Part 4 (1/2)

Heartened by the sight of this wonderful new country, and by the knowledge that they must be approaching some of the Mexican settlements, but with bodies sadly weakened from exposure, hunger, and exhaustion, the Americans slowly made their way down the slope, crossed those fertile lowlands which are now covered with groves of orange and lemon, and so, guided by some friendly Indians whom they met, came at last to the mission station of San Gabriel, one of that remarkable chain of outposts of the church founded by the indefatigable Franciscan, Father Junipero Serra. The little company of worn and weary men sighted the red-tiled roof of the mission just at sunset, and though Smith and his followers came from stern New England stock which prided itself on having no truck with Papists, I rather imagine that as the sweet, clear mission bells chimed out the angelus they lifted their hats and stood with bowed heads in silent thanksgiving for their preservation.

I doubt if there was a more astonished community between the oceans than was the monastic one of San Gabriel when this band of ragged strangers suddenly appeared from nowhere and asked for food and shelter.

”You come from the South--from Mexico?” queried the father superior, staring, half-awed, at these gaunt, fierce-faced, bearded men who spoke in a strange tongue.

”No, padre,” answered Smith, calling to his aid the broken Spanish he had picked up in his trading expeditions to Santa Fe, ”we come from the East, from the country beyond the great mountains, from the United States. We are Americans,” he added a little proudly.

”They say they come from the East,” the brown-robed monks whispered to each other. ”It is impossible. No one has ever come from that direction.

Have not the Indians told us many times that there is no food, no water in that direction, and that, moreover, there is no way to cross the mountains? It is, indeed, a strange and incredible tale that these men tell. But we will offer them our hospitality in the name of the blessed St. Francis, for that we withhold from no man; but it is the part of wisdom to despatch a messenger to San Diego to acquaint the governor of their coming, for it may well be that they mean no good to the people of this land.”

Had the good monks been able to look forward a few-score years, perhaps they would not have been so ready to offer Smith and his companions the shelter of the mission roof. But how were they to know that these ragged strangers, begging for food at their mission door, were the skirmishers for a mighty host which would one day pour over those mountain ranges to the eastward as the water pours over the falls at Niagara; that within rifle-shot of where their mission stood a city of half a million souls would spread itself across the hills; that down the dusty Camino Real, which the founder of their mission had trudged so often in his sandals and woollen robe, would whirl strange horseless, panting vehicles, putting a mile a minute behind their flying wheels; that twin lines of steel would bring their southernmost station at San Diego within twenty hours, instead of twenty days, of their northernmost outpost at Sonoma; and that over this new land would fly, not the red-white-and-green standard of Mexico, but an alien banner of stripes and stars?

The four years which intervened between the collapse of Spanish rule in Mexico and the arrival of Jedediah Smith at San Gabriel were marked by political chaos in the Californias. When a governor of Alta California rose in the morning he did not know whether he was the representative of an emperor, a king, a president, or a dictator. As a result of these perennial disorders, the Mexican officials ascribed sinister motives to the most innocent episodes. No sooner, therefore, did Governor Echeandia learn of the arrival in his province of a mysterious party of Americans than he ordered them brought under escort to San Diego for examination.

Though those present probably did not appreciate it, the meeting of Smith and Echeandia in the palace at San Diego was a peculiarly significant one. There sat at his ease in his great chair of state the saturnine Mexican governor, arrogant and haughty, beruffled and gold-laced, his high-crowned sombrero and his velvet jacket heavy with bullion, while in front of him stood the American frontiersman, gaunt, unshaven, and ragged, but as cool and self-possessed as though he was at the head of a conquering army instead of a forlorn hope. The one was as truly the representative of a pa.s.sing as the other was of a coming race.

Small wonder that Echeandia, as he observed the hardy figures and determined faces of the Americans, thought to himself how small would be Mexico's chance of holding California if others of their countrymen began to follow in their footsteps. He and his officials cross-examined Smith as closely as though the frontiersman was a prisoner on trial for his life, as, in a sense, he was, for almost any fate might befall him and his companions in that remote corner of the continent without any one being called to account for it. Smith described the series of misfortunes which had led him to cross the ranges; he a.s.serted that he desired nothing so much as to get back into American territory again, and he earnestly begged the governor to provide him with the necessary provisions and permit him to depart. His story was so frank and plausible that Echeandia, with characteristic Spanish suspicion, promptly disbelieved every word of it, for why, he argued, should any sane man make so hazardous a journey unless he were a spy and well paid to risk his life? For even in those early days, remember, the Mexicans had begun to fear the ambitions of the young republic to the eastward.

