History Of California Short Essay

Instructions for Essay Test History 114
The essay test will consist of 5 short essays and 5 Identifications (IDs). You will need to use at least five (5) quotes from the book for the short essays, and at least three (3) quotes for the IDs. Each quote must be underlinedand in boldtype and in quotation marks and must be followed with the page number in parentheses, as in the following imaginary (not a real) example, which shows how much of a sentence you might use for the quote. DO NOT USE WHOLE SENTENCES OR WHOLE PARAGRAPHS FOR QUOTES. Here is an example on Lincoln:

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Lincoln is an interesting case in point. He was an excellent politician, but also a great storyteller. (15) As the author notes, He often told funny anecdotes in his speeches. (20) Beyond his politics and storytelling, Lincoln also believed in the occult, actually holding sances in the White Housein an attempt to reach his son who died during the Civil War. (11)
Note that the bolded and underlined quotes(bolded, underlined andwith quotation marks) are the facts gleaned from the book
OTHER REQUIREMENTS (and checklist for submission into Canvas):
A. Use a 12-point readable font, such as Times New Roman, Arial, or Calibri. B. Underline and use boldon quotes and alsoput quotation marks around them, followed by the page number of the quote in parentheses. C. Essays without underlined, bolded quotations and page references will lose 60 of the 100 points, before any additional deductions. You must use Rolle and Verge, California: A History, 8thedition. DO NOT USE OTHER SOURCES. D. EACH of the first five items must have a minimum of five (5) quotes from the book, and EACH of the last five items (IDs) must have at least three (3) quotes. E. Be as comprehensive as possible in discussing each subject. F. IDs must include who, what, when, where and why (significance). G. Your short essays/IDs should not be more than 200 words each, and you must place the word count (excluding a, an, and the) at the end of each item. H. Put your essay in your own words. Do not plagiarize. I. PROOFREADyour items after cutting and pasting them into the answer blocks, because sometimes underliningand other features will not translate directly into the block and you will have to manually make the changes.
The five short-essay items followed by the five ID items are as follows:
1. Californias Mexican Governors, and the most effective ones (and why). 2. Explain the divergent views about what the role of California should be during the Civil War. 3. Discuss the countries that were interested in possibly acquiring California. 4. Discuss the reasons why the Gold Rush was significant in California history. (Dont discuss the Gold Rush itself. 5. Californias Spanish Governors, and the most effective ones (and why). These are the IDs 6. Mark Twain 7. Filibuster(er)s 8. California Missions, presidios, and pueblos 9. Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo 10. San Francisco Vigilantes
BECAUSE WE ARE ONLY ALLOWED TO USE THE BOOK FOR QUOTES AND REFERENCES I HAVE ATTACHED THE PARTS OF THE BOOK BELOW YOU WILL NEED TO COMPLETE THESE SHORT ESSAYS AND IDS. PLEASE MAKE SURE TO USE 5 QUOTES FOR THE FIRST 5 ESSAYS AND 3 QUOTES FOR EACH OF THE IDS. IT IS ALSO IMPORTANT FOR YOU TO BOLD AND UNDERLINE THOSE PARTS AS WELL AS PUT THE PAGE NUMBER AT THE END. EXAMPLE:
Lincoln is an interesting case in point. He was an excellent politician, but also a great storyteller. (15) As the author notes, He often told funny anecdotes in his speeches. (20) Beyond his politics and storytelling, Lincoln also believed in the occult, actually holding sances in the White Housein an attempt to reach his son who died during the Civil War. (11)
Vigilantes question 10- pages 126 and 129
At San Francisco, because law enforcement was so weak, a group of vigilantes took it upon themselves to stamp out crime. As municipal corruption had become entrenched, they enforced their own morality. Mob justice was condoned due to frustration over the failings of law and order. Naive amateurs with no legal background devised random punishments against drifters who had filtered back into the city from abandoned mining camps. In the
camps also, vigilance committees, animated by passion, were set up as popular tribunals, acting as champions of justice and right.After the discovery of gold, a glut of criminals seemed to paralyze municipal justice in San Francisco. In 1849 a band of toughs, who called themselves the Hounds or the Regulators, terrorized the city. The members of a similar group of hoodlums, known as the Sydney Ducks, had arrived from Great Britain’s prison colony in Australia. They greatly flouted law and order at the Golden Gate. Honest residents noted their troublesome presence by saying: The Sydney Ducks are cackling.Nativism, a form of racial hatred, became entwined with the sordid activities of antiforeign gangs. On Sunday, July 15, 1849, a rowdy crowd of Regulators held a patriotic parade. After touring various saloons, where they demanded liquor and smashed windows, they began to assault Chilean families who lived in makeshift tents on San Francisco’s sand dunes. Although a citizens court ultimately disciplined the Regulators, murderers and thieves continued to roam the city’s streets. Indignant city elders arrested and sought to try offenders, supposedly in order to stop a kind of criminal delirium. By May of 1851, after a prominent merchant was assaulted and his safe burglarized, more formal charges were brought against such marauders.That year, 200 members of a Committee of Vigilance of San Francisco organized to eradicate public disorder. At the head of the committee to purge the city of vice was William Tell Coleman, a wealthy young merchant and importer who came to be called the Lion of the Vigilantes. This new-found status made him one of San Francisco’s future nabobs. Scarcely had the Committee of Vigilance formed when the city’s fire bell rang out, beckoning its members to the Monumental Fire Engine House to consider the case of John Jenkins, a convict from Sydney, Australia, who had robbed a shipping office, making off with its strongbox. Jenkins boldly defied anyone to stop him. When several vigilantes sought to do so, he threw the box into San Francisco Bay. Within a few hours the vigilantes took Jenkins to Portsmouth Square. There, on a scaffold, a noose was draped round his neck and he was hanged until his eyes bulged out. San Francisco’s best citizens heartily approved the guilty sentence. Sam Brannan and other vigilantes were charged by the coroner with too hasty an execution. But most San Franciscans approved of their harsh justice.Only five years after San Franciscans dissolved their first vigilance brigades, another vigilance committee formed there. This became the most reputable and orderly of all such groups. It actually regularized its proceedings, having regrouped only because crime had again increased. Indeed, the hangman’s noose had faded from memory. About 1,000 unpunished murders had shocked San Franciscans from 1849 to 1856 alone.By stuffing ballot boxes and using toughs at polling places, corrupt officials had also become entrenched in San Francisco’s municipal posts. Political lawlessness was related to the murder of James King of William, the gadfly editor of the Daily Evening Bulletin. In his editorials, King had openly attacked prominent politicians, including James P. Casey, an unsavory and opportunistic local office holder. When Casey demanded an apology, he was ordered out of
the newspaper’s editorial room. He then vowed he would kill King, who scoffed at this threat in his column of May 14, 1856. That evening, Casey approached the newspaperman on the street, drew a revolver, and pulled the trigger. As King breathed his last, Casey was locked up in the city jail. Three days later several thousand vigilantes, enraged over this latest homicide, stormed the jail, seizing Casey and another accused murderer, Charles Cora. Both men were then sentenced to death before a vigilante tribunal. On May 22, 1856, as King’s funeral cortege moved through the city streets, the vigilantes hanged both Casey and Cora.Within a fortnight, nearly 10,000 outraged men had rejoined the vigilantes. This reactivated San Francisco Vigilance Committee of 1856 appointed its own chief of police and 25 policemen to supplement local law enforcement. But its roster remained secret, each member identified only by a number. Their leader once again was William Coleman, who organized them into squads of 100 men. Mass meetings at Sacramento, Stockton, and San Francisco showed how determined Coleman was to stamp out municipal crime.A new state Law and Order party, however, objected to the harsh verdicts of this latest vigilance committee. California’s Supreme Court Justice, David S. Terry, lent his support to the Law and Order faction. Unfortunately for Terry, he became involved in a knifing fracas with one of the vigilantes and was indicted by the vigilance committee. Fortunately, the man he had stabbed did not die from the injury. After almost a month of embarrassing hearings, Judge Terry was acquitted.Meanwhile, Governor John Neely Johnson asked William Tecumseh Sherman, commander of the second division of the California militia, to aid him in the regularizing of the state’s criminal punishments. The governor did not trust the vigilantes. But Sherman, who later became a prominent Civil War general, could hardly cope with the volunteer forces he now faced. Some 6,000 of the vigilantes had personally taken up arms. Their headquarters, called Fort Gunnybags, was fortified by bags of sand piled ten feet high and six feet thick. Strongly armed, the vigilantes holed up in the building and produced a black list of offenders whom they wished to deport. Beginning on June 5, 1856, the committee sent three men off to Hawaii and three others to Panama. Only on August 18, 1856 did the avenging group dissolve itself, ending three months of virtual control over San Francisco.
