Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  Born in Monterey in 1808, Vallejo had earned the respect of Californios, north and south, and of men such as Sutter, the consuls Larkin and Leidesdorff, and the occasional visitors to his home in Sonoma and his rancho, named Lachryma Montis (Tears of the Mountain) after the springs in the surrounding hillsides. He was a portly, handsome, well-educated, somewhat fatalistic man, frustrated in his administrative duties by Mexico City’s neglect of his beloved land, and especially of its northernmost outpost.

  He was also a man with a keen sense of justice, a trait illustrated in a story told by a contemporary Californio, Antonio María Osio of Monterey, who knew Vallejo well.

  At Yerba Buena in the 1830s, a soldier named Francisco Rubio was condemned to die for raping and killing two small children. This man, holding a crucifix, said at his execution, “I shall presently account for my actions to this Divine Redeemer I hold in my hands. I tell you—He is my witness—that it was not I who killed Ignacio Olivas’s children. Someday you will realize this. But I have committed other offenses, and I should resign myself to the decrees of Providence.”

  Vallejo, who was ayudante de plaza (adjutant of the town), refused to take charge of the execution detail, although he witnessed Rubio’s death. He was apparently convinced that the soldier had told the truth—“virtually all the inhabitants of that area believed that Rubio was not guilty,” Osio said.

  Vallejo decided to inquire into the case and kept the investigation going for six or seven years, during which time he was appointed a commandante and moved to Sonoma.

  Eventually he received convincing information that an Indian named Román, from Mission San Rafael, was the actual killer of the Olivas children. “When he had verified this,” Osio said, “… he ordered Sergeant Lázaro Piña to go there [Mission San Rafael] with a detachment of soldiers. He ordered Piña to shoot the Indian four times as soon as he found him, to leave the Indian lying there on the ground, and to return straightaway to report that he had fulfilled his duty. Two days later, the order was carried out.”

  Larkin, who described Vallejo as “stiff, pompous and exacting … pleasant and condescending,” believed this jefe político would support American annexation if for no other reason than because neither Mexico nor Alta California could prevent it.

  But others were not so trusting of Don Mariano, especially after it was learned that Castro had visited Vallejo at Lachryma Montis on June 5, 1846. The general, it was widely believed, had sought the eminent Sonoman’s assistance in enforcing the new restrictions on American emigrants and in preventing any new flow of them into the Sacramento Valley. Castro also had collected horses and supplies for his men from Vallejo’s rancho.

  Three days after this meeting, William Ide, the Massachusetts carpenter who farmed north of Sutter’s Fort, was visited by another American of the area, William Knight, a Marylander who operated a ferry on the Sacramento. Knight reported that “armed Spaniards on horseback” had been seen in the valley burning homes, destroying crops, and driving off horses and cattle. Ide grabbed his carbine, said good-bye to his wife and children, and mounted up, riding with Knight to Frémont’s camp north of New Helvetia. When the two men arrived, they found others already talking to the captain, among them Ezekial “Stuttering” Merritt, and Henry Ford, the New Hampshireman and army deserter who worked for Sutter as a trapper.

  The tale Knight had reported had no foundation in fact, but as it happened, a real Castro matter was being reported to Frémont. A Lieutenant Francisco Arce, Castro’s secretary, and a militia officer named José María Alviso, with an armed squad of eight men, had crossed the Sacramento near Sutter’s with a herd of 170 horses, said to have been obtained from Colonel Vallejo in Sonoma. Arce, it was reported, was taking the herd to Santa Clara, near the southern shore of San Francisco Bay, where General Castro was organizing a cavalry force to drive the American settlers out of California.

  On June 10, Merritt, Ford, “Long Bob” Semple the Kentucky giant, and sharpshooter Granville Swift, descendant of Daniel Boone (“in a fight, worth a dozen men,” Frémont said of him), took six volunteers, picked up four more en route, and rode out to intercept Arce. They surprised the lieutenant in his camp on the Cosumnes River south of Sutter’s Fort, forced his surrender and seized the horse herd. The Americans returned the swords to the two officers and left one horse each to Arce, Aviso, and their men. Arce was told to deliver to his commander the message that if he wanted the rest of the caballada, he would have to come get them.

