University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Ahistoricism and the literature of California, 1510-1846

(USC Thesis Other)

Ahistoricism and the literature of California, 1510-1846

PDF

Download

Open document

Flip pages

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content AHISTORICISM AND THE LITERATURE OF CALIFORNIA, 1510-1846
by
Brett Garcia Myhren
______________________________________________________________
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)
May 2011
Copyright 2011 Brett Garcia Myhren
ii
Dedication
For my parents
who have made this possible
iii
Acknowledgements
These kinds of endeavors are never the work of a single individual. I’d like to
thank my committee members, who have guided me for many years, and did so while
acting as models of collegial scholars. My dissertation chair, John Carlos Rowe, not only
read all of these pages, but hundreds of emails as well. Along the way, he set new
records for speed of response and depth of insight. Bill Handley was an early and
enthusiastic supporter of my work on the western side of the continent, and he offered
crucial advice in situating my argument within that framework. I have been very
fortunate to have Bill Deverell’s perspective from the History department; his wisdom
and encouragement have been instrumental in guiding this project from day one. All of
them have made this project better. I only hope that I can repay the debt someday.
I also want to thank the department of English, which offered me a fellowship
year to study for my qualifying exams and to shape the project in its early stages. The
Marta Feuchtwanger Merit Fellowship allowed me a crucial year of uninterrupted writing
time before graduation. A Del Amo Foundation award allowed me to travel to Spain for
a month of archival research in Seville. In addition, a summer fellowship at the
Huntington Library helped me to situate my research on California within conversations
about the West. Finally, I cannot overstate the value of having Flora Ruiz guiding me
through the often confusing bureaucratic pathways of the university.
An informal reading group at USC offered many helpful comments on the
manuscript in its early stages. Casey Shoop, Jessica Bremmer, Jonathan Hamrick, and
iv
Mike Cucher graciously read material that was far from polished. Steve Park, a reading
group of one (but with the stamina of ten), read this dissertation from start to finish and
back again. I owe him an enormous debt (and about two dozen beers) for all the pages
and emails that he endured. This project is much better because of his generosity and
insight.
Finally, my family has been incredibly supportive and understanding throughout
this long process. I can imagine that my sisters, Stacey and Lindsey, will be just as
thrilled as I am that I have finally put this behind me. My parents, who have been
generous and kind to a fault, cannot be thanked enough, nor will there ever be time
enough to repay my debt to them. Without them, none of this would have been possible.
Lastly, Nadine and Matías, who have likely endured more than anyone in this long
journey, will finally be able to cross the apartment without tripping over a pile of books.
Without them, I never would have survived. Te quiero mucho.
v
Table of Contents
Dedication ii
Acknowledgements iii
Abstract vi
Introduction: Ideas in/and California 1
Introduction Endnotes 29
Chapter One: Those Accursed Books: Imagination and California,
1510-1785 34
Chapter One Endnotes 92
Chapter Two: Consider the Ravens: Indolence and Industry, 1785-1815 104
Chapter Two Endnotes 154
Chapter Three: The Distant Land of Strangers and Enemies, 1815-1835 166
Chapter Three Endnotes 239
Chapter Four: Histories of Ahistorical Places, 1835-1840 254
Chapter Four Endnotes 320
Chapter Five: Imperial Rescue, 1841-1846 332
Chapter Five Endnotes 412
Conclusion: Twenty-Four Years After, and One Hundred Years Later 426
Conclusion Endnotes 455
Bibliography 459
vi
Abstract
More than most regions, California generates epithets: lotus land, the cultural
desert, or the big nowhere. Perhaps most frequently, California is characterized as a
strange, insular place where, in Joan Didion’s words, “no one remembers the past.” Yet,
this notion of an ahistorical California has, ironically, a long tradition extending back at
least to the sixteenth century. In fact, the inhabitants of Didion’s late twentieth-century
landscape share elements in common with the women of Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo’s
California, the early sixteenth-century “island” that he claimed was so culturally isolated
it “buried alive” those who chose to remain there.
In this dissertation, I explore the perception of California as a place without a
past, but, instead of refuting ahistoricism itself, I consider why the idea is ubiquitous and
trace its genealogy through pre-statehood texts. Scholarship on the literature of
California typically begins with the Gold Rush or westward migration and focuses on
developments after 1850. According to convention, narratives prior to this period are
designated as history, not literature. Yet, many texts written about California prior to the
Gold Rush profoundly influenced the canonical literature of the nineteenth century as
well as the twentieth.
To demonstrate the long textual legacy of California and the importance of its
alleged ahistoricism, I organize the project chronologically around a poly-lingual and
multi-cultural group of texts, focusing on an evolving core of imagery. Ranging from
Early Modern romances and Enlightenment travel narratives to Native American histories
vii
and trappers’ diaries, these texts reveal a self-conscious literary tradition that remains
central to visions of California. Reading these texts within a cultural history of Pacific
exploration and colonialism, I argue that writers shaped an image of California suited to
their imperial goals. Furthermore, these imperial visions were incorporated into later
texts, which further calcified ahistorical narratives. Despite these compounding tropes,
California was imagined by an array of contesting voices, from a Native woman engaged
in a mission revolt to a governor’s wife embroiled in a marital dispute, from a prominent
poet of German Romanticism to a virtually unknown mission Indian. This literature
contradicts conventional ideas about California and illuminates cultural relations between
the Pacific, the nascent United States, and Europe in the years before 1850.
Chapters One and Two connect the Early Modern exploration narratives to
Enlightenment reassessments of the same locations, highlighting the influence of money
and fantasy in figurations of California as well as political entanglements. Beginning
with the first known use of “California” in Garcí Rodríguez de Montalvo’s Las Sergas de
Esplandián (c1510), these chapters look back to cultural narratives about paradise,
gender, and race that influence the Early Modern invention of California and connect
Montalvo’s imaginary island to the writings of Columbus and Cortés as well as Don
Quixote and Medieval travel discourse. Polarizing descriptions of California—as a
vulnerable paradise or an empty wasteland—created an exotic region, a place beyond the
bounds of quotidian life. Following this emergent imagery through a series of sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century texts, including Drake, Coronado, and Vizcaíno, I link these
viii
early visions of California as a remote paradise to diaries produced by the Spanish during
colonization in 1769.
Chapter Two opens with the arrival of La Pérouse at Monterey in 1786 and
situates his description of California in a tradition of Enlightenment publications that
began with Cook and dominated dialogue about the Pacific for years to come. Many of
these scientific expeditions became floating literary laboratories, producing multiple texts
from a single voyage, publications that fed an audience hungry for news of the exotic.
Despite claims about rational, detached observation, writers like Vancouver fixated on
Spanish or Native indolence and squandered profit, inadvertently revealing the racial,
economic, and political forces shaping their observations and furthering images of
California as a mythical lotus land.
The second half of the dissertation, covering the years between Mexican
independence and the Mexican-American War, shows how the influence of Romanticism
and the rhetoric of liberty changed very little about reactions to California. Opening in
the early nineteenth century with the narrative of Chamisso, the German romantic poet,
this chapter proceeds through the beginning of the land-based fur trade and the increasing
number of narratives from the United States. Fur trappers, much like their ocean-based
counterparts, continued to envision California as a contradictory place, both debased and
alluring, in need of containment and rescue. Whether they saw it as beautiful or awful,
visiting writers agreed that California needed to start over and perpetually imagined it as
a place of future potential with a trivial past. However, as Pablo Tac demonstrates in the
ix
only known account written by a California mission Indian, other long-time residents
contested these visions and complicated the conversation.
Finally, in Chapters Four and Five, I consider the period leading up to the
Mexican-American War, a cultural moment marked by increasingly vociferous imperial
claims. Because of its strategic importance to Russian, English, US, and French imperial
goals, writers continued to imagine California in polarizing terms, creating narratives
which, not surprisingly, advocated imperial intervention by their own governments. I
argue that this rhetoric, under the guise of liberation, neutralized and romanticized
California’s past in order to promote a future under foreign rule. Well-known literary
figures, from Washington Irving to Richard Henry Dana, contributed to this convention,
ossifying long-standing tropes and foreshadowing the war with Mexico.
The project surveys texts written in a number of languages, including French,
German, Russian, and Spanish, reflecting the enormous variety of people who shaped the
image of California long before the Gold Rush. Whether travel narratives, histories,
diaries, or letters, the early literature of California contradicts assumptions about its
abbreviated past. In fact, these texts demonstrate a literary tradition that later writers
borrowed for their invocations of an ahistorical place. Ironically, current images of
California as future-directed, culturally shallow, or artificial not only depend on prior
representations, but also on the obfuscation of this literary genealogy, a legacy that is
essential to understanding California’s literature as well as the literature of the Americas,
in which it plays a crucial part.
1
Introduction: Ideas in/and California
It’s another beautiful day in paradise and I’m out on the ocean, riding
waves with a former national surfing champion and onetime prostitute
who’s about to join a seminary. Go ahead, try to name one other state
where I could have written that sentence.
--Steve Lopez, Los Angeles Times, 2009
The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one
remembers the past. […] Here is the last stop for all those who come
from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the
past and the old ways.
--Joan Didion, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” 1961
Now I wish you to know about the strangest thing ever found anywhere in
the written texts or in human memory. […] I tell you that on the right-
hand side of the Indies there was an island called California, which was
very close to the region of the Earthly Paradise.
-- Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo, Las Sergas de Esplandián, 1510
Whether or not he is aware of it, Steve Lopez, a regular columnist at the Los
Angeles Times, characterizes twenty-first century California in a way that resonates with
its sixteenth-century invention. For Lopez, the collision of bizarre details, like a surfing
ex-prostitute with religious aspirations, epitomize California and distinguish it from other
places. Lopez finds this characterization apt and guesses that his readers will feel the
same way. In this regard, he is probably correct. Lopez can assume that virtually all of
his readers will recognize California as a the epitome of the strange because he borrows
from a tradition roughly five hundred years old.
These kinds of quotes, about California as the world’s repository for the bizarre,
are legion. On almost any day of the week, quotes like this can be found in a prominent
publication. In fact, these quips are so common that they have entered the realm of the
2
proverbial, reaching from daily newspapers to daily conversation, from politics and
sports to the canons of literature and art. For twenty-first century readers, these tropes
may sound somewhat banal, even self-evident. However, a long history lies beneath this
image of California, and it merits a closer examination.
Like many ideas in California, the notion of California’s strangeness leads back to
questions of its history. History (or the lack of it) is one of the most frequently recurring
themes in writing about the region. As a way to see how this process functions, it helps
to consider, briefly, a specific example. In 1961, Joan Didion published what is arguably
her most famous book, a collection of essays entitled, Slouching Toward Bethlehem.
Many of the essays in the book deal directly with California, especially those from the
first section, “Life Styles in the Golden Land.” Like Lopez, Didion depicts a place with
bizarre characters and situations, though the tone of Didion’s prose leans in a more
sinister direction. Furthermore, Didion gleans more than mere strangeness from details,
suggesting that these heaped incongruities mean something about California and its
relationship with the past.
Consider, for example, a quote from Didion’s first essay, “Some Dreamers of the
Golden Dream.” In a narrative ostensibly about a murder in San Bernardino, Didion
repeatedly returns to the notion of history and the relationship that the people of
California have with it. Throughout the essay, there is a sense of a culture unmoored and
adrift in a place that defies or confounds tradition, a notion implied by the epigraph about
a place where “no one remembers the past,” where people have “drifted away from the
cold and the past and the old ways.” When she returns to the street where a woman
3
apparently drugged her husband, soaked him in gasoline, and burned him alive in their
Volkswagen, Didion uses the geography to convey her unease.
Like so much of this country, Banyan [Street] suggests something curious
and unnatural. The lemon groves are … too lush, unsettlingly glossy, the
greenery of nightmare. […] The stones look not like natural stones but
like the rubble of some unmentioned upheaval.
1
This geography for Didion signifies something more than mere strangeness. It not only
situates her (and the reader) in a specific place, but also allows for the subtle accretion of
psychological points of reference. Perhaps most importantly, it places her in a world in
which details of landscape convey emotional meaning. In context with the story of the
murder, the surrounding environment tells her something about the underlying psyche of
that place, even if she hasn’t decided exactly what it says.
Those messages become clearer as the essay unfolds. Consider a later quote, in
which Didion ostensibly describes the weather on a winter day.
January 11, 1965, was a bright warm day in Southern California, the kind
of day when Catalina floats on the Pacific horizon and the air smells of
orange blossoms and it is a long way from the bleak and difficult East, a
long way from the cold, a long way from the past.
2
Though she describes California, two places are actually in conversation here, “Southern
California” and the “East,” joined in a mutually informative relationship. Neither place
exists independently; each depends in part on the other to convey its own meaning. In
other words, the meaning of “Southern California” in this description depends in part on
“the bleak and difficult East.” Its meaning is created not only via detailed descriptions of
what it is, but also via an understanding of what it is not. In this case, California is not
the East, but a place located “a long way from” it. While this geographical assertion may
4
seem obvious, it actually signals an important ideological distance between the two
locations, a distinction that requires careful examination.
Didion moves from relatively banal details about weather and time, through more
specific details about sight and smell, before she abruptly leaps into a declarative
statement about history. It is quite a journey that she takes, geographically and
otherwise, from the “bright warm day” to that place located “a long way from the past,”
in a single sentence. Along the way, she creates points of reference, points both physical
and temporal, and blends them so that location in a place seems to exist alongside
location in time. Said another way, one’s location in a certain place also alters one’s
relationship to the passage of time. As Didion writes at the end of the essay, “[T]ime past
is not believed to have any bearing upon time present or future, out in the golden land
where every day the world is born anew.”
3
In a sense, she creates a kind of map in this
essay, a map that blurs ideology with geography.
The ways that geography, history, and culture combine in Didion’s essay,
however, are not accidental, nor are they original. Like Lopez and Didion, Garci
Rodríguez de Montalvo, who described California roughly five centuries previously,
focuses on the strangeness of the place. He imagines it as a confused mixture of paradise
and perdition, a refuge and a threat. Perhaps most interesting, he also imagines
California as a place cut off from the rest of the world, an island so culturally isolated that
it “buried alive” those who chose to remain there.
4
Keeping in mind the twentieth and twenty-first century context, this dissertation
explores the perception of California as an insular and unusual place, and especially as a
5
place without a past, a perspective I am calling ahistoricism. At its most fundamental,
ahistoricism, as used in this dissertation, refers to the practice of imagining peoples,
places, cultures as existing outside the conventional boundaries of time and, as such,
severed from the past, tradition, or normative narratives. This perspective has many
variations and can assume many guises. (In fact, one of the goals of the dissertation is to
demonstrate the protean nature of this rhetoric.) Narratives appropriating this
perspective, for example, might focus on the future to the exclusion of the past.
Gernonimo Boscana, a priest in Alta California, said that the Natives at the mission San
Juan Capistrano “have no tradition, and are entirely ignorant of their descent.”
5
In a
discussion of their calendar, he adds that, “possessing no idea of the past, their thoughts
were limited solely to the present.”
6
In other instances, these narratives might depict a
place as existing in a static dream-state, a place where time does not pass and progress is
arrested. Alexander Forbes, an English historian, imagines the California Natives
“basking, in dreamy inactivity, on the banks of their rivers, or on the shores of the ocean”
before the Spanish arrived.
7
At other times, the very possibility of history itself in
California is questioned. Robert Greenhow, a historian working for the US government
wondered, at the beginning of his own history of the region, “if it be allowable to speak
of the history of a country which still remains almost entirely in a state of nature.”
8
Because I track ahistoricism over a long period of time and through a variety of
permutations, I keep the definition of the term open-ended and flexible. This kind of
approach allows for a fuller consideration and examination of the narratives themselves,
while also allowing for changes in the cultural context over the period of the study. I am
6
aware that I am, in a sense, compiling a history of ahistoricism, but I do not see this as a
contradiction in terms. As the above quote from Greenhow demonstrates, even (and
sometimes especially) in texts written by people who considered themselves historians or
who thought they were writing history, the idea of ahistoricism influences descriptions of
California. On the other hand, this dissertation is not a history of California. Though I
often use scholarship from that discipline, this dissertation is instead a historically-
grounded examination of a group of ideas fundamental to California’s image in literature.
Finally, though California is not, of course, a “new” place, this project does not attempt
to demonstrate the existence of its historical record, an endeavor which seems, at this
point, unnecessary. Therefore, I am not interested in challenging whether or not
California has a history, but in exploring why ahistoricism is ubiquitous and tracing its
genealogy through texts published before 1846. Revisiting that complex legacy has
important ramifications, not just for literature, but history, geography, American studies,
and other disciplines—and not just in California.
Instead of refuting ahistoricism itself, I consider why the idea is ubiquitous and
trace its genealogy through pre-statehood texts. Because scholarship on the literature of
California typically begins with the Gold Rush or westward migration and focuses on
developments after 1850, an opportunity exists for exploring the themes of earlier texts.
9
According to convention, narratives prior to this period fall within the discipline of
history, not literature.
10
Yet, many texts written about California prior to the Gold Rush
profoundly influenced the canonical literature of the nineteenth century as well as the
twentieth.
7
To demonstrate the long textual legacy of California and the importance of its
alleged ahistoricism, I organize the project chronologically around a poly-lingual and
multi-cultural group of texts, focusing on an evolving core of imagery. Ranging from
Early Modern romances and Enlightenment travel narratives to Native American histories
and trappers’ diaries, these texts reveal a self-conscious literary tradition that remains
central to visions of California. Reading these texts within a cultural history of Pacific
exploration and colonialism, I argue that writers from various backgrounds shaped an
image of California suited to their particular imperial goals. Furthermore, due to
traditions of authority and a dearth of reliable information, these imperial visions were
incorporated into later texts, which further calcified ahistorical narratives. Despite these
compounding tropes, California was imagined by an array of contesting voices, from a
Native woman engaged in a mission revolt to a governor’s wife embroiled in a marital
dispute, from a prominent poet of German Romanticism to a virtually unknown mission
Indian. This literature contradicts conventional ideas about California and illuminates
cultural relations between the Pacific, the nascent United States, and Europe in the years
before 1846.
“California,” in this context and over such a long period of time, is a necessarily
indefinite location. In the earliest application of the term and throughout the Spanish
colonial period, the boundaries for California were vaguely drawn, especially on the
northern and eastern borders. While the vagueness of its boundaries was in part a
reflection of a limited geographical knowledge, it was also a deliberate political strategy
that allowed the Spanish government to claim more territory in the face of encroaching
8
British or Russian activity in the Pacific northwest. Of course, the daily reality often
contradicted this political fantasy, especially on the eastern edges of Spanish settlement,
where native tribes controlled the mountains and deserts.
11
In addition to the haziness of
the boundaries, there were shifting designations within the region. Lower or “Antigua”
California, for example, came into existence as a jurisdiction after colonization efforts in
Upper or “Nueva” California. These political distinctions also had cultural ramifications,
affecting the way observers understood and imagined both places.
12
In very general terms, this dissertation begins at the tip of the peninsula and
concludes in what is today the US state of California, with occasional diversions back to
the peninsula. This outline is in part dictated by the literature itself, which tends to focus
on the peninsula in the earliest exploration and moves toward the mainland portion of the
region later. This movement was also influenced by a gradual recognition, despite
romantic descriptions, of the difficulties associated with settlement on the peninsula, one
of the driest regions in North America, a place with mountainous terrain and few
transverse passageways for communications or commerce. Thus, later foreign activity
(and writing) tends to focus on the areas north of the peninsula, as does the movement of
the narratives I track.
It is important to understand this territorial flexibility not only for historical
context, but also to emphasize the way places like California are invented and the
unstable nature of these inventions in a world of competing cultural forces. Too often we
assume that the current formulation or conception of a place is the same as the original,
and that its existence represents an inevitable outcome rather than years of cultural
9
collisions. One of the benefits of reckoning with, rather than ignoring, this dynamic
process is the information revealed about those involved in the act of invention. The
invention of this particular place (California), and its subsequent appropriation by various
groups, tells us as much about what people wanted to find, as it tells us what they actually
found.
Along with calling attention to the early literature, I hope to contribute to a
broader scholarly conversation about California’s place in western North America.
While admitting that a definition for “the West” has been an ongoing struggle in
scholarship and that California has always been part of this dialogue, it’s fair to say that
California’s position in this region remains uncertain.
13
For as long as writers have been
trying to understand California, they have been trying to grapple with its supposed
strangeness, its difference from the west. Theodore Roosevelt’s famous comment
captures some of this sentiment: “When I am in California, I am not in the West, I am
west of the West.”
14
Though all places are ultimately unique, this tendency to view California as an
exception can be limiting, as it obscures many of the fundamental cultural patterns that
connect California to other parts of the globe. In this regard, there are benefits to looking
at the early literature of the region, one of which is that the texts, before distinct regional
divisions solidified, suggest more commonality with (than difference from) the
surrounding areas. In fact, it is fascinating to note the similarity of tropes that circulated
about areas that today would be considered very different (such as southern California,
Alaska, Tahiti, and northern Mexico). However, I don’t intend merely to reinsert
10
California back into a unified version of western North America, nor to flatten
distinctions between California and other places, but instead to add nuance to the current
conversation about how very disparate places fit into larger cultural patterns.
15
Along these same lines, I hope to interest scholars from disciplines related to
studies of the Pacific. Of all the areas for scholarly connections with early California, the
Pacific is the one that is potentially the most productive.
16
Admittedly, discussing the
Pacific alongside California is hardly a new endeavor. Discussions of a “Pacific century”
are at least a century old, and California’s critical role in the Pacific was understood as
far back as the period of the Manila galleons, when administrators were looking for a safe
place to supply their ships and escape pirates. On the other hand, as with treatments of
“western” literature in North American universities, California often seems to fall
between clusters of scholarship. For scholars of the Pacific, who typically focus on the
islands, Australia, New Zealand, China, or Japan, California is part of “American”
narratives. For scholars of American literature, “America” stops at the west coast,
excluding productive connections with Hawaii, Tahiti, Australia, China, Mexico, and
Alaska. All of these places, especially those in the south Pacific, influenced the
burgeoning image of California; all of these places were part of a circuit of text and trade,
in which California appeared as one element in a coalescing idea of the Pacific.
Furthermore, as with early narratives of western North America, reading
California in context offers insight into questions about the source and persistence of
many images. California frequently appeared in around-the-world voyages that also
described China, Alaska, and the Hawaiian islands. Seeing these places, often considered
11
separately, in a broader cultural context reasserts their imaginative proximity and recalls
the ways they were forged in relation to one another. Indeed, this context goes a long
way toward demystifying California. What emerges in these texts, rather than California
as an exceptional place, is California connected to a much larger economic and cultural
fabric, one part of a complex global narrative. Seen in this regard, California, instead of
an odd outlier in traditional divisions of scholarship, might become a bridge between
materials that don’t often intersect. Glendwr Williams’s work on the Pacific trade and
exploration might suggest fruitful connections with David Weber’s work on Spanish
North America and Franklin Walker’s work on literary southern California.
Because I seek to track the development of these images, the argument of the
dissertation proceeds both chronologically and cumulatively, based in part on evidence
that writers were reading and incorporating prior texts on California as they composed
their own. For some writers, reading prior texts was the only way to create their versions
of California, other than wholesale invention of material, which they also practiced.
Especially in the years before James Cook, when long-distance sailing became easier and
more widespread, writers often could not visit the places they described. Instead of
letting this hinder their ability to publish, they simply read and incorporated what others
had written and imagined what remained.
Even writers who did travel to California weren’t necessarily free from the
influence of their predecessors. In the years before doctrines about objective observation
became prevalent, writers sought to incorporate reputable works to demonstrate their
familiarity with extant sources and buttress their own authority. Well into the nineteenth
12
century, they often relied on the observations of prior authors. Though later writers may
not have incorporated whole passages into their narratives, they very often repeated
popular themes. There is concrete evidence of both of these practices in the texts
themselves, moments where writers list prior books they have read and even instances
where they copy the passages of other writers directly into their work, with and without
attribution. Other times, the connections aren’t so direct or deliberate, but there are
nevertheless recurring images and ideas that, if not passed directly from one writer to
another, were circulating at the time of composition.
Careful attention to the cumulative development of imagery also required careful
attention to the order of composition. While I acknowledge that determining precisely
whether or not one writer was aware of or influenced by another text leads to a quagmire
of questions (especially for the older texts under consideration), I do think that there is an
enormous difference between a narrative about, for instance, the California missions
written in 1792 and one written in 1895. To say these narratives are different is not to
claim that one is more accurate than the other, but merely recognizes that writers at
different temporal distances from their subject have different influences and resources
available, both of which impact the composition of that text. In an effort to track the
evolution of images, I have sought to group together texts that were truly coeval.
17
My goal of tracking and understanding a shared image or idea suggested a
primary focus on published works. Not only did focusing on published materials offer
concrete dates for dissemination of ideas, but it also has the added benefit of countering
assumptions about a dearth of available literature before the Gold Rush. Focusing on
13
published materials did, however, have disadvantages. Primarily, it meant that certain
writers and cultures monopolized the conversation. Publication during this period, as it
remains to some degree today, signaled that one had access to resources and power, not
necessarily that one had something interesting or intelligent to say. Furthermore, those
with resources and power often had a similar message; or, put another way, their
overlapping profiles often meant that they had similar goals and that their writing
exhibited recurring themes. These themes reflect not only what they encountered in
California, but the world-views that they brought to the texts they created, including the
ideologies of their cultures and sponsoring institutions. This conversation, though at
times one-sided, shaped many of the most enduring images of California. For this reason
alone, it is important to examine it with care, even if that means with the skeptical eye of
readers having the benefit of hundreds of years of hindsight. Finally, while this group of
writers often echoed an imperialist conversation, it also exhibited the contradictions,
differences, and variations that mark human endeavors.
Given the difficulties in finding texts outside of the tradition here described, I
made some exceptions to my focus on published texts. First of all, texts might be
composed during the period under examination but never published or published much
later. If I could determine roughly when they had been composed, I included them with
contemporaneous published materials, especially if they provided a contrast to the
prevailing themes. This method allowed me to include other interesting materials while
continuing to track chronologically the development of various ideas. For example,
Pablo Tac’s text, the first extant narrative by a mission Indian, was composed in the early
14
nineteenth century, though only uncovered in the twentieth. The description of California
by José Bandini, an early representative of Californio culture, also was composed during
the same period, but not published until long after his death. The legal battles of Eulalia
Callis were summarized and buried in an archive for decades. Though this project looks
critically at texts that emerge from centers of imperial power, that point of view does not
eliminate the problem of reproducing the same imbalances of power when discussing
them. Including unpublished materials provided an outlet for voices that had been
excluded from conversations in the past. Considering these narratives also gives variety
and context to a project that primarily seeks to understand and uncover the sources for the
most common descriptions of early California.
These distinctions become important when choosing which primary sources to
discuss in the dissertation. Because texts written about California before the Gold Rush,
and especially before the Mexican-American War, are typically the least discussed
(Richard Henry Dana and John Charles Frémont being two exceptions), these texts (and
scholarship about them) are also the most difficult to find. I felt, however, that it was
important to focus on this relatively under-examined body of early literature. This has
meant leaving out some later texts that I would have liked to include, especially because
those materials at times offer contrasting views to a period narrated predominately by
European and Euro-American writers.
18
On the other hand, I was able to locate other,
relatively unknown materials written before 1846, by Native Americans, Californios, and
women. I have by no means exhausted this archive, and I hope that scholars will
continue their efforts to uncover more of this early material. Furthermore, in the
15
conclusion I discuss the broader trends in literature that shape the period after 1846, with
attention to some of the post-war materials.
One reason I focused on the early texts was that texts written after the Mexican-
American War are more widely available and more likely to be discussed by other
scholars, while texts written before the war are not. One of the implicit arguments of the
dissertation is that “California literature” (if such a field can be said to exist) ought to
include materials from much earlier on the historical timeline. Furthermore, the scholarly
discussion of this literature should incorporate early texts with a greater understanding of
their influence on later texts. Much of the imagery used to characterize California in the
twentieth century and later comes from books that were written long before the Gold
Rush and Mexican-American War. However, if I stress here that California as a concept
did not begin in 1849 or 1846, I must also emphasize that it did not begin in 1769, with
Franciscan colonization in what became known as Alta California. The nationalist
residue that lingers in scholarship often means that the boundaries of the contemporary
state of California dictate which parts of the region are most often studied, a legacy that
limits the understanding of California in any of its iterations.
19
This is not to say that the texts under discussion here have never been part of the
scholarly conversation. Many of them have been known for years, decades, even
centuries. The source material for the name “California,” for instance, has been
circulating in scholarship since Edward Everett Hale read Las Sergas de Esplandián in
1862 and published his findings an article in the Atlantic Monthly in 1864.
20
Other books,
such as Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, have long been part of the discussion of
16
literature and California. Furthermore, recent anthologies, such as Lands of Promise and
Despair: Chronicles of Early California, 1535-1846; Testimonios: Early California
through the Eyes of Women, 1815-1848; and A World Transformed: California Before
the Gold Rush, have helped to advance the notion of an extant body of literature before
1849.
21
Unfortunately, anthologies of literature on California often include a fraction of
the available materials. The Literature of California, for example, includes twelve entries
for the years between 1510 and 1846, one of which (by Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo)
actually comes from a narrative written in the late nineteenth century. One might assume
that not enough texts were written during this early period to justify further attention, but
in fact more than one hundred narratives that discuss California were published before
1840.
22
Of course, the editors of these anthologies were operating under constraints of
space and had to cover a much longer period than this dissertation. My intention here is
not to fault them for exclusion, but merely to demonstrate that the problem with early
California is not a dearth of materials. The reasons for lack of attention likely come from
other areas.
The aforementioned anthology, Lands of Promise and Despair: Chronicles of
Early California, 1535-1846, edited by Rose Marie Beebe and Robert Senkewicz,
suggests one of the likely sources of friction. Beebe and Senkewicz, whose volume
remains one of the few collections to treat exclusively the era before the Mexican-
American War, are professors of Spanish and history, and their anthology suggests how
some of these early narratives are perceived: as historical evidence or perhaps Spanish-
language literature, but not “American” literature. This is not an attack on Beebe and
17
Senkewicz, who ought to be commended for bringing valuable texts to a broader
audience, in this and other projects. Nor is this an attack on historians or those who study
Spanish-language materials; these narratives can and should be tremendously helpful to
anyone trying to understand the history of California. However, scholars of American
literature are too often content to consider these texts “outside” of their field.
It’s possible that literary scholars assume these early texts are too crude or dry for
literary analysis. However, the texts written before the Mexican-American War
(especially the scientific narratives) display many of the tools of so-called conventional
literature. George Vancouver’s narrative of his voyage around the world, for example,
frequently alludes other literary texts, including the Bible, and often gracefully
incorporates vignettes and sketches into his recitation of daily events. Another early
writer, Adlebert von Chamisso, was a famous German romantic who socialized with
Madame de Staël and whose narrative is as elegant as any contemporary writer of prose.
Even the compilers of government reports, like Robert Greenhow, quoted from Coleridge
in their texts. Thus, if scholars are concerned about establishing a literary pedigree, this
early literature will withstand scrutiny.
Furthermore these early texts deeply influenced later books that scholars have
long been comfortable calling “literature,” and for this reason, if no other, they warrant a
closer examination. When scholars write about California literature and its genealogy,
they typically go back to Dana, but rarely any further. Careful readers will acknowledge
the sixteenth-century origins of the name California, but little effort is made to draw the
lines from the sixteenth century up to the nineteenth.
23
Even cultural historians usually
18
begin with Dana or the US narratives of trade and exploration.
24
The fact is that writers
like Dana and Fremont, often considered forerunners to California literature, had
antecedents. Even if Dana and Fremont had not read these antecedents themselves, those
earlier books influenced circulating ideas about California, ideas that later writers often
absorbed unconsciously if not deliberately.
Finally, if scholars are willing to read John Smith, William Bradford, or John
Hector St. John de Crévecoeur as literature, texts in which a historical dimension
predominates, then they ought to be willing to do the same for Pedro Fages, Pablo Tac, or
George Vancouver. As previously noted, there already exists in Spanish-language
literature and criticism the practice of reading certain early texts as both history and
literature. To acknowledge the historical value of these texts should not simultaneously
diminish their literary value or influence. In fact, it is quite possible that a work initially
conceived as history or reconnaissance, such as Vancouver’s Voyage of Discovery or
Fremont’s Report of the Exploring Expedition, did as much (or more) to influence the
tenor of literature on California as did the fiction of Bret Harte.
25
For instance, Joaquin
Miller, himself a prodigious producer of California images, wrote about how he was
deeply affected by the reading of Fremont’s Report as a boy, a text one might initially
assume only appealed to government officials.
26
Thus, one of the other implicit
arguments of the dissertation is that scholars ought to expand their definition of
“literature” in California to include not only earlier books, but books of various genres,
not just the ones typically found in literary criticism, like fiction or poetry, but histories,
19
reports, diaries, letters, and other materials that reveal much about the culture in and
around the region.
The point about Spanish-language literature suggests that language should not be
a limiting factor either. Though many of the texts under consideration in this dissertation
were not written in English, this does not make them somehow less vital to understanding
contemporary or historical California. Indeed it makes them more valuable, especially if
one wants to incorporate the many historical iterations of that region. Some people may
remain concerned with tracing an English-language tradition, but the variety of languages
in part reflects the variety of cultures who participated in its imagination. In addition,
this linguistic variety in California reflects a similar variety evident in the history of the
Americas, whether on the eastern or western seaboard.
27
Finally, narratives written in
one language were often translated into other languages, which not only increased the
likelihood of their being read, but also increased their circulation.
Of course, the texts of John Smith or William Bradford come from a region of the
US that has long been seen as the cradle of the “American” literary tradition. While this
conception of literature has been under attack for many years, the residue of this
orientation remains in the discipline, and the difficulty of imagining an “American”
literary tradition as something other than a push from the eastern side of the continent to
western side has proven significant.
28
While there is no need for another discussion about
the limitations of this perspective, it likely has influenced the lack of literary scholarship
on these early texts. Under old paradigms of analysis, California didn’t really have a
literature until those who were most often associated with literary production (such as
20
men from Boston) began to write about it in the mid-nineteenth century. This situation
partly explains why Richard Henry Dana remains a seminal figure in genealogies of
California literature; he had the pedigree to establish a literary link from canonical
American literature to California.
29
Money also plays a role in these fluctuations of
cultural influence. (Indeed, money plays a fundamental role even in early modern
explorations and depictions of California.) Without a doubt, the inclusion of the region
into literary cannons was abruptly advanced by the Gold Rush and the simultaneous
explosion of industrial capital, a process which facilitated statehood in 1850 and the
“birth” of literature on the Pacific coast.
The mere existence of dozens of texts written between 1510 and 1846 suggests
that events did not actually occur according to the outlines of this nationalist narrative.
Not only do these materials contradict the idea of an abbreviated literary history in
California, but they also complicate the clean linear progression implied by popular
mantras like “Westward the course of Empire takes its way.”
30
According to tradition,
texts and writers traveled from comfortable colonial towns in the East to the ragged
fringe of civilization in the West. In reality, many writers traveled between California
and Madrid, London, St. Petersburg, Mexico City, or Honolulu. By the time of the
Mexican-American War in 1846, California already had a very long, and complicated,
literary tradition.
Chapter One, “Those Accursed Books,” treats the earliest sources of published
material about California, following the story from the naming of the imaginary region,
in Garcí Rodríguez de Montalvo’s Las Sergas de Esplandián (c1510), to Spanish
21
narratives from the period of colonization in the late eighteenth century. Given the
enormous amount of time covered, this chapter is not intended to be an exhaustive
survey, but rather an introduction to some of the primary themes. This material,
including Drake, Coronado, and Vizcaíno
31
as well as cultural background from writers
like Miguel de Cervantes, tracks the gestation of the core images of California, especially
the beginning of California as a polarizing place—either a paradise or a wasteland. Both
gender and race influenced the imagination of California from the outset, as writers
sought to invent a place that fulfilled sexual fantasies and broader cultural notions of
exotic places. In a remarkable rehearsal of Don Quixote and the dangerous effect of
romance on the imagination, the narratives of early exploration in California blend fact
with fantasy, creating the places writers wanted to find. Given the difficulties of
extended travel and the dearth of available information before the nineteenth century,
early writers imagined as much as they observed in their descriptions of the coast of
California or the interior of the continent.
The beginning of Spanish colonization in Alta California, in 1769, suggests
another stage in writing about California (both Alta and Baja). Letters, diaries, and
histories of California were written in a period marked by efforts to control the Natives
and the landscape. Writers like Pedro Fages, Juan Crespí, and Pedro Font worked
assiduously to shape the place they encountered into the place they desired. Despite their
physical presence in California, they often repeated many of the themes and images of
their predecessors, even as they created others that would also prove enduring. In
particular, the idea of Alta California as an earthly paradise strengthened alongside
22
serious misgivings about the landscape and culture around it. This process continued to
solidify the symbolic role of California as a site of perdition and paradise.
In Chapter Two, “Consider the Ravens,” I turn to the burgeoning group of
exploratory narratives that appeared at the close of the eighteenth century. These writers
are distinguished from those of the first chapter by the fact that most were not Spanish.
The year 1785, when the French explorer La Pérouse arrived in Monterrey, provides a
practical beginning for this shift in California, though arguably the key figure in the
global shift toward the Pacific is James Cook, whose charts and texts essentially made
later voyages possible. If the majority of writers before 1785 were either Spanish
explorers or colonists, the majority of the writers after 1785 were foreign observers with
increasing interest in control of the region.
The turn toward foreign observation, if generally European, was decidedly varied
in culture and nationality. One of the lesser known facets of California literature is just
how heterogeneous its writers were, including people from half a dozen different
nationalities. In addition to La Pérouse and the background to eighteenth-century
exploration, this chapter considers Nikolai Petovich Rezanov (Russia), Georg Heinrich
von Langsdorff (Germany), Alejandro Malaspina (Spain), George Vancouver (England),
and William Shaler (United States). Furthermore, many of the sailing vessels, in their
hunting missions along the Pacific coast, hired crews of natives, thus incorporating
people from Hawaii, Alaska, and the northern Pacific into their circuits of commerce,
exploration, and publication. These writers of varied cultural backgrounds produced
varied responses to the physical presence and circulating idea of California, though many
23
common themes endured, themes which generally reflected the imperial interest in
gaining control of the area and its resources.
Covering the period 1815-1835, the third chapter, “The Distant Land of Strangers
and Enemies,” documents the collapse of the Spanish empire and the beginning of
overland narratives by writers from the US. The weakening of Spanish control, and the
subsequent Mexican revolution, meant that foreign governments were even more eager to
get a foothold in California and, consequently, increased their presence on the coast.
Continuing one of the ironic narratives from past centuries, in California the perceived
(or magnified) weakness of the society and culture only made the region more attractive
to foreigners. The narratives in the early part of the nineteenth century remained
remarkably diverse in origin, with texts by Adlebert von Chamisso (Germany), Jedediah
Smith and Harrison Rogers (US), José Bandini (Mexico), Auguste Duhaut-Cilly (France),
Frederick William Beechey (England), James Ohio Pattie (US), and Pablo Tac
(Quechnajuichom), who wrote the earliest known account by a California mission Indian.
For the first time, some of the romantic strains of European thought began to
appear in writing about California. Chamisso and especially Duhuat-Cilly saw California
not only as distant from the forces of modernity, but as an escape from them, an escape
that offered certain rewards and punishments. This narrative merged with the ongoing
tendency to view California as either a paradise or wasteland, and induced descriptions of
even greater polarity. Nationalist narratives (and denunciations) also increased during
these years. In particular, as the land trade connected with the sea trade on the Pacific
coast, writers often evaluated California based on its efficiency or supposed lack thereof.
24
US writers in particular began to exhibit a sense of cultural superiority in their
evaluations of those who controlled land that they wanted for themselves.
Chapter Four, “Histories of Ahistorical Places,” documents the enormous increase
in narratives from US writers, an increase that reflected a concomitant shift in US policy
and sentiment regarding California. This process occurred alongside the rise of history as
a profession, especially within a particular nation, a circumstance that influenced the
nationalist tenor of publications. At the same moment that Washington Irving turned his
gaze westward to consolidate his “American” credentials, the US government was
printing copies of its reports on the Pacific coast, reports that assessed the literature,
history, politics, and culture of some of the same areas that Irving would discuss in his
books. Treating the narratives of Irving, Zenas Leonard (US), Alexander Forbes
(England), Robert Greenhow (US), and Richard Henry Dana (US), this chapter traces the
spread of fervor for California among writers of various types.
As writing about California approached mid-century, money and investment
played increasingly prominent roles. Of course, money and the ability to generate more
of it were always part of the story of California, but in prior iterations, those
conversations predominately involved physical investments in (and extractions from)
California itself as a producer of capital, rather than the literature about it. Beginning in
the third decade of the nineteenth century, however, the market for the literature about
California offered opportunities for significant profits. This process has antecedents in
writers like Pattie and Flint (from Chapter Three), but not until Washington Irving was
this market truly exploited.
32
By the time Dana sold his sailing narrative in 1840, the
25
profits for books about the “new” and “strange” parts of the continent were as remarkable
as the places described. Not surprisingly, this rise in literary engagement with the Pacific
coast occurred alongside a rise in governmental engagement with the same regions.
Forbes and Greenhow, both writers with state-sponsored positions, suggest how the US
and England were approaching the topic and the literature from the chambers of state
departments and state institutions.
In Chapter Five, “Imperial Rescue,” the activities of three governments—the
United States, England, and France—converge in a flurry of texts and strategies for
intervention in California. During the years from 1841 to 1846, no less than ten
narratives that included material on California were published in English and French.
Many of these publications were large, lavish productions designed to buttress the
international reputations of the sponsoring government. Others were personal
publications that were no less nationalist in tone. Beginning with French reports from the
military ships patrolling the Pacific and concluding on the eve of the Mexican-American
War, this chapter covers the texts of La Place (France), Rosamel (France), Petit-Thouars
(France), Cleveland (US), Belcher (England), Marryat (England), Greenhow (US),
Farnham (US), Mofras (France), Fremont (US), Wilkes (US), and Robinson (US).
Using one of the techniques of prior narratives, writers in California, whether
acting individually or on behalf of a sponsoring government, sought to emphasize their
benevolent position relative to California. According to these narratives, they were not
seeking to control the region for their own good, but for the good of all parties involved.
They were, in effect, attempting to save California, from other governments, from
26
Mexico, even from itself. These narratives demonstrate the increasing belligerence of
foreign writers, especially those from the US. Indeed, the reaction from the US suggests
the deep roots of nationalist fervor, even among people who resided in and had cultural
connections with California.
The Mexican-American War, officially fought from 1846 to 1848, but with roots
and repercussions extending before and after those dates, occurred after more than three
centuries of struggle for control of the region. The end of the war did not, of course,
signal the end of those struggles. That moment does, however, mark a shear-line, a
moment of change in control, which brought with it other literary and cultural changes in
the place that came to be called the “State of California.” Furthermore, this change in
institutional power occurred just before a tectonic and global realignment of people and
capital, a phenomenon called the Gold Rush.
This cultural shear-line, covering roughly the years from 1846 to 1850, offers an
opportunity to conclude the discussion. By design, this dissertation ends where many
discussions of California start. Though this timeline has long been under attack (arguably
as far back as Josiah Royce), the image of California that often emerges from discussions
of its literature is one of a place exploding into existence and fulfilling its destiny in
1850. Even the state seal, depicting Athena, the goddess who emerged fully formed from
the head of Zeus, and the state motto, Eureka (meaning “I found it”), emphasize this
notion of sudden flowering and discovery, rather than a protracted struggle between
various players with uncertain outcomes.
33
27
If nothing else, the enormous variety and number of texts from the three and a
half centuries before statehood make a case for a complex and nuanced literary history.
Furthermore, while there is a tendency to read the narratives of the Gold Rush as the
point of gestation for later tropes and maxims about California, almost all of ideas that
emerge from this period can be traced back to antecedents from the eighteenth,
seventeenth, and even sixteenth centuries. Even gold had its antecedents, both imagined
and actual. The metal most associated with the explosion of California into global
consciousness was found near the mission San Fernando in Los Angeles in the early
nineteenth century by Sonorans, many years before the Gold Rush.
34
More important for
this discussion, gold prominently appears in the text that literally invented the name
California, Las Sergas de Esplandián, in 1510. It’s no accident that gold in this early
narrative takes its place alongside fantasies of sex, race, and paradise. These narratives
about California began long before statehood, and they will likely continue to circulate in
some form under any governments and regimes to come.
This sense of repetition and circularity highlights one of the paradoxes about
California and attempts to understand it, namely the way that its mythologies seem to
emerge from a specific place while simultaneously operating independently of it. That
paradox is reflected, in part, in the dissertation itself. Thus, on one hand, this is a
dissertation about a place. On the other, it is about an idea. In one sense, the dissertation
is about California, but in another it is also not about California at all. In truth, this
dissertation treats the intersection of ideas and places. It tracks the idea of a place and
what that evolving concept meant from its gestation to the middle of the nineteenth
28
century. Understanding a place that has been so deeply engineered by the imagination,
like California, requires understanding those who sought to invent it. It also requires
going as far back into the history of that idea as possible.
29
Introduction Endnotes