GUADALUPE HIDALGO QUESTION 9 -PAGE 151
In 1846, the last year of the Mexican era, 87 rancho grants were made by Governor Pico alone, mostly to personal friends. Although the U.S. and Mexican Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo guaranteed protection and security to landowners, invading American land seekers were appalled at the sheer size of such grants. Two different legal traditions, the Spanish and the American, were about to collide. Old-time Californios suddenly came under extreme pressure to change their languid way of life. Rancheros had, perhaps for too long,
clung to their silver-trimmed saddles and horsemanship. The times were changing, and swiftly.After 1850, rancheros were stuck with herds of stunted cattle on overgrazed pastures. These animals had to be sold at prohibitively low prices because of rising costs. The rancheros also faced fierce competition from American cattle drovers who herded stronger Texas Longhorns into the new state. Land-hungry American squatters also challenged virtually any ranchero’s right to hold huge grants intact. These avaricious newcomers, oblivious to personal property rights, roamed about the countryside, moving their covered wagons onto rancho tracts, using up scarce water, as well as grazing areas as they pleased. They even rounded up unbranded stray calves and cattle and claimed ownership thereof.Ranchos located near a creek or on a lake frontage were especially targeted by poachers. Overland cattle drovers stopped at such places to water their stock. These invading American homesteaders simply became permanent squatters. They asked what right had the Vallejos, the Argellos, or the Swiss Captain Sutter to their seemingly regal estates of 11 or more square leagues? This, despite the fact that both Commodore Sloat’s Proclamation and the subsequent Treaty of GuadalupeHidalgo guaranteed the Californios their existing grantee rights.
FILIBUSTERS QUESTION 7 – PAGE 131
The term filibuster, today’s prolonged speech-making to delay legislation, once had a far different connotation. In the late nineteenth century, rootless filibusterers took it upon themselves to go abroad ostensibly to free unprotected territory from foreign control. Filibustering was the product of a restless and youthful America, one convinced of its manifest destiny to expand toward the country’s natural frontiers. Southerners, in particular, were attracted to filibustering as a way of spreading their cherished institution of slavery beyond the American South. Apologists for filibustering professed admiration for the courage of adventurers willing to shoulder rifles in foreign fields, seeing them as patriotic soldiers of fortune.Unsettled conditions in California in the 1850s stimulated filibustering as disillusioned gold seekers looked covetously beyond American territory for adventure. However, the filibustering expeditions that originated from California after its admission to statehood were uniformly unsuccessful. The first one, in 1851 under the leadership of Alexander Bell, was foolishly undertaken to reinstate a deposed president of Ecuador. That same year Sam Brannan, the apostate from Mormonism who had by now become a prominent Californian, led a party of adventurers to Hawaii. In his crazy attempt to capture those islands, Brannan was lucky to escape incensed Hawaiian pikemen who threatened to run their spears through him. Other adventurers used San Francisco as a base to raise small groups of filibusters who
mostly feuded among themselves. In 1851, Joseph Morehead’s plan to take the spiny peninsula of Baja California proved equally futile. Most of his men deserted him in the field, and he was lucky to escape Mexican imprisonment.California’s foreign population included other footloose adventurers. Among these were various Frenchmen who had fled their country as a result of the revolutionary movements of 1848. These failed aristocrats were captivated by plans to colonize Mexico. Three independent freebooters left their mark upon the history of both California and northern Mexico: the Marquis Charles de Pindray, Lepine de Sigondis, and Count Gaston de Raousset-Boulbon, known as Little Wolf. During the 1850s all three men led hopeless expeditions from California into Mexico, having been promised land there.In 1852, at the head of 260 men, Raousset-Boulbon sailed to Mexico to foment the independence of the state of Sonora. He unfortunately ignored warnings that he must placate local rivals. After 17 of his men were killed and 23 others were wounded, he left Mexico. In 1854, he courageously returned, this time with 500 recruits. After some of them were killed, he was tried on conspiracy charges and, at his own request, faced a firing squad without a blindfold.De Pindray, also a French noble, was skilled at handling weapons. He accepted an offer from the Mexican government to raise volunteers in California to protect the Sonora mines from Apache Indian raids. But, after his party landed at Guaymas on the west coast of Mexico, de Pindray was suddenly shot in the head, murdered by Indians or perhaps by one of his own renegades. The survivors hastily departed for San Francisco, where most of them had been recruited.The best known of all California filibusters, however, was William Walker. A restless native of Tennessee, Walker arrived at San Francisco in June 1850. Following a short venture into journalism, during which his caustic pen landed him in jail, he entered into law practice at Marysville. Called the gray-eyed man of destiny, Walker wanted to bring about the independence of the Mexican states of Sonora and Baja California, where he also hoped to extend slavery. In 1854, Walker left the Golden Gate by ship with 48 followers and landed at La Paz. There he met another 200 seemingly sympathetic Mexicans. He then recklessly proclaimed the independent Republic of Lower California. He quickly abolished the short-lived government in order to launch the Republic of Sonora, with himself as its president. Even local Mexicans resented Walker’s harsh punishment of deserters. By May of 1854, his group had been reduced to a paltry 35 adherents. When they finally returned to the United States via San Diego, they surrendered to American authorities. Although tried for violating U.S. neutrality laws, Walker was acquitted by a sympathetic jury.
Mark Twain question 6 – page 135
One obscure writer, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known later as Mark Twain, took up mining in Nevada. When bad weather kept him from work in the diggings, he amused himself by writing burlesque sketches. Signed Josh, he sent these vignettes to the Territorial Enterprise, a newspaper at Virginia City in today’s Nevada. In 1862, Twain walked 130 miles from a bleak mining site to take a job on the Enterprise for $25 per week. Two years later Twain drifted into San Francisco, where he became a reporter for its Morning Call. Among his friends in the city was a heroic firefighter named Tom Sawyer. In California, in a cabin near Angel’s Camp, Twain wrote The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. The short story made him famous almost overnight, and he went on to write an entire book of mining tales, Roughing It. His piercing satire of human failings out West remained at the heart of his almost instant success. Twain’s later books applied what he had learned in California. His light touch, combined with fast-paced narration, captivated readers. After writing Innocents Abroad (1869), he lost touch with California and became an internationally famous figure.
