Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  * * *

  On February 2, 1848, two days after the verdict, the war officially ended with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The pen strokes made just outside its capital city divested Mexico of forty percent of its territory. Five hundred and thirty thousand square miles, including all of present-day New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and California, plus parts of Colorado, Idaho, and Wyoming, were ceded to the United States, with the Rio Grande established as the boundary between the two nations.

  In return, President Polk agreed to pay $3.25 million in indemnities owed by Mexico, plus $12 million for its annexed lands north of the river.

  The 1846 settlement with England had already added lands that became known as Washington and Oregon, and most of Idaho, to the Union.

  Between the Mexican War and the Oregon settlement, the United States nearly doubled in size, adding 1,200,000 square miles of territory, with the country now stretching “from sea to shining sea.”

  2

  Following the Frémont trial, Stephen Watts Kearny joined Winfield Scott’s army of occupation in Mexico and served briefly as military commander at Vera Cruz. He contracted yellow fever and came home an invalid in July, 1848. That month he was nominated by the army for promotion to major general for “gallant conduct at San Pascual and for meritorious conduct in California and New Mexico.” Senator Thomas Hart Benton filibustered in the Senate for thirteen days against the promotion, repeating most of the testimony against Kearny that had emerged in the court-martial. “After the conspiracy of Catiline, Cicero had a theme for his life; since this conspiracy against Frémont, and these rewards and honors lavished upon all that plotted against his life and character, I have also a theme for my life.” This “ludicrous overshooting of the mark,” as H. H. Bancroft said of the tirade, had no effect. Kearny won the major generalcy but did not live to enjoy its benefits. He died in St. Louis on October 31, 1848, of the effects of the fever he had contracted in Mexico.

  James Knox Polk accomplished all he had set out to do in his presidency, from the annexation of Texas to the settlement of the “Oregon question” to the extension of the Union to the Pacific. He had announced early his intention to retire at the end of a single term and happily turned the presidency over to Zachary Taylor on March 5, 1849. In his diary, Polk wrote, “I am sure I shall be a happier man in my retirement than I have been during the four years I have filled the highest office in the gift of my countrymen.” He enjoyed his retirement for only three months. After the inauguration of his successor, he took a month-long summer tour along the Atlantic seaboard and the gulf states and spent his final weeks working on his papers at his home in Nashville. He had fallen ill during his tour, possibly from a cholera outbreak in New Orleans. On June 15, 1849, he died at age fifty-three.

  Both Senator Benton and Thomas O. Larkin, the latter the consul at Monterey and “confidential agent” during the conquest of California, died in 1858.

  General José Castro returned to Californian in 1848 and lived as a private citizen in Monterey until 1853, when he was appointed military chief and jefe político along the border of Baja California and American California. In 1860, he was killed, Bancroft says, “in a drunken brawl—or, as some say, assassinated.”

  Robert Field Stockton resigned from the navy in 1850 and served in the United States Senate, representing his home state of New Jersey from 1851 to 1853, during which time he introduced a successful bill to abolish flogging as a punishment in the navy. In 1861, he served in a peace commission promoted by former President John Tyler in an effort to avert the impending Civil War, then became president of the Delaware and Raritan Canal Company. He devoted his retirement years to importing race horses from England. He died at Princeton on October 7, 1866.

  José María Flores, who directed the last Californio resistance against the Americans, remained in Mexico after the war and rose to a generalcy in the Mexican army. He died in 1866.

  John Drake Sloat died in New York in 1867. He was the original “conqueror” of California who raised the American flag at Monterey on July 7, 1846, and served as Stockton’s predecessor as commander of the Pacific Squadron.

