Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  Sloat responded to the consul’s request by sending Commander John B. Montgomery’s twenty-four-gun sloop Portsmouth to Monterey Bay, ostensibly to discover “the designs of the English and French” in California—an old bugaboo given credence by Larkin’s worried messages to Washington. More important, Sloat wanted Montgomery to discover “the temper of the inhabitants” and to demonstrate the “friendly regard” for them held by the Americans. In a more overt act, one that might have been seen as openly fomenting rebellion, the Portsmouth skipper was also to distribute among the people of Monterey copies of the constitutions of the United States and the new State of Texas, translated into Spanish.

  The Portsmouth anchored in Monterey Bay on April 21, 1846, four days after Larkin had had a long, private conversation with a young marine lieutenant named Archibald Gillespie. This emissary, sent by Navy Secretary George Bancroft, had made his way overland from Vera Cruz to Mazatlán bearing important messages from Washington.

  Another of the consul’s visitors on this eve of war was Lieutenant Charles Warren Revere, patriot Paul Revere’s grandson, who had transferred from the Cyane to Montgomery’s Portsmouth. He had permission from Larkin and local authorities to take horseback rides around the Monterey hills, hunting and sightseeing, and was captivated by the place. He predicted that the land “will yet prove one of the brightest stars in the American galaxy.”

  Sloat and his squadron were patrolling between Mazatlán and the Sandwich Islands; the impetuous Frémont, who had come close to starting a war from his eyrie in the Gavilán Mountains, was still in the province, up in the north with sixty well-armed and restless men; and now an American warship lay at anchor off Monterey. Three weeks passed before war was declared against Mexico, and several more weeks went by before news of the war reached the Pacific rim, but Washington had already placed its agents in California on a war footing.

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  After buying supplies at Sutter’s stores, Frémont led his men north, following the Feather River to a horse-and-cattle ranch on Butte Creek run by Samuel Neal, a blacksmith who had served with Frémont in ’43 and who had asked for his discharge at New Helvetia. On March 30, the Americans reached Peter Lassen’s Rancho Bosquejo on Deer Creek, some two hundred miles north of Sutter’s. Lassen, also a blacksmith by trade, was a forty-five-year-old Dane who had come west with a fur brigade in 1839. He had traveled from Vancouver Island to Sutter’s lands and in 1841 built a sawmill at Santa Cruz, become a Mexican citizen, and received the twenty-six-thousand-acre Deer Creek land grant in 1843. Except for the Indians he hired to work his horses and cattle, he lived in isolation and at the time Frémont arrived, had not seen a white man for seven months.

  Lassen was a hospitable man and he and Frémont became good friends; the explorer and his men rested in camp on the Dane’s land for a week before moving on again, this time toward the western flank of the Cascades. There the tentative plan was to map a route across the Great Basin to link with the Oregon Trail and then head home.

  The American settlers who saw or heard about Frémont’s exploring party regarded it as a miniature army, perhaps presaging a full-scale military invasion of California. That spring of 1846 had brought threatening news, especially for the squatters in the Sacramento Valley who had ignored the requirement to report to Colonel Vallejo in Sonoma. This disobedience of orders from Mexico City, and Frémont’s defiance at Hawk’s Peak, seemed to have energized General José Castro.

  At the end of March, three weeks after the Americans skulked off the mountain, Castro called a military consejo (council) in Monterey to formulate a strategy to answer the insults of Frémont and his men. In attendance were the most powerful leaders in the province: Castro, Vallejo of Sonoma, the newly appointed governor Pío Pico, who came north from Los Angeles, and former governor Juan Bautista Alvarado

  News of the consejo, carried north by mocassin telegraph, gave rise to fresh rumors: Castro was arming Indian tribes to help expel the illegal emigrants; he was courting French and British officials to assist in the event of war with the United States.

  On April 17, a bando (proclamation) was issued in Monterey that confirmed the settlers’ worst fears: unnaturalized foreigners would no longer be permitted to hold or work land in California and were subject to expulsion.

