Chapter Nine, Imperfect Union

Chapter Nine

I AM NOT GOING TO LET YOU WRITE ANYTHING BUT YOUR NAME

Lieutenant Colonel and Jessie B. Frémont, May–July 1846

California and Washington, D.C.

The next morning the expedition started for California, fighting off small groups of Klamaths as they went. The men descended into the Sacramento Valley, passing the snowy bulk of Mount Shasta and settling at the same rancho from which John had written Jessie a few weeks earlier. He was well north of Sutter’s Fort and the Mexican outpost at Sonoma, so he had time to think before the California authorities learned of his presence. His thoughts were grim. Gillespie’s messages had suggested that his help was wanted in California, but it wasn’t clear what he should do. He doubted his small force could accomplish much in a country so large. He’d recently written a Californian to say that in case of war, “I shall be outnumbered ten to one and be compelled to make good my retreat.” Now he wrote to Senator Benton suggesting he did not plan to stay in California long. “I have but a faint hope that this note will reach you before I do,” he said. “I shall now proceed directly homewards [and will] arrive at the frontier . . . late in September.” He sent this letter eastward, apparently in the hands of Sagundai. The Delaware leader wanted to return home, and volunteered to carry the letter across two thousand miles of mountains and deserts alone. Yet after the horseman rode out of sight in the direction of the Sierra Nevada, John himself made no move to leave California as he had just said he would. His letter to Benton seemed instead to express his own bafflement. He told a Californian he faced “perplexing complications.” He didn’t know how to influence California or keep it out of European hands. He began a period of indecision, like the two weeks or so he’d spent wandering the Great Basin in the winter of 1844 before acknowledging he must cross the Sierra Nevada to survive. He shifted camp a bit southward, near a mountain range called Sutter Buttes, and awaited news.

A courier arrived, carrying a parcel from Thomas Larkin, the consul on the coast. The parcel did not contain what John most wanted—any information that would guide his course—though Larkin’s cover letter did include a tantalizing reference to the instructions both men had received through Lieutenant Gillespie. “You are aware,” Larkin said, “that great changes are about to take place in a country we are both acquainted with. To aid this, I am giving up business, holding myself in readiness for the times to come.” To pass the time until the change, Larkin also sent news from home. He was a collector of eastern newspapers; whenever a ship arrived, he worked his way through the crew asking after any papers the crew might have, no matter how out of date. Now he shared with the army captain: “I have been keeping some . . . papers . . . but cannot resist the opportunity of sending them to you,” he wrote. One contained a “pretty” article that might be suitable for “your published Books of Travels.” This may have been an inspiring biographical sketch of Captain Frémont, written by an anonymous author, which had been spreading from newspaper to newspaper across the country. The story said John was “a native of South Carolina, the son of a widow, and the architect of his own fortunes.” He had risen to fame from a hardscrabble youth. He was married to a senator’s daughter, but succeeded through his own exertions. He was “light and slender in his person, very youthful in appearance, and wholly different from what would be looked for in the leader of such extended and adventurous expeditions . . . a modest looking youth, almost feminine in the delicacy of his person and features.” The writer could have been someone who consulted Jessie for information or even Jessie herself; it had been written in Washington, where Jessie was.

An older article in Larkin’s bundle told of Jessie. One of her cousins had married the governor of Maryland and then became involved in a messy divorce; “Mrs. Frémont and two sisters attended the court as witnesses.” Then there was an article about Indians visiting Senator Benton—a group of Potawatomi, who had once lived near the Great Lakes but had been pushed across the Mississippi. In Washington they paid their respects to the West’s leading senator, who welcomed them into his home. They called him a friend, and he solemnly said that he would “always endeavor to do them justice.” Refreshments were served, and the conversation widened to include “the members of Col. Benton’s family—among whom, we are tempted to remark, was the accomplished lady of a gallant young officer, who has already, by his distinguished service to the government in the wilds between the Missouri and Pacific, achieved for himself a reputation that will be as lasting as it is enviable.” According to the version of the article that Larkin had obtained, the natives also tried to meet three-year-old Lily, but “the little one declined an introduction.” All these things John read about while recovering from his recent Indian wars.

