Eternity Street

by John Mack Faragher

  The men greeted Carrillo’s words with silence until finally Sérbulo Varela rose to speak. He and his brother had arranged this occasion with Carrillo. The Varelas were native Angelenos, gente de razón but not elite, although Don Sérbulo’s marriage to a woman of the Ávila family had raised his social status considerably. Described as tempestuous by all who knew them, the brothers had a long history of political activism in Los Angeles, having played a role in virtually every protest in the decade since the vigilante episode of 1836. They developed a reputation as charismatic and popular leaders of ordinary Angelenos, often working in conjunction with Carrillo, the Varela brothers providing the street smarts, Don José the respectable connections. In 1845, only a year before, they had joined Carrillo in his attempt to overthrow Governor Pico. And in the aftermath of the American conquest, Don Sérbulo immediately got himself into hot water, fined for violating an American regulation against gambling in public. Rather than submit, he went into hiding. He told friends he would rather die than live as he was.

  That night Don Sérbulo vowed he would no longer tolerate the charge of cowardice. “I swear by the love of my homeland this will not be said about me.” In an effort to reclaim Angeleno honor, he would mount a challenge to the American occupiers. The other men present that evening responded with enthusiasm. There was a great deal at stake for them. They wanted to throw out the invaders, but even more they wanted to resuscitate their honor. “We are with you,” they exclaimed, “but what can we do?” There is only one way, said Don Sérbulo, “armarse y combatir”—take up arms and fight. They must risk all or nothing. That night the group assembled at Varela’s swore an oath: that as soon as they had assembled a sufficient force, they would strike at the Americans, pase lo que pase, come what may.

  DURING THE HOLIDAY WEEK the cantinas along Calle de los Negros filled to overflowing with Californios and emancipados but also with off-duty American rifleros—eager for a drink, a chance at the monte table, or the company of one of the pueblo’s loose women, the hijas de puta. The vice district created no end of trouble for Captain Gillespie. His garrison included “some very good men,” he reported, “but many very bad.” They were unaccustomed to military control, and proved themselves “perfect drunkards whilst in this ciudad of wine and aguardiente.” In the evenings, when Angelenos were forced back to their homes by the curfew, the rifleros headed across the river to the pueblito, which never closed. On any given evening half the garrison could be found carousing at the Indian ranchería.

  Gillespie was expert at commanding a Marine company aboard a Navy frigate, but entirely at sea with these independent frontiersmen. “Every means in my power were tried to enforce discipline,” he reported, “but the men whom I depended upon would not do a soldier’s duty.” He sent several incorrigibles packing, but that sparked protest among the remaining men. He dispatched an officer with ten of the rebellious rifleros to guard Warner’s Pass on the Sonora Road, some 125 miles to the southeast, but the trouble did not end there, and a few days later he was forced to jail several men for “mutiny, drunkenness and using disrespectful language towards the flag and officers.” Angelenos, he feared, understood the character of his rifleros all too well. “They were men for whom the Californians could have no respect,” Gillespie wrote, “and whom, from the spirit of insubordination they constantly evinced, the Californians thought they could overcome.”

  Before dawn on the morning of September 23, Gillespie awoke to the report of firearms. Rushing up a ladder to the flat roof of Government House, he found his sentries firing down at what they insisted was a force of several dozen heavily armed men. Angelenos later claimed the group included no more than a handful of hooligans, most of them drunk, armed with several old escopetas, or shotguns. Led by Sérbulo Varela, they gathered at the rear of the building, beating drums and chanting, “¡Abajo los Americanos!”—Down with the Americans! More a protest than an attack, their demonstration turned violent when the Americans opened fire and the insurgents took cover behind an adobe wall. The two sides exchanged shots until one of the Californios suffered a minor wound and all of them retreated.

  At first light Gillespie dispatched Lieutenant Samuel J. Hensley’s mounted company—among them James Barton, future sheriff of Los Angeles County—to locate and arrest the offenders. The Americans barged into homes, confiscated weapons, and seized half a dozen men suspected of “aiding the party in arms.” While investigating some adobes on the pueblo’s south side, they fell into an ambush by a small group of mounted Angelenos, hidden in a field of corn. “¡A las armas, muchachos!” the riders cried as they charged through the tall, dry stalks. The Americans scattered, but not before one of them was knocked from his horse and mortally wounded by a lance.

