Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  In truth, of course, the decrepit, soldierless village had been conquered by dint of a rifle rap on the door of Colonel Vallejo’s home by a coonskinned company of Frémont-inspired freebooters. Sonoma, as Bernard DeVoto put it, “could have been captured by Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.”

  Even so, the buckskin rising needed a symbol, and the duty to come up with one fell to William L. Todd (whose aunt Mary in Illinois, just four years past, had married a frontier lawyer named Abraham Lincoln). With the help of Ben Dewell, an Ohio saddler, and rebel Thomas Cowie, Todd fashioned a flag—a white field with a red-flannel stripe at the bottom—from a petticoat and chemise contributed by the wives of the Osos. On the white material, using a chewed stick as a brush, Todd daubed a figure of a passant grizzly bear (someone said it looked more like a “big fat Berkshire”) and a large, red five-pointed star above the words “California Republic,” lettered, DeVoto says, “in pokeberry juice.”

  This rude banner was fixed to the flagpole in the Sonoma plaza and raised on June 14 to the cheers of the gathered rebels. One shrewd observer, Antonio María Osio, said of the Osos and the occasion, “… they decided to camouflage the flag of stars and stripes with a temporary flag which depicted a brown bear on a white field.…”

  3

  Two days after the capture of the town, John Montgomery of the Portsmouth, now anchored off Sausalito, sent a small landing party up to Sonoma. The commander’s sixteen-year-old son accompanied the sailors and officers and recorded later that “on arriving we found a party of 24 men, mostly dressed in Buckskins … [led] by a plain man about 5o years old in his Shirt Sleeves … Capt. Ide welcomed us to Sonoma.”

  Ide was actually sixty years old as he performed his first acts as commander in chief of the California Republic. With the Bear Flag newly snapping in the breeze above the Sonoma plaza, he reappointed José Berreyesa, the town’s alcalde, to continue as local magistrate under the “new regime.” He also organized his three dozen men somewhat ambitiously into two military units, designated the First Artillery (presumably in charge of the six captured cannons) and the First Rifles.

  Another duty all revolutionary leaders must perform, the drafting of a grandiloquent proclamation, Ide zestfully accomplished. On June 15, he issued his, declaring that the aim of the rising was to overthrow “a military despotism” that “shamefully oppressed the laboring people in California.” He and the Osos promised that all Californians who surrendered their arms would “not be disturbed in their persons, their property or social relations.” The arduously phrased document declared the rebels’ intent to establish a “republican government” that would ensure “civil and religious liberty … encourage industry, virtue and literature … leave unshackled by fetters commerce, agriculture and mechanism.”

  As this Bear Flag manifesto, mostly by word of mouth, made its way south, Americans everywhere who learned of it flocked to Sonoma, swelling the Bear Flagger ranks to over a hundred men within a week, many of them sunshine patriots attracted by the prospect of the square league of land offered as an enlistment enticement.

  Of Ide’s effusion, H. H. Bancroft said sourly, “As a whole, in truthfulness and consistency, as in orthography and literary merit, it was below the plane of Castro’s and Pico’s proclamations. In respect to bombast and general absurdity, it stood about midway between the two.… As a product of filibusterism, pure and simple, it deserves praise not to be awarded from any other standpoint.”

  Castro and Pico did not delay in issuing responses to the Osos’ declaration. On June 17, from his headquarters in Santa Clara, the general condemned “the contemptible policy of the agents of the government of the United States,” which he said had induced a number of “adventurers” to invade the province and capture Sonoma. And in Santa Barbara, Governor Pico declared that “a gang of North American adventurers, with the blackest treason that the spirit of evil could invent, have invaded the town of Sonoma, raising their flag, and carrying off as prisoners four Mexican citizens.”

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  Olómpali

  1

  On June 14, the day the Bear Flag was raised in Sonoma plaza, Frémont and his band, as yet knowing nothing of the outcome of the raid, rode into Sutter’s. Lieutenant Gillespie and sailors from the Portsmouth were waiting for him on the American River with a launch loaded with the gunpowder and supplies the explorer had requested. Among the bags, boxes, and barrels was a gift from Commander Montgomery, a hogshead of whiskey, which the men fell upon with a will.

  On the sixteenth, Merritt, Semple, and Grigsby rode into the fort with Colonel Vallejo and the other prisoners, turned them over to Sutter, their reluctant jailer, and provided endless embroidered details of the capture of Sonoma.

