Eternity Street Page 9

  Shortly after his arrival in California, Rowland traveled to Monterey and applied for a grant of land, offering Governor Alvarado a “personal donation” of $1,000 in consideration of the favor. Rowland presented papers testifying to his wealth and good citizenship, and Alvarado awarded him a large tract in the eastern portion of the San Gabriel Valley known as Rancho La Puente, which he and Workman managed together until they partitioned the property some years later. Rowland then returned to New Mexico to retrieve his wife and children, who had remained behind, bringing them back with the trade caravan in late 1842. Traveling with the party were several young Missourians, including the future sheriff of Los Angeles County, twenty-one-year-old James R. Barton.

  Barton hailed from Howard County, Missouri, near the bustling market town of Franklin, jumping-off place for the Santa Fe Trail. His parents had migrated from Virginia about 1800, settling at American Bottom on the east bank of the Mississippi in the Illinois Country, where they farmed, purchased slaves, and raised a large family. In 1820, shortly after the admission of Illinois as a free state, the family moved across the river and settled in Missouri, where slavery remained legal. When young Barton came of age he went west to Santa Fe, where he found a job with John Rowland, originally from Howard County. Barton continued in Rowland’s employ after his migration to California.

  In the spring of 1845 Tomás Esténaga, missionary priest at San Gabriel, recorded the marriage of “Santiago Barton” to seventeen-year-old Margaret, “legitimate daughter of Don Juan Rolenes, native of the United States of North America.” Barton and his bride settled near her parents and her married sisters, but the marriage lasted only a few months. “We are all well here,” Rowland wrote to a friend in New Mexico less than a year later, “only I had the misfortune to lose one of my children named Margaret, consort of Mr. James Barton, [who] is now lamenting her loss together with her parents. But what can we do? My old friend, we must have patience and hope that the almighty will be merciful to us one day if we are good Christians.”

  GOVERNOR ALVARADO granted passports to every one of the arriving immigrants of 1841 who requested one. But expecting that they would be followed by hundreds more, he wrote his superiors in Mexico, urging a tightening of the borders with the United States and appealing for manpower sufficient to patrol them. Alvarado was wary of Americans who might attempt to play the Texas game in California. His concerns were seconded by the department’s military commandant, Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo. Blood relatives, Alvarado and Vallejo grew up as virtual brothers. Brilliant students, they both became avid liberals. Vallejo followed his father into the military, joined the revolt against Governor Victoria in 1831, and during Governor Figueroa’s tenure won a grant to a huge spread that encompassed the incomparably rich Napa and Sonoma Valleys north of San Francisco Bay. Appointed director of colonization for el frontera del norte, he waged war on resisting Indian communities and founded the pueblo of Sonoma, where he built a sprawling adobe mansion. Vallejo was in favor of American immigration to California, arguing that it offered the Californios the best chance for the development of their northern frontier. He later recalled how gratified he was to see “numerous parties of industrious individuals come and settle among us permanently.” But he agreed with his kinsman Alvarado that they must try to control the tide of settlement. California, he believed, required a more orderly system of immigration, so he too wrote to Mexico City, appealing for men and arms to better protect the homeland.

  Nothing was heard of those requests until the late summer of 1842, when a messenger arrived at Monterey with news that several vessels had landed at San Diego carrying a battalion of 250 Mexican soldiers under the command of Brigadier General Manuel Micheltorena. Both Alvarado and Vallejo had been sacked and Micheltorena appointed to a unified civil and military command with instructions to prevent California from becoming the next Texas. But the Mexican state was nearly bankrupt, and it provided Micheltorena with neither regular troops nor material support. Instead, he was given raw recruits and told to provision them as best he could with resources procured in California. Yankee hide trader Alfred Robinson watched as Micheltorena’s force disembarked in San Diego. “They presented a state of wretchedness and misery unequaled,” he wrote. “Not one individual among them possessed a jacket or pantaloons.” The men were accompanied by dozens of camp followers, including wives and children. “The females were not much better off,” Robinson observed, “for the scantiness of their mean apparel was too apparent for modest observers.” The soldiers, he wrote, “appeared like convicts,” and indeed many were convicted felons, released from prison and granted official pardon upon their enlistment.

  Upon their arrival in Los Angeles, Micheltorena and his battalion were greeted with pomp and ceremony. The new governor delivered a speech from a platform erected in the Plaza, and there was dancing in the streets. But even as Angelenos celebrated, Micheltorena’s needy soldiers were pilfering from local gardens and vineyards. “If I told of all their crimes in detail I’d never be done,” wrote Antonio Coronel, who was serving as assistant alcalde at the time. The governor “lamented his precarious situation,” said Coronel, “abandoned by the central government and struggling with the depravity of the troops given him. He was aware that their conduct reflected unfavorably on himself, in spite of his earnest desire to win the esteem of the Californios by good government.”

