What was said between Gillespie and Polk remains unknown, but a few weeks thereafter, when war with Mexico was looming, Gillespie found himself aboard a sailing vessel bound for California—via Veracruz, Mexico—disguised as a representative of William Appleton & Co. of Boston, Massachusetts, a shipping concern, in other words a government spy, part of whose job would be reporting on conditions, political and military, that he observed in Mexico.
Aside from Polk’s personal instructions to Gillespie, if any, he was used as a clandestine courier carrying letters and directives from the president to Captain Frémont and others—including Commodore John D. Sloat, the U.S. Pacific Squadron commander—regarding what was expected of them in California considering the new turn of events with the Mexican government. Polk had timed Gillespie’s arrival in California with the anticipated arrival there of Frémont, no mean feat allowing that these timings took six months or more to accomplish.
Gillespie, tall, freckled, and with a shock of red hair, who had been selected for the assignment partly because of his excellent command of the Spanish language, arrived in Veracruz on December 10, 1845, to behold a barren, filthy, lawless place, seething with anti-American sentiment and on the verge of yet another revolution.
It was also the birthplace and home base of the notorious one-legged general and perennial Mexican ruler Antonio López de Santa Anna, who had led the Mexican army in the butchery at the Alamo a decade earlier.* Since then, Santa Anna had been Mexico’s president/dictator no fewer than seven times, by some ragged process of coup and countercoup, until his present exile in Havana, Cuba, which was under penalty of death. Unbeknownst to Lieutenant Gillespie, a few weeks after his own secretive nighttime encounter in the White House, an even more intriguing audience had been conducted between the president and a mysterious character named Colonel Alejandro Atocha, who said he was Santa Anna’s close friend. For a “pecuniary consideration” of $30 million, Atocha informed a startled President Polk, the United States could have all the lands of California and New Mexico, and a treaty also ceding them Texas without quarrel, provided Polk would allow Santa Anna safe passage from Cuba to Veracruz, where he would regain control of Mexico and make arrangements for the sale.
When Polk asked how this could be, in light of the current high feelings in Mexico against giving up land to the Americans, Atocha told him the Americans would have to put the screws on the Mexican government. Santa Anna, Atocha said, was convinced that once he regained power it would be necessary for the United States to withdraw its emissary, Slidell, then march General Taylor’s army from Corpus Christi down to the Rio Grande, and place a U.S. naval squadron to blockade Veracruz. Only then would the Mexican people believe the United States really meant business.
In addition, according to one report, the urbane, expensively dressed Atocha informed Polk that the sum of half a million dollars would be needed immediately for Santa Anna and himself “to sustain themselves,” until the main balance could be paid.
Polk’s reaction was that Atocha was untrustworthy; at least that’s what he told his diary. “Col. Atocha is a person to whom I would not give my confidence,” the president wrote. “He is evidently a man of talents and education, but his whole manner and conversation impressed me with the belief that he was not reliable. I therefore heard all he said but communicated nothing to him.”
Maybe so, but within a few months Polk had withdrawn Slidell as ambassador, ordered Taylor’s army from Corpus Christi to the Rio Grande, blockaded Veracruz with a U.S. naval squadron, and sent word to its commander that General Antonio López de Santa Anna be allowed to pass through safely on his way to Mexico from Cuba.
Polk did not, however, fall for the half a million in “walking around money” (i.e., bribe) that Atocha had angled for, and a good thing, too, since Santa Anna was possibly the most corrupt official in Mexican history, which is saying a lot. Wrote the historian Allan Nevins of Santa Anna, “In reality, he was a charlatan.” He was also a master of the double cross, as Polk quickly found out after allowing him safe passage. Far from trying to sue for peace, Santa Anna had scarcely returned to Mexico and seized power when he exclaimed, “Every day that passes without fighting in the north is a century of disgrace for Mexico!” and proceeded to concentrate an army of 25,000 at San Luis Potosí to stop the American invasion.
