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.

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 — "I have no use for prisoners," "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.

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.

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 not whispered. It 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.

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 →