Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  Admiral Seymour’s Collingwood had preceded Frémont’s battalion to Monterey, and his officers and sailors were ashore to watch the spectacle. The British were particularly interested in catching a glimpse of Kit Carson, whose name and exploits were almost as legendary in England as Horatio Nelson’s. Frémont, too, was an object of special interest by the British seamen. One midshipman wrote of him as “a middle-sized man with an aquiline nose, very piercing eyes and hair parted amidships.” Another officer described him as a “spare, active-looking man, with such an eye! He was dressed in blouse and leggings, and wore a felt hat.” The middies viewed the Delawares admiringly, likening them to characters from a James Fenimore Cooper novel.

  A copse of fir trees on the outskirts of town served as a camp. Once the animals were secured and under watch, the men were free to visit the town, to pass their time, one unimpressed observer recalled, “in drunkenness and debauchery.”

  2

  A navy launch took Frémont and his adjutant, Gillespie, out to the Savannah at midday on July 19 and Sloat greeted them cordially, questioning the explorer at length on his role in the rebellion in Sonoma and his subsequent actions. Sloat particularly wanted to know by whose orders Frémont and his men had aided the rebels, imprisoned General Vallejo, spiked the guns at Castillo de San Joaquín, and organized the force he now had camped at Monterey. After a month of inertia, Sloat had taken Monterey only after he had learned of Frémont’s work among the Bear Flaggers in the north, and he now needed to know the source of the explorer’s authority. Had Lieutenant Gillespie brought orders from Washington? From Secretary of War Marcy? From President Polk himself?

  When Frémont casually explained that he had acted on his own authority to assist the settlers who were facing a fight with Castro and expulsion from the province, Sloat paled and retired to his cabin.

  Frémont was livid. He had expected to talk to this officer about amalgamating his men into official service, thereby receiving a sort of ex post facto sanction for all his filibustering work over the past four months—Hawk’s Peak, his encouragement of the Bear Flaggers, the imprisonment of Vallejo, the murders at San Pablo estuary, his commandeering of Sutter’s Fort. He also had hoped to talk to the commodore about pursuing Castro south to San Luís Obispo, Santa Barbara, and Los Angeles. Instead, he learned that the navy had no shore operations planned other than holding actions, and that the highest-ranking American officer in California was old, ill, and timid.

  What Frémont did not know was that his rescuer, Commodore Robert Field Stockton, had arrived in Monterey Bay. He had sailed for California from Norfolk, voyaging the customary route—the Horn, Valparaiso, Chile; Callao, Peru, and the Sandwich Islands—and on July 15, 1846, made his way into Monterey roads from Honolulu on the sixty-gun frigate Congress.

  Stockton’s sealed orders were dated October 17, 1845, the precise date of Secretary of State James Buchanan’s orders to Thomas O. Larkin appointing him a “confidential agent” and instructing him to “conciliate” the Californios and urge them to support annexation.

  Bernard DeVoto calls Stockton the d’Artagnan of the conquest of California, and there are similarities. Both the commodore and the swashbuckling Gascon were ambitious, vain, bombastic, and excitable, and both hungered for glory. But in contrast to the Dumas character, who rode penniless into Paris on a yellow pony, Stockton was a fifty-one-year-old blueblood who had arrived in Monterey on the biggest warship of the Pacific Squadron to the shrilling of a bosun’s pipe and a cannon salute.

  Born in Princeton, New Jersey, his grandfather had been among the signers of the Declaration of Independence, his father a lawyer and politician, serving in both houses of the Congress of the United States. Robert attended Princeton briefly but in 1811, at age sixteen, a perfect time for active service in far-flung stations, he earned a warrant as a midshipman in the navy.

  He served in the war of 1812 on the frigates President and Gurriere at Chesapeake Bay, the defenses of Baltimore, Washington, and Fort McHenry. As a schooner lieutenant in the Mediterranean, he took part in the capture of Algerian warships, which brought an end to the Barbary Wars. In 1821, on the schooner Alligator off the West African coast, he directed the capture of four French slavers, and on the return voyage from Liberia, fought a successful engagement with a Portuguese pirate vessel. In the West Indies in 1822, the Alligator destroyed three pirate ships and captured their loot.

