All of the men who were fit to fight, including Frémont’s desperados, were organized into what he styled the California Battalion—now 234 men organized into four companies and officered by leaders selected for their proven field merit. What they looked like is anybody’s guess, and there was probably no better guesser than Frémont’s most prominent second-generation biographer, Allan Nevins, who conjured a picturesque apparition of the men most responsible for delivering California into the United States.
“The California Battalion, a motley array of voyageurs, trappers, scouts, former sailors, frontier farmers, and ranchmen, was a body unlike any other that has ever fought on American soil, and yet with close affinities to our pioneer fighters in all generations. Miles Standish, Robert Rogers, Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett would have recognized the breed at once. Most of the men wore broad-brimmed hats pulled low over the eyes, shirts of buckskin or blue flannel, and buckskin trousers and moccasins, all much the worse for wear and smeared with dirt, blood and gunpowder. From a leather girdle about every man’s waist hung an ugly-looking bowie or hunter’s knife, and sometimes a brace of pistols. Most of the recruits were bearded and long-haired; all were sunburnt and fierce of visage. A single sorry-looking bugle sounded the calls.” And, he might have added, they were pound for pound among the most ferocious fighters on the planet.
Nevins was correct, of course, except that America had seen their ilk before—that bizarre mix of lawyers, merchants, freed blacks, Louisiana planters, pirates, and Tennessee and Kentucky backwoodsmen who threw back the mighty British army at the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812; or, at the height of the American Revolutionary War, the eclectic 200-man crew of John Paul Jones’s Bonhomme Richard, its decks awash in blood, who took the HMS Serapis in plain view of the British Admiralty off Yorkshire. Indeed, America had seen the likes of these men before and would see their likes again into the future. General Castro and his lieutenants had seen them, too, and wanted no part of them; he marched his army back to Santa Clara to await developments.
Meanwhile, Frémont took the California Battalion to his old camp on the American Fork, near Sutter’s Fort, and began whipping them in shape with drill and rifle practice. He’d only been at it a few days when on July 10 joyous news arrived from the coast. Three days earlier, Commodore Sloat, of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, had hoisted the American flag over Monterey and San Francisco. The war between Mexico and the United States had been declared nearly two months ago. California, according to a proclamation by Sloat, was now U.S. territory. Frémont celebrated the occasion by running up the American flag next morning to a twenty-one-gun salute, a symbolic gesture that ended the short-lived Bear Flag Republic. They were all Americans now.
The messenger who brought this news also brought a U.S. flag for Sonoma, as well as one to be run up at Sutter’s Fort, and a message for Frémont saying that Sloat desired him to march his California Battalion to Monterey as soon as possible. It took a little over a week to get the men equipped and across the Coast Range to Monterey, which they reached on the nineteenth of July. As they marched along the harbor road, Frémont’s men were agog to see, amidst several smaller American warships, a massive British battleship of the line riding at anchor just offshore, its Union Jack floating on the ocean breeze. “Many of my men,” Frémont explained, “had never seen the ocean, or the English flag.”
This vessel was the eighty-gun HMS Collingwood, flagship of Rear Admiral Sir George Seymour, commander of the British Pacific Fleet, which caused some tense moments when it appeared outside the Monterey bight three days earlier. Almost everyone from Sloat, to Frémont, to Larkin—let alone Polk, Bancroft, and the government in Washington—was convinced the British had designs on California, especially if war broke out, which might provide England the opportunity to take the province “under the protection of Her Majesty’s crown.”
As the British behemoth entered the harbor, Sloat had immediately sent word to recall all the sailors and marines who were ashore and ordered his ships readied for action, but he needn’t have worried. To everyone’s relief, the 200-foot Collingwood eased her sail, rounded up, and dropped anchor in the harbor, peaceful as a tycoon’s yacht.
