Imperfect Union

by Steve Inskeep

  The choice was no longer his, however. Because of his strange wanderings around Monterey, the California authorities had issued their proclamation, and because of the proclamation, settlers were determined to respond. A small group was gathering to strike a blow at the Mexican authorities with or without the army officer. William B. Ide joined the party of gunmen led by a settler named Ezekiel Merritt, who had already conducted a raid to steal Mexican horses. The armed party rode toward the nearest military outpost. Picking up recruits as they went, they eventually totaled more than thirty men. They knew the example of the Texas revolution. With Captain Frémont’s implicit support, however contradictory and hesitant it may have been, they meant to take charge of California.

  The riders’ target was the central square at Sonoma, the location of General Mariano G. Vallejo, who lived with his family in the house with the castle tower and long veranda. Nearby was a barracks in which 250 rifles and a few cannons were stored, although the barracks were otherwise vacant. In past years a small military unit was based at Sonoma, men Vallejo had privately recruited and paid himself, but he had disbanded them. The principal defense of Sonoma was General Vallejo’s prestige. And in the early morning hours of June 14, when the riders reached the square after traveling all night, the first thing they did was pound on Vallejo’s door.

  The riders waited; it was not going to be the kind of revolution that involved breaking down doors. Inside, Vallejo gathered with his six children and his wife, Doña Francisca Vallejo, who urged him to flee through a back entrance. The general refused to do anything so undignified, instead stepping into his uniform and, when he was ready, ordering his servants to open the door so that he could welcome the sleepless gunmen in their torn and dirty clothes. Doña Francisca thought they looked like “banditti.” General Vallejo invited a few of the leading rebels to sit in his living room and talk over the terms of surrender, and despite the early hour he called for a bottle of wine. Soon a second bottle was required. By midmorning Ezekiel Merritt was too drunk to command. The men waiting outside held a hasty vote to choose a new commander, who was soon drunk himself. Authority finally devolved on William B. Ide, a teetotaler, who approved an elaborate document for Vallejo’s signature: he was to formally surrender and be guaranteed the safety of his family and property. Ide expected that Vallejo would remain at home, but this he proved unable to enforce. Unruly men in his group were spoiling for a fight, and Ide concluded that General Vallejo, his brother, and an aide must be taken prisoner for their own safety.

  The gunmen, some drunk and some not, remained in charge of Sonoma, collecting weapons and a hundred pounds of gunpowder from Vallejo’s barracks. Soon they raised a homemade flag over the settlement, featuring the image of a bear. “This day we proclaim California a Republic,” Ide wrote the day after Vallejo’s surrender, adding “our pledge of honor that private property be protected.” The independent country would be known as the Bear Flag Republic. Rarely in history had so much land been arrogated by so few; Ide’s little force claimed ownership of an empire, displacing several thousand Mexicans who themselves had never wrested more than a portion of it from its several hundred thousand natives.

  In a letter a few days later, Ide described a revolution as the settlers’ only alternative to being driven away: “We have determined to make this country independent, and to establish a system of government that will be more favorable to us than such a dangerous and long road back.” It was not meant to be a long-lasting government, Ide said, expressing his “earnest desire” to unite with the United States in the way that Texas had. Over the next few days, scores of additional gunmen arrived in Sonoma, some bringing their families for their protection. Ide insisted that “the Spaniards are not only satisfied, but pleased” with his movement—and indeed General Vallejo might secretly have approved the desire to join with the United States if he had not been preoccupied with his own capture. By the time of Ide’s proclamation, gunmen had escorted Vallejo and the other high-profile prisoners out of town, planning to take the captives to Captain Frémont.

  Vallejo did not resist. As a military officer and an admirer of the United States, he found it reassuring that he was being delivered to an American army officer, a trained and educated man who surely would be able to read the terms of the surrender document and release him. The general was so confident and so patient that he even turned down an opportunity to escape on the road to Frémont’s camp. Why take such a risk when any honorable American would do as justice required?

  * * *

  CAPTAIN FRÉMONT WAS IN HIS TENT when the prisoners and their escorts rode into camp. General Vallejo was not tied or restrained; as he dismounted in his general’s uniform, he must have looked more like the commander of his guards than like their captive. He went to find Captain Frémont’s tent and introduced himself. Vallejo indicated that he hoped for better treatment now that he was Frémont’s prisoner—and that was his first surprise. “No,” Frémont replied, “you are the prisoner of these people.” He gestured toward the ragged settlers. Frémont was still trying to keep his distance from the uprising.

  Yet his thinking quickly evolved. He was willing to take the prisoners, just not willing to say they were his prisoners. He ordered them to be held at Sutter’s Fort in violation of their surrender agreement. He even ordered the arrest of Jacob Leese, an American who had married into Vallejo’s family, and who had come with the prisoners to serve as their interpreter. A few of John’s men escorted Vallejo and his companions to a dark room inside the fort. They were not allowed to communicate with the outside world, and they waited day after day without being told how they could be freed. As days became weeks, three different men appeared seeking information about General Vallejo that they could deliver to his worried family at Sonoma. Frémont’s men locked them up too.