  The Americans drove the herd north to the Buttes camp the next day.

  Frémont’s role in this escapade is not known, although there is evidence that he encouraged the raid, if not actually directed it. One of his men, a twenty-two-year-old Tennessean named Thomas Martin, later claimed that the captain “called us together and told us that we were going to take the country and called for volunteers to go and capture this band of horses.” But William Ide’s recollection differed. He said that Frémont “in my hearing, expressly declared that he was not at liberty to afford us the least aid or assistance; nor would he suffer any of his men to do so … that he was able, of his own party, to fight and whip Castro if he chose, but that he should not do so unless first assaulted by him.…”

  H. H. Bancroft, four decades after the fact, wrote that Frémont “instigated and planned” the horse raid as a continuation of the insolence he had demonstrated at Hawk’s Peak and that the explorer “spoke guardedly” to the Sacramento Valley settlers, “inciting them indirectly to revolt, but cautiously avoiding remarks and promises which might in certain contingencies be used to his disadvantage later.”

  Thomas Hart Benton gave an orotund rationale to the press for his son-in-law’s behavior, saying that Frémont had found his progress north in the Klamath Lake area “completely barred by the double obstacle of hostile Indians, which Castro had excited against him, and the lofty mountains covered with deep and falling snow.” He said that General Castro had been assembling troops “with the avowed object of attacking both Frémont’s party and all the American settlers.” The formidable Missourian, known for bellowing “The facts—what are the facts?” in the halls of Congress, said: “I could add much more to prove that Captain Frémont’s private views and feelings were in unison with his ostensible mission—that the passion of his soul was the pursuit of science and that he looked with dread and aversion upon every possible collision either with the Indians, Mexicans, or British, that could turn him aside from his cherished pursuit.”

  Benton’s “facts” notwithstanding, before the June 10 horse raid, the Sacramento Valley settlers were looking for a leader; after it, they seemed to have found one.

  2

  For a few days following the capture of the horses, Frémont managed to remain in the shadows. He could not be identified as the leader of the Osos and their now open rebellion. He was an army officer with an ostensible scientific mission, as yet uncertain that California had become enemy territory. His act of belligerency the past March, from which he had narrowly escaped, had produced a modicum of caution. He had to walk heel to toe like an acrobat on a swaying wire, advising and directing while giving the impression—to whom, it is not clear since no one was fooled—of his neutrality.

  Zeke Merritt, who appears to have been Frémont’s handpicked leader, had gathered a dozen new volunteers in his ride back from the horse raid and had thirty eager Osos in the Buttes camp when the next stage of the miniature revolution began. This step, a far more ambitious and potentially dangerous scheme than a mere horse raid, was directed against the most powerful man in northern California and the seat of his governance. The strategy was to seize the town of Sonoma, force the surrender of Colonel Vallejo and his military garrison, and thus forestall General Castro’s plans to harry the settlers and force them from the country.

  This plan, which many thought in the aftermath was designed and directed by Frémont, had little of military thinking behind it, but at least it depended on more than blind luck.
Sonoma’s primitive defenses were no secret to anyone who passed through the village, and no one doubted that even a tiny armed force could occupy the town without bloodshed.

  On June 13, one month after war was declared against Mexico, Ezekial Merritt and thirty-three men rode southwest from the Buttes, crossed the Sacramento River, and headed for Sonoma, thirty-five miles north of San Francisco Bay. In the party were William Ide, John Grigsby, Bob Semple, Henry Ford, William Todd, Le Gros Fallon, William Knight, Granville Swift, and three recently arrived settlers, Sam Kelsey, Thomas Cowie, and George Fowler.

  Frémont himself did not saddle up, nor would he allow any of his men to take part in the raid, although many of them, notably Kit Carson and his friend Dick Owens, were anxious to join the Osos.