Sloat’s conquest of Monterey (and by proxy all of California, according to his proclamation) had been almost too easy. When his flagship Savannah drew up in the harbor, Sloat as a courtesy had offered to honor the Mexican flag with a twenty-one-gun salute, but the alcalde declined on grounds there was no gunpowder to return it. When, after several days he finally got around to demanding a formal surrender, Sloat was informed by the alcalde that there was no Mexican flag to be hauled down during the ceremonies, since none had been flown at Monterey for many months, and none could be found.
The conquest, however, had been accomplished in a hairbreadth nick of time. As if to confirm the worst fears of the American officials at the Collingwood’s arrival, the first thing Admiral Sir George Seymour said to the American naval commander was, “Sloat, if your flag was not flying on shore, I should have hoisted mine there.”‖
That would of course have posed interesting dilemmas, as the British Pacific Fleet was as fully armed as the American one, if not more so, and any military conflict might have touched off another world war of Napoleonic magnitude. The problem was that Sloat was preposterously tardy in reacting to events and to his orders. But he was sixty-five years old, a martinet, apparently something of a nervous Nellie, and was not about to rock any boats.
Secretary of the Navy Bancroft’s instructions, delivered to Sloat by Lieutenant Gillespie, had ordered the Pacific Squadron to capture the major California ports and hold the country immediately upon word that war with Mexico had commenced. That word was received by Sloat at Mazatlán on May 17, when the U.S. consul in Mexico reported that hostilities had broken out on the Rio Grande between the Mexican army and General Zachary Taylor’s forces. But instead of moving at once to shift the fleet north to California, Sloat dawdled, waiting for more exact reports—in particular, he said later, word that a “declaration of war” had been issued.
Fresh in Sloat’s mind, or so he reportedly said later, was an awkward affair initiated four years earlier by a previous commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. In 1842 Commodore Thomas ap Catesby Jones had also captured Monterey to keep it out of British hands, based on rumors that the United States and Mexico had gone to war. When the rumors proved unfounded Jones, a hero of the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812, did everything in his power to smooth over the mistake with the Mexicans, but when word of the blunder finally got back to Washington he was court-martialed and “censured,” which for officers in the navy is a fate next to death.
As weeks passed by, Sloat continued to procrastinate, causing younger and more eager officers to shake their heads, wring their hands, and talk in whispers, but it was not until more than a month had passed and news arrived confirming that the U.S. Navy had blockaded Mexico’s eastern seaboard that Commodore Sloat finally acted, sailing the squadron north to capture the California coast.
Sloat got his censure anyway. To justify his indolence, Sloat wrote a letter to Navy Secretary Bancroft explaining that while he had word of fighting, he had no knowledge of any declaration of war, and therefore he was being careful “to avoid any act of aggression.” Bancroft replied that “your anxiety not to do wrong has led you into a most unfortunate and unwarranted inactivity … you remained in a state of inactivity and did not carry out the instructions.”
The town of Monterey was busy as a hive when Frémont’s army rode through on the way to its encampment. British and American sailors and marines mingled in the streets with Mexicans and seamen from whalers and assorted traders, residents, and visitors. But if there was lingering doubt by the British as to whether to stay out of the California affair, it was apparently laid to rest by this martial procession. An awestruck lieutenant in the Royal Navy gave his description of the battalion as it arrived in the city: “They naturally excited curiosity. Here we
re true trappers, the class that produced the heroes of Fennimore Cooper’s best works. The men had passed years in the wilds, living upon their own resources; they were a curious set. A vast cloud of dust appeared first, and thence in long file emerged this wildest, wild party.
“Fremont rode ahead, a spare, active-looking man. He was dressed in a blouse and leggings, and wore a felt hat. After him came five Delaware Indians, who were his body-guard, and have been with him through all his wanderings; they had charge of the baggage-horses. The rest, many of them blacker than the Indians, rode two and two, the rifle held by one hand across the pommel of the saddle.
