Gold! (3 page)

For the first time since leaving Switzerland, Sutter was
beginning to enjoy life. Part of that was his love of waffles. Sutter liked them made from wild duck eggs and coarse grain flour from his own mill, cooked on an open fire in a rectangular iron pan that had been divvied up into numerous small, square indentations that gave the waffle its unique shape.

By 1845, Captain John Sutter of the Swiss Guard was prospering. He owned 4,000 head of cattle, 1,700 horses and mules, and 3,000 sheep. He was doing well. While no more than 50 people stayed inside the fort at any one time, a maximum of 200 could use the fort during daylight hours.

Sutter even got to help out his adopted country of Mexico in a military capacity. That happened in February 1845, when the governor needed military assistance against a revolt. He appointed John Sutter “Captain of Sacramento troops” and gave him a land grant of 33 leagues, which superseded his previous one.

With his businesses going well, Sutter finally sent for his wife and children. They joined him from Europe. Everything was looking up. His control of the frontier trade through his fort was unrivaled. His agricultural and cattle interests were extensive. He had plans for a new sawmill to help supply the lumber needs of settlers. There was no reason to assume anything would change that. With his businesses flourishing, Sutter was now poised to become the multimillionaire he had always wanted to be.

A long way from the plains of Lambertsville, New Jersey, where he'd grown up, a middle-aged James Marshall, thirty-three years old, rode his horse through the
soaring Sierra Nevadas. In one way or another, he had been traveling for the past decade.

Marshall had drifted west after his parents died in the 1830s. He settled in Missouri on a nice piece of property on the banks of the Missouri River. There he began farming. He was just about to make a go of it when he caught malaria. His treatment was exactly the same as it had been for General Washington's troops in 1775: massive doses of quinine. It worked. Marshall's fever abated, but the Missouri doctors told him he needed a drier, more hospitable climate if he were survive even six more months. Marshall took that as a mandate to do what most people did in 1840s when times were bad: continue to go west. There was still a mythic quality to the West.

To be sure, Lewis and Clark and their Corps of Discovery had been there first, back in the early part of the century. Since that time, the West had not been fully settled by white men. In 1844, when Marshall took the Oregon Trail west, it had been only
one year
since the first wagon train had departed Missouri for Oregon.

Watching Marshall's wagon train depart was preacher Robert James of Clay County, who stayed behind.

There was his family to consider, which now consisted of his wife, Zerelda, and their young son, Franklin. That plus his hemp crop and his slaves made him a fairly contented man by Southern standards, for while Missouri was a border state, Clay County was controlled by slave-holding families. No, it would take a lot more than simply settling in a new land for Robert James to leave his family, his home, and his God.

And so, while pioneers flowed west, and his family was firmly ensconced at their farm and his slaves in the field, James left home and hearth on a spiritual journey back to his Kentucky roots to decide what to do about his future.

While Robert James was visiting Kentucky, James Marshall arrived in Oregon in 1845 and for some reason didn't like the place. Taking to horse again, Marshall wound up in July of that year mounting a rise just south of Port Sacramento. Looking down, there in the middle of no place was a huge adobe fort set in a perfect rectangle. It was ideally situated on a hilltop, with a view of the Sacramento River harbor. Marshall rode his horse up to the fort and faced the giant gates. They were open, and the first thing that hit Marshall was the activity. He saw the shops that Sutter had set up all around the interior perimeter, and the open areas. The place was full of people, a veritable shopping plaza.

James Marshall was a very clever man, but he did not know that he was the only wheelwright in all of northern California. Combining the talents of both a carpenter and a blacksmith, Marshall specialized in producing wheels for carriages, stagecoaches, whatever was needed to keep people and freight going. It was a very important talent to have in an outpost of civilization where such skills were heavily valued.

Realizing this, Sutter hired him immediately. Plying his trade in the fort's blacksmith shop, Marshall soon made enough to buy a ranch outside the fort, on Butte Creek. He was excited at the prospect of farming again.

