Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

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  On December 10, 1845, Frémont and Kit Carson led fifteen men, including some of Chief Segundai’s Delawares, into New Helvetia and camped on the American River three miles above Sutter’s Fort. Frémont had made vague arrangements to rendezvous in a month or two with Ted Talbot, Joe Walker, and the bulk of the party, nearly fifty men, in the San Joaquin Valley east of Monterey. The Talbot contingent was slowed by their mapping assignment on the eastern flank of the Sierra Nevada, and in the waiting, Frémont had to gather pack animals and provisions before making his way south.

  The explorer grew restless. He had arrived at one destination and needed to move on. He had business in Monterey, an expedition to re-form and its work to finish. California, for all its isolation and putative independence, was Mexican, and perhaps, given the war fever that had been gripping Washington six months ago when he had met with the new President, he might soon find himself in enemy territory. Although it seems never to have daunted him, he was a military officer already in enemy territory, with a small, well-armed army and subject to internment.

  At the fort, Frémont learned that Sutter had departed on a business trip to Yerba Buena. In his absence, John Bidwell, the faithful majordomo, dealt with the impatient explorer and the two were quickly at odds. Bidwell, a twenty-five-year-old farmer who had come to the Sacramento Valley in 1841 with a pioneer train, was a somewhat prim, utterly honest factotum whom Sutter trusted to manage his affairs. He greeted Frémont and his men affably and listened as the explorer demanded to buy sixteen pack mules, six packsaddles, and provisions. Bidwell explained that the fort’s foodstuffs and animals were in short supply. He could not provide the mules but had some good horses and said he could make the packsaddles and come up with some flour and other edibles.

  Frémont was annoyed by the man’s inability to meet his demands and rode off in a huff. He had figured out why he did not get what he requested: he represented one government, Sutter and Bidwell another, and the two governments were having “difficulties.” There was some truth in this. Sutter had a foot in both the Mexican and American camps and was having problems keeping his balance.

  In a few days, the problems were solved. Bidwell rode out to the explorer’s camp, needlessly apologized and explained that he was only an employee following instructions. Soon thereafter, Sutter returned to the fort and Frémont had fourteen of the sixteen mules he wanted, plus the packsaddles and supplies, and even a few head of cattle to provide beef for his men. The Swiss also gave the captain use of his schooner Sacramento to sail down to San Francisco Bay and to Yerba Buena to visit the American vice consul, William Leidesdorff.

  Frémont moved his camp several times, from the American River to tributaries of the San Joaquin—colorful streams such as the Calaveras, Merced, and the poppy-covered banks of Mariposa Creek, the marshes loud with ducks and geese, rich with elk and antelope—before heading south in late January for the rendezvous with Talbot. He led his men in at least three Indian raids against the Miwoks and other “horsethief tribes” in the valley. These swift and merciless strikes were in retribution for ancient thefts of white men’s horses dating back to Ewing Young’s trapping expedition in 1830, in which Carson had been learning the mountain trades. The Delawares were particularly adept at the raids, and took scalps. The killing of these natives rated little more attention in the memoirs of Frémont and his men than did the shooting of geese or elk. Lucien Maxwell, Dick Owens, and Kit Carson are mentioned as “deftly shooting” Indians; Carson would later say: “We came on a party of Indians, killed five of them, and continued on to the Fort.”

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  In January, 1846, six weeks after he entered California, Frémont and his men crossed the San Joaquin Valley to Monterey. The old capital, on the headland south of the bay seen by Cabrillo in 1542, was a cosmopolitan place by California standards, a seaport, a hub of commerce. Its whitewashed and red-roofed adobes were nestled between green hills and a white ribbon of beach lapped by ocean waters running from dark blue to turquoise and green as the sun set. On January 27, Frémont paid a visit to one of the most beautiful of Monterey’s dwellings, the two-story, New England-style home of Thomas O. Larkin, and sat with the consul on a veranda overlooking the pine-circled bay.