All of this was in Lieutenant Gillespie’s future, however, and he was overly anxious to get out of the sticky, fetid hellhole that was Veracruz. After dispatching a report to his superiors on the state of affairs he found in the town, Gillespie traveled four days by mule coach to Mexico City, a trip he described as delightful, passing through a rising country of citrus and other tropical fruit groves and roadsides with bright blossoms in wild profusion. When the coach reached the heights of the Mexican plateau, Gillespie and the others “looked down upon the Great Valley of Mexico … the innumerable spires of the distant city were faintly seen. The volcanoes were enveloped in clouds, all but their snowy summits, which seemed like marble domes towering in the sky.”
Alas, the marine officer’s arrival at the national capital coincided with the outbreak of the umpteenth (thirty-second) revolution during the tumultuous quarter century since Mexico gained independence from Spain. With Santa Anna still exiled in Cuba, this time the army of General Mariano Paredes had deposed the current presidente, General José Herrera, who had fallen from grace merely by hinting that he might consider treating with the Americans for the purchase of Texas or any other Mexican property. During his stay in Mexico City, Gillespie observed Mexican army battalions marching north toward the Rio Grande, and he found the press and people in the capital, if anything, even more vitriolic against the United States than he had the citizens of Veracruz.
The very presence of Polk’s envoy Slidell—though he was never officially received by the Mexican government—“they declared an insufferable insult to the City—and a degradation of the national honor.” In Gillespie’s opinion, war loomed right over the horizon.
Heading out of the city for the West Coast port city of Mazatlán, Gillespie disguised himself as a Mexican, complete with serape, sombrero, sash, and a pistol stuck in his belt, and boarded a stagecoach for the two-week trip to the Pacific coast. When he arrived there, waiting for him was the American sloop of war USS Cyane, which would carry him first to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), then eastward to Monterey, the capital of California.
There he finally arrived on April 17, 1846, one week before General Arista’s massacre of the American cavalry patrol along the Rio Grande, which touched off the Mexican war. His first contact was with the U.S. consul general for California, Thomas Larkin. For him Gillespie had special instructions, which he delivered orally, since even before entering Mexico he had committed to memory and then destroyed the documents of instruction he had received in Washington, as a precaution against their falling into the wrong hands.
The message basically—and here is what has become clouded over the years—was that the president, the secretary of state, and the secretary of war wanted Larkin to become a secret agent of the U.S. government to try and pry California away from Mexico. Like the territory of New Mexico, the California province was too far away for the government in Mexico City to administer, and it had been that way for years (even since the fictional time of Zorro, when lawlessness and corruption prevailed and rich dons abused the people). In fact, in the whole enormous province only a few hundred caballeros and their families (known as Californios) presided over rich estates from San Diego to San Francisco, raising cattle, horses, and generally living the good life without very much direction from anybody.†
These colonists from Spain had arrived in increasing numbers with the official Spanish establishment in 1769 of the Alta California mission system, which over the next sixty years built a chain of twenty-one Catholic missions all along El Camino Real (the king’s road) that ran near the Pacific Ocean from San Diego to San Francisco. The object of these missions—subsidized by the then Church-influence
d Spanish government—was to attempt to civilize the various tribes of Indians who lived in the distant province and turn them into useful, Christian, and—most important—tax-paying citizens.
Administered by the Franciscan order, and backed by government troops, the missions controlled huge sections of land—tens of thousands of acres—and at one point were estimated to have had perhaps a hundred thousand Indians under their sway.‡
By the late 1820s the missions had large agricultural and livestock operations and seemed to be accomplishing their goals. But then the successful Mexican revolution against Spain convulsed their world, and the newly independent Mexicans passed a law of “secularization,” on grounds it couldn’t afford to subsidize the missions anymore.§ This action has also been characterized as “a polite term for robbery,” since the mission properties were quickly confiscated by corrupt bureaucrats, broken up, and auctioned off for pittances, often to the relatives and cronies of Californio authorities or Mexico City politicians. At the same time, the government began encouraging Mexicans to immigrate to California and colonize it, but this did not occur. The Indians, of course, got little or nothing for their sixty-odd years of devotion, and those who didn’t drift back to the wild tribes began hanging around and begging or took up horse stealing and other disagreeable pursuits.