Marshall was perfectly content to continue and perhaps end his life as a farmer. It gave him peace and contentment and quelled the desire to have a drink. Marshall was an inveterate drinker of alcohol, so anything that stopped him from drinking was inherently, in his opinion, a good thing. Sutter, meanwhile, had taken special pains to become a Mexican citizen so he'd own vast tracts of land on his march to entrepreneurial independence.

Neither man expected what happened next. History always has a way of biting its participants in the ass.

2.

MARSHALL ON THE MOVE

It had been a long time coming. Ever since Texas declared independence from Mexico in 1836, the final showdown with Mexico was inevitable. While the United States, Britain, and France all acknowledged the Republic of Texas as a free and independent state, Mexico reneged on its promise and did not.

What's more, Texans fixed their southernmost boundary at the Rio Grande. The Mexicans felt it should be a hundred miles farther north, encompassing millions of fertile acres. The Texans also wanted to be annexed by the United States and had unsuccessfully petitioned the U.S. Congress to do exactly that. The Mexicans, in turn, were outraged that the United States was trying to cheat them out of what was rightfully their property.

By 1844, this border dispute led to calls for war in both countries. Before President John Tyler could act, he lost the election to James K. Polk, who favored annexation. Polk's inauguration was in March 1845, but Tyler thought that too long too wait. To hasten things along, the lame duck president suggested a joint resolution of Congress offering Texas statehood.

The new state would have to meet certain preset conditions to become an official member of the Union. Accordingly, the U.S. Congress passed the Texas annexation resolution on February 28, 1845. All that was left was for envoy Andrew Jackson Donelson to get to Texas and get the Texans to sign on the dotted line.

The United States sent government agents to Texas to lobby the citizens to accept annexation as the only viable option for the state's future. Texas public opinion, already in support of annexation, skewed the pendulum even farther. Now it was all up to two bodies: the Texas Congress and a specially convened state constitutional election.

Anson Jones, president of the Texas Republic, called the Texas Congress to order on June 16, 1845. He did the same with the state delegates on July 4. Each body was given a choice: annexation to the United States, or independence recognized by Mexico. Seeing little future with the latter solution, both voted for the former. Quickly, the state delegates drew up a state constitution. Ratified by popular vote in October 1845, it was accepted by the U.S. Congress on December 29, 1845. On that date, Texas entered the Union as a state that allowed slavery within its borders.

In leaving his post as the last president of the Republic of Texas, Anson Jones said, “The final act in this great drama is now performed; the Republic of Texas is no more.” Not only was Jones wrong, his counterpart, General Santa Anna, the same Santa Anna who had butchered Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, and the Alamo defenders,
that
Santa Anna was still alive and well as Mexico's dictator.

“The new state had come into the Union claiming the Rio Grande as her southern and western boundary. By the terms of annexation all boundary disputes with Mexico were referred by Texas to the government of the United States. President Polk sent John Slidell of Louisiana to Mexico in the autumn of 1845 to adjust any differences over the Texan claims. But though Slidell labored for months to get a hearing … Mexico refused to recognize him, and he was dismissed from the country in August 1846,” explains David Saville Muzzey in his popular 1911 text,
American History
.

President Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor to the southern U.S./Texas border, which had been previously established in the annexation ratification as the Rio Grande. When Taylor got there, he saw that Mexican troops had already fortified the southern bank of the river. The Mexicans ordered Taylor to retreat; he refused. The Mexican commander then crossed the Rio Grande, ambushing a scouting force of sixty-three Americans. The killed and wounded Americans added up to sixteen. As soon as President Polk received word of the attack in early May, he sent a special message to Congress that concluded:

“We have tried every effort at reconciliation.… But now, after reiterated menaces, Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States [the Rio Grande], has invaded our territory and shed American blood upon the American soil. She has proclaimed that hostilities have commenced, and that the two nations are at war. As war exists, and, notwithstanding all our efforts to avoid it, exists by the act of Mexico herself, we are called upon by every consideration of duty and patriotism to vindicate with decision the honor, the rights, and the interests of our country.”