5 Missions, Presidios, and Pueblos- for question 8 As it did in other sparsely settled parts of its far northern frontera (frontier) in its North American empire, the Spanish crown used three institutions to colonize California. These were its missions, presidios(garrisoned frontier forts), and pueblos (small settlements or towns). The missions played the central role, as the other two agencies defended and supported the missions padres, whose purpose was the saving of the souls of pagan natives. Eventually, however, Spain transformed its converted peoples into a labor force. Future missionization would thereby become economically viable and further the expansion of the Spanish empire. By 1776, Father Serra hoped for an increase in the population of Alta California as well as expansion of its agricultural possibilities. He also wanted to build more missions. Eventually 21 of these formed a chain from San Diego to Sonoma. Each mission, some 30 miles apart, was separated by a day’s travel on horseback along the so-called King’s Highway, El Camino Real of the tourist literature, which in truth was little more than a dusty dirt road. Three requisites determined the choice of each mission site arable soil for crops, an ample water supply, and a substantial local native population. By the time the 21 missions were established, the friars had in their possession much of the choicest land in the province. Eventually this lead to resentment by civilian leaders and settlers. The first mission buildings were mere huts of thatch and sticks, plastered with mud or clay, and roofed over with tile not the adobe-brick or cut-stone buildings of today. The stone walls at Mission San Carlos Borromo, near today’s Carmel, were never seen by Father Serra, though he is buried there. The California padres, in their isolation, modified Moorish and Roman architectural styles to render structures appropriate to the environment. Thus California mission architecture is characterized by open courts, long colonnades, arches, and corridors. The typical
red-tiled mission roofs were one way to avoid fires in wooden structures. Destruction of earlier buildings by earthquakes led to the use of thick adobe walls reinforced with occasional buttresses. At the missions, the padres assumed a paternal attitude toward the Indians, treating them as wards. Typically, two friars ran each establishment, the elder of whom had charge of interior matters and religious instruction, while the younger attended to agricultural and outside work. Each mission was subject to the authority of a father-president for all of California. He in turn bowed to the orders of the College of San Fernando, headquarters of the Franciscans in Mexico. Except in the punishment of capital crimes, the friars had control of their native charges. Floggings and other corporal punishments were administered for unacceptable offenses. The missionaries defended their use of discipline on the ground that it was the only effective means of controlling unruly natives, the souls of whom they were trying to save. Some clerical scholars have countered accusations of harshness by the Franciscans toward California’s aboriginal peoples. Flagellation, or use of rope disciplina, as well as that of whips and the forced wearing of hairshirts, formed part of the clerical mortification of the flesh. Although delinquent natives were whipped, sometimes excessively, and some lost their lives due to poor sanitary conditions in and around the missions, one needs to place both the punishment and high mortality rates of those living at the missions within the context of eighteenth-century medical standards on a distant frontier. Nevertheless, most historians continue to consider treatment of the natives by the Spanish clergy and military as harsh, even inhumane. Those who were missionized did, indeed, suffer high casualty rates from a variety of causes. The missions were not devoted entirely to religious instruction. Each was also a school in which natives did daily work and were taught trades. Guided by the missionaries, some of whom were also musicians, weavers, carpenters, masons, architects, and physicians, the native peoples proved to be remarkably good students. The friars also put their own hands to the plow, raising enough food for mission use, and occasionally a surplus of cornmeal, wine, oil, hemp, hides, or tallow. These extra products were then exchanged in New Spain for scarce clothing, furniture, and tools. The missionaries also transplanted traditional Spanish crops to California. Orange, lemon, fig, date, and olive trees flourished in mission gardens, as did grape vineyards. Even cotton was grown at several of the missions alongside livestock. Among those who helped assure progress at the missions was the new viceroy, Antonio Mara Bucareli. He placed great faith in the leadership of Father Serra as well as Fathers Francisco Palu and Fermn de Lasun. Palu had been among the last of the Franciscans to turn over their Lower California missions to the Dominican order. In 1773 he joined Serra in Upper California. Palu was also the author of the first book ever written in California, Noticias de la Nueva California; this and his Vida de Junpero Serra remain seminal works in California history.
Figure 5.1 Mission San Luis Rey, founded in 1798, from Robinson’s Life in California Before the Conquest, 1846.
C. C. Pierce Collection, courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. Upon Serra’s death, in 1784, the Franciscans had been in California nearly 16 years. At Santa Barbara, repeated attempts continued to anoint Serra to sainthood. The missions he founded eventually numbered 5,800 native converts. His successor, Lasun, served as president of the order in California with distinction. He wanted California’s presidios strengthened to protect the missions against native uprisings. To guard against foreign interlopers, each presidio was located at a strategic position, generally at the entrance of ports. Eventually small dwellings, inhabited principally by settlers, traders, and the families of garrisoned soldiers, grew up around the presidios. These were the pueblos. The presidial pueblos came to include San Diego, founded July 16, 1769; Monterey, June 3, 1770; San Francisco, September 17, 1776; and Santa Barbara, April 21, 1782. At first they were under military rule. The presidios themselves consisted of a square enclosure, surrounded by a ditch and rampart of earth or brick, within which were located a small church, quarters for officers and soldiers, civilian housing, storehouses, workshops, and cisterns. With only a few bronze cannons mounted on ramparts, and often without sufficient powder to discharge the weapons, not one of the coastal presidios could have stood up against an attack by a well-equipped ship of war. Indeed, they were maintained more as a symbolic warning against possible enemies, with little expectation of their serving well in a fight. In time the cannon rusted and the presidios took on an air of dilapidation. The duties of soldiers who manned the presidios included the care of outlying herds and flocks. They also cultivated the soil of nearby fields, utilizing native laborers, who for their hard work received such occasional rewards as a string of beads, an extra dish of porridge, a pair of shoes, or a piece of cloth. San Francisco’s presidio was established largely through the efforts of Juan Bautista de Anza. He had a reputation as one of the significant trailbreakers and toughest Indian fighters of the West. Anza had long planned to explore and establish a route northwestward from Sonora to the northern California coast. Such a land passage would reduce the delay and perils of sea voyages, on which California still relied for contact with the outside world. Viceroy Bucareli, wishing to strengthen California’s settlements, saw in Anza’s proposal an opportunity not only to open a new land route, but also to send colonists north under the protection of a capable leader. Women settlers, as well as provisions and domestic animals, remained in great demand in the new province. Anza, in January of 1774, with the trails-priest Francisco Garcs as his guide, and a band of 34 men, set out westward from Tubac in northern Mexico. Theirs was the first sizeable crossing by Caucasians into California from the Colorado basin through the San Jacinto Mountains. A key to the success of this party was Father Garcs. Three years before, he had penetrated into California beyond the junction of the Colorado and Gila rivers, to the walls of the southern Sierra
range. Utilizing his expertise, Anza’s party, on March 22, 1774, reached Mission San Gabriel in the Los Angeles basin, which had been founded three years before. Anza had opened up a new overland route some 2,200 miles long. In 1775, Viceroy Bucareli sent Anza with another party to Alta California. This group consisted of colonists recruited throughout Sinaloa and Sonora. On October 23, Anza again left Tubac, leading a group of 240 men, women, and children, along with a herd of 800 cattle, beyond the Colorado River to Mission San Gabriel, and then on to Monterey. A few colonists accompanied him farther north. They settled near the shore of a great bay which they named San Francisco. On September 17, 1776 a little more than two months after the American Declaration of Independence was signed Anza dedicated the Presidio of San Francisco de Ass. On October 9, Mission Dolores was founded by Father Palu. The viceroy had also sent Captain Juan Manuel Ayala, in command of the vessel San Carlos, to explore the area’s vast bay, which as yet still had no name. No ship had yet passed through the entrance to the bay, known even then as Golden Gate, and Ayala feared danger along its narrow, rocky shoreline. At nightfall on August 5, 1775, the San Carlos moved into the bay, cautiously dropping her lead line until she reached today’s North Beach. Ayala named San Francisco Bay’s two islands Nuestra Seora de los Angeles (Our Lady of the Angels) shortened later to Angel Island, and Alcatraz (Pelican), because of the large number of those birds flying over it.