AS JOHN READ THESE PAPERS in the late spring of 1846, Jessie was twenty-eight hundred miles away in Washington, D.C. She was living with Lily amid the polished English furniture in the Benton house on C Street. Larkin’s newspapers had given accurate, if outdated, information about her life. The messy divorce had actually taken place in 1844: Jessie’s teenage cousin was married to the much older governor, who publicly accused her of infidelity, a charge so destructive to a woman’s reputation that her family and friends, including the Bentons, helped her sue for libel and staged a public event testifying to her virtue. The meeting with Indians had taken place more recently, in late 1845. They were part of a stream of visitors who paid homage to her father, who remained an oversize figure after a quarter century in the Senate, his movements followed in the papers, his counsel sought at times by the president. In the spring of 1846 his decades-old dream of taking possession of Oregon was becoming reality. President Polk had held for a time to the expansionist demand for all of Oregon (“Fifty-four forty or fight!”), but renewed diplomatic efforts with Britain produced a treaty that split the territory, mostly along the 49th parallel that served elsewhere as the dividing line between the United States and Canada. The Oregon settlers had strengthened the US claim to the southern areas centering on the Columbia River; the British took the Fraser River to the north. In June 1846, Thomas Hart Benton was one of the senators who went into executive session, clearing the galleries so they could privately debate and approve the treaty.

Washington was about to become the capital of a transcontinental nation with a confirmed Pacific coast. The growing capital was rapidly approaching fifty thousand residents, though it still did not impress visitors, for it was designed to be larger and grander than it yet was. Its broad angled avenues allowed magnificent vistas of the city, but in comparison with European capitals there was not much of a city to see. Still, its leading citizens were members of a globalized community with connections to the wider world. The Bentons had purchased their house from an early member of the global elite, who traveled between Washington, Boston, and London. A short walk east of the house was the railway station, where trains led to cities in the northeast; a short walk west, at the National Hotel, was the new office of the Morse telegraph company, which had now strung its wires all the way to Philadelphia and New York. At least half a dozen newspapers offered stories from home and abroad, and advertised a “magnificent collection of valuable European oil paintings” that was offered at auction in June 1846. Sophisticated buyers could also bid on “a very handsome variety of Chinese articles,” recently imported and “beautifully ornamented,” including “handsome writing desks,” tea caddies, and “bamboo book-cases and couches.”

Jessie had little time for shopping; she was absorbed in family difficulties. Her mother’s health had grown worse, and often Mrs. Benton seemed disoriented. Once, when Senator Benton was entertaining guests at home, his wife appeared before them less than fully dressed. The family had been told by doctors that it would help Mrs. Benton if they appeared cheerful around her, and they strained to keep up the facade. By the spring, Jessie thought, “the disease seems to have expended itself, and she is quite well again.” But Jessie could be forgiven for feeling alone. On her fourth wedding anniversary in October 1845, she could only guess where her spouse was. Lily turned three in November. Then Jessie turned twenty-two on May 31, 1846. Visitors to the Benton home naturally inquired after her famous husband, and newspapers asked for information about him; she could give biographical details, as she may have for that laudatory profile, but she struggled as much as anyone for up-to-date news.

In the spring of 1846 she began receiving the first word since St. Louis. Newspapers were given a report via Mazatlán, Mexico, that Captain Frémont had appeared in California, having “discovered a good wagon road to Oregon, which is much shorter than any heretofore travelled.” So intently did the country follow his progress that this brief item was reprinted in at least a dozen papers. A few days later came an update reprinted in more than forty newspapers: “Fremont at Monterey.” Now she was living the story of his California exploits, in the order that they happened and several months behind. In May she received a letter from her husband—the one he had written by the vice-consul’s fire at San Francisco Bay in January (“I am going now on business to see some gentlemen on the coast”). She arranged for its publication, confidently contacting newspaper offices with a scoop. The letter was reprinted in two Washington papers on May 15 and spread across the country. On May 26 a Washington paper published further news: General Castro’s demand in early March that John leave California. “We have not the least apprehension for Captain Frémont,” the writer cheerfully concluded. His wife could be forgiven if she did not feel the same. But the very next day a letter arrived from Thomas Larkin, reporting her husband’s apparently safe retreat.

In mid-June she thought she found a way to communicate with him. A man appeared at the Benton house: James Wiley Magoffin, a Kentuckian who did business in New Mexico. While visiting Washington he met Senator Benton, and Jessie saw an opportunity. When he next went west toward New Mexico, would he take a letter to John, leaving it at Bent’s Fort along the way? Magoffin said he would. If John rode home that summer as expected, he would stop at Bent’s Fort and discover the letter.

Washington City June 18 1846.

A Mr. Magoffin says he will be at Bent’s Fort a month from tomorrow, and that he will leave [this] letter for you. . . . I hope that as I write, you are rapidly nearing home, and that in early September there will be an end to our anxieties. In your dear letter you tell me that le bon temps viendra [the good time will come], and my faith in you is such that I believe it will come: and it will come to all you love, for during your long absence God has been good to us and kept in health your mother & all you love best.

