“The hills were wardens of the far-sought gold And streams were glad in valleys unprofaned…”
—GEORGE STERLING, The Homing of Drake
FROM the chalk-white bluffs of the bay sheltered by Point Reyes, the coast-dwelling natives saw with amazement an immense object borne on billowing wings loom out of the mist at sea on June 17 (Julian Calendar), 1579. The man whom they sent the next day to reconnoiter paddled back excitedly to tell of living beings, white of skin and bearded, aboard this apparition. Concluding that these visitors were no less than spirits returned from the dead, the Indians timorously kept their distance, prepared to make—if necessary—proper obeisance. For three days longer the spirits remained in their abode, which rested on the water, its wings folded. On the third day it moved in toward the shore, and the spirits landed.
So came the first white men to set foot in the region of San Francisco Bay—men of Francis Drake's company in the Golden Hinde. They had left England a year and a half earlier in company with four other ships, bound round the world in the service of Queen Elizabeth to plunder the ships and cities of her enemy, Philip II of Spain. Now only the flagship remained.
After two days ashore, they were visited by the awed inhabitants of the country, who brought gifts of feathers and tobacco. “This country our Generall named Albion,’ the chaplain wrote, both because “of the white bancks and cliffes” and in order that “it might haue some affinity, euen in name also, with our own country…” And before Drake's five weeks’ stay had ended, he recorded further, “our Generall caused to be set vp a monument of our being there, as also of her maiesties and successors right and title to that kingdom; namely, a plate of brasse, fast nailed to a great and firme post; whereon is engrauen her graces name, and the day and yeare of our arriuall there, and of the free giuing vp of the prouince and kingdom, both by the king and people, into her maiesties hands…” Thus having established his Queen's title to a new kingdom on the other side of the world, Francis Drake lifted anchor on July 23 and sailed away. The Indians were grief-stricken. As night fell, they lighted beacon fires on the hills.
In the Indians’ geography the only land that lay beyond the smooth disc of the Pacific Ocean was the island where dwelled their dead. The Bay itself was to them no “harbor,” for their small tule rafts never carried cargoes out the Golden Gate. Even the pass through the Coast Range at Carquinez Strait, to which stagecoach and railroad, as surely as the rivers, finally were to gravitate, had no great importance to a fleet brown foot that daily climbed the mountain barrier for rabbits. In all those ways that the contours of the region were to influence the welfare of white inhabitants, the Indians were affected little. But for other reasons the Bay environment impressed its pattern upon them.
It was the Bay that set the sleepy rhythm of the Indians’ days. It determined, first, the location of their villages. A few groups lived on the ocean front and a few more on the banks of streams among the wooded hills, but most of them settled at the mouths of estuaries, on the Bay beaches. There the struggle for existence almost was reduced to reaching out a hand for supplies that the waters laid upon their doorsteps : for mussels, soft-shell clams, and seaweed, and the driftwood used to cook them. The marine vertebrates swam so close to shore that the Indians could run into the waters and catch them—a feat noted by Drake.
In developing their handicrafts, the Indians were influenced by the abundance of tule grass in the marshes. They made no pottery, but from woody stems and fibers they constructed water-tight baskets, often decorated with shell beads, which they used as cooking utensils. Their houses were circular structures of poles usually tied together at the top and thatched with brush or tule matting. Rushes were used, too, for the short flaps worn as skirts by the women, though occasionally these garments were made of deerskin or of bark fiber. The men generally went entirely naked, except in the early morning when they sometimes plastered themselves with a coating of thick mud for warmth.
On the basis of their crafts, mythology, or language, the California Indians can be classified in large groups, but such inter-relationships were involuntary. The intense particularism of local communities gave rise to marked variations, even between closely related groups. In small villages, usually comprising about 15 families each, lived the Indians of the Bay region. Each village claimed a well-defined territory with seasonal campsites reserved for its own use. If a deer hunt or a summer wandering took its inhabitants as far as 50 miles, the racial brothers they encountered might be wholly alien to them and their dialects incomprehensible. However, although they recognized no allegiance beyond that which they paid to their village chief, the peoples of the Bay region were all of one linguistic family, the Penutian. The greater part of the Bay area was occupied by the Costanoan, whose territory included the San Francisco Peninsula, the coast country as far south as Point Sur, and the eastern shores of the Bay as far inland as the Mount Diablo Range. North of the Bay, as far east as the Sonoma Valley and as far north as the Russian River, lived the Coast Miwok. Eastward, beyond the Sonoma Valley, the Wintun held the shores of San Pablo and Suisun Bays.
