Authors: H.W. Brands
The news of Savage’s death sent a shudder through the tribes of the region. Savage had been no saint, and his concern for the Indians’ welfare reflected a large measure of his own self-interest. But at least they had that much in common. Harvey, by contrast, seemed bent on the Indians’ rapid destruction, and his murder of Savage suggested strongly that his malignant designs were in the ascendant. Hundreds of Indians turned out for Savage’s funeral, gathering to mourn the passing of an ally—and, one surmises, to lament the passing of their own way of life.
T
HE INDIANS WEREN’T
the only ones to be thrust aside by the gold-seekers, although their demise was by far the most drastic demographic consequence of the Gold Rush. Native-born Californians of Mexican descent were also displaced; and if their displacement was rarely fatal, it was in its own way only slightly less definitive.
In the era before the Gold Rush, Mariano Vallejo was nearly everything a Californian could wish to be: wealthy, powerful, respected, blessed with family and friends. Moreover, when he saw where history was heading in his native land, he boldly tried to persuade his fellow Californians to embrace the new American regime. Yet all his wealth, power, and courage availed him little, and the gold-triggered tide rolled over him just as surely as it drowned the Indians.
Mariano Vallejo was the son of Ignacio Vallejo, a Spanish soldier who accompanied Junípero Serra at the founding of the San Francisco presidio
in 1776. Ignacio had studied for the priesthood before assuming the military vocation, and the medical training he received in the seminary proved useful when the wife of a friend went into labor. Ignacio safely delivered the baby girl; asked what he would take for payment, he said he wished her hand in marriage when she came of age. Fourteen years later the soldier and the maiden were married at Santa Barbara; several years (and seven children) after that, in 1807, Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo was born at the presidio of Monterey.
Mariano came of age with Mexican California. He was fifteen when Mexico broke free of Spain; he was twenty-six when, in keeping with the family military tradition, he was named commandant of the San Francisco presidio. Shortly thereafter he received orders to establish a new presidio north of San Francisco Bay. The timing, and Vallejo’s geographic sense, couldn’t have been better, for no sooner had he selected the site of Sonoma than the mission there was secularized, giving him effective control over the mission’s large herds and pastures. In addition, he personally received a ten-league grant, which became the basis of a private empire that ultimately comprised 175,000 acres. By one estimate, Vallejo’s income from hides and tallow approached $100,000 per year.
He cut a striking figure, not least on account of the sidewhiskers that had been his trademark since early manhood. These were not the modest salients south of the temple that adorned the cheeks of many Spanish and Mexican gentlemen, but an aggressively curving pair of scimitars that started at the scalp line in front of each ear and threatened mayhem beneath his nose. As he added years and pounds, his cheeks grew fuller, but so did the whiskers, which evolved into twin peninsulas covered, as it were, by thick forests and separated by a narrow and diminishing strait.
Vallejo and his whiskers held court at a splendid hacienda on the plaza at Sonoma. With adobe walls four feet thick, it had broad second-story balconies that sheltered the inhabitants from summer sun and winter rain. From this headquarters Don Mariano rode out across the Valley of the Moon, as the vicinity of Sonoma was called, with a cavalry escort to patrol his empire. He ruled his fiefdom with a firm hand and a rough sense of
humor, enforcing his writ by such sanctions as sending landlubbing recalcitrants to sea to suffer the mal de mer and other terrors of the deep.
Vallejo’s reputation spread throughout California and even across the Pacific. John Sutter heard of Vallejo in Hawaii, and before Sutter left Honolulu in 1839 for Monterey he insisted on having the American consul write him a letter of introduction to Vallejo.
Despite the letter, something about Sutter put Vallejo on guard. Perhaps Vallejo found Sutter too facile and accommodating. Probably he sensed in Sutter an ambition that might threaten his own. Certainly he noted the fact that Sutter carefully cultivated the governor of California, Juan Alvarado, who had been trying for years to rein Vallejo in. Vallejo determined to keep an eye on the Swiss newcomer, by keeping him close. He offered to sell Sutter a fine ranch near Sonoma, at a very attractive price. Sutter, however, had been warned by Alvarado that Vallejo might try something like this, and he had his answer ready. He said he appreciated the kindness of Don Mariano in making the offer, but for reasons of trade and communication he preferred to locate on a navigable river. The Sacramento was just such a river—and was, as Vallejo didn’t need to be told, safely distant from Sonoma and Vallejo’s embrace.
