Cut From a Porous Cloth

If history books are to be believed, the first Stars and Stripes was flown over California in 1842, when a U.S. naval commander sailed into Monterey and declared the region under American occupation, mistakenly believing his country had gone to war with Mexico.

A chagrined Commodore Thomas ap Catesby Jones, head of the American Pacific squadron, ordered the U.S. flag lowered a day later, Oct. 21, 1842, after realizing his error.

But was Jones’ flag really the first Stars and Stripes to fly over the Golden State?

Or was Old Glory first hoisted over Newport Beach 40 years earlier, when California was still a crown colony of Spain? Lingering legend has it that a band of New England settlers bound for Oregon first raised a 13-star American flag after landing on the coast sometime in the late 1790s or the first decade of the 1800s.

At least that’s the story an Orange County man named Bert Stambaugh claimed to have been told by the county’s sole-surviving first American pioneer settler. Stambaugh said he met the woman of French-American origin in Santa Ana in 1899, and he even produced the 13-star flag as “proof” of her story.

The tale, with slight variations, has been around for decades--accepted in whole or in part by some, dismissed by others as one more legend in a state whose very name originated in myth--that of Califia, the queen of an island in a 16th century Spanish novel.

But history buff Robert K. Yount, who first read about the flag story in a magazine 60 years ago--and has kept his copy ever since--has revived the controversy.

“What happened to the flag?” the 74-year-old Huntington Beach man has been asking local historians. And could Stambaugh’s story be true?

Orange County historians have gone back to their archives, and in the search for answers have triggered efforts to locate the 13-star flag that Stambaugh claimed the old woman gave him in 1899.

The quest has led to university libraries and historical museums, to 60-year-old letters and to the diary of a now-deceased former agent of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in Tangier, Morocco, who had more aliases than a motel register.

Historian Kevin Starr, the state librarian of California and a professor of history at the University of Southern California, has his doubts.

“Forget it; it’s all myth,” Starr said. “Why are there no records of that [settlers’] group? There is no documentary evidence. It’s just folklore; it’s charming folklore, but it’s folklore.”

No, Starr said, the first American woman to settle in California was Rachel Larkins, wife of Thomas Oliver Larkins, the first American consul general to California, who arrived in Monterey in 1832.

But Orange County historian Jim Sleeper insists the truth is not so clear-cut.

“The story’s got more holes than a salt shaker,” Sleeper acknowledged. “But there’s always something to these, even in myth. It isn’t created out of whole cloth.”

A brief version of Stambaugh’s story first appeared in print in a 1925 Orange County newspaper article about an Armistice Day parade in Anaheim in which members of the United Spanish War Veterans carried Stambaugh’s 13-star flag.

But the most detailed account appeared in a 1938 edition of the Los Angeles Times Sunday magazine, accompanied by a photograph of the 13-star relic.

In need of freshwater as they headed to Oregon, so goes the tale, the band of New Englanders anchored off what is now Balboa Peninsula. The crew and passengers--many of them families--spent their first night on the beach. The next morning, the French-American woman and her husband raised a 13-star American flag over their tent.

After wintering in a protected location at the base of the bluffs near the entrance to the upper bay, the group sailed on to Oregon, where the men hunted and trapped. A year later, the ship returned to Newport. Because the French-American woman was pregnant with their first child, she and her husband and two other men stayed behind when the others went back to Oregon. As the old woman recalled in Stambaugh’s story, “When fall came, we climbed the bluffs each day and looked for our ship to return--but it never came.”

The woman gave birth to a son, who died at 21. Shortly thereafter the two men left on a “foreign” ship that sailed into Newport Bay. The woman’s husband later died while fishing. Now alone, she traveled up the river to Olive (an area near the current city of Orange) to live with the pioneering Yorba land grant family that had befriended her. “To pass as one of them,” the Yorbas advised her to keep her American flag hidden.

So goes the story.

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Curiously missing from the 1938 account, which was told in the voice of the French-American woman, is her name, the name of the ship and the exact date of the voyage--all of which makes the story tough to confirm.

But historians have spotted a number of what Sleeper calls the “clinkers” in the tale.

The Balboa Peninsula on which the voyagers were said to have landed did not even begin to form until after a massive flood of 1827. Instead of the current harbor, there was open sea up to the shore and upper Newport Bay wasn’t considered a port. Moreover, just how could four Americans go undetected by Spanish authorities for two decades?

The Oregon portion of the story also fails to pass muster, historians say.

Astoria, the first American outpost in Oregon, wasn’t founded by members of John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Co. until 1811. Jane Barnes, an English barmaid who arrived on a supply ship in 1814, was the first European woman in Oregon.

“We really didn’t get true settlers here until the 1840s,” said a spokeswoman for the Clatsop County Historical Society in Astoria.

Jim Ronda, a professor of American history at the University of Tulsa who specializes in the history of the Western fur trade, said there was much shipping along the Oregon coast beginning in the 1870s and ‘80s because of the fur traffic.

“But the notion of women and children on board these ships is just extremely unlikely,” he said, adding that the vessels almost always rounded South America and headed to Hawaii--for reprovisioning and to “avoid any difficulties with the Spanish” in California.

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Perhaps the biggest clinker to the flag story is the French-American woman’s purported age.

Although no specific age is cited, the 1938 article refers to her as “well past the century mark” when Stambaugh first met her in 1899. The French-American woman would have to have been at least 115 or 120 years of age if she indeed arrived in the late 1790s or early 1800s as a young woman. And that would have been extraordinarily elderly for a woman who told Stambaugh in 1899 that she still was working for Mrs. C.E. French of Santa Ana.