By a vote of 174 to 4, the House approved a measure to go to war with Mexico. The Senate followed with an even more impressive 40 to 2 vote. Back in Texas, Taylor was not waiting for orders. He had engaged the Mexicans in the Battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma and pushed them back into Mexico.

Six days after Congress voted to sanction the war, Taylor crossed the Rio Grande and occupied the Mexican frontier town of Matamoros. Making the town his base, during the summer and autumn of 1846 he captured the capitals of three of the Mexican provinces. But as with most wars, the government had more in mind than the Republic of Texas, which had become the biggest state in the Union in land size.

No; the United States had other matters in mind, especially the last two parts of the continental United States still under Mexican control: New Mexico and California. New Mexico and Texas were big but California was the real prize. Its fertile lands, a vibrant, Spanish-influenced character,
and most importantly, its border on the Pacific Ocean and the attendant trade made California the greatest prize of all.

It was no surprise, then, when Lieutenant Colonel John C. Frémont arrived in Upper California in early 1846. He had been there the previous year, when looking out upon the entrance to San Francisco Bay, he called it Chrysoplylae (Golden Gate). The name stuck. Already famous as an explorer of the Far West, Frémont was there to search out “a new and shorter route from the western base of the Rocky Mountains to the mouth of the Columbia River.” That was the official government story given out by Secretary of State William L. Marcy.

The possibility that the handsome and dashing Frémont could be working as a government operative in foreign territory the United States prized was never mentioned publically. Nor, for that matter, was Frémont's close relationship with his father-in-law, Missouri's expansionist senator, Thomas Hart Benton.

Frémont next showed up in Monterey in the spring of 1846, in command of an all-civilian party of “explorers.” The only one in uniform, Frémont petitioned General José Castro, the Mexican government's commander of Upper California's military forces, for permission to quarter his men securely in the San Joaquin Valley. At first Castro granted permission, but then reneged. There was a good possibility that Frémont, well known and respected, could easily incite American settlers to revolt against Mexico.

Frémont wasted no time in responding to his censure. He went to the top of a mountain adjacent to Monterey.
There, Frémont had his men build a makeshift fort, which, he told anyone who would listen, he would defend in a “fight to extremity … trusting to our country to avenge our death.”

Rhetoric aside, Frémont was a practical man. Whoever the men he commanded really were—explorers, soldiers, or a combination of both—he had little or no confidence in their fighting prowess. It only took Frémont a few days of siege warfare by the Mexicans to decide to retreat. He managed to spirit his men out and away from the Mexican lines before the Mexicans realized what was going on.

A messenger from Washington, D.C., Lieutenant Archibald Gillespie, caught up with Frémont, who was in camp at Klamath Lake, Oregon. Gillespie carried a dispatch from Frémont's military superiors. Frémont read his secret orders, then mounted his men up and headed them south. Frémont turned up at Sutter's Fort, where he demanded that Sutter replenish his supplies. While Frémont was with Sutter, settlers outside the fort revolted against the Mexicans.

On June 6, 1846, the California rebels took over the Mexican garrison at Sonoma. Instead of hoisting a U.S. flag, the rebels instead put up a crudely made piece of cloth that bore the rough likeness of a grizzly bear. Thus was born “the Bear Flag Revolt,” in which California was declared by the rebels as a separate republic, much like Texas had been a decade earlier. This time, Washington's response was swift.

President Polk ordered Commodore John D. Sloat to sail from Mazatlán to the territorial governor's office in
Monterey. The rebels gave up without a fight. On July 5, 1846, sailors from Sloat's flagship
Savannah
raised the American flag over the Mexican customs house. Sloat also brought California the news that America had been officially at war with Mexico since the past May.

Unlike Texas and New Mexico, acquiring California did not engender any gunplay. The Mexicans surrendered without firing a shot at Yerba Buena, Sonoma, and Los Angeles. In honor of their victory, the Americans renamed Yerba Buena, San Francisco. There was one other place in California left for Frémont to conquer: Sutter's Fort.