Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  The rebel tactics were simple and effective: the four-pounder was placed athwart the road on which the Americans had to advance; long ropes were lashed to the limber by which the gun could be pulled into the brush for reloading. Flores and Carillo deployed their horsemen at a safe distance from the roadway on the flanks of the approaching enemy.

  Mervine’s force advanced in close columns on the narrow trail, with Gillespie and his men serving as skirmishers on the flanks, all the men bunched up and vulnerable, with no reconnaissance to determine the enemy number and whereabouts. When they came within four hundred yards of the rebel position, the old fieldpiece was fired and quickly yanked back into the brush, followed by a ragged volley of musket fire from Flores’ flankers.

  The first several cannon shots were ineffective because of the weak homemade powder used, but inevitably, with the Americans clotted along the trail, the four-pound balls did some damage, as did the rebels’ musketry. Mervine, who had placed his troops in square formation—the classic defense against cavalry—was helpless with his men afoot against a virtually unseen and uncounted enemy. With a dozen serious casualties, no place to hide, and no chance to advance on Los Angeles, he turned his force back to San Pedro Bay and reboarded the Savannah. After a few days, the warship sailed north to Monterey.

  The “battle” had lasted less than an hour; four of the twelve Americans struck by ball and bullet died of their wounds and were buried on a little island in San Pedro Bay, perfectly named Isla de los Muertos (Island of the Dead).

  * * *

  Frémont meantime had gathered his 170 men and reported to Stockton at Yerba Buena. Many of the men were afoot. Horses were becoming scarce in the north and both officers counted on finding mounts once they reached Santa Barbara, seventy miles upcoast from Los Angeles.

  Stockton needed to get to sea and retake what Gillespie had lost, and on October 12, the day after Frémont arrived, he took the Congress out through the Golden Gate, Frémont and his men following on the chartered trader Sterling. But a day out and in a heavy fog, the Sterling lost sight of the flagship and all plans went awry. Stockton went on to Monterey, learned that the small garrison there feared a rebel attack, and left reinforcements. He proceeded to San Pedro and reached the bay on October 23. Mervine had returned there on the Savannah a few days earlier and Stockton learned the details of the recent encounter with Flores’ rebels. Over the next couple of days, eight hundred sailors, marines, and Gillespie’s volunteers were landed at San Pedro. Stockton then moved on to San Diego to set up a base of operations for the campaign against Flores, to drill and train his sailors, and to scour the countryside and send patrols into Baja California to locate horses and livestock.

  (Antonio María Osio of Monterey said that Stockton’s efforts in San Diego were abetted by “corrupt Californios and some Mexican traitors” who offered supplies to the commodore “so that he could increase his ranks and resources in the war he was fighting against the men whom they should have regarded as their brothers.” Osio said that these turncoats were blinded by ambition and that “if those men had been Americans, Señor Stockton, a patriotic and upright man, would have hanged them like bunches of grapes from every yardarm of his frigate’s main mast.”)

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  After the false start, Frémont and his men proceeded toward Santa Barbara on the Sterling, but en route met the Vandalia, the merchant ship on which Gillespie and his men had taken refuge upon surrendering the Los Angeles garrison. After learning from the merchant skipper of Mervine’s failure to retake Los Angeles and that the rebels had run all horses and cattle inland, Frémont ordered the Sterling to reverse course for Monterey. There he hoped to gather horses and increase his volunteer force for an overland march to Los Angeles to join with Stockton, whose exact whereabouts for the moment were unknown.

  Frémont’s return to Monterey on October 27 and the three weeks he tarried there removed him and his men from the theater of operations between San Diego and Los Angeles, but he did not waste the time. Mervine’s experience against Flores proved that the insurgents were perhaps more numerous than anybody had estimated.

  From his headquarters in Monterey, Frémont, who received word there of his promotion to the brevet rank of lieutenant colonel of the army, sent express riders north with letters to Captain Montgomery of the Portsmouth in San Francisco Bay and to Ned Kern at Sutter’s Fort. These messages requested that volunteers and horses be massed and made ready to join Frémont’s force in Monterey. This recruiting effort, with Sutter’s as the main depot, and with the efforts of Kern and Lieutenant Revere in Sonoma, produced nearly two hundred men, including a number of Paiute and Walla Walla Indians. These mounted volunteers and a remuda of spare horses and mules came south to Frémont toward the end of November.

