fort Ross on thirty thousand dollars in credit from the Russian-American Fur Company, and gained in the sale the fort’s horses, cattle, and forty cannons.
Soon after acquiring the fort, with Governor Alvarado’s blessing and precisely three hundred years after Cabrillo first sighted the California coast, Sutter’s workers constructed a 425-by-170-foot mud-brick fort at New Helvetia, ostensibly to protect the northern boundary of California from Indian depredations and unwanted intruders.
The Swiss had earned the trust of his absentee masters. He had become a citizen of Mexico, won a huge and spectacularly productive land grant, was called “General,” and had the status of a provincial official. He was empowered to enforce the laws of Alta California, to dispense justice, and—a notable responsibility—to prevent Indian raids and “the robberies committed by adventurers from the United States.”
His stature among some key Californios was diminished by his participation, on the wrong side, in the revolt against the last Mexican-appointed governor of the province.
Brigadier General Manuel Micheltorena, a native of Oaxaca, was sent to San Diego in 1841 and took with him an “army” of three hundred thugs liberated from Mexican prisons and jails. These cholos, unpaid and undisciplined, soon ran amok, terrorizing the abajeños by their drunkenness, threats, and pillaging of shops and homes.
Micheltorena, congenial but lazy, earned the loyalty of Sutter and the Americans in the north by permitting the Swiss to make land grants to foreign emigrants, but by the end of 1844, the cholo rampages had alienated the true Californios. The governor’s predecessor, Juan Bautista Alvarado, the man who had given Sutter permission to build New Helvetia, now organized a revolt and enlisted his friend, General José Castro of Monterey, to lead his 220-man army of rebels.
The former governor had reason to trust Castro. In April, 1840, Alvarado had learned of a planned uprising by foreigners intent on taking control of the province. The foreigners, it was said, were led by one Isaac Graham, a Virginia-born trapper who had settled at Natividad, near Monterey. Castro captured Graham and his confederate, an Englishman named William R. Garner, and marched them in irons to Monterey, where they were charged with fomenting rebellion and taken by ship to Tepic, in Baja California. There, apparently through the influence and bribery of the British consul, they were released and permitted to return to Monterey.
Sutter and his handful of loyalists reached Los Angeles in February, 1845, to join forces with Micheltorena. Most of his original force had evaporated, returning to their farms and homesteads in the north when it appeared that Micheltorena was doomed to failure. All that remained in Sutter’s miniature army were some Walla Walla and other Indians, and a few American settlers working land near New Helvetia: Moses Carson, Kit’s half-brother, a rancher in the Russian River area; Ezekial Merritt, a coarse, often whiskey-raddled trapper and frontiersman; Peter Lassen, a Dane, a blacksmith, and a naturalized Mexican citizen who owned a sawmill at Santa Cruz and a 26,000-acre land-grant rancho in the Sacramento Valley; and John Bidwell, Sutter’s trusted assistant at the fort and aide-de-camp in the field.
The rebellion ended bloodlessly on February 20, 1845, in the “battle”
at Cahuenga Pass near Los Angeles. Micheltorena surrendered to Alvarado and Castro and subsequently returned to Mexico.
Sutter and his men, at first taken prisoner, were soon forgiven and pardoned by Alvarado.
Pío Pico, a Californio by birth and a cavalry commander under Alvarado, replaced Micheltorena, taking office in Los Angeles. He may have sensed that he would be the last governor before his homeland was wrested from Mexico, for he seemed to advocate an alliance of some kind with the French or British to stave off the Americans, who had already made serious inroads into his country. American settlers in California he viewed as “lawless adventurers” and “avaricious strangers.” He wrote,
We are threatened by hordes of Yankee emigrants; already the wagons of these perfidious people have scaled the almost inaccessible summits of the Sierra Nevadas, crossed the entire continent and penetrated the fruitful valley of the Sacramento. They are cultivating farms, establishing vineyards, erecting mills, sawing up lumber, building workshops and a thousand and one other things which seem natural to them but which Californians neglect or despise—we cannot stand alone against them.