6 California and Its Spanish Governors- for question 5 California: A History, Eighth Edition. Andrew Rolle and Arthur C. Verge. 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Gaspar de Portol was followed by two brief interim governors. Then in 1775, Felipe de Neve became Spain’s main authority until 1782. Like Portol, he was also a military commander who became an innovator. After his arrival at Monterey, he drew up regulations to guide the province’s civic and military affairs as well as his newly founded pueblos. These remote settlements desperately needed colonists. In 1781 Captain Rivera y Moncada received orders to lead a party of settlers bound for Los Angeles and San Jos. On their way northward, beyond Sonora and Sinaloa, tragedy struck this forlorn group. At the Colorado River, Rivera fortunately sent some of the colonists ahead, while he and his soldiers stopped to rest. On July 17, 1781, a group of Yuma Indians, having seen Rivera’s men marching clumsily through their cornfields and pumpkin patches, suddenly attacked near the Missions Pursima Concepcin and San Pedro y San Pablo. Both missions had been established as way stations near the river crossing. In the event that became known as the Yuma Massacre, all the mission friars, some male settlers in the area, and Rivera as well as the trails-priest Father Garcs, were shot or clubbed to death. While the Yumas spared some women and children execution, others they herded off into slavery.
The natives resented all whites, holding them as their mortal enemies. Yet, the Spanish had previously promised them supplies and good treatment by soldiers and settlers alike. The Yuma Massacre led to the abandonment of this dangerous route to California, originally opened up by Anza. Henceforth, neither pueblos nor missions were established along the Colorado River. As a result, the province of Alta California continued in its isolation from the rest of New Spain. Later, on August 28, 1784, the province suffered a heavy loss following the death of Father Serra. During his 71 years, he had spent 34 as a missionary. His successor, Palu, was President of the California missions for only one year, during which time he prepared several volumes describing local conditions. He was followed by Father Lasun, who labored on for 18 years, carrying out Father Serra’s planned extension of the mission system. From 1782 to 1791, Pedro Fages served as the governor of California. Fages, a sturdy officer, had also been an Indian fighter and an explorer who (in 1770 and 1772) had led expeditions to San Francisco Bay. He personally had helped keep the Alta California colonists alive during a period when supply ships were delayed. This he did by providing bear meat from Caada de los Osos (Bear Canyon) near San Luis Obispo. Nevertheless, the governor’s brusque manner soon landed him in the middle of disagreements between the missionaries and his young wife, Doa Eulalia Fages, all of which the missionaries recorded in their journals in entertaining detail. Because Doa Eulalia (who had caught her husband sexually involved with an Indian girl) so hated the frontier, the padres eventually solicited Spanish officials for the couple’s removal from Monterey, where, the padres asserted, they disturbed mission life. In 1794, after two interim appointments, another governor arrived. This was a Spanish Basque named Diego de Borica. Like Fages, Borica was a good soldier and administrator. The new governor established a more harmonious relationship with the friars, encouraging Father Lasun to seek new mission sites. Together they decided that five more such establishments could be founded. Borica believed that conversion of more natives would make it possible to reduce the necessary number of provincial guards. The missions had been isolated units; Borica proposed to link them into one chain, nearer together so that they served the area from San Diego northward to San Francisco and between the Coast Ranges and the ocean. Eventually one could travel safely over a distance of 500 miles and enjoy the hospitality of the missions each night without having to carry along provisions. Governor Borica also instituted new irrigation works and guarded the provincial revenues. He proved to be a steadfast friend of the local natives. He established California’s first education system, however primitive. He also saw to it that Indians were not despoiled of their lands. He also believed that they should never face capital punishment, even for the crime of murder. Upon Borica’s retirement in 1800, Jos Joaqun de Arrillaga served as governor, during which time he tried to mediate between military and religious officials. Meanwhile, back in Mexico City, the viceroy of New Spain was losing interest in the California missions and stopped sending them financial support. He also allowed the presidios and civic establishments of the province to fall into a deplorable state. Buildings deteriorated while cannons rusted from
exposure to the weather. Spiritless frontier troops remained poorly equipped and went without pay for long periods of time. As for mission expansion, this enterprise came to a halt with the death of Father Lasun in 1803. During his administration, one of Governor Arrillaga’s principal worries concerned the founding of a Russian settlement in California. The Russians initially had arrived in 1806 to examine fur-trading opportunities. But after they established Fort Ross, north of Bodega Bay, the threat posed by the Russians had become all too real. California’s last Spanish governor was Pablo Vicente Sol. His arrival at Monterey in 1815 was marked by days of feasting and dancing, exhibitions of expert horsemanship, and gory bull and bear fights in the capital’s muddy plaza. The vain royalist governor wrongly considered this welcome as an expression of California’s loyalty to Spain. Actually, local allegiance was growing ever weaker. Sol was proud of his Spanish birth and inclined to look with contempt upon colonials whom he considered incompetent whelps. He especially objected to the widespread smuggling that had grown up between the Californians and foreigners. Each year increasing numbers of foreign ships arrived offshore. Particularly alarming were vessels sailing under the flag of the new American Union. When these ships casually landed illegally in California to take on wood and water, the governor realized the sorry state of his shore fortifications. Yet, when he personally faced scarcities of clothing, furniture, and household necessities, the haughty governor always managed to ignore the widespread smuggling. But Sol’s stormy tenure in office would soon be of little consequence. Spain’s New World empire was about to crumble. California, though only an appendage of its far-flung colonies, could not escape the revolutionary fervor felt by colonials throughout Latin America.
