The Nasty Truth About How California Was Won

Anyone who is tempted to use the term “illegal alien” to describe a Mexican national who lives in California but lacks a green card is engaging in a bit of unwitting irony--the Golden State was a province of Mexico until it was conquered through force of arms by a ruthless band of Yankee freebooters shortly before the Gold Rush. Abruptly, the Californios, as the people of the Mexican province of Alta California were known, were robbed of citizenship and sovereignty in their own land.

“Poor Mexico,” goes a Mexican proverb, “so far from God, so near to the United States.”

Dale L. Walker reveals all of the dirty little secrets of California in the years leading up to statehood in “Bear Flag Rising: The Conquest of California, 1846” (Forge, $13.95 paper, 320 pages), a clear, lively and often shocking account of California history that serves as a healthy corrective to what many of us learned back in the fourth grade.

“The spirit of Manifest Destiny, the belief that it was the fate, perhaps divinely written, of the United States to rule the North American continent, was anything but an idle notion,” Walker explains. “It was a virulent force from our national beginnings, and in 1846, it swept like a rush of air into a vacuum from the Continental Divide to the Pacific.”

The dubious hero who stands at center stage of California’s early history--and Walker’s colorful and compelling book--is John C. Fremont, an Army captain and frontier adventurer whom Walker describes as “an agent provocateur, Byronic hero, brilliant leader of men and pathetic egoist.” Leading a little army that Walker describes as “a band of backwoods malcontents”--and acting as the self-appointed agent of Manifest Destiny--Fremont set into motion the “Bear Flag” rebellion that ripped California from Mexico and presented it to the United States.

The California flag, first raised in the sleepy village of Sonoma on June 14, 1846, was actually fashioned out of a chemise and a petticoat painted with pokeberry juice, a bit of rough-and-ready improvisation that nicely symbolizes both the crudeness and the ingenuity of the American conquerors of California. Only 800 American settlers lived in Alta California when Fremont and his men crossed the Sierra Nevada, but when he marched back out again, California was a territory of the United States.

According to Fremont’s cover story, he was merely conducting a scientific expedition, but Fremont and his comrades-in-arms--including a Navy commodore named Robert Field Stockton and a general named Stephen Watts Kearny--promptly launched an open war of conquest against the Mexican authorities. All along, Fremont’s real mission was “to seize California for the United States,” as historian Bernard DeVoto puts it.

Both Mexicans and Native Americans in California fell victim to Yankee ambition. Fremont conducted bloodthirsty raids against “horse-thief Indians,” which “rated little more attention in the memoirs of Fremont and his men than did the shooting of geese or elk.” The Mexican commanding general of Alta California, Jose Castro, called upon the citizenry to join him in expelling “the band of robbers commanded by a captain of the United States Army, J.C. Fremont.” Meanwhile, the United States went to war against Mexico, the Marines famously stormed those “halls of Montezuma,” and Fremont’s “band of robbers” was transformed into the advance guard of American conquest.

Indeed, “Bear Flag Rising” puts a whole cast of familiar characters into a startling new context. Kit Carson was one of Fremont’s men--had he served in Napoleon’s army, Fremont quipped, Carson would have been a field marshal rather than a frontier trapper. Fremont’s first encampment in California was a few miles from Sutter’s Fort, the place where the discovery of gold would set off the Gold Rush, and we learn that John Sutter himself participated in the so-called Battle of Cahuenga Pass near Los Angeles in 1845, an early uprising against Mexican authority in California.

“My acts in California have all been with high motives,” declared Fremont when he returned to Washington, D.C., to face a court-martial on charges that he had exceeded his authority while on operations in California, thus writing into the record his own self-serving version of history. “Bear Flag Uprising” offers a wholly revisionist version of the same events and holds Fremont and his fellow adventurers fully accountable for their exploits. We know how the story of conquest ends--we see the glorious success of Manifest Destiny all around us--but Walker reminds us of the sordid way in which it all began.

*

Long after Fremont brought California under the rule of American law, of course, the West was still wild: “Outlaws, shootouts and brave and colorful lawmen were as plentiful in early California,” writes William B. Secrest in “California Desperadoes: Stories of Early California Outlaws in Their Own Words” (Word Dancer Press, $15.95 paper, 272 pages), “as they were in Deadwood, Tombstone and Old Dodge City.”

“California Desperadoes” is a collection of first-person accounts by various malefactors and eyewitness testimony about their crimes and misdemeanors--police interrogations, newspaper interviews, confessions uttered in the shadow of the gallows, and even a ballad in which Chris Evans celebrated the private war that he and fellow train robber John Sontag waged against the railroad barons who dominated late 19th century California: “Of Sontag and Evans I’ll sing you tonight. . . . They played a lone hand, the joker they hold, in the glorious state that is noted for gold.”

“I have allowed the characters to speak in their own voices--voices rich with colloquialisms, slang and argot of the outlaws and their cohorts,” explains Secrest, who insists that the demimonde of Old California deserves to be rescued from newspaper morgues and library archives and given its proper place in history. “Even the badmen were pioneers.”

*

Women, too, have often been overlooked in conventional histories of California, and that’s what prompted Erin H. Turner to profile 10 compelling figures from the early years in “More Than Petticoats: Remarkable California Women” (Twodot, $9.95 paper, 128 pages), ranging from celebrities like dancer Isadora Duncan and photographer Dorothea Lange to less celebrated women like Tye Leung Schulze, an early civil rights activist in the Chinese community.

We even encounter Jessie Benton Fremont, the willful young woman who married John C. Fremont against the stern disapproval of her father, Sen. Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. She shared a lifetime of struggle and scandal with her husband, and then lived out her life as a widow in Los Angeles.

“The women who were chosen for this book are remarkable because they were women,” insists Turner, “not in spite of it.”

*

West Words looks at books related to California and the West. It runs every other Wednesday.