  Christopher Houston “Kit” Carson returned to New Mexico in 1849, often leaving his beloved Josefa to serve as a military scout and guide in Apache country. In 1861, he reentered the army as a colonel of the First New Mexico Volunteer Regiment and saw action on February 21, 1862, at the Battle of Valverde on the Rio Grande, after which he received the brevet rank of brigadier general. He was then ordered to western New Mexico and Arizona to war against the Navajo, one of the tribes terrorizing New Mexican settlers. With a force of four hundred men, he led a scorched-earth campaign, burning villages and crops, killing cattle, driving the Indians to starvation, and in the summer of 1864, he invaded their stronghold in the Canyon de Chelly in northeastern Arizona. There he forced the surrender of some eight thousand Navajos who were subsequently marched to Fort Sumner, New Mexico, for internment.

  Carson’s last Indian campaign took place in November, 1864, when he led an expedition of 335 men and seventy-five Ute and Apache scouts against marauding Kiowas and Comanches on the Canadian River in the Texas Panhandle.

  A colonel in the regular army after the Indian wars, Carson took command at Fort Garland, Colorado Territory, in July, 1866, and was released from military service the next year.

  Now, at age fifty-eight and after forty-two years of strenuous living, his health began to fail. He suffered from chronic bronchitis, noticed a weakening of his legs, and had persistent neck and chest pains that seemed to signal a faltering heart. With Josefa and their six children, he settled at Boggsville, near present-day Las Animas, Colorado. There a physician visited him and diagnosed an aneurysm of the aorta so large it was destined to be fatal.

  Despite his weakened state and Josefa’s nearing delivery of their seventh child, he made a last journey in February, 1868. As superintendent of Indian Affairs for Colorado Territory, he led a delegation of Utes to Washington to press for a treaty guaranteeing the tribe exclusive hunting rights to lands on the Western Slope. In the capital, he met his old comrade, John C. Frémont, who was so distressed at his friend’s haggard appearance and obvious suffering that he called upon some eminent doctors to examine the frail scout. The aneurysm diagnosis was confirmed.

  Carson returned home in April to the great tragedy of his life. On April 13, his wife gave birth to their seventh child, a daughter, and ten days later, Josefa Jaramillo Carson died.

  He lasted a month after that. He was moved to Fort Lyon, Colorado, where, at his insistence, he slept on the floor of the post surgeon’s quarters under a big buffalo robe. He made his will, leaving his estate to the care and benefit of his children, and on the afternoon of May 23, 1868, he called out, “Doctor, compadre—adios.” Blood gushed from his mouth as the aneurysm burst and he died.

  Archibald Gillespie, the courier who found Frémont at Klamath Lake on May 9, 1846, and who surrendered Los Angeles to Californian insurgents the following September, died at age sixty in San Francisco in 1873.

  Andrés Pico, who commanded the Californians in the battle at San Pascual on December 6, 1846, and later negotiated the treaty of Cahuenga with Frémont, served in the California assembly and state senate after the war. He died in 1876.

  John Augustus Sutter, the lord of New Helvetia, became a delegate to the convention that in 1849 drafted California’s state constitution. The discovery of gold on his lands, rather than making him rich, ruined him, and by 1852 he was bankrupt. He was granted a pension by the California legislature, moved to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and died there on June 18, 1880.

  Richard Henry Dana, Jr., whose 1840 book, Two Years Before the Mast, gave Americans their first real glimpse into life in California before the conquest, died in Rome in 1882. His best-selling memoir had made the Boston patrician famous, so much so that Charles Dickens, upon first visiting the United States in 1842, asked to meet the young author. In his law pra
ctice, Dana specialized in maritime matters, especially the plight of the common sailor. “The truth is,” he said, “I was made for the sea. My life on shore is a mistake.” In 1859, he returned to California—by sea—and paid a visit to the Frémonts and Colonel Vallejo. He spent the last decade of his life traveling in Europe and studying international law.

  Don Mariano Vallejo, arrested by the Bear Flaggers in June, 1846, like Sutter, served in the constitutional convention in 1849. He became a state senator and a leading proponent of cooperation with American authorities in his homeland. He died at his Lachryma Montis estate in Sonoma on January 18, 1890.