  Outraged, Gillespie ordered the roundup and arrest of every paroled officer in the pueblo, including such prominent men as Andrés Pico and José Antonio Carrillo. It was an ill-considered move, for it so angered the Californios, as one of them later testified, “that even those who had recognized the American conquest out of fear joined with those who had started the uprising.” Sensing his error, Gillespie released the officers later that day, but the damage was done. Leaving the American headquarters, the paroled officers joined Varela and his band of insurgents at their encampment at Paredon Blanco, the white bluffs along the east bank of Río Porciúncula, across from the pueblo. By day’s end more than three hundred men had congregated there. Gillespie’s response to Varela’s challenge had sparked a popular uprising.

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, September 24, the insurgents issued a carefully written pronunciamento, an appeal that detailed the justice of their cause.

  Fellow Citizens: For a month and a half we have been subjugated and oppressed by an insignificant force of adventurers from the United States of North America, the result of the regrettable cowardice and incompetence of the department’s chief authorities. They have placed us in a condition worse than slavery. They dictate despotic and arbitrary laws and burden us with onerous levies. They seek to destroy our industry and agriculture, and compel us to abandon our property, which they intend to divide among themselves. Shall we permit ourselves to be subjugated and to accept in silence the heavy chains of slavery? Shall we lose the soil inherited from our fathers, which cost them so much blood and sacrifice? Shall we leave our families victim to the most barbarous servitude? Shall we wait to see our wives violated, our innocent children beaten by American whips, our property sacked, our temples profaned, to drag out a life full of shame and disgrace? No, a thousand times no! Compatriots, death rather than that! Who among you does not feel his heart beat with violence? Who does not feel his blood boil? Who is not willing to rise up in arms to destroy our oppressors? We believe none are so vile and cowardly. We, the majority of the inhabitants of this district, justly indignant at the tyrants, raise the cry of war, arms in hand, and with one voice swear to the following articles.

  A list followed. The insurgents declared their determination to remain a “free and independent” department of Mexico, and vowed to drive the invaders from their soil. They called on all male Californios to report in arms, and warned that anyone failing to respond would be “declared a traitor, under penalty of death.” Extranjeros who assisted the invaders would be subject to the same punishment. All citizens of the United States were to be arrested and dispatched to Mexico, their property confiscated and sold to support the defense of the homeland. The pronunciamento concluded with the signatures or marks of more than three hundred citizens, nearly half the male residents of Los Angeles, men both ordinary and elite. “There was not a soul who did not rise up against the North Americans,” wrote Manuel Clemente Rojo, a young Peruvian attorney and journalist who moved to Los Angeles after the American conquest and devoted himself to collecting the wartime stories of Californios.

  After consulting with the paroled officers, Don Sérbulo appointed Capitán José María Flores commander in chief of what would henceforth be known as las fuerzas nacionales, the na
tional forces. Flores, a native of Sonora, had come to California in 1842 as a young officer in Governor Micheltorena’s battalion. Some time later he married the daughter of a ranchero, and when Micheltorena was forced out in 1845 Flores remained behind with his wife and children, joining the staff of Commandant José Castro. He fled to Los Angeles with Castro following the American invasion of Monterey. In August 1846 he delivered Castro’s proposal for a truce to Stockton, and was deeply insulted by Stockton’s verbal abuse. Captain Flores was an intelligent officer and a righteously angry opponent of the United States. To Californios, however, he remained un mexicano de la otra banda—a Mexican from the other shore—and eventually that would create problems.

