Walla Walla Indians
Walla Walla River
War of 1812
peace agreement after
Warre, Henry J.
War with Mexico
Wasatch Range
Washington, George
Washington (D.C.), disease-laden swamps of
Washington (state)
Waterloo, battle of (1815)
Wayne, “Mad Anthony”
Weber River
Webster, Daniel
Weekes, Stephen
Wentworth, Richard
Western Emigration Society
Western Engineer (riverboat)
Westport Landing (Missouri)
westward movement. See also Independence (Missouri)
White, Elijah
White Eagle. See McLoughlin, John
Whitman, Alice Clarissa
Whitman, Marcus
background of
Bridger operated on by
first trip west by
medical work in Oregon by
murder of
capture and execution of murderers
Catholics charged with
Perkins’ analysis of reasons for
poisoning of Indians charged to
protest trip home and back by
on provisions for the trail
second trip west of
Waiilatpu Mission of
Whitman, Narcissa
accused of flirting
adopted children of
background of
betrothal of
Meeks takes lock of hair from remains of
murder of
capture and execution of
murderers
Catholics charged with
Perkins’ analysis of reasons for
trip west by
pregnancy
at Waiilatpu mission
wedding of
Whittier, John Greenleaf
Wicananish, Chief
Wilkes, Charles
Willamette Cattle Company
Willamette valley
1839 memorial of complaints from
emigrants in
first organized emigrant party
exploration of
Hudson’s Bay Company’s fears of
Lee’s mission in
Peel’s 1845 tour of
provisional government of
removal of Indians from
See also Oregon City
Williams, Joseph
Willow Springs (Oregon Trail)
Windermere Lake
Windlass Hill (Oregon Trail)
Wind River
Wind River Range
Winnipeg (Canada)
Wishram Indians
Wisner, M. L.
Wood River
Wyandot Indians
Wyeth, Jacob
Wyeth, John B.
Wyeth, Nathaniel
first trip west by
McLoughlin defended by
second trip west by
Wyoming
Yakima Indians
Yellowstone National Park
Yellowstone Packet (keelboat)
Yellowstone River
Yerba Buena (California). See San Francisco
York, John W.
York (slave)
York Factory (Hudson’s Bay)
Yosemite Valley
Young, Brigham
Greeley’s interview of
Young, Ewing
death of
Young, Joaquín
Yuma Indians
BEAR FLAG
RISING
The Conquest of California,
1846
To Western Writers of America, Inc.
Mexico can never exert any real governmental authority over such a country.… The Anglo-Saxon foot is already on its borders. Already the advance guard of the irresistible army of the Anglo-Saxon emigration has begun to pour down upon it, armed with the plough and the rifle.…
—John Louis O’Sullivan, The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, July–August, 1845
If I were a Mexican, I would tell you, “Have you not enough room in your own country to bury your dead men? If you come into mine, we will greet you with bloody hands and welcome you to hospitable graves.”
—Sen. Thomas Corwin of Ohio, February 11, 1846
We go to war with Mexico solely for the purpose of conquering an honorable and permanent space. Whilst we intend to prosecute the war with vigor, both by land and by sea, we shall bear the olive branch in one hand and the sword in the other; and whenever she will accept the former, we shall sheathe the latter.
—James Buchanan, Secretary of State, 1846
Poor Mexico, so far from God, so near the United States.
—Mexican proverb
INTRODUCTION
The conquest of California is representative of a concept as old and arrogant as humankind. A New York lawyer-editor named John Louis O’Sullivan called this idea “Manifest Destiny,” the useful phrase printed in a summer, 1845, magazine editorial arguing in favor of the annexation of Texas by the United States. He wrote of Texas’ “absorption” into the Union as “the inevitable fulfillment of the general law which is rolling our population westward,” and California, he predicted, would also fall away from an “imbecile and distracted Mexico.” In the minatory tones of an awakened giant, O’Sullivan said, “The Anglo-Saxon foot is already on its borders. Already the advance guard of the irresistible army of Anglo-Saxon emigration has begun to pour down upon it.…”
Manifest Destiny was a new phrase for an ancient abstraction that has steered and muddled every nation, primitive and civilized, since national attitudes of superiority arose.
