Eternity Street Page 8
With Chico’s departure Lieutenant Colonel Gutiérrez became acting governor, and he continued to rule in the same arbitrary style. The legislature, led by Juan Bautista Alvarado, opposed him as strenuously as his predecessor, and Gutiérrez responded by locking out the delegates and ordering Alvarado’s arrest. The legislators fled to the interior, where they met in rump session and passed a resolution declaring Gutiérrez unfit to govern. Then, with the support of some 150 armed men, Alvarado and his colleagues marched on Monterey and in a bloodless engagement overthrew Gutiérrez and issued a declaration of independence, declaring their homeland the “free and sovereign state of Alta California.” His action, Alvarado later claimed, had been inspired by the example of the Los Angeles vigilantes. The legislature chose Alvarado to be acting governor, and he hired Victor Prudon, principal spokesman for the vigilantes, as his aide. Prudon had the rare pleasure of watching as the Californios escorted Gutiérrez, the man who had ordered and supervised his incarceration, onto the vessel transporting him back to Mexico.
WHEN GOVERNORS OVERSTEP their authority, José Antonio Carrillo once remarked to a group of Mexican citizens, “do what we do in Upper California.” When we dislike a governor’s policies or character, “it’s Moor overboard.” And if “another one comes and behaves badly, the same thing is repeated, and the Government approves everything.” Overthrowing Mexican officials had become something of a tradition for Californios.
Juan Bautista Alvarado’s declaration of independence, however, was less a line in the sand than a bargaining chip, and the Mexican national state proved amenable to negotiation in the aftermath of its loss of Texas that same year. Elevated from the status of a territory to that of a department, which provided for greater local autonomy, California rejoined the patria madre with Alvarado officially installed as governor. In a proclamation likely written by Victor Prudon, Alvarado expressed hope for his homeland. “The benignity of our climate, the fertility of our soil, and—I say on your behalf—the polish of your customs and excellence of your character are so many privileges with which the Omnipotent has favored us in the distribution of His gifts. What country can count so many advantages as ours? Let us then strive to give it in history a place as distinguished as that which it occupies on the map.”
But if the political prospects appeared brighter, the violence in Los Angeles grew considerably darker. From 1836 to 1846, despite a leveling of population growth, the volume of violent criminal complaints heard by the alcalde more than tripled. Angelenos focused attention on the disorder among Indians and Sonoreños, but violence between gente de razón also climbed to disturbing new levels. In the ten years following the murder of José Domingo Féliz, a total of nine Californios suffered violent deaths in the Los Angeles district. The vigilantes of 1836 had insisted on the importance of local justice, swiftly administered, and with California’s elevation to the status of a department came the authorization to create an expanded justice system, with a superior court qualified to make final rulings in capital cases. Governor Alvarado divided the department into districts and appointed a prefect for Los Angeles whose duty it was to regularize local judicial proceedings. But with very few lawyers and virtually no judges in California, the creation of a functioning judicial system languished. In 1837 and 1838 three Californios accused of murder in Los Angeles were tried, convicted, and sentenced to death by the alcalde, but in the absence of an appellate court their appeals were forwarded to Mexico, and two years later the three prisoners were still awaiting the outcome of their appeals. For Angelenos, there was no closure, no sense of justice being served.
Their frustration came to a head in the aftermath of a particularly brutal murder in 1841. Nicolás Fink, a forty-year-old German cobbler who operated a shop near the Plaza, was reported missing by his neighbors. Alcalde Ygnacio Palomares investigated and found Fink’s body in a back room, lying in a pool of dried blood, his skull horribly crushed and his goods rifled. A few days later some of the stolen items turned up in the possession of a young woman, and after intense interrogation she fingered three male accomplices who had committed the cold-blooded murder. Palomares prepared for trial, but he faced an angry public, well aware that there was no likelihood of punishment anytime soon. There were public calls for a revival of the junta popular, the vigilance committee. Palomares issued a ban on public meetings, declared a nightly curfew, and posted soldiers from the presidio at Santa Barbara as a guard around the jail. Then, in a short but seemingly fair proceeding, he found the accused guilty and sentenced the woman to banishment, the men to death. He wrote Governor Alvarado, requesting permission to proceed with the executions, despite the men’s right to an appeal. Surely California’s newly secured autonomy included the authority to mete out local justice. How otherwise would they stem the tide of violent crime? Palomares’s letter was endorsed with the signatures of thirty-three prominent Angelenos.