1
Joan Didion, Slouching Toward Bethlehem (New York: Touchstone, 1968), 5.
2
Didion, Slouching, 19.
3
Ibid, 28.
4
Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo, The Labors of the Very Brave Knight Esplandián, trans.
William T Little (Binghamton: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1992), 460.
5
Geronimo Boscana, Chinigchinich: an Historical Account of the Origin, Customs, and
Traditions of the Indians of Alta-California, in Life in California, by Alfred Robinson,
ed. Andrew Rolle (Santa Barbara: Peregrine, 1970), 1.
6
Boscana, Chinigchinich, 47.
7
Alexander Forbes, California: a History of Upper and Lower California from their First
Discovery to the Present Time (London: Smith, Elder and Co, 1839), 233.
8
Robert Greenhow, Memoir, Historical and Political, on the Northwest Coast of North
America, and the Adjacent Territories (Washington: Blair and Rives, 1840), iv. Italics in
original.
9
For examples of this tendency, see David Wyatt, The Fall into Eden: Landscape and
Imagination in California (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986) or Stephen Fender, Plotting
the Golden West: American Literature and the Rhetoric of the California Trail
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981). Likewise, Lawrence Clark Powell, California
Classics: the Creative Literature of the Golden State (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1982)
and Franklin Walker, A Literary History of Southern California (Berkeley: U of
California P, 1950) focus on the mid or late nineteenth century. Anthologies of literature
often reflect this situation, such as California Poetry: from the Gold Rush to the Present,
Dana Gioia, Chryss Yost, Jack Hicks, eds. (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2004); Many
Californias: Literature from the Golden State, Gerald Haslam, ed. (Reno: U of Nevada P,
1999); and West of the West: Imagining California, Leonard Michaels, David Reid,
Raquel Scherr, eds. (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1989). Most of these collections
make an attempt to incorporate the early nineteenth century, but the majority of the texts
come from the twentieth. The Gold Rush itself is one of the most popular literary
subjects in the history of the US, as evidenced by the enormous literary and critical
literature it generated and continues to generate. See, for example, Gold Rush: a Literary
Exploration, Michael Kowalewski, ed. (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1997). Some
anthologies have incorporated older literature, such as California Heritage: an Anthology
of History and Literature, John W. Caughey and LaRee Caughey, eds. (Itasca: Peacock
30

Publishers, 1971); The Literature of California: Writings from the Golden State, Jack
Hicks et al., eds. (Berkeley: U of California P, 2000), and California: a Literary
Chronicle, W. Storrs Lee, ed. (New York: Funk &Wagnalls, 1968), though many
opportunities for expansion remain.
10
This convention exists primarily in the English-language scholarship of California. It
is not, however, a convention of Spanish-language scholarship, where texts like Historia
Verdadera de la Conquista de la Nueva España, by Bernal Díaz del Castillo, are
considered both historical and literary.
11
For an example in Alta California, see George Harwood Phillips, Chiefs and
Challengers: Indian Resistance and Cooperation in Southern California (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1975).
12
The various theories of regions as well as how regions are shaped and understood
continue to generate an enormous body of literature. While regionalism itself will not be
a focus of this particular study, I have shaped my arguments within the context of these
conversations, both those related directly to California and to other places on the map and
in the mind. A short (though incomplete) sample of those titles might include Walter
Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005); John Caughey, The
American West, Frontier & Region: Interpretations (Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie, 1969);
Charles Crow, A Companion to the Regional Literatures of America (Oxford: Blackwell,
2003); Katherine Morrissey, Mental Territories: Mapping the Inland Empire (Ithaca:
Cornell UP, 1997); Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996).
13
Richard White describes Hollywood as “that peculiar corner” of the West. See “It’s
Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: a New History of the American West (Norman:
Oklahoma UP, 1991), 614.
14
Theodore Roosevelt, West of the West, xi.
15
The literature of this period also raises intriguing questions about why certain tropes
persist in some places while in others they do not, an issue I consider in Chapter One.
16
As an example, Australia was often described with rhetoric similar to that of California.
See J. M. R. Cameron, “Western Australia, 1616-1829: An Antipodean Paradise,”
Geographical Journal 140.3 (1974): 373-385.
17
This method means, for example, that I do not discuss a text like William Heath
Davis’s Sixty Years in California (1889), even though it treats material before the Gold
Rush, because it was written and published much later.
18
I’m thinking of the Testimonios of the Californios, The Squatter and the Don, and
Joaquin Murieta, to name a few. Unfortunately, these texts were written or recorded in
31

the late nineteenth century (in the case of the Testimonios) or even later (in the case of the
Native American materials) and were influenced by an array of literary, historical, and
cultural factors after the period under discussion. This is particularly true for the
Testimonios, which scholars have noted look back to the period before the Mexican-
American War with nostalgia. Of course, if we are to believe the sources that remain
from the period before the war, many of those Californios saw their lives in California
much differently than did those who wrote about the region years later. See Rosaura
Sánchez, Telling Identities: the Californio Testimonios, (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,
1995) and Genaro Padilla, My History, Not Yours: the Formation of Mexican American
Autobiography (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1993).
19
The same could be said, of course, about the date 1510 and the publication of Las
Sergas de Esplandián. I use the term “begin” here with the understanding that I am
tracking a European and Euro-American conception of California. As I point out in
Chapter One, Native Americans were in the region long before Europeans ever saw or
imagined it and, based on extant evidence, seemed to view it quite differently. Thus, a
“beginning” for California as a concept is limited in this discussion to non-Native images.
20
Edward Everett Hale, His Level Best, and Other Stories (Boston: Roberts Brothers,
1885), 234.
21
Some editors, such as Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz, and certain
publishers, such as Heyday, have been very helpful in this regard. See Lands of Promise
and Despair: Chronicles of Early California, 1535-1846 (Berkeley: Heyday Books,
2001), Testimonios: Early California through the Eyes of Women, 1815-1848 (Berkeley:
Heyday Books, 2006), and A World Transformed: California Before the Gold Rush
(Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1999). Other anthologies have incorporated older literature,
such as California Heritage: an Anthology of History and Literature (Itasca: Peacock
Publishers, 1971), The Literature of California: Writings from the Golden State
(Berkeley: U of California P, 2000), and California: a Literary Chronicle (New York:
Funk &Wagnalls, 1968).
22
Robert Ernest Cowan, A Bibliography of the History of California and the Pacific
West, 1510-1906 (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1914). This number doesn’t
even begin to approach, of course, the number of unpublished narratives in archives.
23
Even writers as eminent as Lawrence Clark Powell reflect this bias. See California
Classics: the Creative Literature of the Golden State (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1982).
For other examples of this tendency, see David Wyatt, The Fall into Eden: Landscape
and Imagination in California, Stephen Fender, Plotting the Golden West: American
Literature and the Rhetoric of the California Trail (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981), or
Franklin Walker, A Literary History of Southern California (Berkeley: U of California P,
1950). Anthologies of literature often reflect this situation, such as California Poetry:
32

from the Gold Rush to the Present, Many Californias: Literature from the Golden State,
and West of the West: Imagining California.
24
Kevin Starr’s first book is one example. Though it includes some materials as early as
1785, Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973)
mostly focuses on material after 1849. To be fair, his book is about people from the US,
and thus focuses on that part of the story. Starr’s later overview, California: a History
(New York: Modern Library, 2005), devotes much more space to materials before the
Gold Rush.
25
The cross-pollination of history and literature is one of the prominent threads of
discussion throughout the dissertation.
26
Martin Severin Peterson, Joaquin Miller: Literary Frontiersman (Palo Alto: Stanford
UP, 1937), 16.
27
Before 1700, and often after, writers in the eastern coast of North America were just as
likely to be communicating in Spanish, French, Dutch, or German—not to mention the
variety of Native languages.
28
This is a long-standing complaint among students of western literature. See, for
example, Thomas J. Lyon’s introduction to The Literary West: an Anthology of Western
American Literature (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999), 3.
29
Washington Irving was likewise an important figure in validating a “western”
literature, but his specific connection to California remains more complex. See Chapter
Four for a discussion of Dana and Irving.
30
This famous quote comes from George Berkeley’s poem “Verses, on the Prospect of
Planting Arts and Learning in America.” The Works of George Berkeley, vol. III
(London: Macmillan, 1871), 232.
31
I recognize that Spanish-language naming practices differ from English-language
naming practices. Spanish speakers are often dismayed to find that Juan Rodríguez
Cabrillo is called Cabrillo in English-language scholarship, which would be like calling
the author of Don Quixote, “Saavedra.” Unfortunately, readers in the US are likely to be
confused if I follow Spanish-language tradition. I am thus following the English-
language convention in the dissertation.
32
Significantly, the only other author who could compete with Irving for this distinction
is Cooper, another “western” writer. Both are discussed in Peter Antelyes, Tales of
Adventurous Enterprise: Washington Irving and the Poetics of Western Expansion (New
33