9 Mexican California – for question #1 California: A History, Eighth Edition. Andrew Rolle and Arthur C. Verge. 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. After three centuries of neglect by the homeland, the Spanish colonies in the New World grew increasingly restive. Discontent kindled the flame of revolution, which spread throughout Spain’s New World provinces between 1808 and the mid-1820s. California remained loyal to Spain partly because so little news reached the province regarding the revolutionary fervor throughout the rest of Latin America. An aristocrat, Governor Sol looked upon revolutionary activities south of his capital at Monterey as the work of misguided fanatics. After 1808, severe discontent arose in California when vessels from San Blas failed to arrive in sufficient number to supply the local populace. Revolutionary attacks against Spanish ships had aggravated the situation, so that fewer and fewer relief vessels made it into California ports. Along with American trading ships that helped fill the supply gap, foreign privateers began to appear in the Pacific, some fitted out in the United States. These vagabond pirates roamed the
high seas, menacing shipping lanes as well as the shorelines of Spain’s colonies. News of the blockade of the South American Pacific colonial ports of Valparaso, Callao, and Guayaquil by revolutionists and privateers so worried Governor Sol that he ordered a stricter shore watch for suspicious vessels. Although the Californios registered complaints against the viceroy in Mexico City for his failure to send them sufficient supplies and back pay to the soldiers, they originally had no thought of resisting his authority or that of Governor Sol. They were more concerned with pirates. In November of 1818, a sentinel at Point Pinos near Monterey sighted two mysterious ships. The larger of the two vessels, the Argentina, was commanded by a Frenchman, Hippolyte de Bouchard, who had served in the patriot navy of the new Republic of Buenos Aires. He was a big, brutal man of fiery temper, a captain who exercised an iron rule over his men. The other vessel was the Santa Rosa under the command of an English soldier of fortune named Peter Corney. The Englishman had fallen in with Bouchard in Hawaii, where the latter was trading gold chalices and silver crucifixes looted from churches in Peru and Ecuador. Their crews comprised a motley lot of cutthroats and thieves, but also revolutionists. Among them were Malays, Portuguese, Spaniards, Englishmen, and Australians all of whom aimed to profit from the unraveling of the Spanish empire. The Santa Rosa dropped anchor in front of the presidio of Monterey and opened fire. Captain Corney and his crew, expecting little resistance from the dilapidated fort, were surprised at a brisk return of cannon balls from a battery hastily established on the beach by the presidio’s 40 soldiers. At this point, Bouchard moved in with the Argentina and sent ashore, under a flag of truce, a demand for the immediate surrender of Monterey. Bouchard received a defiant reply from Governor Sol, although the Californians had little means of resisting. The pirate landed several hundred men and a number of field pieces near Point Pinos. Greatly outnumbered, Sol retreated, taking a supply of munitions and the provincial archives with him to the Rancho del Rey, near the present site of Salinas. Back at Monterey, its townspeople fled. Some took refuge at Missions San Antonio and San Juan Bautista. In the meantime, the invaders sacked and burned both the presidio and town of Monterey. Few buildings escaped undamaged. The vandals even destroyed the mission orchards and gardens. Concerning the conduct of his crew during this pillage, Corney later wrote of them: The Sandwich Islanders, who were quite naked when they landed, were soon dressed in the Spanish fashion; and all the sailors were employed in searching the houses for money and breaking and ruining everything. The attackers spent something over a week in burying their dead, caring for their wounded, and repairing the Santa Rosa. The revolutionaries among them also made efforts to win over to their cause those of the inhabitants who had the courage to remain in the pueblo; but such propaganda, ostensibly promoting the cause of liberty, failed to impress the group of Californians whose homes had just been despoiled.
Their larders replenished, the Argentina and the Santa Rosa set sail, and Governor Sol returned to Monterey. The privateers next moved down the coast, stopping at points on the way to burn and pillage. Rancho del Refugio was burned in revenge for the loss of three pirates who had been lassoed and ignominiously dragged off by a party of local vaqueros. San Juan Capistrano was another of the places sacked and robbed of its store of wines and spirits, much of which immediately went down the throats of the pillagers. After taking two Indian girls aboard, the pirates sailed south from that mission, and California was finally relieved of their presence. This attack constitutes California’s only contact with outside revolutionists during the wars of independence. Once Bouchard left the province, life resumed its calmness. Not long thereafter, however, events of great importance to Spain’s colonies took place. In February of 1821, Agustn Iturbide, a colonel in the Spanish army in New Spain, raised a revolutionary flag, and on September 27 entered Mexico City. He ordered that thereafter New Spain should be called Mexico, an independent nation. Iturbide, who named himself emperor on May 19, 1822, began to use California as a dumping ground for potential rivals. When news reached California of the seizure of political control in Mexico, Governor Sol convened a junta (or political caucus), consisting of officers from the presidios and padres from the missions. These took an oath of allegiance to Iturbide’s insurgent government. The friars, however, correctly sensed that without Spain’s jurisdiction, their mission system was in peril. The California junta chose Sol as its delegate to the new Mexican Corts (or congress). But before the governor could depart for Mexico City, Iturbide sent an official to preside over the transfer of authority from Spain to Mexico. Aware of lingering royalist sympathies, this agent of the new regime sailed into Monterey on a ship boldly flying a green, white, and red flag from its masthead. The eagle in the flag’s center, the symbol of the new nation of Mexico, indicated that Spain’s sovereignty over California had ended. Succeeding Sol as governor was the native-born and popularly elected Lus Antonio Argello. Thereafter, officials in Mexico City would impose their own governors on the province. Most proved to be unpopular. Argello, a Californian who had, as noted, served as comandante of the port at San Francisco, announced that all decrees of the Mexican government would be followed. After the collapse of Iturbide’s rule in 1823, he also agreed that such designated titles as nacional would replace imperial in official documents. Even public and private letters would thereafter conclude with the words: God and Liberty. The old aristocratic title Don was to be changed to Ciudadano (Citizen). All such Spanish dignities were to give way to an imposed Mexican republicanism. California, far from the vortex of the revolutionary struggle, luckily became part of an independent Mexico without blood-letting. Yet, the province failed to escape the eruption of personal rivalries. Indeed, scarcely a governor during the entire Mexican period would serve his term in office without facing a disturbing local outbreak against him.
In his election, Governor Argello, who came from northern California, had been favored by northerners and won out over a prominent southerner, Jos de la Guerra. Thus began a rift between northern and southern California that has continued the issues changing with the years to this day. Argello established his own diputacin, or junta. Because of a severe money crunch, he ordered the unprecedented taxation of local crops as well as branded cattle. The padres protested that crops raised by the missions were untaxable, but such claims only earned their establishments increased governmental surveillance. While no direct steps toward mission secularization occurred under Argello, missionary power was nearing its end. So was the province’s willingness to take orders from Mexico City. During Argello’s governorship, still more foreign traders and settlers arrived in California. He personally had been friendly with the Russians since the days when Rezanov had courted his sister. And the Russians had long desired to enter into a partnership for sea otter-hunting and trading with the Californians. Now Governor Argello signed a contract with Fort Ross that furnished him with his own contingent of Aleut hunters, who in return were to be fed and supplied by the Californians. Meanwhile, the changing political situation lessened the willingness of the missionaries to cooperate with the governor. In defiance of regulations, the padres signed an agreement with McCulloch & Hartnell, a subsidiary of the English trading firm of John Begg and Company. The Scotsman Hugh McCulloch and the Englishman William E. P. Hartnell, who later became a local school teacher, had arrived in California from Lima in 1822. Known locally to the Californians as Macala y Arnel, they were allowed to bring one ship cargo a year to the province. They were also authorized to take out all the hides the missions had for sale at the price of $1 apiece, as well as suet, lard, tallow, wheat, wine, furs, and pickled beef. This launched California into its lucrative hide-and-tallow era. Though illegal, warm-water Yankee traders reaped rewards from marketing their sorely needed goods. Some of them settled permanently, including Nathan Spear, William Heath Davis Jr., John R. Cooper, and Alfred Robinson. Shipmasters eventually were allowed to load and unload their vessels at designated collecting points, rather than engaging in smuggling at secret landfalls. Both the traders and the Californios profited from these activities. Such was not the case for the Mexican customs collectors, whom the Yankees grew expert at avoiding. One Boston firm, Bryant, Sturgis & Company, maintained a steady chain of ships plying the sea lanes between California, Hawaii, and China. The company’s fleet imported hundreds of thousands of California hides for New England’s shoe industry. Other Boston shippers included Marshall & Wildes as well as William Appleton & Company. The holds of their ships swelled with hundreds of commodities, from silk stockings to needles and tobacco. The crews of these floating commissaries processed great quantities of hides purchased from interior ranchos. First the skins were soaked in seawater. Then they were stretched on the ground and pegged fast with wooden stakes. Once dried, the hides were sprinkled with salt and scraped. Floated out to ships beyond the breaking surf, the hides were stored alongside cowhide bags filled with tallow.
