With a flourish, General Vallejo grandly motioned us down the breezeway toward a second room, on the right side of the hall, that had been set up as a more traditional museum display. Poster dividers crisscrossed the room to separate numerous exhibits.
I felt only the slightest tingle of apprehension as he smoothly waved his hands at the doorway and invited us inside. “After you.”
Chapter 44
THE BEAR FLAG REVOLT
VALLEJO’S ROUND FIGURE
strolled across the dusty concrete floor, swishing past displays of an oxen yoke, a Western saddle, and a trio of three-foot-tall dolls dressed as celebrating Bear Flaggers.
“I think you will find our most
een
-teresting
eggs-zhibit
at the back of the room,” he said suggestively.
The building’s rock walls absorbed the sounds from the street, leaving the interior with the ambient noise of the water rushing through the gutters that ran along the rim of the roof.
The room had a damp, clammy feeling; it was only duskily lit. The wooden shutters that framed each of the wide exterior windows were bolted shut, blocking any natural light. It had been over a hundred and fifty years since this building was last occupied by Mexican soldiers, but the Sonoma Barracks still gave the appearance—from the inside, at least—of a formidable bunker.
I pushed the stroller after the General, leaning forward over the handlebar as I listened to his in-character commentary.
“It’s a
drra-
matic story, that of the Bea
rr
Flag
Rr
evolt,” he said, stroking his bushy side-whiskers. “One that I
unfor-tu-netly
experienced firsthand.” He cleared his throat and straightened his wide lapel.
“You can
eee-ma-gene
my surprise. The morning of June 14, 1846, I was lying in bed,
pace
-fully watching the sun rise, when I heard someone kicking down my f
rr
ont door.” He nodded his head toward the center breezeway. “My bed
rr
oom was just around the corner there.”
Vallejo shook his head, as if remembering. “On my f
rr
ont stoop, I found a group of
buck-skeen band-deets
, armed to the teeth and
rr
eeking of spirits. They said they were here to decla
rr
e Sonoma an independent
rr
epublic. Let me assure you, it was a quite
un-see-vilized
way to start the day.”
The General stroked his side-whiskers indignantly before continuing.
“Now, I was
nut
opposed to switching my allegiances,” he said, touching his chest to emphasize his sincerity. “T
rr
uth be known, I had a
fut
in each camp.” He spread his legs wide and tapped each booted toe against the concrete.
“I had
dis-kussed
the future of Califo
rr
nia at length with Tomas La
rr
kin, the American Consul in Monterey, and William Leidesdo
rr
ff, his associate in Yerba Buena. I thought we were all of a similar mind on the matter. There would be no stopping the Americans’ Westward
ex-panshon
. Better, then, to join them and profit from it.” He winked at me conspiratorially. “Leidesdo
rr
ff was particularly enthusiastic about the idea.”
There he was again—William Leidesdorff. The man I associated with the tulip-printed wallpaper that had started this whole treasure hunt kept sneaking into Bear Flag conversations. My brow furrowed as Vallejo continued.
“But no one had said
any-ting
about this
rr
ough lot showing up on my doorstep,” Vallejo said, shrugging his shoulders in confusion. “The Sonoma ga
rr
ison had been unmanned for
say-ver-al
years, leaving my wife and family unprotected.”
He held his hands up, as if surrendering. “There was nothing I could do. I invited the leaders—or at least the most
rray-son-able
looking of the crew—into my hacienda for a glass of b
rr
andy. I hoped that would calm them down a bit.” He smiled ruefully. “We went through
say-ver-al
bottles of b
rr
andy that day.”
The General rubbed his temple, as if remembering the voluminous alcohol consumption.
“As the afternoon wore on, we began to
rr
each the end of my b
rr
andy supply. I was so
shure
the
Americanos
were behind all this. I kept expecting one of my
al-lies
to arrive to help
fas-cili-tate
my situation. So, you can see, I was
ray-leeved
when the Osos finally told me they were under orders to take me to
Cap-i-tan Frray-mont
.”