York: Columbia UP, 1990). See also, William Charvat, Literary Publishing in America,
1790-1850 (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1959).
33
Some have suggested that the seal depicts Minerva, the Roman goddess, rather than
Athena, the Greek. Regardless of whether the goddess is Roman or Greek, the symbolic
effect is basically the same. Minerva was also said to have emerged from the head of her
father, Jupiter, fully formed.
34
JS Holliday gives this earlier discovery a passing mention in his book The World
Rushed In: The California Gold Rush Experience (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1981), 34. But it was noted by many earlier chroniclers of the region. See Donald C.
Cutter, “The Discovery of Gold in California.”
34
Chapter One
Those Accursed Books: Imagination and California, 1510-1785
For his imagination at all hours of the day and night was full of battles,
enchantments, adventures, follies, loves, and challenges as are related in
the books of chivalry, and all his words, thoughts, and actions were turned
to such things. Don Quixote
1
In 1533, a group of men sailed north from the Pacific coast of New Spain and into
a body of water that had not yet been named by Europeans. They had been sent on a
mission funded and organized by Hernán Cortés to discover islands supposedly loaded
with gold and pearls, and inhabited by a race of warrior women. During the voyage, they
mutinied and murdered their first captain, and their new captain, Fortún Ximénes,
promised them that “they would all become rich.”
2
Eventually, they sighted what they
thought was an island, and prepared to claim the spoils of their fantasy.
3
Events did not go according to plan. When they disembarked to search for fresh
water, many of the crew were killed by the Natives, who apparently had plans of their
own. According to Bernal Díaz del Castillo, “This island was inhabited by a savage tribe
of Indians, and they massacred Ximénes with the whole of the men who had
accompanied him on shore…” The remainder of the crew struggled back to Jalisco
“where they related all that had taken place and spread a vast account of the large
population and the rich pearl fisheries that they had discovered.”
4
The place where these sailors landed came to be called California, which was not
an island but an enormous peninsula. Though much of what transpired in regard to these
35
events is shrouded in conjecture, including exactly when and by whom the name
California was first used, the existing narrative is not surprising. The fact that these
sailors (or someone soon after them) named the location California, that they assumed
they had reached an island, that they imagined it to be rich in pearls and gold and
inhabited by Amazon women—all of these details have literary, historical, and
geographic antecedents.
5
The story of Ximénes, like so many in the long history of California stories
written by Europeans, almost sounds scripted to conform to later visions of the region. It
demonstrates, in nascent form, many of the elements that recur in later literature:
fantasies of wealth and women, extremes of expectation and disappointment, insular and
exotic geography, and even the promise of the future. In fact, antecedents for almost
every idea about California in circulation today—such as its newness, its strangeness, its
polarizing extremes of culture and wealth, its isolation, its hedonism—emerge not in the
film industry, or nineteenth-century boosters, or even the Gold Rush, but in a mixture of
early modern ideologies that flourished in Spain and many of the colonial empires of
Europe, dating back at least to the sixteenth century.
6
Spanish romances, the voyages of
Columbus, the conquest of Mexico, the search for the “Seven Cities of Gold” or the
“Straight of Anian,” and other facets of early modern culture profoundly shaped the
conventional understanding of the place called California today.
7
Furthermore, each of
these ideas, and others soon to emerge, played a role in creating an image of California as
a place without a past, perhaps its most intractable mythology.
36
While the notion of a place without history is fundamental to California’s image,
because of these broad historical patterns, it is not unique to California. Various places in
the Americas and throughout the world have been described as ahistorical, often for some
of the same reasons explored here, and sometimes with the same devices.
8
The narrative
of ahistoricism does, however, have some unusual features in California, where it has
endured much longer than might be expected. In particular, geography played a
complicated and persistent role in generating and shaping these narratives, serving as a
receptacle for collecting ahistoricism as well as a tool for dispensing it. In addition,
various recurring tropes (such as futurity, paradise, exaggeration, exoticism, and
isolation) typically fuel the idea of California as a place without history, and they blend
or fuse with geography in a bewildering variety of ways.
Finally, we can be fairly certain that these ideas did not come from pre-conquest
Native cultures. Though it is impossible to form definitive conclusions (because there are
no known documents written by Native Americans in California before the arrival of the
Spaniards), evidence from stories recently transcribed suggests that these tribes saw
California in ways radically different from Europeans. For Natives, California was not
isolated, degenerate, uninhabited, full of gold and pearls, or populated by islands of
racialized and half-naked pagan women. In fact, in oral narratives, California is a place
with deep historical roots.
9
Furthermore, there is evidence of Native resistance to these
ideas even in the Spanish records. As will be shown by the discussion of Toypurina in
this chapter and by the discussion of Pablo Tac in Chapter Three, Native histories flatly
contradict the notion of an empty landscape or a culture without a sense of its past.
37
Islands and California in the Imagination
Ironically, for a place soon to exist in a historical vacuum, California had long
been in gestation in the imagination of early modern Europeans when Ximénes claimed
to have found it. In fact, someone had already written it into fiction. The word itself, in a
story that is now fairly well known, comes from a romance, Las Sergas de Esplandián,
written by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo in 1510.
Now I wish you to know about the strangest thing ever found anywhere in
written texts or in human memory. […] I tell you that on the right-hand
side of the Indies, there was an island called California, which was very
close to the region of the Earthly Paradise. This island was inhabited by
black women, and there were no males among them, for their life style
was similar to that of the Amazons. […] Their armor was made entirely
out of gold—which was the only metal found on the island…
10
Nearly every element of the story of Ximénes was prefigured by Montalvo: the pearls and
gold, the expectation of Amazons, even the idea of an island itself. Of course, as scholars
later realized, it was the romance that had given the sailors the name for the region.
11
Right from the beginning, then, California as a place merged in the European imagination
with California as a fantasy. In fact, it is clear that many of the eyewitness accounts from
this period are assembled, in part, from received notions about what travelers to
California were to expect. The end result is that the “factual” record of exploration in
California often reads like a passage from an early modern romance, and in this mixture
of literature with fantasy and geography we have the birth of the idea of California.
38
Though this passage from Montalvo is often mentioned in discussions of early
California history or literature, it is usually only mentioned as the precursor to the name
of the contemporary U.S. or Mexican states rather than part of an ideology of fantasy,
exoticism, and wealth that exploded in the sixteenth century. Deep psychological and
cultural roots influenced Montalvo’s choice of a remote, inaccessible island for his
mythic setting, as well as the presence of fabulous riches and sexualized, racialized
women. This cluster of ideas influenced not only Montalvo, but Cortés, Columbus and
other early modern explorers, extending back centuries before any of them ever lived.
Thus, as it turns out, Montalvo himself was prefigured.
In her exhaustive study of the myth of California as an island, Dora Beale Polk
traces the history of island myths as repositories for fantasy and desire to the Middle
Ages, specifically to Marco Polo, the Letters of Prester John, and other influential
“oriental travelogues.”
12
As Polk repeatedly demonstrates, these myths had long been in
circulation—for several centuries—when Montalvo invented California, and they
continued to have a profound effect on those who lived after him, influencing
cartography for roughly two hundred years. In fact, myths of Amazon women or other
women living without men on islands are at least as old as the Greeks.
13
Yet, in the grafting of island myths, there is more at stake than simply the shape
of California on a map. Islands at that time (and even today) were thought of as sites of
mystery and romance, cut off from the regulations and restrictions of contemporary life,
places outside the norms of culture, places where time passed differently, if it passed at
all (an idea evident in such varied cultural material as More’s Utopia, Shakespeare’s the
39
Tempest, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Stevenson’s Treasure Island, and the television
show Fantasy Island). Islands even suggested sacred religious sites because of their
frequent associations in medieval texts with the biblical Garden of Eden.
14
Many elements of this cultural narrative begin with geography. Islands, by
definition, are separated from the mainland by a body of water, suggesting not only their
physical distance from mediating cultural forces, but also their symbolic separation. In
this sense, islands were (and still are) often seen as an escape from the dominant culture.
On the other hand, this same feature often suggests that they are isolated, undeveloped, or
backwards because of their lack of contact with the dominant culture or the world at
large.
15
In fact, in Montalvo’s account of the island, he says that the queen of the island,
Calafía, “knew nothing” about “most regions of the world” and “was acquainted only
with neighboring lands…”
16
If the reader imagined that the queen and her subjects lived
in blissful ignorance, the price of living without knowledge of the surrounding world is
made clear when Montalvo adds that “remaining on their island and doing nothing other
than what their ancestors did would be tantamount to being buried alive like the living
dead and to living out the rest of their days like dumb animals without fame or glory.”
17
These attributes raised the probability that Calafía’s island (and California) would be seen
as ahistorical. As a feminized and racialized space, Calafía’s people did not participate in
the making of history. As Montalvo reminds us, these women were “buried alive,” “dead
while they lived,” like “brutes.” It would be difficult to imagine a more chillingly apt
metaphor for many of the Native women in the Americas.
18
40
But the ideological power of island mythologies only begins there. In the
sixteenth century, California the island collided with ideologies of race and gender, for
the island as geographic concept offered a space for an encounter (or adventure) beyond
the disciplining gaze of Spanish culture. Calafía’s island is populated by “black women”
who, as it turns out, live in a place with “no males among them” who might interfere with
European sexual conquest. Given the long historical and literary record of European men
disparaging Native men but desiring Native women, Montalvo’s island offers a perfect
example of the gendered and racialized fantasy of conquest.
19
It also suggests the myriad
ways that geography and ideology interact. Like the island itself, the women are
simultaneously alluring and threatening. They are exotic—pagan and savage—yet
ultimately capable of being dominated. They are distant, but finally accessible to diligent
and intelligent males. Of course, they are also beautiful, rich, and sexually available.
As a subordinate geography, the island becomes a reward for the conquistador,
the reward that male European imperialists would have dreamed to conquer, an image
which was not unique to Montalvo either. Cervantes makes reference to it in Don
Quixote when Sancho Panza repeatedly imagines “himself governor of the island his
master [Quixote] had promised to him.”
20
Furthermore, even in Don Quixote, the island
remains associated with race. In a moment that reveals the deeply racist fears of early
modern Spaniards, Sancho Panza, again contemplating his island reward, “worried…that
his kingdom [would be] inhabited by Negroes and that all his subjects would be black.”
But he finds a “remedy” for this problem in the fact that he can “ship them off to Spain”
and “sell them for ready money.”
21
Once again, the island becomes a place of anxiety
41
and fantasy. In short, islands were often exotic, places without history in the
conventional sense of the term. Before California even existed in Montalvo’s fictive
geography, islands carried so much symbolic weight in the European imagination that
making California an island was almost inevitable. It was this image of California, a
place outside the norms of society, that merged with ideologies of race, gender, and
imperialism and initiated the protean mythology of California as a place without a past.
Islands as Drivers of Exploration and Conquest
This fantasy-rich, history-poor imagination of islands was so powerful that it
actually helped propel many of the Spanish explorations in the Americas, with references
to this mythology even appearing in orders of exploration. In the first reports of
exploration, California is frequently figured as an island, one with all of the cultural
hallmarks of Amazonian predecessor.
22
Montalvo’s island of California, emerging in the
fecund mixture of early modern fantasies about islands, exploration, and conquest,
migrated from Europe and attached itself like a barnacle to the first landmass that
Spaniards found west of the coast of New Spain. In fact, it was the lure of potential
islands that inspired Cortés to organize the expedition that sent Ximénes into the Pacific.
In 1522, almost immediately following the conquest of the Aztec empire, even
while Spanish diplomats were arguing over the spoils of Mexico, Cortés began probing
the Pacific for other potential areas of wealth.
23
Because his expedition had acquired vast
sums of money with relatively little expense, it increased the Spanish appetite for further
42
conquest—and generated incredible rumors. As we have seen, California, the remote
island paradise of wealth and desirable women, already flickered like a mirage in the
Spanish imagination, even before any place had officially received the name. Coming on
the heels of the conquest of Mexico and reaching the Pacific Ocean, these latent
mythologies solidified and materialized in expeditions to find it.
In 1524, Cortés ordered further exploration of the Pacific coast in order to follow
up on these rumors, and his letters suggest the power of the mythologies circulating in
literature and culture. Cortés wrote,
I am informed that down the coast which borders the said villa there are
many provinces thickly inhabited by people and containing, it is believed,
great riches, and that in these parts of it there is one which is inhabited by
women, with no men, who procreate in the way which the ancient histories
ascribe to the Amazons.
24
The unapologetic frankness of Cortés’s avarice, as well as the undercurrents of sex,
science, and history, permeates literature of the era. This kind of discourse, in fact,
infects much of the material on California. Part of the power of passages like these, part
of their ability to amass credibility in the early modern imagination, emerges from the
subtle way in which the writers acknowledge the unknown and then assert what they see
as probable. For instance, Cortés acknowledges the rumors with the passive construction
“I am informed” and later inserts “it is believed.” This rhetorical gesture, a slight of
hand, allows him to insert the most improbable of rumors or the wildest of fantasies about
“great riches” or “women, with no men” without ever having to assume culpability if the
rumors turn out to be unfounded. He also cleverly ascribes the genealogy of this
depiction to “ancient histories,” which was, in a sense, correct; the myth of an
43
Amazonian island dates back to the Greeks. Cortés would have also known, however,
that the credibility of the description increased if it could be linked to a lineage of
scholarship that sounded simultaneously formidable and mysterious.
In the early modern era, the power of literary precedent was tremendous,
especially in matters of exploration. Early European visitors to the Americas would first
have tried to fit their understanding of what they found to prior conceptions of the world,
which helps explain in part why these myths were so pervasive and enduring. As
Anthony Pagden explains, in the sixteenth century
the nature of the universe and of man could be known only through a body
of authoritative texts—the Bible, the writings of the Church Fathers and a
select number of ancient authors… The gathering of empirical data was
only of secondary importance and, by and large, had to be fitted into a
framework already established by the texts.
25
Furthermore, subsequent exploration used the texts of the previous expeditions. Thus,
one might dismiss California’s early modern texts in part because they were typically not
printed in large volume. Yet, it could be argued that texts about California prior to the
nineteenth century, despite lower circulation, exerted greater influence and control over
the construction of the image of California. In part because of their rarity, they were
prized and their contents were passed from diplomat to captain to sailor, whether as text
or as oral narrative.
26
To return to Cortés’s description of the imaginary island, though he might have
suggested, perhaps just as credibly, that California was believed to contain dragons that
consumed the genitals of sailors, he would likely have lost a substantial number of
potential recruits for his exploration, men who were often in short supply and already
44
sufficiently concerned about the dangers of sailing unexplored seas.
27
Instead Cortés
inserted a ready-made sailor’s paradise into his narrative, something to shimmer like a
mirage just beyond the reach of a crew likely to be sick with scurvy, living on wormy
biscuits, and reckoning their passage across the sea with crude instruments. His
manipulation of an island myth of rich and lonely women can hardly be seen as
accidental, given not only the climate of fantasy surrounding the search for California,
but also his desire to secure funding and a motivated force to join him in that
undertaking.
When he received word of the failure of Ximénes, Cortés himself mounted an
expedition and sailed across the Pacific into the gulf of California, landing near today’s
La Paz in May 1535. Again, events did not turn out as he had hoped. His supply ships
were lost, and the men who waited on the peninsula starved or succumbed to disease. In
the end, his own sailors cursed him.
28
This second attempt, like many others after it, was
also a failure from the Spanish perspective; it was expensive, uncovered no treasures, and
produced no colonies. Cortés found this “island,” near the southern tip of the peninsula,
hot, barren, and unfriendly, as would other Spaniards who came after him. The Natives
here proved particularly intractable to Spanish incursion, killing fresh arrivals and
rendering the eventual name for the settlement, “peace,” more than a little ironic.
45
A Second Wave of Exploration
This drubbing, however, did not dampen Spanish fervor for the fabled California.
Shortly after his failure, Cortés sent Francisco de Ulloa up the gulf, searching for the
passage around the supposed island of California. In fact, Ulloa’s instructions, from
Cortés, told him to “finish the circumnavigation of California.”
29
When Ulloa’s report
seemed to suggest that California was actually a peninsula, it was dismissed.
30
Ulloa’s
expedition was followed almost immediately by Coronado, who mounted the first land
expedition into the northern reaches of the Spanish empire (today’s southwestern U.S.)
and completed a truly remarkable demonstration of the power of mythologies to drive
people in futile searches for treasure.
31
Two members of his expedition, Alarcón and
Díaz, split off early from Coronado’s group and found themselves in the midst of one of
the driest regions on the planet, the Sonoran desert southeast of the Colorado river.
These men, too, came home as sun-beaten survivors with vague tales of treasure
somewhere beyond the places they were able to reach.
32
Yet Coronado’s expedition staggering home with little more than abalone shells
for the Spanish coffers still did not quash Spanish desire to find the “Seven Cities,” or
“Quivira,” or other fantasy places that often stood for the same desire. In a pattern that
was constantly repeated, the Spaniards and other Europeans, much like a Don Quixote
transfixed by “the power of those accursed books,” simply shaped their narratives (or
their interpretations of other narratives) to suit their desires.
33
“Isla California” was still
out there. They only had to look in the right place. Thus, the fact that Cortés first
46
thought the California peninsula was an island is as much a product of the cultural
imagination as it is of geography. Clearly, Cortés and others after him desperately
wanted it to be an island, and, as sixteenth and seventeenth century maps show, many
cartographers shared this desire to create a place apart, a place of isolation and fantasy,
long after repeated evidence demonstrated otherwise.
34
The existence of this kind of
willful imagining in the face of contrary evidence suggests that from the moment of its
invention California became a repository of longing, and that even before California’s
invention, Europeans were already desiring it.
We should not assume, however, in looking at the long record of writing about
California, that on-the-ground experience had little to do with the way that the place was
depicted. On the contrary, as the records of writers such as Cortés demonstrate, the
developing mythology of California was dependent on actual expeditions in the
Americas. In a self-reinforcing cycle, the fictional descriptions of California such as
those in Montalvo’s novel prepared the ground for the seeds that were planted by the
actual riches of the Aztec empire, which then spawned further fanciful descriptions.
When the Spaniards reached the Pacific, they concluded that their fantasies were about to
be fulfilled again, that the Pacific was the gateway to those isolated island places they had
always dreamed about. In the highly malleable region that came to be known as
California, imagination, event, and place were in constant conversation.
47
Cabrillo and Notions of Paradise
The voyage of Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, in 1542, was the first attempt by the
Spaniards to go beyond the landmass that Cortés explored (what eventually came to be
called Baja California), to ascertain whether it was an island, and to explore further the
opposite coast. In his journey from the Pacific shore of New Spain up to the
contemporary California-Oregon border, he also became the first European to visit the
coast of today’s California, stopping at San Diego bay and other points along the coast.
35
Like Cortés, Ximénes, and others before him, Cabrillo set off in pursuit of a place that he
imagined contained precious metals, desirable women, and numerous other strange
creatures, a mindset that influenced his imagination. For example, he described a cluster
of animals as “herds…like cattle, which went in droves of a hundred or more, and which,
from their appearance, from their gait, and the long wool, looked like Peruvian sheep.
They have small horns a span in length and as thick as the thumb. The tail is broad and
round and a palm long.”
36
No such animal exists in this region, or ever did. Later
historians suggest that this animal was “about equal parts of fact and imagination” and
probably combined the antelope, which did exist, with a grab-bag of ideas taken from
romances.
Cabrillo also demonstrates how Spaniards forged imaginative connections
between the foreign coastal region of California and a region with which they were quite
familiar, that of the Iberian peninsula. While the Spanish imagination worked overtime
to incorporate the extremely arid landscapes of Baja California, the northern regions
48
offered something more familiar. Entering the biotic zone that contemporary ecologists
define as coastal southern California (just south of present-day Ensenada)
37
, he noted a
change in the landscape: “All the land from California to here is sandy near the shore, but
here begins land of another sort, the soil being reddish and of better appearance.” He also
noted “groves of trees like silk-cotton trees,” “large savannahs, and grass … like that of
Spain.”
38
This gesture, connecting the unfamiliar with the familiar, appears frequently in
travel writing in general and plays a key role in California in particular. When writers
describe a new region, there are always at least two geographies in operation: the new
geography which stands before them for interpretation in their texts and the remembered
geography which they carry in their heads and often plays counterpoint to that landscape
in which they are presently immersed. Both regions constantly play off one another,
fracturing into an array of possibilities depending not only on the writers’ present
circumstances but also on their emotional connection to those geographies in the past.
For the Spaniards, the land which extended from present-day Ensenada to San Francisco
resonated with their own memories of home because the regions were remarkably similar
in ecology and climate. This connection, frequently noted in their texts, comes to play an
important role in how they reacted to California and how they depicted it. Primarily, it
facilitated one of the more important narrative tropes in the literature about California:
the notion of the place as a paradise.
In one of the most remarkable turns of circumstance, Spaniards happened to stake
their flags in one of about half a dozen places in the world with a climate similar to their
49
own.
39
The fact that this place began life in their imaginations as paradisical island
makes the coincidence all the more unlikely, but it suggests one reason why other New
World environments, such as Florida or the Yucatan, which also were initially thought to
be islands, did not continue to be figured that way in the Spanish imagination.
40
California’s climate and geography were probably familiar enough to fuel the machinery
of longing for Spain, yet remained sufficiently distant and exotic to recall those “ancient
texts” and their proscriptions about where the Garden of Eden or the island of paradise
might be found. This narrative of California as a paradise eventually becomes one of the
primary drivers of ahistoricism.
For Europeans, paradise, as an enclosed and idealized space, necessarily exists
outside the norms of the historical world. In the garden of Eden, one of the primary
models for Christian notions of paradise, Adam and Eve, its sole human residents, lived
free from care. While the beauty of the garden itself emerges in its description, the
contentment of that place is most clear when the Christian god banishes them from it and
explains what they have lost. “Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat
of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee… In the
sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return to the ground…”
41
Furthermore, in
the biblical account, Adam and Eve were ordered to leave Eden and the space was
guarded so that they could not return. “So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east
of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword…” Like the recurrent myths of
paradise, Eden was not only imbued with magical properties, but it was also separated
and protected from the surrounding world. In fact, the word paradise was adopted into
50
Greek from an ancient Persian word meaning “enclosed space,” a word that also referred
to gardens, and it was in this sense that the word passed into the Greek versions of
Genesis.
42
Implied, though not made explicit in Genesis, is the notion that Adam and Eve did
not age. In other accounts of religious paradise, immortality is a standard motif. At the
least, time seems to stand still in the garden of Eden. Those lucky enough to live in such
a place find that days blend into an unbroken tapestry of ease, without seasons or periods
of hardship. Even animosity among animals is typically set aside in literary visions of
Eden.
43
Paradise, then, remains blissfully immune to the cumulative daily struggles that
make up the historical record in the space Europeans recognized as the world. Thus, the
literary trope, whether accepted as fictive or factual, of California as a paradise
powerfully affected the popular imagination of it as a space outside of history.
An English Episode: Drake in California
Francis Drake’s account of California, though brief, offers some contrast to
Spanish narratives before the waves of foreign accounts that appeared at the end of the
eighteenth century. Drake arrived in California in 1579, as part of his voyage around the
world. Though many of the details remain clouded, it appears that Drake and his crew
stopped in the area near San Francisco and stayed there, according to the narrative, from
June 17 to July 23, where they apparently interacted extensively with the Native
Californians.
44
Most of the discussion surrounding Drake and California centers on
51
where exactly he landed and whether or not the plate of brass he supposedly left behind
can be authenticated.
45
As the image of California is most pertinent to the present
discussion, neither of those issues are very important here. The fact is that he claimed to
have landed in a place he called New Albion, which was understood by his
contemporaries to be near or within the territory called California. This information was
published and circulated in numerous narratives, and it influenced the ongoing idea of
California for years afterward.
46
Arguing that the texts are more important in this discussion than the controversy
over the precise location of his landing, however, does not mean that the historical
context is irrelevant. On the contrary, because of the folk hero he became upon his return
in 1580, his voyage generated an enormous amount of material, accounts which need to
be unpacked and placed in their specific historical and political contexts. The narrative
discussed here is The World Encompassed (1628), written by another person named
Francis Drake, a nephew of the captain. This narrative, while the longest and most
detailed in regard to Drake’s visit to California, offers a perfect example of the contextual
issues mentioned above. Written after the original Drake had died, by a member of his
own family, it was almost certainly crafted to buttress the image of the sailor. This
supposition is strengthened by the fact that Drake’s reputation had suffered toward the
end of his life, and a reappraisal of the voyage that made him most famous would
certainly have helped that reputation. The narrative and its path to publication also reveal
the importance that descriptions of the Americas played in secrets of the state. When
Drake returned to England, nearly ten years passed before the Queen allowed Richard
52
Hakluyt to publish his Principall Navigations and Voiages (1589), which contained an
account of Drake’s voyage around the world. More than likely, the Queen wanted to
protect what might have been revealing information about strategic positions in the
Pacific, and this must be kept in mind when considering how California is described.
47
California, in the eyes of Drake (the nephew) appears less than pleasant. The
coast is cold and not necessarily the picture of paradise that the Spanish painted. Drake
writes that
…notwithstanding it was in the height of summer, and so neere the Sunne;
yet were wee continually visited with like nipping colds…; we could very
well haue been contented to haue kept about us still our winter clothes;
yea … to haue kept our beds; neither could we at any time, in whole
fourteen dayes together, find the aire so cleare as to be able to take the
height of sunne or starre.
48
Yet it was actually worse. Not only did Drake complain of cold and fog, but the land
hardly fulfilled the picture of bountiful abundance that later writers suggested.
Besides, how vndhandsome and deformed appeared the face of the earth
itselfe! shewing trees without leaues, and the ground without greenes in
those moneths of June and July. The poore birds and foules … not daring
so much as once to arise from their nests after the first egge layed, till it,
with all the rest, be hatched and brought to some strength of nature, able to
helpe itselfe.
49
Despite these kinds of descriptions, highlighting the “generall squalidnesse and
barrennesse of the countrie” or “most stinking fogges,” the English decided that they
wanted California or, at least, that they wouldn’t refuse it.
In a ceremony performed by the Native Californians and, according to the
narrator, full of the symbolism of English royalty, California was transferred to them:
[They] made seueral orations [to our Generall], or rather, indeed, if wee
had vnderstood them, supplications, that hee would take the Prouince and
53
kingdome into his hand, and become their king and patron: making signes
that they would resigne vnto him their right and title in the whole land,
and become his vassals in themselues and their posterities…”
50
It was, for the English, quite a windfall, especially considering that California was “freely
offered.” Of course, in light of the prior description, it is not at all clear why they would
want California. Drake even has an opportunity to demonstrate his magnanimity in the
scene when he decides not to refuse the gift merely because “he would not giue them any
cause of mistrust or disliking of him.”
51
But perhaps most prophetically, he ultimately
decided to accept the gift because “he knew not to what good end God had brought this to
passe, or what honour and profit it might bring to [his] countrie in time to come.” As it
turns out, the rewards of that gift were soon to come.
A few paragraphs later, Drake took a trip to see what it was that they had been
given, and suddenly he reverts to the mode of description more common to California.
He writes,
The inland we found to be farre different from the shoare, a goodly
country, and fruitfull soyle, stored with many blessings fit for the vse of
man: infinite was the company of very large and fat Deere with there we
sawe by thousands…
52
Simply the use of the word “infinite” suggests the world of myth and fantasy, even if
somewhat circumscribed. Furthermore, as was common, Drake noted that the inhabitants
of this “fruitfull” place were “of a tractable, free, and louing nature, without guile or
treachery.” Thus, the current occupants might, according to this description, prove a
minor impediment to empires interested in conquest or the establishment of a strategic
position in the northwestern Pacific. This notion of easy conquest is further augmented
by a description of their weapons, which “they vse very skillfully, but yet not to do any
54
great harme with them, being by reason of their weaknesse more fit for children then for
men…”
53
Thus, California would appear to be, much like Calafía’s island, available for
appropriation. Fittingly, in the next paragraph the English named the place “Albion …
that it might haue some affinity, euen in name also, with [their] own country…”
One of the many possible explanations for these variances in assessment is that
the English and Spanish visited different places in California or at different times of the
year. Perhaps, too, the inland areas, away from the fogs of the coast, simply did appear
more appealing to the English. Yet, it is also interesting to consider the ways that
politics—claims, ceremonies of possession, strategies for control—factor into these
narratives. While the narrative recounts a wealth of fascinating ethnographic detail, the
key point for the writer is clearly the ceremony whereby California was supposedly
granted to the English, and the fact that the English were no longer under Spanish
jurisdiction. Indeed, the writer points out that “Spaniards never had any dealing, or so
much as set a foote in this country, the vtmost of their discoueries reaching onely to many
degrees Southward of this place.”
54
The narrative of Drake’s encounter with California, then, suggests that politics
were always in play in descriptions of California, even if the degree to which they played
a role cannot be determined from a vantage point almost four hundred years afterwards.
In addition to myths and desires, questions of strategy, of state secrets, and of claims to
territory also figured in the imagination of California, and these constructions often had
long lasting effects. In this case, the claims of Drake would surface over two hundred
years later, when, during the political squabbling over the “Oregon question” in the mid-
55
nineteenth century, the British used the accounts Drake’s landfall to buttress their proof
for rights to the land in dispute with the US. Perhaps this is what Drake had in mind
when he said that “he knew not … what honour and profit it might bring to [his] countrie
in time to come.” Certainly, during the squabbling of imperial governments over rights
to territory, that was one possible interpretation.
Economics and Exaggeration
Reaching California, never mind settling and defending it, was proving to be very
expensive for the Spanish. Despite the promising reports of Cabrillo, decades passed
while Spanish officials vacillated over how to maneuver themselves into these new
regions so that they could capitalize on promises of wealth and strategic passages to
China or the Atlantic that they supposed were hidden somewhere along the coast. By the
time the sixteenth century drew to a close, the goals had begun to change for Spanish
government. Having recently discovered a feasible trade route between the Philippines
and Mexico, which involved coasting down the shores of California, they wanted to
reexamine the landscape for potential safe harbors where they might replenish their stores
and hide from pirates who were devastating their shipping routes.
55
Francis Drake was
only the most famous of many instances of plunder during this period. Indeed, his
voyages reinvigorated Spanish desires to return to the region, not only to protect their
claims, but to investigate rumors that he had returned to England via the fabled Strait of
Anian.
56
In 1602, this job fell to Sebastián Vizcaíno, or rather he convinced those with
money and power to outfit an expedition that he led. At least in part because of this
situation, he was eager to deliver on his promises. The desire to fulfill the expectations of
those who financed expeditions appears frequently in the journals and diaries that
survive. In fact, it is one of the more prominent features of this literature and often led to
exaggeration, itself one of the more salient aspects in writing about California. Both of
these features were at least partially a product of the circumstances.
Because their expeditions were financed by the government and/or wealthy
patrons with financial stakes in the outcomes, early explorers found themselves in an
interesting predicament. While they were ostensibly charged with objectively describing
the lands they explored, they would also have been encouraged to make those places
appear in the best possible light. If the places they explored sounded worthless, then their
expedition and the money raised to launch it were wasted. (Funding might even be cut
off.) If, however, the places explored appeared to have great potential, then the
expedition was a success and the explorer was likely to be rewarded.
56
Since later
explorations might use their maps and texts, writers wouldn’t want to be caught
deliberately lying, but many might have reasoned that a little embellishment would not
hurt them. Thus, not only were explorers saturated in a culture of fantasy with regard to
California before they ever saw it, but they lived in conditions which encouraged them to
indulge and even embellish those fantasies. These kinds of narratives, which were passed
from official to official in the government and used by cartographers, historians, and later
57
explorers to describe or find California, contributed enormously to the mythologies of
paradise.
Seen in this perspective, the current of positive exaggeration that runs throughout
the earliest chronicles of exploration in California makes more sense, and Vizcaíno was
not immune to the disease. For example, like Cabrillo before him, Vizcaíno notes the
change in landscape as he leaves the ecological region of desert on the peninsula and
enters the Mediterranean zone of southern California; but Vizcaíno’s commentary rises
beyond the occasion when he proclaims, “The climate of the land is the best in the
world….”
57
In a region known for boosters, Vizcaíno prefigures their zeal for
salesmanship by more than two and half centuries. Yet, the explorers weren’t the only
ones inflating their claims; priests proved just as susceptible to fits of exaggeration.
Father Antonio de la Ascención, who traveled with Vizcaíno and kept a diary of
his own, offers even more ridiculous examples of exactly this kind of writing. In his
“Brief Report,” compiled in 1620 from diaries he had made during the journey in 1602,
Ascención sounds like a seventeenth century booster before he even gets past his prolix
title, which modestly describes the report as “containing an Account of the Riches, the
Temperate Climate, and the Advantages of the Realm of the Californias, and setting forth
how his Majesty will be able at little cost to pacify it and incorporate it into his Royal
Crown and cause the Holy Gospel to be preached in it.”
58
All of the usual inducements,
except perhaps the sexual, are presented in summary: money, weather, power, as well as
religion, the usual justification for openly desiring these inducements. In this microcosm
of California themes, patterns emerge for subsequent centuries of literature. Even
58
Ascención’s use of the future tense, positioning California as a place of potential and
possibility, suggests a later hallmark of California writing. All of these elements,
additionally, share the overriding theme of exaggeration, an important engine of
ahistoricism, driving California out of the realm of the quotidian and into the realm of the
bizarre.
In what will become a pattern even into the late nineteenth century, Ascención
uses so-called scientific data to buttress its claims about climate, in this case, in relation
to Spain. For instance, in a dazzling display of rhetoric, he argues that Cape Mendocino,
California and Salamanca, Spain are
the antipodes of each other, being opposite each other and in the same
climate, but with different and diametrically opposed meridians. Hence it
follows that they must possess the same atmospheric conditions and
climate, having the same winter, summer, and autumn. It is possible that
they differ in some conditions and temperatures, because of the different
influences of the vertical stars which affect their qualities.
59
Whether or not his audience understood the theory of “vertical stars,” a reference like that
would have the desired effect of fortifying his authority. In addition to theorizing on
cosmography, Ascención lost no opportunities to speculate on the potential for wealth,
especially mineral resources, often reading from various supposed clues (such as pyrite)
what was just out of reach. Ascención returns again and again to this theme of easy
wealth awaiting collection in California, claiming that the land “has many minerals of
various kinds” such as “gold and silver”
60
and drawing on medieval ideas about the
connection between gold and hot, dry climates.
61
Like Cortés, he nests the possibility of
riches in vague authorities, saying, “Apparently they are very abundant, according to
experience and trustworthy information upon which I rely.”
62
Later in the report, he says
59
“I believe that it has very rich silver ores” that might prove to be “profitable” and offset
the outlay of capital an expedition would entail.
63
The “riches” of California are mentioned at least four separate times, and it is in
these passages where the exaggerated, fantastic vision of California clearly emerges. In
describing the sea between mainland New Spain and the landmass of California,
Ascención practically glows with religious fervor. “I will say that the wealth and
abundance of pearls in this sea is very great…and they are, indeed, large and beautiful,
choice, and very perfect.” He goes on to note that the pearls are quite easy to obtain,
which had the simultaneous effect of suggesting the ineptitude of the Natives; if the
Natives could find the pearls, then anyone could: “The oysters are not very deep, for the
Indians search for and bring them up.” Finally, in his last attempt to dazzle the reader,
and borrowing heavily from the tropes of fantasy, he explains how the pearls are wasted.
“This is not to make use of the pearls, because they do not understand or value them, but
only to eat the fish within. … When found they are thrown away, as if they were stones
of no value.”
64
European readers likely groaned in anguish as they contemplated that
final detail, imagining the perfect pearls tossed on a desolate beach, ignored by those
supposedly too foolish to appreciate their value.
This wasn’t the first time that someone had oversold a piece of real estate, nor
would it be the last, but Ascención’s argument formed part of a much broader pattern in
the literature of California: inflated expectations, wild promises, visions of utopian desire.
In part, this rhetoric was facilitated (though never determined) by the landscape, a place
which by remarkable coincidence seemed to provide the canvas that Spaniards needed to
60
project their desires. Actually visiting California, however, was never a precondition for
writing about it.
Many writers simply allowed their knowledge of current mythologies, along with
a few supposedly penetrating glances from afar, to give them the authority to write about
a place they had never seen. For example, Juan de Oñate, who spent the better part of a
decade tramping throughout the regions of present-day southwestern US and eventually
claimed New Mexico for the Spanish in 1598, decided to make an expedition to reach his
long desired “South Sea,” or the Pacific.
65
The expedition followed the Colorado river
south to the Gulf of California, never actually reaching what was then known as
California. But before turning back to New Mexico they encountered a tribe who
described for them “the island of Zinogaba,” a place that, given the long history of island
mythologies in relation to California and nearby geographies, must have sounded
familiar.
They said that the mistress or chieftainess of it [the island] was a
giantess… They pictured her as the height of a man-and-a-half of those of
the coast, and like them very corpulent, very broad, and with big feet; and
that she was old, and that she had a sister, also a giantess, and that there
was no man of her kind, and that she did not mingle with anyone of the
island.
66
On the one hand, Oñate’s narrative, begun in 1604 and written into a document in 1626,
demonstrates the pervasive power of the island mythology that Polk illuminates as well
as the ability of California to attract those mythologies. On the other hand, just as critical
to these myths and the resultant ahistoricism spawned by them is that California, as
depicted in these and other related fantasies, remained a place essentially unseen by
Europeans. Of course, Cabrillo had sailed up the coast in 1542, naming ports and
61
charting maps, and Vizcaíno had followed after him in 1604, renaming the very same
places. Still, California the geographical region, as if overmastered by the sheer
metaphorical or mythological weight of desire, remained at least equal parts fact and
fancy, much like the “herds” sighted from Cabrillo’s ship that sound like a crossbreed of
the antelope and buffalo.
67
For Europeans, this condition was crucial. If California were to retain its position
in the imagination as the fulfillment of desires, it needed to remain perpetually unseen.
By continually receding beyond the grasp of those who sought desperately to find it (and
other New World geographies of the imagination like Cibola, the Seven Cities, and the
Strait of Anian), California could continue to retain its magical atmosphere, its flying
griffins, its armor of solid gold, its giant man-eating women. But in order to do this, it
had to remain an empty vessel, a cipher, a blank canvas, an unknown yet constantly
imagined place of miraculous future potential; all of which meant that it also remained a
place without a past. Places that writers physically encountered typically passed into the
world of conventional, quotidian life. California’s continual resurgence as a mirage in
the imagination, despite contradictory evidence, helps to explain why, after frequent
sightings of geographies ostensibly named “California,” these contradictory elements
were dismissed or forgotten.
62
Expectation and Disappointment
The European imagination, however, often did not allow California’s landscapes
to pass from exemplary to merely mediocre. If writers were to encounter California and
find themselves disappointed, they had to be disappointed with gusto. Because of these
demystifying encounters, therefore, the myth of California also spawned an equally
powerful counter-mythology, one which led to a perpetual re-imagining of the region as a
place of disappointment.
68
Furthermore, in a region where opposed forces ironically
produce similar outcomes, even disappointment fueled ahistoricism.
Given the outrageous descriptions of California’s potential, it should come as no
surprise that it frequently disappointed people. In fact, it often disappointed them on a
scale inversely corresponding to their former expectations, which is to say, profoundly.
These extreme fluctuations in feeling about California—utopia and dystopia, paradise
and hell, future-perfect and future-horrific—became themselves standard tropes in
literature, rhetorical set-pieces in the cultural imagination.
69
Furthermore, this tendency
toward extremes of vision cemented the image of California as a place unconnected to the
norms of the world; it became more isolated, more unusual, more strange, until it
occupied a space in the European imagination beyond the limits of history. What history
it might have had was merely the fabric of its own fantasy. Like a tale or legend, it
existed in an atmosphere of artificiality, an other-worldly ether (sometimes heavenly,
sometimes hellish) that marked it as a place apart. Thus, long before hucksters became
63
associated with Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, California was associated with fakery
and lies.
Inflated expectations and bitter disappointment, however, were not unique to
California; they were the product of a more generalized condition of fantasy in the
Americas. This kind of polarizing reaction to California has roots, of course, in the first
European voyages to the Americas. Just as European fantasies of wealth and lust in the
Americas filtered into perceptions of California, European polarities of elation and
despair in the Americas influenced perceptions of California. The enormous variance of
emotion is, almost immediately, one of the salient features of literature in the Americas,
present in the publication of the first written document on Columbus’s voyage (1493) and
certainly at the opening of the sixteenth century.
70
Looking back to the sixteenth century, Coronado’s journey, which sent two
splinter expeditions in quest of the “South Sea,” demonstrates the explosive potential of
expectation and disappointment. Coronado, who spent years slogging through New
Spain’s northern frontier in pursuit of rumors of wealthy empires (before finally turning
back in the vicinity of contemporary Kansas), had followed the advice of a priest, Fray
Marcos, in his travels. At each new camp, Marcos claimed that riches were just ahead
and offered tantalizing details for the expedition. Finally tiring of the wild claims of Fray
Marcos, they sent him home so that he wouldn’t be slaughtered by furious compatriots.
In a travel narrative from the expedition, the writer bitterly notes that the camp was not
safe for [Marcos] … seeing that his report had turned out to be entirely
false, because the kingdoms that he had told about had not been found, nor
the populous cities, nor the wealth of gold, nor the precious stones which
64
he had reported, nor the fine clothes nor other things that had been
proclaimed from the pulpits.
71
In a sense, Fray Marcos sounds like a huckster from Day of the Locust who, after having
duped investors in a development scheme, was caught by an angry mob bilked of its
collective savings and dreams of wealth. Fray Marcos led the Spaniards further north
with constantly escalating visions of riches and fabulous cities, yet his technique would
not have functioned without the atmosphere of fantasy that permeated the European
imagination of the Americas. In other words, profound disappointment functioned
alongside, and in response to, inflated expectations.
California, because of its overabundance of expectation, had more than its share
of these counter-narratives of disappointment. Starting with the first appearances and
experiences of the geography in written records (such as the stories of Ximénes and
Cortés), and increasing markedly after a series of Jesuit attempts to occupy the peninsula
in the seventeenth century, stories of California as a place of disappointment and despair
became common. While the region that would become Alta California remained mostly
out of written records for more than a century after the expedition of Vizcaíno, the other
landmass that bore the moniker California remained prominent in both the imagination
and exploration.
72
For example, Cortés, despite all his boasting about discovering
wealthy new lands, failed miserably in California, and nearly all of the expeditions that
followed him shortly afterward fared no better. One Spaniard after another fell into
disaster in expeditions to the peninsula, a region that proved resistant to Spanish
colonization from 1535 until 1697—nearly two hundred years—despite the fact that it
glimmered just across the gulf from Spanish settlements on the mainland.
73
65
Impediments to colonization were significant. Not only were the natives
especially resistant to the Spanish overtures of conversion, but the peninsula itself
fiercely resisted incursions by those who lacked experience in its climate. Even the
Spaniards, who were quite familiar with arid climates, found the peninsula devastating
and depressing in its aridity and capacity for heat. Various writers describe the finger of
land as a god-forsaken blast-furnace composed entirely of rocks and thorns.
74
This
geography, by turns menacing or degrading, seeped quickly into their descriptions of the
local native population who, in a leap of logic that would prove prophetic for Alta
California, were often seen in similar terms. In this vision of anthropology-via-
geography, the natives were not only savage, but the most miserable people the Spaniards
had ever encountered, hardly human and as infertile for the seeds of salvation as the
baking rocks were for mission crops.
75
The note of despair in these texts is intensified by their being forced to grapple
with the still current notions of California as a version of paradise. In other words,
California became increasingly hellish at least in part because it was constantly forced to
live up to heavenly expectations. Had those expectations not existed, California certainly
would have been seen as difficult, but the tenor of those complaints likely would have
sounded much different. In retrospect, it’s amazing, given the fervor of their negative
reactions to the peninsula, that the Spanish were interested in finding more of it, but the
lure of something potentially marvelous just over the horizon always beckoned. The
peninsula simply became the “wrong” California, while the “right” California, which
existed in some other place that they had not yet found, reformed itself in the European
66
imagination and lured people to search for it. Thus, the literature of California, even as it
created oppositional narratives in reaction to the images of paradise, perpetuated the
notion of California as a place of extremes, thereby pushing the region further beyond the
reaches of credibility, quotidian experience, and history.
Inertia and Desire: California’s Narratives in Context
Still the question remains about the ability of these narratives to adhere to
California. To some extent, this polarity (or extremity) remained a feature of
representations of California more than it did of other places in the Americas. The seeds
of this idea proved readily adaptable to the imaginative soils of California and have
flourished ever since. What was it in particular that made California susceptible (or
perhaps receptive) to this kind of cultural perception on such an enormous and enduring
scale? One explanation is that nearby regions of Spanish settlement in the Americas were
not especially likely candidates for the kind of euphoric (and later despairing) narrative
that became common in California; they were predominately dry (with the exception of
Florida and Louisiana), and even contained regions of pure desert. Furthermore those
regions that were well watered were excessively so, containing swamps and mosquito
infestations that made them as uncomfortable as the deserts.
76
On the other hand, there
were other regions of the Spanish empire besides California that were fairly similar to
Spain (if that was in fact their ideal). Furthermore, the Spanish were very familiar with
arid climates, knew how to make them work for agriculture, and even appreciated them
67
aesthetically. Finally, California, as we have already seen in the stories of the peninsula,
was proving to contain an enormous desert and an expanding body of literature about
how horrible life there could be.
Another explanation is that the other regions of the Spanish empire in the
Americas were more thoroughly explored and colonized by the Spaniards and, therefore,
could no longer remain fantasy places. Some of these places (such as Florida and the
Yucatan peninsula) had even first appeared in documents as islands, but, because they
had been seen, explored, and found not to live up to the fantasy, they relinquished their
role as fabular places. Other regions, such as those near present-day Texas, Arizona, and
Louisiana, never really were imagined as fantasy places, and therefore the slow pace of
European exploration in, for instance, parts of present-day Texas had a different effect on
the imagination of that region.
77
On the other hand, California was not only a fabular
place but also only partially known to Europeans, and essentially remained so into the
nineteenth century, which made for very fertile imaginative ground. Indeed, one could
make a fairly convincing argument that even up to the gold rush, European and Euro-
American settlement of California was littoral in nature and that enormous portions of the
inland territory, especially the mountains, remained unknown.
78
This does not, however, fully explain why Alta California continued to remain a
fabular place even after it was colonized by Spaniards in the late eighteenth century. In
other words, California, or the growing collection of narratives about it, wasn’t in all
senses more fertile terrain for the kinds of stories that became its hallmark. Why then did
it retain this image? Why did it, after continually disappointing those Europeans who
68
tried to settle on its shores, remain fixed like a polestar of the imagination as a place of
wonder and desire? In part, because writers wanted it to remain that way. Having begun
as a fantasy, inertia and ideology kept it so. Explorers needed a fantasy place to drive
them forward, to compel them to continue in spite of often dispiriting conditions,
confusion, and radical uncertainty. Without this fantasy, and even perhaps suspecting it
was false, they likely would have had more difficulty motivating themselves and others.
79
This is not to make heroes of them, however; in the name of these fantasies, they
committed numerous, well-documented atrocities.
80
The European imagination of
California, like other talismanic fantasies of the era, was, as Father Ascencion described
it, the “lure” that pulled people further and further in search of rewards. Ascencion saw
this lure as a necessity for the benefits of Christianiztion and colonization; scholars now
usually see it as a mania with disastrous consequences.
Thus, from the earliest days of its description and exploration in European texts,
California occupied a peculiar place in the imagination: both known and unknown,
explored and unexplored, seen and unseen, over-filled and empty. Even as it was named
and mapped, it shifted, remained elusive, and retreated continuously beyond the grasp of
its visitors. It remained this way even into the eighteenth century, when European
cultures were supposedly embracing the cold calculus of Enlightenment science, and
even when California itself was subjected to more careful interrogations. A Jesuit priest,
Eusebio Francisco Kino, offers a compelling example of the flexibility and power of the
recurring narratives.
69
Jesuit Reappraisals and Interventions: Kino and Venegas
Throughout the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, California shifted
in the popular and scholarly imagination. The Jesuits, especially Kino, Link, Consag, and
Ugarte, contributed to much of this change. In their explorations of the Colorado river
and the territory in present-day Arizona and Texas, these writers documented their
encounters with often sophisticated maps and depictions of Native culture.
81
In a sense,
these explorations were reruns of the Coronado expedition and its offshoots because they
covered much of the same territory. Yet in another way, they were significantly
different.
First, they were more accurate. Kino had an excellent understanding of
geography, cartography, and cosmology; and he brought his considerable education to
bear on the fundamental geographic questions of the time, specifically whether or not
California was an island. As a result of his explorations in the region of the Colorado
river (near today’s eastern border of California), he was able to demonstrate that the
peninsula was in fact connected to the main landmass and therefore not an island.
Secondly, they had somewhat different goals than did Coronado or his subordinates.
While Coronado set off almost exclusively in search of plunder (despite contrary orders),
the Jesuits could claim, whether for good or for ill, that they were seeking religious
converts. Finally, Kino was clearly aware of the mythologies propagated in regard to the
lands of New Spain in general and California in particular, and complained that “some
ancients blot the map with … such unreal grandeurs and feigned riches as a crowned king
70
whom they carry in chairs of gold, with walled cities, lakes of quicksilver, of gold, of
amber, and of corals.”
82
He saw dispelling these mythologies as part of his duty in
writing about New Spain.
Despite Kino’s skepticism, his extensive travels, and his first-rate education, he
nevertheless continued to believe in the existence of the “Strait of Anian,” which he
claimed was “no more than ten or twelve leagues across,” and which allowed people to
access “Great China.”
83
Furthermore, Kino in part explained the “rather poor” and
“somewhat sterile”
84
region of California he saw by suggesting the real California was
somewhere else.
85
In other words, writers like Kino still sought California—if not to find
it, then to delimit it as best they could, to contain it on the expanding maps of the
imagination.
Yet, throughout his lifetime California remained an apparition in European
imagination and text. His argument that California was not an island perhaps diminished
the luster of the seventeenth and eighteenth century fantasy of California, but did not
foreclose entirely the element of mythology. California remained for Europeans a
distant, separate place, in his case beyond the desert and mountains, still remote,
inaccessible, potentially fabulous, if only for the fact that it had not yet been “found.”
86
Thus, the mass of convincing misinformation and confused facts in regard to California
suggests why mythologies, even for those who were highly educated and perhaps less
culturally motivated to succumb to them, remained powerful over such an extended
period of time. Even into the eighteenth century, as writers were assuring readers and
71
travelers that they were correcting the mistakes of the past, they were perpetuating
others.
87
In this spirit of correcting the wrongs of past accounts and gathering together in
one place the known data about California, Miguel Venegas, a Jesuit working in Mexico,
wrote the first European history of California, at the end of an extended period of relative
silence in regard to California. From the voyages of Vizcaíno at the opening of the
seventeenth century until the research and writings of Kino at the beginning of the
eighteenth century, very little is written about California by Europeans. Spain largely
recollected itself and took stock of the tremendous expenses it was carrying in the
Americas; other interested empires had not yet arrived in force. Not until Venegas
compiled his material in the middle of the eighteenth century, which in effect marked the
permanent end to its relative obscurity, was much written about it.
Venegas’s A Natural and Civil History of California was first published in
Madrid (1758) and almost immediately translated into English. While this date may
sound rather early for a European history of California, there was already plenty to say
about the region, especially for the Spaniards who wanted to control the narratives about
a place in which they had invested a great deal of energy and money. Despite likely
pressure to show the place in the best light, one of the first tasks that Venegas undertakes
is to summarize the history of the mistakes made by Europeans in describing California.
In the opening sentence, he aims directly at more than two centuries of misunderstanding,
acknowledging the misinformation generated by uninformed people: “The country of
72
California … has long been discovered; notwithstanding which, it was till lately, but
imperfectly known.”
88
His acknowledgement of a place “long … discovered” but “imperfectly known”
points to one of the primary sources of ahistoricism, and it foreshadows a litany of
paradoxes that themselves become central to the literary tradition in California. Venegas
concludes that the results of this imperfect knowledge of California are the
“contradictions” that one encounters in the literary record, and he goes on to compile an
extensive list of them.
There are relations which make the coast of California intolerable, from
the piercing cold. There are again accounts, which say these coasts are
insupportably hot. Some represent it as a region sterile, void of water, and
not only unimproved, but unimproveable chiefly from this defect. Others
speak of it as fruitful and pleasant, and having very fine rivers. […] The
variations are as great, in reference to the worth, as in regard to the face of
this extensive peninsula…
89
In the middle of the eighteenth century, at least a hundred years before many scholars
would suggest that California even had a literature, Venegas recognizes one of the
primary conundrums that mark California writing even in the 21
st
century: its ability to
inspire polarizing reactions. How is it, Venegas asks, that all of these contradictory ideas
can be true simultaneously? Furthermore, given the extremities of these descriptions,
what should one believe, if anything, in regard to California?
For Venegas the root problem was that California remained for Europeans
“imperfectly known,” both in spite of and because of all the writing about it. Essentially,
people often lied about California, and they felt compelled to lie because of mythologies
73
and the culture in which they fermented. Venegas himself attributes much of the rumors
about California to this very situation:
However from a desire of alleviating, in some measure, by strange and
surprising accounts, the uneasy sensations arising from the miscarriage of
the enterprises for its conquest, and the pleasure with which the attention
and wonder of the hearers flatters the relator, as one who has been an
eyewitness of such strange things, stimulated many at their ignominious
return from those expeditions to court popularity, palliate miscarriages and
render their company acceptable by a fruitful invention of fables. The
frequent repetition of these opened a door for improvement and emulation.
The last who arrived thought themselves obliged to add some
circumstances of greater terror and wonder, than what had been related by
the first adventurers: and this they did with the less caution, and their
narratives could not be easily disproved.
90
[my emphasis]
In Venegas’s explanation, it is easy to understand how hyperbole allowed both highly
negative and positive stories to emerge from the same place. The point of the stories was
the extremity of the tale. In a sense, he reiterates the critique of Don Quixote regarding
the fervid culture created by books of chivalry. Yet, these general comments about New
Spain have specific applications in California.
Venegas’s initial enumeration of the contradictions in California points to an
additional feature that emerges from the very complex landmass that early modern
Europeans (not Native Americans) elected to designate as “California.” Even using the
limited Spanish conception of it in the eighteenth century, the area comprises one of the
more diverse bioregions on the planet. Enormous mountains loom over vast basins, and
deserts sit adjacent to fertile watersheds. This unusual variety in ecosystem cannot be
ignored in tracing the roots of the wildly variable reactions of visitors to California. One
can imagine the surprise that sailors, for example, must have experienced in the contrast
between the desert mountains surrounding Cabo San Lucas and the pines surrounding the
74
bay of Monterey. That both of these places were called “California” only added to the
confusion.
A further geographical influence, along with this idea of multiple Californias, was
the continuing notion of California as a place apart. Even in Venegas, there is a sense of
the separation, ecologically, of littoral California from the surrounding territory,
especially from the peninsula and Pimería Alta (present day Arizona). Remarking on the
comments of earlier travelers, he says, “Both [Vizcaíno and Taraval] agree that these
coasts, either with regard to the air, or plenty of fruits, have little or no affinity with the
other parts of California.”
91
As we saw earlier, these kinds of comments were duplicated
in Kino. Thus, quite early in narratives of California, writers noted the sometimes
dramatic distinction in ecology that separated the various parts of what was then a still
congealing notion of California and North America. It was this initial geographic fissure
that combined with and contributed to the growing imaginative fissure, separating
California from the rest of the continent and even the rest of the world. California had
already been a place apart in the imagination, and this idea was further facilitated by
European reactions to its geography, something that would prove even more powerful in
the following century.
1769: the Invention of Alta California
Almost exactly twenty years after the publication of Venegas’s History of
California, the Spanish mounted their “Sacred Expedition,” a state- and church-
75
sponsored initiative to colonize the coast of California north of Jesuit settlement.
Literature began to appear quite rapidly. Reports, travel logs, letters, and diaries were
written, most of it requested by the Spanish bureaucracy as the expedition moved up the
coast, attempting to subdue Native Americans and fend off foreign empires in territory
that had for many years escaped concentrated European influence. One of the key
changes in the formation of what we now know as “California” or “Alta California”
occurred during this flurry of literary production. In these texts, the notion of California
as a distinctly different place strengthens, especially as Spaniards saw it marked in
geography, an idea which culminates in a distinction between a “new” and an “old”
California. It was this eventual demarcation that created (and reflected) one of the
longest lasting and most powerful drivers of ahistoricism.
The journal of Juan Crespí, a Franciscan priest, offers an excellent example of this
process. In Crespí’s journal, written while the Spanish struggled up the peninsula, he
describes how they cross successive ecological zones, moving from one that was dry and
rocky to one that became successively fuller in its vegetation and water supply. When
Crespí sets out from Vellicatá (then the northern-most reach of missionization) on 24
March 1769, he notes, “The country continues like all the rest of it at the last missions,
barren, arid, wanting grass and water, still having the brush, thorns, and rocks with which
this peninsula is so plentiful.”
92
And later in the journal, he mentions more than once the
“thorny cirio trees…continually with us and all the other thorns and spines,” through
which they travel “in search of the farther shore.”
93
76
His last phrase, remarking on the goal of a “farther shore,” suggests the extent to
which Crespí and others placed faith in a region beyond them that functions, almost on a
purely symbolic level, as unrealized desire. The power of this as yet unknown place to
compel them emerges more starkly in the way it is contrasted with their present,
uncomfortable situation. Much like the early Spanish arrivals to the peninsula in the
sixteenth century, Crespí imagines another California beyond the California of his
present experience. California, in its idealized formulation, is always the place where one
wants to be, but is not.
94
As with the island mythologies, the imagination of this future California is
facilitated by actual changes in geography, ecosystems, and climate as the expedition
moves northward. Though they were fortunate enough to travel during the spring and
thereby avoid the ferocious heat of the peninsula during the summer, they were still quite
conscious of the arduous nature of travel through the vegetation and landscape.
95
When
this began to change, near present-day Ensenada, their relief, at times rising to wonder, is
evident. This sense of wonder emerges in part from religious symbolism that Spaniards
likely saw inscribed in the landscape. Returning to Genesis and the story of the Garden
of Eden, recall that the Bible describes the world outside Eden as a place of thorns. For
people steeped in the language of this Christian text, accustomed to finding signs of their
religion in the world, and deeply invested in narratives about paradise in the Americas, it
is not difficult to imagine that the disappearance of these thorns heralded a miraculous
change.
77
By the end of March, Crespí writes that the thorny cirios had disappeared behind
them, and they began to see cottonwoods and other shrubs. By the 3
rd
of April, he notes
that “the country began to change…, some bushes appearing that had not been seen
before…, live oaks; and some pines and wild date palms.”
96
As they move northward, this
gradual alteration continues, with Crespí noting changes in the soil and increasing
sightings of sycamores, willows, pines, and wild grape vines, until these observations
evolve into the now familiar exaggeration.
97
Eventually Crespí claims that they “[had
not] encountered a stone since leaving San Diego.”
98
He says that the trees “appeared
like nothing so much as a handsome fig orchard”
99
and that the grass is “seemingly all
cultivated because it is so green everywhere.”
100
These descriptions, innocuous as they
might seem, actually emptied the region of Native history and reinscribed it with
European religious symbolism.
101
First, they recall the Garden of Eden, both as a space
of divine artifice and as the controlled, enclosed space suggested in the term’s etymology.
Second, this passage signals that the Spaniards were totally unaware of the Natives who
did in fact cultivate the natural environment via controlled burning and other grooming
techniques.
102
This misinterpretation and exaggeration can be attributed in part to the desire of
Crespí, like other writers before him, to show the landscape in the best possible light so
that those receiving the information would be encouraged to continue funding the
expedition. It can also be attributed, however, to the route that they took. Because of the
unusual natural features of the region, in order to enter it by land, one must cross
remarkably arid terrain as well as mountains. In fact, the coastline of Alta California is
78
quite difficult to reach on foot from just about any direction, especially if one is
unfamiliar with the topography. Mountains block access from almost all directions and
deserts complicate access from both the south and east.
103
Thus the region would have
felt, in a way that has been mostly forgotten today, enclosed, inaccessible, or even
insular.
104
The deserts in particular played a further role in shaping reception to California.
Because of the extreme aridity in the southeastern parts of the territory, deserts served to
heighten the contrast to the relative lushness of what is now called southern California.
In other words, almost any vegetation looked like paradise compared to the scorching
deserts. While the Spaniards’ familiarity with Mediterranean climates certainly
influenced the way they reacted to this region, the deserts of the peninsula magnified the
appeal of Alta California. In fact, the stark contrast between these ecosystems rises, as
did many ecological features, to the level of symbol or metaphor.
105
Thus the new landscapes they encountered as they moved northward became for
them part of the imaginative building blocks for what would become “Nueva” or New
California, in contrast to “Antigua” or Old California. Furthermore, until the Franciscan
priest Francisco Palóu published his Noticias de Nueva California in 1787, there was no
existing terminology for designating the peninsula as different from the mainland.
106
“California” for the sailors, merchants, geographers, and priests who discussed it, ran
from the tip of the peninsula all the way to some vaguely determined point north of
Monterey Bay (roughly 42 degrees latitude, but sometimes as high as Puget Sound) and
to some still more vague line designating the eastern limits of the territory.
107
During this
79
flurry of writing and re-imagining that occurred in 1769 and after, however, California
began to realign and reconsolidate in the European imagination.
The renaming of the regions as “new” and “old” suggests that more than separate
geographic conditions were at stake. Just as easily, and perhaps with more reason, they
might have called the two places “wet” and “dry” California. Even more practically, they
might have called them “northern” and “southern” California. They chose, however, to
designate them by chronology, a detail that is most intriguing in terms of persistent
notions of ahistoricism in California. New places offered a receptacle for visions of
potential; they had riches yet undiscovered and could be imagined ideally. New places
also lacked known problems and were free from the complicated entanglements of
history. Seeing California as a place without history not only allowed for European
powers to claim it as uninhabited land, but also allowed for them to continue to imagine it
as untethered to the problems of the mundane, increasingly modern world, a place with
scurvy and pirates, a place with hostile natives and fragile diplomacy, a place of limited
resources and diminishing returns. For the Spanish especially, limping through a series
of international humiliations, the “new” California was a place where that history could
be forgotten, where that weight of misfortune and uncertainty could be cut loose.
It is also important to remember that what was being designated “New California”
was not really new even to the Spaniards in the eighteenth century. While native
American tribes inhabited California long before the Spaniards or any other Europeans
even knew it existed, the Spanish themselves had sighted, named, and claimed the ports
of this supposedly new place (Alta California) in 1542. Yet it was being called “new”
80
California in 1787, nearly 250 years later. One of the salient points that emerges in the
literature and history of California, long before the close of the eighteenth century, is that
the land often remained “new,” despite its historical connections even to the Europeans
who imagined it that way.
Calling it New California was, therefore, hardly coincidental, for Palóu, the other
Spaniards, or European culture at large. Like Crespí, Spaniards were searching for some
way to reorganize the region in their mind, and this thought process was tracking,
whether consciously or unconsciously, the perennial place of desire that can be traced
back to Montalvo’s romance and to cultural ideas that preceded it. Using their perception
of the geography to buttress their ideological needs, they created their “new” place.
Thus, long before the arrival of film stars, gold rushers, or even trappers from the ragged
westward boundaries of the nascent United States, California made its claim as a place of
reinvention and new beginnings in its literature. Not coincidentally, these claims helped
to empty the region of its history and the long record of its Native inhabitants.
Priest and Soldier: Font and Fages
Crespí and Palóu weren’t the only Spaniards shaping the European understanding
of California in the late eighteenth century. Pedro Fages and Pedro Font also wrote
influential texts that suggest the ideological roots of reactions to the landscape. Fages,
the military commander of an expedition from San Diego to Monterey, offers an
especially interesting example of the interaction of race and geography. For him the
81
landscape near San Diego was “delightful” and “pleasantly picturesque,” but, in a
contrast that would prove prophetic for California, the natives were as disgusting as the
landscape was “alluring.”
108
They are, Fages says, “generally speaking, rather dark, dirty,
of bad figure, short of stature, and slovenly.”
109
At times they are even “evil-looking,
suspicious, treacherous.”
110
Fages’s attraction to the landscape and denigration of the Native Californians
points to a crucial ambiguity and one of the key drivers of ahistoricism. The continued
figuration of the region as an Edenic paradise stripped it of historical associations and
separated it from the normative world. Yet there remained the question of those people
who already inhabited this fabular land; their presence had to be incorporated into, or
reconciled with, the existing mythology. Were the Natives somehow the authors and
owners of this paradise, human caretakers of this supernatural world? Or were they
degraded hangers-on, unworthy by-products of a landscape where they found themselves
by some quirk of circumstance?
For the most part, the Spanish opted for the latter description, which allowed them
to continue to embrace the landscape while dismissing the claims (and the historicity) of
the Natives. Fages’s reaction recalls, of course, the reaction of the Spaniards to Natives
in Baja California, with the exception that instead of being products of a supposedly
worthless landscape, they were now unworthy of the landscape. In both narratives, the
common denominator remains Spanish desire. As in other situations, they simply
changed the narrative to suit their needs, and the overall objective was to erase Natives’
historical claims to the land.
111
82
Font achieves this same objective by returning to biblical metaphors. Font, a
Franciscan priest, was traveling with the second Anza expedition, the colonization effort
made in 1774 by Spanish authorities who realized that to control California, they would
need to fill it with settlers, which meant sending families. In addition, the Spanish
needed a land route from New Spain that could dependably deliver supplies and people to
the missions because sea routes to Alta California were impractical and dangerous.
The narrative and Font’s reactions are most interesting in regard to ahistoricism
because they show yet again how the geographical context was critical to the formation
of cultural understandings of California. When Font and his fellow travelers passed
through the desert and into the mountains, seeing for the first time the relative green of
the coast ranges, the change came like a revelation. In Font’s reckoning, the landscape
itself transforms into metaphor as basic as the contrast between good and evil. As they
crossed from one ecosystem to another, he says, “The hediondilla, shrub of evil augury,
for it can live only in such bad country, which is appropriate to it, lasted to the top of the
ridge. Then at once I noted a change in the landscape…”
112
This break is noted again a
few pages later, when Font remarks, “…this country completely changes its aspect, in
contrast with that left behind on the other side. …as if the scenery of the theatre were
changed, one beholds the Sierra Madre de California now totally different—green and
leafy, with good grass and trees…”
113
Most important is the note of the contrast; the
place they find is improved in their estimation by the place they have left behind.
As the expedition progressed northward, these comments continued, suggesting
that they weren’t a momentary lapse of reason, but an ongoing shift in perception. Like
83
Crespí, Font thought that the landscape was so abundantly layered with flowers and
fruits, especially wild grapes, that it had a cultivated aspect and “looked like a
vineyard.”
114
He also began the familiar slide into hyperbole, exclaiming, when he finally
arrived at the Mission San Gabriel (near present day Los Angeles), that it “has such fine
advantages…that nothing better could be desired” and that he “[did] not remember
having eaten fatter or finer mutton.”
115
At the end of this discourse, he summarizes all he
has said by noting, “In short, this is a country which…looks like the Promised Land.”
116
With a single phrase, he connects the present Spanish settlements and roughly 400 years
of dreaming to the fundamental text of Christian understanding. The metaphoric and
symbolic world of the Bible, always available to Christians traveling to the Americas,
serves Font’s purposes in multiple ways. It connects the struggles of his own party with
the struggles of the Israelites in the Old Testament. Furthermore, it would have resonated
ecologically as well as metaphorically because the Israelites traveled through a desert
before they reached their “promised land.”
Font finishes his commentary by adding that “beginnings are always difficult,
especially in lands where formerly there was nothing.”
117
Thus, not only are “Promised
Lands” available, by divine right, to the chosen, but they are also, like Gardens of Eden,
places without a past (for the conquering party), places where people begin traditions,
rather than continue or disrupt them, places carved out of vacant land, out of the
“nothing” that existed before the chosen arrived. The way he and others reacted to these
changes in the landscape, the ways that they assimilated them into metaphor and adapted
them to a larger narrative about the place of California in relation to other European
84
stories of desire and conquest, suggest that deeply rooted psychological and cultural
forces shaped the way they saw and understood these supposedly innocuous details of
landscape.
Two Women Register Complaints in “Paradise”
Not everyone in California, however, felt the way that Font did about the
landscape. Despite the Spanish imposition of biblical metaphors on the geography,
Natives frequently resisted their assessments. For some of them, the Spanish arrival in
California was not the divine blessing of arrival in a Promised Land, but outright theft;
the Spaniards had not arrived to begin “where formally there was nothing,” but had
instead trespassed on occupied land. The revolt at Mission San Gabriel and the
subsequent trial of Toypurina offer evidence of the anger that often simmers just beneath
the surface of official histories of missionary success. Toypurina, a medicine woman in
southern California, helped to organize various Native rancherías in an attack on the
mission. She was subsequently caught and put to trial. The record of this trial, though
dictated and transcribed by Spanish authorities, nevertheless offers a glimpse of the way
at least some of the Natives felt about Spanish occupation of the landscape.
118
In the transcript, from 1785, Spanish authorities repeatedly return to the issue of
motivation, asking Toypurina in various ways why she had organized the revolt:
Question 2: After they had been warned and advised repeatedly to
keep the peace, why did they come here armed to kill the priests and the
soldiers who had never harmed them?
85
Reply: She responded that it was true that she had ordered Chief
Tomasajaquichi to come and persuade the Christians to trust her and not
the priests. She said that she advised him to do this because she was angry
with the priests and all the others at the mission, because we were living
on their land.
119
The interlocutor in the exchange frames the question so that any motivation would appear
morally suspect, highlighting the fact that “the priests and the soldiers … had never
harmed them” and were thus innocent victims of Native violence. Despite this context,
Toypurina responds without apparent hesitation that she was angry with the Spaniards for
living on their land, a response suggesting, contrary to the subtext of the question, that a
transgression had indeed occurred.
Apparently unsatisfied with her reply, or perhaps still not understanding why the
Natives considered Spanish colonization a transgression, the interlocutor returns to his
attempts to uncover a motive.
Question 4: Have they [the Natives] been harmed in any way at the
hands of the soldiers, priests, or other Christians which would make them
want to kill them?
Reply: She responded that the only harm that she experienced was
that we were living on their land.
120
While it is difficult to assess the tone of an exchange that has passed through several
stages of mediation, it seems safe to say that Spaniards and Natives often differed about
who actually owed the land (a dispute, incidentally, that goes all the way back to Spanish
ceremonies of possession). Furthermore, if the questions put to Toypurina are any
indication, the Spanish interpretation of that landscape, divinely infused and divinely
given, often made it difficult for them to comprehend the source of Native anger.
Obviously, this situation meant that they were likely to disagree about what was fair.
86
As if to make the point about fairness, the interlocutor returns again to the theme
of punishment and justice. “Do they understand,” he asks, “why they are imprisoned and
why the Governor, the Lieutenant, the priests, and all the soldiers are so angry with them?
Are they aware of the just punishment they deserve?”
121
Here he wants to make sure that
Toypurina understands, yet one might reasonably ask the Spaniards the same question.
Did the Spanish understand why the Natives would attack, knowing the risks, knowing,
as he pointed out to her, that “with one shot from a cannon many Indians would die”?
Perhaps, they did not. Or perhaps they did not want to understand a concept that would
have required a radical reconfiguration of their plan for colonization.
Eulalia Callis, a woman from a wealthy and well-connected family in Barcelona,
experienced a version of what may be called California’s narrative of disappointment,
though she appears to have expected little from the place initially. Married to Pedro
Fages, the governor of California and a man almost thirty years her senior, in an
exchange that looks more than a little like a negotiated deal between Callis’s father and
Fages (longtime friends from the military), she found herself bound for California against
her will. A resident of Mexico City, she had tried repeatedly to avoid moving to what
would have then been considered the frontier, but when Fages was able to convince even
her parents of the need to have her in California, she finally agreed to make the arduous
trip across the gulf of California and up the peninsula to Monterey.
122
It was a decision that she likely came to regret. She was pregnant during the trip
and suffered a miscarriage halfway up the peninsula. Upon arrival, she was apparently
dismayed at the living conditions for the governor and the locals in Monterey. Nor did
87
the situation get any better. She suffered another miscarriage along the way to giving
birth to two more children and deeply missed her former home in Mexico City. Clearly,
she was a child of privilege, and her residence, in conditions that would have been far
more austere than was usual for her, certainly contributed to her desire to return home.
Yet, certainly her status as a woman, even an elite woman, altered her experience of
California.
One of the few documents that remains from Eulalia Callis’s time in California
suggests just how different life might be for women in California than for men. In a
petition to officials in Mexico, Callis explains that she discovered her husband, Governor
Pedro Fages, “physically on top of one of his servants, a very young Yuma Indian girl.”
This was the same Pedro Fages who, in his assessment of some California Natives,
described them as “rather dark, dirty, of bad figure, short of stature, and slovenly.”
123
If
Callis’s accusation was true, then her husband’s condemnation of Natives did not extend
to his preteen servants.
124
Regardless of the veracity of her accusation, Callis soon discovered the
consequences for opposing the patriarchy in California. As she recounts in her petition,
when she publicly charged her husband, “Fray Matías Antonio de Noriega, the priest at
the nearby mission, ordered that the offended party [Callis] be locked in a room guarded
by soldiers from the troop.” The fear of reprisal extended to the Native servant as well,
Callis notes, who “[k]neeling before the judge, …uttered what she could, constrained by
her fear of the punishment she faced.” Of course, given the general attitude in California,
rather than considering the women in question, there were instead “cries to restore her
88
husband’s reputation (as if he had lost it with just that one woman),” Callis bitterly adds.
Even the legal procedure was a sham, since the “judge forgot to obtain statements from
everyone at the presidio who had evidence.”
125
Even for Callis, a woman whose social status (which she characterizes as “her
honor and noble birth”) gave her more power than most people in California, that status
was not sufficient when colonial authorities decided to maintain order and protect the
patriarchy. In the most basic sense, Callis’s narrative was not allowed to enter the
conversation in California, a place where narratives were shaped and controlled by the
authorities whenever possible. Callis herself perfectly understood what was at stake, as
she makes clear in her petition: “Was it not important for Your Honor to allow this
woman of sound mind to be heard? Apparently not. Perhaps one fears what she will say
in her defense.” The priests, however, also understood the gravity of the situation, which
they demonstrated by their response to Callis. In a remarkable paragraph, Callis
describes the official reaction:
[O]n Ash Wednesday in the presidio church, the priest who celebrated
Mass also was the judge on the case. After reading from the Gospel and
preaching the sermon, he ended by vilifying me and had the soldiers throw
me out of church. This is what he said: ‘Detain that woman so I can put a
gag over her mouth.’ He made it known that he would excommunicate
anybody who spoke to me or who spoke about the matter. […] On my
saint’s day they tied me up and transferred me to Mission San Carlos.
[…] They stood watch over me and forced me to eat even though I was
sick. I conclude this wretched tale of suffering with the threats of the
aforementioned Father, who said he would have me flogged and placed in
shackles.
126
It is difficult to reconcile this description of life in California with Font’s “Promised
Land” or Fages’s description of San Diego as “delightful,” difficult, that is, until one
89
considers that both Font and Fages, as males and members of elite classes, would have
been among the first to benefit from the very resources they described.
As this incident also demonstrates, emissaries of both church and state (who,
incidentally, didn’t always agree in other matters of management in California) could
quickly find common ground when their own control of those privileges was threatened.
It doesn’t require significant effort to imagine that Fages, whether consciously or not,
considered his sexual encounters with the Yuma girl to be one of the privileges permitted
to him as governor. Indeed, according to a certain line of thought, Natives were part of
California’s “natural resources” and, depending on one’s moral position, available for
exploitation.
127
Though Callis in this document doesn’t explicitly engage with ideas of
history or paradise, her story illuminates the often occluded similarities behind those who
repeated the stories about California and the ways that they protected the privileges those
narratives frequently bestowed.
Conclusion: 1769 to 1784
All of these texts taken together demonstrate that in the late eighteenth century,
California (the idea) began to fragment and consolidate, with certain sections maintaining
the aura of fantasy, exaggeration, and ahistoricism that began in the sixteenth century and
other regions receding into European memory as bits of California unrealized, regions
where California proved irreconcilable with its mythology. Though up to this point most
of the narratives that formed the cultural image of California have been Spanish-language
90
texts (with a couple of important exceptions), from this point forward Spaniards (or their
associates) are not the primary controllers of images of California. Beginning near the
turn of the nineteenth century, a flood of texts in many languages—French, Russian,
English, German—dilute the prior Spanish dominance of eyewitness accounts in
California. Palóu’s narrative, then, suggests an interesting transition at the end of a
sudden burst of Spanish-language texts. Roughly simultaneous with Palóu’s history of
California, a French scientific expedition arrived in Monterey (1784), forever disrupting
the relative control and independence the Spanish maintained in the settlement.
This period of renewed conquest in California occurred in concert with, and in
reaction to, the movement of other foreign governments in the Pacific. Looking back to
Venegas, it’s clear that other parties were increasingly interested in California, and that
the Spanish were increasingly disconcerted by this situation. Indeed, it was this fear of
being outmaneuvered by another government, especially the Russians, that supplied the
Spanish government with sufficient motivation to mount a colonization effort north of the
Jesuit missions on the peninsula.
128
While the Russian threat from the northern Pacific
was somewhat exaggerated, the general increase of foreign interest in California was not.
Though Spanish authority had never been uncontested (pirating raids and Native revolts
being only two examples), the movement of well-funded, highly organized efforts for
territory acquisition on the Pacific side of North America was a new challenge.
Furthermore, as the “science” of exploration gained authority in the eighteenth century,
many of these expeditions sailed under the flag of scientific, rather than national,
91
affiliation, without mentioning that they were reporting secretly back to their home
governments.
129
Just as Crespí, Fages, Palóu, Font, and others were shaping their vision of
California, the first waves of foreigners pushed into the Pacific, beginning with Cook in
1778 and eventually beaching on the shores of California with the arrival of La Pérouse
in 1784. Before the century had closed, a third and highly influential explorer, George
Vancouver (1792), had sailed the entire coast of California and the first American trading
vessel, the Otter (1796), had arrived. Even before the first adobe bricks had dried, waves
of foreigners began to beat against the shore.
92
Chapter One Endnotes