2
Despite such words, Sutter continued to encourage emigrants, including Americans, even urging the new government to grant to foreigners two-league parcels of wilderness lands along the San Joaquin River and tributaries of it such as the Stanislaus and Merced, and offering parcels of his own grant to newcomers.
The motive behind his largesse may have been his indebtedness—Sutter owed the Russians most of the thirty thousand dollars he had agreed to pay for Fort Ross—but he was nonetheless exceedingly charitable with his money and manpower. Many times he dispatched his men across the Sierra to assist stranded or desperate emigrant parties; he was a convivial and generous host and a benefactor to the down-and-out. John Bidwell, one of the thirty-two emigrants who had come to the Sacramento Valley in 1841, said of the lord of New Helvetia, “He employed men, not because always needed or could profitably employ them, but because in the kindness of his heart it simply became a habit to employ everybody who wanted employment.”
Bidwell himself worked for Sutter, serving “the General” as majordomo and bookkeeper.
Not all the Americans making their way to Sutter’s Fort were farmers or others seeking gainful employment. California historian Hubert H. Bancroft said that some of the arrivals were deserters from ships visiting coastal trade ports: “Reckless, daring, and unprincipled men, with nothing to lose.” He said there were also a number of men—“mere filibusters”—looking not for work, but for glory, wealth, and power under what they felt was a soon-forthcoming American takeover of the province, men who looked upon the Californios as inferior humans who had to be taught the beauties of freedom and the ways of a civilized nation.
In this, Bancroft was practically defining the spirit of expansionism defined in the summer of 1845 by John Louis O’Sullivan as “Manifest Destiny.”
3
Manuel Micheltorena, early in his troubled tenure as governor, had a notable run-in with American trespassers, an affair that served as an omen, bright as a signal rocket, that the United States would be arriving soon and intended to stay.
On October 18, 1842, an American naval officer of Welsh ancestry named Thomas ap Catesby Jones arrived off Monterey in his flagship, the frigate United States, accompanied by a sloop-of war, the Cyane. Commodore Jones and a party of officers and sailors came ashore and to the astonishment of ex-governor Juan Alvarado, port officials, and townspeople, announced that he was taking possession of Monterey in the name of the government of the United States.
As it happened, Jones, commander of American naval forces in the Pacific, had been at anchor off Callao, Peru, when he received some newspaper articles and dispatches leading him to believe that the United States and Mexico were at war—apparently over the Texas dispute. Since there were no telegraphic stations in the West and all military instructions came to Pacific outposts by way of Cape Horn, the commodore concluded that in the absence of orders to the contrary, he needed to sail for California instantly and seize it. Otherwise, Mexico might do something drastic, such as ceding the province to England.
Alvarado, appalled at Catesby Jones’ surrender demand, signed the proclamation dazedly. A Mexican customs official who witnessed the sudden capitulation wrote of the “true Californios, people who loved their country and were proud of their nationality,” as having been forced to witness a painful ceremony in which the flag of Mexico was replaced with the Stars and Stripes: “This flag was alleged to be the symbol of liberty, but that was actually a lie. It belonged to an oppressor who displayed arrogance against the weak,” the official wrote.
The comic conquest of Monterey lasted for a single day, the reversal effected by another American, Thomas O. Larkin, a Boston man who had come to California via the Sandwich Islands in 1832.
Serving as interpreter between Jones and Alvarado, Larkin showed the American some Mexican newspapers and commercial mail, all of more recent date than the material the commodore had read while off Callao, revealing that no state of war existed.
Thomas ap Catesby Jones apologized, restored the Mexican flag and province to Alvarado and his stunned subordinates, and sailed south to make his apologies to the governor.
Micheltorena meantime had issued a bombastic call to arms to repel the American invaders, and upon receiving the commodore and dining with him, presented the officer with a bill for the damages done to Monterey and its citizenry: he asked for fifteen thousand dollars in cash, sixteen hundred military uniforms, and some musical instruments.
