Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  They can hardly go from one house to another without getting on a horse, there being generally several standing tied to the doorposts of the little cottages. When they wish to show their activity, they make no use of their stirrups in mounting, but striking the horse, spring into the saddle as he starts, and sticking their longs spurs into him, go off on the full run. Their spurs are cruel things, having four or five rowels, each an inch in length, dull and rusty. The flanks of the horses are often sore from them, and I have seen men come in from chasing bullocks with their horses’ hind legs and quarters covered with blood.

  He said that when the people embarked on long journeys, “they rode one horse down, and catch another, throw the saddle and bridle upon him, and after riding him down, take a third, and so on to the end of the journey.”

  The Californios, even the “Dons,” Dana wrote disdainfully, were an “idle, thriftless people” who could “make nothing for themselves.” Here, he said, was a land abounding in grapes, “yet they buy, at a great price, bad wine made in Boston and brought round by us, and retail it among themselves at a real (twelve and a half cents) by the small wine glass.” He said that cowhides, “which they value at two dollars in money, they barter for something which costs seventy-five cents in Boston; and buy shoes (as like as not made from their own hides, which have been carried twice around Cape Horn) at three and four dollars.…”

  He told of a country where none but “Papists” could own property or even remain more than a few weeks ashore unless assigned to a trade vessel; a place with no system of credit, no banks, no investments except in cattle, no schools, and no discernible governance.

  He told of a vast, bizarre, lazy and decadent land, immensely rich (if more in the potential than the tangible), whose people, other then a handful of “grandees,” had no education and no initiative and seemed to be in a geographical and cultural limbo, as if apathetically awaiting conquest.

  “In the hands of an enterprising people, what a country this might be!” he wrote.

  * * *

  Three hundred years before Dana’s advent, the Spaniards, an enterprising people, had thought the same thing.

  PART ONE

  THE COAST OF CATHAY

  1

  The Spaniards

  1

  Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo had commanded a company of crossbowmen in the march by Hernán Cortés to the Aztec capital of Tenochitlán in 1519, and for these and other military labors, he had earned the confidence of the viceroyalty of Mexico. After two decades of service to Spain in the New World, the Portuguese-born officer was given his first command—an odd assignment for a soldier, but an important one. In June, 1542, he sailed north from the port of La Natividad, on the Pacific coast of Mexico, his flagship the caravel San Salvador accompanied by a smaller vessel, the Victoria.

  Cabrillo’s mission, assigned him by the viceroy, was to explore the uncharted “coast of Cathay,” believed to be a large island somewhere in the north, and perhaps discover any number of fabled places: the Strait of Anián, a northwest passage between the two great oceans; or the seaport of Quivira, a land said to contain Seven Cities of Gold ruled by El Dorado, a king whose subjects dusted him with gold every morning and washed it off every night.

  He might even find the island mentioned in a popular work by the Spaniard Ordóñez de Montalvo titled Las sergas de Esplandián (“The Deeds of Esplandián”), published in Madrid in 1510. This tale told how the Christians in Constantinople had fought a force of black Amazons led by Queen Califía of the island of California. The island was said to be located “at the right hand of the Indies” and close to the Terrestrial Paradise, a place bounteous in gold and guarded by griffins that carried unwary intruders high into the sky and dropped them to their deaths.

  Whatever he was searching for, the record of Cabrillo’s voyage, written about thirteen years later, states that on “Sunday, July 2 [1542], they sighted California.”

  He sailed up the unknown coast, charting islands, bays, inlets, reefs and rocks, among the latter a dangerous group he named the Habre Ojos—“Watch Out.” In September, he visited a “good harbor” that he named San Miguel (soon called San Diego), found ways to talk with coastal Indians, and sailed on, often far to seaward to avoid fierce winds and the terrifying crash of the ocean on the cliffs and rock-girded beaches. He sighted but did not visit a widemouthed harbor 450 miles north of San Miguel and named it Baía de los Pinos (probably Monterey Bay), and in mid-November, after sailing past a great fog-shrouded place that would become known in three hundred years as the Golden Gate, the San Salvador and Victoria anchored in a large bay about six hundred miles north of San Miguel. This anchorage was visited thirty-five years later by the English freebooter, Sir Francis Drake, and given his name.