So, despite their protests, he ordered the Americans to be imprisoned--and no one knew better than they did that, once within the walls of a Mexican prison, there was small chance of their seeing the outside world again. Fortunately for the explorers, however, it so happened that there were three American trading-schooners lying in San Diego harbor at the time, and their captains, determined to see the rights of their fellow countrymen respected, joined in a vigorous and energetic protest to the governor against this high-handed and unjustified action. This seems to have frightened Echeandia, for he reluctantly gave orders for the release of Smith and his companions, but ordered them to leave the country at once, and by the same route by which they had come.

When the year 1827 was but a few days old, therefore, the Americans turned their faces northward, but instead of retracing their steps in accordance with Echeandia's orders, they crossed the coast range, probably through the Tejon Pa.s.s, and kept on through the fertile region now known as the San Joaquin Valley, in the hope that by crossing the Sierra farther to the northward they would escape the terrible rigors of the Colorado desert. When some three hundred miles north of San Gabriel they attempted to recross the ranges, but a feat that had been hazardous in midsummer was impossible in midwinter, and the entire expedition nearly perished in the attempt. Several of the men and all the horses died of cold and hunger, and it was only by incredible exertions that Smith and his few remaining companions, terribly frozen and totally exhausted, managed to reach the Santa Clara Valley and Mission San Jose.

So slow was their progress that the news of their approach preceded them and caused considerable disquietude to the monks. Learning from the Indians that he and his tatterdemalion followers were objects of suspicion, Smith sent a letter to the father superior, in which he gave an account of his arrival at San Gabriel, of his interview with the governor, of his disaster in the Sierras, and of his present pitiable condition. ”I am a long way from home,” this pathetic missive concludes, ”and am anxious to get there as soon as the nature of the case will permit. Our situation is quite unpleasant, being dest.i.tute of clothing and most of the necessaries of life, wild meat being our princ.i.p.al subsistence. I am, reverend father, your strange but real friend and Christian brother, Jedediah Smith.” As a result of this appeal, the hospitality of the mission was somewhat grudgingly extended to the Americans, who were by this time in the most desperate condition.

Hards.h.i.+ps that would kill ordinary men were but unpleasant incidents in the lives of the pioneers, however, and in a few weeks they were as fit as ever to resume their journey. But, upon thinking the matter over, Smith decided that he would never be content if he went back without having found out what lay still farther to the northward, for in him was the insatiable curiosity and the indomitable spirit of the born explorer. But as his force, as well as his resources, had become sadly depleted, he felt it imperative that he should first return to Salt Lake and bring on the men, horses, and provisions he had left there.

Accordingly, leaving most of his party in camp at San Jose, he set out with only two companions, recrossed the Sierra at one of its highest points (the place he crossed is where the railway comes through to-day) and after several uncomfortably narrow escapes from landslides and from Indians, eventually reached the camp on Great Salt Lake, where he found that his people had long since given him and his companions up for dead.

Breaking camp on a July morning, in 1827, Smith, with eighteen men and two women, turned his face once more toward California. To avoid the snows of the high Sierras, he chose the route he had taken on his first journey, reaching the desert country to the north of the Colorado River in early August. It was not until the party had penetrated too far into the desert to retreat that they found that the whole country was burnt up. For several days they pushed on in the hope of finding water. Across the yellow sand wastes they would sight the sparkle of a crystal lake, and would hasten toward it as fast as their jaded animals could carry them, only to find that it was a mirage. Then the horrors preliminary to death by thirst began: the animals, their blackened tongues protruding from their mouths, staggered and fell, and rose no more; the women grew delirious and babbled incoherent nothings; even the hardiest of the men stumbled as they marched, or tried to frighten away by shouts and gestures the fantastic shapes which danced before them. At last there came a morning when they could go no farther. Such of them as still retained their faculties felt that it was the end--that is, all but Jedediah Smith. He was of the breed which does not know the meaning of defeat, because they are never defeated until they are dead. Loading himself with the empty water-bottles, he set out alone into the desert, determined to follow one of the numerous buffalo trails, for he knew that sooner or later it must lead him to water of some sort, even if to nothing more than a buffalo-wallow. Racked with the fever of thirst, his legs shaking from exhaustion, he plodded on, under the pitiless sun, mile after mile, hour after hour, until, struggling to the summit of a low divide, he saw the channel of a stream in the valley beneath him.

