On July 7, 1846, the United States Navy sailed into Monterey Bay and announced that the Republic of California was now a part of the United States. Just like that, the future state of California fell from Mexico’s hands into its American future.
The story of California’s shift from Spain to Mexico and then to American control is an extraordinary one. The last part of that story, the annexation of California by the United States, is due largely to the exploits of a somewhat forgotten man, John Charles Frémont and his extraordinary wife Jessie Benton Frémont. A surveyor known as “The Great Pathfinder,” Frémont was a colorful character whose explorations had opened the way for thousands of American settlers to move west. His reports had been edited by his wife, Jessie, the daughter of Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton, then one of the most powerful Senators in America and a high priest of the the belief in “Manifest Destiny,” the idea that God had ordained that America should rule from coast to coast.
At the time, California was part of Mexico, but was only lightly governed. Mexico’s chief means of control over California was through the Mission system, a combination of churches, farms and military outposts (Presidios) that served mostly to keep the California’s Native Americans in virtual slavery. The missions would provide little resistance to the arrival of Americans in force.
In 1846, while America was at war with Mexico, a small group of Americans who had moved into the area around Sonoma, California took matters into their own hands. They had the behind-the scenes support of America’s hero, John Charles Frémont, then in northern California on another surveying trip that was an ill-disguised incursion into California. Encouraged by an administration in Washington that openly wanted to purchase California and Oregon, this motley group of American settlers calling themselves osos, or bears, declared an independent republic in California and raised the “Bear Flag” on June 25, 1846. According to historian Hampton Sides, their flag was, “A slightly deformed banner fashioned from scraps of ladies’ undergarments, with a grizzly bear (or ‘something they called a bear,’ as one early historian of the revolt put it) rising on its haunches, the crude image dribbled in berry juice.”
Moving south under orders from Commodore Robert F. Stockton, Frémont led a military expedition of 300 men to capture Santa Barbara in 1846.
This success, with little cost, only added to Frémont’s now legendary stature. One newspaper, the Intelligencer, reported on the arrival of Frémont’s band in Monterey: “They are the most daring and hardy set of fellows I ever looked upon. They are splendid marksmen, and can plant a bullet in an enemy’s head with their horses at full gallop. .. They never sleep in a house, but on the ground, with a blanket around them, their saddle for a pillow, and a rifle by their side.”
Warships of the United States Navy sailed into Monterey Harbor and raised the American flag in place of the Bear Flag on July 7. The man who is credited with first raising the Stars and Stripes over California was naval officer Joseph Warren Revere, the grandson of Revolutionary hero Paul Revere and namesake of Revere’s friend and compatriot Joseph Warren, one of the first martyrs of the Revolution, killed in the Battle of Bunker Hill.
On January 16, 1847, Commodore Stockton appointed Frémont military governor of California after the Mexican-American War in California ended.
Then came what seemed a divine confirmation of “Manifest Destiny.”
On the morning of January 24, 1848, James Marshall, a New Jersey mechanic building a sawmill for Johann Sutter on the American River not far from what is now Sacramento, spotted some flecks of yellow in the water. While Marshall is always credited as the discoverer, one history of women in the Gold Rush era offers a different view, claiming that Marshall and the others at the site didn’t know what gold actually looked like. According to JoAnn Levy’s The Saw the Elephant, a woman named Jennie Wimmer working for Sutter was making soap and said, “This is gold, and I will throw it into my lye kettle. . . and if it is gold, it will be gold when it comes out.” The next day, she removed the nugget from a bar of soap. And the Gold Rush was on.
The Gold Rush transformed California and the United States. In no time, a hundred thousand people were sent racing west that year. During the next few years, some $200 million worth of gold would be extracted from the hills of California
The story of Jessie Benton Frémont and her husband John in opening California is told in A NATION RISING
