While William A.’s ship was heading north to San Francisco, he may well have mused about the times when he was young and untainted, when he first came to California, to San Diego. In the late spring of 1854 he’d toiled in the dust and hot sun when as a first lieutenant he had “landed at La Playa [at the tip of San Diego] from the steamer Sonora with two companies of the 3rd Artillery.”1
Getting off the ship in San Diego, mounting up, and climbing a hill past the ruins of the old Spanish presidio, then down along slashes of browned ground, sand, and mud, Winder would have seen a road of sorts that drifted to a plaza where an American flag billowed. It hung on a pole plunged into the dirt on July 27, 1846, when John C. Fremont’s California Battalion took the town from the Mexicans on his way to capturing Los Angeles. After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican War, wanderers, failures, and health seekers, along with adventurers, merchants, outlaws, and land grabbers with bulging pockets or nothing at all, had streamed to California to hang their futures on a hardscrabble life far from home. They came on trading ships, many inspired by Richard Henry Dana’s elegiac Two Years before the Mast, a paean to the working sailor that told how he, a Harvard dropout with eye problems and a sickly constitution, went to sea aboard the Alert on a long voyage to California. After traveling up and down the coast, he finally landed at La Playa, the center of a booming trade in cattle hides. His labors at the hide houses included scrubbing and cutting the flayed remains of cattle, curing the hides, storing them in barrels, then hefting them onto ships that arrived to take the valuable cargo to Boston. In return for the hides, the ships traded luxury goods and much-needed necessities of daily life to San Diego residents hungry for the tastes, smells, and silks from the Northeast. Of all the places he roamed Dana would most remember Old Town, the Spanish-Mexican settlement, the lighthouse at La Playa, and the “little harbor of San Diego,” and he fondly recalled the warmth of the families who welcomed him. In 1835 he wrote, “We were always glad to see San Diego; it being the depot, and a snug little place, and seeming quite like home to me.”2
Not yet seeking the snug little place of Dana’s dreamy idyll, William A. would land at La Playa twenty years later as a soldier-passerby. The hide houses were gone, the cattle stock depleted, but he would meet and come to know the pioneer settlers who had come to California as new dreamers seeking warm air and a comfortable climate. When they arrived in the early 1850s, some were soldier-surgeons to the missions—bone crackers wielding scalpels and tinctures of laudanum to numb pained bodies. Sedate and sedating, they eschewed the Indian remedies and drifted to Old Town. William A.’s mining associate with whom he briefly partnered in 1857 was a Massachusetts-born merchant named Ephraim Morse. Morse had first voyaged north to the gold fields but was foiled by the “shine” that was no shine but merely bits of sun-bleached rock in the pans, so he drifted south to San Diego. Dr. David Hoffman, a graduate of Toland Medical College in San Francisco, came to San Diego as “a ship’s surgeon with the Pacific Mail Steamship Company.” He ignored the other ports of call—San Francisco, Monterey, San Pedro—and came to Old Town in 1853. The place beckoned to him, “hidden in the crook of the river, remote, asleep, forsaken, a place of oblivion.”3
Hardly a lost soul, but seeing an opportunity as the lone physician in Old Town, Hoffman stayed and thereby met William A. The Old Town they saw was a village of long, thick-walled adobes that kept occupants cool in the heat. These structures had been built by proud landed gentry from Spain, Peru, and Mexico—the José Estudillos, the Juan Bandinis, the José Altamiranos, the Don Miguel de Pedrorenas, the José Serranos—they and their children often marrying Americans and speaking a mix of Spanish and English. There were Prussian émigrés among the settlers too, German-Jewish merchants and entrepreneurs—Louis Rose, Joseph Mannasse, and Marcus Schiller. Yankees were well represented too—the venerable and venerated Old Town storekeeper, Ephraim Morse; the New Yorker who built the first brick home in the area, Thomas Whaley; the Pennsylvanian and Old Town mayor, Daniel Brown Kurtz, known as “D.B.”; and the judges from Ohio, Oliver Witherby and James Robinson. Among the southerners who found their way to San Diego were George Pendleton, from Virginia, and Cave Johnson Couts, from Tennessee. From Ireland came Joshua Sloane, George Lyons, and Philip Crosthwaite. Wooden buildings, rough-hewn houses, and hotels like the Exchange were scattered around the plaza, where often, right in front of the courthouse, rough justice prevailed amid bullfights, bear baits, gunfights, duels, and a hanging or two. Such activities were commonplace, as were the bailes (balls), the festivals, the music, the Mexican food with chiles, beans, spiced beef, and corn tortillas—new tastes, new smells. Five miles away was New Town, a tattered little outpost, an attempt at a new settlement, the creation-turned-folly of developer William Heath Davis meant to draw investors to a “32 square block area” with the promise of fine dwellings and “better shipping” opportunities closer to the water. Few investors came, dreams failed. In defeat “Davis gave some land to the US Government for an army post, the San Diego Barracks.”4
One of the hopefuls who dipped quickly into New Town and very briefly graced the place in 1851 with a newspaper, the San Diego Herald, was John Judson Ames, a giant of a man who came down from the gold country to tell the literate among the residents what news was news—there is a stage line from Los Angeles; there will be, God willing, a railroad, an overland mail route—and what was not. Seeing New Town as an utter failure, he quickly vacated to Old Town.