  * * *

  By the time Lieutenant Archibald Gillespie met with Larkin in Monterey on April 17, 1846, many of the confidential messages entrusted to him had been memorized and destroyed. Instead of making his way to California by the common routes around Cape Horn or a portage across the Isthmus of Panama, he had spent five nerve-racking months traveling across Mexico in a stagecoach under the guise of a whiskey salesman. The overland journey had a purpose, and Gillespie was a resourceful and intelligent officer. He was fluent in the Spanish language; he read, listened, watched, and absorbed everything he could in a country seething with political chaos; he saw firsthand examples of the hatred of Americans over the annexation of Texas, and the preparations for war.

  After meetings with President Polk, Secretary of State Buchanan, Navy Secretary Bancroft, Senator Thomas Hart Benton, and Jessie Frémont, Gillespie had departed Washington the previous November 16 and traveled to Vera Cruz by commercial steamer. He reached Mexico City by diligencia and spent a month there while one government fell and another, led by a military man, took its place. He read of the mission of the American minister John Slidell, who was coming to Mexico to attempt to buy the country’s provinces north of the Rio Grande.

  By the time he was able to leave the Mexican capital, his ears rang with “¡Dios y Libertad!” and “¡Viva, Mexico!” and anti-American speeches; his brain teemed with newspaper stories about the United States’ attack on Mexico’s honor and scenes of soldiers on the march.

  He had reached Mazatlán in April, gotten word to Commodore Sloat, and after delivering oral messages and briefing the officer on his mission, had boarded the Cyane for a voyage to Honolulu, thence to Monterey.

  Gillespie met with Larkin and upon learning of the Hawk’s Peak incident and Frémont’s probable whereabouts north of Sutter’s Fort, he prepared to move upcountry to intercept the explorer. On the evening before his departure, he was invited to a ball at the home of former Governor Alvarado. The marine’s mufti did not seem to fool the Mexican officials in attendance. Colonel Vallejo eyed the American with undisguised suspicion, and Commandante Castro seemed overly attentive, plying Gillespie with brandy and asking difficult questions.

  With a servant and two horses provided by Larkin, Gillespie made his way north. At Yerba Buena, he visited Vice Consul Leidesdorff, then proceeded north to New Helvetia. Sutter recognized the lieutenant—they had met in Honolulu some years before when the marine had been assigned to the Pacific Squadron—and the Swiss knew that this man was no whiskey salesman.

  On May 8, 1846, Frémont learned that a military man carrying some kind of dispatches was riding north to intercept him. Sam Neal brought the news from his Butte Creek ranch to the explorer’s camp, sprawled among a stand of cedars in a meadow at Upper Klamath Lake in Oregon territory, a few miles above the northern limits of Mexican California. Neal said that the officer was about a day behind.

  The next morning, Frémont gathered ten men—Kit Carson, Alexis Godey, Lucien Maxwell, Dick Owens, Basil Lajeunesse, Denny the Iowa half-breed, Bill Stepp the gunsmith, and the Delawares Segundai, Swanok, and Crane—and by sunset, after a thirty-mile ride, found Gillespie. He, Peter Lassen, and a few other men from Sutter’s Fort were camped at the lower end of the lake.

  Although neither man left a detailed record of their meeting on the wilderness shore of Klamath Lake, Frémont’s normally chilly demeanor must have been put to the test. It had been eleven months since he had seen Jessie and his baby daughter Elizabeth—little Lily—eight months since he and his party had ridden out of Bent’s Fort. He was news-famished, had had no contact with any American fresh from the East, had heard no news since his visit with Larkin in Monterey the past J
anuary. He was supposed to be heading home, but war was imminent and he could not yet abandon California. He desperately needed orders, news, something to guide his movements, and now there were possible answers, carried by this military man who had come across Mexico bearing letters, perhaps instructions, and certainly news.

  Gillespie must have been similarly anxious as he was greeted by a trail-weary gallant in buckskins who turned out to be John Charles Frémont, the celebrated Pathfinder, explorer, author, husband of Jessie Benton. And the others! Kit Carson, the shy little gray-eyed man Frémont had hailed in his famous reports as the very embodiment of the intrepid Western frontiersman; and the French-Canadians, sons of voyageurs and couriers du bois, and the grimly silent Delawares who seemed to be the captain’s bodyguard.