  After several weeks in Los Angeles, Micheltorena and his convict army finally packed up and headed for Monterey. But after only a day’s march, encamped for the night in the San Fernando Valley, several soldiers from Monterey rode into his camp with an urgent message from Alvarado, dated October 19, just five days before. Two American warships had anchored at Monterey, and Commodore Thomas ap Catesby Jones, in command of the U.S. Pacific Squadron, had demanded the surrender of the department. “Without doubt,” Alvarado wrote, “Monterey will be tomorrow occupied by the enemy.” Governor Micheltorena dashed off a series of messages to local authorities, urging a militant defense. “Would that I were a thunderbolt to fly and annihilate the invaders,” he wrote. But instead of flying northward, he turned around and marched his battalion back to Los Angeles.

  COMMODORE THOMAS AP CATESBY JONES (ap meaning “son of” in Welsh) had been appointed to the command ­of the Pacific Squadron in 1841. His official instructions were “to protect the interests of the United States” while exercising “great prudence and discretion,” a vague directive that was fleshed out in private conversations with Navy Secretary Abel P. Upshur. The United States, with large trading interests in the Pacific, had long expressed an interest in the acquisition of California with its great port at San Francisco. President Andrew Jackson tendered an offer to purchase the department in 1836, but angered by the revolt of American settlers in Texas the Mexicans refused to consider it. President John Tyler, Secretary Upshur’s boss, renewed Jackson’s bid, but he too was rebuffed, the Texas question continuing to divide the two nations. Mexico refused to recognize the independence of its former territory, and warned the United States that annexation would be considered an act of war. If the two nations did indeed go to war—which Secretary Upshur thought inevitable—Jones was instructed to seize Monterey and lay claim to California by right of conquest. Upshur’s instructions were aptly summarized by a contemporary observer: “That Texas was to be annexed, that Mexico was to go ‘on the rampage,’ that finally war was to be proclaimed, and then California would be fair game for the American squadron on the Pacific.”

  In early September 1842, anchored with the Pacific Squadron at the Peruvian port of Callao, Jones received a letter from the American consul at Mazatlán, alerting him to the rapid deterioration of relations between the United States and Mexico. Jones concluded that “war was not only inevitable, but that hostilities must have already commenced.” His concern was amplified by the sudden departure of the British Pacific Squadron and the rumor that Mexico had ceded California to Great Britain. Since the War of 1812, in which Jones se
rved as a young lieutenant, he had carried a British musket ball in his shoulder, and he nursed an abiding hatred of everything British. Vowing they would not beat him to the punch, he immediately set sail for Monterey.

  The frigate USS United States and the sloop USS Cyane, boasting a total of seventy-eight guns and upwards of seven hundred men, entered Monterey harbor on the afternoon of October 19. Commodore Jones made no bones about his intentions. “My approach to the shores of California,” he wrote, “was in battle array, with lighted match and cannon pointed against the flag and troops of Mexico.” To his relief, he found no British vessels in the harbor—Great Britain, historians have since concluded, had no interest in acquiring California. Jones anchored his vessels within firing distance of the presidio’s castillo and sent one of his captains ashore with an ultimatum. The Californios had until the next morning to surrender the department or suffer the destruction of their capital. “Señor Alvarado was in shock as he read the note,” wrote a Californio who was present, “his face suddenly became pale and then immediately turned red, as if blood was about to burst from his eyes.” With fewer than thirty able-bodied men and a few old artillery pieces mounted on rotting carriages, resistance was out of the question. Alvarado dispatched riders to General Micheltorena, and late that evening, after delaying as long as he dared, he sent a delegation out to the frigate to arrange the capitulation. Then he locked himself in his office and drank himself into a stupor.

  Having spent the majority of his career in the peacetime Navy, Commodore Jones was determined to make the most of this rare opportunity for glory. The next morning he ordered a contingent of 150 sailors and marines ashore to raise the flag, and following a salute from the big American guns, an officer read a proclamation, addressed to the people of California. “Although I come in arms as the representative of a powerful nation,” Jones had written, “I come not to spread desolation.” As long as the inhabitants remained at home in the peaceful pursuit of their occupations, he would guarantee the security of life and property “from the consequences of the unjust war into which Mexico has plunged you.” With the raising of the American banner, he declared, California had become a possession of the United States. “Those stars and stripes, infallible emblems of civil liberty, now float triumphantly before you, and henceforth and forever will give protection and security to you, to your children, and to unborn, countless thousands.”

  But the American flag flew over Monterey for less than thirty hours. When Jones came ashore the following morning, Thomas O. Larkin, a young American merchant from Massachusetts who had resided in Monterey for ten years, handed him copies of the most recent Mexican newspapers, none of which made any mention of war with the United States. Jones spent some time stewing before finally admitting that he had acted precipitously. He ordered the Mexican flag rehoisted, recalled his marines and seamen, and dispatched a perfunctory note to Governor Micheltorena in Los Angeles. This note has been described as an apology, but it was hardly that. “I have received new communications from Mexico,” Jones wrote disingenuously, “which induce me to believe that friendly relations have been reestablished between the two nations.” In fact, relations had never been broken. Micheltorena received the note on October 26, the day his battalion returned to the pueblo, and he replied immediately. The honor of Mexico and California “require that satisfaction should be public,” he wrote, and he demanded that Commodore Jones meet him in person in Los Angeles to settle the affair honorably.