William A. Winder, a first lieutenant on the way to his post at the mission, would not forget the ragged Cahuilla and Kumeyaay left begging in the dirt of the plaza, driven off their lands by the white immigrants who wanted them gone forever. With the horrors of the shipwreck of the San Francisco still raw, William A.—thankful for solid earth—and the survivor-soldiers of the Third U.S. Artillery marched about five miles to their post, the Mission San Diego de Alcalá, founded in 1769 by Father Junípero Serra. Thought by many to be unnecessarily brutal to his neophytes, while others proclaimed him a saintly Franciscan, Father Serra ultimately ruled over twenty-one missions that dotted the present-day state of California from San Diego to Sonora. By the time Winder arrived, the San Diego mission had been partially rebuilt after a damaging revolt by some of the natives. The Dieguenos, many of whom were Kumeyaay—one of the tribes dislocated to work at the missions—were ruled by a succession of priests who’d gone about the task of converting the natives to Christianity.
Winder, during his time at the mission with the occupying army, wrote two extant letters expressing his concern that the Cahuilla and Kumeyaay who called the mountains around the wild scrublands home were being ill treated and endangered by the white settlers. From his post at the mission William A. wrote to Bvt. Maj. William Whann Mackall, the assistant adjutant general, at No. 61, Dept. Pacific Division at Benicia, telling him that “Thomas, the principal Captain of the Santa Isabel Indians, together with thirteen of his Captains, came into this post some two weeks since, and complained that Mr. J. J. Warner (Sub-Agent for these Indians) had informed them of his intention to take all animals, having no brands upon them, in the hands of the Indians, from them as his property.” William A. also told Mackall that “as many of these Indians own mares, which have had colts, and which are not branded for the reason that they have no brands, this proceeding would be manifestly unjust.” The injustice prompted William A. to tell Thomas, the captain of the Santa Isabel Indians, to “bring the animals here in case any attempt was made to take them, and I would endeavor to secure his property for him.” Again William A. addresses “one of the many cases of injustice practiced upon these Indians, and by the very men whose duty it is to protect them, and I presume my action will be reported as ‘an interference on the part of the military’ with the duties of an agent.” But William A. is willing to risk his reputation and the possible consequences of such interference. He has taken it upon himself to “report the case, in order that the Commanding General [John Ellis Wool] may be made aware of the characters of the persons making such reports.”5
An earlier communication again gives evidence of William A.’s concern for the plight of members of the Cahuilla tribe. That letter he wrote to the commander of Mission de Alcalá, Capt. Henry Stanton Burton, a wise young officer and good friend. William A., unlike so many army men who saw the Indians as disposable nuisances, or worse, worthy of massacre, wrote on April 29, 1856, “I proceeded to the Rancho of San Jacinto, in the vicinity of San Gorgonio. On my arrival there I sent for Juan Antonio, the principal Capt. of the Cawilla (sp) Indians, from whom I learned that the Whites were encroaching upon the lands now occupied by the Indians.” William A. then writes that Juan Antonio “complained that the commissioners had promised to send him farming utensils, and told him to live on this land where he would not be disturbed, neither of which promises have been fulfilled.” Due to the failure of their crops, “the greater portion of the tribe was almost entirely destitute of the means of subsistence. . . . The whites were in the habit of taking the gardens or other lands from the Indians without paying them for either crops or improvements.” And here William A. explains that “for many years these Indians have been in the habit of cultivating their fields without fencing, but at present the cattle of the whites overrun and destroy their crops and they have no means of redress. The foregoing facts will, I think, show the absolute necessity of adopting at an early day some means for protecting the Indians from the Whites.”6
This evidence of the advice verging on a dictate given by Lieutenant Winder to his ranking officer was at once bold and a window into his thinking as he became a passionate advocate of fair treatment of Native Americans. For the rest of Burton’s short life (he died suddenly in 1869, after a storied career as a West Pointer and heroic Union Civil War general), William A. remained friends with Burton and his wife, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton.