Among all the peoples of the earth, no others are known who kept so long unchanged their ways of living and thinking. During the last 30 to 40 centuries when western civilization was making its cyclical and labored rise, time stood still for the Bay Indians. Early white visitors remarked that these natives were squalid and listless. However, most such observers had seen them after the mission system had begun forcing upon them an alien civilization. In 1579 Drake's men had noted that the Miwok Indians handled their bows and arrows “very skilfully,” that their spokesman was “using sich violent Gestures, and so strong a Voice, and speaking so fast that he was quite out of Breath,” and that these Indians “run very swiftly, and long, and seldom go any other Pace….” It was after 40 years of mission rule, in 1816, that the Frenchman Louis Choris described the apathy of the San Francisco Costanoan: “I have never seen one laugh. I have never seen one look one in the face.”
Apathetic though they may have seemed to white men who could not understand their failure to take up arms in their own defense, still they were not lacking in sensitivity, for they gave lyrical expression to their feeling for the environment in their mythology and songs. In the beginning, the Costanoan told each other, waters covered all of the earth except the summit of Mount Diablo. There lived a coyote, a humming bird, and an eagle, and as the waters receded these three, but chiefly Coyote, created the world. Their myths about Coyote's subsequent adventures are a mixture of ribald humor and idealism. The Indians worshipped the sun with offerings, and held sacred the towering redwood trees. To the Coast Miwok, Mount Tamalpais, whose long eastward slope resembles the figure of a sleeping woman, was the human bride of the sun god, who fell from his arms as he was trying to carry her to his celestial world. When summer fog wrapped the figure, the Indians told each other that this was her fleecy blanket, made by the god from his tears.
Even critical white observers found the Costanoan songs peculiarly pleasing. In some of them the singers tried to express the sensibilities of small woodland animals—of the wood-rat, for instance:
“I dream of you,
I dream of you jumping.
Rabbit, jack-rabbit and quail…”
Apparently they were aware that their Bay and its peninsulas were the dramatic western boundary of a great land, for another of their songs began:
“Dancing on the brink of the world…”
Such imagery suggests that the native singers were not wholly apathetic and morose. When the white man came, to prove that their coast was not the world's brink and to put an end forever to the dancing, apathy may not have been the only reason they did not laugh.
Grim, medieval Carlos V of Spain—uncertain of his geography, but with his black eyes fixed on galleons bearing spices and treasure across the vast Pacific—had ordered Hernando Cortez, in the course of the expedition on which he set forth in 1532, to “seek a natural port well north of New Spain” where “my navigators may find refuge, refit and rest.” From such a safe harbor, far up the unexplored California coast, His Most Catholic Majesty had hoped that “they may then continue the voyage from Manila to Acapulco with a greater degree of safety from the enemies of my country.”
Spanish navigators required 227 years to carry out this royal decree; and even then, it was not his Majesty's sailors but rather his soldiers, led by Don Gaspar de Portola, who early in November of 1769 first discovered the great landlocked anchorage now known as San Francisco Bay. Not even Portola, to whom the glory has gone, was the first actually to see that body of inland water large enough to contain “all the ships of Spain.” From the summit of the Montara Ridge Don Gaspar himself saw no more than the Gulf of the Farallones and, purple in the distance, the long headland which the navigator Sebastian Vizcaino, in 1603, had named Punta de los Reyes (Sp., King's Point). It fell to soldiers of his expedition whose names with one exception are unknown to look first on San Francisco Bay.
Finding on the jagged shoreline no resemblance to the huge and sheltered bay described by Vizcaino in 1603, Portola's party had followed the shore of Monterey Bay without recognizing it to the mouth of the San Lorenzo River, present site of Santa Cruz. Pushing on through redwood trees, over ridges, arroyos, and creeks, they trudged past Half Moon Bay. Rising before them in the October rain they saw the rocky barrier of Montara Ridge, and at its base made their camp. The next day being clear, they surveyed from the summit of Point San Pedro the far-off purple cape of Point Reyes.
Gazing at the distant headland christened in honor of the Three Wise Men of the East who had brought gold and frankincense and myrrh to the infant Jesus, Don Gaspar decided it might be worthwhile to search the intervening coastline for that Puerto de San Francisco which shipwrecked Cermeno had happened upon in 1595. Portola therefore put one of his scouts, Sergeant Jose Francisco Ortega, in charge of a party of ten, presumably to explore the region as far north as Point Reyes.
