CHAPTER 20

Founding the Left Coast

Why is it that the coastal zone in northern California, Oregon, and Washington seems to have so much more in common with New England than it does with other parts of those states? From voting behavior to culture wars to foreign policy, why has the Left Coast found itself allied with Yankeedom—and at odds with its neighbors to the south and west—since its foundation?

The primary reason is that the majority of the Left Coast’s early colonists were Yankees who arrived by sea in the hopes of founding a second New England on the shores of the Pacific. And while they didn’t fully succeed in this mission—the Left Coast has always had fundamental temperamental differences from its eastern ally—they left a stamp of utopian idealism that put this young nation on a collision course with its neighbors in deferential El Norte and the libertarian Far West.

 

In the early nineteenth century the Pacific coast of North America was still largely under Native American control. Spain theoretically claimed all of what is now California, but for practical purposes, norteño influence began petering out to the north at Monterey, and ceased altogether at San Francisco. Britain and the United States had yet to resolve who controlled the Pacific Northwest, agreeing only that it would eventually be divided between them. On their maps there was just an enormous mass of land called the Oregon Territory, which encompassed what is now British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. Prior to this, the struggle in the region pitted New France against Yankeedom. The New French dominated the local staff of the Hudson’s Bay Company, the British fur trading conglomerate that was, in effect, the government of much of what is now western and northern Canada. On the ground, the New French manned most of the company’s fortified fur trading posts in the area, and when they retired, some settled down with their Native American wives in the familiar métis pattern. Until the 1830s their primary rivals were shipborne fur traders from New England, who made no attempt to set up permanent outposts.¹ For the next century or more, the Chinook Indians called all British people “King George Men” and referred to Americans simply as “Bostons.”²

As a result of this very long-distance fur trade, New Englanders had better intelligence and greater knowledge of the Pacific coast than anyone else in the United States. Not surprisingly, their intellectual and religious leaders soon added this new “wilderness” to the list of places in need of Yankee salvation. In the 1830s Lyman Beecher was calling on his followers to save the West from the cruel machinations of the Pope and his obedient Catholic immigrant followers. “The rapid influx of foreign emigrants, unacquainted with our institutions, unaccustomed to self-government, inaccessible to education . . . and easily embodied and wielded by sinister design,” he wrote, threatened “the safety of our republic.” The solution, Beecher argued, was to educate and assimilate the newcomers “under the full action of our schools and republican institutions.” Beecher, who was then training missionaries in Cincinnati, had German and Irish Catholic immigrants in the Great Lakes and upper Mississippi Valley foremost in his mind. But for those familiar with the Pacific, Beecher’s warnings were equally applicable to Catholic New French traders on the Columbia River or, soon thereafter, the norteños of California. That Franciscan missionaries were already schooling Indian children in San Jose only increased the urgency of the mission.³

This new Yankee “errand in the wilderness” got underway in fits and starts in the late 1820s. A delusional New Hampshire schoolmaster, Hall Jackson Kelley, tirelessly promoted an ambitious colonization scheme for the Pacific Northwest, a region he’d never seen. His elaborate plans for a civic and religious republic never got off the ground, but his marketing effort—he plastered posters across New England, published books, and petitioned Congress for aid—did inspire others. Jason Lee, a northern Methodist preacher from Vermont, traveled overland across the continent to found a mission near what is now Salem, Oregon, in 1834. Working first with Native Americans, Lee recruited teachers and settlers from New England and eventually added an institute that would become the first college in the western United States (now Willamette University). A Presbyterian missionary named Samuel Parker of Massachusetts spent much of 1835 and 1836 preaching and selecting future mission sites in the Oregon Territory; his book, The Far West, drew more Yankees to the territory, most of them clustering near Reverend Lee’s Willamette Valley mission in what is now Oregon State. In May 1843 Yankee settlers in the territory held a meeting at which they set up their own provisional government, drafted laws prohibiting slavery, and elected officers; three-quarters of those elected were from New England. The document would later form the basis for Oregon’s state constitution.⁴

While the Yankees dominated the political and intellectual scene, they were not to form a majority of the population. Within a few months of the creation of the provisional government, a wagon train arrived bearing over 700 new settlers, doubling the Willamette Valley’s non-Indian population. The vast majority of the newcomers were farmers from the Appalachian Midwest. As one historian put it, the Borderlanders “carried to Oregon an allegiance to . . . local sovereignty, grass-roots organization, an independent producer ethic and the ‘doctrine of the negative [i.e., weak] state.’ ” The Borderlanders tended to settle on farms in the countryside, leaving the towns and government to the Yankees. This settlement pattern continued throughout the 1840s and 1850s, leaving New England–born Yankees outnumbered fifteen to one but still in control of most civic institutions. ⁵

