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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 The Renegade 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.

California, far from any capital

To understand the men at Sonoma it helps to see how thin the ground under everyone was. Alta California was the far northern edge of Mexico, a province held loosely from a capital that lay weeks of hard travel to the south. Mexico had won its independence from Spain a generation earlier, and in the years since, the central government had changed hands often and had little to spare for a coast most of its citizens would never see. Authority in California rested with a small class of Californio landholders and a handful of soldiers, and it reached only as far as the ranchos and the old mission towns. Between those points lay a great deal of country that no government watched closely.

Into that opening came the Americans. Through the early 1840s a slow current of settlers crossed the plains and the Sierra and dropped down into the valleys of the interior, most of them squatting on land they did not own and could not legally buy. They arrived carrying an idea that had hardened into common sense back east, that the continent was meant to belong to the United States and that the people already on it were a temporary condition. The revolt at Sonoma was the local outbreak of that national appetite. The men who took the town were hungry and afraid and convinced that history was on their side, and they were acting on a conviction that had already been decided for them far to the east.

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.

Sonoma was chosen for reasons that were half practical and half symbolic. It was the northernmost of the Mexican settlements, the guard post Vallejo himself had built years before to hold the frontier, and its barracks on the plaza held the military stores of the region, muskets and powder and cannon that a few dozen farmers could not otherwise have laid hands on. Taking the town meant taking the arms, and the arms turned a grievance into a garrison. It also meant taking the one man whose name carried weight across northern California, which gave the seizure a scale it would not have had if the Osos had simply raided a ranch.

What drove them was as much fear as ambition, and the fear ran on rumor. In a country with no newspapers to speak of and no fast way to check a story, a report that Castro was arming the tribes against the settlers, or preparing to expel every foreigner who held no title, could not be confirmed or dismissed. It simply spread. Men who believed they were about to be driven from their farms decided to strike first, and the thinness of the evidence did not slow them, because waiting for proof felt like waiting to be ruined. The revolt was built on that logic, the sense that the safest thing to do with a rumor of violence was to commit some of your own.

Vallejo, taken prisoner in his own house

The strangest part of the morning was the prisoner. Mariano Vallejo, the man the settlers had built up as a tyrant, was in fact a large landholder and the former military commander of the northern frontier, and privately 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.

Nothing about the imprisonment served the cause it belonged to. Vallejo was the readiest ally the Americans had in California, a man who had already decided their side would win and had said so to anyone who asked. Locking him in a room at Sutter's Fort for two months worked against the very thing it was meant to help. It humiliated the one Californio most inclined to ease the conquest, damaged his health and his fortune, and turned a possible partner into a prisoner with a grievance. The decision made sense only inside the small, suspicious world of the men who made it, where a general was a general and a friendly one was still a risk. It is the kind of mistake that improvised power makes, and it would be quietly forgotten once the conquest needed a dignified story about itself.

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.

The star that Todd set in the corner carried its own quiet history. An earlier generation of Californios had risen against the government in Mexico City and flown a lone star of their own, and the settlers borrowed the symbol without much thought for whose rebellion it had first marked. That borrowing is the whole revolt in miniature. A handful of newcomers took the emblems, the town, and the country of the people already living there and improvised a government out of the pieces. The republic they proclaimed had a flag and a name and almost nothing else. It issued no laws that outlived it, minted no money, guarded no border, and sent no envoy that any nation received. It was a placeholder held up in the shape of a state, waiting for the real power to arrive and give it meaning.

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.

What Gillespie actually carried to that camp near Klamath Lake is one of the genuine mysteries of the conquest, argued over ever since. Some of it was ordinary, letters from home and word of the worsening relations with Mexico. Some of it may have been more, a private sense of what Washington would welcome, passed by mouth rather than paper so that nothing could be produced later. Frémont read the dispatches, turned his column south, and never gave a clear account of why. That vagueness was the instrument. A written order can be disobeyed, cited, or hung around a man's neck at a court-martial, while an understanding leaves no such trace. By keeping the crucial part of the business unwritten, Frémont left himself a version of events he could shape afterward, and shape it he did, for decades.

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 men who came to raise the American flag were as cautious as the settlers had been rash. Sloat had waited off the coast for confirmation that war had truly begun before he moved, wary of starting a fight his government might disown, and the settlers' revolt and the fear of a British claim on California finally pushed him ashore. When his sailors and marines raised the Stars and Stripes at Monterey, the improvised republic had its answer. The Osos got what they had been waiting for and lost the thing they had made in the same stroke. Their bear came down, their battalion was folded into the regular effort, and the seizure of California passed from a settlers' rumor into a naval and military campaign that would grind on in the south for months before the province was fully in American hands.

Seen from a distance, the timing tells the real story. The war had been declared in Washington in the middle of May, before a single Oso saddled a horse, over a border dispute in Texas that had nothing to do with California. The men at Sonoma rose in June without knowing any of it, certain they were making their own history and in fact playing a small part in someone else's. When the fighting finally ended and the two governments signed the treaty that closed the war in 1848, California passed to the United States by the stroke of a pen in a document the Bear Flaggers had no hand in. The republic they had proclaimed was not named in it. It had served its purpose, which was to hold the ground for a month until the country that wanted it could arrive.

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.

The record and the men it leaves out

The distance between what happened at Sonoma and the way it was later told is the subject that draws the novel to this season. On the morning of June 14 the conquest of California was a scramble, thirty frightened men, a borrowed symbol, a prisoner nobody needed, and an officer keeping his orders in his head. In the accounts written afterward it became something firmer, a forward step in a national design, the pathfinder and his men doing the country's work. The improvisation was tidied into policy. The luck and the fear were edited out, and the men who had acted on rumor were granted the dignity of a foresight they had not shown at the time.

That editing shapes more than the tone of the story. It decides who stays in it and who disappears. The conquest ran on a class of men who rarely made it into the official version, the guides who knew the passes, the packers who moved the horses, the interpreters who could speak to the Californios and to the tribes whose country all of this crossed. Frémont's own camp was a polyglot outfit that included Delaware scouts and hired hands of every background, men whose knowledge made the marches possible and whose names, when they survive at all, survive in a line or two. Enos, the multilingual guide at the center of the novel, comes out of exactly that class. He is the sort of man who carried the dispatches and the rumors and the animals between the American camp and the country it was taking, was useful while the work was rough, and was written out once the work was done and the story wanted heroes in place of hands.

What the Bear Flag really was

The flag itself made the myth easy. A bear is a good emblem, plain and strong, and it lent the episode a rugged dignity the actual morning did not have. Californians raised a cleaned-up version of Todd's cloth over the state a lifetime later, and the grizzly on it now reads as the sign of a bold and settled founding rather than the mark of a nervous month in 1846. That is how these things usually go. The symbol outlives the scramble that produced it and slowly replaces the memory of it, until the flag over the capitol says more about how a state wishes to have begun than about how it did.

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 The Renegade 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.