  While the explorer awaited reinforcements, Ezekial Merritt, John Bidwell, and two dozen men were landed from the whaler Stonington a short distance from San Diego and wrestled the three small cannons appropriated from the ship to the outskirts of the town. Flores’ men discovered them and set up a desultory fire, but after the pieces banged a few times, the rebels vanished into the brush and Merritt and his tiny force reoccupied San Diego. They raised the flag in the town plaza and nervously held their position until the end of October, when Stockton and Mervine arrived in the bay with their warships and the town was secured once and for all.

  The commodore’s main order of business was to find horses, saddle-rigging, mules, and cattle; armed patrols fanned out into the countryside and others shipped to the Baja California coast to gather the animals and equipage. One of these expeditions succeeded in gathering a hundred forty head of horses and five hundred of cattle, but did not return until late December.

  While Stockton was establishing his base in San Diego and preparing to march north and Frémont was gathering his force in Monterey for a march south, General José Flores was also regrouping. At an assembly convened in Los Angeles, he had been elected governor and military commander of California, but the added power did nothing to alleviate his problems. He had no funds with which to pay his men—regulars and unenthusiastic volunteers, about four hundred in all; he was running low on powder and ammunition and had to operate with an inadequate supply train. He had also divided his force into thin units, a hundred men under General José Castro at San Luís Obispo, between Monterey and Santa Barbara, to watch for the advance of Frémont’s force, another hundred under Captain Andrés Pico to guard the eastern approaches to San Diego, and the remainder of the men—less than two hundred—in Flores’ own command, camped near Los Angeles to counter, as best they could, either Stockton or Frémont, or both.

  One significant encounter between the Americans and Californios occurred during this November regrouping period and involved the United States consul in Monterey, Thomas O. Larkin. He rode out of Monterey for Yerba Buena after receiving news that his four-year-old daughter Adeline was seriously ill there. He was aware of the danger of the journey, knew that he might be taken prisoner in retaliation for General Vallejo’s capture in Sonoma, and during the night of November 15, while staying with friends in San Juan Bautista, his worst fears were realized. He was captured by Castro’s troops and taken to the general’s camp on the Salinas River, within view of Frémont’s old battlements on Hawk’s Peak.

  As these events unfolded, there arrived in San Juan a force of California Battalion men out of Sutter’s Fort, bringing five hundred head of horses and mules to Colonel Frémont in Monterey. As the advance guard of the battalion advanced toward the Salinas and reached a rancho called La Natividad, they were met by a patrol of 130 Californians—with their prisoner Larkin among them. The melee that ensued, later called the “Battle of La Natividad,” cost the lives of five to seven Americans, two Californians, and several wounded on each side. Larkin was unhurt but was not released from captivity for a month. In that period, Adeline Larkin died in Yerba Buena.

  Frémont got news of the skirmish as he prepared to depart Monterey; he took
his men north the thirty miles to the San Juan Bautista outskirts to gather his new recruits and the horses and mules they had herded. He spent two weeks there as reinforcements continued to arrive from the Sacramento Valley, bringing with them more horses and pack animals.

  At last, on November 30, in a thunderstorm that instantly turned the dirt trail into a muddy swamp, he was ready to strike out toward Los Angeles. He led an army of 430 men, three artillery pieces, and nearly two thousand horses and mules.

  * * *

  Frémont and his cumbersome force were still slogging down the Salinas River Valley, three days out of San Juan Bautista, when Commodore Stockton, in San Diego, received a letter, brought in by an express rider, from Brigadier General S.W. Kearny of the United States Army. The general informed the commodore that he was approaching the city from the east and asked about the state of affairs in California.

  Stockton sent for Gillespie, gave him quick orders to select a number of good horsemen and ride out to meet Kearny and his men. Gillespie led his patrol out of San Diego in the early evening of December 3, 1846.