  Nearly a month passed before Frémont learned with certainty that the United States and Mexico were at war, but he seemed to regard Merritt’s news as the act requiring him to exert his leadership. He began signing his letters “Military Commander of U.S. Forces in California” and proceeded to alienate John Sutter by commandeering his supplies. Ned Kern, the civilian artist-cartographer from Philadelphia, who got along well with Sutter, was placed in command of the fort and its prisoners.

  In Sonoma meantime, Captain William Ide of the Republic of California’s hundred-man army sent William Todd on a mission to the Portsmouth to notify its skipper of the horse raid, the surrender of Colonel Vallejo and the town, and, in effect, of the Osos’ independent declaration of war. Unlike Frémont, Ide was hesitant to ask Montgomery for gunpowder. and supplies since the naval officer, with no assurance that his country was at war, could not legally arm and provision a rebel force. Instead, Todd was given a second assignment and, with another man, rode north toward Bodega Bay to find American settlers who had stores of arms and powder. Ide also dispatched two other Osos toward the Russian River below Fort Ross for the same purpose. These men, Thomas Cowie and George Fowler, were to locate Moses Carson, who could help them find arms and gunpowder. Carson had been a Mexican citizen since 1836 and now served as majordomo at the Sotoyomi rancho owned by Henry D. Fitch, a former trade-ship master from New Bedford, Massachusetts.

  Two days passed and when the parties failed to return from the short ride north, Ide’s chief lieutenant, Henry L. Ford, organized an eighteen-man search team to comb the countryside between Sonoma and the Russian River. Moses Carson reported that he had seen neither Cowie nor Fowler, but during the return to Sonoma, Ford and his party spotted a small body of Californio soldiers and after exchanging a few gunshots, captured a man who told them of the awful fate of the two Osos.

  The prisoner, one Bernardino “Four-Fingered Jack” García, whom Vallejo described as “the wickedest man that California had produced up to that time,” said that the two Americans had been captured near Santa Rosa by a patrol of “irregulars” led by Castro lieutenants Juan Padilla, a barber, and Ramón Carrillo, brother of Francisca Vallejo. García, who was present during the horrors he described, and probably participated in, said that Cowie and Fowler were tortured for two days—tied to trees, stoned, mutilated with knives, and disembowled—before being shot.

  (Writing in the New York Evening Post in October, 1856, the faithful Frémont man Alexis Godey, who saw the corpses, said “… their bodies presented a most shocking spectacle, bearing the marks of horrible mutilation, their throats cut, and their bowels ripped open; other indignities were perpetrated of a nature too disgusting and obscene to relate.” He said that Cowie “was well known to many of our men, with whom he was a favorite, and the sight that his lifeless remains presented, created in the breasts of many of his old friends a feeling of stern and bitter revenge.…”)

  After delivering García to the calabozo in Sonoma and giving Ide the details of the murders, Henry Ford and Granville Swift gathered eighteen volunteers and, on the morning of June 23, rode northwest toward Santa Rosa. They hoped to pick up the trail of Padilla and his irregulars and determine the fate of the still-missing Bill Todd and his companion.

  Ne
ar the village of San Antonio, Ford’s men captured four Californios and after camping the night and acting on information the prisoners provided, the searchers turned south on a trail toward San Rafael. At mid-morning, near the mouth of the Petaluma River, they found a corral of horses at a place known locally as Olómpali, named after a Miwok Indian village that had been visited by Drake’s freebooters in 1579. It was also known as Camilo’s Rancho for its owner, Camilo Ynita, an Indian wheat grower and one-time business partner of Colonel Vallejo’s.

  Ford and his men dismounted after spotting a number of uniformed Californio lancers milling around Ynita’s adobe ranchhouse eating a late breakfast. The horsemen, about fifty in number, were commanded by Captain Joaquín de la Torre, a veteran officer from Monterey. He had been sent north by Castro after the American attack on Sonoma, and with him at the rancho was the Cowie-Fowler culprit, Juan Padilla.

  The Californios ran for their horses after Ford’s men opened fire on them from the brush and trees bordering the rancho. They managed to make a ragged cavalry charge toward the brush, but the American volley fire killed one lancer, wounded one, and scattered the others, forcing them to kick their mounts out of rifle range. After some desultory firing on both sides, De la Torre and his men, Padilla among them, escaped downtrail toward San Rafael.