  They were a study in contrasts even though such a mix of men was common to Monterey, its path and byways a-jostle with wealthy Californios, traders, sea captains, merchant sailors, government men, Mexican soldiers, street urchins, and Indians. Even so, it must have been amusing for the urbane, mutton-chopped Larkin, in starched shirt, coat, collar, and cravat, to sit face-to-face with the scraggy-bearded explorer wearing a wide-brimmed sombrero, trail-worn boots, grimy buckskins decorated with beads and porcupine quills.

  There is no record of their meeting, but it is clear that they discussed the worsening relations between their native country and Mexico and their duties should news of war arrive on the Pacific coast. Frémont told of his expedition and its purpose and asked Larkin for a loan, to be billed to the Topographical Corps headquarters in Washington, to buy supplies. The consul agreed to supply the money and took Frémont to visit two of Monterey’s leading dignitaries, Commandante José Castro, and the town’s prefect, Manuel Castro. Frémont told these wary men of his peaceful mission, assured them that his party was not military but comprised of civilian explorers, mapmakers, and guides under the command of army officers. He asked the commandante for permission to buy supplies and to “winter in the valley of San Joaquin.” Castro, probably out of respect for Larkin, agreed to these requests with the proviso that Frémont and his men stay inland, outside the settled coastal areas.

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  By mid-February, Frémont had rejoined Talbot, Walker, Ed Kern, and the others who had crossed the Sierra Nevada farther south. Now, with his full sixty-two-man complement, he moved the party north toward the southern extremity of San Francisco Bay and camped in a meadow about fifteen miles from the San José Mission, where almost immediately he ran into trouble.

  Sebastián Peralta, who owned a large rancho outside the village of Santa Clara, a short distance from the mission, registered a complaint with the alcalde of San José. Peralta said that some of his horses were missing and had turned up in the herd being kept by the Americans. He said he had ridden out to the American camp to claim his animals and had been ordered away. On February 20, he had addressed a letter to the leader, Frémont, and had received an antagonistic response. The explorer, Peralta reported, claimed that all his animals had been purchased and paid for, and that Peralta “should have been well satisfied to escape without a severe horse-whipping” for having the temerity to attempt to gain horses that did not belong to him.

  Peralta, vastly insulted by the American officer, showed the alcalde Frémont’s letter and fulminated over the arrogance of it. The letter ended: “Any further communication on this subject will not, therefore, receive attention. You will readily understand that my duties will not permit me to appear before magistrates of your towns on the complaint of every straggling vagabond who may chance to visit my camp.”

  Before this incident could be resolved, Frémont ensured that there would be trouble with Mexican authorities by moving his camp to the outskirts of the coastal town of Santa Cruz, on the north edge of Monterey Bay. Then, on March 5, the exploring party moved again, to a camp on the Salinas River, even closer to Monterey.

  During this period when Frémont blatantly broke his pledge to keep his party inland and away from coastal settlements, some of his men were further testing the patience of Mexican officials. The Monterey customs official, Antonio María Osio, wrote in his 1851 memoir of the incident that ended all tolerance of the Americans.

  Osio told of three of Frémont’s “soldiers” who invaded a rancho near San Juan Bautista, a short distance from the American camp. The ranch was owned by Don Ángel Castro,1 who reported that one of the drunken men held a gun at his head while another tried to rape his daughter. Don Ángel, a tough former soldier, resisted
, even at the risk of death, and succeeded in wrestling the gun away and chasing the Americanos out of his home.

  This act, Osio said, had infuriated General José Castro and convinced the commandante that Frémont and his “army” were purposely inciting a confrontation. The general reacted to the outrage by notifying Consul Larkin of his decision to expel the Americans—at least from the Monterey area—and by sending a courier to Frémont’s camp to deliver the message demanding that he and his men leave Monterey forthwith. Castro wrote:

  This morning at seven, information reached this office that you and your party have entered the settlements of this department; and this being prohibited by our laws, I find myself obliged to notify you that on receipt of this, you must immediately retire beyond the limits of the department … it being understood that if you do not do this, this prefecture will adopt the necessary measures to make you respect this determination.