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  San Pascual

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  Stephen Watts Kearny received the news that California had been annexed with his customary stoicism, but it shocked him. The miraculous convergence of his path down the Rio Grande Valley with that of Kit Carson and his escort on October 6, a month out of Los Angeles, seemed a wicked trick of fate. He had come a thousand cruel miles at the head of an army and raised the flag of the United States over the old province of New Mexico. Now, the second half of his objective had been snatched from him by the navy, a gang of topographical explorers, and a handful of malcontents calling themselves Bear Flaggers.

  Carson could be trusted. He told of the capture of Sonoma and the subsequent surrender of Monterey, of the occupation of San Francisco Bay and Los Angeles, matter-of-factly. The Californians had folded pitifully. Carson said they were cowardly, had no means to resist and, worse, no will.

  Carson’s news dictated a new course of action. The general still had responsibilities in California, now political rather than military. His orders were to take over command there, and with the navy’s cooperation, establish a civil government and serve as proconsul. The War Department was shipping another army unit around Cape Horn to California, commanded by Richard B. Mason, colonel of the First Dragoons, and Mason would succeed Kearny as military governor when the general was satisfied that the entire territory had been pacified.

  He now needed only an armed escort to travel through Indian country and so sent back to Santa Fé two hundred of his three hundred dragoons and all but two fieldpieces, and cut his supply train to the bone, trading his wagons for packsaddles. He retained only the First Dragoon companies, under Captain Benjamin D. Moore and Lieutenant Thomas C. Hammond, the latter married to Moore’s sister. His other officers were Captain Henry Smith Turner, acting assistant adjutant general; Captain Abraham R. Johnston, aide-de-camp; Major Thomas Swords, quartermaster; lieutenants William H. Emory and William H. Warner, topographical engineers; Lieutenant John W. Davidson, in charge of the two mountain howitzers; and assistant surgeon John S. Griffin. A dozen assistants and servants were selected to accompany the escort, and the French-Canadian Antoine Robidoux, a veteran tracker, remained the principal guide, with Kit Carson his associate.

  On October 15, Robidoux and Carson led Kearny and his escort, most of them mounted on mules, and the pack train southwest toward the Santa Rita del Cobre country, inhabited by Mimbreño Apaches. The trail was an ancient one, used by Spaniards and Mexicans traveling to and from California, and it cut through wilderness both weirdly beautiful and forbidding: in the first few days, a lushly green country of oaks, ash, and walnut trees, and aspens on the higher ground, the Mimbres range and other mountains to the north; then rock-strewn desert, countless bone-dry arroyos, great canyons, mesas disappearing into the horizon, yucca and Joshua trees and all manner of cactus, some hugging the ground with tentacles spread seeking moisture, others squat and fat and decorated with gorgeous flowers, still others tall and stately, like sentinels with arms pointing skyward, their hides pocked with bird holes. There were occasional grassy stretches along the old roadway, and small streams and rivulets and great cottonwood copses, but these were rare, and water and forage were daily problems for man and beast.

  On October 20, five days out of the Socorro camp, the Americans crossed the Continental Divide and reached the southernmost branch of the Gila River, where they made camp, and watered their stock. Before starting out the next morning, Kearny and his officers were startled when a band of twenty Apaches—Mimbres men led by their great chief Mangas Coloradas (Red Sleeves)—rode into the camp. Through sign language and what Apache-Spanish Kearny’s officers could understand, Mangas said that his visit was peaceful and assured them they could pass through his country unmolested. He knew that Kearny had captured Santa Fé and he was delighted—the Apaches and Mexicans were ancient enemies, slaughtering each other since conquistador times—suggesting to the general that he join forces with the Apaches and conquer all of northern Mexico. Kearny politely declined and after many hours of bartering with the band for a few mules, the march was resumed and Mangas led his men south into the hills.

  * * *

  In early November, the trail threaded through scattered villages of the Pima and Maricopa tribes, some of them with irrigated patches of land growing corn, wheat, beans, melons, and squash. The Pimas were especially friendly and when Carson tried to barter with a chief, he was told that “bread is to eat, not to sell; take what you want.” But there were no horses or cattle available and the Americans were able to gain only a few bony mules, these from a Coyotero Apache band.