Sergeant Ortega's little band of soldiers never reached their rather ambiguous goal. Precisely what they did, where they went, and what they saw are mysteries which still tantalize the imagination of historians. Some authorities have advanced the theory that Ortega's progress northward was halted by the Golden Gate, for which reason he must have been the first to look into San Francisco Bay from the vicinity of Point Lobos. However probable, the theory is pure conjecture based mainly on the fact that the exploring party, in the three days it was given to accomplish its purpose, had sufficient time to traverse the Peninsula to its end. The diary kept by Padre Juan Crespi, chronicler of Portola's expedition, gives scant information on this vexing possibility. And his diary, overburdened as it is by the padre's preoccupation with the needs of Portola's men suffering from scurvy and diarrhea, is the only reliable record of these events.
The San Francisco Peninsula's abundance of roots, acorns, grasshoppers, sparrows, and squirrels may have been responsible for the tameness of the aborigines, but it hardly served to supply the lack of red meat and green vegetables which had brought Portola's men to the point of starvation. It was therefore mainly a desperate abdominal urge which drove them on to some rather extensive exploration of the area around San Francisco Bay—exploration which would later result in the establishment of the northernmost outpost of Spanish civilization in the New World.
According to Padre Crespi's diary, which is corroborated by Miguel Costanso, Portola's engineer, the second exploring party was allotted four days for their itinerary and “their ration of flour to keep off hunger for that time.” They started on the afternoon of November 7. On the night of November 10, wrote Crespi, “the explorers returned, very sad, and no longer believing in the report of the heathen, which they confessed they had not understood. They said that all the territory which they had examined to the northeast and north was impassable because of the scarcity of pasture and especially because of the ferocity and ill-temper of the heathen, who received them angrily and tried to stop their passage. They said also that they had seen another estuary of equal magnitude and extent with the one which we had in sight and with which it is communicated, but that in order to go around it one would have to travel many leagues; and that they saw no signs that might indicate the proximity of the port where it terminates, and that the mountains were rough and difficult.”
So well does Crespi's description apply to the contra costa (Sp., opposite shore), it is fairly obvious that this exploring party discovered San Pablo Bay, probably from the rugged shoreline of Pinole Point, at that time inhabited by the Wintun Indians, who later proved a menace to Spanish settlers north of San Francisco Bay. Their failure to report having seen the Golden Gate indicates that they may have travelled inland, possibly up the Moraga Valley. Certain it is that famished as they were, and presumably mounted on mules equally famished, they took the easiest route they could find.
Discouraged by their inability to reach the entrance of what they still believed was the port of Monterey, in the vicinity of Point Reyes, Portola's expedition began the long trek homeward to San Diego. The whole course of their explorations had been determined by their first view of the Gulf of the Farallones, which tallied with Cabrera Bueno's description of the old Port of San Francisco, derived originally from reports of Spanish galleons dropping anchor there for wood and water some 200 years before. Even if they had been able to see the Golden Gate from Point San Pedro, however, it is doubtful that they would have followed a different course, so convinced were they that Point Reyes was the headland of a great arm of the sea extending inland east of the rocky peninsula shaped like a plowshare which lies between Bolinas Lagoon and Tomales Bay.
Padre Junipero Serra, father superior of the Franciscan missionaries in California—lean, ascetic, sometimes merciless, but a more efficient administrator than most secular representatives of Spain in the New World—came north by ship the following year (1770) to establish a mission on Monterey Bay, discovered finally at the cost of a second expedition. Even before the founding of this future capital of Alta California, Serra had insisted that surely one of the projected missions in the territory should be dedicated to the patron saint of his order. To this the Visitador-General, Don Jose de Galvez, had answered dryly: “If St. Francis wants a mission, let him show us his port and we will found one.” Now that Portola had been led by Divine Grace to St. Francis’ port, it became an obvious duty to establish a mission there without delay.
Hence, in the spring of 1772, Portola's young lieutenant, Pedro Fages, and Padre Crespi led a party of 12 soldiers from Mission San Carlos Borromeo (now Carmel Mission) to select a suitable site for the new mission near the entrance to what was now called the Port of Our Father St. Francis. The Fages expedition proceeded up the Salinas and Santa Clara Valleys, and northward around the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay. From the present site of Oakland, which they passed on March 27, they must have had a fair view of the Golden Gate. Next day, from the hills below which Berkeley now stands, they saw through the Golden Gate the peaks of the southeast Farallon Islands rising on the horizon. Though Costanso later claimed that Portola's men were the first to see the famous strait, the honor doubtless belongs to the Fages party.