  The marine even saw a small delegation of Klamath Indians as they hesitantly visited the camp and gave Frémont’s men some salmon from their strings. The Klamath chief personally handed one of the fish to Gillespie.

  After a meal of salmon cooked over the roaring fire built to ward off the winter wind hurtling off the lake, the marine and explorer talked into the night. In his tent under hurricane-lantern light, with the men rolled in their frosty blankets beneath the cedars as the wind whistled, Frémont read the mail and messages Gillespie presented in an oilskin packet. There were letters from Jessie; a note from Secretary of State Buchanan dated November 1, 1845, introducing the lieutenant; cryptic letters from Senator Benton, and miscellaneous newspaper articles.

  Gillespie had committed to memory certain confidential messages from President Polk, Senator Benton, and Larkin. It is certain that Benton and the President had something to say about the British navy’s presence off California, a matter Larkin had reported to Washington in the winter of ’45; something was relayed about the imminence of war with Mexico, and Gillespie certainly talked at length about his journey from Vera Cruz to Mazatlán, his month in tumultuous Mexico City, and what he had learned from Sloat and Larkin.

  In his memoirs published forty years afterward, Frémont remarked only on the messages from Benton that Gillespie carried, these on the old John Bull fear, subsequently proven groundless, that the British were concocting some scheme to “steal” California from the Americans. “The letter of Senator Benton,” he wrote, “was a trumpet of no uncertain note. Read by the light of many conversations and discussions with himself and other governing men in Washington, it clearly made me know that I was required by the Government to find out any foreign schemes in relation to California, and to counteract them so far as was in my power. His letters made me know distinctly that at last the time had come when England must not get a foothold; that we must be first. I was to act, discreetly but positively.”

  In a peculiar anachronism in his memoir, Frémont wrote that he learned from Gillespie that “my country was at war.” He could not have learned this from the marine since their meeting at Klamath Lake occurred on May 9, 1846, four days before the war against Mexico was officially declared.

  Years later in his own memoirs, Kit Carson also remembered learning of the war before it could have been possible for him to have heard of it: “A few days after we left [Lassen’s rancho, on April 24], information was received from California that war was declared.… Lieutenant Gillespie, U.S. Marines, and six men were sent after us to have us come back.”

  Clearly, it was not the actual news of war that turned Frémont south again; it was the certainty of war as borne out by Gillespie’s experiences and the intelligence he had picked up in Mazatlán and Monterey. The explorer was a trailsman too experienced not to have known of the impossibility of crossing the Cascade range in winter. He knew that winter snows blocked the passes, that game was scarce, his animals in poor shape. Common sense demanded that if he did return east, he would need to do so from a southern route. In a letter to Benton from Klamath Lake, he had laid the groundwork for returning to California, writing that “snow was falling steadily and heavily in the mountains,” that “in the east, and north, and west, barriers absolutely impassable barred our road; we had no provisions; our animals were already feeble.”

  (Benton later added to the confusion as to why his son-in-law turned back to California when he wrote that it was “in the midst of such dangers, and such occupations as these, and in the wildest regions of the Farthest West, that Mr. Frémont was pursuing science and shunning war, when the arrival of Lieutenant Gillespie, and his communications from Washington, suddenly changed all his plans, turned him back from Oregon, and opened a new and splendid field of operations in California itself.…”)

  The truth seems to be that Frémont’s movements north of Sutter’s Fort comprised a calculated delaying tactic and that he fully intended to return to New Helvetia, there to bide his time and learn what he could. If war was averted through some eleventh-hour diplomatic legerdemain, he would head his men for Walker’s Pass and a southern route home.

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  That night of his meeting on Klamath Lake with Frémont gave Archibald Gillespie his first taste of combat since he had entered the Marine Corps in 1832.

  Kit Carson remembered the long day’s ride on May 9 and falling exhausted into his bedroll on “the only night in all our travels, except the one night on the island in the Salt Lake, that we failed to keep guard.” He said that since Gillespie and his companions had strengthened their party, they anticipated no Indian attack and that “the Colonel,” as he called Frémont, posted no night watch and sat up late talking with Gillespie.

