1540–1846
On May 13, 1846, the day that the United States Congress recognized a state of war with Mexico, President James Polk, it will be recalled, took a little-noticed but far-reaching action, directing Secretary of War William Marcy to send Colonel Stephen W. Kearny, 1st Dragoons, to occupy the Mexican city of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Polk did not anticipate much difficulty in subduing the local population. Therefore, Kearny was to continue on to California if he thought he could do so before the snows fell in the mountains. This move Polk set in motion with an eye to the peace treaty he expected to sign with Mexico sometime in the future.
The dispatch of a force to the West was not a drastic action. Given the small size of Kearny’s force, this episode is nearly lost in the current of the great westward movements of American settlers. Indeed, in hindsight it seems likely that the United States would have gained control of the West without fighting for it as the population expansion to the Pacific Ocean had already begun. In 1843, the first of the “great migrations” to Oregon had occurred, followed by an even greater surge in 1845. As historian Bernard DeVoto has remarked, “… those years made Oregon American soil no matter what might be said in Congress or Downing Street.”1 The surge was delayed in California and New Mexico, but by 1846 it was beginning.
The fever to take California had now assumed a sort of mystical justification, born partly out of romance, partly out of an idealistic desire to share superior American institutions with those less favored, and partly out of a feeling of incompleteness. Even those like Benton, who disliked infringing on Mexican rights, still seemed to feel that “providence” called for the United States to spread westward to the Pacific.*
Manifest Destiny, in practical terms, was far from unrealistic, for the territories the United States coveted were nearly empty, and the people living in Texas, New Mexico, and California were already enjoying a state of semiautonomy within the republic of Mexico. They constituted the portion of the old Spanish Empire where “Spain’s imperial energy had faltered and run down.… Here it began to ebb back.”2
To the American people these lands were called the Great American Desert, only waiting to be filled by an expanding United States.
In 1846 Texas claimed all the land to the north and east of the Rio Grande, territories that even included the city of Santa Fe itself. West of that boundary, generally north of El Paso, Texas, and south of Oregon, was territory claimed by Mexico, theoretically divided into two states, Upper California and New Mexico. The boundary between the two was indeterminate, at least to American mapmakers,3 though California was generally supposed to extend eastward to a line within a hundred miles of the Rio Grande, and to include the present American states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of Wyoming and Colorado.4 In reality, the settled portions of both New Mexico and California were narrow, restricted strips, in New Mexico’s case running along the Rio Grande, and in California’s along the Pacific Coast. Outside these strips the surrounding territories were occupied only by Indians, separate from and almost unaffected by these former Spanish colonies.
Of the two, New Mexico had been founded earlier. Coronado’s expedition of 1540 in that region had led to no permanent settlements, but before the turn of the sixteenth century, Don Juan de Oñate had established a colony of four hundred men, with a number of women and children, on a site near present-day El Paso, Texas. From there New Spain had sent out exploring expeditions that in turn established a number of smaller missions. The Indians were generally docile, and by 1680 an estimated 2,400 Mexicans were living in various settlements in New Mexico.5 After an Indian rebellion that caused a gap in the occupation, New Spain reestablished her settlements, still surrounded by the Navajos, Utes, Apaches, and Comanches. By 1800 the population of New Mexico had grown to about thirty thousand, of whom ten thousand were pure-blooded Indians. This number grew to about forty thousand by 1825.6
Before Mexican independence in 1821 Spain had prohibited any intercourse between New Mexico and the United States. This was an easy policy to enforce on the Mexicans because of the nearly nonexistent road system. Most people were forced to remain close to home anyway. But Spain exerted the same restrictions on Americans as well. Nearly all who ventured into the forbidden region were arrested. Some, like Lieutenant Zebulon Pike (in 1807), were treated decently and released. Others, like Sylvester Pattie (in 1830), died in captivity.