Some Yankee traders married daughters of the country and founded families in California. One of them, John R. Cooper, arrived in 1823 as captain of the American ship Rover and settled at Monterey. Along with Cooper came Daniel Hill and Thomas Robbins of Massachusetts, both of whom decided to make their home at Santa Barbara. At Yerba Buena, William A. Richardson, who defected from the ship Orion, married the daughter of its comandante. After he was baptized in the Catholic Church, Richardson started a trading post. Thus, a generation of these early American settlers established close relations with the Californios long before the first overland party pushed west across the Great Plains. California was an appealing place to settle before its Indians learned how to use firearms. In February of 1824, a series of revolts started among the neophytes of Missions Pursima Concepcin, Santa Ins, and Santa Barbara. Feeling ill-treated because of forced labor, they attacked at Santa Ins, setting fire to its buildings. At La Pursima, 400 armed assailants fought a contingent of outnumbered soldiers. Both Indians and whites died in the violent uprising. The natives maintained possession of that mission for nearly a month. By erecting crude dirt fortifications, cutting loopholes in the church walls, and mounting two rusty cannons, they warded off attackers. However, due to their inexperience in handling guns and powder, the occupiers were eventually defeated by Lieutenant Jos Mariano Estrada and a force of 100 men. The discontented Indians at Santa Barbara also entrenched themselves in mission buildings. After Comandante de la Guerra attacked them, they fled into the hills, taking all the church property they could carry. In mid-1825, Governor Argello reported to the Mexican government regarding the miserable state of the mission Indians, calling attention to the injustice of keeping these people any longer in virtual slavery. Under Argello the change to Mexican rule had been quietly accepted by most Californians, and progress was made toward the foundation of a representative government. The sleepy province had, somehow, managed to substitute the paternalistic regime of Spain for the unsettled sovereignty of Mexico. As a result, subsequent governmental instability would fuel further factionalism. Jos Mara Echeanda, Governor Argello’s successor, was a tall, thin, juiceless man possessing little force of character. He was, however, much concerned about the effect of the California climate upon his less-than-robust health. At first Echeanda so feared the foggy weather in chilly Monterey that he came no farther into California than San Diego. Echeanda claimed that Alta California’s southernmost town was more conveniently located for transacting official business with Mexico City. As nothing in his instructions required this hypochondriac to reside at Monterey, he was acting within his rights in conducting California affairs from the city of his choice. Yet, his move to San Diego made the new governor unpopular from the start, especially among northerners. In 1826, a contest flared up between Echeanda and a young Massachusetts sea captain named Henry Delano Fitch for the hand of Seorita Josefa Carrillo of San Diego. This event suggests that a romantic motive as well as health concerns may have had something to do with the new
governor’s decision to stay in the south. In fact, lovesick over the 16-year-old beauty, Echeanda halted her plans to marry Fitch. At this point Captain Fitch, in command of the U.S. barque Maria Ester, sailed his intended to Chile, where the couple wed. Yet their ordeal was far from over. Upon their return to Monterey, the governor charged the captain with abduction and other heinous crimes. Henry and Josefa were jailed, separately, for more than six months. Upon their release, the couple returned to San Diego, where they started a family of 10 children (ancestors of the future 32nd president of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt). In 1840, another Mexican governor granted Fitch the 48,000-acre Rancho Sotoyome near Healdsburg. Ten years later Fitch, by this time a prominent ranchero and merchant, died at the age of 48. Josefa lived on until 1893, dying at the age of 82. A much more pressing question had faced Governor Echeanda. It concerned providing supplies for California’s unpaid soldiers and their families. He also had to contend with two northern political rivals. Expressing the discontent of the province’s frustrated soldiers and suspicious padres, Joaqun Sols, a former convict, and Jos Mara Herrera, who had been sent to the province from Mexico as financial agent of the government, issued a pronunciamiento accusing the governor of tyrannical behavior toward the populace. In 1828, Sols and Herrera led a local revolt against the governor that began at Monterey and extended as far south as Santa Barbara. Ultimately both dissidents were arrested and shipped off to San Blas. So ended the first of a series of minor uprisings against Mexican authority in the province. These were largely wars of words, not guns. The practice of sending criminals to the province also had much to do with the antagonistic feeling between Californians and Mexicans. About the same time as the collapse of the Sols rebellion, Mexican officials sent 80 convicts north to California. They were put ashore at Santa Cruz Island with a few cattle and some fishhooks to sustain themselves. In time, these men made it back to the mainland on rafts of their own construction. In July 1830, another ship from Mexico arrived with 50 more criminals, who were distributed throughout the province. Echeanda was blamed for their arrival. Although Californians asked Mexico not to send any more such reprobates, other convicts entered the province as enlisted soldiers. In the summer of 1829, Echeanda faced another Indian revolt, this one under Chief Estanislao, a former alcalde of San Jos. Estanislao and a band of angry natives fortified themselves in some dense woods. From there they issued defiant challenges. Forty of the governor’s soldiers, armed with muskets and a swivel gun, soon engaged these rebels. The Indians killed two of the soldiers and wounded eight others. The rest of the force abandoned the siege when their ammunition ran out. Echeanda feared that the uprising might become more widespread. So he sent in cavalry, infantry, and some artillery under Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, commander of California’s military. This force ousted the Indians from their entrenchment. Estanislao then fled, taking refuge with Father Narciso Durn, president of the missions, who concealed him until a pardon could be obtained from the governor.