  But before it did so, Flores displayed his organizational skill. He divided the insurgent forces into three squadrons, two commanded by Californios José Antonio Carrillo and Andrés Pico, the third by a Mexican officer. Fewer than half the volunteers had firearms, and there was very little lead or gunpowder. But owing to the forethought of an elderly woman, Flores found himself in possession of a valuable artillery piece. For years this brass swivel gun had been used for firing ceremonial salutes on feast days and special occasions. When Stockton began his advance on the pueblo in August, the widow María Cota de Reyes enlisted her daughters and nieces to help bury it in the garden behind her adobe, declaring that the Americans should not have the cannon. Learning of it, Flores ordered the weapon exhumed, and Angelenos christened it “el pedrero de la vieja,” the old woman’s gun. A blacksmith hammered out a number of iron cannon balls, and Doña María’s niece María Rafaela Cota de Temple contributed several kegs of gunpowder, expropriated from the storehouse of her husband, merchant Jonathan Temple.

  Temple himself was holed up at Government House with virtually every other American remaining in Los Angeles, a total of fifty or sixty men. Well stocked with hunting rifles and an ample supply of ammunition, they also had access to several rusty iron cannons that had been spiked and abandoned after the battle with Governor Micheltorena in 1845. Gillespie ordered his men to drill them out and collect scrap iron for shot, then had them drag one of the guns up the hill behind the church, where it commanded the Plaza, making it impossible for the insurgents to attack without serious risk. But the Americans remained besieged, with no way to break out of the pueblo.

  Gillespie received a copy of the insurgents’ proclamation on the evening of September 24 and immediately dispatched a courier to Stockton in the north. For this desperate mission he selected a man named John Brown, better known as Juan Flaco or Lean John, a Swede who had resided in California for some fifteen years. While they waited for nightfall to provide him with some cover, Brown’s fellow rifleros treated him to champagne plundered from a local cellar. Finally, when it was dark, he mounted up. “I then requested Jon Temple to open the gate and give the password so that I could pass the sentinels,” Brown recalled. Instead, Temple shouted out, at full voice, “Don’t shoot the man on the white horse!” Brown felt as if a target had been slapped on his back. “I put spurs to my horse and went off kiting, followed by a pack of dogs barking,” he remembered. The Americans heard the Californio guards shouting to one another and mounting up in pursuit. The chances of Brown’s making it out of town, let alone reaching Monterey, seemed remote. In a memoir, Brown described Temple’s shout as “impudence.” Had the Americans known that Temple’s wife, Doña Rafaela, had provided powder to the insurgents, they might have considered his loud mouth something worse. Temple was one of many for whom the war created difficult personal dilemmas.

  LATE IN THE AFTERNOON of September 25, on a bear-hunting expedition in the Palomar Mountains with the men of his ranger company, Captain Benjamin Davis Wilson was overtaken by an exhausted rider with an urgent message from ranchero John Rowland and several other extranjeros, warning “that there was a general revolt of the Californians and Mexicans against Gillespie and all Americans, and that there was the devil to pay generally, and to hasten down.” Wilson turned his men around and, after traveling down mountain trails in the dark of night, arrived the next morning at Rancho Jurupa, his home place on the upper Río Santa Ana, where they found Rowland and two others waiting. “Gillespie’s course towards the people had been so despotic and in every way unjustifiable,” explained Rowland, “the people had risen to a man against him.” The “shout of insurrection” now sounded throughout the countryside, “and rumor was that they would spare not the life of any extranjero.” Wilson’s wife had fled with their child to her father’s rancho downriver. The Indian women who kept his house told Wilson that his vaqueros had taken all the horses and joined the insurgents at Paredon Blanco. “They are going to drive the Americans out of the country,” they said.

  Americans were a small minority among the several hundred residents—Californios, New Mexicans, and Indians—who lived and worked along the upper Río Santa Ana. Wilson and his company were vulnerable, so he decided to lead his men west some twenty-five miles to Rancho Santa Ana del Chino, where American ranchero Isaac Williams, known to Californios as Don Julián, was said to have ample stores of gunpowder and lead. Spread the word to rendezvous at Chino, Wilson told Rowland, as he and his rangers rode off. They would gather there, then attempt to penetrate the Californio lines and join Gillespie’s force.

  Within an hour of Wilson’s departure José del Cármen Lugo arrived at Jurupa with ten or fifteen of his vaqueros. Lugo, Wilson’s upstream neighbor, operated Rancho San Bernardino with his two brothers. For several years the Lugos and Wilson had maintained neighborly relations, dividing their cattle at the annual rodeo and defending each other’s stock against desert raiders who swept down Cajon Pass, the notch in the mountains separating southern California from the desert badlands beyond. But the war divided neighbors, and fearing a preemptive attack by Wilson’s ranger company, Lugo chose to take the offensive.