From the Richmond Hills the explorers travelled northward to the south shore of San Pablo Bay a few miles east of San Pablo Point and then eastward past Carquinez Strait to the present site of Martinez. They skirted Suisun Bay and followed the south bank of the San Joaquin River almost to where Antioch now stands. Finding the San Joaquin too wide to cross, the Fages party decided to return to Monterey. On their homeward journey they passed through the Pacheco Valley, west of Mount Diablo through the San Ramon Valley, and down through Alameda Canyon to the site of the future Mission San Jose. From their camp near the present village of Milpitas they continued down the old trail to Monterey which, beaten by the pack trains of the explorers who came after them, was to extend the great Camino Real (Sp., King's Highway) from Mexico to the northernmost limits of the Spanish Empire.
The new Spanish viceroy at Mexico City, farsighted Antonio Bucareli, was determined, at the risk of losing one of his clumsy little ships on the dangerous California coast, to settle for once and for all the question of San Francisco Bay. He therefore sent Lieutenant Juan Manuel de Ayala on the San Carlos with instructions to make a further survey of the Gulf of the Farallones. As darkness fell on August 5, 1775? the San Carlos, having sent a launch ahead to find anchorage, sailed cautiously through the Golden Gate and anchored for the night. On August 7 it moved to a new anchorage on the north side of Raccoon Strait and a week later to another in Hospital Cove off Angel Island.
The hardy band of settlers whom Juan Bautista de Anza led through incredible hardships all the way overland from Tubac in Sonora province had arrived on the present site of San Francisco with a platoon of soldiers and two priests by the time the San Carlos sailed a second time through the Golden Gate. With the assistance of the ship's carpenters and crew, Lieutenant Jose Joaquin Moraga's soldiers were able, on September 17, 1776, to raise the standard of Carlos III of Spain over the quarters of the comandante (commander) in the Presidio. The occasion was celebrated with a high mass, the firing of cannon, and the chanting of a fervent Te Deum.
The opening and dedication of the new Mission San Francisco de Asis (later known as Mission Dolores) on the grass-clad slope near a small lake, dolefully named by the padres Laguna de los Dolores (Lake of Sorrows), was delayed until October 8, 1776 because of the absence of Moraga on an exploring expedition. Moraga's expedition observed the feast-day of Saint Francis by proving conclusively that the Golden Gate was the only entrance to San Francisco Bay. “At length” exclaimed Padre Serra on his arrival at the new mission the following year, “our Father St. Francis has advanced the sacred cross…to the very last extremity of California; to go further requires ships.”
Unfortunately, St. Francis’ new mission lacked adjacent arable land. Anza's poverty-stricken settlers, and the few who came after them, soon found the fertile Santa Clara Valley to the south more suitable for them than the wind-swept, flea-infested sandy wastes of the area dedicated to their patron saint. Therefore, on January 12, 1777, the new Mission Santa Clara was founded down the peninsula. And three miles south of it arose the first purely civil settlement in California—the pueblo (town) of San Jose.
Before the close of the century two more Franciscan missions had been established in the Bay area: Mission Santa Cruz, on August 28, 1791, and Mission San Jose de Guadalupe, on June 11, 1797. The lands which reminded Anza's settlers of the fertile valleys of Valencia soon brought prosperity to these adobe outposts of Catholicism; their baptismal fonts grew muddy with the dirt of Indians saved from the wrath of God. Only by slow degrees, however, did the reluctant aborigines desert their mud huts and childlike savage habits for the adobe barracks, the lengthy prayers and hard work of the missions. Though the padres occasionally lost patience and punished petty crimes with rawhide when sweet words were of no avail, they did not generally ill treat their converts. On the whole the condition of the Indians was improved by their strange new masters in cassocks with shaved heads whose God hung nailed upon a cross. Of course, they learned to speak Spanish and did the manual labor of plowing and harvesting; they excelled in handicraft and later as herders of cattle and sheep. By 1800 intermarriage had produced many mestizos (half-breeds) among the 30,000 Indians converted by the Bay region missions. Within the following decade, however, the neophytes were decimated by measles and smallpox epidemics.