Vallejo leaned back with an expression of exaggerated relief. “
Herre
, I thought, is the American presence I had been
wait-ing
for. G
rr
aciously, I permitted myself to be taken
pri-son-ner
. I was
nut
concerned; I considered it a mere formality. It was
nut
until they b
rr
ought me to Sutter’s Fort that I
rray-al-lized
what that scoundrel
Frray-mont
was up to.”
Vallejo shook his head back and forth. Then he blew out a gust of frustrated air, fluttering his lips as if he’d tasted something unpleasant.
“He was
nut
an hono
rr
able man, in my opinion—that so called
Path-finderr
. He was
rr
uthless and blood-thi
rr
sty. I suppose I should consider myself lucky that I only had to withstand the
in-dig-nity
of being locked up for six weeks before La
rr
kin could a
rr
ange my freedom. Others who crossed
Frray-mont’s
path fared a fa
rr
worse fate.”
He sighed sadly. “When I finally
rray
-turned to my home in Sonoma, I was a b
rr
oken man, my body sick and diseased. All of my cattle and horses had been stolen, my crops destroyed.”
Vallejo bridled indignantly. His side-whiskers puffed out as his cheeks reddened. “
Frray-mont
later tried to deny that he had been the one
puppet-teer-ing
the Osos, but I had no
dowt
who was
rray-sponsible
.”
I watched, impressed by how seriously Clem was taking his role as General Vallejo. He seemed to be channeling inner emotions—as if he were projecting a personal modern-day grudge onto the egotistical explorer’s historical figure.
He tugged once more at the wide lapels of his jacket, puckered up his lips, and spat at the floor. “
Frray-mont
,” he said bitterly. “That is what I think of him.”
Chapter 45
A FLOWERY FABRIC
HAROLD WOMBLER GIMPED
through the plaza’s wet grass as the woman with the long brown hair left the Bear Flag Memorial, crossed the intersection, and entered the breezeway of the Sonoma Barracks.
He paused for a moment, considering. Then he backtracked about a hundred yards into the park, keeping his cover by lurching from tree to tree, until, cautiously, he approached the street. Peering up and down the damp avenue, he hobbled across to the opposite curb. After a quick glance at the front entrance of the breezeway, he circled around to the back side of the building.
Past the rubbled remains of Vallejo’s hacienda, Harold turned right into an overgrown alley. Less than a hundred feet down the passage, he hefted himself over a rickety rock wall and dropped into a muddy courtyard. Several inches of water had pooled in the center of the rectangular half-acre, forming a barrier of thick gooey muck between his location and the back entrance to the barracks’ breezeway.
Harold grimaced as rain ran across the green brim of his baseball cap and dripped down the front of his face. After studying the growing pond in the middle of the courtyard, he started off around the perimeter, his wornout construction boots sliding across the slick surface.
He had to slosh through a stream of water gushing from one of the gutter’s downspouts, but he eventually reached the barracks’ back wall. As he approached the breezeway entrance, cold mud began to ooze through the holes in his boots. The accumulating grit quickly packed in around his toes. Grumbling irritably, he nudged his nose around the corner.
The breezeway was empty, but Harold could hear a man’s voice coming from one of the interior rooms. His face scrunched up in disgust as he listened to the General’s exaggerated accent. That’s horrendous, he thought, rolling his eyes. Vallejo wasn’t
French.
Harold’s muddy construction boots tiptoed across the concrete floor of the breezeway until he reached the exhibit room’s open doorway. Holding his breath, he leaned around the opening to get a better visual of the Vallejo impersonator. Then he backed his way out to the courtyard.
Taking cover beneath the building’s eaves, he fished through his pockets until he found a small cell phone. He gave the device a look of intense loathing before he flipped it open and began fumbling with its controls.
“How’m I s’pposed to . . . ” he muttered under his breath. After several failed attempts during which time he nearly slammed the phone against the wall of the barracks, he finally managed to place his call.
A female voice answered on the other end.
“I don’t like the look of this,” he grumbled tersely. “She’s inside the Sonoma Barracks with a rogue Vallejo.”