  The village of San Francisco Solano de Sonoma was squalid and flyblown, its spacious plaza littered with rubbish and the bones of slaughtered cattle and surrounded by caved-in jacales and weed patches. More important to the Osos, the town’s defenses, never remarkable, had deteriorated to ruin since the time they were set up by Colonel Vallejo in 1835 as protection against possible incursions by Russians out of Fort Ross. These defenses consisted of a cuartel, a windowed wooden barracks on the north side of the town’s central plaza adjoining Vallejo’s two-story Casa Grande home; a torreon, a four-story adobe tower with loopholes for riflemen; nine brass cannons stationed around the plaza; and an armory, located in the barracks building, holding 250 muskets, some lead ball and iron shot, and a hundred pounds of gunpowder.

  But even the cuartel was a sham. Sonoma had no garrison, no one to lay the cannons or load the muskets. The soldiery had been removed during the Micheltorena troubles in ’45 and never replaced. Mexico City had been of no help—the home country insisting that all its colonies be self-supporting—nor was Governor Pico in Los Angeles of any assistance; he provided no finances for a Sonoma garrison despite the problem of the unauthorized settlers in the north.

  These matters were known to the Osos as they clattered across the bridge between the Napa and Sonoma valleys at dawn on June 14, entered the town from the north, rode past the Misión San Francisco de Solano, reined up in front of Vallejo’s Casa Grande, and banged gun butts on the door.

  Don Mariano came to the door in his nightshirt. Arrayed before him, bathed in the yellow lantern light, some still on horseback, some afoot, stood a crew that might have come north from San Pablo Bay off a ship flying the Jolly Roger. This motley nightmare consisted of “about as rough looking a set of men as one could well imagine,” Kentuckian Robert Semple later said. Some wore bandannas, pirate-fashion, on their heads, others coon, fox, and coyote-skin caps; most favored buckskin hunting shirts and trousers, and Indian mocassins. All were armed—rifles, muskets, pepper-box pistols, tomahawks, hunting knives—and all were tired and agitated.

  After a few words at the door, Vallejo invited the ringleaders into his sala. As they lounged on his mahogany furniture and eyed the piano and paintings, the colonel dressed. His wife Doña Francisca begged him to escape from these banditti through the back of the house, but he rejected this idea; he would not desert her and their six children. He sent a servant to fetch his brother-in-law, the Ohio-born merchant Jacob Leese, to serve as translator.

  “To what happy circumstances shall I attribute the visit of so many exalted personages?” Vallejo asked Merritt with a witty irony lost on the ruffian with the tobacco-juice beard.

  “We mean to establish our own government in California, an independent republic, and are under arms to support it. You are under arrest, General, as the responsible head of the Mexicans hereabouts,” Merritt stuttered. He added a point, useful and perhaps even true, asserting that he and his men were acting under orders from Captain Frémont of the United States Army.

  Frémont’s name must have convinced Vallejo that these “white Indians,” as he later called them, were not mere bandits. He handed over the keys to the town arsenal and offered the men food and brandy. One eyewitness reported that after hearing of their mission, he went to his room and, “following the usages of war,” retrieved his ceremonial sword, which he offered to his captors. None of the Osos seemed to know what to do with it and so Don Mariano returned it to his room.

  After sunrise, Vallejo’s brother, Salvador, a captain in the Mexican army, and the colonel’s secretary, a French emigré named Victor Prudon, came to Casa Grande and were also placed under arrest. Now, the buckskinned Osos and their prisoners enjoyed the repast the general’s servants brought into the sala. William Ide later recalled that the “generous spirits gave proof of his [Vallejo’s] usual hospitality as the richest wines and brandies sparkled in the glasses, and those who had thus unceremoniously met soon became merry companions.… The bottles well nigh vanquished the captors.”

  Meantime, with the town now awake, the rebels still lounging outside Casa Grande were growing restless. They had found a few villagers willing to sell them food and wine but were tired of the waiting, and some of them drunkenly surveyed shops and homes with looters’ eyes. John Grigsby volunteered to find out about the delay and disappeared into the casa. William Ide followed some time later.

  At last documents were drafted by Robert Semple, written in both English and Spanish, in which Vallejo agreed to surrender Sonoma to the Americans with the provision that the townspeople would not be molested and personal properties would be respected.