Alarmed by the catastrophic mortality, which was threatening the mission with extinction, the fathers transferred a number of neophytes to the more salubrious climate of the north Bay region. The experiment proved successful; the health of these invalids was greatly improved. On December 14, 1817, the asistencia (chapel) of San Rafael was founded at the present site of the town of San Rafael. Young Padre Jose Altimira planned a more radical solution to the problem, namely, complete abandonment of Mission Dolores and transference of its neophytes along with those at San Rafael to a new mission at Sonoma. Accordingly Mission San Francisco Solano was founded in 1823—with out, however, the authorization of church dignitaries, who objected. A compromise was reached, permitting the new mission and Mission Dolores and San Rafael as well to remain. It was to be the last mission founded in Alta California.
Even after the outbreak of the Napoleonic wars, when trade with foreigners was declared illegal, alcaldes (mayors) and comandantes averted their eyes from the illicit traffic with American whalers and traders who brought oil, tea, textiles, silk, and household utensils in exchange for hides and agricultural products piled up in the storehouse of the missions. Rezanof's unromantic followers who settled around P'ort Ross on Bodega Bay, and whom Governor Pablo de Sola distrusted, were being welcomed to Yerba Buena Cove with urbane politeness in 1821—while the viceregal regime in Mexico City was being overthrown. The interregnum of General Agustin Iturbide's regency, immediately succeeded by the short-lived Empire of Mexico, passed almost unobserved by the Emperor's subjects in Alta California; and news of the institution of a republican regime, which reached the territory in January, 1824, was received without much enthusiasm. At Mission Dolores, Father Estenaja delivered a sermon praising the constitution of the new Republic of Mexico and said a mass for its future greatness. The Presidio guns were fired, a few cheers went up; and when the echoes of the celebration had died away across the great Bay, the straggling settlement relaxed into its accustomed siesta.
The Bay region, despite a half century of misrule that combined paternalism with neglect, had attained economic independence when on March 26, 1825, Alta California formally was declared a province of the Mexican Republic. The decade which would elapse before the secularization of the missions was to witness the heyday of Hispano-Mexican colonization on the Pacific Coast.
Mission San Jose in 1825 owned 62,000 head of cattle, as many sheep, and other livestock; in 1828 Mission Santa Clara had, besides other livestock, 14,500 head of cattle and 15,500 sheep. Mission Dolores’ economic importance was, however, eclipsed by the cove of Yerba Buena to which the Bay area missions and ranchos brought their produce in oxcarts for trade with foreign ships. Besides their great herds, which furnished the hides and tallow sought by European and American traders, the missions owned vast fields planted in wheat and maize and other crops primarily for domestic consumption. Cloth, a coarse kind of serge, was woven from wool; and the aguardiente (brandy) distilled from the vineyards of Mission San Jose was the delight of foreign visitors. The missions, designed originally to form the nuclei of pueblos and intended to relinquish control of their Indian convert-citizens to the civil authority, had become so wealthy by 1830 that they were reluctant to fulfill a destiny which would deprive them of their power.
This system of monastic feudalism was likewise perpetuated by the vast ranchos, ranging from one-half to more than sixteen square leagues (a league being equal to about 4,438 acres), granted by Spanish governors to soldiers of the Portola and Fages expeditions. During the years of Mexican rule grants were also made to Americans and other foreigners who showed a disposition to settle the country in a neighborly manner. Rancho San Antonio, the 48,000-acre domain within whose former boundaries now stand the cities of Alameda, Albany, Berkeley, Emeryville, Oakland, Piedmont, and San Leandro, and Las Pulgas (the fleas), the 35,000-acre rancho granted in 1795 on which stand almost as many Peninsula towns, were typical of these feudal estates. Here, in their adobe ranch houses, the lordly dons entertained friends and relatives with lavish hospitality. They were grateful for the luxuries brought to Yerba Buena Cove by foreign traders whose followers would one day dispossess them.
When the missions were secularized about 1834, the great landowners came into possession of most of the mission lands—and of their Indian charges as well. The plan had been that the mission communities should be organized as towns, enough land set aside for the support of the clergy, and the surplus divided among the Indians. But to the administrators appointed by the government, rather than to the Indians, went the greater part of the flocks and herds and grain fields. Relieved from the discipline of the monks, the freed neophytes were the easy prey of gamblers and thieves. Without any direction, spiritual or economic, they became scattered on the great ranches whose owners under Mexican grants were getting control of the best of the lands in the coast valleys. All the while tuberculosis and smallpox and a declining birth rate were steadily reducing their numbers. The state of affairs at the Mission Dolores was typical. The pueblo did not develop into a prosperous town. Padre Rafael de Jesus Moreno pointed out that the commissioner was acting for his own advantage rather than for the good of the Indians. Likewise there were charges and countercharges at Santa Clara, San Jose and the other missions around the Bay. All of them fell into neglect and decay. There were only 50 Indians at San Francisco when the French explorer and scientist, Duflot de Mofras, was there in 1841.