The expedition was saved. Stumbling and sliding down the slope in his haste to quench his intolerable thirst, he came to a sudden halt on the river-bank. It was nothing but an empty watercourse into which he was staring--the river had run dry! The shock of such a disappointment would have driven most men stark, staring mad. Only for a moment, however, was the veteran frontiersman staggered; he knew the character of many streams in the West--that often their waters run underground a few feet below the surface, and in a moment he was on his knees digging frantically in the soft sand. Soon the sand began to grow moist, and then the coveted water slowly began to filter upward into the little excavation he had hollowed. Throwing himself flat on the ground, he buried his burning face in the muddy water--and as he did so a shower of arrows whistled about him. A war-party of Comanches, un.o.bserved, had followed and surrounded him. He had but exchanged the danger of death by thirst for the far more dreadful fate of death by torture. Though struck by several of the arrows, he held the Indians off until he had filled his water-bottles; then, retreating slowly, taking advantage of every particle of cover, as only a veteran plainsman can, blazing away with his unerring rifle whenever an Indian was incautious enough to show a portion of his figure, Smith succeeded in getting back to his companions with the precious water. With their dead animals for breastworks, the pioneers succeeded in holding the Indians at bay for six-and-thirty hours, but on the second night the redskins, heavily reinforced, rushed them in the night, ten of the men and the two women being killed in the hand-to-hand fight which ensued, and the few horses which remained alive being stampeded. I rather imagine that the women were shot by their own husbands, for the women of the frontier always preferred death to capture by these fiends in paint and feathers.

How Smith, calling all his craft and experience as a plainsman to his a.s.sistance, managed to lead his eight surviving companions through the encircling Indians by night, and how, wounded, horseless, and provisionless as they were, he succeeded in guiding them across the ranges to San Bernardino, is but another example of this forgotten hero's courage and resource. Having lost everything that he possessed, for the whole of his scanty savings had been invested in the ill-fated expedition, Smith, with such of his men as were strong enough to accompany him, set out to rejoin the party he had left some months previously at Mission San Jose. Scarcely had he set foot within that settlement, however, before he was arrested and taken under escort to Monterey, where he was taken before the governor, who, he found to his surprise and dismay, was no other than his old enemy of San Diego, Don Jose Echeandia. This time nothing would convince Echeandia that Smith was not the leader of an expedition which had territorial designs on California, and he promptly ordered him to be taken to prison and kept in solitary confinement as a dangerous conspirator. Thereupon Smith resorted to the same expedient he had used so successfully, and begged the captains of the American vessels in the harbor of Monterey for protection. So forcible were their representations that Echeandia finally agreed to release Smith on his swearing to leave California for good and all. To this proposal Smith willingly agreed and took the oath required of him, but, upon being released from prison, was astounded to learn that the governor had given orders that he must set out alone--that his hunters would not be permitted to accompany him. His and their protestations were disregarded. Smith must start at once and unaccompanied. He was given a horse and saddle, provisions, blankets, a rifle--and nothing more. It was a sentence of death which Echeandia had had p.r.o.nounced on this American frontiersman, and both he and Smith knew it. Without having committed any crime--unless it was a crime to be an American--Jedediah Smith was driven out of the territory of a supposedly friendly nation, and told that he was at perfect liberty to make his way across two thousand miles of wilderness to the nearest American outpost--if he could.

Striking back into that range of the Sierras which lies southeast of Fresno, Smith succeeded in crossing them for a fourth time, evidently intending to make his way back to his old stamping-ground on the Great Salt Lake. Our knowledge of what occurred after he had crossed the ranges for the last time is confined to tales told to the settlers in later years by the Indians. While emerging from the terrible Death Valley, where hundreds of emigrants were to lose their lives during the rush to the gold-fields a quarter of a century later, he was attacked at a water-hole by a band of Indians. For many years afterward the Comanches were wont to tell with admiration how this lone pale-face, coming from out of the setting sun, had knelt behind his dead horse and held them off with his deadly rifle all through one scorching summer's day. But when nightfall came they crept up very silently under cover of the darkness and rushed him. His scalp was very highly valued, for it had cost the lives of twelve Comanche braves.

But Jedediah Smith did not die in vain. Tales of the rich and virgin country which he had found beyond the ranges flew as though with wings across the land; soon other pioneers made their way over the mountains by the trails which he had blazed; long wagon-trains crawled westward by the routes which he had taken; strange bands of hors.e.m.e.n pitched their tents in the valleys where he had camped. The mission bells grew silent; the monk in his woollen robe and the _caballero_ in his gold-laced jacket pa.s.sed away; settlements of hardy, energetic, nasal-voiced folk from beyond the Sierras sprang up everywhere. Then one day a new flag floated over the presidio in Monterey--a flag that was not to be pulled down. The American republic had reached the western ocean, and thus was fulfilled the dream of Jedediah Smith, the man who showed the way.

THE FLAG OF THE BEAR

Because the battles which marked its establishment were really only skirmishes, in which but an insignificant number of lives were lost, and because it boasted less than a thousand citizens all told, certain of our historians have been so undiscerning as to a.s.sert that the Bear Flag Republic was nothing but a travesty and a farce. Therein they are wrong.