  On the return voyage, somewhere in the islands off Santa Barbara Channel on January 3, 1543, Cabrillo died of an infection caused by having broken his arm and shoulder in a shipboard fall, but he had made his mark: this Portuguese-Spaniard soldier-mariner found the land that had been named before it had been seen.

  * * *

  After Cabrillo’s expedition, 227 years passed before the Spaniards made their first settlement there, but in the waiting, California was rediscovered many times.

  Galleons from the Philippine Islands, a Spanish possession from 1564 and governed by a viceroyalty of New Spain, built a profitable trade between Manila and Mexico and skirted the California coast laden with cargoes of silks, damasks, spices, chinaware, wax, and other exotic goods of the Far East. The rules of the trade called for the galleons, outward-bound from Manila, to follow the Great Circle. This route took them northeast toward Japan, then due east along the forty-first parallel to the vicinity of Cape Mendocino, westernmost point of the California coast, then south past Baja California to Acapulco. There were at least two hundred Manila galleon voyages to Mexico and many of them, perhaps most, touched on the California shore to fill water casks, cut wood, and search for game.

  2

  Then Drake came. He and his corsairs sailed from Plymouth in November, 1577, with a fleet of six vessels led by the hundred-ton Golden Hind. They ran south to the Cape Verdes and into the Strait of Magellan, took seventeen days to thread the hellish Horn, and, as they entered the Pacific, endured a storm that lasted fifty-two days, destroyed some of their ships and sent others scurrying back to England. Now alone, a speck on the measureless ocean, Drake worried the battered Hind north along the gale-swept western coast of South America, his cutthroat crew sacking Spanish towns from Chile north to Mexico and filling the hold of the flagship with gold and silver bullion and plate, pearls and emeralds, and all manner of plunder. The Hind captured and looted many Spanish ships as well. One of them, bound for Panama, had the memorable name Cacafuego (“Shitfire”) and was grappled to the Hind off Lima. It was found to contain so much booty—twenty-six tons of silver bullion, eighty pounds of gold, plus weapons, gunpowder, clothing, and religious artifacts—that it took three days for Drake’s pinnaces to transfer the cargo to his flagship.

  The master mariner sailed on and spent a month in the summer of 1579 on the California coast, careening, refitting and provisioning the Golden Hind, and claiming the land, which he named Nova Albion, for his patron, Elizabeth I. Drake may have entered the Golden Gate, though he made no mention of the spectacular bay that lay inside the headlands. He did trade with the Miwok Indians of the northern coast and may have journeyed as far north as the future Bodega Bay before sailing west for Mindanao, Java, the Indian Ocean, the Cape of Good Hope, and home to Plymouth in September, 1580, completing his circumnavigation of the globe in two years and nine months.

  * * *

  The Englishman’s claim of New Albion does not seem to have greatly disturbed the Spanish crown or its viceregal authorities in the New World, but since a port was needed for the Manila galleon trade, Spain did send several expeditions to the California coast in the years following Drake’s foray.

  The most significant of th
ese explorations was that of the adelantado (merchant-adventurer) Sebastián Vizcaíno, who set out from Acapulco with two ships in the spring of 1602. In December, he arrived off Cabrillo’s Bay of San Miguel, which he renamed for his flagship San Diego, then moved north, bestowing names, most of them holy names, on the islands, points, and inlets he spied—Santa Catalina, Santa Barbara, Punta Concepción. At Santa Catalina, he saw many Indian canoes made of cedar and pine, their seams caulked with brea from seepages along the coast, some of them carrying fifteen men who rowed like galley slaves.

  The prize discovery of Vizcaíno’s expedition was the sighting of a magnificent harbor. It was, he said, “the best port that could be desired, for besides being sheltered from all the winds, it has many pines for masts and yards, and live oaks, and white oaks, and water in great quantity, all near the shore.” He spoke of the bay being “excellent for shipping,” sheltered from the winds, ideal to provide security and protection for ships from Manila, and a climate resembling that of Castile.