  The capture of Sonoma seemed to alter John’s calculus for what he could or should achieve. He dropped his pretense that he was not involved in the settlers’ uprising and turned his expedition into a revolutionary strike force. First he moved to protect the settlers who held Sonoma: word came that California’s General Castro was organizing troops to drive them out—so as Theodore Talbot of Frémont’s expedition put it, “we went to the rescue,” starting for Sonoma on June 23 and gathering recruits from among the American settlers along the way. They never found the Mexican force, which the Bear Flaggers deflected by themselves, but the move brought John and his men out of the Sacramento Valley and down to the vicinity of San Francisco Bay. The lack of action, yet another anticlimax, proved to be a prelude to Frémont’s drastic escalation in his use of force.

  A story had spread that the Californians had captured two American settlers. They were messengers, Bear Flaggers sent out of Sonoma to obtain gunpowder, and when they failed to return, rumors spread that their captors had killed them. This put John’s growing force in a mood for revenge, and the simplest explanation for what followed was that they targeted the first victims to come within range of their guns. At San Rafael, on San Francisco Bay, they spied several people in a boat approaching shore, and concluded that the distant specks on the water must be spies. One eyewitness, a man named Jasper O’Farrell, said Captain Frémont ordered Kit Carson and two other men to intercept them once they made land. Carson asked, “Shall I take these men prisoners?” According to the witness, Captain Frémont replied, “I have no room for prisoners.” Carson’s men rode down to meet the men near the water’s edge and killed them.

  There was reason to doubt the details of the witness’s account: very few men could have directly overheard the soft-spoken army captain, and O’Farrell did not write down his damning quotation until a decade later. But there was no doubt that three men were killed. Two were twin brothers about twenty years old, Francisco and Ramon de Haro, sons of a prominent landowner. The third was an elderly rancher, José de los Reyes Berreyesa. One apparently was carrying a message for some of General Castro’s troops, which meant the
re was legitimate reason to detain them. Killing them was another matter. They were alone and posed no apparent threat. John seemed to know that something was wrong about the killings, because when describing them later, he wrote himself out of the event. In a long letter to Senator Benton, he reported the encounter in a single sentence: “Three of Castro’s party having landed on the Sonoma side in advance, were killed on the beach; and beyond this there was no loss on either side.” In his memoir, he placed himself at even greater distance, blaming the incident not on white men but on Indians who acted in their savage way, overcome by emotion after the deaths of the Americans: “My scouts, mainly Delawares, influenced by these feelings, made sharp retaliation and killed Berreyesa and de Haro, who were the bearers of the . . . messages.”

  After this atrocity, the men rode south toward the harbor entrance John had labeled the Golden Gate. He stood on the north side of the channel, peering across the waves at the Mexican artillery pieces at the presidio on the south side. He conceived a plan to take them out of action. From an American merchant ship in the bay the men borrowed a small boat, onto which a dozen gunmen crowded for a commando raid. “Pulling across the strait or avenue of water which leads in from the Gate we reached the Fort Point in the gray dawn of the morning and scrambled up the steep bank just in time to see several horsemen escaping at full speed,” he said. The raiders captured six brass cannons (so he reported at the time; in later years he inflated the number to fourteen) and spiked the guns, jamming a long steel file down each cannon’s touchhole so it would be impossible to use until repaired. Then the men rowed back across the strait and rode northward to Sonoma, arriving in the central square in front of the home of General Vallejo just in time to mark the Fourth of July. By now his force had grown to 160 men, who mixed with the growing garrison of Sonoma and held a celebration of their independent republic on the American day of independence. And Frémont began to assume command. “It had now become necessary to concentrate the elements of this movement, in order to give it the utmost efficiency [and] the people desired me to take charge of it.” He had gone from a reluctant warrior to, in his mind, the keystone of the revolution: “Its existence was due to my presence in the valley, and at any time upon my withdrawal it would have collapsed with absolute ruin to the settlers.” No longer did he talk of his own very recent plans to depart. On the morning of July 5, “I called the people together, and spoke to them in relation to the position of the country, advising a course of operations which was unanimously adopted. California was declared independent, the country put under martial law, the force organized and officers elected. A pledge, binding themselves to support these measures, and to obey their officers, was signed by those present. The whole was placed under my direction.” What, exactly, was he talking about here? The settlers had already declared independence weeks before. But this declaration included him.

  * * *

  A FEW DAYS LATER, word arrived from the coast: everything had changed. The United States was taking charge. US Navy ships dropped anchor in Monterey Bay, and on the morning of July 8, 1846, men swarmed over the sides of the warships and down into small boats. Under cover from the ships’ cannons, about 250 sailors and Marines rowed ashore and took the Monterey custom house with no resistance. The American consul Larkin, whose government had once refused to reimburse him for the cost of a flag, came out of his house to discover that one had been delivered; the Marines organized a flag-raising ceremony, reading aloud a proclamation declaring California to be under the control of the United States. The only shots fired came from the cannons on the warships, which fired a twenty-one-gun salute. In San Francisco Bay, Marines from another warship conducted a similar takeover of Yerba Buena, and soon after that riders arrived at Sonoma with the Stars and Stripes to replace the Bear Flag.