  Stockton had retired from the navy in 1828 upon the death of his father and his inheritance of the family estate in Princeton. For ten years, he concentrated on improving the family’s already substantial fortune in New Jersey railroads and ship canals. He married, became a celebrated horse-breeder, traveled in Europe, and dabbled in politics, first as a supporter of John Quincy Adams, later as an ardent backer of Andrew Jackson and John Tyler.

  Upon reentering the navy in 1838, he was promoted to captain of the warship Ohio and studied naval architecture and marine engineering in England, where he became a disciple of John Ericcson, the steam-and-screw propulsion pioneer. When he returned to the United States, he promoted the idea of a screw-driven warship and used his wealth and political influence in supervising construction of the Ericcson-designed man-of-war Princeton. It was this ship, Stockton in command, that in February, 1844, had taken President John Tyler and four hundred Washington dignitaries—including Senator Thomas Hart Benton—on a cruise of the Potomac. The pleasure cruise had ended in unutterable tragedy when, during an ordnance demonstration, one of the Princeton’s massive guns, ironically called the Peacemaker, exploded, killing Tyler’s secretary of state, secretary of the navy, and four other onlookers.

  Stockton, who had been burned by the gun explosion, was cleared of any responsibility for the catastrophe. The next year, President Polk ordered the captain and a small squadron, including the Princeton, from the Mediterranean to patrol in the Gulf of Mexico and prevent any Mexican intervention during negotiations over the annexation of Texas. Stockton overstepped his authority in conducting talks with Texas officials and whipping up the idea of military intervention in Mexico, but since this notion was not unknown in the White House, its main tenant did not censure the officer for his arrogance. In fact, soon after his Texas coast duties, he was promoted to the rank of commodore and given command of the Pacific Squadron with orders to proceed to California.

  He had not changed much in character over the thirty-five years since he entered the navy. His natural impertinence and tactlessness had flowered as he climbed the command ladder. He was obedient to his superiors as long as they remained in Washington and he far removed; he gave orders with alacrity, took them reluctantly, was protective of his rank and command, brooking no dissenting opinions among his officers.

  He was also zealous, patriotic, and energetic. He did not avoid decision-making, did not let his rank interfere with his love of a fight.

  He was a smallish, handsome man, long-nosed, dark-haired, clean-shaven, with piercing dark eyes and a cutlass slash of a mouth.

  He had so much in common with John Charles Frémont that the two became fast friends at once.

  * * *

  The two commodores met for the first time on July 15 when Sloat took the preliminary step toward retirement by naming Stockton commander in chief of all the land forces in California.

  Frémont and Gillespie, meantime, had also met with the new commodore and were greatly encouraged by Stockton’s eagerness to pursue Castro and finish the conquest of California with land forces—including Frémont’s 160 men.

  On July 23, Stockton mustered the former Bear Flaggers and Frémont’s men into the military service of the United States as the “Naval Battalion of Mounted Volunteer Riflemen”—soon known as the California Battalion—with Frémont as major in command, Gillespie as captain and second. Within a few weeks following, some 428 other volunteers were engaged, most of them at Sonoma and Sutter’s Fort, to be paid twenty-five dollars a month. Fifty Walla Walla Indians from Oregon enlisted at Sutter’
s.

  Commodore Sloat transfered his pennant to the Levant on July 29 and headed home. Among his last acts before turning the Pacific Squadron command over to Stockton was the ordering of the release of General Vallejo and the other prisoners at Sutter’s Fort.