After Mexican independence, however, the border restrictions were relaxed, and soon trade between the United States and Mexico began to spring up. American traders from St. Louis began traveling the route to Santa Fe, and by 1825 the route along the Arkansas River to Santa Fe, by then called the Santa Fe Trail, was marked and smoothed out. The Bent brothers, William and Charles, established Bent’s Fort, an important way station located near present-day Animas, Colorado, and set up a roaring business of supplying and refitting caravans as they passed along the way. Traders from Missouri delivered hardware, cutlery, hats, shirts, calico, linen, shawls, and hose for sale at 600 percent profit—a total of thirty thousand dollars from one caravan load. At Santa Fe they would pick up gold and beaver skins.7
Santa Fe was an unimpressive town. It was described as a “prairie-dog capital … a collection of brick kilns, a dry-land gathering of Mississippi flatboats.” The Palace of the Governors came in for more scorn, described as a “single-story four-hundred-foot straggle of mud along the north side of the plaza, its portico held up by pillars of rough-hewn tree trunks and its doors so low that a tall Missourian had to stoop to enter.”8 The streets were full of donkeys and oxen, the latter drawing two-wheeled carts, Indians, peons, trappers, and teamsters. But in the evening the square reflected the red light of bonfires while men stood around and warmed the seats of their pants as they listened to fiddles and guitars. As at Taos, so the visitors reported, the main amusements seemed to be drinking, fornicating, and gambling. So Santa Fe appeared to the first American traders.9
From Santa Fe the caravans from Missouri continued southward on the Camino Real (Royal Highway) to the trading center of Chihuahua. Both the Santa Fe Trail and the Camino Real were well marked, but water and forage were scarce; and the fierce Indian tribes killed and plundered any group of travelers lacking force to resist them. To proceed in relative safety a traveler or messenger planning to go from Missouri to Santa Fe or Chihuahua would have to accommodate to the schedule of the next escort.
The governor of New Mexico in 1846 was one Manuel Armijo, a man of great power who reportedly harbored ambitions to emulate Texas and make New Mexico independent.”10 A man of imposing size and energy, Armijo was shrewd, greedy, and cruel. On the side he was a businessman, and sent his own caravans over the Santa Fe Trail to Missouri. Armijo was reportedly born poor and had achieved his political start by his proficiency in avoiding punishment for sheep stealing.11 Armijo had been governor off and on since 1837, and by 1846 the Armijo family had accumulated most of the lands around Abuquerque, about sixty miles southwest.
In 1841 Armijo chanced on a golden opportunity to enhance his position. The new Republic of Texas had decided to enforce its claim to lands extending to the northern reaches of the Rio Grande, land that included Santa Fe itself. Having been independent for over four years, the Texans decided to send an expedition, thinly disguised as an escort for merchants, to that town as their military objective. Unfortunately for them, the planners had placed too much stock in reports of New Mexican dissatisfaction with Mexico City, and the Santa Fe expedition was woefully inadequate, comprising only 270 volunteers.
Everything went wrong for the expedition, and physical deprivation, not New Mexican guns, destroyed it. Some members of the expedition surrendered at the town of Anton Chico, and another at Laguna Colarada. Armijo, gloating, officially described the nearly bloodless surrenders as “great victories.” Bells celebrated Armijo’s victory in Mexico City, and speeches lavished praises on him and also on the recently reinstalled Santa Anna. The Texan prisoners were treated with great cruelty at Santa Fe, though their fortunes improved as they were shipped south of the Rio Grande, and eventually most of them made it home.
The fortuitous circumstances surrounding the destruction of the Texas expedition served to reinforce Armijo’s conviction that “it is better to be thought brave than to be so.”12
Conditions prevailing in the Mexican state of Upper California were similar in most respects to those in New Mexico. The main difference lay in how these states were perceived by the American people. Although there was more interest in California than in New Mexico, the public knew less about it. As a cosmopolitan area on the ocean, California carried a certain mystique, but its allure resembled that of the Orient, not of a territory on the same landmass as the United States.
Americans had been arriving on the West Coast for many years, alone or in small groups, most of them trappers or deserters from the great whaling fleet that periodically put into port at Monterey.† Most of them fit into the California scene. For a long time the emigrants arrived intending to leave or to become Californios themselves.
Political leaders in the United States, on the other hand, had long coveted the region. President John Quincy Adams had advocated its acquisition at one time, and Andrew Jackson, in 1835, had offered $5 million to Mexico to purchase territory north of a line that ran between Monterey and San Francisco Bay.‡ The offer was spurned, but in the same year Richard Henry Dana made his trip to the region as a seaman and in 1840 his acclaimed book Two Years Before the Mast whetted the public interest in that region. Soon newspapers began to print reports of a bountiful land, its hills full of gold. At the same time, they reported evidence of British machinations to seize California and to restrict the United States to the Eastern seaboard. Nevertheless, although Americans were stirred by tales of wonderful California, they still knew nothing of its topography, rivers, ports, or towns—in contrast to their knowledge of the facts regarding both New Mexico and Oregon. The West Coast was just too far away.