  During the volley from Ford’s men, William Todd and his gunpowder-searching partner, both captured by De la Torre some days earlier, ran from the ranchhouse to the American line and reached it unscathed. Todd said he was saved from execution by the Californios by telling his captors that if they killed him and his partner, the Americans would execute their prisoners—presumably alluding to Vallejo and the others in Sutter’s cells.

  Ford did not pursue the lancers. None of his men had been scratched in the encounter, he had rescued the two missing Osos, and he feared that his tiny force might ride into a trap if he chased De la Torre’s already superior numbers, so he gathered his men and rode on to Sonoma to report to Captain Ide.

  The “Battle of Olómpali” was the only fight of the Bear Flag Republic.

  2

  Frémont, in camp with his ninety men near Sutter’s, learned of the fate of Cowie and Fowler, and of Ford’s patrol, from an express dispatched from Bear Flag headquarters in Sonoma. Days earlier, he had learned from various Sutter men that General Castro had called for a levée en masse and had sent a force of lancers north from Mission Santa Clara preparatory, it was believed, to an attack on Sonoma. The informants said that Castro was determined to chase the rebels out of Sonoma, but considered it his real duty to rid California of all Americans—Frémont and his men first among them.

  On June 25, the explorer and his men (among them a new recruit named James Marshall, a thirty-five-year-old New Jersey wheelwright and carriage-maker), with Archibald Gillespie, Kit Carson, Segundai, and his Delawares in the van, rode into Sonoma, where they learned of the skirmish at Olómpali. The next morning, joined by Lieutenant Ford and a detachment of Osos, Frémont rode out of Sonoma south to San Rafael, hoping to intercept De la Torre and Padilla. Upon reaching the village and discovering that the Californios had vanished, the Americans set up camp at the old mission, situated on a hill overlooking San Pablo Bay. In the waiting, scouting parties fanned out toward Sausalito to see if there was any activity among Castro’s forces.

  Across San Francisco Bay, Castro had yet to learn the whereabouts of his lancer patrol, and on June 28, he sent a boat into San Pablo Bay with a message to Captain De la Torre. In the small launch were an oarsman and three others: the twin brothers Francisco and Ramón de Haro, age twenty, of Yerba Buena, and their uncle, José de los Reyes Berreyesa, father of the alcalde of Sonoma, who hoped to visit his son, whom he believed had been taken prisoner by the Americans.

  From his perch on the mission hill above San Rafael, Frémont trained his telescope on the launch as it crawled across the bay toward the landing at Point San Pablo and ordered three of his men, Kit Carson, Granville Swift, and the Pennsylvania blacksmith Sam Neal, to ride down to the beach and ascertain the business of the boatmen.

  Precisely what occurred after the oarsman rowed across the bay and the old man and the twin brothers slogged ashore with their saddles and gear is not known, but it is indisputable that the three, apparently unarmed, were murdered in cold blood.

  In his memoirs, Frémont dismissed the incident in a few lines and seemed to forget whom he had sent to intercept the boat—or perhaps he wished to protect Carson, Swift, and Neal—especially Carson—from blame. He also reduced the number of murders by one, neglecting to mention there were two De Haros killed. “Both the settlers and the men of my command were excited against the Californians by the recent murder of the two Americans [Cowie and Fowler],” he wrote, “and not by the murder only, but by the brutal circumstances attending it. My scouts, mainly Delawares, influenced by these feelings, made sharp retaliation and killed Berreyesa and de Haro, who were bearers of intercepted letters.”

  A man named Jasper O’Farrell, an Irish resident of San Rafael at the time, reported in the Los Angeles Star in September, 1856, that he was in the village when Captain Frémont and his “troops” arrived and when the boat landed the three men at the Point San Pablo estuary. O’Farrell wrote that Kit Carson and two other men were detailed to intercept the boat and that Carson soon returned to where Frémont was standing in the corridor of the mission “in company with Gillespie, myself, and others, and said, ‘Captain, shall I take those men prisoners?’ In response, Frémont waved his hand and said: ‘I have got no room for prisoners.’” Then, according to O’Farrell’s account, Carson and the others “advanced to within fifty yards of the three unfortunate and unarmed Californians, alighted from their horses, and deliberately shot them.”