But Governor Alvarado balked. Although he had publicly endorsed the objectives of the 1836 vigilante movement, he did not possess the legal authority to comply with the alcalde’s request. Finally, realizing that if he failed to act, Angelenos would take the law into their own hands, Alvarado authorized the executions under cover of his military authority. On April 7, atop the hill behind the Plaza church, on the same spot where the murderous lovers had been executed in 1836, a firing squad of Mexican soldiers carried out the sentence. Alvarado later boasted of his enthusiasm for popular justice, for letting the people themselves decide. But coming face-to-face with the awakening lion, he did what he could to protect the authority of the state. For the moment Angelenos were satisfied. But they remained without a legally-constituted system that could ensure both order and justice.
It was during these turbulent years that Los Angeles gained a reputation as the “wickedest town in California.” El pueblo de los angeles, wrote George Simpson, governor of the British Hudson’s Bay Company, was situated in perhaps the loveliest and most fertile district on the entire Pacific coast of North America. But, he added, the pueblo was also “the noted abode of the lowest drunkards and gamblers in the country.” Simpson may have been the first observer to note in print the dramatic contrast between the pueblo’s idyllic setting and the terrible things that took place there. But his sentiments were shared by others. Cosme Peña, whom Governor Alvarado appointed prefect of Los Angeles in the late 1830s, served for less than a year. But in that short time he got his fill of the troublesome Angelenos. In his letters and reports he christened el pueblo de los angeles with a name he thought more appropriate, el pueblo de los diablos—the city of demons.
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CHAPTER 4 •
EXTRANJEROS
IN EARLY APRIL 1840 Alcalde Tiburcio Tapia received a dispatch from Governor Alvarado instructing him to investigate the foreign residents of the Los Angeles district, detaining all those who were undocumented. Tapia discovered that half the approximately fifty extranjeros in his jurisdiction lacked official papers authorizing their presence in California, and following further inquiry into their employment and marital status, he sent fourteen foreigners under guard to the presidio at Santa Barbara. After additional interrogation by military officers, eight were released and six loaded aboard the government barque Joven Guipuzcoana, which had sailed down from Monterey with several dozen foreigners from the north. On the morning of May 8 the vessel weighed anchor and set sail for Mexico with a total of forty-seven deportees—twenty-four Americans and twenty-three Britons. “We were all crammed down in the hold,” one of them later recalled. It was a warm day and the atmosphere below deck was stifling. “Such of the prisoners as were able broke the silence that reigned in horror around us by singing ‘Rule Britannia’ or ‘Hail Columbia.’” Others joined in, their voices rising in crescendo, until “the sides of the old barque resounded with the songs of battle.”
The expulsion marked the first crackdown on undocumented immigrants in California history. Mexican law allowed for immigration and offered foreigners a pathw
ay to citizenship, but required that they register with the authorities. But officials in Los Angeles were lax, often not bothering with paperwork for the outsiders who began trickling into the pueblo following Mexican independence in 1821. Those who came with plans to settle generally played it by the book, voluntarily registering with the alcalde, applying for naturalization, and frequently marrying daughters of the country. By the mid-1830s Los Angeles had a small but thriving émigré community. But the foreigners who found their way to the pueblo included plenty of vagabonds—deserters from the whalers and trading vessels that anchored at San Diego and San Pedro, or trappers from the mountains—who came to enjoy the mild climate, consume the cheap beef and fresh oranges, and earn a few reales to spend in the cantinas. It was men of this type who were deported in 1840. They had little in common with grandees such as Jonathan Temple, Abel Stearns, or Jean Louis Vignes, or with the craftsmen and day laborers who made up the majority of the émigré community. Governor Alvarado labeled the vagabonds “malditos extranjeros,” wicked foreigners, some of whom, he claimed, belonged to “a sordid and mercenary faction” that sought “to strip us of the richest of our treasures, our country and our lives.”