In Oregon, which split from what became British Columbia in 1846 and from Washington in 1853, the Yankees dominated the scene to a remarkable degree. Salem and Portland were founded by New Englanders, the latter named by a native of Portland, Maine, after winning a coin toss with a Bostonian. The state’s first and most influential newspaper, the Oregon Statesman, was founded, owned, and operated by Yankees, as was its rival, The Oregonian, which promoted a Beecher-like fear of Catholic immigrants. Yankees ran most of the public schools, colleges, and seminaries and dominated debate at the Constitutional Convention of 1857, which produced a document championing communities of independent family farmers and the very Yankee notion that individual interests must be subsumed for the common good. Six of the first eight state governors and six of the first eight U.S senators were Yankees from New England, New York, or the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania.⁶

North of the Columbia River, the Washington Territory was much more sparsely populated, the territorial dispute with Britain having discouraged potential settlers, who had no assurances that their land titles would be respected if the area changed sovereignty. Still, the cultural pattern was similar. Attracted by the lumber resources of Puget Sound and the Olympic Peninsula, Yankees from the forests of eastern Maine, northern Vermont, and the Great Lakes arrived in considerable numbers in the 1840s and 1850s. The East Machias, Maine, lumber firm of Pope & Talbot founded the towns of Port Gamble and Port Ludlow and transported both sawmills and workers from the eastern Maine coast in an organized migration that continued for seventy years. (“It seemed everybody there came from East Machias or his father did,” one Port Gamble veteran recalled a half century later. “We always had baked beans and Johnny bread at Gamble and plenty of codfish.”) When Puget Sound became desperate for women in the 1860s—white men outnumbered white women by a nine-to-one ratio—local leaders recruited 100 single New England women and shipped them to Seattle; to be a descendant of one of these settlers still has Mayflower-like cachet there. Mainer Alden Blethen arrived to found the region’s principal newspaper, the Seattle Times, and Massachusetts’ Isaac Stevens was Washington’s first territorial governor and U.S. representative. But, as in Oregon, the region was not to have a Yankee majority, as large numbers of Scandinavian, Irish, and Japanese immigrants settled there after the Civil War. Coastal British Columbia developed even later, populated in large part by immigrants from Seattle, Oregon, and northern California who brought their Congregational and Presbyterian churches with them.⁷

 

The Yankee mission in California was complicated by the fact that parts of the region had already been colonized. El Norte’s culture was well rooted south of Monterey, and Yankee traders and travelers who decided to move to southern California prior to the U.S. annexation generally assimilated to Californio ways. Arriving by sea, the Yankees congregated in Santa Barbara and Monterey, learned Spanish, converted to Catholicism, took Mexican citizenship and spouses, adopted Spanish versions of their names, and respected and participated in local politics. Some were very successful. Abel Stearns, a shipboard agent from Massachusetts, settled in Los Angeles in 1829, married well, ran a lucrative trading company, and died a spectacularly wealthy cattle rancher. Thomas Larkin, a carpenter and failed businessman from Charlestown, Massachusetts, hoped the province’s people would secede from Mexico and join the United States on its own terms; the home he built in Monterey blended New England proportions and roofing with Spanish full-length balconies and adobe construction, yielding the popular hybrid now called the Monterey Style. By the time of the American conquest in 1846, such Mexicanized Yankees comprised around a tenth of California’s non-Indian population of 4,000.⁸

But El Norte’s cultural influence vanished when one moved away from the coast or north of Monterey. In the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento regions, norteños were few and far between, and the immigrants were of a very different sort. At the time of conquest, a tenth of California’s population lived on the Bay or along a branch of the Sacramento River that soon became known as the Rio Americano, or American River. As in the Oregon Territory, these settlers were a mix of Yankees (who typically arrived by sea and congregated in the towns) and Appalachian people (who arrived overland, fanning out to farms, ranches, and mills). Whatever their differences, the two groups did share a resentment of southern California, Mexican rule, and norteño culture. They generally refused to take up Mexican citizenship, occupied land without permission, and openly agitated for American annexation.⁹

If California’s north-south split was already apparent by 1845, the 1848 discovery of gold in the American River Valley helped divide the Left Coast from the until-then unpopulated interior. This division—presaging that which would soon divide the older, coastal Pacific Northwest from the arid lands over the Cascades—was largely due to the Yankee presence around San Francisco Bay and adjacent sections of the Pacific seaboard. Even more than their counterparts in Oregon, these Yankees were compelled by a particular mission: they had to save California from the barbarians.

The barbarians, in this case, were the Forty-niners, whose Gold Rush mentality was completely at odds with the Yankee Puritan ethos. “Never was there such a gold-thirsty race of men brought together,” one resident said of the hordes that came to California in 1848–50. “The principle is to get all of the wealth of the land possible in the shortest possible time, and then go elsewhere to enjoy it.”¹⁰ In what was one of the largest spontaneous migrations in human history to that point, 300,000 arrived in California in just five years, increasing the new American territory’s non-Indian population twentyfold. Within twenty-four months San Francisco grew from a village of 800 to a city of 20,000. Its harbor was filled with derelict ships abandoned by their gold-hungry crews, and the pubs, gambling houses, brothels, knife fights, criminal gangs, and drunken parties that followed in their wake were worthy of Port Royal in the time of the buccaneers.

