California had its origin in mythology, but its statehood was earned by American frontier stubbornness. The 15th century Spanish writer Rodríguez de Montalvo created the mythical island empire of Queen Calafia in his heroic epic Las Sergas de Esplandían. Calafia ruled over a nation of Amazon warriors armored in pure gold on an island off the northwest coast of North America. Myth and reality combined on the unexplored western coast and mythical Calafia became real California. California became a state in 1850, the only state to leap from having virtually no government at all to full-blown statehood. So California got its name as a result of good press, but it owes its existence to a lot of stubborn people who just said "no."
The Spanish Empire in North America was largely concentrated in Mexico and Central and South America. Forays into what is now the American Southwest in the hope of finding fabled sources of gold and silver (the Seven Cities of Cibola) resulted in little prolonged military presence or colonization. Exploration of California was almost exclusively conducted from the sea, mostly in aid of finding suitable harbors for the Spanish treasure galleons returning from the Philippines to North America on the easterly trade winds that blow steadily at about 40° north latitude. (San Francisco is, for example, at about 38° north.) In the 18th century Spain began overland exploration into California and established a minor military presence, backing it up by also establishing of a chain of missions from the southern to the central California coast. Capt. Juan Bautista de Anza established the Presidio at San Francisco in 1776.
Later, after it won its independence from Spain, Mexico assumed control of the minor military presence and mission system in California. In an effort to cement their governance, first Spain and then Mexico granted large tracts of land to soldiers and others, including foreigners, who agreed to recognize the control of the territory by the Mexican government. In the California Central Valley, for example, a failed Swiss banker, John Sutter, obtained a substantial land grant and started what he thought was going to become a major rancho. But more of that later. This system might have worked except for those pesky American mid-westerners. They were on the other side of two major mountain ranges and a huge desert, but that was just 1,800 miles away and they were restless.
The first "just say no-er" was Jedediah Smith, a fur trapper and far-ranging explorer, who brought a company of Americans to California by crossing the Mojave Desert from the east in 1826. He eventually showed up at Mission San Gabriel in Southern California in November and was confronted by Don Jose Maria Echeandia, the Mexican governor of Alta, California. Echeandia granted Smith a temporary passport but ordered him to leave California promptly along the same route he had followed to come in. Smith started back along his route, but at Cajon Pass in the San Gabriel Mountains he flouted Echeandia’s orders, turned sharply north and worked his way up the east side of the great California Central Valley. Smith eventually reached the south fork of the American River just east of present-day Sacramento. After exploring for several months, in May 1827, Smith crossed the Sierra Nevada Mountains west to east by following the north fork of the Stanislaus River up and over them in the vicinity of present day Ebbetts Pass. He returned to trapper and explorer rendezvous along the Missouri River and told the world that the mighty Sierra Nevada Mountains could be safely crossed in Northern California.
Mexico’s hold on California remained tenuous. After gaining its independence from Spain, internal political issues diverted Mexico’s attentions, and it allowed its garrisons in Alta California and other parts of the present-day American southwest to languish. All along a trickle of adventurers from all over the world, but particularly from the United States, began to settle in California, some obtaining land grants from the authorities and some just staking out a claim.
A group of the foreign settlers began to agitate for independence or affiliation with the United States. Just as these agitations were getting seriously under way, by fortuitous circumstance, John C. Frémont arrived in California with 60 armed men. As a lieutenant in the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, he had been sent west to explore a possible wagon road route to the Pacific, but as the son-in-law of fiery, manifest destiny, Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton he seems to have thought himself the potential liberator of California. He made his way to Monterey and was confronted by Colonel José Castro, the Mexican military authority, who, like Echeandia ordering Smith out of California, told Frémont to leave immediately. Frémont’s response was a definite "no." He retreated only as far as a nearby hill and raised the American flag. Although he was eventually dislodged by the presence of 200 soldiers under Castro, he withdrew no further than the vicinity of the northern California/southern Oregon border.
By June 1846, the agitators for independence grew bolder. The first shots in the Mexican American War were fired on April 25, 1846, and by June they knew war was under way or would be soon. They descended upon the town of Sonoma, California, seized the home of General Mariano Vallejo and declared California an independent republic. A quickly fashioned flag showing a bear and a single star was raised. In the meantime, Frémont had decided once again to disobey Castro and had brought his 60 men back down to Sacramento. He had occupied Sutter’s fort temporarily and Vallejo was imprisoned there for about two months. After a brief skirmish between the agitators and Castro’s troops, Frémont resigned from the United States Army, joined the Bear Flaggers and crossed San Francisco Bay to seize the undefended San Francisco Presidio on July 1, 1846. The United States’ war with Mexico soon overshadowed this rebellion. Apart from the symbolism of the Bear Flag, there was little substance to the independent Republic of California.
The United States had annexed the Republic of Texas, which had, in practical effect, won its independence from Mexico in 1836. In late 1845 President Polk sent an envoy to the Mexican government to adjust disagreements over the border. Although the envoy labored for months, two successive presidents of revolution-torn Mexico refused to recognize him and he was dismissed from the country. Almost immediately the United States was at war with Mexico. General Zachary Taylor invaded Mexico and eventually captured Mexico City and vast tracts of territory (much of that with the help of a Captain of Artillery named Robert E. Lee, who in only 14 years would be fighting to take territory away from the Union). By late 1847, both parties seemed ready to settle their differences by a peace treaty, and President Polk dispatched a little known official from the Secretary of State’s office, Nicolas Trist, to negotiate the treaty. Trist was not a high-ranking official but he came from an illustrious background. He had been Thomas Jefferson’s clerk, had created the original catalog for the Library of Congress and had married Jefferson’s favorite granddaughter. In fact, as we shall see in a moment, one can make a convincing argument that Thomas Jefferson and his family were the moving force behind the expansion of the United States from its 13 original colonies along the eastern seaboard to a continent-spanning nation. Jefferson encouraged western expansion over the Appalachian Mountains to the Northwest Territories and negotiated the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France. Trist, as we shall see, got the rest.