  On July 12 Captain Frémont received a letter from the naval officer who had ordered the Marines ashore: Commodore John D. Sloat summoned the army officer to Monterey. “There may be a necessity of one hundred men, well mounted,” Sloat said. He wanted a security force to prevent looting. John immediately started for the coast, moving so swiftly that he left behind some unfinished business—he had promised to visit the imprisoned General Vallejo and his companions at Sutter’s Fort to discuss their release, but never showed up, leaving them waiting without explanation. Vallejo could do nothing but write Frémont a letter, managing to ask politely when he and his compatriots would be freed. He would remain locked up until August 2, when he was finally paroled on the orders of a navy captain whose ship was in San Francisco Bay.

  Leaving men to guard Sonoma and Sutter’s Fort, John’s main force faced no opposition on the way to Monterey, and heard that General Castro was retreating southward toward Los Angeles. With a single cannon in tow, they trotted through Monterey with its toy-sized Spanish cathedral and Consul Larkin’s New England house and United States Marines on the streets. They camped outside town on a hillside, in the shade of fir and pine trees and with a commanding view. “Before us, to the right, was the town of Monterey with its red-tiled roofs and large gardens enclosed by high adobe walls, capped with red tiles; to the left the view was over the ships in the bay and on over the ocean, where the July sun made the sea-breeze and the shade of the pine trees grateful.”

  One of the ships on the bay was a British man-of-war, which had arrived after the US Marines went ashore. John persuaded himself, without evidence, that the US Navy must have beaten Britain in a race for empire—that the British would have intervened if only they had arrived first. The other four ships in the bay flew the American flag, and were from the US Pacific Squadron. Riding down to the waterfront, John learned that the flagship was a frigate called the Savannah—a name he could not help but notice. (“I pleased myself,” he said, “with thinking it a good augury that as Savannah was my birthplace, the birth of this new child of our country should have been presided over by this Savannah of the seas.”) Accompanied by Lieutenant Gillespie, he found a boat that could take him out to the big sailing ship. They climbed up on deck and greeted Commodore Sloat, who had seized California for the United States.

  He did not convey an air of triumph. Even in a formal portrait, John D. Sloat of New York had a worried expression; he was sixty-five, worn down by years at sea, in poor health, and scheduled soon to relinquish his command. He did not want to make a mistake at the very end of his career. A few weeks earlier, when his ship was at anchor at the Mexican port of Mazatlán, Sloat had learned of battles near the Rio Grande between United States and Mexican forces. Knowing that in the event of war his government would want to seize California, Sloat raised anchor and headed north, although he resolved he would not seize California’s ports unless he learned of an actual declaration of war. There was still no word of a declaration when he reached Monterey—but he heard of the Bear Flag rebellion and Frémont’s operations inland, and seemingly concluded that no United States Army officer would behave as John had unless he knew something. “I have determined to hoist the Flag of the U. States at this place,” he informed the captain of another warship on July 6, “as I would prefer being sacrificed for doing too much than too little.” Consul Larkin thought Sloat had acted “perhaps fearing some other foreign Officer might do it” if he did not.

  Now Sloat met the officer whose activity had provoked him to move. “Commodore Sloat was glad to see me,” John said afterward. “He seemed excited over the gravity of the situation in which he was the chief figure; and now, wholly responsible for its consequences.” The ailing commodore soon came to the vital question.

  “I want to know by what authority you are acting,” Sloat said.

  “I informed him,” John said afterward, “that I had acted solely on my own responsibility, and without any expressed authority from the Government to justify hostilities. He appeared much disturbed by this information,” which meant Sloat had no legal cover. “He had expected to find that I had been acting under such written authority as would su
pport his action in raising the flag.” Sloat “was so discouraged that the interview terminated abruptly.” Frémont and Gillespie were soon rowing away from the Savannah. They returned to the elevated campsite with its view of Monterey’s red tile and the ships on the bay. Miles away, on the north shore of the bay, lay the Santa Cruz Mountains and the Santa Cruz shore—the shoreline he had inspected a few months earlier, when hoping to find a place to live with his mother.

  John went for a walk toward Point Pinos, on the Monterey Peninsula, “which juts into the sea. No matter how untoward this interview [with Sloat] had been I felt that the die was cast. . . . Sitting here by the sea and resting and gathering about me these dreams which had become realities, I thought over the long way from Washington to this spot and what little repose of body or mind I had found. . . . But now I was having an ideal rest.” His uncertainty resolved into certainty; when he recorded his experiences later, he would forget or omit the moments when he didn’t know what to do, didn’t receive clear instructions, didn’t think he could accomplish anything, kept his distance from the Bear Flag rebellion, and even made plans to leave. What remained was John Charles Frémont, conqueror of California. He deserved credit, just not the way he imagined; his dreamy thrashing about had triggered a chain of events that led Commodore Sloat to stake the American claim by accident. John’s work was done.