  Three hours had passed since Merritt and the others had entered Vallejo’s home. Those outside listened as the capitulation paper was read aloud. To several of the Osos, primed with aguardiente, everything was too easy—no fight, no booty, no reward for their efforts—and there was loud talk of abandoning the revolt. Grigsby, under the clear impression that Captain Frémont had ordered the capture of Sonoma and its leading citizens, said he would resign and back out of the scrape.” Others talked of tearing down Casa Grande and ransacking it and the town before riding back to the Buttes.

  Semple was furious over such talk and threatened to shoot any man who tried to turn the revolution into a “looting expedition,” and was backed up by Grigsby and Sam Kelsey.

  It fell to the schoolteacher-farmer William Ide to bring the rabble under control. In a theatrical speech to his fellow insurgents, he said, “Saddle no horse for me. I will lay my bones here before I will take upon myself the ignominy of commencing an honorable work, and then flee like cowards, like thieves, when no enemy is in sight. In vain will you say you had honorable motives. Who will believe it? Flee this day, and the longest life cannot wear off your disgrace!”

  He closed his peroration by shouting like a backwoods Bible-thumper: “Choose ye this day what you will be! We are robbers, or we must be conquerors!”

  The exhortation had its effect. Twenty-four Osos voted to stand with Ide and elected him their leader and spokesman.

  The raiders “seized and held in trust for the public benefit” the armory, the nine cannons and 250 “stands of arms,” shot and powder, estimated to be worth twelve hundred American dollars, and 140 horses that were handed over to the Americans by Vallejo and Leese.

  Next, ten men, Semple, Grigsby, and Merritt among them, were selected to escort the prisoners—Vallejo, his brother Salvador, and Victor Prudon, with Leese as interpreter—to the American camp on the Sacramento, eighty miles northeast. Ide apparently confirmed to Don Mariano that Captain Frémont had ordered the raid, and Vallejo was relieved to learn it. He felt that he would be treated justly by an officer of the Army of the United States.

  Ide and twenty-five Osos controlled Sonoma. The still-terrified Doña Francisca and her six children remained at Casa Grande under guard.

  * * *

  The escort and prisoners spent a night on the trail and arrived at Frémont’s camp at noon on June 16. Vallejo’s hope of cordiality and fairness from the explorer was quickly dashed. Frémont denied responsibility for the raid, denied even that the colonel was his prisoner, yet lectured the stunned Californio on the complaints of the Americans in t
he Sacramento Valley. Vallejo shrewdly assessed the captain as having “a very elastic conscience.”

  Merritt and the others, with Frémont’s approval, removed the prisoners to Sutter’s Fort, where the empresario treated them with kindness, leaving them unguarded, sharing meals with them, and permitting them walks outside their quarters to escape the stifling heat. (Frémont, when he visited the fort sometime later, sternly reprimanded Sutter for trying to make Vallejo’s cell more comfortable.) The prisoners’ cubicles were infested with mosquitoes rising from a slough behind the fort, and the colonel soon developed malarial symptoms, lost weight, and presented a haggard appearance. This disturbed Sutter and after he sent a message to Montgomery of the Portsmouth, anchored off Yerba Buena, a ship’s surgeon came to the fort, escorted by Lieutenant Charles Warren Revere, to treat the prisoners.

  By the time he was released from captivity on August 1, Vallejo’s frayed and shabby clothing hung on his six-foot frame as on a bone rack. After being reunited with his wife and children, he toured his Lachryma Montis estate and sadly estimated that during his six-week imprisonment, more than a thousand head of cattle and six hundred horses had been stolen from his lands. His entire untended wheat crop was also lost.

  During his absence, Doña Francisca treated the Americans with Californio courtesy and hospitality and earned their respect and admiration. The surgeon from the Portsmouth, who tended her husband and visited her at Casa Grande, described her affectionately as “muy gorda [very fat], but still has the evidence of much beauty. She seems to be femininely passive and voluptuous, contented and happy.”

  Months after the event, Thomas Hart Benton reported on the “capture” of Sonoma to his Senate colleagues. He treated the event as a military enterprise of considerable tactical effort and gave the impression that a siege had been required to force the surrender of the town, which he described as “a fortified, well-garrisoned presidio.” He based his information on letters received from his son-in-law, on the scene.