Alvarado’s fears originated in the role foreigners had played in the 1836 revolution that brought him to power. He and his principal collaborator, Captain José Antonio Castro of the California militia, assembled an armed force that included a company of twenty-five or thirty foreigners known as los rifleros americanos made up mostly of American frontiersmen, as the name suggests. Isaac Graham of Kentucky, their leader, had arrived at Los Angeles in 1834 with a party of trappers. During the two years Graham and his associates hung around southern California, they developed a poor reputation among assimilating foreigners. American ranchero Benjamin Davis Wilson described Graham as “a bummer, a blowhard, and a notorious liar, without an atom of honesty.” In the census of 1836 Graham and his companions were listed as “transients.” Later that year they all relocated to the Monterey area, where Graham opened a distillery and grogshop that became a favorite gathering place for local ruffians. When Alvarado and Castro were organizing for their confrontation with Gutiérrez, they recruited allies wherever they could find them, and the armed Americans constituted an important addition to their force. Although the rifleros saw no action during the short revolution, their presence thoroughly intimidated Gutiérrez and his Mexican lieutenants.
Alvarado quietly made promises of some sort to the rifleros, probably a pledge to officially recognize their land claims. For their part, the Americans proclaimed their conviction that Alvarado should declare California independent of Mexico, opening the way for annexation by the United States. That was what American settlers had done in Baton Rouge in 1810, when they declared the district of West Florida independent of Spain and requested incorporation by the United States. And that was what American settlers had done in Texas, where they were fighting for autonomy from Mexico. In both those cases the American cause was symbolized by a lone star flag, and Isaac Graham supplied Alvarado with an identical lone star banner to raise over the presidio at Monterey. Alvarado declined to use it, presumably alerting the Americans to the fact that he did not share their objectives. Later, however, after Alvarado negotiated an agreement with authorities in Mexico City that kept California within the Mexican union, Graham and the rifleros howled that they had been misled. At Graham’s distillery they raised their glasses to the independent Republic of Texas, concluding their toast with the cheer “California next!” Bringing California under American authority would give them easy access to land and power. Increasingly alarmed at the danger these men posed to his regime, Governor Alvarado determined to be rid of them.
In the spring of 1840 the governor learned from a Catholic priest that a recently deceased American had made a deathbed confession of his part in a conspiracy organized by Graham to seize the capital, declare California’s independence, and request the protection of the United States. Many Americans, no doubt, had talked about doing precisely that, but even Alvarado’s associates were skeptical about the existence of an actual conspiracy. Alvarado nevertheless seized the opportunity, issuing orders for the immediate arrest of all undocumented extranjeros in the department. Soldiers under the command of Captain Castro raided Graham’s place, seriously wounding one American and arresting several more, including Graham himself. Over the next several days officials rounded up several dozen men, and by the end of the month the jail at Monterey was filled with more than seventy extranjeros, both Britons and Americans. Nothing tied foreigners in southern California to the alleged plot in the north, but Alvarado concluded that the time had come for a clean sweep.
News of the deportation circulated quickly among Pacific traders, and in June 1840 the American sloop of war USS Saint Louis, boasting a crew of 124 men and twenty large guns, sailed into Monterey Bay. Captain French Forrest demanded an explanation for what he characterized as the “very cruel outrage” committed against the Americans. Justice had been done, Alvarado replied. The deportees were “vagabonds, deserters, and horse thieves,” all were in California illegally, and some were suspected of conspiring to overthrow the government. His answer did not satisfy Captain Forrest, who demanded that Alvarado present himself for interrogation, but he was informed that the governor was unavailable.