(Substituting “Spaniard” for “Anglo-Saxon” in O’Sullivan’s editorial results in a pronunciamento that might have guided Cortéz and his conquistadores when they conquered Mexico in 1520 and when his successors claimed California for Spain in 1769. At the time of the events of Bear Flag Rising, the British, who wrote the text on spreading Anglo-Saxon “civilization” around the globe, were warring against the Maoris in New Zealand and the Sikhs in India.)
The spirit of Manifest Destiny, the belief that it was the fate, perhaps divinely written, of the United States to rule the North American continent, was anything but an idle notion. It was a virulent force from our national beginnings, and in 1846, it swept like a rush of air into a vacuum from the Continental Divide to the Pacific, guided by what Bernard DeVoto called “the logic of geography.”
* * *
Bear Flag Rising is the story of three agents of Manifest Destiny in collision with one another while on a common mission: the annexation by military force of the Mexican province of Alta California by the United States.
The event signaling the opening of the takeover occurred on June 14, 1846, when a band of backwoods malcontents raised the berry-juice-painted petticoat known as the Bear Flag over the plaza of the northern California village of Sonoma. The process of conquest, however, had begun six months earlier, upon the arrival in the Far West of John Charles Frémont, the first of the three linked but unbonded conquerors.
The Bear Flag is the perfect symbol of the conquest; Frémont, the highly imperfect human manifestation of it. Firmly wedged between the other two men and abraded by them, he inspired and abetted the Sonoma rising and stood at the epicenter of the thirteen-month storm that followed it. He is the looming presence of the California campaign.
He is also one of our history’s enduring enigmas, a thoroughgoing man of action, easy to admire but difficult to like. A pathmarker if not a pathfinder, he is at various times an agent provocateur, Byronic hero, brilliant leader of men, and pathetic egoist. One of his signal characteristics is that, like the ostrich, his eye is bigger than his brain. He sees panoramas, but details, many of them urgent, confound him. What remains fixed in his character and life are his unbounded hubris and ambition, and the devotion to him of his wife, Jessie.
The se
cond of the triad of conquerors is Robert Field Stockton, a commodore of the navy and confidant of presidents. He is wealthy, imperious, elegant, grandiloquent, and ruthless—a born satrap. He dreams of military glory, a spectacular sea fight, a great overland march to battle, some chance to prove himself, to ensure himself an eminent niche in history. He is smallish in stature and as excitable as Lord Nelson, whom he admires.
And the third figure in the story is Stephen Watts Kearny, a general of dragoons, a briary old-school martinet blooded in Indian wars. He is a master of tasks, but like his contemporary, Zachary Taylor, a primitive tactician. He is courageous in battle and, in appropriate company, courtly in manner, but he is foolish and vindictive in many critical matters, and like generals before and after his time, he surrounds himself with the like-minded and hears little in opposition to his thinking except from his enemies.
These contentious men, around whom the spectacle of the conquest tumbles and swirls like a Mojave dust devil, and the color and drama of the California conquest, preoccupy this book.
While Bear Flag Rising is about the California campaign from an American perspective, I have tried, at some length, to provide a picture of pre-conquest California and to do justice to the Californian “side” in the 1845–47 era, especially in recounting how leaders such as José Castro, Pío Pico, and Andrés Pico rose to oppose, as best they could with no assistance from Mexico, an event each knew was inevitable: the loss of their beloved land, and their way of life, to the interlopers.
—DALE L. WALKER
June 14, 1998
PROLOGUE
The Californios called them “Bostons.”