Though Vallejo never trusted Sutter—“that Swiss adventurer,” he called him—the two probably could have reached an accommodation. They shared an Old World heritage; they also shared the belief, inspired by that heritage, that land held the key to wealth and security. What Sutter wanted, a landed empire, was no more than Vallejo already had. And California had land enough for them both.
It did, at any rate, until the arrival of the Americans. Vallejo got his first inkling of what was in store at the same time Sutter did, and from the same source: John Frémont. Vallejo watched Frémont descend from the snowy Sierras in 1844 and prance about the province, scorning Mexican authority with each step of his horses and men. He observed Frémont’s return the following year, when the American officer gave every indication of intending to conquer California, pending only the formality of a declaration of war. Frémont’s slowness in withdrawing to Oregon after being ordered
to leave California, and his general insolence toward all things Mexican, intimated danger to anyone with a stake in the status quo. Vallejo would have been more than human—or Californian—not to resent Frémont’s very presence.
Yet Vallejo saw farther than most of his fellow Californians. Frémont, Vallejo judged, embodied the inevitable, whether Californians wished to admit it or not. At a time when most Californians swore resistance to yanqui expansionism, Vallejo took the astonishing step of advocating attachment to the United States. The United States, he said, represented the future of North America, and America’s institutions represented the best guarantee of the future of California. “When we join our fortunes to hers, we shall not become subjects but fellow citizens, possessing all the rights of the people of the United States,” Vallejo declared. “We shall have a stable government and just laws. California will grow strong and flourish, and her people will be prosperous, happy, and free. Look not, therefore, with jealousy upon the hardy pioneers who scale our mountains and cultivate our unoccupied plains; but rather welcome them as brothers, who come to share with us a common destiny.”
The problem was that the Americans didn’t act like brothers. At the outbreak of the Bear Flag revolt the rebels attacked Sonoma, the seat of Vallejo’s empire. They caught Don Mariano by surprise, rolling him out of bed at gunpoint and taking him prisoner. The flag of Mexico was torn from its staff above Vallejo’s hacienda; the Bear Flag was raised in its place.
The rebels then delivered Vallejo to Frémont, who transported him to Sutter’s Fort, where Frémont ordered Sutter to imprison him. This turn of events didn’t improve Vallejo’s opinion of Sutter, but he placed the primary blame on Frémont. “In spite of the fact that he was wearing the honorable uniform of an officer in the American army,” Vallejo recalled afterward, “he had no compunction about stooping to the extreme of associating himself with those robbers who on June 14th assaulted and robbed the peaceful residents of the Sonoma frontier.”
To the ignominy of arrest was now added the discomfort of detention. Vallejo stifled in the small cell he shared with three others, including his brother Salvador. For six weeks Vallejo sweltered—and alternately shivered,
from the malarial fever his imprisonment brought on. Such news as filtered into his cell made him fear the worst regarding the situation at Sonoma, for when rebels ruled, the property of the law-abiding was forfeit. Beyond the fear and the fever was Vallejo’s mortification at having encouraged California’s attachment to the land of these brigands and dishonorable officers.
Eventually Vallejo was released—significantly, on the order of Robert Stockton rather than Frémont, who had departed south in pursuit of glory. Vallejo emerged from his cell, blinking in the light and shaking from disease, to discover that the rebel-robbers had indeed continued their depredations during his imprisonment. “I left Sacramento half dead and arrived here almost without life,” he wrote from Sonoma. “I have lost more than one thousand live horned cattle, six hundred tame horses and many other things of value which were taken from my house here and at Petaluma. My wheat crops are entirely lost.” Tallying up additional damage, and reflecting on how the marauding made his American sympathies seem foolishly naïve, he reiterated, “All is lost.”