That was increasingly the case. Alvarado was no longer the brash young revolutionary. According to one British trader, a diet of rich food and strong wine had transformed him into “a plump and punchy lover of singing and dancing and feasting.” Actually, it was considerably worse than that. Alvarado’s excessive drinking had nearly destroyed his family and seriously disrupted his political career. When intoxicated, wrote an acquaintance, the man “lost all judgment and no power could keep him within bounds.” He often turned to drink on the most stressful occasions—and Captain Forrest’s visit to Monterey was one of them. There would be many more such days to come.
Following a miserable voyage, the deportees were unloaded at the Mexican port of San Blas, then marched overland to the provincial capital of Tepic. Twenty-eight were immediately deported as illegal aliens and the rest bound over for trial, charged with insurrection. But largely through the efforts of the British consul, who threatened trade reprisals, the charges against the rifleros were eventually dropped. In truth, there was little evidence against them, and in an attempt to resolve the matter with the British, the authorities agreed to pay damages and return the deportees to Monterey at government expense, teaching the Californios a hard lesson about the inconstancy of Mexican support. In July 1841, fifteen months after their departure, nineteen deportees made their return. Isaac Graham reveled in his vindication, proclaiming his hatred of Alvarado and Castro.
Press coverage of the deportation in the United States was extensive, if superficial and prejudicial. “Outrage on American Citizens in California,” read a typical headline. Travel writer Thomas Jefferson Farnham, who arrived in Monterey just as the roundup was getting underway, appointed himself advocate for the American deportees and soon afterward published a melodramatic account of the episode, assigning California officials stock roles as ethnic villains: Governor Alvarado, the corrupt Spaniard, a schemer who “smiled graciously at us with one corner of his mouth while he cursed us with the other.” Captain Castro, the malevolent mestizo, with sinister mustache and dark, shifty eyes. In this confrontation between Californio and American, Farnham claimed to read the future. “No one acquainted with the indolent, mixed race of California will ever believe that they will populate, much less for any length of time govern the country,” he asserted. “The old Saxon blood must stride the continent, . . . [and] erect the altar of civil and religious freedom on the plains of California.” Race was destiny and destiny was justice. Farnham invented neither the stereotypes nor the rhetoric, which went back decades, but he was the first to apply them to California. Reading his book—which appeared in several editions and was excerpted in numerous newspapers throughou
t the country—Americans learned to despise the Californios as cruel, treacherous, and unworthy of their beautiful homeland.
THE EXTRANJERO PROBLEM was not going away. The return of the deportees in the summer of 1841 was followed that autumn by the arrival of two large companies of American immigrants, sentinels of a great overland migration that before 1860 would bring more than two hundred thousand Americans across the plains, deserts, and mountains to California. In early November thirty-four settlers from the vicinity of Missouri straggled into the outpost of Swiss empressario Johann Augustus Sutter, located at the junction of the American and Sacramento Rivers, site of present-day Sacramento. John Bidwell, the leader of the group, came with Texas on his mind. “To take the country and annex it,” he later wrote, “that was what sent me to California.” After becoming personally acquainted with Californios, however, Bidwell had a change of heart. He was shamefaced, he later wrote, “that I ever entertained the idea of making a kill upon a people who have never done me any harm.” Bidwell may have soured on conquest, but a number of the men who accompanied him to California would become leaders of the American settler uprising known as the Bear Flag Revolt. That fact alone made Bidwell’s the better remembered of the two settler companies of 1841.
The other, which arrived at Mission San Gabriel in the fall, was the larger of the two, numbering some sixty-five persons, including several extended families. The company’s well-to-do leaders, Missourian John A. Rowland and Englishman William Workman, had resided in New Mexico for the previous fifteen years, partners in a milling and distillery business in Taos. Converts to Catholicism and naturalized Mexican citizens, both men had married New Mexican women and raised large families. The Rowland-Workman party followed the route of the annual trade caravan that carried New Mexican woolens to California to exchange for horses, and included several New Mexican families, who planted communities on the upper Río Santa Ana, near what are now the cities of Riverside and San Bernardino.