These were the Americans who came around Cape Horn from Eastern seaports, the principal ones on the Massachusetts coast, to the Pacific Rim in the half-century before the conquest.
The first American ship to visit California was the Otter, out of Boston, which dropped its hook in Monterey Bay in October, 1796, en route to the Sandwich Islands and China with a cargo of sea-otter pelts. The captain of this small vessel, one Ebenezer Dorr, had several convicts aboard, escapees from the Australian penal colony at Botany Bay who had paid him to take them to the United States. Dorr asked permission of Monterey’s commandante to land these “English sailors” but was politely refused. In the dark, and in the first recorded instance of the Americans wearing out their welcome, he landed them anyway.
* * *
In the dozen languorous years before the conquest, many other Bostons ventured unbidden to California. Some of them stayed, tolerated as foreign residents. One who came and returned home and wrote an influential book about his adventures was an uncommon sailor out of Cambridge, Massachusetts, named Richard Henry Dana.
His grandfather, a jurist, had been a delegate to the Continental Congress and United States minister to Russia; his father was a poet and essayist and founder of the influential literary journal, The North American Review, and his favorite teacher in private school was a certain serene transcendentalist and aspiring Unitarian minister, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
In 1831, at age sixteen, Dana entered Harvard but a bout with measles left his eyesight impaired and, feeling “useless, pitied, and dissatisfied,” he left the college after two years to cast about for some answer to his failing health. He found it, to his family’s alarm, in the port of Boston.
“There is a witchery in the sea,” he later wrote, and the tall-masted ships he saw, and the carefree sailors at work on their decks, romanced him. He might have embarked as a passenger or, through his family’s influence, as a merchant officer, but on August 14, 1834, he traded his frock coat, silk topper, and kid gloves for the rough duds of the ship’s slop chest—a pair of baggy duck trousers, a checked pullover shirt, and a black-varnished tarpaulin hat “with half a fathom of black ribbon hanging over the left eye”—when he signed on as a common seaman on the brig Pilgrim, outward-bound for Cape Horn and Mexican California.
“There is not so hopeless and pitiable an object in the world as a landsman beginning a sailor’s life,” he said of the beginning of his two-year adventure. In fact, he had no notion of just how wretched life before the mast could be. He had swapped more than clothes: he had traded silk sheets in a warm and spacious home for a hammock slung in the crew’s quarters below the Pilgrim’s forecastle, amidst coils of rope, rigging, spare sails, stores, and the eternal stink of the bilges; he had traded sumptuous meals served at a damask-covered table for cold salt beef scummed with grease, and “scouse” (biscuits pounded into crumbs and mixed and boiled with beef), potatoes, and pepper; he had traded brainwork for picking oakum—old rope pieces untwisted and picked into shreds, then tarred for use in caulking—and for flensing the skin off his knees in endless days spent holystoning decks; he had traded intellectual talk with poets and pedants for the stupefying chatter of his deckmates and the fearsome pronouncements of the Pilgrim’s tyrannical captain, a self-described “regular down-east johnny-cake” who promised his crew, “If you ain’t careful, I’ll make a hell of heaven.”
Most of the voyage to California was hellish, but not all of it. Dana learned to love the capstan songs the sailors sang, to delight in their effusions over the grog ration that was passed around in bad weather; and he was filled with awe to witness such seagoing phenomena as the weirdly beautiful corposant—Saint Elmo’s Fire—that crawled along the masts and yards in stormy weather.
By the time the Pilgrim had slugged its way south in high seas to the Falkland Islands and the coast of Patagonia, he had learned much of sailing-ship nomenclature, writing in his journal of the “fine breeze from the northward, topmast and topgallant studding-sails set, and every prospect of a speedy and pleasant passage round.” He also studied Bowditch on the voyage south and learned to identify such navigational phenomena as the Magellen Clouds—three small nebulae, two bright, one dim—seen just above the horizon soon after crossing the southern tropic, and, directly overhead at Cape Horn, the four stars of the Southern Cross, one of the brightest constellations in the heavens.