1
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote, trans. Walter Starkie (New York: New
American Library, 1964), 170.
2
Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Memoirs, vol. 2, trans. John Lockhart (London: 1844),
351-352.
3
For a good overview of the events surrounding Cortés and California, see Robert Ryal
Miller, “Cortés and the First Attempt to Colonize California,” California Historical
Quarterly 53.1 (1974): 4-16. See also, Harry Kelsey, “Mapping the California Coast: the
Voyages of Discovery, 1533-1543,” Arizona and the West 26.4 (1984): 307-324; and
Henry R. Wagner, “Spanish Voyages to the Northwest Coast in the Sixteenth Century:
Introduction,” California Historical Society Quarterly 6.4 (1927): 293-331.
4
Díaz del Castillo, The Memoirs, 351-352.
5
Dora Beale Polk, The Island of California: a History of the Myth (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1995), 121. For a brief introduction to the myths and their historical
context, see W. Michael Mathes, “The Mythological Geography of California: Origins,
Development, Confirmation and Disappearance,” The Americas 45.3 (1989): 315-341.
See also Henry R. Wagner, Spanish Voyages to the Northwest Coast of America in the
Sixteenth Century (San Francisco: California Historical Society, 1929).
6
To get a sample of these circulating tropes, see Michael Kowalewski, “Visions of
California,” The Gettysburg Review 9.3 (1996): 481-496. Significantly, his examples
tend to locate the sources for these tropes in the years after the Gold Rush. For other
takes on the issue, see Carey McWilliams, California: the Great Exception (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999; rpt. 1949); Jack Hicks, et al., eds, The Literature of
California: Writings from the Golden State (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2000), 1-13; and Kevin Starr, California: a History (New York: Modern Library, 2005),
xi.
7
For a discussion of the cultural dialogue and its influence on the early modern period,
see Irving Leonard, Books of the Brave: Being an Account of Books and of Men in the
Spanish Conquest and Settlement of the Sixteenth-Century New World (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1992; rpt. 1949).
8
There is a whole category of literature that sought to shape all of the Americas as
“empty” of history and culture, not to mention supposedly degraded (relative to Europe,
of course). See, for instance, the conversation surrounding Jefferson’s Notes on the State
of Virginia, especially those descriptions of America to which he was responding, like
Buffon and de Pauw. For other places in the Americas, see José Rabasa, Without
93