“His original men are principally backwoodsmen from the State of Tennessee and the banks of the upper waters of the Missouri. He has one or two with him who enjoy a high reputation in the prairies. Kit Carson is as well known there as the Duke is in Europe.a The dress of these men was principally a long loose coat of deerskin, tied with thongs in front; trowsers of the same, of their own manufacture. They are allowed no liquor, tea and sugar only; this no doubt has much to do with their good conduct; and the discipline, too, is very strict.b
“They were marched up to an open space on the hills near the town, under some long firs, and there took up their quarters, in messes of six or seven, in the open air. The Indians lay beside their leader. In justice to the Americans I must say they seemed to treat the natives well, and their authority extended every protection to them. The butts of the trapper’s rifles resemble a Turkish musket, therefore fit light to the shoulder; they are very long and very heavy, carry ball thirty-eight to the pound.”
During the next days there was much visiting of Frémont’s camp by officers and sailors from the Collingwood and from the American fleet, and a great deal of conversation about shooting and marksmanship, which led to marks being put up against trees, which, as with soldiers and sailors everywhere, led to serious wagering.
For his part Frémont, accompanied by Lieutenant Gillespie, went straightaway to Sloat’s headquarters aboard the Savannah. At first, Frémont said, the commodore “seemed glad to see me,” but soon he became “excited over the gravity of the situation in which he was the chief figure; and now, wholly responsible for its consequences.” Sloat demanded to know under whose instructions Frémont had taken up arms against the Mexicans.
“I do not know by what authority you are acting,” Sloat huffed. “I know nothing. Mr. Gillespie … came to Mazatlan, and I sent him to Monterey, but I know nothing. I want to know by what authority you are acting.”
Frémont replied that he had acted on his own authority at Sonoma and elsewhere, when the situation seemed to be coming apart. At this information, Sloat “appeared much disturbed,” and he told Frémont he had raised the flag at Monterey only because he assumed that Frémont had been acting on written orders from Washington to overthrow the Mexicans in California. Before Frémont could explain, he said, the commodore became “so discouraged that the interview terminated abruptly … [and] he did not ask me for another.”
Frémont returned to shore in shock that Sloat had somehow relied on authority conferred on him to justify raising the American flag in a country that was at war with the United States, adding that “the situation now had something in it so grand that hesitation was incomprehensible. I knew that the men who understood the future of our country and who at this time ruled its destinies, and were the government, regarded the California coast as the boundary fixed by nature to round off our national domain.”c Frémont had left Washington the previous year “with full knowledge of their wishes, and also of their purposes so far as these could be settled in the existing circumstances.”d
Walking beside the ocean, Frémont said he went out on the Point of Pines, a craggy promontory that juts into the sea, dotted with the well-known stunted Pacific pines. From there, he said, he could see warships at anchor in Monterey Bay—the massive Collingwood surrounded by smaller U.S. vessels. “There lay the pieces on the great chess-board before me,” he waxed metaphorically, “with which the game for an empire had been played. I was but a pawn, and like a pawn had been pushed forward to the front at the opening of the game.”
In the face of what he again believed was lack of definitive authority from Washington, Commodore Sloat once more become intransigent and idle, loitering his command at Monterey for the next several weeks, much to the consternation of Frémont, who wanted to get on with the total conquest of California before the Californios could regroup or the Mexicans sent an army to retake the province.
In the meantime, Sloat’s replacement arrived in the USS Congress. He turned out to be none other than Commodore Robert Stockton, who had presided over the tragedy of the Princeton explosion on the Potomac and the skulduggery down in Texas just prior to the outbreak of war.
Stockton was made of wholly different cloth than Sloat and seemed just as anxious as Frémont to consolidate American gains in California; however, as he explained to Frémont, his orders did not call for him to take over for Sloat for some days. Frémont then threatened—though that is probably too strong a word for it—to take his party back to the United States. At least he told Stockton that he would make that decision overnight, whereupon Stockton prevailed on him to stay, saying he would have command of the Pacific Fleet in a few more days.