Three and a half months out, the Pilgrim anchored off Juan Fernández—Robinson Crusoe’s island—four hundred miles west of Valparaiso, to fill water casks, and on January 13, 1835, sighted the California coast. It took the eighty-six-foot Boston brig five days to beat its way one hundred miles upcoast to its trade destination, fighting head winds and smashing seas so unrelenting that the ship sprung its foretopmast and was driven hundreds of miles off course. But on January 18, the Pilgrim sailed past Point Pinos, the headland entrance of the twenty-four-mile-wide Bay of Monterey, and Dana saw the town. Before him lay a pretty collection of whitewashed adobe buildings with red-tiled roofs, a customshouse, and a square presidio, Mexican flag fluttering above it, all huddled neatly on the edge of a large, pine-wooded cove “green as nature could make it.”
The bay and the town teemed with commerce. Since Monterey had the only customshouse on the coast, all trading vessels were required to drop anchor there, enter their cargoes in the registry, undergo a haphazard inspection by harbor authorities, and receive permission to traffic in the other ports north and south. Ships from New England threaded through the anchorages of ships from Mexico, Central and South America, England, France, Genoa, the Sandwich Islands, China, and Japan; on the beach and in town, trader captains and sailors, hide droghers, shag-bearded trappers in greasy buckskins, Kanakas, Indians, freighters, and laborers jostled with presidio soldiers and monied gentlemen in stovepipe hats.
Since Dana spoke Spanish, the Pilgrim’s captain appointed him interpreter, and in the year the brig wandered up and down the coast with its cargo of spirits, tea, coffee, sugar, spices, raisins, molasses, hardware, tinware, crockery, cutlery, calicoes and cottons from Lowell, boots and shoes from Lynn, crepes, silks, shawls, scarves, jewelry, combs, furniture—“everything that can be imagined, from Chinese fireworks to English cartwheels”—the husky, curly-headed New Englander kept a meticulous journal, subsequently published as Two Years Before the Mast.
He admired the dress of the Californios (the Mexican natives of California). The men, at least those of some substance, wore dark, flat-topped, broad-brimmed, silk-lined sombreros with gilt or figured bands; short, vest-like silk jackets; shirts made of broadcloth or velveteen, laced with gilt and open at the neck; pantaloons open at the sides below the knee; white stockings and Indian-made, gold-embroidered deerskin shoes; broad sashes, often blood-red, cinching the waist; dark blue or black cloaks of broadcloth with velvet trimmings; and colorful serapes slung over their shoulders.
“Every rich man looks like a grandee and every poor scamp like a broken-down gentleman,” he wrote.
He saw ladies in silks, crepes, crinolines, and calicoes, all made in the European style but with short sleeves, leaving the arm bare, and loose around the waist—“corsets not being in use.” They wore shoes of kid or satin, bright sashes or belts, necklaces and silver-filigreed pendant earrings, and since they wore no bonnets, their hair, loose or in long braids, was decorated and held in place by tall combs.
People of pure Spanish blood, he said, had clear “brunette” complexions. The Indians, who ran about naked except for “a small piece of cloth, kept up by a wide leather strap round his waist,” were darker.
The Californios were caste-conscious, Dana recorded: “The least drop of Spanish blood, if it be only of quadroon or octoroon, is sufficient to raise one from the position of a serf, and entitle him to wear a suit of clothes—boots, hat, cloak, spurs, long knife, all complete, though coarse and dirty as it may be—and to call himself Español, and to hold property, if he can get any.”
Horses—smallish, wiry animals—were prevalent in their daily lives, and it was so commonplace to see men and women on horseback that he thought of the Californios as centaurs, but he was disgusted by the neglect and downright cruelty shown to the beasts. The men may have been caballeros, but only insofar as the word meant “horsemen.” They were not gentlemen. He wrote,
Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising Page 48