Jones thought Micheltorena was joking but was ushered from the governor’s office before he laughed out loud.
The preemptive conqueror of Monterey was recalled and temporarily relieved of his command. Washington disavowed responsibility for his actions.
Larkin took office as consul for the United States at Monterey in April, 1844.
* * *
By 1845, the American colony in northern California had become a source of grave concern to leaders such as Pío Pico and José Castro. The Graham and Jones affairs had left scars, reminders of the audacity and untrustworthiness of the American “adventurers,” and with Mexico teetering on the brink of a war with the United States, the Californios decided that the flow of these intruders must be stopped.
Meantime, Sutter, ostensibly answerable to General Castro of Monterey, but with his loyalties split, said of the Americans: “Nothing can stop this migration. In case of opposition, they would fight like lions.”
PART TWO
BEAR FLAG RISING
5
The Dark Horse
1
“He has no wit, no literature, no point of argument, no gracefulness of delivery, no elegance of language, no philosophy, no pathos, no felicitous impromptus; nothing that can constitute an orator, but confidence, fluency, and labor.”
This mixed assessment of James Knox Polk was offered in 1834 by John Quincy Adams when he and Polk were opposite-aisle colleagues in Congress. The former President’s remarks on the future President were perspicacious but not news to his party. Jacksonian Democrats knew more about Polk’s limitations than his strengths, and when they brought him to the power of the presidency, they did so tentatively; they really did not know what to expect of him.
Born in North Carolina in 1795, he grew up in Tennessee, the son of a prosperous planter. A sickly boy from birth, at age seventeen, “Jimmy” Polk survived an operation for gallstones, a risky procedure performed with only liquor as anesthetic. He recovered slowly but never fully; fragile health shadowed his life.
He studied law at the University of North Carolina, served in the Tennessee House of Representatives, and was elected to Congress in 1825, the year after his marriage to Sarah Childress, daughter of a plantation owner in Murfreesboro. She was a homely, lively, charming, and well-educated helpmate, a devout Presbyterian who frowned on drinking and dancing and doted on her husband, believed h
im to be a man of destiny, and protected him. He confided in her as in no other while he served six terms in Congress, including two years as Speaker. He was an unwavering supporter of Andrew Jackson’s presidency and opponent of John Quincy Adams’. Sarah was delighted when he retired from Congress to serve a term as governor of Tennessee. They had no children.
* * *
At the Democratic Party convention at the Odd Fellows’ Hall in Baltimore, May 27–30, 1844, Martin Van Buren of Kinderhook, New York, appeared to be the favorite for the nomination. He had seemingly impeccable Jacksonian credentials: he had served as Old Hickory’s secretary of state and vice president and had succeeded Jackson in the presidency. But as chief executive, Van Buren had fallen afoul of Southerners—the heart of Jackson’s party—in opposing the annexation of Texas, which had declared its independence from Mexico in 1836. Northern politicians opposed the admission of Texas to the Union as another slave state, and Van Buren agreed with them. Democrats with long memories remembered the words of the most celebrated of the Alamo defenders, David Crockett, who, as a Tennessee congressman in 1835, said, “Van Buren is as opposite to General Jackson as dung is to a diamond.”
Van Buren’s support eroded after the first ballot in Baltimore, and the other candidates—Lewis Cass of Michigan, Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky, and James Buchanan of Pennsylvania—did not catch on. Polk, whom some believed might make a good vice president, was not in attendance at the convention when his name came up in the eighth ballot, and when he was nominated on the ninth, he became the original “dark horse.” He accepted by letter, expressing appreciation for the endorsement of his mentor, Andrew Jackson, and the honor bestowed on him by the delegates in Baltimore. He pledged to a one-term presidency—a tenet that Polk firmly believed was implicit in Jacksonian ideology (although Jackson served two terms)—and began the effort to defeat his Whig opponent, Henry Clay of Kentucky.
Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising Page 51
