The Reading Room · July 19, 2026

The Bear Flag Revolt of 1846: How a Handful of Settlers and Frémont Seized California

Around dawn on June 14, 1846, roughly thirty armed men rode into the sleeping town of Sonoma, north of San Francisco Bay. They carried no commissions and no orders from any government. Some were farmers who had crossed the mountains in the last few seasons, some were hunters who had drifted west and stopped. They surrounded the largest house in town, the home of General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, and informed the most powerful man in northern California that he was their prisoner. There was no fighting. There was barely a plan. By the time the sun was fully up they held a town, a general, and a stretch of country they had no clear idea how to govern. Out of that confused morning they declared a republic that would last less than a month.

The Bear Flag Revolt is the moment the loose American presence in California turned into an act of seizure. It is also one of the strangest episodes in the whole conquest, a mix of real grievance, rumor, and quiet manipulation from the edge of the frame. The novel Enos: Witness to the American West moves through this same season, and the guide at its center belongs to exactly the world the revolt was made in. This is what happened at Sonoma, and how a homemade republic became a piece of the United States.

The settlers who called themselves Osos

The men who took Sonoma were part of the small and nervous population of American settlers who had come into Mexican Alta California overland in the early 1840s. They held no legal title to most of the land they farmed, and by the spring of 1846 many of them were convinced that the Mexican military commander of the north, General José Castro, meant to drive them out. Rumors ran ahead of any facts, and some of the rumors were plausible enough that acting on them felt like sense rather than panic. A first party under Ezekiel Merritt, a rough Sacramento Valley trapper, had already intercepted a herd of government horses days earlier. Seizing the horses committed them. Seizing the town followed.

They took their name from the animal that stood for the country they were in. Their enemies called them los Osos, the bears, meant as a jab about men who lived rough in the hills. They kept it. It gave a scattering of squatters and hunters something to be. William B. Ide, a farmer and former schoolteacher from back east, emerged as the closest thing the movement had to a head, and he wrote a proclamation to justify what they had done, promising the Californios their safety and their property and calling on them to help build a new government. It was earnest and slightly ridiculous, a homestead manifesto for a country of a few hundred people.

Vallejo, taken prisoner in his own house

The strangest part of the morning was the prisoner. Mariano Vallejo was not the tyrant the settlers had built up. He was a large landholder and the former military commander of the northern frontier, and privately he was one of the strongest voices in California for peaceful annexation to the United States. He thought his own country's grip on the province was hopeless and that American rule was coming whether anyone welcomed it or not. When armed men filled his courtyard he received their leaders indoors, sent for paper, and by several accounts brought out brandy while the terms of his own surrender were worked out. The negotiations ran long. The men waiting outside grew suspicious that their delegates had been bought with drink, and they took Vallejo anyway, carrying him off to Sutter's Fort on the Sacramento, where he was held for about two months. The man who had argued for the Americans spent the birth of American California as its prisoner and came home broke and in poor health. It is one of the cleaner ironies of the whole business.

The flag and the republic

They needed a flag. A young man named William L. Todd, a relative of Mary Todd Lincoln, made one out of plain cloth. He put a single red star in the upper corner, borrowing it from an earlier Californio revolt, and beside it a standing grizzly bear, and along the bottom a red stripe, and across the whole thing the words CALIFORNIA REPUBLIC. The bear reportedly looked enough like a pig that some of the Californios said so out loud. It was run up the pole in the Sonoma plaza, and for a few weeks it was the flag of a sovereign country that existed mostly on paper.

The California Republic never had a constitution, a treasury, a port, or a border anyone recognized. It had a plaza, a few dozen armed men, a proclamation, and a name. It never really asked to be permanent. Ide and the others understood themselves to be holding ground until the United States arrived, and the whole exercise ran on the belief that the United States would. Its independence, such as it was, lasted from June 14 to roughly July 9, about twenty-five days.

Frémont behind the curtain

Every account of the revolt leaves the same shadow across it, and the shadow is John C. Frémont. He had come into California the previous winter at the head of an armed survey party of around sixty men, the Third Expedition, ostensibly mapping a route to the Pacific. In March he had faced down Castro's forces in a brief, theatrical standoff on Gavilan Peak, then withdrawn north toward Oregon. Near Klamath Lake a Marine lieutenant, Archibald Gillespie, caught up with him carrying dispatches from Washington, and after that meeting Frémont turned his column around and came back down into the Sacramento Valley. He camped near the Buttes, north of Sutter's Fort, and waited.

He gave no written order for the taking of Sonoma, and he was careful about that, then and for the rest of his life. But his armed camp sat within reach of the settlers, and it worked as their backstop, their arsenal, and their reason to believe the government was with them. Merritt and the others went to Frémont before they moved. What passed between them was never fully written down, which was much of the point. Frémont let the settlers act, kept his own hands technically clean, and then, once Sonoma was taken and Vallejo was in irons, stepped forward to command what they had started. Within weeks the Bear Flaggers were folded into his California Battalion, and the homemade republic had become a military instrument of the United States. This was Frémont's method through the whole conquest: encourage the violence, stand just behind it, and be present to accept the result.

How the republic became a conquest

It was over almost as soon as it began, because the larger war it stood in for had already started without anyone in California knowing. The United States had declared war on Mexico on May 13, 1846, over the disputed Texas border, weeks before the men rode into Sonoma. News crossed the continent slowly, and the Bear Flaggers raised their republic in the dark, unaware that they were a small local piece of a national war. On July 7, Commodore John D. Sloat raised the Stars and Stripes over Monterey and claimed California for the United States. Two days later the bear flag came down in Sonoma and the American flag went up in its place. The republic was absorbed into the country it had been waiting for.

The weeks in between were not bloodless. Two Bear Flaggers, Cowie and Fowler, were caught and killed by Californios, and in retaliation, near San Rafael, Kit Carson shot three unarmed Californios, an old man and two young twins, on Frémont's order. That killing sits in the record beside the Klamath Lake killings and the burned villages of the same season, part of the pattern of casual, deniable violence the conquest ran on. These are the events the novel moves through. Enos, the multilingual guide, belongs to exactly this world, one of the men who carried the horses, the dispatches, and the rumors between the American camp and the country it was taking, and who were used and then written out.

What the Bear Flag really was

Californians have kept the bear. The grizzly and the red star and the words California Republic are on the state flag that flies over Sacramento today, cleaned up and made to look like the emblem of a proud founding. The morning it comes from was smaller and stranger than that. A few dozen anxious settlers, acting on rumor and short of any authority, seized a town from a man who agreed with them, ran up a hand-painted flag, and declared a country they never meant to keep, while an army officer with real orders watched from a camp upriver and let them do it. The republic lasted less than a month. The conquest it opened the door to did not. For how a topographical survey turned into that armed seizure, see Frémont's Third Expedition; for the scout at the center of its violence, see Kit Carson and the conquest of California. For the man who moved through all of it, there is Enos: Witness to the American West.

Sources & further reading

• "Bear Flag Revolt," Wikipedia — overview of the June 1846 uprising at Sonoma, the Osos, and the merge into the U.S. conquest, with sources.
• "California Republic," Wikipedia — the short-lived republic, its flag, and the bear that became the state emblem.
• "Bear Flag Revolt," Encyclopædia Britannica — a concise account of the revolt and its place in the Mexican-American War.
• "Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo," Wikipedia — the general the settlers imprisoned, and his own case for American annexation.
• "William B. Ide," Wikipedia — the settler who wrote the proclamation and headed what there was of the republic.