The voice twittered worriedly out of the receiver.
“I can’t go in there,” he snapped back. “She’d pick me out immediately.”
He held the phone up against his right ear, his already unhappy expression growing more and more affronted as he listened to the woman’s instructions.
Harold made several uninterpretable sounds of disbelief before he managed to spit out a coherent sentence.
“You want me to do what?”
TEN MINUTES LATER,
Harold propped himself against the side of his pickup, panting despite the cool rain trickling down his neck. His knees ached from the sprint across the park, but he had no time to waste. Sure enough, in the bottom right-hand side of the metal locker in the bed of the truck, he found a brown paper bag, just as Dilla had described.
His grim expression soured further as he lifted the bag out and peeked at the garment folded neatly inside.
“Tulips,” he groaned. “Perfect.”
Chapter 46
THE REPLICA
I STOOD WATCHING
the Clemlike Vallejo as he finished his Frémont rant, waiting to see what else he had to say about the Bear Flag Revolt. But as his face lifted from where he’d spat on the floor, his gaze shifted to the front of the room, and his lips curved downward into a strangely discordant frown.
“I am afraid,” he said in a flat tone, suddenly dropping his fake Spanish accent,”that you will have to excuse me. An old acquaintance of mine has just arrived.”
I watched as the General strolled toward the front of the room, where a dumpy woman in a flower-print dress stood examining the saddle display. Her back was partially turned to me, and a headscarf of matching flowered material obscured the small portion of her face that I might otherwise have been able to see.
With a shrug, I focused my attention on the display the General had alluded to at the beginning of his speech. Here on the back wall of the Sonoma Barracks, mounted on a board inside an airtight Plexiglas case, was a replica of the original Bear Flag.
Made for the fifty-year commemoration of the revolt, it was this 1896 replica flag whose picture I had seen in my guidebooks and in the exhibit at Sutter’s Fort.
I crouched down to read the handwriting on the flag’s bottom left-hand corner. The ink had bled through the fabric, blurring some of the letters, but after several minutes of close examination, I was able to make out the signatures of the two surviving Bear Flaggers who had assembled the flag, Ben Dewell and Henry Reason.
The flag retained the made-in-the-moment improvisation of the original. The star and bear appeared to have been either glued or stamped onto the fabric. Not a great rendition of a bear, I thought to myself, but certainly not something that would have been confused with a stoat. The creature stood on all four of its feet, not upright, as the original bear emblem had been described.
I pulled out my notebook from the pocket in the back side of the stroller and flipped it to my attempted sketch of the original flag, pondering. For some reason, Dewell and Reason had changed the positioning of the bear figure in this replacement flag. Was it an oversight or done intentionally? Perhaps they simply preferred the four-feet-onthe-ground stance.
More importantly, I wondered as I reflected on the notation my uncle had left in the margin by the description of the original flag, why had the change been significant to Oscar?
I reached beneath the stroller and pulled out the DeVoto book, which I had stashed into a lower zippered compartment beneath the carriage. As I flipped through the thick book to the section on the Bear Flag, a yellowed piece of paper tucked into the pages fell out and dropped to the floor.
The paper unfolded as it floated through the air, revealing a sheet of typewritten stationery. I reached down to pick it up, immediately focusing on the bold monogram next to the professionally printed header. This appeared to be official correspondence from the now-defunct Jackson Square Board, the organization which had been responsible for the historical preservation of the Jackson Square neighborhood.
The paper suddenly felt toxic in my hands. My eyes jumped to the signature line at the bottom, and I almost dropped the sheet as I read the identity of the author. The letter was written by Gordon Bosco, a onetime alter ego of Frank Napis, in response to a query he’d apparently received from my Uncle Oscar.
Gulping nervously, I focused in on the main text. Water stains blurred much of the first paragraph, but from the portion of writing that remained legible, Napis appeared to be responding to Oscar’s request for a valuation estimate on the original Bear Flag raised by the Osos in 1846. Presumably, Oscar had targeted the Board’s President as someone with expertise in antiquities from the era.