  On the day of Sloat’s departure and before sailing south to San Pedro on the Congress, Stockton issued a hammering proclamation annexing California to the United States, vowing to drive Castro and all Mexicans opposing the measure out of the province. He said he would march “against these boasting and abusive chiefs” who had “violated every principle of international law and national hospitality by hunting and pursuing with several hundred soldiers, and with wicked intent, Capt. Frémont of the U.S. Army, who came here to refresh his men, about forty in number, after a perilous journey across the mountains, on a scientific survey.” The document named Castro as a “usurper” who “has been guilty of great offenses, has impoverished and drained the country of almost its last dollar, and has deserted his post now when most needed.” Stockton wrote that “reports from the interior” told of “rapine, blood and murder” at the hands of the Mexican general and his soldiers. He went on, “I must therefore, and will as soon as I can, adopt such measures as may seem best calculated to bring these criminals to justice, and to bestow peace and good order to the country.”

  H. H. Bancroft called Stockton’s declaration a “pronunciamento filibustero,” found the remarks on Castro’s “hunting and pursuing” Frémont particularly amusing, and said of it as a whole, “The paper was made up of falsehood, or irrelevant issues, and of bombastic ranting in about equal parts, the tone being offensive and impolitic even in those inconsiderable portions which were true and legitimate.… It should have borne the signatures of Frémont and Gillespie, who managed to gain for the time being complete control over the commodore.…”

  Commodore Sloat, who took a copy of the proclamation with him on the Levant, wrote to the secretary of the navy, “It does not contain my reasons for taking possession of, or my views or intentions toward that country; consequently it does not meet my approbation.”

  3

  Following Stockton’s manifesto, General Castro, in Santa Clara, began his move south to Los Angeles to join forces, such as they were, with his old rival, Governor Pío Pico. At the time of the Olómpali skirmish with the Osos, Castro had close to two hundred men in his command, mostly local militiamen; now, with many of them deserting, drifting toward home rather than abandoning their families for a real and potentially deadly campaign against the Americans, his force had dwindled to about a hundred. He hoped—but probably knew the impossibility of it—to raise an army to “rise en masse irresistible and just” to crush the invaders and announced, “Duty leads me to death or victory. I am a Mexican soldier and I will be free and independent or die with pleasure for those inestimable blessings.”

  Governor Pico, doting on classical references, was even more emotional in his response to the Monterey takeover and subsequent American flag-raisings. “Fly, Mexicans, in all haste in pursuit of the treacherous foe,” he wrote in his message to the populace. “Follow him to the farthest wilderness; punish his audacity; and in case we fail, let us form a cemetery where posterity may remember to the glory of Mexican history the heroism of her sons, as is remembered the glory won by death of that little band of citizens posted at the Pass of Thermopylae under General Leonidas.”

  On July 16, as Frémont and his men were en route to Monterey, Pico issued a more formal proclamation on the American invasion. He promised to “make every possible effort to repel this the most unjust aggression” and issued a conscription order for all Mexican citizens of the department of California between the ages of fifteen and sixty to “defend the country when as now the national independence is in danger.” The governor called a special meeting of his legislators and gave the assembly a report on the invasion. “He and the others,” historian Bancroft said, “made patriotic speeches.”

  But the speeches rang leadenly: the legislators were apathetic, and few among the citizenry saw any hope in defending California—neglected by its motherland throughout its history and now, in war, utterly abandoned—against so mighty a foe as the United States. There was no money to finance an army, no appreciable stock of weapons to arm it. Further, many influential Californios welcomed the American invasion and many others were secretly sympathetic to it. Thus few flew to pursue the treacherous foe; Pico’s hope of raising a force with his conscription order produced about a hundred men to combine with Castro’s hundred from the north.

  * * *

  Stockton knew nothing of the precise numbers opposing him when he determined to mass his men at Los Angeles to locate, confront, and defeat Castro in battle. On July 26, he ordered Frémont and his battalion from Monterey downcoast on the Cyane to San Diego, there to gather cattle, oxen, horses, and a pack train of mules, preparatory to a march north to the capital. Stockton, meantime, planned to land his force from the Congress at San Pedro, thirty-five miles south of Los Angeles, and rendezvous with the explorer.