  He named it for the viceroy of Mexico, the Conde de Monterey.

  3

  By the time the Spaniards made their first mission foothold there in 1769, the immense and still unmapped land they called California was inhabited by native peoples, perhaps 150,000 in all, in at least a hundred tribes and clans. In the north were people such as the Shasta, Modoc, Northern Paiute, the coastal Pomo, Miwok, Costanoan, and others; in the midlands were the Washo, Paiute, Shoshone, Salinan, and Yukot; in the south, the Chumash, Serrano, Diegueño, Gabrielino, Mojave, and Yuma.

  They knew little of the vastness and diversity of their land for they were not nomadic and for twelve thousand years had subsisted on whatever their small domains provided.

  Among many tribes, acorns provided the staple food. These were pounded and ground by mortar and pestle into a fatty, nutritious flour, winnowed by tossing in a basket, washed free of their bitter tannic acid, and rolled into a mush or unleavened cakes, seasoned with wood ashes, bits of meat or fish, and baked in earthen ovens. In the deserts, mesquite beans were a staple; in forested areas, piñon nuts. Hunters, using snares, pit traps, and arrows with obsidian points, killed deer and other small game; coastal tribes fished with nets and hooks and harpoon-like spears, gathered shellfish, and caught small fish by using buckeyes to poison pools and eddies. Mojaves and Yumas and the people of the Colorado River region grew corn, beans, and pumpkins; the more primitive tribes ate insects and grubbed for roots.

  Many of the mid- and southern-California Indians lived in conical or domed huts made of poles and brush and banked with dirt; in the north, there were solid frame dwellings of redwood planks.

  There were basket-makers among some of these people, clever weavers using sedge, bulrush, willow, bracken, or tule reeds, who often decorated their works with stained bird feathers. The baskets were used for gathering and winnowing, and those of finest weave were filled with water and hot stones, for cooking.

  Along the coast, boats were made of tule balsa, and rafts of rushes; in the far northwest, dugout canoes were fashioned from redwood trunks.

  Artisans made arrow points of obsidian, stones, and shells; made awls and pots, charms, pendants, dentalium or clamshell beads (used for money); others made music from clap-sticks, deer hooves, turtle shells, gourds, bone whistles, and animal-skin drums.

  In some places, the natives were naked; in others, they wore skirts of plant fibers or animal skins, and slept on furs and deer-hides.

  Most of these disparate people were exogamous, mixing and marrying among one another; the men were polygamous, the marriages made by agreement or purchase.

  Religion and medicine were guided by a shaman; sometimes drugs were a part of the religion, as in the northern San Joaquin Valley and among certain southern tribes that developed a toloache, or jimsonweed cult.

  The Spaniards, including the missionaries, who invaded their lands were contemptuous of the Indians, describing them as lazy, filthy, immoral savages.

  4

  In May, 1769, a Spanish officer named Gaspar de Portolá led an expedition of fifty soldiers, servants, Christianized Indians (called “neophytes”), and missionaries from northern Baja California to the bay founded by Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo 227 years earlier.

  At the head of the brown-robed Franciscan fathers in Portolá’s party was a Spanish farmer’s son, born on Majorca in 1713, Fray (Friar) Junípero Serra, father-president of the missions in Baja.

  Portolá took possession of San Diego on July 1, established it as a presidio, and on July 16, Serra proclaimed the first mission of Alta California and named it San Diego de Alcalá.

  San Diego was the earliest of twenty-one missions founded in California, each a day’s journey apart and connected by a rude wagon trail called El Camino Real (the Royal Road). The northernmost of the missions, San Francisco Solano de Sonoma (Sonoma a Miwok word meaning “earth village”), was founded by Franciscans in 1823, two years after Mexico won its independence from Spain. For all its isolation from the governance of California, Sonoma became among the most prosperous of the missions. It had rich pasturage around it for herds of cattle, horses, and sheep; the grainfields were irrigated by water piped from springs; there were grapes for wine-making, and orchards of pears and apples, pomegranates, figs, and olives.