  Frémont received the message in his customary high dudgeon and dismissed it and the courier, whom he considered offensively brusque, with a wave of his hand. He did not respond. Afterward, he wrote, “I peremptorily refused compliance to an order insulting to my government and myself”—thus assuming an attitude that was later cheered by Senator Thomas Hart Benton as a courageous act.

  On March 5, Frémont and his men broke camp on the Salinas River and moved north a short distance to a wooded hill known locally as Gavilán (Hawk) Peak, just thirty miles from Monterey and overlooking the Salinas Valley and San Juan Bautista. The captain flouted Castro’s orders by having his men chop trees and throw up a crude log fort, complete with earthworks, as if expecting a siege. A stripped sapling served as a staff from which the American flag flapped in the breeze.

  From this hawk’s eyrie, Frémont heatedly scribbled a note to be delivered under cover of darkness to Larkin. It was an extraordinary declaration for a man ostensibly leading a peaceful mission of exploration into a foreign country.

  Frémont wrote the consul that “if we are unjustly attacked, we will fight to extremity and refuse quarter, trusting our country to avenge our death.” He proceeded with a statement that Larkin, a salaried secret agent of the United States, must have found laughable: “We have in no wise done wrong to the people, or the authorities of the country, and if we are hemmed in and assaulted here, we will die, every man of us, under the flag of our country.”

  Unmoved by the captain’s bravado, Larkin dispatched a return message patiently explaining Castro’s order, what it meant and why it had been written. The consul also tried to placate the commandante, urging a more tempered approach to the Frémont problem and even suggesting that the two men meet and reach some kind of accord.

  Castro was having none of this, and at San Juan Bautista on March 8, he called on the citizenry to assist him in expelling the “band of robbers commanded by a captain of the United States Army, J.C. Frémont.” The leader and his “highwaymen,” he said, had made their camp nearby, “from which he sallies forth committing depredations, and making scandalous skirmishes.” He asked for volunteers to place themselves under his immediate orders to “prepare to lance the ulcer” that would “destroy our liberties and independence.”

  Castro, whom Frémont later admitted had “a fair amount of brains,” put together a cavalry force of nearly two hundred men, regulars and volunteers, including a handful of local Indians, believed to have been plied with liquor, to engage the Americans. The general deployed his horsemen in plain view below Frémont’s position and ordered three brass cannon dragged into the brush beneath the hill and aimed at the summit.

  On Hawk’s Peak, Frémont anxiously watched all this activity through his spyglass. He had practically begged for a confrontation and now had one, was outnumbered three to one and unsure of what to do next. He had a log fort and primitive siegeworks, a good high defensive position, plenty of wood, water, powder, and shot, and men—especially his Delawares, who had already smeared paint on their faces—anxious for a fight.

  But what business did he have in fighting the Mexicans? Or in provoking a fight? He did not know that on the day after he occupied Hawk’s Peak, Polk’s minister extraordinary to Mexico, John Slidell, had reached Jalapa and was denied an audience with the government in Mexico City. He did not know that on the day General Castro issued his “band of robbers” proclamation, General Zachary Taylor had moved his army across the Nueces River in Texas, headed for the Rio Grande. He did not know as he watched Castro’s cavalrymen through his glass that Polk’s other secret agent, Lieutenant Archibald Gillespie, had reached Honolulu en route to rendezvous with Commodore Sloat, Consul Larkin, and Captain Frémont, and bearing important messages for each.

  All Frémont knew in the three tense March days he occupied Hawk’s Peak was that he had gotten into something that far superseded his authority and that was potentially quite dangerous. He had learned that General Castro was not to be trifled with and that the Mexicans, despite talk of their indolence and cowardly obsequiousness, seemed willing to defend their country and capable of doing so.

  The closest the two forces came to a fight occurred when the Americans spotted a cavalry patrol winding its way through the trees and brush toward the peak, apparently reconnoitering the position. Frémont gathered forty of his men and started down the trail to engage the Californians. They waited off-trail to ambush the patrol, heard the men’s voices and saw them approach and stop, holding some kind of consultation. Then the patrol rode back down the slope.