Though it is doubtless true that the handful of frontiersmen who raised their home-made flag, with its emblem of a grizzly bear, over the Californian presidio of Sonoma on that July morning in 1846 took themselves much more seriously than the circ.u.mstances warranted, it is equally true that their action averted the seizure of California by England, and by forcing the hand of the administration at Was.h.i.+ngton was primarily responsible for adding what is now California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and more than half of Wyoming and Colorado to the Union. The series of intrigues and affrays and insurrections which resulted in the Pacific coast becoming American instead of European form a picturesque, exciting, and virtually unwritten chapter in our national history, a chapter in which furtive secret agents and haughty _caballeros_, pioneers in fringed buckskin, and naval officers in gold-laced uniforms all played their greater or their lesser parts.

To fully understand the conditions which led up to the ”Bear Flag War,”

as it has been called, it is necessary to go back for a moment to the first quarter of the last century, when the territory of the United States ended at the Rocky Mountains and the red-white-and-green flag of Mexico floated over the whole of that vast, rich region which lay beyond. Under the Mexican regime the territory lying west of the Sierra Nevadas was divided into the provinces of Alta (or Upper) and Baja (or Lower) California, the population of the two provinces about 1845 totalling not more than fifteen thousand souls, nine-tenths of whom were Mexicans, Spaniards, and Indians, the rest American and European settlers. The foreigners, among whom Americans greatly predominated, soon became influential out of all proportion to their numbers. This was particularly true of the Americans, who, solidified by common interests, common dangers, and common ambitions, obtained large grants of land, built houses which in certain cases were little short of forts, frequently married into the most aristocratic of the Californian families, and before long practically controlled the commerce of the entire territory.

It was only to be expected, therefore, that the Mexicans should become more and more apprehensive of American ambitions. Nor did President Jackson's offer, in 1835, to buy Southern California--an offer which was promptly refused--serve to do other than strengthen these apprehensions.

And to make matters worse, if such a thing were possible, Commodore T.

ApCatesby Jones, having heard a rumor that war had broken out between the United States and Mexico, and having reason to believe that a British force was preparing to seize California, landed a force of bluejackets and marines, and on October 21, 1842, raised the American flag over the presidio at Monterey. Although Commodore Jones, finding he had acted upon misinformation, lowered the flag next day and tendered an apology to the provincial officials, the incident did not tend to relieve the tension which existed between the Mexicans and the Americans, for it emphasized the ease with which the country could be seized, and hinted with unmistakable plainness at the ultimate intentions of the United States. That our government intended to annex the Californias at the first opportunity that offered the Mexicans were perfectly aware, for, aroused by the descriptions of the unbelievable beauty and fertility of the country as sent back by those daring souls who had made their way across the ranges, the hearts of our people were set upon its acquisition. The great Bay of San Francisco, large enough to shelter the navies of the world and the gateway to the Orient, the fruitful, sun-kissed land beyond the Sierras, the political domination of America, and the commercial domination of the Pacific--such were the visions which inspired our people and the motives which animated our leaders, and which were intensified by the fear of England's designs upon this western land.

As the numbers of the American settlers gradually increased, the jealousy and suspicion of the Mexican officials became more p.r.o.nounced.

As early as 1826 they had driven Captain Jedediah Smith, the first American to make his way to California by the overland route, back into the mountains, in the midst of winter, without companions and without provisions, to be killed by the Indians. In 1840 more than one hundred American settlers were suddenly arrested by the Mexican authorities on a trumped-up charge of having plotted against the government, marched under military guard to Monterey, and confined in the prison there under circ.u.mstances of the most barbarous cruelty, some fifty of them being eventually deported to Mexico in chains. Thomas O. Larkin, the American consul at Monterey, upon visiting the prisoners in the local jail where they were confined, found that the cells had no floors, and that the poor fellows stood in mud and water to their ankles. Sixty of the prisoners he found crowded into a single room, twenty feet long and eighteen wide, in which they were so tightly packed that they could not all sit at the same time, much less lie down. The room being without windows or other means of ventilation, the air quickly became so fetid that they were able to live only by dividing themselves into platoons which took turns in standing at the door and getting a few breaths of air through the bars. These men, whose only crime was that they were Americans, were confined in this h.e.l.l-hole, without food except such as their friends were able to smuggle in to them by bribing the sentries, for eight days. And this treatment was accorded them, remember, not because they were conspirators--for no one knew better than the Mexican authorities that they were not--but because it seemed the easiest means of driving them out of the country. Throughout the half-dozen years that ensued American settlers were subjected to a systematic campaign of annoyance, persecution, and imprisonment on innumerable frivolous pretexts, being released only on their promise to leave California immediately. By 1845, therefore, the hara.s.sed Americans, in sheer desperation, were ready to grasp the first opportunity which presented itself to end this intolerable tyranny for good and all.