  From the Indian women at Wilson’s casa he learned that the Americans were headed west to Chino. Lugo knew Rancho Santa Ana del Chino well, for it was part of his family’s patrimony. He also knew its proprietor intimately. Born in Pennsylvania, Isaac Williams had came to California in the early 1830s after several years as a fur trapper and trader in the Rocky Mountains. He settled in as a merchant, became a naturalized Mexican citizen, and in 1839 married María de Jesús Lugo, daughter of Antonio María Lugo, one of the wealthiest rancheros in the Los Angeles district. Rancho del Chino, some 22,000 acres sixty miles east of Los Angeles, was the father’s wedding present to the couple. Don José del Cármen was Don Julián’s brother-in-law. Doña María, his sister and Don Julián’s wife, had died in childbirth several years before, after bearing three children. The families were close.

  The ranch house at Chino was heavily fortified against attack by Indian raiders, equipped with heavy wooden doors and shutters, gun ports, and a bulwark of ditches and walls, making it a logical place for the Americans to make a stand. Wilson’s rangers arrived in the midafternoon and were soon joined by Rowland and several more extranjeros, raising their number to twenty-five or thirty men. But it turned out that Don Julián had almost no ammunition—his stores, like Wilson’s horses, had been confiscated by Californio insurgents—and Wilson estimated that with what they had in hand they could hold out for no more than a few hours in a siege. Better to leave immediately and find a back way into Los Angeles, he advised his men, but they scorned the suggestion. “The majority of them, being new in the country, had a very contemptible opinion of the Californian’s courage and fighting qualities,” Wilson later recalled, “and seemed to be of the unanimous opinion that a few shots would suffice to scare away any number of them that should come to attack us.” A few went so far as to question Wilson’s nerve, which raised his dander. So be it, he exclaimed. He would stay and fight with the rest, and “we would see where the real courage was.”

  Wilson sent one of the rangers out to scout, and after a few minutes they heard the sound of gunfire, and the man came running back with a ball lodged in his shoulder
. The compound was surrounded by nearly a hundred Californios, he reported excitedly, inflating the size of Lugo’s party by a factor of five. For his part, Don José del Cármen also overestimated. He dispatched a courier to Los Angeles reporting that at least fifty Americans were inside his brother-in-law’s casa and begging for reinforcements. Lugo’s fear was that Wilson’s men might commence a fight before the Angelenos arrived. “They would have finished us,” he later recalled, “since we had no more than four or five guns and a few pistols, plus one or two lances and a few Indian arrows.” His men made camp in a willow grove not far from the compound, and both sides spent a restless night exchanging sporadic gunfire.

  Early the next morning, thirty Angelenos arrived under the command of Sérbulo Varela. Many were indignant, as one later recalled, that the Americans, “most of whom had solicited and obtained Mexican citizenship, who had married the daughters of the country, and had made their fortunes under the Mexican banner, should show themselves such ingrates toward those who had loaded them with benefits.” Lugo requested that Varela hold off on any attack while he made a final attempt to persuade Wilson to surrender. He was concerned that Don Julián’s three children—his nephew and nieces—might still be in the house.

  As the two men stood talking, a boy on horseback suddenly bolted from a corral at the backside of the ranch house, a pair of mounted Californios took off in pursuit, and someone inside the adobe began firing at them through the gun ports. The fight was on. Shouting to his men to follow him, Lugo mounted and charged toward the adobe. His horse jumped a moat, but the horse of the man riding beside him, Carlos Ballesteros, stumbled, throwing the rider to the ground. Ballesteros jumped up and was instantly hit in the temple with a slug fired from an American rifle. Lugo heard him cry out, with his last breath, “¡Adelante, adelante, compañeros!” Forward comrades! Lugo and several others made it to the adobe. They jumped from their horses and crouched against the outer wall, below the gun ports, where the Americans firing from inside could not get at them.