In fact, Vallejo had much more to lose. The discovery of gold brought an army of invaders who showed no more respect for Vallejo’s holdings than for Sutter’s. “The good ones were few and the wicked many,” Vallejo remarked. Even so, he might have held on to what was left of his empire, if only because Sonoma was farther from the mines than New Helvetia. But what he couldn’t fend off was “the great crowd of shyster lawyers,” as he put it, who came after the argonauts and immediately “set out to find means of depriving the Californians of their estates and property.” Likening the lawyers to the notorious Sydney Ducks, Vallejo declared, “The bandits from Australia stole our cattle and horses, but these thieves in frock coats, wrapped about with the mantle of the law, took away our lands and buildings and, with no scruple whatsoever, enthroned themselves as powerful monarchs in our houses.”
Vallejo sought, through participation in the new government of California, to limit the damage. As a delegate to the Monterey convention he impressed his fellow delegates with his seriousness and grasp of the issues, and his understanding of those aspects of American history that touched
on property rights. “He is better acquainted with our institutions and laws than any other native Californian,” Bayard Taylor reported. (Vallejo also brought to the convention a sly sense of humor. When the delegates considered putting a bear on the state seal, in memory of the Bear Flag revolt, Vallejo, with different memories of that period, offered an amendment proposing that if a bear must grace the seal, “it be represented as made fast by a
lazo
in the hands of a vaquero.” Vallejo’s amendment got 16 votes— mostly from other Californians—out of 37 cast.)
Vallejo threw himself into the politics of the new state. Elected a state senator, he worked to bring the capital to a site on the Carquinez Straits, a town he wished to call Eureka but which his friends insisted on calling Vallejo. He donated 150 acres and pledged $500,000 toward the construction of public buildings, including a capitol, a governor’s mansion, a university, and an insane asylum. Construction began, and the lawmakers arrived. But they found the virgin town to be insufficiently entertaining, and when the fleshpots of Sacramento beckoned, they moved there, leaving Vallejo the town forlorn and Vallejo the man wiser and $100,000 poorer.
As a
patrón
of the old regime, Vallejo had been accustomed to lavishing generosity on family, friends, and protégés. He continued to do so even after the Gold Rush drove prices to ten times what they had been before. He spoiled his children, of whom he had a large but indeterminate number (counting, or rather estimating, his illegitimate offspring). When he bought a silver-studded saddle for himself, for $2,000, he bought a similar, smaller version for his son Napoleon, for $1,500. He loaned money on the unsecured promises of borrowers, considering collateral beneath him. When his own cash grew short, he borrowed against his land.
As long as the prices he received for his cattle and crops stayed high, he continued to prosper. But when prices subsequently fell—when the supply of food and other provisions started to catch up with the gold- driven demand—Vallejo found himself short. His mortgages came due, and the property behind them had to be sold. Piece by piece his empire was dismantled.
The greater disaster, however, occurred in the courts. Congress and the
American legal system, acting at the behest of those “shyster lawyers,” redefined the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to place the burden of proving land ownership on the Californians. Vallejo spent tens of thousands of dollars defending his titles in various lower courts, with diminishing success. The coup de grâce came in 1862 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against him regarding the most important of his remaining properties, leaving him with large debts and a small fraction of his former assets.
Vallejo had braced himself for this outcome. “I think I will know how to be decently poor when the time comes,” he said, “just as I have known how to be rich.”
VALLEJO’S SAD EXPERIENCE was peculiar among the native Californians in the size of the fortune he had to lose, but it was not unique in kind. Within a decade of the gold discovery, the Californians were pushed to the margins of society in the land of their birth. The ten or twelve thousand Californians suffered no important decline in absolute numbers—certainly nothing like the destruction of the Indians—but, overwhelmed as they were by the influx of Americans, they lost political power, and with it, in many cases, property.
Explaining
why
the Californians became marginalized is more difficult than merely observing that they did. As Vallejo’s experience demonstrated, their inability to assimilate wasn’t due to a lack of trying—if anything, he was more American than many of the Americans. In Vallejo’s case, as doubtless in others, some of the inability owed to a failure to master the commodification of life the Gold Rush wrought. In this regard, Vallejo was the same sort of casualty as John Sutter.