By the time of Frémont and Gillespie’s arrival, California had been divided by the Mexican government into four military districts, each with its comandante, and a governor, Pío de Jesús Pico IV, part Indian, part black, part Mexican, part European, and a self-made California aristocrat, who lived much of the time in Los Angeles, a thriving town of about 250 souls. In recent years, the Mexicans in this territory‖ had watched with growing alarm as scores of American settlers began to push in from Oregon and take up farming and ranching in the rich valleys between the Sierras and the Coast Range.
At first, when they were just a handful, the Americans’ presence seemed harmless enough, but soon the reality of what had happened in Texas began to dawn on the Californios. This was no idle supposition; Niles’ Register, a weekly journal, had recently observed that “There will soon be more Yankees than Mexicans there, and they will, most likely, establish a government of their own, entirely independent of Mexico.”
Governor Pico, who had boot-strapped himself from a two-bit dram shop proprietor to owner of a half-million-acre ranching enterprise, probably best summed up the Californios’ viewpoint when he said, “What are we to do then? Shall we remain supine, while these daring strangers are overrunning our fertile plains, and gradually outnumbering and displacing us? Shall these incursions go on unchecked, until we shall become strangers in our own land? ”
The answer to these questions came soon enough, when Pico—who favored breaking California away from Mexico and aligning her not with the United States but with England—issued an edict banning further American immigration from the Oregon Trail. Furthermore, after a tour of inspection of the northern valleys, General José Castro, the military comandante, published an additional decree that reduced the presence of those Americans already farming or ranching there to “provisional” status, meaning he could kick them out anytime he saw fit. Naturally, this created more fear and ill will between the two sides.
And so it was upon this dicey state of affairs that Captain Frémont, of the United States Army, dropped in with his large posse of heavily armed frontiersmen.
Frémont and his party had descended the California side of the Sierra Nevadas through the crest of a 7,200-foot pass on December 3, 1845, an eyelash ahead of the snows that nearly did him in at that altitude during the previous expedition.
After clawing across the Great Salt Lake Desert, Frémont had divided the expedition at Pilot Peak, sending part of it to explore along the Humboldt River while he and the rest crossed over the mountains to Sutter’s Fort, a large trading post and ranch in the California Valley that he’d visited the year before.
Nearing the mountains, the explorers began finding signs of human life, notably that of miserable “Digger” Indians, who inhabited this part of America. It was generally agreed among the trappers, mountain men, Mexicans, and even other Indian tribes that the Diggers represented a sort of low bar on the scale of human development, as they appeared squalid and were essentially limited to gathering roots and acorns or occasionally killing small game—a far cry from the ideal of the “noble savage” concept that had gained popularity in European art and literature. Even slaves, or ex-slaves, disdained the Diggers. A woman pioneer on her way to Oregon described them in a letter to her sister: “Their food consists of bugs, crickets, ants and worms. In winter they live in the ground, and in summer they wander from place to place.”
Frémont came upon a Paiute, “naked as a worm,” in the foothills as he searched for the pass through the mountains: “We found a single Indian standing before a little sage-brush fire over which was hanging a small earthen pot, filled with sage-brush squirrels. He was deep in brown study, and did not hear or see us until we were upon him. Escape was not possible, and he tried to seem pleased, but his convulsive start and wild look around showed that he thought his end had come. As so it would—abruptly—had the Delawares been alone. With a deprecating smile he offered us a part of his pot-au-feu and his bunch of squirrels. I reassured him with a friendly shake of the hand and a trifling gift. The Delawares lingered as we turned away, but I would not let them remain. They regarded our journey as a kind of war-path, and no matter what kind of path he is on the Delaware is always ready to take a scalp when he is in a country where there are strange Indians.”