History: Subaltern Studies, the Zapatista Insurgency, and the Specter of History
(University of Pittsburg Press, 2010) or Euclides de Cunha, The Amazon: Land without
History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). For places in Europe, see Eric R.
Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1982). For a discussion focused on Hawaii, see David E. Stannard, “Recounting the
Fables of Savagery: Native Infanticide and the Functions of Political Myth,” Journal of
American Studies 25.3 (1991): 381-417. For a discussion focused on Native Americans,
see Thomas E. Sheridan, “How to tell the Story of a ‘People without History’: Narrative
versus Ethnohistorical Approaches to the Study of the Yaqui Indians through Time,”
Journal of the Southwest 30.2 (1988): 168-189. For a discussion focused on women in
California, see Antonia I. Castañeda, “Gender, Race, and Culture: Spanish-Mexican
Women in the Historiography of Frontier California,” Frontiers: a Journal of Women
Studies 11.1 (1990): 8-20.
9
See Jack Hicks, et al., The Literature of California: Native American Beginnings to
1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 17-68. See also Brian Fagan,
Before California (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); Malcolm Margolin, The Way
We Lived (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1993), 123-129; and Herbert W. Luthin, ed.,
Surviving through the Days (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
10
Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo, The Labors of the Very Brave Knight Esplandián, trans.
William T Little (Binghamton: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1992), 456-
458. Little’s introduction gives context to Montalvo and novels of chivalry. For
additional critical material on Montalvo, see Frank Pierce, Amadís de Gaula (Boston:
Twayne, 1976). For material on Montalvo and chivalry, see Nancy Vogeley, “How
Chivalry Formed the Myth of California,” Modern Language Quarterly 62.2 (2001): 165-
187; and Irving Leonard, Books of the Brave, 36-53.
11
Polk, The Island of California, 124-132. See also Edward Everett Hale, “The Queen of
California,” in His Level Best and Other Stories (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1872), 243-
280.
12
Polk, The Island of California, 22.
13
Batya Weinbaum, Islands of Women and Amazons: Representations and Realities
(Austin: U of Texas Press, 1999), 115. See also Polk, The Island of California, 37.
14
Polk, The Island of California, 31-36.
15
The symbolism of islands is rich and extensive. For a gloss, see Jean Chevalier and
Alain Gheerbrant, A Dictionary of Symbols (New York: Penguin, 1982), 544-546.
16
Montalvo, The Labors, 459.
94

17
Ibid, 459-460.
18
Bouvier, Women and the Conquest of California, 9. See also Antonia I. Castañeda,
“Gender, Race, and Culture: Spanish-Mexican Women in the Historiography of Frontier
California,” Frontiers: a Journal of Women Studies 11.1 (1990): 8-20.
19
For examples from California, see Antonia Castaneda, “Engendering the History of
Alta California” in Contested Eden: California before the Gold Rush, Ramón Gutiérrez
and Richard J. Orsi eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and Virginia
M. Bouvier, Women and the Conquest of California, 1542-1840 (Tucson: Arizona UP,
2001).
20
Cervantes, Don Quixote, 96.
21
Ibid, 295.
22
Polk, Island of California, 45. See also Wagner, Spanish Voyages.
23
David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale UP, 1992),
38.
24
See note in Herbert Eugene Bolton ed., Spanish Exploration in the Southwest, 1542-
1706 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916), 3. See also Hernán Cortés, Letters
from Mexico, Anthony Pagden trans. and ed. (New Haven: Yale UP, 1986).
25
Anthony Pagden, introduction to A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, by
Bartolome de las Casas (New York: Penguin, 1992), xxxiv.
26
See Irving Leonard, Books of the Brave (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1949) for general
literary culture of early modern Spain. Some of the effects of deliberately restricted
information, particularly with regard to navigation, are covered in Weber, The Spanish
Frontier, 55.
27
Derek Wilson, The Circumnavigators (New York: M. Evans and Company, 1989), 47
and 60.
28
Wagner, Spanish Voyages, 56. See also Polk, Island of California, 102.
29
See Polk, Island of California, 133. See also Weber, Spanish Frontier, 40.
30
Polk, Island of California, 140.
95

31
For information on Coronado, see Richard Flint and Shirley Cushing Flint, eds., “They
were not Familiar with His Majesty, Nor did They Wish to Be His Subjects”: Documents
of the Coronado Expedition, 1539-1542 (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press,
2005); and Richard Flint, No Settlement, No Conquest: a History of the Coronado
Entrada (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008).
32
Weber, The Spanish Frontier, 46-49.
33
Cervantes, Don Quixote, 236.
34
This is one of the overriding themes of Polk’s book. See, for example, Island of
California, 306-307.
35
Weber, Spanish Frontier, 41. For a more detailed background and biography on
Cabrillo, see Harry Kelsey, Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo (San Marino: Huntington Library
Press, 1986).
36
Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, “Relation of the Voyage of Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, 1542-
1543” in Spanish Exploration in the Southwest, 1542-1706, ed. Herbert Eugene Bolton
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916), 22.
37
Norman C. Roberts, Baja California Plant Field Guide (La Jolla: Natural History Pub.
Co., 1989).
38
Cabrillo, “Relation of the Voyage,” 22.
39
Ronald D. Quinn and Sterling C. Keeley, Introduction to California Chaparral
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 22-23. The editors assert, “Less than
three percent of the world’s land surface has a Mediterranean climate.”
40
Weber, Spanish Frontier, 33.
41
Genesis 3:17-19. Obviously, early modern Spanish-speakers would not likely have
read the King James Version of the Bible. More likely, they would have encountered this
story in Spanish in the Ferrara edition or, later, in the Reina-Valera edition. This
translation was chosen to give English-speakers a text roughly contemporary to the
Spanish-language version. See Peter Ackroyd, ed., Cambridge History of the Bible
(Cambridge: U of Cambridge P, 1963-70), vol. 2, 465; and vol. 3, 125, 354.
42
Genesis 3:24. Chevalier and Gheerbrant, Symbols, 736-737.
43
Chevalier and Gheerbrant, Symbols, 736-737. The literature on paradise is extensive,
and it is complicated by the potential overlapping of terms like heaven or even utopia.
96

For an overview, see Jean Delumeau, History of Paradise: the Garden of Eden in Myth
and Tradition, trans. Matthew O’Connell (New York: Continuum, 1995). For a
cartographical perspective, see Alessandro Scafi, Mapping Paradise: a History of Heaven
on Earth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). See also Polk’s discussion of
Eden as a contributor to myths of paradise in Island of California, 33-36; and Edward J
Wright, The Early History of Heaven (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
44
There is no shortage of material on Drake. The book that has garnered the most recent
attention (and controversy) is Harry Kelsey, Sir Francis Drake: The Queen’s Pirate
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). See also Bruce Wathen, Sir Francis Drake:
The Construction of a Hero (Rochester: Boydell & Brewer, 2009); and Sir Francis Drake
and the Famous Voyage, 1577-1580: Essays Commemorating the Quadricentennial of
Drake’s Circumnavigation of the Earth, Norman Thrower, ed. (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984); and Henry R. Wagner, Sir Francis Drake’s Voyage Around the
World: Its Aims and Achievements (San Francisco: John Howell, 1926). For a collection
and discussion of the primary sources, see John Hampden, ed., Francis Drake, Privateer:
Contemporary Narratives and Documents (University of Alabama Press, 1972).
45
See Edward Von der Porten, et al., “Who Made Drake’s Plate of Brass? Hint: It
Wasn’t Francis Drake,” California History 81.2 (2002): 116-133; Harry Kelsey, “Did
Francis Drake really visit California?” Western Historical Quarterly 21.4 (1990): 444-
462; Warren L. Hanna, Lost Harbor: the Controversy over Drake’s California
Anchorage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). One interesting text looks at
Drake’s account for ethnography on the Native Californians; Robert F. Heizer, Francis
Drake and the California Indians, 1579 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1947).
46
In fact, stories about Drake magnified various rumors about California’s geography and
inspired further Spanish expeditions to California.
47
Hampden, Francis Drake, Privateer, 120.
48
Francis Drake, The World Encompassed (London: Hakluyt Society, 1854), 115-116.
49
Drake, The World Encompassed, 117.
50
Ibid, 128.
51
Ibid, 128-129.
52
Ibid, 131-132.
53
Ibid, 131.
97

54
Ibid, 132.
55
Weber, Spanish Frontier, 83-84.
56
As Leonard notes, “The Conquistador … often shar[ed] in the capitalistic ventures… of
their expeditions,” which provided a powerful motivation for further pursuits of plunder.
Leonard, Books of the Brave, 4.
57
Sebastian Vizcaíno, “Diary of Sebastian Vizcaino, 1602-1603,” in Spanish Exploration
in the Southwest, 1542-1706, ed. Herbert Eugene Bolton (New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1916), 75.
58
Antonio de la Ascensión, “A Brief Report of the Discovery in the South Sea, by Fray
Antonio de la Ascención, 1602-1603,” in Spanish Exploration in the Southwest, 1542-
1706, ed. Herbert Eugene Bolton (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916), 105. For a
discussion of Ascensión and exaggeration, see W. Michael Mathes, “Early California
Propaganda: The Works of Fray Antonio de la Ascensión,” California Historical
Quarterly 50.2 (1971): 195-205.
59
Ascensión, “Brief Report,” 110.
60
Ibid, 114.
61
Polk, Island of California, 129.
62
Ascensión, “Brief Report,” 114.
63
Ibid, 129.
64
Ibid, 112.
65
Weber, Spanish Frontier, 77.
66
Juan de Oñate, “Journey of Oñate to California by Land, [Zárate, 1626],” in Spanish
Exploration in the Southwest, 1542-1706, ed. Herbert Eugene Bolton (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1916), 276.
67
This is in part a function of Spanish secrecy in regard to cartography. Maps and
explorers logs were treated as state secrets and were carefully guarded. See Weber,
Spanish Frontier, 55.
68
This powerful strain of narratives is usually associated with the twentieth century,
particularly with Los Angeles. See Kowalewski, “Visions of California,” 490; and Mike
Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage, 1992),
98

17-88. Davis’s terminology for this group is “noir,” which he pits against “sunshine.”
For another reading of these themes, see Gerald Haslam, “Literary California: ‘The
Ulitmate Frontier of the Western World,’” California History 68.4 (1998/1990): 188-195.
69
See, for example, Lands of Promise and Despair: Chronicles of Early California,
1535-1846, Beebe and Senkewicz, eds. (Berkeley: Heyday, 2001).
70
See The Four Voyages of Columbus, Cecil Jane, trans. and ed. (New York: Dover,
1988).
71
Pedro de Castañeda, “Account of the Expedition to Cibola which Took Place in the
Year 1540, in which All those Settlements, their Ceremonies and Customs, Are
Described,” in The Journey of Coronado, George Parker Winship trans. and ed. (New
York: A.S. Barnes & Co, 1904), 26.
72
The best account of the peninsula is Harry W. Crosby, Antigua California: Mission and
Colony on the Peninsular Frontier, 1697-1768 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1994).
73
For Spanish activities in Alta California during the latter half of this period, see Donald
C. Cutter, “Plans for the Occupation of Upper California: a New Look at the ‘Dark Age’
from 1602-1769,” Journal of San Diego History 24.1 (1978).
74
See Beebe and Senkewicz eds., Lands of Promise and Despair, 94. See also Johann
Jakob Baegert, Observations in Lower California, trans. Brandenberg and Baumann
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952).
75
See Geronimo Boscana, Chinigchinich in Life in California by Alfred Robinson (Santa
Barbara: Peregrine Press, 1970), 34. See also Baegert, Observations in Lower California.
76
Weber, Spanish Frontier, 60-90.
77
Ibid, 147-171.
78
Kevin Starr, California: a History (New York: Modern Library, 2005), 40.
79
Irving Leonard makes a similar argument about the craving for fantasies that were
always just beyond reach. Leonard, Books of the Brave, 11-12, 19, and 25. This was also
the case in other places, such as Australia. See J.M.R. Cameron, “Western Australia,
1616-1829: an Antipodean Paradise,” Geographical Journal 140.3 (1974): 373-385.
80
The list of scholarship on genocide in early California alone is extensive. See, for
example, Heizer and Almquist, The Other Californians (Berkeley: University of
99

California Press, 1971); Albert Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier,
(New Haven: Yale UP, 1988); James Sandos, Converting California (New Haven: Yale
UP, 2004); Kent Lightfoot, Indians, Missions, and Merchants (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2005); and Jackson and Castillo, Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish
Colonization (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995). This list does not
include, of course, the long record of atrocities after U.S. occupation of the region, nor
atrocities in the Americas in general.
81
Crosby, Antigua California: Mission and Colony on the Peninsular Frontier, 1697-
1768 (Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1994), 57 and 151. See also Weber, Spanish
Frontier, 239.
82
Eusebio Francisco Kino, “Report and Relation of the New Conversions,” in Spanish
Exploration in the Southwest, 1542-1706, ed. Herbert Eugene Bolton (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1916), 457.
83
Kino, “Report and Relation,” 454.
84
Ibid, 437 and 441.
85
Ibid, 453.
86
This notion persists, in a sense, into the twentieth century. See Joan Didion’s
comments on California being far from “the bleak and difficult east” in the Introduction.
87
The fluctuations in belief regarding the island myth are just one example of this
process. The island was “disproved” on more than one occasion. See Mathes,
“Mythological Geography of California,” 315-341.
88
Venegas, A Natural and Civil History of California, vol. 1 (London: Rivington and
Fletcher, 1759), 10.
89
Venegas, Natural and Civil History, 13.
90
Ibid, 25.
91
Ibid, 28
92
Juan Crespí, A Description of Distant Roads, trans. Alan K. Brown (San Diego: San
Diego State UP, 2001), 183.
93
Crespí, Description, 187.
100

94
Of course, the opposite formulation is also common, that California is the place where
one wanted to be and, unfortunately, is. The two formulations suggest the idea of a trap
and an escape, a dichotomy that recalls the dual nature of islands.
95
The season of travel often affected travelers’ reactions to California. This was
especially true for those unfamiliar with Mediterranean climates and their growing
seasons. California’s vegetation is typically greenest during the winter months, the time
of peak rainfall and growth for chaparral, while the same ecosystems typically look dead
or dormant in the summer, during times of extended drought. For those writers arriving
during the winter (or early spring), California might seem a kind frost-free paradise. For
those arriving in the summer, and expecting vibrant growth, California might seem an
example of sun-blasted perdition. See Greg Hise for an analysis of examples.
96
Crespí, Description, 195.
97
Ibid, 199.
98
Crespí, in Spanish Exploration in the Southwest, 1542-1706, ed. Herbert Eugene
Bolton (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916), 124.
99
Crespí, Description, 271.
100
Ibid, 275.
101
These reactions and outcomes are related to later comments by the English about
California resembling a nobleman’s park or garden, though with a financial, rather than
religious, subtext. See the discussion of Beechey, for example, in Chapter Three. They
are also linked by their metaphoric creation of an enclosed space in which artifice, rather
than a “natural” process, seems to play a role in shaping the environment.
102
See M. Kat Anderson, et al, “A World of Balance and Plenty” and William Preston,
“Serpent in the Garden,” both in Contested Eden, Gutierrez and Orsi, eds. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998).
103
In addition to general geographic treatises on California, such as Allan A. Schoenherr,
A Natural History of California (Berkeley: U of California P, 1995), see John W.
Robinson, Gateways to Southern California (Big Santa Anita Historical Society, 2005).
104
The metaphoric implications of insularity, however, have not been forgotten. See
Carey McWilliams, Southern California: an Island on the Land (Salt Lake City:
Peregrine Smith, 1973; rpt. 1946). For a more recent example, see the discussion of Joan
Didion in the Introduction and Conclusion.
101

105
This is still common today as the state’s biodiversity is often metaphorically linked to
its cultural, literary, or ethnic diversity.
106
Prior to this expedition, Kino does call the northern part of the territory “Alta
California,” but does not use the designation to separate new from old. See Eusebio
Francisco Kino, Kino’s Historical Memoir of Pimería Alta, vol. I (Cleveland: Arthur H.
Clark, 1919), 339. For an older gloss on some of the changes in terminology, see Lynn
Townsend White Jr., “Changes in the Popular Concept of ‘California,’” California
Historical Society Quarterly 19.3 (1940): 221-222.
107
See Beebe and Senkewicz eds., Lands of Promise and Despair, 147-149; and Crosby,
Antigua California, 4. For a look at the boundaries via Spanish-language naming, see H.
F. Raup and William B. Pounds, Jr., “Northernmost Spanish Frontier in California: As
Shown by the Distribution of Geographic Names,” California Historical Society
Quarterly 32.1 (1953): 43-48.
108
Pedro Fages, A Historical, Political, and Natural Description of California, trans.
Herbert Ingram Priestley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1937), 6 and 20. For
more material on Fages, see Donald A. Nuttall, “Pedro Fages and the Advance of the
Northern Frontier of New Spain, 1767-1782,” PhD diss, 1964; and Donald A. Nuttall,
“Light Cast Upon Shadows: the Non-California Years of Don Pedro Fages,” California
Historical Quarterly 56.3 (1977): 250-269.
109
Fages, Description of California, 21.
110
Ibid, 11.
111
The uses of natives for European imaginations has a long history in California. See,
for example, James J. Rawls, Indians of California: the Changing Image (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1984).
112
Pedro Font, Font’s Complete Diary: a Chronicle of the Founding of San Francisco,
Herbert Eugene Bolton trans. and ed. (Berkeley: U of California P, 1939), 157.
113
Font, Complete Diary, 160.
114
Ibid, 168.
115
Ibid, 177.
116
Ibid, 178.
117
Ibid, 178.
102

118
For material on Toypurina, see Steven W. Hackel, “Sources of Rebellion: Indian
Testimony and the Mission San Gabriel Uprising of 1785,” Ethnohistory 50.4 (2003):
643-669; Antonia Castañeda, “Engendering the History of Alta California” in Contested
Eden: California before the Gold Rush, Ramón Gutiérrez and Richard J. Orsi eds.
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and James A. Sandos, “Social Control
within Missionary Frontier Society: Alta California, 1769-1821,” in Choice, Persuasion,
and Coercion: Social Control on Spain’s North American Frontier, Jesús F. de la Teja,
ed. (Albuquerque: Univeristy of New Mexico Press, 2005), who also compares these two
women, though his argument is different than mine. For theoretical and contextual
material on women in California, see Antonia I. Castañeda, “Presidarias y Pobladoras:
Spanish-Mexican Women in Frontier Monterey, Alta California, 1770-1821,” PhD diss,
1990; and Antonia I. Castañeda, “Gender, Race, and Culture: Spanish-Mexican Women
in the Historiography of Frontier California,” Frontiers: a Journal of Women Studies 11.1
(1990): 8-20; Antonia Castañeda, “Engendering,” ibid; Virginia M. Bouvier, Women and
the Conquest of California, 1542-1840 (Tucson: Arizona UP, 2001); Bárbara O. Reyes,
Private Women, Public Lives: Gender and the Missions of the Californias (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2009); Miroslava Chávez-García, Negotiating Conquest:
Gender and Power in California, 1770s to 1880s (Tucson: University of Arizona Press,
2004); María Raquél Casas, Married to a Daughter of the Land: Spanish-Mexican
Women and Interethnic Marriage in California, 1820-1880 (Reno: University of Nevada
Press, 2007); Barbara L. Voss, “Domesticating Imperialism: Sexual Politics and the
Archaeology of Empire,” American Anthropologist 110.2 (2008): 191-2003; Albert
Hurtado, Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Old California (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1999); Yolanda Venegas, “The Erotics of
Racialization: Gender and Sexuality in the Making of California,” Frontiers: a Journal of
Women Studies 25.3 (2004): 63-89.
119
“From Investigations of Occurrences at Mission San Gabriel on the Night of October
25, 1785,” in Lands of Promise and Despair: Chronicles of Early California, 1535-1846
(Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2001), 248.
120
“Investigations of Occurrences,” 248.
121
Ibid, 249.
122
For an extensive discussion of Eulalia Callis, see Bárbara O. Reyes, Private Women,
Public Lives: Gender and the Missions of the Californias (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 2009), 93-110. Additional information can be found in James A. Sandos, “Social
Control within Missionary Frontier Society: Alta California, 1769-1821,” in Choice,
Persuasion, and Coercion: Social Control on Spain’s North American Frontier, Jesús F.
de la Teja, ed. (Albuquerque: Univeristy of New Mexico Press, 2005); Donald Nuttall,
The Señoras Gobernadoras of Spanish Alta California: a Comparative Study (Santa
103

