Reading Room · 1846

San Rafael, 1846: "I Have Got No Room for Prisoners"

The conquest of California produced a great deal of violence that the official record learned to describe as something else. One killing it could never quite dress up happened on the shore at San Rafael in June 1846, when three unarmed Californians were shot on an answer given out loud.

By the summer of 1846 the Bear Flag Revolt had turned the north of Mexican California into a low, ugly war. American settlers and John C. Frémont's armed "exploring" expedition moved through the country seizing horses, prisoners, and towns, and the line between soldier and irregular had mostly stopped meaning anything. It was in that stretch, near the mission at San Rafael, that Frémont's men killed José de los Reyes Berreyesa and the twin brothers Francisco and Ramón de Haro.

The country that summer

The revolt had begun a short time before at Sonoma, where a party of American settlers rode into the town, seized it, and carried its leading residents off as prisoners. Out of that seizure they declared a republic and ran up a flag with a bear on it, and for a few weeks the northern district of California belonged to whoever was willing to carry a rifle and hold a horse. The United States and Mexico were drifting into open war, though word of a formal declaration had not yet reached the coast, so the men doing the seizing were acting on their own authority and on Frémont's, which for the moment amounted to the same thing.

What that produced on the ground was a war without a front. Men were stopped on roads, horses were taken from ranchos, and captives were held or turned loose on the judgment of whoever had taken them. A great deal came down to the temper of one officer on one afternoon, because command in the district had thinned to a few men on horseback and the record that would later judge them had not been written yet. San Rafael happened inside that arrangement.

Three men on a boat

The three had come ashore from a small boat near San Rafael. The de Haro brothers were young, barely twenty. Berreyesa, their uncle, was an older man, a Californio of standing, traveling to see his family. None of them was armed in any way the situation required. By the account that has come down through Jasper O'Farrell, who said he was present, Kit Carson rode up to Frémont for instruction: should the men be taken prisoner? Frémont, by that account, waved his hand and answered that he had no room for prisoners. The three were shot where they stood.

The exact words have come to us in more than one form, whether "I have no use for prisoners" or "I have got no room for prisoners," and some details of the day are argued over still. What is not in serious doubt is the shape of it: three unarmed men, a question asked aloud, an answer given aloud, and a killing that followed as if it were a routine order rather than a decision anyone would have to carry.

The word of one man

The account turns on a small exchange, and the smallness is the point. Carson was the expedition's scout, the man Frémont sent ahead to see and to act, and by O'Farrell's telling he carried the question back to his commander rather than settling it himself. He rode up and asked whether the three should be taken prisoner. That is the ordinary shape of an order. One man brings the question to the man with the authority, and the authority answers in a sentence. Frémont raised no hand against anyone himself. He had only to decline to make room.

It is worth being plain about what that answer settled. To say there was no room for prisoners was to choose killing over the small trouble of guarding and feeding three captured men. Nothing in the moment forced the choice. Three unarmed men climbing out of a small boat put the column in no danger, and taking them in would have cost it an afternoon. The killing was a convenience, and it was spoken as one.

Why it does not soften

Most of the conquest's violence reached the archive already translated. A massacre became "an engagement." Burned villages became "enemy dead." A raid became "protection of the road." San Rafael resists that laundering because there was no cover story available and no one who needed one. It was done in daylight, in front of witnesses, on a plain reply. The record could file it, but it could not make it into anything other than what it was.

For Californio and Mexican-American families, San Rafael has never been a footnote. The de Haros and the Berreyesas were real people with descendants who carry the memory, and José Berreyesa's family would go on losing land and men in the years that followed. To tell this story honestly is to tell it from the side of the people on that boat rather than from the saddle of the man who waved his hand.

A few flat lines

Killings like this one tend to reach us thin. The men who ran the conquest wrote the first accounts of it, and they wrote briefly, in the tone of officers noting the weather. What happened at San Rafael came down to a few flat sentences on the victorious side, the kind of lines a reader passes over without slowing down. The event was recorded and then left alone.

That thinness is why so much of what we can say rests on O'Farrell, who put his name to an account of being present. Without a witness willing to describe the exchange in the open, the killing would survive only as a phrase or two, three names and a boat and no question asked of anyone. The gap between what a witness remembered and what the report chose to keep is itself part of the history, and it is a gap the novel walks straight into.

The witness on the shore

In The Renegade Enos, the packer Enos is near enough to San Rafael to understand something he had been avoiding: that there was never a secret to how the conquest was done, only a method. The order was asked for out loud and granted out loud, the way a foreman grants anything, and the only thing left to the record afterward was to decide how the sentence would read. That is the whole engine of the book, a conquest fought in the field and then finished on the page, with a man who held the horses watching the distance between the two.

Enos spends the book close to that second place, the page, because a packer is always near the paper without ever holding the pen. He hears the sentence spoken and later sees how little of it the report keeps. For a man in his position the crime scene has two locations. One is the shore at San Rafael. The other is the flat line that will stand in for the shore once everyone who was there has ridden on. An order given without room for prisoners becomes an order given without room in the record, and the book sits in the space between the two and refuses to let it close.

The Renegade Enos: Witness to the American West is a novel by H.L. Delaney, forthcoming from Basalt Sea Press. More documented history sits behind the book on The History Behind the Novel. Get launch news →