  The California Battalion, about 120 weak-kneed, seasick men, landed at San Diego on July 29 and raised the flag there without opposition. A week-long search produced only a few horses and pack animals.

  On his move south, Stockton dropped off a small garrison at Santa Barbara, and on August 1, the Congress dropped anchor in San Pedro Bay and landed the commodore and his 360 sailors and marines armed with muskets, pistols, cutlasses and boarding pikes, and four six-pounder cannons.

  Thomas Larkin, who had accompanied Stockton on the Congress, came ashore at San Pedro with hopes high that he might negotiate a peaceful annexation of California. These hopes rose even higher on the day after the landing when two representatives from Castro arrived at Stockton’s camp. The commissioners, Pablo de la Guerra and Captain José María Flores, delivered a letter to the commodore in which the Mexican general expressed a willingness to negotiate for peace provided that “all hostile movements be suspended by both forces.”

  This gentlemanly proffer seemed eminently reasonable to Larkin but not to Stockton, who did not believe negotiations with Castro would be valid without sanction from Mexico City and so rejected the terms of the letter out of hand. His return message to the general, dated August 7, said, “I do not wish to war against California or her people; but as she is a department of Mexico, I must war against her until she ceases to be a part of the Mexican territory. This is my plain duty.” He ended the letter with a proposal he knew would be rejected: “… if, therefore, you will agree to hoist the American flag in California, I will stop my forces and negotiate the treaty.”

  Castro eloquently and indignantly rejected this proposal. “Never, never, never!” he proclaimed, and called the commodore’s ultimatum “humiliating,” “shameful,” and “insidious.” “Never will I consent that [California] commit so base an act … And what would be her liberty with that protection offered at the cannon’s mouth?”

  Two days after Stockton’s truce-ending message was written, Castro held a war council at La Mesa, just south of Los Angeles, and dispatched a letter to Governor Pico. He said that he had been able to muster only a hundred men and these “badly armed, worse supplied, and discontented by reason of the misery they suffer.” He notified the governor, “I have reason to fear that not even these few men will fight when the necessity arises.” He had resolved, he said, to journey to Sonora, there to report to the supreme government in Mexico City the plight of their people in California, and he invited Pico to join him. He included in the letter his farewell address to the people of California, in which he said, “With my heart full of the most cruel grief, I take leave of you. I leave the country of my birth, but with the hope of returning to destroy the slavery in which I leave you; for the day will come when our unfortunate fatherland can punish this usurpation, as rapacious as unjust, and in the face of the world, exact satisfaction for its grievances.”

  Pico read Castro’s messages to the
legislature in Los Angeles. He announced that he agreed with Castro that it would be impossible to defend the department against the American invaders and told of his intention to join the general in leaving California to notify Mexico City of the latest occurrences. He proposed that the assembly adjourn sine die, and this was done.

  “My friends, farewell!” Pico wrote in an open letter, an echo of Castro’s, upon departing Los Angeles. “I abandon the country of my birth, my family, property, and whatever else is most grateful to man, all to save the national honor. But I go with the sweet satisfaction that you will not second the deceitful views of the astute enemy; that your loyalty and firmness will prove an inexpungable barrier to the machinations of the invader. In any event, guard your honor, and observe that the eyes of the world are fixed upon you.”

  On the night of July 10, Castro and Pico left Los Angeles separately. The general and twenty men rode toward the Colorado River. With him was his secretary, Francisco Arce, who precisely one month earlier had lost a horse herd after encountering Ezekial Merritt and other Bear Flaggers on the Cosumnes River. Early in September, Castro and his party reached Sonora, where he sent dispatches to Mexico City explaining his flight and urging that forces be marched to the defense of California.

  Pico hid out with friends in San Juan Capistrano for a month before making his way to Mulegé on the eastern Baja California coast, thence across the Gulf of California to Guaymas and subsequently to Hermosillo, the Sonoran capital. He too urged, unavailingly, the Mexican government to defend its Pacific department.