Barbara: Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation, 1998); Susanna Bryant Dakin,
Rose or Rose Thorn? Three Women of Spanish California (Berkeley: Friends of the
Bancroft Library, 1963); Irving Berdine Richman, California Under Spain and Mexico,
1535-1847 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), 156-158; Theodore Hittell, History of
California, vol. I (San Francisco: N.J. Stone, 1898), 529-530; Charles E. Chapman, A
History of California: the Spanish Period (New York: Macmillan, 1921), 398-400;
Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of California, vol. I, 1542-1800 (San Francisco: The
History Company, 1886), 389-393.
123
Fages, Description of California, 21. See previous section for a discussion of Fages.
124
Some writers, in particular male historians from early in the twentieth century, have
speculated that Callis might have invented the story in order to gain leverage over her
husband and force him to return to Mexico City. Recent scholars have correctly noted
that this issue is far less important than the reaction of the authorities to the accusation
itself. See Reyes, Private Women, Public Lives, 93-110.
125
“Petition by Doña Eulalia Callis, the Wife of Don Pedro Fages, Governor of the
Californias, that Her Case be Heard and That She Be Freed from the Oppression from
which She Is Suffering (Summary),” in Lands of Promise and Despair: Chronicles of
Early California, 1535-1846 (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2001), 237. As the title suggests,
this document is actually a summary made by a transcriber; the originals were lost in San
Francisco’s earthquake and fire in 1906. See introduction to the selection, ibid, 236.
126
“Petition,” 237-238.
127
Hackel, Children of Coyote, 226. He notes that “Indian women, in the eyes of many
Spaniards, had no honor to lose” and that sexual crimes against Natives received lighter
punishments. See his larger discussion of “illicit sex,” 222-227.
128
See Weber, Spanish Frontier, 237-239.
129
Jean-Francois de La Pérouse, Life in a California Mission: the Journals of Jean
Francois de la Pérouse, Malcolm Margolin ed. (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1989), 6.
104
Chapter Two
Consider the Ravens: Indolence and Industry, 1785-1815
When Jean-Francois de Galaup de La Pérouse reached the shores of Monterey in
mid-September of 1786, he found the Spanish working hard to recreate European
civilization in a place that they (and most other Europeans) considered about as far from
it as one could get. They had been earnestly and actively trying to colonize the region
north of Jesuit settlement, which they were calling Nueva (or Alta) California, for
roughly fifteen years, and, if we are to judge by the opinions of their peers, they had
made little progress. La Pérouse’s report, Voyage du La Pérouse Autour du Monde,
culled from his journals and published in Paris in 1797, marks the first instance of that
appraisal, and it stands at the head of a series of evaluations of California by writers who
were not aligned with the Spanish government.
1
Most of these evaluations were not
favorable.
In the late eighteenth century, during a period of strengthening Enlightenment
ideologies, this literature emerged as the textual apparatus of various scientific
expeditions, in particular those of France, Spain, England, the United States, and Russia.
Not coincidentally, this period of increasing scientific exploration in the Pacific occurred
alongside an equally powerful mercantile and imperial expansion, with the declared
humanitarian aims of science assisting the undeclared financial aims of merchants and
governments. The shift toward rationality and complex mechanisms of commerce also
produced an ideology of efficiency that valorized “industry” and demonized “indolence.”
105
Not surprisingly, the application of this palette of ideologies on the canvas of
California resulted in a picture that was favorable to foreign acquisition rather than to
continued control by natives or Spaniards. Despite claims for the new tools of critical
observation, this wave of international writers continued the future-oriented,
dehistoricizing work of the predominately Spanish-speaking writers before them
(although in ways that reflected their own political and cultural contexts). They
borrowed information from prior accounts, maintained a fraternal fellowship with other
explorers, and reproduced their own culturally-rooted prejudices. Furthermore, while
traveling as ambassadors of rational, disinterested description, these writers produced
texts that revealed a confused, deeply invested relationship with California, even (or
especially) when they pictured it as a degenerate wasteland. Using a turn of argument
convenient to their sponsoring governments, they transformed the California wasteland
into wasted potential, a squandered or dormant resource that another more enlightened
government might easily recuperate or resuscitate.
As the Spanish empire weakened and foreign surveillance strengthened, writers in
California implicitly and explicitly connected value to vulnerability. In the circular,
decidedly irrational logic of California literature, denigration increased value, with
images of a defenseless and degenerate culture making the land more desirable rather
than less. Spaniards and natives were described as lazy or stupid, and therefore unworthy
of the region’s almost mythical fecundity. Depicting California as an abundant paradise
provided the contrast needed to highlight their profligacy and incompetence; it also
happened to provide a justification for conquest.
106
However, the narrative of abundant paradise presented its own problems. Both
Europeans and Euro-Americans found themselves increasingly entangled in their own
rhetorical machinery and succumbing to the languorous appeal of the place they claimed
to despise. Unlike prior Spanish explorers, these writers often dealt in a kind of literary
espionage, a genre that (because of the political context) required confounding postures
and contradicting reactions. They proclaimed California presently inconsequential but
eventually crucial, totally worthless but simultaneously desirable. They created a bizarre
environmental determinism that posited the dangers of over abundance, even while they
claimed that California’s resources were under utilized. They claimed the Catholic
religion was phony and superficial (if they were Protestant writers), even as they attacked
its cultural entrenchment and power over natives. In short, California became an image
of what was desired as well as feared.
Throughout this period, the idea of California served as a highly flexible (though
sometimes unmanageable) rhetorical tool for a variety of writers, a concept that
constantly shifted depending on one’s point of view. As in prior centuries, geography
never stood as an inert set-piece behind the actors, but instead played an active role. In
this cycle of words and geographies, texts and contexts, prior narratives always
circulated, even in the so-called science of critical observation. Ironically, for this
perpetually new place, seeing California meant peering through the residue of older ideas.
In fact, context influenced description and description influenced context to such an
extent that one wonders how much of California was seen and how much imagined.
107
Trade and Text in the Pacific
La Pérouse’s description, whether seen or imagined, nearly sank to the bottom of
the South Sea. After his ten-day visit in Monterey, La Pérouse (1741-c.1788) and his two
ships, the L’Astrolabe and La Boussole, continued on to China, Siberia, and Australia,
dropping off a packet of his journals in each location. In March 1788, they sailed out of
Botany Bay and were never seen again.
2
Despite the political and social turmoil of the
French Revolution, the surviving journals were assembled and edited for publication in
1797, a testament to his continued high regard and the nationalistic fervor he inspired.
3
The publication was quickly translated into several languages, including English,
German, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Italian, and Russian.
4
In addition to its narrow escape from oblivion, Voyage du La Pérouse Autour du
Monde resembles many early California texts in another way; it had a famous literary
precedent. This precedent requires some backtracking in order to properly understand the
context for the Frenchman’s voyage. La Pérouse was not part of the same class of
explorers who reached California in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Those
sailors and soldiers, part mercenary and part treasure hunter, usually traveled under the
banner of religion and empire, bringing their version of salvation to the masses—and
padding their purses at the same time. Instead, La Pérouse was part of an emerging
contingent of travelers whose primary (declared) reason for exploration was the
advancement of science—describing, categorizing, and charting the globe.
5
These
explorers, steeped in ideologies of the Enlightenment, patrolled the Pacific in growing
108
numbers after the publication of James Cook’s enormously influential narrative, A
Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, in 1778. Ironically, Cook, who never reached California,
was in a sense directly responsible for La Pérouse’s arrival there roughly eight years
later.
6
Cook, who made three expeditions in the Pacific before he was killed and
ceremonially flayed by Hawaiians, published a narrative of his journey that was widely
read around the world. It contained not only exacting details of longitude and latitude,
but also the imprimatur of science, examining flora, fauna, and cultures wholly unknown
to Europeans. Diagrams, speculations on origins and affiliations, and explication of
native cultures filled its pages, motivating other governments and explorers to contribute
to expansion of science, supposedly for the benefit of the world.
7
Of course, if this
exploration assisted in enriching the coffers of a particular sponsoring government, that
was an additional (though unannounced) benefit. Trade, while declared second to science
in importance, emerged as a willing accomplice in these expeditions. In fact, a trading
discovery on the Cook expedition led to one of the major explosions of exploration,
capital infusion, and literature in nineteenth-century California.
8
John Ledyard, one of the crew on Cook’s expedition, published in 1783 a book on
his travels with Cook in which he mentioned that there was an abundance of sea otter fur
in the north Pacific, furs that were hunted by the natives and could be acquired in trade
for a few nails, buttons, a spoon or other commonplace items—and later sold for
“astonishing profits.”
9
This sailor remarked that the Chinese paid “from 50 to 70 dollars
a skin…for what [they] bought for only a hatchet or saw.” The fur trade between the
109
coast of California and China precipitated a rapid infusion of capital into the Pacific.
London companies raised extravagant sums of money to outfit trading expeditions, and
along the way, many of these sailors wrote about their journeys.
10
La Pérouse’s presence in Monterey was, therefore, at least partially an outcome of
this clamoring for control of the new trade network. In fact, one of those eagerly
consuming Cook’s journals was France’s King Louis XVI, who was inspired to send La
Pérouse on his circumnavigation by his reading of the English captain. The French king
was so inspired that he included in his instructions to the French navigator a very explicit
admonition.
He will similarly ascertain the latitude at which one can begin to buy furs,
the quantities the Americas can provide, which goods and items would be
most appropriate to buy furs with, what facilities there might be for an
establishment along this coast should this new branch of commerce offer
enough advantages to traders to lead them to engage in it in the hope of
exchanging the furs in China where they can be sold easily and
profitably.
11
The instructions continue in a similar vein, requesting information on samples, prices,
and markets. Though he was apparently stopping in California to report on flora, fauna,
and navigation for compilers of encyclopedias in Europe, he also noted the plentiful sea
otter in the waters around Monterey as well as the viability of the region for settlement by
European powers.
12
In fact, animal skins were quite literally the last words in La
Pérouse’s chapter on Monterey.
13
These were the same animal skins that would attract
Vancouver, as well as the first U.S. trading vessel to arrive in California (called, not
surprisingly, the Otter). In other words, it was this animal and its description in these
texts that, as much as anything, initiated massive shifts in international trade at the
110
opening of the nineteenth century in California.
14
Regarding the sea otter and its potential
benefit to the Spanish, La Pérouse himself declares, “It is to Captain Cook and the
publication of his work that they are indebted for this dawn of information, which will
procure them the greatest advantages.”
15
Despite his occupational and ideological connections to Cook, La Pérouse was
different from him in one important way. La Pérouse was Catholic (even if tending
toward agnostic), and though he might have had a nationalist prejudice against the
Spanish, he did not have the anti-Catholic sentiment readily visible in writers from
England and the United States.
16
Still, La Pérouse does not have a generally favorable
impression of the Spanish settlement, nor of the priests who are charged with managing
the lives of their Indian neophytes. In fact, keeping in mind that La Pérouse probably
moderated the language of the report for political reasons, the document describes a
virtual dungeon for native Americans. La Pérouse even compares Monterey to a West
Indian plantation: “…[W]e have seen both men and women in irons, and others in the
stocks [and] …the noise of the whip might have struck our ears…”
17
The conflict that plays out in his mind is evident as he tries to resolve the
theological imperatives of conversion with his rational objective for human liberty.
A friend to the rights of men rather than to theology, I could have wished,
I confess, that there had been joined to the principles of Christianity a
legislation which might gradually have made citizens of men whose state
at present scarcely differs from that of the Negro inhabitants of our
colonies…
18
Yet, La Pérouse not only struggles with his scruples about the treatment of the natives,
but also struggles with the value of those humans in question.
111
I know that these people have very few ideas, and still less stability, and
that if they were to cease to be treated as children, they would escape from
those who have taken the pains to instruct them. I know likewise that
reasoning can produce very little effect upon them, that it is absolutely
necessary to appeal to their senses…”
19
Ultimately, La Pérouse, with his conflicted notions of justice in a place he struggles to
understand, can’t decide what he wants and settles for a mixture of praise and blame,
remarking with an almost audible sigh, “Still I could wish that the minds of the austere,
charitable, and religious individuals I have met with in these missions were a little more
tinctured with the spirit of philosophy.”
20
His struggle to decide how he feels about California, especially in terms of his
Enlightenment notions of rationality and the confused benevolence that they produce,
illustrates an emerging narrative in the literature of California, one which had a sustained
impact on visions of the region as a place without history. For La Pérouse and others
who followed after him, especially those not friendly to Catholicism, California becomes
a wasteland and, simultaneously, a place of wasted potential. Evidence of this pattern
emerges immediately, when La Pérouse switches from a critique of the shortcomings of
the Spanish cultural objective to hyperbolic praise for the natural environment, an echo of
earlier Spanish narratives of enchantment and disappointment. La Pérouse gushes, “The
soil is likewise inexpressibly fertile. Every kind of garden plant thrives astonishingly.”
21
As if that weren’t praise enough, he adds, “Our European cultivators can form no
conception of so abundant a fertility.”
22
Here again, geography makes up for the apparent
shortcomings in culture, but also puts those shortcomings in stark relief. Furthermore,
112
though not emphasized here, this pattern undermines the present while it gestures toward
the future—a mode of description that favored takeover.
Despite his effusive praise for the land, La Pérouse sums up the settlement with
typical ambivalence. “New California, notwithstanding its fertility, does not yet possess
a single European colonist. […] If it were closer to Europe, it would be in no respect
inferior to Virginia…”
23
While he either ignores or accidentally omits the pueblos of San
Jose and Los Angeles, he emphasizes the necessity of a European presence for the
colonial marriage with fecund California. This has, for the French, the concomitant
benefit of advertising the limited nature of Spanish control and buttressing future claims
for unoccupied lands. He also makes clear the way distance from European culture
determines value. California is “inferior” to Virginia because of its greater distance from
Europe, the centers of power and knowledge (as well as crucial supplies) for La Pérouse.
Yet it was this same separation from Europe that made California vulnerable and,
ironically, more valuable. In keeping with its prior tendencies toward paradox and
extremes, California was both too far away and just far enough.
A Spanish Defense of the “Vigorous and Happy”
If imitation is the highest form of flattery, then the late eighteenth century would
have been incredibly flattering for Cook, had he lived to see the various expeditions
launched in imitation of his own. In this flurry of late-eighteenth century Pacific
exploration, the Spaniards offered their own tribute to the British navigator, an expedition
113
so conscious of Cook’s example that it was deliberately designed “to emulate and
possibly to surpass” his accomplishments.
24
The voyage of Alejandro Malaspina was
intended as a circumnavigation that would advance science generally and serve the added
purpose of initiating Spain into the exclusive ranks of those nations who were reaping the
benefits of those scientific advances. It was, therefore, mission of reconnaissance and
national pride for a country that saw itself drifting in the doldrums with rags hanging
from the mainmasts while the rest of the world passed with full sails.
Scholars still aren’t sure who wrote the journals, and because the Malaspina
expedition as a whole was ignored upon its return for political reasons, it remained in
archives for decades.
25
The influence of the journal on the reading public and later
writers is, therefore, quite different than other texts previously discussed. It does offer,
however, perspective on California from Spanish authorities who were not living in the
region, during a time dominated by foreign accounts. Furthermore, the journal shows
how California could appear quite different depending on the vantage point of the writer.
While La Pérouse described the settlements in negative terms, setting a pattern for other
writers that would be continued by Vancouver and Shaler (among others), the journal of
the Sutil and Mexicana suggests other allegiances and the ways those allegiances could
influence the description of California. In fact, the deviations from the standard script
demonstrate perhaps more effectively the flexibility of California as a rhetorical device
and the way the same geography could be shaped to very different arguments.
In one of the most interesting passages, for example, the journal writer pauses in
his assessment of the settlement to launch a spirited defense of the soldiers of Monterey.
114
Sounding very different from later English and American writers, he takes special care to
note how hard the soldiers work. For instance, he argues that they have very little leisure,
as their time, when not consumed with guarding the presidio, is necessarily taken up with
“domestic labors.” Furthermore, he claims, they work cheerfully even in difficult
circumstances.
26
Already accustomed to this continual activity, their spirits are not
overwhelmed by the weight of work, but rather they enjoy with the
greatest happiness the moments that they can give to diversion. With
vigorous and happy spirits, they go off to the forest to hunt the cattle-
destroying bears in order to kill them. They spend a great deal of the night
dancing when this diversion is offered to them.
27
This picture of “continual activity” and “vigorous” workers stands in stark contrast with
what becomes the prevailing image of the lazy Spaniard or Mexican. Yet, while it
contradicts one stereotype, it offers evidence of another: the image of the “happy,”
“dancing” Spaniard or Mexican, the perpetually celebratory and easy life that would be
popularized by Euro-Americans especially in the latter part of the nineteenth century.
For the writer of the journal, however, the “diversion” that was to become a
dominant trope in California, and an engine of ahistoricism, was secured only after
strenuous work, a point lost on later European and Euro-American writers. While those
writers would see California as promising in spite of the Spaniards, this writer saw the
Spanish soldiers as promising in spite of California. These soldiers were “worthy of
being presented to serve as models even in the most-civilized settlements and worthy of
the greatest considerations and comforts in a colony almost totally short on
resources…”
28
The system in which the Spaniards find themselves employed is so
115
disagreeable that the writer claims, “Every political argument that can be proposed to
defend this [present] system can easily be destroyed.”
29
The subject of “diversion” was actually quite serious. Industry, or willingness to
work and efficiency in work, was one of the crucial terms of the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth century.
30
Writers from European and Euro-American cultures applied it
frequently to cultures in the Americas as a method for assessing value and establishing
hierarchies. While typically deployed as a measure of efficiency, because of its
connection to motivation for work, the term had a moral dimension. People who lacked
industry, in other words, were thought of as deficient not simply in strength or ingenuity,
but also in character; they were said to lack the requisite moral fiber to work diligently.
In part this critique stems from Protestant strains of Christian doctrine, which emphasized
demonstrations of morality in work. Recall, for example, Ben Franklin pushing his
wheelbarrow through the streets merely to give the appearance of industriousness. Lack
of industry (or laziness) was not simply a Protestant peccadillo, however; “sloth” had
been vilified in the Judeo-Christian tradition for centuries.
31
More importantly for the
eighteenth century, industry also emerged in the wake of Enlightenment philosophies and
European cultural shifts toward key terms like “efficiency” and “rationality.”
32
Because industry and related oppositional terms like laziness were deployed as
determiners of cultural inferiority or superiority, they are important to California and
especially ahistoricism. According to the European and Euro-American point of view,
those without industrious cultures expose themselves to various temptations and risk
“falling behind” others in a teleological race toward some undefined but crucial place of
116
evolutionary nirvana.
33
In short, they risk letting history pass them by, or, as it was
explained to Calafía, being “buried alive.” The importance of being seen as industrious
by other Europeans is illustrated by the amount of time that the writer spends in
defending the Spanish soldiers from this charge as well as the time he devotes to the issue
in his discussion of the natives.
Clearly, the natives do not live up to his standards. All of the tribes in the
Monterey area “seem to be the stupidest as well as the ugliest and dirtiest that can be
found.”
34
Furthermore, they demonstrate their innate laziness by “tak[ing] the greatest
delight in lying face down and spend[ing] several hours that way.”
35
Even when they
fight, their “wars are of as little boldness and duration as are their truces.”
36
Suddenly,
the same writer who defended the soldiers from charges of indolence turns to attack the
natives, using the same techniques that were used against the Spanish. The principle
elements of technique also remain the same: disparagement via diminution. Even when
motivated to anger and aggression, these writers argue, the actions of those in California
are of no consequence. Because history requires consequences, they produce no
history.
37
The writer of the Sutil and Mexicana journal does make some efforts to appear
balanced in his assessment. For example, after complaining about native intelligence, the
writer amends his assertion. “Though we confess that the stupidity of these native is very
common, we should not for that reason consider them incapable of work that requires
reflection and judgment.”
38
He goes on to describe the native method for hunting deer in
a disguise of deerskin, which he calls “exceedingly industrious.” And he further remarks
117
that the natives can be “stimulated to hasten work…in the hope of some presents or the
desire to eat well for several days or to get some clothing to cover themselves.”
39
In other
words, the natives work harder when they know they will be compensated for their labor,
an apparently novel concept.
Still, most of these concessions sound like a calculated rhetorical gesture. In
general, even when the Spaniards were trying to be more equitable with the Natives, they
did so out of pity, not out of an attempt to see the native culture as equally valuable, a
moral position that maintained the hierarchy of value already in place. This ultimate
imbalance is crystallized in the writer’s description of the natives as, on the one hand,
“our fellow men,” but on the other as
miserable for lack of learning, worried by a thousand superstitions, given
over to a roving life and to all of the discomforts that accompany it,
foraging at times like animals, [and] accustomed to destroy each other by
continual wars for frivolous reasons.
40
Thus, even in his attempts to concede the natives’ humanity, the writer must do so under
the veil of pity, seeing their condition as horribly degraded, one from which they would
rescue themselves had they the means and knowledge.
Ironically, this assault on the “miserable” life of the natives might be perfectly
applied to European life in numerous places during the eighteenth-century. Depending
on one’s vantage point, the phrases “worried by a thousand superstitions” and
“accustomed to destroy each other by continual wars for frivolous reasons” aptly describe
European culture during a time marked by obsession with fashion, religion, and
belligerence. In fact, the satire of writers like Jonathan Swift suggests that the frivolity of
eighteenth-century Europe was apparent even to some of those immersed in it.
41
While
118
one might wish that these writers had been able to recognize the absurdity of condemning
in another culture what flourished in their own, they could not make the connection (or
chose not to). Thus, determining whether or not the natives actually seemed miserable to
visiting writers is less important than understanding why they might have shaped their
narratives in certain ways. Of the numerous potential details available for their
narratives, they chose to emphasize specific details that contribute to a larger pattern with
specific consequences.
Despite some deviations, there were continuations of prior ideologies. As with
previous centuries, the writer of the Sutil and Mexicana journal depends considerably on
prior writers. These explorers are not only aware of other people working in the region,
but they often refer to other texts within their own. In the journal of the Sutil and
Mexicana, for instance, there are numerous references to Vancouver and the American
captain Robert Gray.
42
These other explorers (and their texts) were simultaneously
creating an image for California and the Americas as well as carrying out various
governmental missions. In fact, one could argue that creating an image of the region was
their primary mission, and in many cases was their most lasting legacy.
But not only were they competing with each other for primacy in setting the
diplomatic and imaginary vision of California, but they were also incorporating the text
of prior writers into their own images, a tactic that began in the earliest European
descriptions of California and continued into the nineteenth century. For example, in the
Sutil and Mexicana journal, the writer quotes directly and extensively from Vizcaino’s
journal, a record of Monterey that was written in 1602, almost two hundred years earlier.
119
The reason, he claims, for this insertion is that those earlier writers could “observe better
what the spontaneous products of the soil were.”
43
Given the infusion of fantasy,
exaggeration, and confusion in those earlier accounts, this defense holds little weight.
But it also sounds dubious given the fact that one of the primary benefits of the new
Enlightenment science was supposedly better methods of observation.
The journal quotes even more extensively from Venegas, which means that it
relies on an eighteenth-century history without any first-hand observation to confirm the
veracity of more recent, first-hand observations.
44
The journal also substitutes Venegas
for observations that could not be made, especially in regard to the natives of Monterey,
even when the writer admits that Venegas’s comments concern different natives from
hundreds of miles away.
45
These passages suggest the continuing influence of precedent
and authority in travel literature, how deeply indebted subsequent writers in California
were to prior writers, and how the images of the region were easily passed along the
textual chain from one person to another. Despite Enlightenment ideas about jettisoning
the outdated methods of research, intellectual tendencies that can be traced to the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries still operated in California.
Vancouver and the Ravens
Following on the heels of La Pérouse’s journals, George Vancouver’s A Voyage
of Discovery, published in 1798, describes his trip from England around the world,
including stops in California, along the Pacific coast of North America, and the Sandwich
120
Islands (Hawaii). This text is of primary significance in the literature of California
because it influenced many subsequent writers, especially those writing in English.
Furthermore, unlike La Pérouse, whose journals were delayed in publication for more
than a decade, or Malaspina’s expedition, whose journals vanished into archives for more
than half a century, Vancouver’s journals were published almost immediately upon his
return and found a public hungry for information about the South Sea and other so-called
curiosities of circumnavigation.
46
Like La Pérouse and Malaspina, Vancouver rode the tailwinds of Captain Cook
and the expansion of European exploration into the Pacific during the late eighteenth
century. Like those explorers, Vancouver also had an intellectual and cultural connection
to the British captain. Yet in addition to those connections, Vancouver had another more
fundamental, tangible connection to Cook: he had sailed on Cook’s ships. Having served
as a midshipman on Cook’s second and third voyages, he was quite familiar with the
Pacific and had seen first-hand the potential for profits from the emerging circuits of
Pacific travel (between Hawaii, Alaska, California, and China).
47
Vancouver, as an Englishman, was also an heir to the long and bitter rivalry with
Spain, a rivalry that had recently flared into near war. Vancouver sailed into Monterey
shortly after the Nootka Sound convention, a diplomatic resolution that resolved little
more than the fact that England and Spain would agree to disagree on the northern
boundaries of California and would not formally declare war.
48
Nootka Sound (in
present-day British Columbia) represented Spain’s northernmost settlement and one of its
feeblest attempts to claim the entire western coast of North America. The English had
121
other plans, and they pressed southward on Spanish territory until outright hostility
began.
49
Though Spain wanted to mount a vigorous reprisal against English movement
into the Americas, the government had little choice but to bark loudly. The Spanish were
badly over-extended in the Pacific, and their navy was a shadow of its former power.
50
Therefore, while it was clear to the Spanish that Vancouver’s visit and his claims of
scientific reconnaissance had to be viewed with cautious skepticism, Vancouver likely
felt more confident about his political leverage in California. In addition to a political
situation that might have added a tincture of contempt to his view of the Spanish,
Vancouver, as the emissary of a Protestant culture, carried with him a centuries-old
cultural legacy called the “Black Legend,” stories about the depravity and cruelty of
Spaniards in the Americas that, ironically, emerged from Las Casas’s sixteenth-century
attempts to reform the Catholic church.
51
Finally, and perhaps most crucially, the Pacific
coast of North America was land that the British, despite claims of scientific interest,
wanted to control, if not for the profits of natural resources, then for the importance of the
shipping lanes. Since Drake and the years of pirate raids in Spanish territories, the
California coastline had been strategically valuable, and any description of it, especially
by foreigners, suggests a secondary function in that context.
52
This cultural and political context influences Vancouver’s assessment of
California and interacts with local geography, both driving descriptions of the landscape
and following from geographical data. Vancouver attempts to undermine Spanish and
Native authority in California, usually via assessments of modernization, but he often
does so with assistance from descriptions of the landscape as a “barren,” “dreary,”
122
“lonesome,” “stunted,” “groveling,” “sterile” desert.
53
If this list of adjectives seems
overly despondent, it sounds even more confounding in light of the very optimistic
assessments of California’s potential fertility.
54
In either case, ideas of value or worth are
critical in Vancouver’s use of landscape description as a tool for British imperialism and
acquisition. Throughout the journals, Vancouver’s (and England’s) desire for control of
California conflicts with his denigrating assessments of its worth. Paying close attention
to these conflicting reactions reveals not simply amusing contradictions, but highlights
the political strategies of Vancouver and other foreign writers. These reactions
demonstrate, once again, that the landscape was always more than mere background.
Geography carried meaning, often powerful ideological meaning; and meaning
influenced value, not simply in agricultural terms, but in terms of politics, power, and
war.
The stated purpose of Vancouver’s mission is clear enough. He saw himself as a
surveyor and scientist, as well as a benevolent distributor of knowledge. In his journal he
writes, “…[T]he voyage in which we were engaged, was for the general use and benefit
of mankind, and that under these circumstances, we ought rather to be considered as a
labouring force for the world in general, than for the advantage of any particular
sovereign…”
55
Despite his claims for international beneficence and charity, popular
claims among foreign writers in California, Vancouver reveals that more than simply
selfless pursuits of knowledge motivate his explorations.
The profound secrecy which the Spanish nation has so strictly observed
with regard to their territories and settlements in this hemisphere, naturally
excites in the strongest manner, a curiosity and a desire of being informed
123
of the state, condition, and progress of the several establishments provided
in these distant regions…”
56
His choice of the words “excites,” “curiosity,” and “desire” suggests an admixture of
emotion beyond detached scientific observation. The tenor of the first half of his
sentence stands in ironic contrast to the second half of the sentence with its focus on
“state,” “establishment,” and “region,” as if the breathless, emotional subtext surfaces
despite Vancouver’s attempts to maintain an indifferent, diplomatic diction.
Furthermore, his comments underscore the element of espionage that intersects with texts
often regarded as primarily scientific in nature.
In fact, the production of maps during the late eighteenth century, much as it had
been during preceding centuries, was not simply a matter of exploration or science, but a
state secret. Spanish officials worked diligently to conceal and control maps of their
more distant provinces, especially in the Americas, in order to keep valuable information
out of the hands of their political and commercial rivals. They even deliberately
disseminated misleading or false information, which contributed to the perpetuation of
egregious geographical errors long after they had been repeatedly corrected. Occasionally
Spanish officials were so successful in these endeavors that Spain’s own explorers were
unaware of prior Spanish expeditions and were forced to find their way guided by half-
finished charts and a handful of conjecture. In one sense, therefore, much of California
literature from La Pérouse to the mid-nineteenth century (the period of increasing
observation by non-Spaniards) can be viewed as a kind of espionage, in which writers
observe the coastal settlements with one eye on their stated objective and another on the
feasibility of a political takeover.
57
Whether or not one considers these texts as
124
simultaneous acts of literature and espionage, their context certainly establishes British
interest in California. These undercurrents of secrecy and desire further roiled the
supposedly placid surface of what were intended to be impartial scientific observations,
adding to the potential for conflicting commentary.
Yet, more than purely national and commercial interests influence Vancouver’s
text. At times the residue of long-standing cultural feuds seeps into quotidian
commentary about the voyage. In the following passage, for example, Vancouver’s
bitterly sarcastic commentary, as he prepares to leave California for Hawaii, suggests
ways that cultural prisms bent and even fractured the impartial light of scientific
observation.
Exploring these shores any further would however have exceeded the
strict letter of my instructions, and might possibly have excited jealousy in
the breast of the Spanish acting governor. Under these considerations I
was compelled, though with infinite reluctance, to abandon this interesting
pursuit, and to determine on making the best of our way to the Sandwich
islands, where I could firmly rely on the sincerity of Tamaahamaah, and
the professions of the rest of our rude uncivilized friends in those islands,
for a hearty welcome, a kind reception, and every service and
accommodation in their humble power to afford; without any of the
inhospitable restrictions we must have been under from the then civilized
governor at Monterey.
58
Thus, despite being composed by a writer steeped in the eighteenth-century dictates of
detached, rational observation, the political and cultural context infuses Vancouver’s
description of California.
The potential consequences of this cultural context appear in a simple comparison
of a description of presidio soldiers. If we recall the vigorous defense of the Spanish
soldiers given by the diarist of the Sutil and Mexicana, Vancouver’s description of the
125
soldiers offers a remarkable example of the friction between the two European cultures
and the ways that friction played out in California’s particular ideological landscape.
Vancouver writes,
The Spaniards in their missions and Presidios…lead a confined, and in
most respects a very indolent, life… The last mentioned order do nothing,
in the strictest sense of that expression; for they neither till, sow, nor reap,
but wholly depend upon the labour of the inhabitants of the missions and
pueblos for their subsistence, and the common necessaries of life.
59
Vancouver’s comments echo what would have been a very well known passage from the
King James version of the New Testament, in which Christ says, “Consider the ravens:
for they neither sow nor reap; which neither have storehouse nor barn; and God feedeth
them: how much more are ye better than the fowls?”
60
The allusion places the Spaniards
in the position of the ravens, as profligate and careless but nevertheless well fed. Though
in the context of the biblical passage the example is meant to warn against the dangers of
keeping one’s mind too much on the future (and off one’s devotion to God), Vancouver’s
allusion reflects an extrapolation from that context in which the ravens flourish despite
their irresponsibility, inspiring both envy and contempt among members of society who
see themselves as more responsible.
61
The English and other foreign governments had, in fact, considered the Spaniards,
their ravens in California, and would scrutinize them for years to come with increasing
avarice and belligerence. In doing so, these foreigners likely recalled how much “better”
they were than these ravens, who had been given in abundance yet were blissfully
unaware of what they had been given. As Vancouver and other foreign writers frequently
reminded their readers, these Spanish ravens had no storehouses nor barns; they had no
126
wells nor mills; they had no government nor society.
62
The Spanish, they argued, didn’t
know how to plan or prepare. And like the ravens, they were fed plentifully (if not
divinely) by an external force indifferent to their spendthrift habits: California. It was
enough to make a hard-working Englishman mad, especially one on the hunt for strategic
commercial locations in the Pacific.
On the one hand, it is critical to keep in mind that Native Americans, who
performed the bulk of the labor, influenced descriptions of work and laziness in
California.
63
On the other hand, foreign descriptions, as they did throughout the various
permutations of the Black Legend, focused on certain facts and conveniently excluded
others.
64
While Vancouver recognizes one of the pillars of colonialism in California—the
reliance on Indian labor—his comments also reflect an emerging regional trope, one that
perfectly suited the political motivations of the British and other foreign observers.
According to this view, lazy (or “indolent”) people squander the potential of California’s
resources, exposing themselves to international censure and justifying a foreign takeover.
Furthermore, lazy people “do nothing”: they do not push the wheels of progress; they do
not spread civilization; they do not maximize resources; and they do not make history.
Vancouver wasn’t the only member of his expedition to see the Spaniards in this
way. The clerk of the Chatham, Edward Bell, offers similar comments on the soldiers of
Monterey.
Except the Governor’s we saw no Garden belonging to anyone else here.
It could not fail striking every one of us with astonishment to see how
little had been done by the Spaniards in the space of upwards of 16 years,
and in a country as fine as any in the world; that except at the Missions,
there was not a Soldier who had in that time, eaten any thing of his own
production and were contented to live in the Hovels that they
127
raised…when they first established the place, and why?—merely because
they are too lazy and Indolent…”
65
The key term in Bell’s and Vancouver’s passages is “indolent,” a word the surfaces
repeatedly in descriptions of the Americas, with increasing frequency in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially in regard to the natives and
Spaniards.
66
Vancouver himself comes back to the terminology at the end of the passage,
remarking on the “habitual indolence and want of industry in the military part of these
societies.”
67
Notably, the English transferred this terminology to the Spaniards who,
themselves colonists, had used it to describe the natives when they first arrived. Recall,
for example, the commentary of Pedro Fages, a military commander in Alta California
(and its eventual governor), who derides the natives for their supposed laziness.
68
These
same derogatory terms were being appropriated by foreigners for use against the Spanish.
Partly this can be attributed to the political background in Spanish-English
relations. It can also be attributed, however, to aforementioned religious prejudice.
Protestants and Catholics had, by this point in time, a long-standing mutual hatred, and
evidence of this animosity emerges in Bell’s comments on the Indians and the Catholic
religion.
As to converting them to Christianity it is certainly at present all a farce; --
the Roman Catholic Religion of all others, from the mummery, parade,
pomp and shew belonging to its forms, is certainly the religion that would
strike an Indian with astonishment, and attract his attention Soonest, but it
does not follow that because they can cross themselves, Gabble over their
Ave Maria’s & Patre nosters, and mutter a parcel of Latin after the Padres,
that they are converted to Christianity. –for I will venture to say there is
not one among them who knows what he says or why he says it.
69
128
Bell manages in this diatribe to implicate both the Indians and the Catholics, the former
for being foolish enough to believe the vacuous ceremonies of the church, and the latter
for believing that their own religious charades would qualify for actual Christianization.
70
While most scholars of pre-Mexican War California attribute this type of
condemnation to ossifying racist and nationalist ideologies world-wide, few integrate this
sentiment with the centuries of accumulated cultural material emanating from the
region.
71
In fact, what emerges here are the solidifying strata of very powerful images of
artificial, indolent California life, images that racism and nationalism certainly affect and
even transform, but that also draw strength from narratives about islands, paradise, and
Catholicism.
Since the invention of the name by Europeans, the pattern in California, contrary
to the notion that it lacks history or forgets its past, has always been to draw from the
well of existing narratives while at the same time coloring that water with the dye of a
particular historical moment. Thus, at any given point in the literature of California, the
prior narratives are always present, even as they are continuously transformed. For
example, Bell could not have predicted (and probably would not have believed) that
roughly one hundred years later the very same “mummery, parade and pomp” would
stand at the center of a vigorous revival—by Protestants—of the “Spanish” traditions in
California, celebrating with pangs of nostalgia all that he condemns. Even more
paradoxically, this Spanish revival would simultaneously invigorate California’s
detractors who would return to Bell’s complaints about the artificiality and superficiality
of California culture. Thus, California is often “remembered” and “erased” by the same
129
narratives, narratives that seem to change even as they (and their outcomes) remain
essentially the same.
The objectives and desires of Vancouver’s particular narrative, despite claims
about the scientific nature of his expedition, emerge in his closing assessment of the
territory. After meticulously determining the number of soldiers at each presidio, he
remarks that the Spanish “are totally incapable of making any resistance against a foreign
invasion.”
72
If this point weren’t clear enough, he adds, “Should the ambition of any
civilized nation tempt it to seize on these unsupported posts, they could not make the
least resistance, and must inevitably fall to a force barely sufficient for garrisoning and
securing the country.”
73
The weakness of Spanish defenses and the desirability of Spanish land have
remarkable effects on his assessment of the outcome of their laziness. Vancouver writes,
The Spaniards…have only cleared the way for the ambitious enterprizes of
those maritime powers, who, in the avidity of commercial pursuit, may
seek to be benefited by the advantages which the fertile soil of New
Albion [Alta California] seems calculated to afford. By the formation of
such establishments, so wide from each other, and so unprotected in
themselves, … instead of strengthening the barrier to their valuable
possessions in New Spain, they have thrown irresistible temptations in the
way of strangers to trespass over their boundary.
74
The interplay of temptation and value, of avarice and opportunity, reveals the actual
context for Vancouver’s depiction of work. Rather than a call for efficiency or even a cry
for justice in the name of Native workers, Vancouver really wants to show that
California’s residents are unworthy of California. In this case, ironically, the poor
condition of the Spanish settlement makes California more desirable rather than less. This
was one of the more prominent features of narratives of indolence and one of the key
130
arguments for conquest. The more unworthy (or lazy) Spaniards appeared in accounts of
foreign writers, the more justified those same foreigners felt in appropriating California
for themselves. In fact, temptation follows directly from denigration, a formula in which
denigration doesn’t simply reflect hidden desire, but actually creates it. Like a
corporation seeking to deflate the market value of another company prior to a hostile
takeover, Vancouver seeks to make California less valuable (and more vulnerable) for an
immediate acquisition, realizing that it will become more valuable (with capital
investment) in the future. Thus, diminishing or demeaning colonial California
paradoxically makes it more valuable to him because he can acquire it at a better
(cheaper) price.
These convolutions help explain the vacillation in Vancouver’s text, the ultimate
result of which is the rhetorical dance common to narratives of California. It had to
sound valuable and worthless, potentially great but currently squandered, claimed but not
maintained. Most importantly for Vancouver and later writers, California had to be
separated from its inhabitants rhetorically to assist in their actual divestment. In order to
facilitate this process, California must appear to be populated with savages and imbeciles,
people unworthy of its care.
While it is easy to imagine Vancouver and the other British picturing themselves
as that same “civilized nation tempt[ed] to seize on these unsupported posts,” one also
wonders to what extent this “civilized nation” defined itself in opposition to the
apparently uncivilized nation of Spain. Certainly, the Natives were considered “savage”
by Vancouver,
75
who makes no attempt at all to disguise his sentiments in that regard.
131
But the shift in assessment of Spaniards—an outgrowth of their religion, their residing in
California itself, and their control of desirable real estate—suggests a change for
assessments of California at the end of the eighteenth century. While the natives find
themselves at the bottom of the cultural hierarchy in California, the Spaniards are no
longer at the top of the imaginary space, at least not in all visions of it. The arrival of
foreign surveillance in California marks not only a shift in the political landscape, but
also an expansion of the groups of people who would be implicated by these narratives.
A Smuggler’s and Merchant’s Manual for Conquest
It is perhaps in keeping with the image of the United States that the first writer
from the U.S. to describe California was not a traveling scientist, but an independent
merchant and sometime smuggler. William Shaler came to California with the first wave
of merchants looking to capitalize on the emerging and very lucrative trade with China in
sea otter furs. Once again, Cook’s voyages, the ship that launched a thousand ships into
the Pacific, had inspired Shaler to invest in a venture to California. Unlike prior writers,
however, he was not part of a state-sponsored exploration, at least not officially. In this
sense, he signals a shift from earlier patterns of voyages that emphasized science (even
though they always kept one eye on the sextant and the other eye on the accountant’s
ledger). In another sense, Shaler also foreshadows the eventual outcome of those earlier
patterns: the arrival of mercantile sailors. These merchants reversed the previous
132
emphasis, first hunting for favorable trade and second, if they had the time and
inclination, describing the land and culture of the places they visited.
Despite this apparent difference in motivation, Shaler reaches many of the same
conclusions as those explorers who traveled to California under the banner of science. In
Journal of a Voyage (published in 1808), he writes passages with an eerie similarity to
Vancouver’s narrative, reflecting his knowledge of that narrative tradition as well as
some similar desires. In fact, there are moments in Shaler’s narrative that echo
Vancouver’s in terms of ideology and produce similar ahistorical effects.
Before the opening of the nineteenth century, Shaler was already established in
Pacific trade, and by 1801 he had a partner, Richard J. Cleveland, with whom he traveled
to South America and Mexico, eventually arriving in California in 1803. The expedition
he describes in Journal of a Voyage was actually his second trip to the region (the first
being with Cleveland), and prior to visiting California he had already been to Montevideo
and Buenos Aires.
76
Thus, Shaler was a veteran of Pacific trade as well as someone with
prior experience in California. The nature of that experience lends some context to what
he writes.
Shaler was in fact not just a veteran of trade, but a veteran of trouble, especially
the kind that involved foreign governments. He met his future business partner,
Cleveland, in prison, the first of several lockups in various locations around the globe.
On the Isle of France, at the turn of the century, they were imprisoned by the French
government because of uncertainty about relations with the U.S., and in their cell they
concocted plans for a Pacific trading run that they hoped would allow them to “see new
133
lands, improve their fortunes, and scatter the seeds of liberty,” a three-pronged approach
that perfectly captures the way curiosity, business, and political philosophy worked
together as the ideological residue of the eighteenth century filtered into the evolving
mercantile and nationalist goals of the nineteenth. So zealous were they in their desire
for converts to their notion of “rational liberty” that they packed, along with preparations
for trade, Spanish translations of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, as well as copies
of the Constitution.
77
With their philosophical and commercial materials in tow, Shaler and Cleveland
made numerous stops in the Pacific (China, Mexico, Sandwich Islands, Guatemala),
always fomenting revolution (with an emphasis on profits) wherever they stayed and, like
missionaries leaving tracts, scattering their copies of the Declaration and Constitution.
Because most of these ports were closed to foreigners, a situation that had not deterred
Shaler in the past, the two merchants often attracted suspicion and had their share of
conflicts with local governments. Before coming to California, they stopped in
Valparaiso, Chile and San Blas, Mexico (sometimes avoiding prison, sometimes not),
where they continued to talk to the disgruntled about the freedoms (and profits) available
under a U.S.-style democracy.
78
Because California was also a closed port (meaning that the colonists were
forbidden to trade with foreigners), those who wanted to profit from exchange with the
Spanish colonies had to do so illicitly. Spain was desperate to maintain a veil of secrecy
in California because the government was stretched to breaking and in no position to
defend, or even supply, the settlements. At least in part, this was why trade was
134
forbidden with outsiders, and interaction was kept minimal. On the other hand, the
colonists and missionaries understood that if they were to survive, trade would sometimes
be necessary. Even those who were supposed to enforce the regulations were known to
participate in trade with foreigners, or at least to ignore the practice.
79
Furthermore, the
regulations inspired considerable ire in foreign merchants who wanted to penetrate these
lucrative markets, which sometimes led to open hostility.
Shaler participated in these transactions, and exhibited considerable hostility. On
one of their trips to California, Cleveland and Shaler were forced to sail out of San Diego
harbor under cannon fire, the culmination of an episode in which prisoners were taken on
both sides, black market furs were purchased and confiscated, and Shaler’s ship was
ordered to leave.
80
This kind of pirating was not necessarily unusual for the time, but it
illuminates the position from which Shaler narrates his voyage to California, as a U.S.
merchant looking for markets with maximum profit and minimal regulation.
81
If those
markets didn’t conform to his notions of liberty and appeared vulnerable to acquisition by
foreign governments, he might have occasion to mention that too.
It does not require much imagination to see Shaler’s Journal of a Voyage as part
of his general strategy for liberation-via-acquisition. This was actually the pattern for a
good portion of his career as a quasi-filibustering merchant, diplomat, and occasional
covert representative for U.S. interests in the Pacific. In Cuba and Mexico, he acted as a
revolutionary agent, at times while he continued his smuggling. In both places, Shaler’s
efforts for liberation had similar designs—revolution with commercial and political
outcomes coincidentally beneficial to the U.S.
82
135
However, Shaler also demonstrated cultural interest in those regions that he
sought to “liberate,” interest that went beyond simply acting as a cunning merchant and
imperial agent for the U.S. He worked assiduously to learn French, then Spanish, despite
the fact that he had very little formal education and had become an orphan at the age of
thirteen. Furthermore, his fluency in Spanish and interest in the culture did not only
apply to his balance sheets. After returning from his travels in the Pacific, he assisted in
the translation and publication of Juan Ignacio Molina’s Geographical, Natural, and
Civil History of Chile.
83
Still, Shaler’s larger pattern suggests designs of a more imperial nature, even
when driven by what he claimed were altruistic motives. In this regard, Shaler looks both
different and quite similar to those prior to him. Like La Pérouse, Malaspina, and
Vancouver, Shaler was driven by ideologies of aspiration, though in the former case that
ideology was science and in the latter it was liberty. In both cases, despite varying
contexts and particulars, aspiration tended toward acquisition; and acquisition in
California typically meant some variety of ahistoricism.
Thus, even though Shaler begins his “brief description” and “general account of
California” with what appear to be innocuous assessments of geography, climate, plants,
animals, and missions, the journal quickly reverts to its more urgent purposes.
84
In order
to realize these purposes, Shaler must perform the rhetorical feat common to narratives
about California in the early nineteenth century; that is, he must reconcile his general
attitude of disdain with a call to arms for the conquest of California. Like Vancouver and
other writers, Shaler attacked the productivity or industriousness of California. For
136
instance, he claims, “No encouragement is given to industry in this country: neither their
fish nor their furs can be introduced into New Spain without paying a heavy duty.”
85
Using one of the key terms of the nineteenth century, he ascribes the lack of “industry” to
a flaw in governance, arguing that the tariff discourages trade.
He then shifts his focus to the landscape, making clear its fertility. “At present, a
person acquainted with the coast may always procure abundant supplies of provisions.
All these circumstances prove that under a good government the Californias would soon
rise to ease and affluence.”
86
In this way, Shaler attempts to separate the land from the
people, which, as noted earlier, involved rhetorical and physical tactics, the former
usually proceeding and assisting the latter. According to Shaler, the Spaniards are simply
getting in the way of the natural fecundity of the landscape.
87
Once this cultural and
political impediment is removed, Shaler suggests, the region will offer bounteous rewards
to its rightful governors.
Following this gradual attempt to undermine the “industry” of the colony, Shaler
moves into a denigration of the inhabitants themselves.
The Spanish population of the Californias is very inconsiderable…it
hardly exceeds 3000 souls…there are very few white people: it principally
consists of a mixed breed. They are of an indolent, harmless disposition,
and fond of spirituous liquors. That they should not be industrious, is not
surprising; their government does not encourage industry.
88
Again, Shaler makes a half-hearted attempt to disguise his racial contempt behind a
complaint about governance, but he really wants to say that the land is sparsely inhabited
(therefore vulnerable) and that the Spaniards are lazy (therefore inconsequential). The
natives hardly fared better. Other than the inhabitants of Santa Barbara, whom Shaler
137
seems to have genuinely admired, he saw the natives as “a dull, stupid people…far from
comely.”
89
As he continues this assessment, pairing the potential value of local resources
with the relative worthlessness of its government and people, his primary objective
comes into sharper focus.
The word “conquest” enters the journal twelve pages into his evaluation of
California, appearing in a sentence that illustrates the perfectly calibrated coupling of
value with violence. “The missions of California may be considered as so many valuable
estates or plantations belonging to the king of Spain, and capable, in case of conquest of
this country, of furnishing abundant supplies of all kinds of provisions, horses, &c.”
90
The remarkably deft insertion of force, offered as the kind of aside one might find in an
instructional manual (“in case of conquest”), suggests just how likely, even ordinary, this
outcome appeared to him. In fact, the journal becomes a kind of manual for conquest, a
reading supported by Shaler’s history as an agitator and by the direction of the
subsequent text.
For those nations interested in reading (and following) his instructional manual,
Shaler makes clear that the Spanish “are masters of the maritime part of the country
only.”
91
Furthermore, in a series of judgments remarkable in their similarity to
Vancouver’s, Shaler remarks, “Any of the great maritime powers that should determine
to give independence to New Spain, or wrest it from the Spanish dominion, would
naturally seek to establish themselves in California.”
92
If he initially attempts to conceal
the ultimate goal of his assessment behind the rhetoric of “independence,” this only
serves to acclimate the reader to his upcoming flights of belligerence and contempt.
138
These hints and suggestions quickly give way to unapologetic evaluations of the
possibility of conquest. Alta California, Shaler argues, “could make no resistance against
the smallest military force.”
93
From this point forward, he evaluates each site of Spanish
occupation with one eye on its potential for profit and the other on the ease of conquest.
Monterey is defended by a “miserable battery” and the garrison has “no works capable of
affording defense.” Santa Barbara resides in “the most agreeable as well as most wealthy
district in California,” and “would fall an easy conquest to the smallest ship of war.” San
Diego has a “very fine, secure harbor” with a “sorry battery of eight pounders at the
entrance.” And so it continues, down the entire peninsula and around to the gulf,
becoming a literal guide to attack.
94
Still, Shaler must attempt to maintain his façade of
international charity. At times his comments are almost comical in their vacillation
between belligerence and diplomacy, as when he describes Loreto, the capital of Baja
California, as “a very important post, either for communication with, or defense against
the maritime provinces of New Spain, opposite to California.”
95
However, if Shaler appears uncertain about whether he will be fighting or
communicating with New Spain, there is nothing ambivalent about his final assessment
of the region, a two-page diatribe that justifies its hawkish stance on the pretense that
California, of course, needs liberation. “The mutual jealousies and selfish policy of the
great European powers have been the causes that some of the most beautiful regions of
the universe have long languished under the degrading shackles of ignorance and
superstition.”
96
Having established the degradation of European rule (relative, one
supposes, to the benevolence of U.S. control), Shaler argues that instead of protecting
139
California, the Spanish have simply made it more desirable and conquerable. Echoing
Vancouver in every way except his recommendation for British takeover, Shaler baldly
declares,
They have, at great expense and considerable industry, removed every
obstacle out of the way of an invading enemy. […] [I]n a word, they have
done everything that could be done to render California an object worthy
the attention of the great maritime powers: they have placed it in a
situation to want nothing but a good government to rise rapidly to wealth
and importance.
97
Once again, California’s weakness increases its desirability; and its present degradation
amplifies its future potential.
The increasing prominence of these kinds of descriptions furthered notions of
California as a region without history. The fact that California was supposedly populated
by an “an indolent, harmless” culture that was “fond of spirituous liquors” facilitated
denigration not only of the culture itself but its products. An “indolent, harmless” culture
is of no consequence; it makes no art, has no economic or social value, and does little or
nothing to push the wheels of progress. Indeed, it is easy to imagine how such a culture
would be thought ahistorical.
These ideas, then, were built on self-reinforcing, circular logic: natives and
Spaniards were lazy and degenerate because they lived in backward place called
California; California was backward because it was populated by lazy and degenerate
people. In order to denigrate the culture, Euro-Americans relied on the landscape, but in
order to explain the problem of the landscape, they relied on the culture. Of course,
inventing a place that was defended by degenerates and wildly attractive worked
perfectly for stirring up the sentiment of conquest. In fact, making California sound both
140
enticing and forbidden created an atmosphere that invited a reckless, frenzied clamoring
for conquest. Thus, though he preceded them by forty years, Shaler foreshadows and
even prepares the path for later U.S. agitators for conquest.
In many ways, then, Shaler is the prototype for the westering Yankee writer in
California, a role that he partially inherits from other Europeans, but also a role that he
refines with his aggressive commercial tactics and his penchant for philosophical
justification. In this sense, he definitively shapes the writer’s role for later U.S. travelers
to California, especially Richard Henry Dana, but also Rogers, Smith, and Pattie—all of
whom were, not coincidentally, independent traders (to be treated in subsequent
chapters). Unable to conceal completely his acquisitiveness and belligerence, he
nevertheless attempts to create a foundation of liberation philosophies on which he bases
his observations of the region. This equivocation between colonial desire and supposedly
disinterested attempts to bring (isolated, islanded) California within the sheltering harbor
of liberty spawned further gyrations of ahistoricism.
A People Doomed by Leisure
One outgrowth of the early Pacific expeditions and publications was, not
surprisingly, further exploration and interest by European powers. Though often
forgotten in collective memories of California, the Russians were a significant part of this
process and in fact spurred the Spaniards in their first land expedition to what became
Alta California in 1769.
98
For decades, the Russians had maintained trading posts in the
far northern coasts of the Americas, in a frosty but lucrative region known as Sitka, in
141
present-day Alaska. The government’s desire to supply and maintain Sitka led to the first
Russian circumnavigation of the globe and, indirectly, to the first Russian visit to Alta
California. In fact, they had mapped the northern Pacific long before either Cook or
Vancouver ever attempted to reach it, a feat considered so implausible that scholars as
recently as the twentieth century doubted its veracity.
99
While contemporary readers might not imagine Alaska, Hawaii, and California in
the same sphere of influence, they were deeply intertwined at the opening of the
nineteenth century. Cook, La Pérouse, Vancouver, and others had established a circuit of
communication and commerce in which sailors hunted for furs along the Pacific coast of
North America during the summers, then wintered in Hawaii before returning to the
northern Pacific. When they had enough cargo, they went to China to sell the furs,
fetching as much as thirty-five thousand dollars.
100
Two brief anecdotes suggest the remarkable interdependence and diversity of the
northern Pacific at the turn of the century, as well as Russia’s entrenchment in it. First,
during an expedition in 1808 down the coast of North America, from Sitka to Baja
California, the Russians sailed in two ships, neither of which they had constructed. The
ships had been bought from Americans who themselves had built them for the Hawaiian
King Kamehameha I in the Sandwich islands, before sailing them to Alaska to sell them
for “150 sea otter skins.” Second, trading and smuggling expeditions were often complex
multi-national, multi-ethnic business ventures. The Boston-based captain Joseph O’Cain,
for instance, partnered with the Russians to hire native Alaskan hunters, who helped kill
the otters in Baja California, which they then sold in Canton, China.
101
Thus, while
142
Europeans and Euro-Americans usually considered the Pacific the edge of the known
world, it had already attracted a generous sampling of those people who lived outside of
its orbit.
Into this world sailed Nikolai Petovich Rezanov, a Russian noble, and Georg
Heinrich von Langsdorff, a German naturalist, both of whom wrote surviving texts about
the expedition. Though they would live and work in close proximity for many months,
the men had quite different goals and backgrounds. Rezanov, the son of wealthy parents
and founder of the Russian-American Company (a multi-national trading organization
based in Sitka), organized and funded the expedition, with the aim of expanding trading
relations in the Pacific and colonizing for Russia the western shores of America.
Langsdorff, of more humble lineage but more extensive education, sought to record for
science the natural conditions of the western coast of America.
102
With such different
objectives, they were bound to disagree. Furthermore, their struggles neatly epitomize
the sometimes difficult marriage between state and science in California. While the
primary conflict during the period of Spanish control was between the church and the
military, the emergence of a naturalist with zeal equal to that of the Catholic fathers
suggests a shift in European ideology with significant ramifications in California.
When the Russians arrived in Sitka, like many other expeditions to the Americas,
they found their colony in disarray and near starvation. They managed to survive the
winter, then headed for the only place where they thought they might be able to secure
supplies to feed their starving colonists: California.
103
They were so desperate when they
arrived at San Francisco that they sailed right past the presidio without asking permission
143
to enter, recognizing, as Rezanov laconically put it, “that two or three cannonballs would
make less difference … than refusal.”
104
Because of their circumstances, and the condition of the place they had just
escaped, they saw California as, of course, a paradise. Rezanov notes that “the excellent
climate of Nueva California, the abundance of breadstuffs there … were hourly subjects
of conversation among members of our crew,” and that the people of the pueblo of San
Jose “live in the midst of plenty.”
105
In fact, California was so appealing that Rezanov
recognized in his men “the inclination and desire to remain [there] permanently, and
thereupon [he] took the necessary precautions against their desertion.”
106
Once again,
California, or its image, was forged in the crucible of desperation. Those who reached it
at the end of difficult circumstances were quick to proclaim its abundance, and this
abundance (rather than the context for comparison) was what people remembered.
As usual, this favorable appraisal of California did not extend to the natives.
According to Langsdorff, the local tribes “were badly proportioned, and their appearance
was so dull, heavy, and neglectful that we were all agreed that we had never before seen
the human race on such a low level.”
107
He makes no mention of the mission as a
possible source of disease and chronic despondency in the natives. Instead, the state of
the natives most puzzles Langsdorff in relation to the climate and bountiful environment.
In this regard, Langsdorff foreshadows more than one hundred years of speculation about
geographical determinism. The connection between the natives and the
climate—ultimately between anyone living in California and its climate—becomes one of
the chief concerns in the nineteenth century, one with serious ideological ramifications.
144
Langsdorff offers an excellent introduction to the principal concepts of
geographical determinism, especially as an example of the way that this rhetoric,
marching under the banner of science, facilitated the dissemination of racism in
California.
Although it must be allowed generally, as facts incontestable, that
a moderate climate is the most favorable to the human species, and that the
mild regions of the globe are those which nature points out to man as the
most friendly for his habitation, here we find a most striking exception to
the general rule.
Here on this western coast of North America in the thirty-eighth
degree of north latitude, where the aborigines live in a very moderate and
equable climate, where there is no lack of food and no care about
habitations or clothing, where by hunting they can obtain sustenance,
where an abundance of roots, seeds, fruits, and the products of the sea, in
many varieties, are at their hands—these people are, notwithstanding,
small, ugly, and of bad proportion in their persons, and heavy and dull in
their minds.
108
Langsdorff further elaborates on this “most striking exception” by making a comparison
with another tribe far to the north.
Yet several tribes living on the same coast, on the contrary, as, for
example, the Kolosh, in the fifty-eighth and fifty-ninth degrees of north
latitude, are strong, well built, and handsome, and possessing so much
acuteness of mind that by their shrewdness or cunning they have often
foiled both the English and the Russians. I frankly acknowledge that the
phenomenon of these Californian pigmies, in such a mild climate and with
an abundance of food, is to me a puzzle.
109
This “puzzle” and its lingering effects would preoccupy the European and Euro-
American mind well beyond the nineteenth century. In fact, their anxiety over the
potential effects of climate (and how to inoculate oneself against these supposed effects)
would ultimately become one of the central debates in regard to California.
110
145
The key to the debate, and to figurations of California as a place without history,
was Langsdorff’s emphasis on abundance. California in this narrative is a place that
requires little of its inhabitants, a place with an almost mythical “abundance of roots,
seeds, fruits, and the products of the sea,” where its residents have “no care about
habitations or clothing.” While Langsdorff argues for “a moderate climate” as “the most
favorable,” this argument became a flash point for future debates as Europeans and Euro-
Americans pushed imperial regimes into warmer climates and encountered other
civilizations that they decided were inferior to their own. These imperialist texts began to
make the connection between the environmental abundance of tropical climates and the
supposed torpor of the native inhabitants. When coupled with existing European and
Euro-American anxieties about productivity, these narratives ossified into tropes that
were applied to warm climates throughout the Pacific.
111
Primarily, the climate of California was thought to be beneficial, and it was
described to readers world-wide as a natural, even medicinal, wonder soon after its
appearance in European texts.
112
Like many powerful ideologies in the cultural stew of
California, however, it also produced an opposite effect. Europeans and Euro-
Americans, especially Protestants, fretted about the possibility of an overabundance of
one’s desires. In other words, what might happen to people if the climate proved too
beneficial? What was the effect on people if daily existence required little or no work?
Europeans asked themselves this very question as they assessed, with prejudices similar
to Langsdorff, the so-called progress of the native and Spanish populations. As
suggested by prior accounts, visitors generally found both groups lacking. Unable to
146
reconcile in their minds the narrative of paradise with their racist views of the natives and
Spaniards, they often concluded that “paradise” might have deleterious effects on one’s
constitution.
Their imaginations were assisted in constructing this narrative by centuries of
stories about the inherent danger of languor-inducing paradise. Perhaps the most famous
example of this type of story comes from Homeric legend, specifically the story of
Odysseus, in which the narrator recounts a visit to the Lotus eaters, people trapped in a
distant land (possibly an island) because they ate the lotus flower. When Odysseus’s
sailors sample the food, they “longed to stay forever, browsing on / that native bloom,
forgetful of their homeland.”
113
Because the flower caused the sailors to abandon their
orders and forget their original task (to sail home), the Lotus became associated with
amnesia and intoxication, two states of mind that figure prominently in narratives of
California. The seeds of this narrative could not have fallen on a cultural geography
more readily adaptable to the notion of people doomed by ease and leisure, and this
specific allusion gained traction as the nineteenth century progressed. It’s no accident
that by the close of the nineteenth century, botanical activists successfully lobbied for the
California poppy, a species synonymous with narcotic stupor, as the state flower.
114
Langsdorff himself makes no specific reference to the Lotus-eaters or the opiate
properties of California, but this was unnecessary. He only needed to mention the
“puzzle” of native intelligence in California’s “moderate climate” in order to generate
anxiety about isolated paradises, primarily because these notions were already embedded
in the idea of California and could be traced back to the symbolism of islands themselves.
147
The geographic isolation of islands, for instance, cuts in two directions. On the one hand,
it offers an escape from conventional society, a place of refuge from the problems of the
quotidian world. On the other hand, the island is necessarily unable to benefit from the
technology or ideas of that same quotidian world. In this sense, islands, while an
idealized space, are often associated with retardation rather than advancement,
backwardness rather than progress. In the story of Calafía, the narrator says that if the
women did not leave their island to interact with the outside world (and, of course,
become Christians) they were “buried alive.” Thus, while Calafia’s island was in many
respects an idealized place (especially for sex-starved sailors), the separation from
Europe that allowed it to exist in idealized space simultaneously made it dangerous.
As mentioned in a previous discussion of industry, the notion of indolence was
particularly frightful, especially in the Americas.
115
According to Langsdorff, the
Spaniards themselves were conscious of the dangers of idleness. The Spanish, he writes,
had not introduced windmills to California because there would not have been enough
work for the natives, and Spaniards “fear that the introduction of mills would only be
productive of idleness.”
116
Whether or not these claims are true, his arguments reflect
California’s position in the imagination as both alluring and threatening, much as it had
been since Montalvo’s Calafia.
The actions of the natives and other Europeans only increased anxiety over the
narcotic effects of the region. When presented with a choice between rational,
enlightened modernity and the blissful vacuum of California, many chose the latter.
Indian desertion from the missions of California was an ongoing problem. In many
148
missions, had the Spanish not continually engaged in forced “recruitment” (in which they
captured natives and brought them to the missions), the mission populations would have
constantly diminished due to high rates of disease, infant mortality, and
abortion—without any help from desertion. Death rates were almost always higher than
birth rates, and records of baptism do not reveal how many of those baptized remained in
the community or even alive. (One frequent Spanish practice was to baptize natives on
their deathbed.)
117
Not surprisingly, European texts go to great lengths to explain why natives, when
faced with the supposedly overwhelming appeal of European culture, fled for their lives.
Langsdorff argues that “the Indians…must be happier in their condition of comparative
civilization than they were before…” Despite this claim and his repeated assertions that
“they can live much more free from care than in their previous wild, natural state,” he
acknowledges that “an irresistible desire for freedom sometimes breaks out in
individuals.” Because they thought themselves the bearers of progress, Europeans
couldn’t allow this behavior to suggest some deficiency in their own culture. The
Europeans, therefore, ascribed this “desire for freedom” to “the natural genius of the
race” as well as “their attachment to a wandering life, their love of alternate diversion
from hunting and fishing to entire idleness…”
118
Langsdorff even comments on how he
suspects that the fear of losing natives keeps the Spanish from building boats. They “are
afraid that if they had boats the escape of the Indians—who never wholly lose their love
of freedom or attachment to their original habits—might be facilitated.”
119
If what
149
Langsdorff claims is true, then the Spanish efforts at conscripted civilizing ironically
resulted in retarding the very civilization that their methods were supposed to cultivate.
At it turns out, the Native’s own reasons for fleeing were different than what the
Europeans often claimed. Rather than an “attachment to a wandering life” or a love of
“idleness,” the reasons Natives most often gave for fleeing the missions were hunger,
death, and unjust punishment. The testimony of runaway Natives, recorded by the
Spaniards after the runaways had been captured and interrogated, provides some of the
most devastating evidence to contradict the narratives about California’s indolent
paradise. A few of these comments suggest the scope of the situation.
Tiburcio: He testified that after his wife and daughter died, on five
separate occasions Father Dantí ordered him whipped because he was
crying.
[…]
Magín: He testified that he left due to his hunger and because they had put
him in the stocks when he was sick, on orders from the alcalde.
[…]
Ostano: He testified that his motive for having fled was that his wife, one
child, and two brothers had died…
[…]
Homobono: He testifies that his motive for fleeing was that his brother had
died on the other shore, and when he cried for him at the mission they
whipped him.
[…]
Milán: He declared that he was working all day in the tannery without any
food for either himself, his wife or his child. One afternoon after he left
work he went to look for clams to feed his family. Father Dantí whipped
him. The next day he fled to the other shore, where his wife and child
died.
[…]
Magno: He declared that he had run away because, his son being sick, he
took care of him and was therefore unable to go out to work. As a result
he was given no ration and his son died of hunger.
120
150
As these excerpts of Native testimony make abundantly clear, “innate laziness” was
hardly a motivating factor in Native attempts to flee the missions. A skeptic might
counter that Natives were free to invent whatever excuse they chose in responding to
these interrogations, but the historical record provides ample evidence of the catastrophic
death rate among mission Indians. These brief statements provide a human dimension
and local specificity to those statistics.
121
Despite the frequent use of Natives as an example, they weren’t the only ones
who tried to escape the European version of civil society. As mentioned earlier, Russia’s
own sailors exhibited an “inclination and desire to remain here permanently,” a desire so
great that the officers “took the necessary precautions against their desertion.”
Apparently unaware of the profound irony of their actions in a mythological context, the
officers took the potential deserters to “a barren island, where they were held until the
day of [their] departure.”
122
Contemporary readers may attempt for themselves to sort out
the refracting and overlapping layers of symbolism entailed in imprisoning men on an
island so that they would not attempt to escape to a place that was itself imagined as an
island. It is enough to say that, whether he was aware of the context or not, Langsdorff
could hardly have invented a better real-life parallel to the story of the lotus-eaters.
Just as Odysseus had to lash his men to the boat in order to get them to comply
with their original orders, Rezanov was forced to imprison his men on an island to keep
them from succumbing to the opiate allure of California. Nevertheless, Rezanov admits
that “in spite of every precaution, two of [their] most esteemed men … seized the
opportunity to escape when at the creek washing their clothes, vanishing without a
151
trace.”
123
Rezanov offers no further commentary on the incident, nor mentions
similarities between the behavior of his men and that of the natives, but one wonders if
the loss of these “most esteemed men” was perhaps due to some “irresistible desire for
freedom” that beckoned from the narcotic wilds of California.
Europeans were reluctant to explain these incidents because they were reluctant to
explain anything that made European culture less appealing than California’s pigmy-
producing wilderness. Thus, the continued attraction of California as a place beyond
(and more powerful than) the mediating influences of European civilization had to be
explained in other ways. As suggested earlier, one method was to blame the “natural”
inclinations of the local tribes. In this narrative, the natives were simply too foolish to
know what they were missing. The European texts made them sound like infants, calling
them the “nursling” of the Spaniards.
124
Another tactic argued that their tendency to
embrace frivolous objects and practices, such Langsdorff’s description of their “great
fondness for ornaments and sports,” suggested a lack of judgment in general.
125
Of course, these explanations would not have been effective in explaining why
California appealed to Europeans who, apparently, should have known better. This was a
more delicate task because Europeans had to make California attractive for potential
conquest while minimizing the sense of narcosis that might be associated with a paradise
that inspired people to abandon work and home. In order to achieve this, California
becomes, like the natives’ desire for “ornament and sport” or the feminized and frivolous
island of Calafia, a place of pleasure but not yet of consequence (at least not while the
Spanish controlled it). The most telling anecdote in this regard comes from the single
152
narrative of this expedition that captured the imagination of later writers, the romance of
Rezanov and Dona Concepcion.
Whether the Russian noble crassly targeted Concepcion Arguello, the teenaged
daughter of Don Luis Arguello, for political leverage or whether he actually planned to
marry her will probably never be known. Clearly, Rezanov, desperate for supplies for his
beleaguered outpost, needed an ally in California. Unable to make much headway with
the Spanish officials, he began to court Arguello’s daughter—against their fervent
remonstrations—and was finally promised marriage. Whether ploy or not, the scheme
worked, and Rezanov’s ships were outfitted with the necessary supplies. He promised
his fiancée that he would return to his palaces and courtly duties in Russia and then bring
her back himself, but he froze to death in a foolish quest to cross Siberia on foot.
Concepcion Arguello, who waited for him without reply for years, finally entered a
convent.
126
As one might imagine, this material, which was perfectly suited to nineteenth-
century notions of exotic and romantic California as well as long-standing ideologies of
marriage and gender, galvanized legions of sentimental writers. Under the patient hands
of later storytellers, the narrative of Rezanov and Concepcion was molded into a classic
marriage-tale, complete with the requisite international intrigue and patient virgin.
127
Rezanov and Langsdorff, however, provided the foundation for the narrative’s ahistorical
implications.
In his description of their courtship, Rezanov says that Dona Concepcion was
“dissatisfied with the land of her birth. She always referred to it jokingly, thus, as ‘a
153
beautiful country, a warm climate, an abundance of grain and cattle—and nothing
else.’”
128
The fact that she describes California “jokingly” does little to undermine the
fact that she (via Rezanov) crystallizes one of the dominant sentiments for the next two
hundred years of writing about California. It was this notion of California—beautiful,
comfortable, abundant, but otherwise vacuous—that Europeans used to shape and control
the future of California (along with the threat of muskets and cannons). Closely related
to these notions was the idea of California as a feminized place, one both fertile and
available, lovely and frivolous, defenseless and desirable.
The Rezanov and Concepcion romance was the perfect vehicle for advancing
these ideologies. Concepcion, the idealized figuration of a nineteenth-century Calafia, is
“unlimited and overweening” in her “desire for rank and honors”; the religion of her
parents is “fanatical.” Yet, Rezanov’s desire is more economic in nature: to manage “this
Puerto” according to his own “interests.” Because of his financial and national
motivations, Langsdorff says that Rezanov “decided to sacrifice himself, by wedding
Dona Concepcion, to the welfare of his country, and to bind in friendly alliance both
Spain and Russia.”
129
While contemporary readers may doubt the selflessness of
Rezanov’s “sacrifice” on the altar of nationalism, his comment makes clear how
California cements the masculine, colonial power with the feminine, colonized desire.
As usual, the European side of this equation contains history and authority, while the
Californian side is “beautiful…and nothing else.”
154
Chapter Two Endnotes