  Larkin meantime got messages to the explorer that he must abandon any plans to oppose Castro, and on March 9, Frémont led his men off Hawk’s Peak and aimed them north toward Sutter’s Fort. He wrote Jessie that he left the hill “slowly and growlingly” and he inflated the number of Castro’s cavalry to “three or four hundred men.”

  Joe Walker, a faithful Frémont man up to the Hawk’s Peak retreat, wanted a fight and was so disgusted at the turn of events that he quit the expedition. The Tennessean, mountain legend, and discoverer of Yosemite Valley, would later call his old chief “morally and physically … the most complete coward I ever knew … timid as a woman if it were not casting unmerited reproach on that sex.”

  In Washington, Thomas Hart Benton saw no cowardice or timidity in his son-in-law’s performance. “To my mind,” he later wrote, “the noble resolution which they took to die, if attacked, under the flag of their country, four thousand miles distant from their homes, was an act of the highest heroism, worthy to be recorded by Xenophon.”

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  News of Frémont’s exploit in the Gavilán Mountains preceded him upcountry. John Marsh, a Harvard-educated physician who had a cattle ranch near Mount Diablo in the northern San Joaquin Valley, was in the Monterey area during the March dust-up between Castro and the Americans and sent a courier to Sutter’s Fort with the news. Marsh was a veteran of the Blackhawk War in the Midwest, a one-time post surgeon and trader in the Sioux country of Minnesota who had grown wealthy among the Californios and saw the province as a Texas in the making. He wrote letters back East encouraging emigration to California. He may have seen Frémont as the vanguard of an American takeover—which he favored—but the filibustero appearance of the explorer’s ruffian-like band disturbed him.

  Not so James Clyman, a Virginia-born mountaineer of the Joe Walker stripe. Clyman had fought Arikaras with Jedediah Smith and Tom Fitzpatrick while Frémont was still in knee pants in Savannah. Now the frontiersman, newly arrived at California and hearing of the Americans’ “defense” of Hawk’s Peak, wrote the explorer a letter offering him a company of emigrant volunteers to help fight the Mexicans. Frémont answered Clyman’s inquiry:

  I have received information to the effect that a declaration of war between our government and Mexico is probable, but so far this news has not been confirmed.… If peace is observed, I have no right or business here; if war ensues, I shall be outnumbered ten to one, and be compelled to make good my retreat, pressed by a pursuing enemy.… Under these circumstances, I must m
ake my way back home, and gratefully decline your offer of a company of hardy warriors.

  Frémont and his men, after camping among the lupin, poppies, and oaks of the San Joaquin Valley, moved north to the American River. On March 21, 1846, he reached Sutter’s Fort to refit his expedition to continue north to the Oregon Territory and, perhaps, to turn east for home.

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  Klamath Lake

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  In June, 1845, Commodore John Sloat, the elderly, cautious commander of the United States Pacific Squadron, received orders from the Navy Department to proceed from the Peruvian coast to Mexican waters. Aboard his sixty-gun flagship Savannah, after delays in provisioning, he led his seven-vessel squadron northwest and in November was joined off Mazatlán by the sloop-of-war Cyane, which carried more recent instructions.

  Sloat’s orders were a reflection of the Polk administration’s belief, reinforced by Larkin, Leidesdorff, and other Americans in California, that the citizens there were friendlier to the United States than to their home country. The commodore was thus instructed that if he learned with certainty that war had begun between Mexico and the United States, he was to seize San Francisco Bay and blockade the other California ports, while attempting to preserve friendly relations with the people.

  In an odd choice of words to send to an officer assigned to blockade and seize foreign territory, Sloat was told to be “assiduously careful to avoid any act which could be construed as an act of aggression.”

  Larkin in particular had advocated that a deft and delicate touch would be necessary to win over the Californios, and Frémont’s ham-handed little drama at Hawk’s Peak had greatly upset him. So much so, in fact, that he sent a panicky message to Sloat, then poised off Mazatlán, asking that one of his ships be dispatched to Monterey. Even after Frémont had abandoned Hawk’s Peak and disappeared into the San Joaquin Valley, Larkin apparently feared that the explorer’s defiance of General Castro might lead to bloodshed.