She offered him the love of a spouse and the shrewdness of a public relations counsel. “I had to publish almost all your letter,” she reported, “and like everything you write it has been reprinted all over the country.” She did not comment on a peculiar feature of his letter—that so much was suitable for publication, with little private sentiment directed to her alone. It was less a love letter than a report to a trusted partner. To be sure, she was proud to be his trusted partner, and proud of him. She had heard that President Polk was about to approve another promotion for the famous explorer—he had been a second lieutenant, then a first lieutenant, then a captain, and now would skip past the next rank, major, to become a lieutenant colonel. “I am sorry,” she said, “that I could not be the first to call you Colonel.” She said he was “the most talked of and admired Lieut. Col. in the army,” and that “almost all the old officers came to congratulate me on it.” She insisted that nepotism had nothing to do with the promotion: “It was certainly a free will offering of the President’s, neither father nor I nor anyone for us having asked or said we would like it.”

There was in this line a hint that Mrs. Frémont was beginning to see a role for herself as a political operative. By denying that she had lobbied for him, she indicated that she could lobby for him. Although she was young and a woman, whose assigned sphere did not include politics, she was an “accomplished lady” with an emerging public profile, who knew the top players throughout Congress, the administration, and the army. Some, like James Buchanan, were family friends who had known her all her life. Others, like Senator John Adams Dix of New York, had arrived in the city in recent years to discover a self-possessed, well-informed, and well-connected young woman who sat in on her father’s meetings with them and seemed to be as much a part of Washington’s landscape as the green copper Capitol dome.

She told her husband how the public was responding to the combined report of his past two expeditions, the masterpiece they had written together. “Its popularity has astonished even me, your most confirmed & oldest worshiper.” People compared it to Robinson Crusoe: just as Daniel Defoe’s tale of a man shipwrecked on a Caribbean island was “the most natural and interesting fiction of travel, so Frémont’s report is the most romantically truthful.” A British lord from the Royal Geographical Society wrote to say that he was preparing a paper on the report. It was even providing John with his only connection to his three-and-a-half-year-old daughter:

Lily has it read to her . . . as a reward for good behavior. She asked [the mapmaker Charles] Preuss the other day if it was true that he caught ants on his hands and eat them—he was so much amazed that he could not answer her, & she said, “I read it in papa’s lepote [report]; it was when you were lost in California.”

Editors were writing Jessie for his “biography and likeness.” In spite of the evidence that she may have given them information, she claimed she had not yet done so; “I had no orders from you.”

You know it would look odd to leave out your age, & you never told me how old you were yet. How old are you? You might tell me now that I am a Col.’s wife—won’t you, old papa? Poor papa, it made tears come to find you had begun to turn gray. You must have suffered much and been very anxious.

She was thinking that when he returned, she would help him rest by taking a larger role in his next report: “I am not going to let you write anything but your name when you get home.”

Jessie said John’s mother had sent a daguerreotype of her son. Jessie hung it over her bed, where it served as her “guardian angel.” Even when she was not gazing upon his likeness, he flashed into her head, as when she started reading a history of the Spanish colonization of North America. “I was by myself, Lily asleep, and reading by our lamp, when I came to De Soto’s search for the fountain of youth. I stopped, for it seemed as if pleasant old days had returned; and then I remembered so well what you once wrote to me that I could not help bursting into tears.”

Do you remember, darling? It was soon after we were married, & you wrote me, “Fear not for our happiness; if the hope for it be not something wilder than the Spaniards’ search for the fountain in Florida, we will find it yet.” I remembered it word for word, although it was so long since I read it. Dear, dear husband, you do not know how proud & grateful I am that you love me. We have found the fountain of eternal youth for love, & I believe there are few others who can say so. I try very hard to be worthy of your love.

She kept writing until she could write no more.

Mr. Magoffin has come for the letter & I must stop. I have not had so much pleasure in a very great while as today. . . . Farewell, dear, dear husband. In a few months we shall not know what sorrow means. At least, I humbly hope & pray so. Your own affectionate and devoted wife,

Jessie B. Frémont

She gave the letter, this piece of her heart, to the traveler Magoffin, who packed it away for the long journey to Bent’s Fort. Jessie had no way of knowing that by the time she sent the letter her husband had changed his plans, and would not be traveling to Bent’s Fort that summer after all.