Still, Echeanda’s troubles had not ended. His governorship saw the arrival of a new wave of foreign expeditions. On November 6, 1826, the British ship Blossom sailed into San Francisco Bay under the command of Captain F. W. Beechey. He, like Vancouver, was struck by the contrast between the natural beauty of the country and Mexico’s neglect of its colonists. He commented, for example, on the discontent among all classes and predicted that the Mexicans could not permanently hold onto the land. Many of the friars dreaded the worst, he noted, and would have quit the country. Some of them were ingenious and clever men, wrote Beechey, but they had been so long excluded from the civilized world that their ideas and their politics, like the maps pinned against the wall, bore the date of 1772, as near as I could read for fly specks. Beechey’s visit is important for the detailed description of the country and its inhabitants. In addition, some remarkable watercolors of California were painted by artists in his crew. In January of 1827, yet another foreign visitor arrived in California waters: Auguste Bernard Duhaut-Cilly, in command of the French ship Le Hros. A close observer and entertaining writer, this Frenchman was accompanied by Dr. Paolo Emilio Botta, an Italian archaeologist who described the peoples and wildlife they encountered. Like almost all such foreign visitors to California, Duhaut-Cilly was critical of both the government and the powerful missionaries. At this point Mexican officials, still struggling to create a bona fide nation, planned to convert all of the missions into civic pueblos. In California, however, this process of secularization had to be approached cautiously. For one thing, the padres were the only ones who could induce mission neophytes to work. If these priests should ever leave, the province would suddenly be at a loss for sufficient laborers as well as exposed to even more raids by hostile natives from the interior. Because the missionized Indians were not generally a threat, on January 6, 1831, Governor Echeanda secularized a number of missions. These were now to become civilian pueblos. As the friars were reduced to the role of mere curates, their power dwindled. No longer would church and state rule California. From now on, local civic leaders would try to dominate political affairs. Furthermore, an interfering Mexico was about to lose control over its most distant province. Chapter 20- question #2 Meanwhile pro-South sympathizers tried to kindle the fires of secession. Among southern residents of California was Kentucky-born General Albert Sidney Johnston, U.S. Army commandant at the presidio of San Francisco. To him, the coercion of California into a state of war by the North was flagrantly unconstitutional. When General Johnston’s loyalty came into question, he gave up his California command to join the Confederate Army. Various southern officers from the state’s Sixth Army Regiment followed him into the Confederacy. There was other opposition to the Union. Before Lincoln’s inauguration there was talk of a Pacific Republic by Representative John C.
Burch. This fiery legislator urged Californians, in case of a fratricidal war, to call upon the enlightened nations of the earth to acknowledge our independence, and to protect us. John B. Weller, who became governor in 1858, also advocated that California, instead of siding with North or South, should establish on the shores of the Pacific a mighty republic, which may in the end prove the greatest of all. In January of 1861, a resident of Stockton hoisted a flag to represent a Pacific Republic. This touched off the raising of the Stars and Stripes throughout the city. It was clear that Union feeling remained strong. Later in 1861, once hostilities had begun, California’s legislature debated whether it would support President Lincoln. That year, the lawmakers resolved that the people of California are devoted to the Constitution and the Union now in the hour of trial and peril. They allocated funds to train volunteers for the Union Army at Drum Barracks in San Pedro. Paradoxically, nearby Los Angeles became a hotbed for secessionists. The Los Angeles Star was banned from the mails for its seditious editorials. Its Bella Union Hotel on Main Street was out of bounds for Union troops because the hotel’s bar was a gathering place for Southern sympathizers. They toasted Robert E. Lee with tumblers of bourbon and referred to Abraham Lincoln as that baboon in the White House. The Los Angeles News, a pro-Union paper, editorialized: Los Angeles County is disloyal, double-eyed in treason, and the inhabitants break out in broad grins upon hearing the news of a Confederate victory. Secretive supporters of the Confederacy included the Knights of the Golden Circle, Knights of the Columbian Star, and the Committee of Thirty. The members of these organizations avoided meeting in large groups, seeking not to draw attention to themselves. During the war, advocacy of secession sometimes broke out in public speeches, sermons and prayers from the pulpit, and at covert celebrations of Confederate victories. Newspapers that urged independence for California included the San Francisco Herald, Sacramento Standard, Alameda County Gazette, Marysville Gazette, and Sonora Democrat. The Visalia Equal Rights Expositor, which repeatedly printed inflammatory editorials, saw its printing press smashed by the state militia. The operation of five other disloyal newspapers were wrecked by mob violence. To counteract secessionist sentiment, the California legislature enacted severe emergency measures. One such law made it a misdemeanor to display rebel flags or devices. Illegal behavior also came to include adherence to the enemy by endorsing, defending, or cheering the subversion of United States authority. Other state laws were enacted to exclude traitors and alien enemies from the courts of justice in civil cases. Secessionist dissension at El Monte, Visalia, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, San Bernardino, and Los Angeles was discouraged by the presence of federal troops. During the great conflict, Californians were spared actual warfare at home. Pro-Union demonstrations took place in all parts of the state, with resolutions of loyalty adopted at mass meetings in various towns and counties. San Francisco Home Guards promoted enlistments in the Union Army, kept an
eye out for conspiracy, and worked vigorously for the election of a pro-Union war governor. Californians, having cast their vote for Lincoln in 1860, chose Leland Stanford, one of the builders of the Central Pacific Railroad, as their wartime governor. Meanwhile, Lincoln’s popularity remained so great that in 1864 he would again receive the state’s vote for the presidency. California provided indispensable financial strength for the Union cause. As a hard-money state, it did not at first gracefully accept national laws making paper greenbacks legal tender. Californians, accustomed to trading in real gold and silver, did not trust greenbacks as a stable currency. Yet California gold flowed into the federal treasury, bolstering the nation’s economy during the stressful wartime period. The state also helped to supply the Union armies with wool, wheat, and other raw materials. The war hastened California’s integration into national life in other ways as well. Passage of the Pacific Railroad Bill of 1862 by Congress was facilitated by the absence of Southern legislators who previously had blocked adoption of a northern railroad route. During 1863, work on the Central Pacific Railroad began at Sacramento. As that project’s principal advocate, Governor Stanford joined national party leaders in temporarily abandoning the name Republican. They sought the support of all citizens under a Union party label. Nevertheless, anyone who deviated from expressions of Northern loyalty was apt to feel the whip of public censure. Californians were moved to new heights of sentiment for the Union cause by Thomas Starr King, a popular Unitarian preacher. As many as 40,000 persons came to hear him speak at mass meetings. Although King lived in California less than four years, he was an extraordinary figure in the history of the state. After his arrival from Boston in 1860, he became a major spokesman for the Union cause and raised funds for the Sanitary Commission, forerunner of the Red Cross. Over one-fourth of its donations came from California. King’s eloquence was so great that his supporters claimed he saved California for the Union. Relatively few of the state’s residents saw active service. Conscription was never enforced. Only some 15,000 Californians enlisted in the Union Army. Some of these volunteers spent the war years pacifying Indians in Arizona and New Mexico. The California Column, under the command of Colonel James H. Carleton, marched to Yuma, then into New Mexico. But they were too late to forestall a Confederate invasion there. Stranded amid whirling winds and itchy desert sands, their only enemy seemed to be what derisively came to be called the battle of the fleas. Because Massachusetts paid large bounties for volunteers out of a special fund earmarked for recruiting, a company consisting mainly of native-born Californians was organized at San Jose. They were actually equipped with lassoes, which they used expertly. Another unit, the California Hundred, sailed through the Golden Gate on December 11, 1862, leaving cheering crowds behind at dockside. Five weeks later, after a trip around Cape Horn, these troops reached Boston for service in the Union Army. Finally, during 1865, Californians rode with General Philip H. Sheridan in the defeat of Robert E. Lee’s Army of
Northern Virginia. Some were even present for Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. Once the war ended, Governor Stanford went on to serve in the U.S. Senate from 1885 to 1893. A railroad builder and skillful politician, Stanford created one of the largest personal fortunes in the West. Also repeatedly reelected to the Senate was George Hearst, father of the well-known publisher. Another senator was a geriatric wonder. Cornelius Cole, during his 102 years from 1822 to 1924, lived within the life spans of every U.S. president from John Adams through John F. Kennedy already born when Cole died. In the years after the Civil War, both of the major political parties remained relatively conservative, in California and nationally. Not until the Progressive Era would voters move toward embracing substantial political and economic reforms.