The population density of California in 1846 came to only one person per twenty-six square miles. About twenty-five thousand people inhabited the entire area, and of these only some ten thousand were whites. Some five thousand of the others were “semicivilized” Indians, who had been baptized by the missions, and another ten thousand were complete savages. The capital of California, Ciudad de Los Angeles, was an adobe pueblo of only fifteen hundred people;§ the region around San Francisco Bay was inhabited by a few people in a group of buildings known as Yerba Buena, founded in 1836. Other settlements existed, most notably at Monterey, San Pedro, and San Diego, but all were trading posts, mere clusters of small buildings.
The native people of California—the Californios—had long since ceased to hold any strong ties with Mexico City, and the political link between the regions has been described as “gossamer.”13 Racially and culturally, the Mexicans and Californios were the same, but time, distance, and circumstance had pulled them so far apart emotionally that Mexicans from home had more difficulty than even Americans in being accepted in California.14 The most critical of the cultural ties between Mexico and California had been cut in 1834, when Acting President Valentín Gómez Farías had “secularized” the twenty-one missions of the Catholic Church. Those missions had constituted one leg of the Spanish plan for regional settlement, along with the presidios, or military garrisons, and the pueblos, or civil towns, where colonists were granted free land. Of the three types of installations, the missions had been by far the most important, for they had become the granaries and the educational, religious and cultural centers for all the Indians who lived in areas surrounding them. Several cities, such as San Luis Obispo, Sonoma, San Juan Batista, and San Juan Capistrano, had grown up around them. The missions performed social functions that the soldiers of the presidios had viewed with disdain. Thus, when the Goméz Farías secularization deprived the missions of their lay functions, the Indian populations around them declined from thirty thousand to ten thousand in just ten years.15
As of early 1846, by dint of four separate rebellions in a single decade (the latest in 1844), California had achieved the status of a semiautonomous province of Mexico. Theoretically it was administered by a civil governor named Pío Pico, in Los Angeles. But Pico’s power was limited by the great distances that lay between settlements and by the lack of means at his disposal to enforce the laws. As a result, one General José María Castro, a man described as “utterly deficient in strength and steadiness of purpose,” held sway in the north. At Monterey he gathered a group of followers unacquainted with “discipline, sobriety, and order.”16 Ordinarily, Castro and Pico might have gotten along in their two separate fiefdoms were it not for the fact that Monterey was the only California port that traded with the outside world. All of the revenue from duties was collected there at Monterey, and Castro simply pocketed most of the eighty thousand to one hundred thousand dollars that came in yearly. Pico, four hundred miles away, was powerless to bring Castro to terms.17 To the outside world, California was virtually ungoverned, the “derelict on the Pacific.”
The Californios, as a group, exhibited the Mexican proclivity to be easygoing, fun-loving, and extraordinarily hospitable.‖ It was said that, along with the all-night fandango, the California man loved his horse above all else, and he was, truly, an unparalleled horseman. But being such an individualist, the Californio was not a good civic participant. He was not overly concerned as to who ruled him, so long as his own rights and religion were not disturbed.