JOHN’S INACTION IN CALIFORNIA could not last. Though still without a strategy, he had already set events in motion. Because he had drifted down to the coast in February with a hazy notion to find real estate, he had prompted General Castro to order his expulsion. Although the Americans slipped away, their temporary defiance made it hard for Castro and other officials to let the matter drop. They had to take additional measures for California’s security. On April 11, officials met in Monterey to counter “the imminent risk of invasion founded on the extravagant design of an American Captain of the United States Army, Mr. N. [sic] Frémont.” Those in attendance included the prefect of Monterey, as well as General Castro and General Vallejo, the commander of the northern frontier. They agreed that Castro would command a military response, and moved to cut off John’s most obvious potential source of support. On April 30 they issued a declaration targeting American settlers, proclaiming that “a multitude of foreigners” had come to California, “abusing our local circumstances,” and had become “owners of real property, this being a right belonging only to citizens.” If foreign landowners were “not naturalized” as citizens, their ownership should be declared “null and void,” and they were subject to expulsion from the country “whenever the Government may find it convenient.”

The threat to expel foreigners was not enforced. The authorities were not likely to “find it convenient,” for expulsion was politically hard and the government was weak and divided. Even if the government had been strong, Generals Vallejo and Castro were well disposed toward the Americans. The wording of their proclamation suggested its true purpose was not expelling Americans, merely pressing them to pledge allegiance to the government—but the American settlers missed the nuances. One, a New Englander named William B. Ide, later recalled the proclamation as a death threat, which supposedly said that “all foreigners” who had arrived within the last year must “leave the country, and their property and beasts of burden, without taking arms, on pain of death.” Ide seemed baffled that the “naturally humane and generous” General Castro would have issued such a cruel edict—which, of course, he had not.

Ide was a pivotal actor in what happened next. He was a Massachusetts-born carpenter and teacher, a somber man of fifty with a line of whiskers on his chin, and a Mormon. He had arrived in California just two months earlier than John had, crossing the Sierra Nevada with a party of settlers in October 1845. He worked for a few months on the same northern California rancho where John stopped on his way to and from Oregon in early 1846. That was the full extent of his connection to California; he had no claim to it except his long journey to get there. But just as Captain Frémont reached California and instantly began naming landmarks, complaining to the authorities, and shopping for beachfront property, Ide already viewed California as his own. This was not surprising, given the ideas afoot in his country (“This country appears to have been created on a magnificent plan,” “Westward the star of empire takes its way,” “the manifest purpose of Providence”). When he heard rumors of a Mexican crackdown, he did not think of complying with the authorities’ demands and looked for protection to the US Army captain who was camping in the region.

Ide was encouraged to do so: Captain Frémont, also fearing a Mexican attack, had authorized his former employee Neal and other settlers to spread the word that Americans should band together for “their common safety” and that “my camp, wherever it might be, was appointed the place of meeting.” These settlers were likely the authors of a letter that a messenger carried through the Sacramento Valley. Ide saw it on June 8, 1846. It falsely claimed that “a large body of Spaniards on horseback” were on their way up the Sacramento, burning crops and houses as they went, and that “Capt. Fremont invites every freeman in the valley to come to his camp” to develop a plan of action.

When Ide visited Captain Frémont at his tent, however, he was disappointed. The army officer still did not think he could hold out against the California authorities and intended to avoid involving himself directly in conflict so that the United States would not be implicated. According to Ide, John proposed a harebrained scheme in which the settlers would rise up to strike some blow against the Mexicans and then flee California, with John escorting them back to the United States. John never recorded making any such proposal, and Ide’s memory was not reliable, but the notion fit John’s written statements that he intended to retreat to the United States, and it contributed to a mystery: What was the army officer up to? What was his intent? If he believed, as he said later, that he was “required” to do what he could “to promote the object of the President” to “take California,” why was he planning to leave? If he believed that he should not involve himself in a war with local authorities, why was he encouraging settlers to join him for their common defense? Was he covertly leading the settlers to rise up or merely stirring the pot? Was he lying about his plans to leave in order to fool Mexican authorities, who might intercept his letters? Or was he lying long afterward, when he forgot that he had ever planned to leave and talked instead of his duty to remain? The simplest explanation is the most likely: the historical record is confusing because John Charles Frémont was confused. He was exhausted after thousands of miles in the saddle. He lacked clear instructions from home. He lacked the information he most needed, whether war had started between Mexico and the United States. He also lacked reliable information about what the Mexicans were doing. He had long ago absorbed Senator Benton’s understanding of the strategic power of American settlers to take control of a desired piece of land, but he was not a great strategic thinker. Thus he sent mixed signals, not knowing what to do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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