1
John Dunmore, introduction to The Journal of Jean-Francois de Galaup de La Pérouse,
1785-1788, vol. I, by Jean-Francois Galaup de La Pérouse (London: Hakluyt Society,
1994), clxvi.
2
Definitive evidence of their shipwreck, near the Santa Cruz islands, was not found by
Europeans until 1826. John Dunmore, introduction to The Journal, by La Pérouse, vol. I,
ccvii-ccxxviii. See also Malcolm Margolin introduction to Monterey in 1786: Life in a
California Mission: the Journals of Jean Francois de la Pérouse, by Jean-Francois de La
Pérouse (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1989), 43-44. Additional material on La Pérouse can
be found in John Dunmore, Pacific Explorer: The Life of Jean-Francois de La Pérouse,
1741-1788 (Anapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1985); Donald Jackson, “Ledyard and
Laperouse: a Contrast in Northwestern Exploration,” Western Historical Quarterly 9.4
(1978): 495-508. Dated but useful bibliographic information can be found in Edward
Weber Allen, “Jean Francois Galaup de Lapérouse: a Check List,” California Historical
Society Quarterly 20.1 (1941). For a brief consideration of French imperialism during
the period, see Rufus Kay Willys, “French Imperialists in California,” California
Historical Society Quarterly 8.2 (1929): 116-129. The most comprehensive overview of
France’s connections to California is Abraham Nasatir, French Activities in California:
an Archival Calendar-Guide (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1945). For additional contextual
material, see Annick Foucrier, The French and the Pacific World, 17
th
-19
th
Centuries:
Explorations, Migrations, and Cultural Exchanges (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005),
especially 17-30.
3
La Pérouse’s expedition inspired an enormous outpouring of national sentiment,
including the numerous paintings and even monuments produced in his wake. See
Dunmore, introduction to The Journal, by La Pérouse, vol. I, ccxxvii; and Margolin,
introduction to Monterey in 1786, 44-45.
4
Francis J. Weber, Prominent Visitors to the California Missions (Los Angeles:
Dawson’s Book Shop, 1991), 8.
5
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York:
Routledge, 1992).
6
John Dunmore, introduction to The Journal, by La Pérouse, vol. I. See also Margolin,
introduction to Monterey in 1786, 43-44.
7
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes. See especially her discussion in chapter two for a
helpful context to travel literature at this time. One of her objectives, however, is to
separate eighteenth-century writing from prior travel narratives, while one of mine is to
show their continuity. Furthermore, her assertion that the eighteenth century marks a turn
155

to the interior is puzzling in light of the extensive interior literature of New Spain.
Indeed, most of Mexico was a notably interior, rather than littoral, colonization.
8
“James Cook and the Origin of the Maritime Fur Trade” in Britain, Canada, and the
North Pacific: Maritime Enterprise and Dominion, 1778-1914, ed. Barry Gough
(Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004).
9
Donald Jackson, “Ledyard and Laperouse: a Contrast in Northwestern Exploration,”
The Western Historical Quarterly 9.4 (1978): 496.
10
Qtd. in Richard Batman, The Outer Coast (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1985), 57-60.
11
Qtd. in John Dunmore, introduction to The Journal, by La Pérouse, vol. 1, cxxxviii.
12
See Margolin, Monterey in 1786, 99-103, for comments on otter skins; for European
settlement, see 103-104.
13
Jean-Francois Galaup de La Pérouse, The Journal of Jean-Francois de Galaup de La
Pérouse, 1785-1788, vol. I, ed. and trans. John Dunmore (London: Hakluyt Society,
1994), 194.
14
Franklin Walker remarked that three animals were responsible for the first literature of
southern California: the seal, sea otter, and the long-horned steer. See Franklin Walker, A
Literary History of Southern California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950),
7.
15
Margolin, Monterey in 1786, 101.
16
John Dunmore, introduction to The Journal, by La Pérouse, vol. I, clvii (for views on
religion) and xvii (for background on French-Spanish situation).
17
Margolin, Monterey in 1786, 81.
18
Ibid, 70.
19
Ibid, 71.
20
Ibid, 71.
21
Ibid, 67.
22
Ibid, 67.
23
Ibid, 103.
156