International rivalries meanwhile were shaping the future of Alta California and the Bay area. Fort Ross, less than 100 miles north of the Bay, was developing into something more formidable than an outpost of Russian hunters of seal and sea otter who chased their prey from the Farallon Islands right into San Francisco Bay. Representatives of Britain's Hudson's Bay Trading Company, who came to make surveys of the Boy region and to twit the comandante of Yerba Buena's presidio on the sad state of his defenses, had a knowing political gleam in their eyes.
Least suspect of all were the Americans. Unlike some other foreigners settling in the Bay region, they assumed no official character which could be construed as representing aggressive designs on the part of the United States. The majority of Yankee immigrants, in fact, adopted unhesitatingly the religion and customs of the Mexicans; they renounced their American citizenship and married into leading Mexican families. Not for some years after the first trappers had begun to cross the Sierra were the Yankees regarded by Mexican authorities with suspicion such as the Russian incursion into the Bay area had received since 1812.
Secure behind their stockades and twelve brass cannons at Fort Ross, the Russians ignored repeated orders to leave the country. As early as 1817 Governor Pablo Vicente de Sola had reported to his superiors in Mexico City that he could not drive them out with the forces at his command, whose weapons were effective only against Indians armed with bows and arrows. Now that Mexico was an independent nation she no longer had protection from the Spanish navy, and no supply ships had arrived at Yerba Buena since 1811. Captain William Shaler, describing San Francisco Bay in 1805, found the entrance defended only “by a battery on which are mounted some brass pounders, which afford only the show of defense; and the place could make no resistance against the smallest military force…” The Castillo de San Joaquin, here described, was not improved by subsequent decades of neglect.
Whether or not the provincial authorities recognized the fact, from 1823 onward the American government had entered into the long-range struggle of world powers for control of Alta California. Concern over Russian inroads into the Bay region prompted Andrew Jackson's administration to undertake negotiations with the Mexican government for acquisition of Alta California. What “Old Hickory” had his eye on was that portion of Mexican territory north of the 37th parallel, including San Francisco Bay, which had been described to him as “a most desirable place of resort for our numerous whaling vessels…in the Pacific, far superior to any to which they now have access.” The $3,500,000 which Jackson offered Mexico's President Santa Anna was, however, refused; and the American government's subsequent attempts to bring the Mexicans to terms met with no better success.
American citizens meanwhile were far from idle. From frontier settlements in Missouri, Kentucky and Tennessee, trappers and fur traders in coonskin caps and greasy buckskin had been threading their way across the plains and mountains of the West. First of these restless Yankees to reach Alta California by an overland route was Jedediah Smith. In the fall of 1826 this “Pathfinder of the Sierras” had opened the way for American settlement of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys. That his presence in the Bay region was unwelcome is apparent from the fact that, on his arrival at Mission San Jose, Padre Narciso Duran locked him in an outhouse; and upon his release Governor Jose Maria de Echeandia gave him two months to get his fur traders out of the country.
The feudal rancheros had no great interest in encouraging trade and industry, but under Governor Jose Figueroa's liberal regime San Francisco Bay was declared a port of entry and, in 1835, the pueblo of Yerba Buena was laid out on the cove. Appointment of a harbormaster and lifting of restrictions on trade with foreign shipping opened for the Bay area a decade of friendly relations between Mexicans and Yankee settlers which might eventually have resulted in peaceful annexation of California by the United States. The appointment of Thomas O. Larkin as United States Consul to Alta California in 1843 was made, apparently, to encourage the Californios to sever their ties with Mexico and seek protection under the American flag.
The loss of Texas to Sam Houston's rebellious settlers in 1836 left the regime in Mexico City in too perilous a state to cope with the political intrigue among its representatives in Alta California; and some of these began to depend upon certain foreign elements in the province to maintain their despotic rule against rival officials and a citizenry from which arose the rumblings of revolt. Their most powerful aide in the vicinity of the Bay area was Johann Augustus Sutter, Swiss immigrant and adventurer extraordinary, who had established a settlement in the Sacramento Valley. At Sutter's Fort were welcomed the American immigrant trains whose oxcarts came straggling down through passes in the high Sierra after 1841.