  In a highly improbable postscript to the story, the Irishman claimed to have talked with Carson in 1853 about the incident, “and he assured me,” O’Farrell said, “that then and since he regretted to be compelled to shoot those men, but Frémont was bloodthirsty enough to order otherwise, and he further remarked that it was not the only brutal act he was compelled to commit while under his command.”

  O’Farrell concluded, “I must always look upon [Frémont] with contempt and consider [him] as a murderer and a coward.”

  Many years later, Archibald Gillespie, by then alienated from the man he once considered his hero, placed responsibility for the murders on his former chief. In Gillespie’s recollection, when Carson returned from the estuary, Frémont asked, “Where are your prisoners?” And when Carson said, “They lay out yonder,” the captain replied, “It is well.”

  (Bernard DeVoto’s version of the incident, lifted from O’Farrell’s with customary sarcasm added, was that “Kit reported to Napoleon and asked for instructions. The Conqueror’s mind swarmed with enemies, this was war, and he must be stern. ‘I have no room for prisoners,’ he said, possibly thinking of biographers unborn. So Kit Carson and his corporal’s guard killed them.”)

  Alexis Godey, in the New York Evening Post story in which he described the savage mutilations of Cowie and Fowler, claimed that Berreyesa and the De Haros were “carrying letters to the commander of the enemy’s force” and that they “resisted efforts to seize them as prisoners.” Godey said, “Had they submitted, and not attempted to escape, they would have received no harm, but they furnished a pretext which, to the friends of Tom Cowie, was, perhaps, not unwelcome.”

  Bancroft called the incident “cowardly vengeance,” the time when “the only blood of Frémont’s campaign was spilled, and that under such circumstances as to leave a stain of dishonor upon the commander and some of his men.”

  Ten years after the event, José S. Berreyesa, the Sonoma alcalde, recounted in a Los Angeles newspaper a sad footnote to the murder of his father. After the capture of Sonoma and his imprisonment before being reinstated as magistrate, Berreyesa said that Don José had embarked from Santa Clara for San Pablo to determine his son’s condition and fate. The alcalde said that
on the day after the event at the estuary, as he was held prisoner in a room in Sonoma, he saw a soldier pass by with a serape that had belonged to his father. He made a request of Frémont: “I told him that I believed my father had been killed by his orders and begged that he would do me the favor to have the article restored to me that I might give it to my mother … to this, Col. Frémont replied that he could not order its restoration as the serape belonged to the soldier who had it, and then he retired without giving me any further reply. I then endeavored to obtain it from the soldier, who asked me $25 for it, which I paid, and in this manner I obtained it.”

  3

  After the estuary murders, Frémont moved his camp from San Rafael south to Sausalito, still hoping to encounter Captain De la Torre and his lancer patrol and prevent them from rejoining General Castro in Santa Clara. (De la Torre, meantime, had escaped; he and his men had been ferried from the southern shore of the Marin Peninsula across the strait to Yerba Buena some days before.)

  At the end of June, the merchant barkentine Moscow, which had made a run around Cape Horn from Worcester, Massachusetts, anchored off Sausalito and its master, Captain William D. Phelps, a veteran in the California trade, paid Frémont a visit. Phelps described the celebrated explorer as a “slender and well-proportioned man, of sedate, but pleasing, countenance,” and said that the captain was dressed in a blue, open-collared flannel shirt covered by a deerskin hunting jacket, blue cloth pantaloons, moccasins, and a cotton handkerchief tied around his head. Phelps said the outfit “might not appear very fashionable in the White House or be presentable at a Queen’s levee; but to my eye it was an admirable rig to scud under or fight in.”

  The two men struck up a friendship, and on July 1, Phelps provided passage on the Moscow to Frémont, Gillespie, Carson, and several other of the explorer’s men for a small venture. The bark ferried the party from Sausalito across the strait—which Frémont felicitously named “the Golden Gate”—to Castillo de San Joaquín, just south of the entrance to San Francisco Bay. This vacant, horseshoe-shaped fort, built in 1794, had ten rusty cannons on its battlements that Frémont believed could be used by the Californios to harass American ships attempting to enter the bay. Bill Stepp, a blacksmith and an old wilderness hand, had come along on the mission to end even the remote possibility that the cannons could be used. With a maul and a handful of rattail files, Stepp plugged the cannons’ touchholes with the iron shafts and snapped them off.