María was born at La Paz, in Baja California. Brilliant and eventually fluent in English, she married Henry Burton in 1847. María’s writing talent (she wrote and directed plays for the soldiers to perform), and especially her later novels in English, brings her a measure of fame. And for William A. she becomes a devoted and lifelong friend. Both were artistic and in many ways out of place—he a gentle soul forced into soldiering and she a Californio, a Spanish land grantee of noble stock but regarded by some as a foreign interloper in her American husband’s world. William A. and María were like-minded and generous. The two would endure struggles: she would fight to keep her land, and he would fight to keep his honor.
The first recorded example of William A. the artist working at what would become a passionate lifelong avocation was noted by Judge Benjamin Ignatius Hayes—“elected . . . in 1852, the first Judge of the Southern District of California, including Los Angeles and San Diego Counties”—as he traveled with his son through Old Town to the Mission de Alcalá. There he “found Lieutenant Winder painting in watercolors two views of the Mission. Several portraits there by him of different persons. A delightful quiet reigns around this post,” he wrote in his diary.7
The delightful quiet and the painting were interrupted in early March 1855 when William A. was sent to Fort Yuma, at the junction of the Gila and Colorado Rivers. Scorching hot in summer, with the temperature sometimes reaching 130 degrees, the fort was tasked with protecting the ferry that crossed the Colorado from attack by the Yuma Indians or by volatile new settlers who feared the Indians and sometimes forced themselves on Yuma women. William A. is also trying his luck at mining—the fickle game that drove men to madness or made them poor and hopeless, middling drunks, or millionaires—and allying himself in that endeavor with the wealthy rancher Rufus King Porter, Ephraim W. Morse, and Capt. Henry Burton. In signing a contract with Mexican landowners, the three Americans made sure the agreement was binding, official and inked, ready and final. The San Antonio mine had rock ledges glinting with copper. From his post at Fort Yuma, William A. wrote to Morse and Porter that if the San Antonio mine could be properly managed—and this would be a common refrain—a great fortune awaited. But a windfall did not await. Here begins a pattern, one of almost-riches at the next mine and the ones after that.
But again William A. must move, leaving with another officer to follow the Mojave River on a survey for the Southern Pacific Railroad. The railroad: always planned, always awaited, as capricious and heartbreaking as the mines. Next William A. went to the Arizona Territory, once a slavery-riddled prize of the Confederates until it was pried away from New Mexico. In later years William A. will look back on his stint in the Southwest as the time when he was young, when he experienced all the colors, all the sights and sounds, all the pitfalls and disappointments. He will look back especially to San Diego, as did Richard Henry Dana when he pondered his lost youth. “The past is real,” Dana wrote, mourning the “light hearted boys who are now hardened middle aged men, if the seas, the rocks, fevers . . . have spared them.”8
The sea has spared William A. again and again. He will fear it, war with it, and struggle in its vastness and finally, eventually, find safe harbor in California after the war. Like a Circe in gossamer or in army blue, California will call him back to a state whose vicissitudes and loyalties will try him anew.