In 1841, when the Russians decided to withdraw from Fort Ross, Sutter had acquired all their territory around Bodega Bay. In return for assisting General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, comandante of Sonoma, to disperse the roving brigands which General Manuel Micheltorena brought with him from Mexico when he came to displace Governor Juan Bautista Alvarado at Monterey in 1842, the redoubtable Sutter was left unmolested to play off one rival official against another. Even when this “Lord of the Marches” threatened to “proclaim California a Republic independent of Mexico” if he were not given leave to do as he pleased, Vallejo dared not break off friendly relations with him. He wrote unhappily at the time, when American immigration was filling the Bay area with Yankee settlers, that “the only certainty is that Californians will die,” and again, “I dare not assure myself that California will be saved.” He drew what consolation he could from the fact that Sutter had prevented further encroachment of the British Hudson's Bay Company and kept his political rival, Juan Bautista Alvarado, at a safe distance; but he saw the Americans taking over the country.
When the first overland party from Missouri arrived at the ranch of Dr. John Marsh near Mount Diablo in November 1841, they were permitted to settle unmolested. Governor Micheltorena had orders to put a stop to all immigration; but his disreputable army had made him unpopular and he was dependent on American support to put down the conspiracies of rival officials who openly defied his authority. Furthermore, the crafty Alvarado had left the treasury of the province empty; and the secularization of the missions in 1834 had already destroyed the source of funds by which presidio garrisons had been maintained. To aggravate this precarious situation even more, the American and British consuls in Monterey were keeping their respective governments informed of the events leading to a crisis in which intervention of some sort would decide the future of the territory.
Such was the state of affairs in California and the Bay region when, in December 1845, Captain John Charles Fremont entered the province. As United States topographical engineer in command of two previous expeditions sent to survey California's natural resources, Fremont was received on January 27, 1846 in Monterey without serious misgivings by Mexican authorities, who gave him permission to obtain supplies pending his promised departure into Oregon. Little more than a month later, however, Fremont's followers joined him near San Jose, marched across the Santa Clara Valley and through the Santa Cruz Mountains, and camped near Monterey.
Promptly ordered to leave the country, Fremont made a show of resistance, swearing that “if we are hemmed in and assaulted we will die, every man of us under the flag of our country.” Being neither hemmed in nor assaulted, Fremont's party withdrew up the Sacramento Valley to Sutter's Fort and proceeded north toward Oregon. His martial depredations caused Larkin to petition Consul John Parrott at Mazatlan to send a warship to Monterey.
Whether acting on secret orders received from the United States State Department or on his own initiative, Frémont suddenly retraced his steps and set up headquarters at Marysville Buttes in the Sierra foothills. From here a party of about a dozen Yankee hunters and trappers—in command of Ezekiel Merritt, a settler from Rancho Barranca Colorado (Red Bluff)—was ordered by Fremont to seize 170 horses being taken from Sonoma to Santa Clara by a party of Castro's men. The captured animals having been delivered to Fremont's new camp on the Bear River, Merritt's party of 20 marauders crossed the hills into Napa Valley, where they were joined by 12 or 13 recruits.
At daybreak on June 14, General Mariano G. Vallejo in his house at Sonoma was roused without warning by this little band of men and called upon to surrender. Somewhat puzzled, but courteous as always, he invited them in. On being informed that they were acting under Fremont's orders, he proceeded to wine and dine his callers to the point of stupor while terms of surrender were being discussed. At length the captors were able to agree on a declaration to which three of them put their names—Ezekial Merritt, Robert Semple, and William Fallon. They presented it to Vallejo: “We, the undersigned having resolved to establish a government upon republican principles, in connection with others of our fellow-citizens, and having taken up arms to support it, we have taken three Mexican officers as prisoners: Gen. M. G. Vallejo, Lieut. Col. Victor Prudhon and Capt. Salvador Vallejo.” But dissension then broke the ranks of the insurrectionists, frightened by the magnitude of their exploit. William B. Ide, a Yankee settler with the gift of oratory, saved the day. Cried he: “I will lay my bones here before I will take upon myself the ignominy of commencing an honorable work and then flee like cowards, like thieves, when no enemy is in sight. In vain will you say you had honorable motives. Who will believe it? Flee this day, and the longest life cannot wear out your disgrace!… We are robbers, or we must be conquerors!”