The result was that the native Californios, though they represented the largest single group of people in the state, were not the most conspicuous. By 1846 about twelve hundred “foreigners” had arrived on the scene, representing nearly every nation.a And of these the largest group was the Americans. Most of these Yankees, some eight hundred, were concentrated in the Sacramento Valley, as that was the region first reached by the new settlers after crossing the mountains from the east. The Sacramento Valley was dominated by an outpost named Sutter’s Fort, owned by a Swiss immigrant of that name. John A. Sutter enjoyed a privileged but precarious position: he was host to the new American settlers but at the same time he was beholden to the Californio government for his continued possession of fifty thousand acres on the Sacramento River. In public Sutter held an official governmental position with, as he boasted, “the power of life and death over everyone in his district.”18 He survived in this balancing act by playing up to both sides. When settlers arrived, he provided for their needs—for a price, of course—and then reported their activities to Castro.19 On that basis, Sutter’s Fort prospered, and by 1844 it boasted fifteen-foot walls and a dozen cannon.20
With an estimated 350 new American settlers arriving at Sutter’s Fort per year—and with the disaffection of the local people from Mexico City—it was only natural that most Americans, in California and Washington alike, expected the region to gravitate into the Union without the need for bloodshed. Prominent among this group was Thomas O. Larkin. This New Englander, of limited education, had come to this “jumping off place of the world” in 1832 to seek his fortune.21 He had done well, and in a short time he had become a leading trader in Monterey and had married a prominent local girl. A figure in the community, Larkin had served as an interpreter and mediator when Commodore H. Catesby Jones had precipitately—and mistakenly—seized Monterey in 1842. That incident had raised Larkin’s stature in the eyes of the State Department in Washington, and in 1843 he was appointed United States consul in Monterey. As consul, Larkin was a keen and articulate observer, and his reports were the most reliable sources of information that Washington had available.b He was personally generous, and his hospitality was described as “munificent.”22 So influential was he that when a responsible scholar later wrote of the competition between France, Britain, and the United States, he noted, “In this contest, the United States had two weighty advantages: Larkin, its resourceful consul at Monterey, and the preponderance of its citizens among the foreigners in the territory.”23
Larkin’s status as United States consul did nothing to interfere with his activities as a merchant; in fact, the two activities supplemented each other. And politically he found no conflict between his affection for California and his desire to see that region affiliated with the United States.
Of like mind was a prominent Californio merchant and dispenser of credit in Sonoma, General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo. Vallejo, once nearly as powerful a figure as Castro, had withdrawn from public life, but as a Californio patriot he had independently concluded that California’s future interests lay not with Mexico but with the United States, and he had become known as America’s best friend in the region.24 Vallejo and Larkin, together with Sutter, were therefore convinced that everyone’s best interest—theirs and California’s—would be served if the United States would allow California to gravitate peacefully into the Union.
“The pear,” Larkin wrote, “is near ripe for falling.”25
* A group called the Brook Farmers, a literary group located near Boston, wrote in their house organ, “There can be no doubt of the design being entertained by the leaders and instigators of this infamous business, to extend the “area of freedom” to the shores of California, by robbing Mexico of another large mass of her territory; and the people are prepared to execute it to the letter.… [It] is to be viewed as monstrously iniquitous, but after all it seems to be completing a more universal design of Providence.” DeVoto, The Year of Decision, pp. 9–10.
† Estimates placed that fleet as comprising 600 vessels and 17,000 men (Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine, January 1845, quoted in Justin Smith, The War with Mexico, vol. I, p. 525). It was based largely on Lahaina, in the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii). Before Mexican independence it was illegal, but one John Hudson is recorded as having bought a schooner from the Spainsh king as early as 1805 (interview with William Mason, Los Angeles, December 26, 1985).
‡ Hubert Bancroft, History of California, vol. Ill, p. 400. The Russians had an interest in the region, and it was said that the Russians feared American influence more than they did the Mexican.
§ Justin Smith, The War with Mexico, vol. I, p. 315. Alaska today has one person per 1.3 square miles, about twenty times as dense.
‖ “Though a quasi-war exists [in California], all the amenities of life, and liberty, are preserved; your person, life, and liberty, are as sacred at the hearth of a Californian as they would be at your own fireside. He will never betray you; the rights of hospitality, in his generous judgment, require him to peril his own life in defence of yours. He may fight you on the field, but in his family, you may dance with his daughters, and he himself will make the waltzing string.” Walter Colton, Three Years in California, pp. 17–18.
a One astute observer saw them as “the reckless Californian, the half-wild Indian, the roving trapper of the West, the lawless Mexican, the licentious Spaniard, the scolding Englishman, the absconding Frenchman, the luckless Irishman, the plodding German, the adventurous Mormon.” He added that all had come “with the expectation of finding but little work and less law.” Colton, p. 19.
b Bernard DeVoto, The Year of Decision, p. 20. In early 1846, for example, Larkin sent to Polk a remarkable 3,000-word extremely thorough assessment of the situation in California dealing with the past history of the region, its present condition, and even the prices of every commodity from gold to land to bullock hides.