*
As the nation was divided, so was the state of California, threatened by sedition and talk of separation. The state that beckoned forty-niners, made ordinary men rich beyond their dreams, or sent them, desperate, into deserts or saloons, was also home to proslavery advocates of Southern birth. They were especially prominent in the Los Angeles area, in both the city proper as well as in towns such as El Monte, Sierra Madre, and Visalia, among others. Henry Hamilton’s Los Angeles Star and the Democratic “Chivalry” (proslavery) wing of the party throughout the state repeatedly denounced emancipation, abolitionists, and “Black Republicans” and urged the creation of a separate “Pacific Republic.” Many loathed, feared, and ridiculed the president of the United States. The Visalia Equal Rights Expositor described Lincoln as “the cadaverous, long shanked, mule countenanced-rail splitter from Illinois.”9
Lincoln and the rise of the Republican Party in northern California and the crowded, enthusiastic, and defiant “Union mass meetings . . . convinced many Southern sympathizers to leave California for Dixie.”10 The Sacramento Daily Union, “the political conscience of California,” according to the historian Robert J. Chandler, rarely changed its loyal stance, declaring, “Secession is revolution.” The newspaper condemned the institution of slavery and endorsed the Lincoln administration. Church pulpits became bully pulpits for both sides. “Jefferson Davis was no more traitor than George Washington,” the Reverend William Anderson Scott of San Francisco’s Calvary Presbyterian Church (now the site of the St. Francis Hotel) declared to his congregation, inciting riots and necessitating a call for Federal troops to quell the crowds.11
Taking up the opposing view, the Unitarian minister and orator Thomas Starr King “bolstered the weak-hearted” to stand for the Union and called for the use of black troops. He also said that “abolitionism” should no longer be considered a dirty word. Although “during the Civil War, civil authorities, by inclination, the ballot box, and presidential proclamation, smothered any secessionist threat to the three hundred thousand Californians,” resistance was real. There were local armed militias and not-so-secretive cliques like the treasonous and seditious Knights of the Golden Circle. Already active in the Northeast, the group had infiltrated parts of California to ready their bands for a takeover of San Francisco in the Civil War.12
According to the historian John A. Martini, in this period “San Franciscans never felt more isolated.” There was also “the real possibility that Great Britain might ally herself with the . . . Confederacy.” Should that happen, “the Royal Navy’s powerful Pacific fleet might try to capture San Francisco.” These were real threats both foreign and domestic.13 For protection and shows of strength, the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Squadron, comprising six small wooden “sloops of war”—the USS Lancaster, Saranac, Wyoming, Narragansett, St. Marys, and Cyane—were at the ready as urgent warnings about “secessionists gaining a foothold, abounded.” These ships plied the coasts of Mexico and California for the “protection of the mail steamers and their heavy shipments of gold.”14
The Bay of San Francisco was guarded by Fort Point, Lime Point, and Black Point—also known as Point San Jose—none of which was as well armed or as well situated as Alcatraz. And the Navy Yard at Mare Island, twenty miles away at Vallejo, California, not to mention the Benicia Arsenal, might well become rebel targets. Because of the threats, the immediate defense of Mare Island became paramount. The Kentucky-born general Albert Sidney Johnston, commander of the Military Department of the Pacific, was regarded with suspicion in the lead-up to the war.
Johnston was accused of abetting Confederates who wished to take over all the forts in the Bay Area and the all-important arsenal at Benicia, commandeer steamers to invade the Golden Gate, raid the gold stores, and create a separate nation, the Pacific Republic. Johnston, however, was never a party to any such cabals. “I have heard foolish talk about an attempt to seize the strongholds of government under my charge,” he wrote. “Knowing this, I have prepared for emergencies, and will defend the property of the United States with every resource at my command, and with the last drop of blood in my body. Tell that to our Southern friends!”15 When the war began, however, Johnston resigned from the Union Army to fight with Confederate forces. His loyalties apparently lay with those of his adopted state of Texas.
Gen. Edwin Sumner, who replaced Johnston as commander of the Department of the Pacific, well knew the profound and pressing need to defend San Francisco. In addition, there was the threat from Confederate privateers and marauding British raiders who might slip unnoticed through the Golden Gate, where “tens of millions of dollars of gold went east” from the harbor, so the question facing Sumner was, “How could it best be protected?”16 “From 1861 to 1864, more than $173 million passed though the Golden Gate from the California mines and the Comstock Lode of Nevada,” much of it having been housed in the U.S. Mint that was located in San Francisco, after passing through “Mare Island Naval Shipyard, and Benicia Arsenal.” One “capture of a single gold steamer” would have helped the Confederacy. The immediate defense of Fortress Alcatraz was paramount.17