Taking possession of the pueblo without opposition, the rebels impatiently hauled down the Mexican flag. It occurred to them that a new flag was needed to replace it. On a piece of homespun to which was attached a strip of red flannel they painted a red star and the crude figure of a grizzly bear. “My countrymen,” orated Lieutenant Henry L. Ford as the new standard was hoisted up the flagpole, “we have taken upon ourselves a damned big contract.” But the insurgents’ chosen leader, William B. Ide, who promptly dubbed himself “Commander-in-chief” and later “President of the California Republic,” was undaunted. He invited “all peaceable and good citizens of California…to repair to my camp at Sonoma, without delay, to assist us in establishing and perpetuating a Republican government, which shall secure to all civil and religious liberty, which shall encourage virtue and literature; which shall leave unshackled by fetters, agriculture, commerce and manufactures.”
Though Frémont would admit no direct responsibility for the “Bear Flag” rebellion, he ordered the arrest of Jacob Leese, Vallejo's brother-in-law, because he was a “bad man”; and according to Leese's account, he also threatened to hang Sutter for demanding that consideration be shown a man of Vallejo's pro-American sympathies. It was generally assumed, by both Yankee settlers and Californios in the Bay region, that Frémont was in command of a movement to seize the territory.
General Castro, learning of the affair at Sonoma, sent a force of 50 or 60 men under Joaquin de la Torre to attack the “Bears.” Marching northward from San Rafael, De la Torre's contingent was joined by Juan Padilla's roving bandits. On the morning of June 24, 1846, the Californios were attacked at the Olompali Rancho near Petaluma by 17 or 18 men under Lieutenant Henry L. Ford. After a charge in which one of De la Torre's men was killed and several wounded by Ford's riflemen, the Californios retired and the Americans returned to Sonoma.
Until this first battle of the war Fremont had taken no open part in the events which his presence doubtless had precipitated. Now, however, as he says in his Memoirs, “I have decided that it was for me to govern events rather than to be governed by them. I represent the Army and the Flag of the United States.” Furthermore he realized that “at last the time had come when England must not get a foothold; that we must be first. I was to act, discreetly but positively.” And act he did, though neither he nor his Mexican opponents were as yet aware that their respective countries were already at war below the Rio Grande.
Arriving at Sonoma on June 25, Frémont assumed command of the Bears and with a combined force of 130 men marched to meet De la Torre's detachment at San Rafael. Here occurred an incident which ever since has blemished Frémont's reputation. This was the murder of three innocent Californios—the twin sons of Yerba Buena's first alcalde, Francisco de Haro, and old Don Jose Berryesa, father of the alcalde of Sonoma who was then among Fremont's prisoners at Sutter's Fort. On being informed by Kit Carson that these three were about to land from a boat at Point San Pedro, Fremont is reported to have said: “I have no room for prisoners.” Kit Carson, G. P. Swift, and one of Frémont's trappers shot down the three unarmed men.
Outnumbered and badly armed, De la Torre's forces fled across the Bay to join Jose Castro's at Santa Clara. Following Fremont's raid on the old Castillo de San Joaquin, Dr. Robert Semple, participant in the Bear Flag affair at Sonoma, led ten men on a foray into Yerba Buena which captured Robert Ridley, ex-factor of the local Hudson's Bay Company post.
After thus putting down all military resistance of the Californios in the Bay region Fremont returned to Sonoma to declare the independence of California and place the country under martial law for the duration of the conflict. While continuing “in pursuit of Castro” in the valley of the Sacramento (actually Castro already had begun his retreat southward from Santa Clara), Fremont received news that the United States naval commander on the Pacific Coast, Commodore John D. Sloat, had raised the American flag at Monterey and had ordered the U.S.S. Portsmouth to do likewise at Yerba Buena. Thenceforth the Bay region heard only distant rumblings as the Yankee invasion progressed southward with mild skirmishes in the Salinas Valley, to end at last in a decisive victory for the Americans at San Gabriel, January 8-9, 1847.
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, February 2, 1848, gave California to the United States. The Bay region's Bear Flag war was only an incident in the hasty transfer of a vast territory from one nation to another. But it marked the beginning of a new era, and the end of an old one. And Jose Castro himself, comandante-general of the forces of the north in the struggle of the Californios against the Yankee invaders, foresaw in some degree what that new era would be like when he told an assembly at Monterey: “These Americans are so contriving that some day they will build ladders to touch the sky, and once in the heavens they will change the whole face of the universe and even the color of the stars.”