  Jones took his time getting there. After spending some weeks in Monterey, indulging his men in an extended shore leave, he took the opportunity to visit San Francisco Bay and Honolulu before sailing to San Pedro, arriving in mid-January 1843. He was met by a Mexican officer in command of a cavalry company who escorted the commodore and his small entourage of officers and midshipmen over the twenty-five miles of rough road that led to the pueblo, depositing them at el palacio, the townhouse of Abel Stearns. The next day the commodore and the governor sat down to reason together. Micheltorena demanded the payment of an indemnity as well as a formal apology from the United States, which Jones said he did not have the authority to grant, but would communicate to his superiors. Nothing came of it. Eventually the Mexican minister in Washington delivered a formal note of protest, demanding a public reprimand. “Does Commodore Jones esteem the peace of nations so lightly,” he asked, “that on the strength of a mere rumor of some printed paper, in which war with his country is spoken of, he should consider himself authorized to act in arms against a friendly nation?” But rather than censuring Jones, the navy secretary praised him for his “ardent zeal” and his “elevated principles of duty.”

  The seizure of Monterey doomed President Tyler’s proposed purchase of California while greatly stimulating the American interest in acquisition. Jones and his officers spoke enthusiastically about the department, particularly Los Angeles. While in the pueblo they had attended a brilliant ball at an elegant townhouse, where they danced with the wives and daughters of the rancheros. Jones was particularly taken with Arcadia Bandini, young wife of Abel Stearns, who “for beauty, amiability, and accomplishments would not lose by comparison with our own fair countrywomen.” The Americans chuckled at the nickname Angelenos used for Stearns and his lovely bride—“la bella y la bestia,” beauty and the beast. They toured El Aliso, the vineyard and cellars of Louis Vignes, sampled his wines, and expressed astonishment at the golden fruit hanging from his orange trees in the midst of winter. Los Angeles, they declared, was “the Eden of the earth.” Even more important, it was a paradise vulnerable to conquest. An effective defense of this priceless territory seemed far beyond anything either Mexicans or Californios could muster. Governor Micheltorena drew the same conclusion, writing to Mexico City that he despaired of holding the department against another American assault. Mexico, he wrote, must immediately find a way of “preventing it from being overrun by the North Americans and declared independent by them and the native Californians.”

  GOVERNOR MICHELTORENA remained in Los Angeles until the fall of 1843, when he finally relocated his command to Monterey. The Montereños resented the governor’s convict army as much as the Angelenos did. But when Micheltorena, in keeping with his conservative politics, announced a policy designed to strengthen the missions by restoring a portion of their lands, resentment turned to outright opposition. In fact, Micheltorena’s plan never had a chance. The mission system was a skeleton of its former self, and while the governor “might rattle its dry bones,” as one California historian puts it, “to give it the breath of organic life was impossible.” The mere aspiration to revive the missions, however, precipitated another rebellion among the Californios, for whom the overthrow of appointed Mexican governors was an established tradition.

  By the fall of 1844 a full-scale revolt was underway, led once again by Juan Bautista Alvarado and José Antonio Castro. The campaign revived Alvarado, a natural-born agitator and orator. Traveling through the countryside outside of Monterey, he succeeded in rallying some two hundred mounted vaqueros, whom Castro organized into a rough military force, and in November they confronted Micheltorena’s battalion near the pueblo of San José. The governor—who trusted neither the capacity of his officers nor the courage of his troops—avoided bloodshed by agreeing to negotiate. But, as he later admitted, he intended no change of course but was simply playing for time while he recruited support among extranjeros in the north, including Alvarado’s old nemesis, Isaac Graham. When Alvarado and Castro learned that Micheltorena had enlisted los rifleros americanos, just as the two of them had done eight years before, they feigned outrage. “Sir, you have aroused the country,” they wrote to Micheltorena. “The sons of California will do us justice, and we will shed our blood rather than permit our country to endure this infamous oppression.” Outnumbered by the governor’s newly augmented battalion, in early 1845 the two leaders fled south with a force of mounted men, hoping to enlist Angelenos in their cause.

  But for the moment
Angelenos remained loyal to Governor Micheltorena. When negotiation failed to change their minds, Captain Castro led a detachment in a surprise assault on a small company of soldiers garrisoned at the rectory of the Plaza church. The intense fighting claimed several lives on both sides, and it was with some difficulty that Castro was able to restrain his troops from wreaking vengeance on Andrés Pico, the garrison’s commander. Over the next couple of weeks Alvarado employed a combination of threat and persuasion to bring leading Angelenos over to his cause. Castro’s protection of Pico turned out to be critical, for the tipping point came when Pico’s brother, Don Pío, senior member of the diputación and the leading politician of the south, announced his support of the rebellion. On February 15 the legislature convened in rump session, deposed Micheltorena, and appointed Pío Pico as his successor. The principal charge against the governor was his reliance on the American rifleros. Yet, with the active support of the Pico brothers, Castro had already enlisted immigrant William Workman to recruit a rifle company among American émigrés in southern California, a force that included Workman’s partner, John Rowland, and Rowland’s son-in-law James Barton.