And that wasn’t all. A day or two later Frémont and his companions found a good camp by a spring where they had cooked and eaten a freshly killed antelope, and were now lounging by the fireside, smoking and enjoying themselves.
“[Kit] Carson who was lying on his back with his pipe in his mouth, his hands under his head, and his feet to the fire, suddenly exclaimed, half rising and pointing to the other side of the fire, ‘Good God! Look there!’ In the blaze of the fire, peering over her skinny, crooked hands, which shaded her eyes from the glare, was standing an old woman, apparently eighty years of age, nearly naked, her grizzly hair hanging down over her face and shoulders.”
She had assumed the fire was a group of her own tribe, ran away in fright, but was brought back, where it was quickly ascertained that she was starving. “She had been left by her people at the spring to die, because she was very old and could gather no more seeds and was no longer good for anything,” Frémont wrote.
They gave her a quarter of the antelope, “but no sooner did she get it into her hand than she again darted off into the darkness.” Some of the men went after her but the woman had vanished. Before they departed next morning, Frémont’s men left her “a little supply from what food we had.”
The Indians, it seems, had figured out a system or way of life that was practical, if unforgiving.
The party crossed over the Sierras and arrived at Sutter’s Fort on December 1, 1845. Sutter’s was a large, self-contained adobe stockade that had been constructed a decade earlier by John Augustus Sutter—a Swiss national fleeing financial reverses—at the confluence of the Sacramento and American rivers, at what is now the city of Sacramento. Sutter named it New Helvetia (New Switzerland). It contained a saddlery and a blacksmithy and offered fresh horses, cattle, and feed for sale.a
With his party united once again, Frémont set out to pay his respects at the province capital, Monterey. They had been four months in the wilderness since departing Bent’s Fort. Accompanied by the U.S. vice consul William A. Leidesdorff, Frémont sought out Governor Pico, only to find he had gone to Los Angeles, but he did meet with the commanding general, Don José Castro. To this officer Frémont asked permission to continue exploring and described his expedition as a party of geographical surveyors looking to find the nearest route from the United States to the Pacific Ocean. The men composing it, he said, were private citizens and not soldier
s.
“The permission asked for was readily granted,” Frémont recorded, “and during the two days I stayed I was treated with every courtesy by the general and the other officers.”
Procuring supplies and fresh horses in San Francisco and Monterey, Frémont’s band was reunited by mid-February in the San José valley. After telling General Castro that he intended to leave California once his party was refitted, Frémont instead proceeded to head south for his explorations, having run-ins first with a grizzly bear, which, smelling breakfast, burst into camp one morning and “treed even the Delawares,”b and, second, a band of so-called Horse-Thief Indians, which ended in death for at least one Indian.c
The reason Frémont later gives us for his detour south was his curiosity about the giant redwood trees he had heard about and to take in the seascape of the Pacific Ocean. Secretly, also, it was to pick out a future home site, or so he said.
“Always, too, I had before my mind the home I wished to make in this country,” he wrote, “and first one and then another place charmed me. But none seemed perfect where the sea was wanting, and so far I had not stood by the open waves of the Pacific. This I wanted for my mother. For me, the shore of ‘the sounding sea’ was a pleasure of which I never wearied.”
So Frémont had headed southwest toward Santa Cruz and Monterey Bay, over the towering Coast Range where gigantic redwood forests formed a colossal, sun-dappled cathedral down to the blue expanse of ocean—and it was there that trouble found him.
Having granted Frémont permission to refit his party so as to depart the province, General Castro prudently ordered his people to keep an eye on this outlandish, heavily armed congregation. When they turned back south, passing only twenty miles in fact from Monterey, he flew into a rage.
“In the afternoon [of March 3, 1846] the quiet of the camp was disturbed by the appearance of a cavalry officer and two men,” Frémont wrote. “The cavalry officer proved to be a Lieutenant Chavez, with a communication from the commanding general.”