Next morning Stockton sent a message to Sloat emphasizing the importance of either capturing General Castro and his army or driving him out of the province. “Until either one or the other is done, I see no hope of restoring peace and good order to this territory.”
He requested that Sloat turn over to him the sloop of war Cyane in order to transport Frémont’s California Battalion south of Los Angeles to head Castro off. After some grumbling and hand-wringing Sloat finally agreed. To Frémont’s 250 men, Stockton added 80 of his marines, and he commissioned Frémont as a major and promoted Gillespie to captain. On July 25 the reinforced California Battalion embarked in the Cyane for San Diego, to Castro’s rear. The plan was to then march quickly to Los Angeles to surprise him and cut him off. “This country has been trifled with long enough,” Stockton declared.
As Frémont told it, “My men were all greatly pleased at the novelty of a voyage in a man-of-war, which they had anticipated would be very pleasant and there would be no prospect of storms.”
However, no sooner had the Cyane cleared the bay and hauled southward than the wind began to blow and the ship began to roll and wallow in swells; after a few hours of this, Frémont said, “We were all very low in our minds. Carson was among those who were badly worsted by this enemy to landsmen, and many were the vows made that never again would they put trust in the fair-weather promises of the ocean.”
Five hundred sea miles later, the bedraggled warriors at last staggered off Cyane’s long boats to lay foot on solid ground for the first time in three days and nights. Instead of the hostile reception they had anticipated, Frémont and his people were greeted as friends by the captain of the port, Santiago Argüello, and the suave, wealthy Don Juan Bandini, described as “the chief citizen of the place.”
It was a good thing, too, since Frémont’s party was entirely ignorant of the geography of the area or its resources. He was immediately in need of horses to mount his men and cattle to feed them but quickly discovered that the large ranches in this part of southern California were few and far between. Bandini and Argüello were “extremely valuable” in providing aid and information on these matters, but still it took Frémont a month to round up enough horses and provisions for his now 330-man army.
Conversations with Bandini and Argüello revealed that the “leaders”—meaning the wealthy—of San Diego were not pleased with the Mexican government, which had more or less abandoned them and had taken no steps whatever to exploit the value of the port in the bay or given any other economic help or encouragement. Thus these men welcomed the Americans and the notion of becoming part of the United States. Frémont convinced the two to use their influence with the rest of the population �
��to obtain quiet possession of the territory,” and to convey Frémont’s intentions of conciliation, which would “go far to allay the natural excitement created by our invasion.”
In the meantime he familiarized himself with the country, reporting that while it was mostly arid, brush-covered waste, there was a surprising number of “little valleys converted by a single spring into crowded gardens, where pears, peaches, quinces, pomegranates, grapes, olives and other fruits grew luxuriantly together, the little stream acting upon them like a principle of life.” The soil was so fertile in these oases, Frémont exulted, that “a single vine has been known to produce a barrel of wine, and the olive trees are burdened with the weight of the fruit.” On the eighth of September they marched north, on Los Angeles.
The 140-mile expedition was a pleasant one, according to Frémont, with good weather, ample food obtained from the ranches, and frequent streams to water the stock. Juan Bandini had obtained information that General Castro was “encamped on the mesa near [Los Angeles] with a force of about five hundred men and ten pieces of artillery.” Since Frémont had left behind the eighty marines Stockton had lent him, plus fifty of his own men, to garrison San Diego, he was feeling a little edgy that Castro might attack his reduced force. Not long after the expedition had gotten under way reconnaissance horsemen from Castro’s cavalry began to shadow them. Frémont was relieved, therefore, when word came after several days’ marching that Commodore Stockton had landed with 350 men and several pieces of artillery at San Pedro, about twenty-six miles from Frémont’s present position.
As planned, these two forces united and on September 13, 1846, marched jointly on Los Angeles. Instead of the expected battle the American army waltzed into the city accompanied by a full brass band, “like a parade of home guards, rather than an enemy taking possession of a conquered town,” as Frémont put it.
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