4 Colonizers of the Frontier- question #3 California: A History, Eighth Edition. Andrew Rolle and Arthur C. Verge. 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. New Spain’s northern border extended in an arc from present-day Louisiana to a remote chain of Jesuit missions. These desolate adobe edifices were spread throughout northern Mexico as well as in Upper and Lower California. Mining camps, cattle ranches, and crude forts also dotted the vast frontier. Three Jesuit clerics contributed to the Spanish colonization of Upper California. Foremost among these was Eusebio Francesco Kino (sometimes spelled Chino or Chini), a native of Trento in what is now northern Italy. As an explorer, cartographer, and mission builder, Father Kino was responsible in the years 16781712 for the founding of missions on New Spain’s northern frontiers. It was Father Kino, also an astronomer, who proved in 1702 that California was not an island. Aiding him in his work was another Italian Jesuit, the flinty and square-jawed Juan Maria de Salvatierra, who in 1697 founded the first of what would become a chain of missions in Lower (Baja) California. A third major black robe, a term used by Indians to refer to the Jesuit missionaries, was Father Juan de Ugarte. He labored for years among Indians newly converted to Christianity. In 1763, after the defeat in North America of France by the British in the Seven Years War, Spain feared more than ever that England might attempt to extend its New England colonization farther west, possibly into Spanish territory. To prepare for any such incursions, in 1765 Charles III, one of Europe’s enlightened monarchs, appointed Jos de Glvez visitador-general, or inspector general, of New Spain. In 1768 Glvez,
commissioned to reform colonization procedures, sailed to Lower California on an inspection tour of the peninsula’s scraggly frontier missions. While in Baja California, Glvez, an avid expansionist, was ordered by King Charles to expel the Jesuits from the Spanish colonies. All over Europe a keen distrust of that order’s political power had spread. Fearing that the Jesuits might eventually control Spain’s colonial settlements, the king ordered the Jesuits replaced, even in distant Baja California. Thereafter, gray-robed Franciscan friars arrived at La Paz to continue the work begun earlier by Father Kino and his fellow Jesuits. These Franciscan priests would, in time, become the key colonizers for Glvez in Alta California. In the meantime, the Russians began to encroach upon California from the north. The voyages of Vitus Bering and Alexei Chirikof in 1741 deeply disturbed officials in New Spain. Furthermore, Russian sea otter-hunting ships were extending their poaching farther southward each year. Glvez, therefore, felt a pressing need for Spaniards to occupy Alta California, although he personally would never see an outpost in the province. In his capacity as inspector general, Glvez next arranged a vital four-pronged expedition into Alta California. Two divisions were to go by sea and two more by land; if one party of either set should fail, the other might succeed. If all went well, however, all four groups would convene at San Diego before pressing onward to Monterey, the place so highly praised long ago by Vizcano. Religious supervision of the expeditions into Alta California was entrusted to the Franciscan missionaries. The peninsular (Baja) missions contributed to the exploring parties all the horses, mules, dried meat, grain, cornmeal, and dry biscuits they could spare. Glvez took great care to select a strong cleric to lead the Franciscans northward into the new land. His choice was the 55-year-old Fray Junpero Serra. The selection of Gaspar de Portol to head the military branch of the expedition proved equally shrewd. Serra, the religious zealot, and Portol, the dutiful soldier, were to become the first colonizers of Alta California. Father Serra, originally from the Mediterranean island of Majorca, had come to the New World in 1749 to labor among its natives. Before he was called to take charge of the missions of both Californias, he served for nine years among the Pam Indians in the Sierra Gorda mountains of Mexico. Serra brushed aside obstacles that would have stopped lesser men. These included a lame leg, from which he suffered pain nearly all his life. Unbelievably, he applied manure to it as a poultice. When Serra set out on the 1769 expedition to Upper California, he was in such poor shape that two men had to lift him onto the saddle of his mule. Yet, when his friend and fellow cleric, Fray Francisco Palu, bade him a sad farewell, Serra insisted that, with the aid of a merciful God, he would make it to Alta California. Serra’s military companion, Portol, had served the king as a captain of dragoons. In addition to occupying San Diego and Monterey, Portol and Serra hoped to establish
five missions. Church ornaments and sacred vessels did not constitute all of Serra’s cargo. He also brought along seeds and farm tools with which to plant future mission gardens. The two land parties also herded along 200 head of cattle, the descendants of whom would roam the hills and valleys of Alta California and become the chief source of the province’s pastoral wealth for several generations. POST GOLD RUSH- QUESTION #4 Banking was another enterprise related to communication. Some frontier bankers began as saloon keepers or stage coach operators who kept strong safes on their premises. On their visits to town, miners entrusted their hard-earned treasure to these men for safekeeping. In contrast with modern banks, which pay interest to their depositors, western merchants charged depositors interest for storing their money. Indeed, early western bankers considered safeguarding a miner’s doeskin bag of nuggets or poke of gold dust as a risky venture. Only the large national express companies possessed the facilities for the safe transportation of money. By the mid-1850s, travel by water had entered a new era. Upon finally arriving at the Golden Gate, river boats took passengers to interior ports. These included Marysville, Sacramento, and Stockton. The fastest steamboats, among them the Senator, Cornelia, and New World, sometimes engaged in foolish, indeed dangerous, races. On several occasions passengers on riverboats moving under high steam felt the explosion of iron boilers as decks literally buckled beneath them. Steamboats and barges along California’s inland rivers irregularly serviced outlying ranches. The smaller vessels continued up the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers, trading supplies en route. The smaller vessels were able to reach shallow bodies of water, including the Mokelumne River and Lake Tulare, which was once linked to the turbulent lower Kern River and the new town of Bakersfield. After the Civil War, San Francisco remained California’s major port. By 1870, an increasing number of ships entered its waterfront, sometimes in ballast, to load grain, lumber, wool, quicksilver, and flour. In and around the city, nearly 100 flour mills were in operation, as were scores of lumber and textile mills and foundries. Among these were the Risdon and Pacific Iron Works, the San Francisco chocolate factory of Domenico Ghirardelli, the sugar-beet refineries of the Oxnard Brothers and Claus Spreckels, several cigar and boot factories, tanneries, ship-repair yards, and even gunpowder works. San Jose, Stockton, Sacramento, Marysville, and Merced each started woolen mills. California also needed more blacksmiths, harness and saddle makers, wheelwrights, and carpenters. Almost every sizable town acquired a brewery or distillery and a metal or iron shop; soon canneries would also make their appearance. John Studebaker at Placerville and Phineas Banning at Wilmington began to build excellent wagons and
carriages. After 1867, Banning operated a stage line into Los Angeles and eventually a railroad that reached San Pedro’s harbor. As the state’s population grew, fishing and whaling became important industries. In 1855 alone, 500 whaling vessels visited the California coast. That same year, firms as far north as Sacramento were smoking and salting salmon. As canned salmon production increased, Monterey emerged as a terminus for anchovy and sardine fleets while San Pedro became a tuna-packing center. San Diego too was processing tons of mackerel, sole, sand dabs, skipjack, albacore, rockfish, and barracuda. In order to meet the demand for shellfish, clams, crabs, and abalone were increasingly harvested all along the California coast. The building of a transcontinental railroad would greatly expand manufacturing, commercial fishing, and produce marketing. The state was on its way to becoming a provider of what would become nationally known products. In the meantime, California sorely needed steel rails over which to ship its agricultural products and merchandise.