  During California’s “pastoral” era (1769–1833), eighty-two thousand Indians lived, worked, and died in a feudal peonage in the missions. These neophytes were the church’s slaves, given instruction in Christianity, working throughout their lives as menials in the mission fields as planters and harvesters, adobe brick-makers, and butchers of cattle for the growing hide-and-tallow industry.

  In the sixty-four years that followed the founding of the San Diego mission, two-thirds of the native peoples died, most of them from the diseases brought by their conquerors: cholera, dysentery, smallpox, tuberculosis, syphilis, diphtheria, typhoid, and scarlet fever.

  2

  The Mexicans

  1

  As the colony of Alta California grew, the Spanish rulers in Mexico found it increasingly difficult to garrison their remote Pacific province, or even to supply it with needed goods. Ships from Mexican ports and especially from Spain, faced long, costly, and hazardous voyages to this isolated outpost, and when the wars of independence from Spain began in 1810, these supply-ship voyages ceased entirely.

  In 1821, Mexico gained its independence from Spain, and in September, 1822, California became a Mexican territory. For a time, the new mother country made an effort to exert control over its stepchild, which it promoted to a “department” in 1836. Governors were appointed from Mexico City, and a disputación, a sort of provincial legislature, was established. This body met only when the governor ordered, and as a result, the business of state devolved into a petty despotism, with little or no guidance from home. Mexico, preoccupied with its own perpetual inner turmoil, adopted a laissez-faire policy toward the department of California, as it did toward its New Mexico colony, allowing both to drift and find ways of maintaining themselves.

  Just as California’s goods, guidance, and governance were ignored by Mexico, so did matters of security languish. Many of the soldiers who were sent to the province were ex-convicts and the meanest scrapings from the streets of Mexico, unqualified for the job and as little interested in service outside their home country as were the pressed or shanghaied seamen from England and America. The Californios detested these cholos (half-breeds) and borrachos (drunks), as they called them, and Governor Juan Bautista Alvarado said of them, “The majority of these soldiers were corrupt and lustful, and so audacious that not even their officers dared to impede their mutinies and other demonstrations.…”

  Another conflict between the central government in Mexico and the Californios had to do with the secularization of the province’s missions in the period 1834–1840, converting them to parish churches and selling off their great landholdings to private individuals. This enabled the wealthy to establish large privat
e ranches—an estate usually at least four square miles in size, some as large as thirty square miles—and haciendas, most of them over five square leagues, or twenty thousand acres, in size.

  2

  In the absence of shipments of goods from Mexico, trade opened in Alta California to the outside world, especially in the ports of San Diego, Monterey, and San Francisco Bay. In 1822, the first foreign trading ship, a British vessel, arrived, soon followed by a Boston trader; within months, both British and American agents were ashore and thriving.

  Although the Californios had some wheat, timber, beaver and otter skins, wine, and aguardiente to sell, the mainstay trade in early California lay in cattle hides and tallow and, to a lesser extent, in other cattle by-products such as suet, lard, and pickled beef.

  Cowhides (called “California banknotes” by the Americans), scraped, salted, and dried, fetched up to two American dollars each, and by 1846, California was producing up to eighty thousand hides annually. Tallow, packed in rawhide botas (bags), was valued at two dollars per arroba (twenty-five pounds), and twenty-five thousand arrobas were traded annually at peak production.

  The hide-and-tallow market had its main depot at San Diego, where the hides were dumped from carts onto the beach and “droghers” cleaned and salted them, staked them in the sun to dry, folded them lengthwise, hair side in, and made great, ungainly bundles of them. These were taken by pack mules or oxcarts for transfer to small boats, then stacked into the trade ships’ holds, the hides for boot and shoemaking in New England, the tallow for soap and candles.

  Other anchorages for this specialized commerce were established off San Luís Rey, San Juan Capistrano, San Pedro (serving Los Angeles), Santa Barbara, San Luís Obispo, Monterey, Santa Clara, and Yerba Buena, the village that came to be San Francisco.