  Pío Pico was the longest-lived of all the principal Californios. Born at the San Gabriel Mission in 1801, he saw his home country ruled by Spaniards, Mexicans, and Americans. His career as political partisan, most often in opposition to the governors Mexico sent to their far-western province, had begun in 1831, his opposition to American incursions in the early 1840s, and he served as the last Mexican governor before the American takeover. He returned to California in 1848 and took up residence near San Luís Obispo. He lost his extensive land holdings—sixty thousand acres—to an American swindler and was left a pauper. He died at his daughter’s home on September 11, 1894. Bancroft judged Pico to have been a man “abused far beyond his just deserts; a man of ordinary intelligence and limited education; of generous, jovial disposition, reckless and indolent; with a weakness for cards and women; disposed to be fair and honorable in his transactions, but [unable to] avoid being made the tool of knaves; patriotic without being able to do much for his country.”

  3

  In a wise assessment of John Charles Frémont, Irving Stone said, “In his every success there was contained the germ of his next defeat; in every defeat, the seed of his next victory.”

  He lived forty-three years after the conquest of California, remaining a Child of Fortune—“He was essentially a lucky fellow,” Bancroft said—to the end of his days.

  But his fortune was not always good and his luck did not always hold out.

  In the winter of 1848, he led his fourth expedition west, into the San Juan Mountains of southern Colorado, exploring a railroad route to California. The venture ended in disaster: ten of his thirty-three men were trapped in the mountains by heavy snows and perished.

  In 1853, on his fifth and last exploration, he successfully crossed the San Juans—in the winter.

  He became a millionaire when gold was found on the Las Mariposas lands he had purchased for three thousand dollars in the Sierra foothills, near Yosemite Valley. He acquired real estate in San Francisco, for several years lived in affluence with Jessie and their children in Monterey, and in 1850 was elected one of California’s first senators, serving through a single year of Congress, giving up his seat to return to his Las Mariposas mines.

  In 1856, he was nominated the first presidential candidate of the new Republican Party (“Free Speech, Free Press, Free Soil, Free Men, Frémont and Victory!”) but lost to James Buchanan in the era’s most disgraceful political campaign. Frémont, accused of being anti-Catholic, a mountebank, a drunkard, a bastard, a foreigner, and a convicted mutineer, managed to carry eleven states to Buchanan’s seventeen and received 1,341,264 popular votes to Buchanan’s 1,838,169.

  During the Civil War he resumed his army commission and was sent to St. Louis as a major general and commander of the army’s Western Department. He was obliged to work without funds, arms, or supplies, and had to organize an army in a slave state that had a strong and vocal core of secessionists. He imposed martial law and worked indefatigably to make the city safe for the Union—even issuing his own emancipation proclamation—but was removed by President Lincoln after a controversial one-hundred-day command.

  In 1864, he was endorsed as candidate for president by the radical wing of the Republican Party but withdrew for the sake of party unity.

  He lost his Maricopa lands and fortune in unprofitable railroad ventures.

  He served as territorial governor of Arizona from 1878–1881, after which undistinguished and absentee tenure, he was granted a pension by Congress.

  In 1890, while visiting Washington, Congress restored him to a major generalcy and awarded him a six-thousand-dollar annual pension, but on July 13 that year, he died at age seventy-seven of peritonitis from a burst appendix in a New York City hotel at 49 West Twenty-fifth Street. His only son, John Charles, Jr., was at his bedside and placed in his hand a locket containing a miniature portrait of Jessie. She had remained in their modest Los Angeles home, unable to afford the trip east with her husband.

  Kit Carson told his biographer in 1856, “I was with Frémont from 1842 to 1847. The hardships through which we passed I find it impossible to describe and the credit to which he deserves I am incapable to do him justice in writing. But his services to his country have been left to the judgment of impartial freemen and all agree in saying that his services were great and have redounded to his honor and that of his country.”

  Carson paid special tribute to how Frémont “cheerfully suffered with his men when undergoing the severest of hardships” and said, “His perseverance and willingness to participate in all that was undertaken, no matter whether the duty was rough or easy, is the main cause of his success.”

  Jessie’s epitaph for her husband: “From the ashes of his campfires have sprung cities.”