All of this deeply offended Yankees on both coasts, prompting yet another moral crusade, this time to save California. The Reverend Joseph Bendon, a Yale-educated descendant of Puritan preacher John Eliot, proclaimed the Gold Rush a challenge to Protestants to complete the civilizing effort that had been begun by the Franciscan missions. The Congregationalists’ American Home Missionary Society immediately dispatched missionaries by steamship, seeing an opportunity not just to save California but to create a Protestant beachhead for taking on the “strong holds of Paganism” in Asia. “If we can plant [in California] a people with our civilization, our Bible, our Puritanism, our zeal for spreading what we know and believe to others, it will be a direct means of pouring light upon the Isles of the Sea and the land of Sinim [Sin] that lies beyond,” the society’s journal proclaimed on the eve of the great enterprise. “It is the will of God to make some great use of the new movement towards Oregon and California.”¹¹

The missionaries and their Yankee followers regarded their journey as yet another Pilgrim-like errand to the wilderness, a chance to erect a second City on the Hill. “Sons and daughters of New England, you are the representatives of a land which is the model for every other,” Presbyterian minister Timothy Dwight Hunt told San Francisco’s New England Society in 1852. “Here is our colony. No higher ambition could urge us to noble deeds than, on the basis of the colony of Plymouth, to make California the Massachusetts of the Pacific.”¹²

Large numbers of Yankees joined the migration: 10,000 in 1849 alone, or a quarter of all those arriving by sea. Some were undoubtedly headed straight to the “diggings,” but a remarkable number lent support to the effort to create a Yankee California. Some donated land, money, and materials for the missionaries to build their churches and schoolhouses in San Francisco, Sacramento, and Monterey. Graduates of Amherst, Bowdoin, Harvard, Yale, and other Congregational colleges traveled into the mountains to set up outdoor schools among the miners. John Pelton of Andover, Massachusetts, arrived with school supplies, teaching materials, and a bell to found California’s first free public school. By 1853 the San Francisco school board was entirely staffed by New Englanders, who made the Boston curriculum mandatory in the city. Sherman Day, the son of the president of Yale, joined a group of New England lawyers and clergymen to help transform a Congregational preparatory school into the College of California, which is now the University of California at Berkeley; most of the professors at the “Yale of the West” were New Englanders. Even the Boston and California Joint Stock Mining and Trading Company brought a staff pastor and divinity students with them in 1849, and required in company rules that they preach sermons on Sunday and host prayer meetings at midweek. Members of the Bunker Hill Mining and Trading Company pledged to “abstain from all the vices and intimidations” of California.¹³

However well funded and organized they were, the Yankees had little luck with their efforts beyond their coastal beachheads. They successfully lobbied to get the state legislature to pass laws protecting the Sabbath, but the California Supreme Court was by then dominated by Borderlanders from the mining districts, who declared the law invalid. San Franciscans on the whole rejected Puritan morality. “In California, the Sabbath is ignored by the masses,” the San Francisco Bulletin reported in 1860. “The more abandoned resort to gambling saloons where, with drugged whisky and logwood wines they manage to stake their previous week’s earnings on a throw of dice or a doubtful game of pasteboard.” Yankees had influenced the Left Coast, but they could not make it a commonwealth of saints.¹⁴

The central problem, of course, was that from 1850 onward the overwhelming majority of California’s Left Coast residents—and those of the state as a whole—weren’t Yankees. The Gold Rush had drawn people from all over the world: Appalachian farmers, Chilean and Australian miners, Irish and Italian adventurers, and hopeful Chinese laborers. In a land whose colonial culture was yet to be defined, few were willing to simply follow the Yankees’ lead. Catholics rejected it altogether in favor of their own dreams that California, on account of its relative isolation and Spanish heritage, might serve as a refuge from Protestant America. They, too, had their schools, missions, orphanages, and colleges: Italian Jesuits were issuing degrees at Santa Clara while Berkeley was still a prep school. When voters elected delegates to the territory’s constitutional convention in 1849, Yankees were a distinct minority, outnumbered by Borderlanders and norteños. California’s first two governors were San Francisco residents, but both were from Appalachia.¹⁵

While the Yankees failed in their broad mission, they did have a lasting effect on coastal California from Monterey north. The coast blended the moral, intellectual, and utopian impulses of a Yankee elite with the self-sufficient individualism of its Appalachian and immigrant majority. The culture that formed—idealistic but individualistic—was unlike that of the gold-digging lands in the interior but very similar to those in western Oregon and Washington. It would take nearly a century for its people to recognize it, but it was a new regional culture, one that would ally with Yankeedom to change the federation.