  “Owens and I were sleeping together,” Carson wrote, “and we were waked at the same time by the licks of the axe that killed our men.…”

  Deep into the night, the scout had heard a noise and wakened suddenly. He called out to Basil Lajeunesse, sleeping nearby: “What’s the matter there? What’s the fuss?” There was no answer. Lajeunesse was dead—“his head had been cut in, in his sleep,” Carson said. Instantly, the camp had come alive with men scrambling for their weapons amid the yelping of the attackers—a Klamath band—and the frenzied stamping and snorting of hobbled horses.

  As the Klamaths fell on the camp, the four Delawares sprang up, and one of them, Crane, who had failed to load his carbine, flailed at the attackers with the gun until he fell, bristling with arrows. The half-breed Denny was also killed in the first few seconds of the melee. Frémont burst from his tent and joined Maxwell, Godey, and Stepp, all of them running toward the Delawares at the center of the fight.

  Carson, who found his rifle useless because of a broken cap-nipple, sprinted toward the others, firing his pistol.

  “I don’t know who fired and who didn’t,” the scout said later, “but I think it was Stepp’s shot that killed the Tlamath chief; for it was at the crack of Stepp’s gun that he fell.… When the Tlamaths saw him fall, they ran.…”

  Maddened at seeing his friend Lajeunesse’s head split open, Carson had taken an ax to the fallen Klamath chief’s skull, after which Segundai’s knife sliced expertly and he popped the scalp off.

  Frémont recalled that his party had encountered some of the Klamaths the day before and that the slain leader, who had given a salmon to Gillespie, had worn an “English half-axe” hanging from his wrist. “Carson seized this and knocked his head to pieces with it,” the explorer said. The arrows in the chief’s quiver were “all headed with a lancet-like piece of iron or steel—probably obtained from the Hudson’s Bay Company’s traders on the Umpqua—and were poisoned for about six inches. They could be driven that depth into a pine tree.”

  The quick fight was over, “but we lay,” Carson said, “every man with his rifle cocked, until daylight, expecting another attack.”

  None came and at daylight, the bodies of Lajeunesse, Denny, and Crane were wrapped in their blankets and buried in a laurel grove before Frémont gathered his men for a retaliatory strike.

  On May 12, Carson and ten men found a Klamath village of fifty lodges and charged in, Frémont and the others following. Within minutes, fourteen Indians lay de
ad, the lodges and huts and stores of dried fish on scaffolds torched, the canoes smashed to kindling. The Delawares, determined to avenge the slaying of Crane, did particularly close work with knives and axes.

  Carson, who commanded the raid, recalled, “Their houses were built of flag [a lakeshore plant with sword-shaped leaves], beautifully woven. They had been fishing and had in their houses some ten wagon loads of fish they had caught. All their fishing tackle, camp equipage, etc., was there. I wished to do them as much damage as I could, so I directed their houses be set on fire. The flag being dry, it was a beautiful sight.”

  Gillespie, goggle-eyed at the bloodshed, opined, “By heaven, this is rough work,” and promised that his superiors in Washington would learn of the gallantry of Frémont and his men.

  Before they returned to California, there were several isolated incidents when Indian arrows whispered out of the trees at them. On one occasion, Carson fell off his horse as an arrow missed him by inches. Frémont spurred his big mount, El Toro de Sacramento, into a gallop and ran the lone Indian down. Segundai finished the job and took the hair.

  The Klamaths were suspected of being recruited, along with Modocs and other tribes, by General Castro to harass the Americans. Carson said merely that “The Indians had commenced the war with us without cause and I thought they should be chastized in a summary manner. And they were severely punished.” Frémont’s view was somewhat different, writing that the reason for his brutal raids on the natives was to “anticipate” Indian problems and strike first to make them realize that “Castro was far and I near.”

  They reached Peter Lassen’s ranch on May 24 and there learned that the sloop-of-war Portsmouth had anchored at Sausalito, on the northern headland of the Golden Gate. Gillespie, who had put himself under Frémont’s command, was sent down to request supplies from Captain John B. Montgomery—rifle lead, percussion caps, gunpowder, and foodstuffs—and to ride on south to Monterey with a letter to Larkin assuring him that while Frémont and his expedition were back in California, they were heading home.