  * * *

  The second of Senator Benton’s six children, Jessie had married Frémont on October 18, 1841, when she was eighteen, a bright, pretty, boisterous tomboy, and he twenty-eight, a solemn, ardently ambitious, handsome, and gallant suitor. She was pregnant with their first child when he departed in May, 1842, to explore the Oregon Trail to the South Pass in the Wyoming Rockies, and thereafter she transformed the raw data of his oral narrative and notes into memorable books.

  She was also pregnant during her husband’s trial, and the couple lost the baby three months after its birth.

  She argued with Lincoln on her husband’s conduct in Missouri in 1861—so forcefully that the exasperated President called her, after she left his office, “a female politician.”

  When their fortune disappeared in bad speculative investments, Jessie, now fifty, had to take up her pen and write reminiscences and children’s stories to earn a subsistence wage.

  But even in Frémont’s brooding and bitter last years, when he went east without her, she wrote, “Love me in memory of the old times, when I was so dear to you,” and assured him that their advancing age and uncertain future changed nothing. “I love you now much more than I did then,” she said.

  After her husband’s death, Jessie and her daughter Lily lived in an eight-room cottage in Los Angeles given them by the Women of California Club. In her parlor, sitting near the Gutzon Borglum portrait of her hero, she received occasional visitors and eked out an income by writing magazine articles. She eventually received a two-thousand-dollar annual widow’s pension, and to the end of her twelve-year widowhood, sheltered the flame of her “Jason of California.”

  She died in her sleep at age seventy-eight on December 27, 1902, and was buried beside her husband at Piermont, New York, overlooking the Hudson River.

  NOTES

  5. The Dark Horse

    1  Not to be confused with the California historian, Hubert H. Bancroft.

  7. Hawk’s Peak

    1  There were many Castros in California. Ángel Castro, a former presidio soldier, was a judge and distinguished citizen of San Juan Bautista and uncle of General José Castro. The prefect at Monterey, Manuel Castro, does not appear to have been directly related to General José Castro.

  12. Stockton

    1  Revere is said to have tucked the original Bear Flag in his pocket. Years later, it was donated to the Society of California Pioneers in San Francisco but was destroyed in the earthquake and fire in 1906. The flag design became the official state emblem in 1911.

  13. Kearny

    1  Spelled
with two r’s in Mexico, one in California. Either way, it means King’s Mountain.

  16. San Pascual

    1  These camps were near the modern town of Ramona, a few miles from the San Pascual battlefield, today a state historic park lying eight miles southeast of Escondido on California Route 78.

    2  Some sources put the number as high as 160.

  17. Mule Hill

    1  Historian H. H. Bancroft treats this figure with an “(!).”

  19. Cahuenga

    1  The site is commemorated by a historical marker on Lankershim Boulevard, in North Hollywood.

  20. Last Battle

    1  Brevet Major Henry S. Turner of the First Dragoons kept a journal of his experiences with Kearny on the march from Forth Leavenworth to California. He wrote that the reason Kearny failed to place Frémont in irons for mutiny was that the general “is afraid of giving offense to Benton.” Turner was disgusted with his chief for his inaction in the matter and for not dealing decisively with Stockton, whom Turner characterized as “a low, trifling, truckling politician.”

  21. Return

    1  In 1850, Mason, having returned from his service as governor of California, wrote to his old adversary in Washington offering to fight the duel if Frémont would come to St. Louis. Frémont wisely chose not to answer the letter. The quarrel ended with Mason’s death that year at the age of fifty-three.

    2  Dwight L. Clarke, Kearny’s biographer, in attempting to mitigate the six-month delay in informing Frémont of his fate, provides an inadvertent indictment of the dragoon officers the explorer regarded as lackeys. “The Lieutenant Colonel should have been very grateful that his arrest had been so long delayed,”Clarke says, adding the telling comment that had the explorer been arrested when Kearny first decided on it and a court-martial convened then, “What chance would John C. Frémont have stood with a court composed in part of Mason, Cooke, Swords, Turner and Sherman?”