The introduction to the 1938 magazine article said the French-American woman’s tale had been verified 40 years earlier by Victor Yorba as “an old family tradition and story handed down” from the time of his grandfather, pioneer Orange County settler Jose Antonio Yorba.

True or not, the story was never passed down to Bernardo Yorba of Anaheim Hills, the great-great grandson of Jose Antonio Yorba.

“I’ve never heard of this story, but it’s fascinating,” Yorba, 77, said two weeks before his death in June.

Ellen Lee, author of “Newport Bay: A Pioneer History,” said she explored the flag story while researching her 1973 book but decided not to include it.

“I just think the story is highly implausible,” Lee said, adding that she always thought the story was “a hoax cooked up by Alfonso Yorba.”

Yorba is the man in the Spanish outfit holding the 13-star flag with Reyes Velardes Yorba of San Juan Capistrano in the 1930s-era photograph that accompanied the magazine article.

Yorba, who claimed to have been a distant cousin of Jose Antonio Yorba, was born Bruce Hamilton Chalmers but also went by the names Bruce de Conde and Chauncey Chalmers. After a career in the Air Force in the 1940s and early 1950s, Yorba joined the CIA and spent 17 years in Yemen. Retiring from the CIA in 1974, he moved to Spain and later settled in Tangier, where he died in 1992.

But during the 1930s, according to Sleeper, Yorba spent a lot of time in San Juan Capistrano and wrote numerous articles on local history.

Sleeper said there’s no question that Yorba ghost-wrote and did research for the “enhanced” 1938 version of the flag story.

“Obviously, he’s basing the bulk of it on what Stambaugh said and making some conclusions of his own,” he said.

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Sleeper said letters addressed to Stambaugh after the magazine article appeared were forwarded to Yorba. Sleeper has copies of Yorba’s responses, which are among a collection of Yorba’s old diaries and historical material that came into the hands of the San Juan Capistrano Historical Society 20 years ago.

Responding to a question about the old woman’s age at the turn of the century, Yorba said in one letter that Stambaugh was going to check death records for 1904. Sleeper said, however, that there is no indication that Stambaugh ever did.

Responding to another query, Yorba wrote that he had recently discovered the first name of the French-American woman: Rachel.

“Obviously, the inquiries sent him scurrying,” Sleeper said.

Examining Yorba’s diaries of the 1930s, historian Ted Parker of Villa Park last month came up with something even better: the old woman’s first and last names--Rachel Ratchet. But that, too, may be a blind alley.

In a 1954 copy of the Pony Express, a now-defunct Western history magazine, editor Herbert Hamlin referred to the “first American flag to fly in California” as the Rachael Marquette Flag.

By then, Stambaugh had donated the 13-star flag to Hamlin’s collection of Western history artifacts, which Hamlin had just donated to the University of the Pacific in Stockton.

Sleeper’s recent search of death and cemetery records in Santa Ana for the period Stambaugh said he last saw the old woman failed to turn up either the name Rachel Ratchet or Rachael Marquette, and a check of U.S. census records for 1900 proved equally unsuccessful.

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The truth of the flag story further unravels with new information about the flag itself.

The 1938 magazine article said the flag “has been pronounced an authentic original by officials of the Navy Department.” But that’s not what a Navy flag expert said in 1940 after the flag was lent to the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana.

Alice Bryant, the current collections manager, said museum records show that the flag was returned to its owner after “Capt. McCandless, USN,” an authority on flags, examined the flag’s stitching and fabric. His conclusion: the flag did not match its purported age.

Mary Bennett, a Los Angeles broker of California historical items who had recommended that Stambaugh donate the flag to Hamlin’s Pony Express collection in the 1950s after it had been on loan to a Boston museum, was even more to the point.

In a letter Bennett wrote to Sleeper after reading his 1971 Westways magazine article on early colonies in Orange County, Bennett said she saw the flag in a glass display case in Hamlin’s San Francisco home in the early ‘50s.

Bennett recalled that the linen appeared old but in generally good condition, but there was no getting around the obvious: The flag, she said, was machine-sewn. And the first practical sewing machine sold to users was not patented until 1846.

Hamlin’s collection remained at the University of the Pacific until the late 1960s, when, according to an archivist there, Hamlin took it back and donated it to the American Christian College in Tulsa, Okla. A college spokeswoman, however, said Hamlin asked for the collection back in the mid-1970s.

After Hamlin died in Sonora in 1982 at 93, part of the collection went to the Tuolumne County Historical Society in Sonora; the rest was sold at an auction.

The whereabouts of the 13-star flag remains a mystery.

Historical society officials say the flag was not among the items received by them, and several people who attended the auction don’t remember seeing the flag.

Even faced with a machine-sewn flag and other holes in Stambaugh’s story, Sleeper continues to believe there must be some truth to it. Maybe, he reasons, the flag began falling apart at one point and was “doctored up.” And maybe Stambaugh was off on his dates by a few decades.

“I believe there’s enough in there that there must have been something to it,” Sleeper said. “Unfortunately at this point, it’s like that old party stunt of whispering a message in one guy’s ear and he whispers it in the next and so forth.”

Historian Ellen Lee prefers to view the story of the first American flag to fly over California differently: “I loved it when I first read it and I believed it at first, but I reluctantly gave it up.”

Indeed, legends die hard. And there’s no shortage of legends in California history.

“California even begins with this,” said Martin Ridge, president of the Historical Society of Southern California. “The story of Califia is a fabrication. Hell, we built our tourism out here on ‘Ramona.’ This is the Land of Myths. We go from Califia to Hollywood, and this fits right in the middle.”