  They rode on, twenty or thirty miles a day, depending on water and graze and the state of fatigue of the men and animals, fording streams and arroyos—dismantling the guns and their carriages each time—climbing rocky hills, trudging across miles of deep sand that bogged the heavily laden mules and fieldpieces. Each day, men in advance of the main column searched for water, grass, and suitable campsites, and each night, after the animals were fed and picketed, the men ate their frugal meal and fell exhausted into their bedrolls.

  The tedium of the march was broken on November 22 when the column reached a point ten miles from the confluence of the Gila and Colorado rivers. The advance guard had discovered near a pueblo ruins fresh remains of an abandoned camp. The size of the camp and the countless hoofprints around it seemed to indicate that a large number of horses had been there, tended by a few men.

  After the two mountain guns were brought forward, Kearny dispatched Lieutenant Emory and a detail of riders to investigate, and ten miles downtrail, they discovered a dust cloud caused by a caballada of at least five hundred animals. Emory and his men took four Mexican herders prisoner with no resistance and brought them to Kearny’s camp to be questioned. “Each gave a different account of the ownership and destination of the horses,” Emory wrote, and while it appears that the animals were headed from California to Sonora to be sold, many of the dragoon officers were convinced that the horse herd belonged to General José Castro.

  Of far more importance than the captured horses was the alarming news related by one of the Mexican prisoners that there had been a revolution in Los Angeles and the pueblo had been taken back from the Americans. This astonishing story was substantiated the next day when Emory captured a courier carrying dispatches to Castro in the Sonoran capital. The papers were unsealed, found to be dated October 15 and containing details of a counterrevolt that had “thrown off the detestable Anglo-Yankee yoke.” Castro was informed that Pueblo de Los Ángeles, Santa Barbara, and other towns in the southern province were again in the hands of the Californians and that General Flores had defeated the American naval officer Mervine at San Pedro.

  The news in the captured dispatches was five weeks old and Kearny had no idea of what might have happened in the interim, but one thing seemed clear: the Californians had
been misjudged.

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  Kearny had no intention of taking prisoners and did not need five hundred wild horses. The captured dispatches had transformed his hundred-man dragoon force into a flying column and he was restless, fretting over every hour spent off the trail, desperate to discover the state of affairs in California. He freed the horse herders, even resealing and returning the dispatches to the courier, and in a gentlemanly and unwarlike gesture, purchased twenty-five of the tamest animals and a few mules and gave the Mexicans some tea, coffee, and sugar from his meager stores.

  On November 25, the dragoons found a suitable ford on the Colorado, a place where the river, nearly a half-mile wide, ran less than four feet deep. Because Carson had advised that the grass and mesquite thinned out a short distance from the river, the mules were loaded with forage and bags of mesquite pods after the laborious crossing. Ahead lay desert country and within two days of the Colorado crossing, Kearny’s men were digging deep into the sand in dry streambeds looking for water seepage. The four-day crossing of the desert cost the lives of several of the 250 mules and horses in the expedition, but the dragoons found water and graze at Carrizo Creek, struggled through a gap in the foothills of the Vallecitos Mountains, and in the mid-afternoon of December 2, reached Warner’s Ranch, fifty miles northeast of San Diego, the first trace of civilization the Americans had seen since leaving the Rio Grande Valley on their “thousand-mile leap” fifty days ago.

  The ranch and nearby springs lay on the Agua Caliente land grant awarded in 1844 to Jonathan Trumbull Warner of Lyme, Connecticut, who had served with Jedediah Smith’s 1831 trading expedition to New Mexico (during which Smith was killed by Comanches). Warner was a naturalized citizen of Mexican California and had a fifteen-year history in the province. Carson knew “Juan Largo” Warner (Long John stood six-foot-three), and Kearny was anxious to meet the proprietor of the remote way station, but Warner was away on business when the dragoons reached the springs. There they were greeted by Juan Largo’s factotum, an American named Marshall. With men and animals watered and fed and the camp made, Marshall told Kearny and his officers all he knew: the Californians had taken control of much of the southern province; the Americans still held the ports of San Francisco, Monterey, and San Diego. A neighboring Englishman, a former sea captain named Edward Stokes, came to the Warner ranchhouse and confirmed this information. He said he was on his way to San Diego and offered to carry with him any messages Kearny wished delivered to Commodore Stockton.