Trist arrived in Mexico and began negotiations. Hostilities, however, were still ongoing. The American army in the field continued to have remarkable success, and apparently President Polk had misgivings about negotiating a treaty. Accordingly, he recalled Trist while the negotiations were underway. Trist, a stubborn non-conformist with a clear vision of what he wanted to accomplish, just said "no." He simply ignored Polk’s order to return to Washington and continued to negotiate the treaty. After several more weeks of work, on February 2, 1848, he signed the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, named after the small town where it was negotiated and signed. Under that treaty, the United States agreed to pay Mexico 15 million dollars and guaranteed the payment of 3.5 million additional dollars to compensate Mexican citizens for any property loss resulting from the treaty. Most significantly, Mexico ceded to the United States the territory of present-day California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and parts of New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming. Mexico also recognized Texas’ annexation to the United States. Trist returned to Washington with the signed treaty in hand, which was accepted by Polk and ratified by the Senate. Sadly, Trist was regarded as a renegade by Polk, who dismissed him from the government, and blocked the payment of his compensation for years.
Fifteen million dollars for most of the American West does not sound like a lot of money — even in 1848. But it was absolutely nothing in light of an event that had occurred just nine days before the treaty was signed, but was wholly unknown to the treaty negotiators 2,000 miles away in Mexico. On January 24, 1848, gold was discovered by James Marshall at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, California.
Remember Sutter? After the aborted Bear Flag revolt, things quieted down, and Sutter went back to trying to rebuild his fiefdom in the California Central Valley. As part of that effort, he continued building various mills. One he wanted to finish was a large gristmill for grinding grain. To do this, he needed lumber. He sent Marshall, one of his foremen, to Coloma to build a lumber mill. The mill site was outside Sutter’s land grant but this was California, so Sutter, despite being an ardent supporter of the Mexican rancho land grant system, simply ignored the legal niceties and got to work on the mill — fortunately for all of us. So Marshall set about building a waterpower-driven saw mill on the river.
On the morning of January 24, 1848, Marshall discovered flakes of what looked like gold in the millrace. Concerned about what to do, he took some samples to Sutter’s fort in Sacramento, and the two of them tested the samples. Sure enough, it was gold. Sutter went to Coloma himself, and, having become convinced that it was a gold strike, he negotiated a "lease" with the local Indian tribe hoping to obtain the authorities’ approval of it and cement his control over the area. Once again, however, circumstances and some just say no-ers interfered with his plans.
Sutter specifically instructed Marshall to tell no one of the gold strike and Marshall gave similar orders to the workers at the Coloma Mill. Nevertheless, Marshall soon began babbling about it and, of course, word got out through the mill workers. Even while Sutter was attempting to establish legal control over the gold-bearing territory people were already making plans to mine for it themselves.
Sutter set out for Monterey to visit Colonel Richard Barnes Mason, who headed the American military presence in California. There, Sutter met with Mason and Captain William Tecumseh Sherman. (Sherman was another Civil War figure who showed up on the West Coast before that conflict started. Grant was here too; witness Grant’s Pass, Oregon.) Sutter presented his case and sought approval of his arrangement with the Indians. Mason, the last of our just say "no-ers," told him "no." It was not within his authority to recognize Sutter’s "lease."
Soon, of course, the word was out and 150,000 people flooded into California during the next two years. Like ants at a picnic they overran Sutter’s modest empire and the last vestiges of the Mexican rancho system. Many millions of dollars worth of gold each month was pulled from the quartz formations of the ancient Tertiary river bed that makes up the central Sierra Nevada foothills. As the gold poured forth it was almost no time at all before California had become a State.
For further reading see these web sites:
Calafia
WWW-SUL.STANFORD.EDU/DEPTS/HASRG/LATINAM/CALAFIA/
Spanish exploration of California
WWW.CCNET.COM/~LAPLAZA/CALHIST2.HTM
The Golden Cities of Cibola
WWW.ZIANET.COM/SNM/JAY8.HTM
Jedediah Smith
WWW.DESERTUSA.COM/MAG99/FEB/PAPR/JSMITH.HTML
WWW.MTDEMOCRAT.COM/COLUMIST/RHUGHEY.HTML
John C. Fremont
WWW.CCNET.COM/~LAPLAZA/CALHIST4.HTM
Nicholas Philip Trist, the Mexican American War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
WWW.JSRI.MSU.EDU/MUSEUM/PUBS/MEXAMHIST/CHAPTER12.HTML
Sutter and Marshall
WWW.ACUSD.EDU/~JROSS/GOLDRUSH.HTML
Mason and Sutter
WWW.SFMUSEUM.ORG/HIST6/SHERMGOLD.HTML
WWW.SFMUSEUM.ORG/HIST2/GOLD.HTML
The geological origin of gold
PUBS.USGS.GOV/GIP/PROSPECT1/GOLDGIP.HTML