24
Donald C. Cutter, California in 1792: a Spanish Naval Visit, (Norman: Oklahoma UP,
1990), xiii. Due to a recent resurgence in scholarly interest, material on Malaspina and
the voyage can be found in various sources: The Malaspina Expedition, 1789-1794:
Journal of the Voyage by Alejandro Malaspina, vols. I and II, Andrew David et al., eds.
(London: Hakluyt Society, 2001); John Kendrick, Alejandro Malaspina: Portrait of a
Visionary (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999); The Voyage of Sutil and
Mexicana, 1792: The Last Spanish Exploration of the Northwest Coast of America, trans.
John Kendrick (Spokane: Arthur H. Clark, 1991); Donald C. Cutter, Malaspina &
Galiano: Spanish Voyages to the Northwest Coast, 1791 & 1792 (Vancouver: Douglas &
McIntyre, 1991); Javier Martínez Reverte, The Malaspina Expedition: a Scientific and
Political Voyage Around the World, 1789-1794, trans. Mike Escárzaga (New York:
Distributed Art Publishers, 2010); Barbara G. Beddall, “Scientific Books and Instruments
for an Eighteenth Century Voyage Around the World: Antonio Pineda and the Malaspina
Expedition,” in Science, Empire and the European Exploration of the Pacific, ed. Tony
Ballantyne (Burlington: Ashgate, 2004); “New Empires of Trade and Territory in the
Time of Malaspina,” in Britain, Canada, and the North Pacific: Maritime Enterprise and
Dominion, 1778-1914 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2004); Phyllis S. Herda, “Ethnology in the
Enlightenment: the Voyage of Alejandro Malaspina in the Pacific,” in Enlightenment and
Exploration in the North Pacific, 1741-1805, Stephen Haycox et al., eds. (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 1997); Iris H. Wilson Engstrand, “Of Fish and Men:
Spanish Marine Science during the Late Eighteenth Century,” Pacific Historical Review
69.1 (2000): 3-30.
25
Cutter, California in 1792, xiv.
26
Ibid, 124.
27
Ibid, 124.
28
Ibid, 124.
29
Ibid, 128.
30
This applies not only to California, but also to other places around the globe. See Sarah
Jordan, The Anxieties of Idleness: Idleness in Eighteenth-century British Literature and
Culture (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2003); Hussein Alatas, The Myth of the
Lazy Native: a Study of the Image of the Malays, Filipinos, and Javanese from the 16
th
to
the 20
th
Century and its Function in the Ideology of Colonial Capitalism (London: Cass,
1977); and Rod Edmond, Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook
to Gauguin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 108-9. On South Africa,
see Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 62; and J. M. Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters
in South Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 32. For fear of laziness in
157

colonial New England, see John Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America, 1580-1845
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 58.
31
The notion of laziness as a sin appears in a wide range of literature, from Dante’s
Inferno to Spenser’s Fairy Queen. The Old Testament contains various admonitions
against it. For example, Proverbs 21:25 says, “The desire of the slothful killeth him; for
his hands refuse to labour.” The moral dimension is also evident in such sayings as “Idle
hands are the devil’s playthings.”
32
For the Euro-American importance placed on these terms, refer to Ben Franklin’s
remark in his Autobiography that he “took care not only to be in Reality Industrious and
frugal, but to avoid all Appearances of the contrary.”
33
The relationship between history and cultural value is deftly explicated in David E.
Stannard, “Recounting the Fables of Savagery: Native Infanticide and the Functions of
Political Myth,” Journal of American Studies 25.3 (1991): 381-417.
34
Cutter, California in 1792, 132.
35
Ibid, 140. While there is no evidence of any kind of “innate” inclination toward
laziness among Natives, there is evidence that some tribes in California valued
industriousness. See Thomas R. Garth. Jr., “Emphasis on Industriousness Among the
Atsugewi,” in Native Californians: a Theoretical Retrospective, Lowell J. Bean and
Thomas C. Blackburn, eds. (Menlo Park: Ballena Press, 1976), 337-353.
36
Cutter, California in 1792, 141. This condemnation of native wars as petty and
irrelevant foreshadows later descriptions of Mexican wars by Americans and especially
by the Englishman Forbes.
37
For a gloss on this line of thinking, see Stannard, “Native Infanticide,” 382-384.
38
Cutter, California in 1792, 133.
39
Ibid, 133.
40
Ibid, 137.
41
Recall, for instance, the Big-Endians in Gulliver’s Travels. “It is computed that eleven
thousand persons have, at several times, suffered death, rather than submit to break their
eggs at the smaller end.” Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (New York: Norton, 1961),
31. The occasional self-awareness of Euro-Americans is also evident in texts like
Franklin’s “Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America.”
158

42
See, for instance, Cutter, California in 1792, 103, 107, and 112.
43
Ibid, 119.
44
This is particularly interesting, given not only eighteenth-century ideas about scientific
observation, but also given the historical trends in historical writing and the importance
of eyewitness authority. See Rolena Adorno, “The Discursive Encounter of Spain and
America: the Authority of Eyewitness Testimony in the Writing of History,” William and
Mary Quarterly 49.2 (1992): 210-228.
45
Cutter, California in 1792, 141.
46
Anthony Payne, “The Publication and readership of Voyage Journals in the Age of
Vancouver, 1730-1830” in Enlightenment and Exploration in the North Pacific 1741-
1805, Haycox, Barnett, and Liburd, eds. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997),
176-186. Payne notes that Cook’s publications set the standard, and that Vancouver’s
were never quite as popular. Nevertheless, the account “went through a second edition
and foreign translations” (181).
47
George Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean and Round the
World 1791-1795, ed. W. Kaye Lamb (London: Hakluyt Society, 1984). More
information on Vancouver can be found in From Maps to Metaphors: the Pacific World
of George Vancouver, Robin Fisher and Hugh Johnston, eds. (Vancouver: UBC Press,
1993); Robin Fisher, Vancouver’s Voyage: Charting the Northwest Coast, 1791-1795
(Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1992); and Joshua Paddison, A World Transformed:
Firsthand accounts of California before the Gold Rush (Berkeley: Heyday, 1999), 64.
48
For additional details on Nootka Sound, see Janet R. Fireman, “The Seduction of
George Vancouver: a Nootka Affair,” Pacific Historical Review 56.3 (1987): 427-443.
49
Robin Inglis, “Successors and rivals to Cook: the French and the Spaniards” in Captain
Cook: Explorations and Reassessments, ed. Glyndwr Williams (Rochester: Boydell
Press, 2004). See also Alan Frost, “Nootka Sound and the Beginnings of British
Imperialism of Free Trade” in From Maps to Metaphors: the Pacific World of George
Vancouver, Robin Fisher and Hugh Johnston, eds. (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1993).
50
Donald C. Cutter, “Malaspina and the Shrinking Spanish Lake” in Science and
Exploration in the Pacific, Margarette Lincoln, ed. (Rochester: Boydell Press, 1998). On
Spanish weakness, see also Paddison, A World Transformed, 64.
51
The literature on the Black Legend is extensive. See Weber, The Spanish Frontier,
336-341 for an introduction. See also Roberto Fernández Retamar, Caliban and Other
Essays (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 56-73; Philip Wayne Powell,
159

Tree of Hate; Propaganda and Prejudices Affecting United States Relations with the
Hispanic World (New York: Basic Books, 1971); and Margaret Rich Greer, Walter
Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan, Rereading the Black Legend the Discourses of
Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2007); Eric J. Griffin, English Renaissance Drama and the Specter of
Spain: Ethnopoetics and Empire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009);
George Mariscal, “The Role of Spain in Contemporary Race Theory,” Arizona Journal of
Hispanic cultural Studies 2 (1998): 7-22.
52
Alan Frost, “Shaking off the Spanish Yoke: British Schemes to Revolutionise Spanish
America, 1739-1807” in Science and Exploration in the Pacific, Margarette Lincoln, ed.
(Rochester: Boydell Press, 1998).
53
Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery, 1091, 1104, 1125, 1126, and 1128. The word
“dreary” alone appears at least three times in descriptions of California. He also called
the trees and shrubs “dwarf,” “stunted,” or “groveling.”
54
Ibid. At times, California is “picturesque” (1092) or “romantic” (1105), even
“enchanting” (1106). But more than anything, Vancouver loved the weather, which he
noted on various occasions (1423, 1424, 1130).
55
Ibid, 1083. See also Forbes and the “starving world” in the subsequent chapter.
56
Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery, 1122.
57
See Weber, The Spanish Frontier, 55. He argues persuasively about maps as state
secrets and the importance of geographic information: “New pilots … took an oath in the
name of the holy trinity never to relinquish their charts to foreigners.” W. Kaye Lamb,
however, agues that “there is little about Vancouver’s descriptions to suggest espionage.
They simply record what one would expect an observant naval officer to notice.” See his
comment in Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery, 119. In light of the political situation, I
find this argument unconvincing, especially when Lamb acknowledges that “ignorance
had been in effect New Spain’s first line of defence on the coast” (149).
58
Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery, 1121. Emphasis in original.
59
Ibid, 1129.
60
Luke 12:24.
61
This interpretation would perhaps have been influenced by another famous parable, that
of the Prodigal son. In that case, when the irresponsible son comes home, the father
celebrates his homecoming, despite his profligate ways. This celebration leads the other
160

children to complain to their father that his actions are unjust because the other children
have been responsible and yet not rewarded for their behavior.
62
They also lacked defenses, a deficiency that begins to sound strangely like a benefit in
this and later texts.
63
Phillips, Vineyards and Vaqueros, 22.
64
From the beginning of the Black Legend, Spain’s imperial rivals were eager to charge
the Spanish with atrocities that they themselves were committing. Despite this historical
context, some critics have decided that Spaniards and Mexicans simply were lazy as
charged. See David J. Langum, “Californios and the Image of Indolence,” Western
Historical Quarterly 9.2 (1978): 181-196; as well as Weber’s response. David J. Weber,
“Here Rests Juan Espinosa: Toward a Clearer Look at the Image of the ‘Indolent
Californios,’” Western Historical Quarterly 10.1 (1979): 61-69. Phillips occasionally
treats the interconnected nature of these issues and the rhetoric they inspired. See
Phillips, Vineyards and Vaqueros, 118, 133, 290.
65
Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery, qtd. in footnote, 1129. The non-standard grammar
is in the original. Incidentally, this was a “private journal,” kept out of the hands of
Bell’s superiors, and was not the only instance of someone onboard observing those who
were also officially doing the observing. See Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery, 259.
66
David J. Langum, “Californios and the Image of Indolence,” Western Historical
Quarterly 9.2 (1978). While Langum briefly mentions Vancouver, he discusses mostly
nineteenth-century accounts, focusing on religion, nationality, and ethnicity. See also
Jordan, The Anxieties of Idleness; Alatas, The Myth of the Lazy Native. Compare to the
prior discussion on the Sutil and Mexicana journals, as well as the later discussion of
indolence in the section on the Russians.
67
Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery, 1129.
68
For a discussion of Fages, see Chapter One.
69
Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery, qtd. in footnote, p 1130.
70
For context on the Black Legend, see Weber, Spanish Frontier, 336-341; as well as
Susan M. Griffin, Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2004).
71
Langum, “Californios and the Image of Indolence.” He notes the religious influence in
the early nineteenth century, but does not connect this to earlier narratives about
California and its supposed artificiality.
161

72
Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery, 1132.
73
Ibid, 1133.
74
Ibid, 1134.
75
For example, while speculating on the architect for an imagined building, he notes,
“The whole had a most beautiful appearance of human ingenuity and labor; but since it is
not possible, from the rude and very humble race of beings that are found to be the native
inhabitants of this country, to suppose they could have been capable of raising such a
structure, its being the production of nature, cannot be questioned…” Vancouver, A
Voyage of Discovery, 1423.
76
Material on Shaler can be found in Roy F. Nichols, Advance Agents of American
Destiny (Phildelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1956), 50-156; and Roy F.
Nichols, “William Shaler: New England Apostle of Rational Liberty,” The New England
Quarterly 9.1 (1936). See also Lindly Bynum, introduction to Journal of a Voyage, by
William Shaler (Claremont: Saunders Studio Press, 1935), 14-15.
77
Nichols, “William Shaler,” 73.
78
Ibid, 73-74.
79
Some years later, one Spanish official remarked, “Necessity makes licit what is not licit
by law,” and priests made similar comments. While not acute at this point, the situation
was later exacerbated by war with the French and the beginnings of the revolution in
Mexico. See Paddison, A World Transformed, 135-136, for quote and commentary. On
trade regulations, see Kenneth N. Owens, “Frontiersman for the Tsar: Timofei Tarakanov
and the Expansion of Russian America,” Montana the Magazine of Western History 56.3
(2006): 7.
80
Lindly Bynum, introduction to Journal of a Voyage, 16-17.
81
Joseph O’Cain, an American captain out of Massachusetts who forged multi-national
ventures with Russians and Inuit natives for pirating expeditions all the way to Baja,
offers another example. See Owens, “Frontiersman for the Tsar,” 7.
82
Nichols, “William Shaler,” especially 76, 77, 80, 88.
83
Ibid, 72, 75.
162

84
William Shaler, Journal of a Voyage between China and the Northwestern Coast of
America, Made in 1804, Lindly Bynum, ed. (Claremont: Saunders Studio Press, 1935),
50.
85
Shaler, Journal of a Voyage, 56.
86
Ibid, 60.
87
This strategy was somewhat different from those who argued that the fecundity of the
land actually posed the problem, making the Spaniards and natives lazy. The end result,
however, was the same.
88
Shaler, Journal of a Voyage, 59.
89
Ibid, 56.
90
Ibid, 61.
91
Ibid, 67.
92
Ibid, 76.
93
Ibid, 68.
94
Ibid, 68-70.
95
Ibid, 72.
96
Ibid, 75. This philosophy is remarkably similar to British efforts to free the Americas
from the “Spanish yoke.” See Frost, “Shaking off the Spanish Yoke.”
97
Shaler, Journal of a Voyage, 77. Ironically he proclaims their “considerable industry”
in this situation.
98
Over the decades, many scholars have complained about the dearth of scholarship
acknowledging Russian activities in California and, more generally, in North America.
Despite this persistent complaint, the situation remains mostly unchanged. This
dissertation will address only a tiny fraction of the materials available, but several
surveys of the literature offer good starting places for those interested. See Stephen
Haycox, “Russian America: Studies in the English Language,” Pacific Historical Review
59.2 (1990): 231; Leonid A. Shur and James R. Gibson, “Russian Travel Notes and
Journals as Sources for the History of California, 1800-1850,” California Historical
Quarterly 52.1 (1973): 37-63; and Kenneth N. Owens, “Frontiersman for the Tsar,”
163

Montana: the Magazine of Western History 56.3 (2006): 3-21. For an interesting
collection of contextual documents, see W. Michael Mathes, ed., The Russian-Mexican
Frontier: Mexican Documents Regarding the Russian Establishments in California,
1808-1842 (Jenner, CA: Fort Ross Interpretative Association, 2008).
99
Owens, “Frontiersman for the Tsar,” 4.
100
Ibid, 8.
101
Ibid, 4.
102
Paddison, A World Transformed, 96. Material on Langsdorff can be found in Victoria
Joan Moessner introduction to Remarks and Observations on a Voyage Around the
World, from 1803 to 1807, by Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff (Kingston: Limestone
Press, 1993); and Richard G. Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2006), 42-47. For general material on German
colonialism, see Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in
Precononial Germany, 1770-1870 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). For material
on Germans and Native Americans, see Colin G. Calloway, ed., Germans and Indians:
Fantasies, Encounters, Projections (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002).
103
Paddison, A World Transformed, 97.
104
Ibid, 101.
105
Ibid, 104 and 131.
106
Ibid, 104.
107
Ibid, 112.
108
Ibid, 115.
109
Ibid, 115.
110
The late nineteenth century, especially in southern California, contributed more than
its fair share to this literature. Writers from the eastern U.S. penned some of the most
inspired convolutions of logic imaginable in their efforts to “explain” this effect. The
idea was, however, much older. For example, Cook’s voyages had inspired considerable
debate on the topic, debates that likely influenced Langsdorff’s thinking. See Bernard
Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768-1850: a Study in the History of Art
and Ideas (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1960), 63-69.
164

111
In particular, it is interesting to note how the passage across Panama, in the middle of
the century, influenced people’s reactions to California, reactions that were probably
made possible by eighteenth-century discourse on the tropics. See Smith, European
Vision and the South Pacific.
112
Celebrating the supposed bliss of the California climate is hardly a new phenomenon,
certainly much older than late nineteenth-century boosters, despite the common
perception of it being their invention. There are numerous instances, dating back to the
first Spanish explorations. In this chapter Vancouver is a prime example. See Chapter
One for additional, and older, examples.
113
Robert Fitzgerald, trans., The Odyssey (New York: Anchor Books, 1963), 148.
114
Richard Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists (Berkeley: U of California
Press, 2006), 426. Later references to this idea are legion. A recent title, Daniel Olivas,
ed., Latinos in Lotusland: an Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature
(Tempe: Binlingual Press, 2008), is only one example.
115
See the discussion of the journal of the Sutil and Mexicana.
116
Paddison, A World Transformed, 116.
117
James Sandos, Converting California (New Haven: Yale UP, 2004). See also Kent G.
Lightfoot, Indians, Missionaries, and Merchants (University of California Press, 2005).
118
Paddison, A World Transformed, 117.
119
Ibid, 123.
120
“From Testimony of Runaway Christian Indians,” in Lands of Promise and Despair:
Chronicles of Early California, 1535-1846 (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2001), 267-269.
121
For a detailed discussion of death and population at the missions, see Steven Hackel,
Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial
California, 1769-1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 96-123.
122
Paddison, A World Transformed, 104-105.
123
Ibid, 105.
124
Ibid, 124.
125
Ibid, 113.
165

126
Maria Raquel Casas, Married to a Daughter of the Land (Reno: U of Nevada Press,
2007), 81-86 and Richard A Pierce, ed., The Romance of Nikolai Rezanov and
Concepcion Arguello (Kingston: Limestone Press, 1998).
127
The classic examples, and probably the most influential, are Gertrude Atherton’s novel
Rezanov and Bret Harte’s poem “Doña Concepcion.”
128
Paddison, A World Transformed, 122.
129
Ibid, 122-123.
166
Chapter Three:
The Distant Land of Strangers and Enemies, 1815-1835
But without industry, trade, and shipping, California remains desolate and
unpopulated. For six to seven years during the internal wars between
Spain and its colonies it has languished forgotten without any imports
from Mexico.
1
--Adelbert von Chamisso, 1821
Even though Adelbert von Chamisso only visited California once, looking back at
the literary record, he appears to have gone twice. The first time he arrived as a young
writer on the brink of fame, working diligently as a naturalist for the Russian
government. The second time he journeyed to California, he was an established romantic
poet in Germany, looking back on his legacy as he compiled his selected works, and
arguing that his prior work on California was “not altogether unworthy of being rescued
from oblivion.”
2
In his second journey, however, he never set foot in a boat. In fact, he
never even left his desk. Instead he wrote a new account, using journal notes from the
old voyage.
In his first voyage, he wrote the sentences quoted above, descriptions of
California that attest to seismic changes in California and their detrimental effect on daily
life. It was, overall, a bleak assessment. Yet when he returned to his notes some fifteen
years later, a different California materialized. In this version, a gentler, even comic
California emerges. In his 1836 text, for example, Chamisso describes his first encounter
with the governor of California, on a morning in which he was to arrange a diplomatic
meeting between the representatives of the Russian and Spanish governments: “I found
167
the little man in dress uniform and all his decorations, except for a sleeping cap, which he
still wore on his head, ready to take it off in time.”
3
Despite catching the governor in his
bedclothes, the Russians were able to manage a decorous meeting of nations. After
further comic ventures, their amicable stay concluded with a farewell party, during which
Chamisso witnessed “a good missionary [who] had dipped his cloak too deeply into the
blood of the grapes and swayed visibly under the burden.”
4
If the second version of
California sounds remarkably different from the first, one wonders what changed in the
interim, especially since the observer had not yet returned to observe anything new.
Chamisso, who was nothing if not a skillful writer, knew a good angle when he saw one,
and his two texts, marking both the beginning and ending of the period under discussion,
offer an excellent example of the malleability of the region. This shifting image
illustrates how California, as a concept, continued to change in the early nineteenth
century, and how those changes had as much to do with the positions of the observers as
they did with the place itself. Despite these alterations, and even as California continued
to transform culturally and materially, it remained, according to the needs of those who
wrote about it, much the same.
The beginning of the nineteenth century saw further deterioration of the Spanish
empire. In fact, the imperial regime had been in decline before the first attempt at
colonization in California. What is often understood as the beginning of “California
history” in the U.S. was also the last desperate attempt of the Spanish to stave off foreign
incursion in lands they claimed for the crown. When La Pérouse and other travelers
168
arrived in the late eighteenth century, they were witnessing the end of one era and
simultaneously marking the beginning of another.
5
In the years after the departure of Langsdorff and Rezanov, during the first quarter
of the nineteenth century, these processes of change continued as both international and
local events occurred that would have a lasting effect on the region. First, a series of
international humiliations weakened Spain’s ability to discipline and supply its colonies.
Second, the Mexican fight for independence, begun in 1810 and ending in 1821, altered
political and bureaucratic control in the region.
6
The combined impact of these events,
while not initially as powerful in California as in other parts of Mexico,
7
still influenced
events and perceptions in the region, changes which were reflected (though not
uniformly) in the narratives that describe California. The most immediate and readily
discernable impact of the war was the interruption of money and goods sent from the
government in Mexico City. While the imperial bureaucracy had never been totally
faithful in distributing compensation to the soldiers and other officials (even sending
cigars in lieu of payment), during the war of independence conditions noticeably
worsened, an economic fact that nevertheless appears in support of several cultural
arguments about the inhabitants.
Other events began more independently of decisions made in California, Mexico,
or Madrid. The further westward penetration of overland trappers continued a process
precipitated by Lewis and Clark. Since their expedition during the years 1804 to 1806,
pressure on the boundaries of native tribes was relentless. Like shipping in the Pacific,
resource exploitation for capital acquisition was consistently at the root of this rapid
169
expansion of trade into the continent. Blazing a trail for dollars, trappers and traders
enlisted in companies of increasing economic sophistication for the management of risk
and maximizing of profit. As with Pacific trade, animal furs were the primary
commodity.
8
Concomitant with shifts in shipping and exploration was a shift in financing or
patronage. As state-sponsored voyages to California decreased, privately financed
voyages increased, a tendency foreshadowed by the somewhat precocious merchant,
William Shaler. This general trend became the norm in the early nineteenth century as
ships, especially from the northeast US, dotted the harbors of California with a mixture of
legal and illegal operations.
9
Even as direct state-sponsorship diminished, however, state
influence often remained in vessels ostensibly under private orders. Ships in California
might serve two masters, with fluctuating levels of affection and devotion depending on
the situation.
“Under the Direct Rays of the Sun”
A second Russian expedition to the Spanish settlements of coastal California
offers an example of this mixture of patronage. In 1816, the Rurik, under the command
of Otto von Kotzebue and sponsored by the Russian Count Nicolai Rumiantsov, entered
California waters in the midst of sustained Russian-Spanish tension. The Russians had
established two outposts within fifty miles of San Francisco, one at Fort Ross and another
at Bodega Bay. Though Spain ordered the Russians to vacate what they considered
170
Spanish territory, the Russians refused, and Spain lacked the military leverage to do more
than complain about their refusal. To add insult to injury, in times of scarcity the Spanish
were forced to trade with the Russians, the very activity that Russians were forbidden to
undertake, in order for Spanish settlements to survive.
10
When the Rurik arrived in California, it had, like many other expeditions to the
region, its stated as well as its secret objectives. On the one hand, the crew was to
continue exploration and description of the Pacific, especially the search for the fabled
northwest passage. To that end, the ship carried a German naturalist of French descent,
Adelbert von Chamisso, and a Russian artist of German descent, Louis Choris, whose
duties included documenting the flora, fauna, and human habitations of the places
visited.
11
On the other hand, the expedition also sought demonstrate the strength of the
Russia to desperate and wary Spanish officials.
12
To that end, it was outfitted with
several cannon and a captain from the Russian imperial navy, even though the voyage
was privately financed. Furthermore, the Russians likely wanted to test the tenacity, if
not the patience, of the Spaniards to see what resistance they might mount to a Russian
attempt at colonial expansion.
13
Most interesting for the development of cultural ideas about California was the
prodigious textual wake left by the voyage. Both Chamisso and Choris published
narratives of the expedition (published in 1821 and 1820-22). Chamisso also published a
second narrative fifteen years later, and Choris produced a series of sketches for his
narrative that are still widely reproduced. In addition, the ship’s captain, Otto von
Kotzebue, wrote his own officially sanctioned account, which was published in 1821. In
171
fact, Kotzebue published a second account of a later voyage, which also included a visit
to California and comments on the conversation that began with the first voyage. All of
these narratives were translated and reissued at various times, in Russian, German, Dutch,
and English.
14
In retrospect, the Rurik looks like a floating literary laboratory, generating
at least four publications from three different writers and influencing the later texts and
conversations about California culture, history, and geography.
Chamisso’s account of the voyage to California is especially interesting because
he marks the first instance of a distinctly literary figure commenting on California. In
fact, he was already known as a writer before he ever stepped on board the Rurik, and he
would later gain recognition as a romantic poet, associating with some of the most
famous figures in German romanticism. Chamisso had also, however, been trained as a
naturalist at the university, and he was deeply invested in advancing the cause of science,
recording and preserving the specimens of plants, animals, and indigenous culture that he
found around the world. Unlike Shaler, for example, Chamisso’s first account mostly
ignores the mercantile potential of California and makes a point of assessing the native
culture, a task he assiduously pursued in Hawaii and other places on the voyage. In fact,
while remarking on the importance of recording native cultures in California, he argued,
“Every fraction of the history of mankind has importance,” a position contrasting with
many earlier and later visitors.
15
His second publication (of 1836) contains even more
narrative detail in this vein and is peppered with anecdotes, character sketches,
descriptions of pets on board the ship, and even some of his dreams. Chamisso offers, in
172
other words, an interesting combination of talents and proclivities, a person that had not
yet been sent to California by Europeans.
16
The publication history for Chamisso’s two texts reveals some important details
that tend to shape his comments. The first text, called Bemerkungen und Ansichten (or
“Notes and Opinions”),
17
was Chamisso’s catalogue of each day’s events onboard and
was included with Kotzebue’s official publication (1821) as an appendix to the first two
volumes written by the Russian captain. In this section Chamisso makes most of his
interpretative comments from the perspective of a scientist while his storyteller’s voice
remains subdued, likely because of the official nature of this report. The second text,
which he recreated from notes on the original voyage and called Tagebuch (or “Journal”),
was published in 1836 as part of Reise um die Welt (“Voyage Around the World”) and
included with his collected works.
18
This second publication tends to be more narrative
in style and has the stamp of a literary narrator, one looking back with some nostalgia on
events twenty years past. Furthermore, because of disagreements he had with Kotzebue
on the voyage and with the captain’s interpretation of events in his earlier narrative,
Chamisso uses this opportunity to chide Kotzebue for some of his decisions.
Ironically, the first text, “Notes and Opinions,” the official publication of the
voyage and thus the more politically sensitive of the two, tends to criticize the Spanish
more harshly. Chamisso says that the “pious Franciscans…are not trained in any of the
arts and crafts that they are supposed to practice and teach here nor in any of the
languages…”
19
He further notes that the “contempt that the missionaries feel toward the
peoples to whom they are sent seems to us to be an unhappy circumstance” and that “the
173
relationship [between missionaries and natives]…would…be different only in name if a
slaveholder kept them for labor and rented them out at will.” In a rebuke of the standard
defense for the missions as caretakers, Chamisso adds that “he too [the slaveholder]
would feed them.”
20
Not only does he note the problems of mission infrastructure, but
Chamisso also notices the devastation wrought by disease, where “Indians are dying out
…at a rate that is increasing terribly” in a place where there is “no medical help to be
found, other than a “ship’s doctor” who encouraged blood-letting.
21
Despite his sympathies for the Indians, Chamisso cannot totally escape his
romantic sensibilities. Thus, while he remarks on the desire of a native to return to “his
home mountains with vain longing,” Chamisso nevertheless concludes,
The savage is thoughtless; he is as inconstant as a child. Unaccustomed
labor becomes too hard for him; he regrets the step that has fettered him;
he longs for his inborn freedom. The love for his native soil is powerful in
him.
22
As with so many other writers, the narrative of paternalism seeps into the sympathy.
Furthermore, these elements of paternalism reinforce and augment narratives about work
and motivation. Descriptions of diligence almost imperceptibly connect to those of
freedom, so that the so-called natural state of natives merges with a picture of carefree
indolence. In a haunting echo of tropes about memory and fortitude in California,
Chamisso says that “the Indian generally forgets his industry in the mission.” Adding to
this assessment, he claims, “No one plants or sows; they just burn the meadows off from
time to time to increase their fertility.”
23
Here, even when he signals that he understands
the native practice of burning and its connection to their food gathering, the lack of
European agricultural techniques suggests to him the same kind of lackadaisical attitude
174
that infects many other European accounts of California. Thus, despite his supposed
disdain for the calloused philosophies of his predecessors, Chamisso finds himself
mouthing some of their same sentiments.
His second publication (“Journal,” in 1836) is somewhat different. When given
the opportunity to speak freely, without the constrains of an official Russian publication,
he generally avoids the starker critique of his earlier voyage. Chamisso’s comments on
the day to day events in his journal are mostly uneventful; he participates in various
feasts for saints, meets missionaries and military personnel, and brokers a treaty between
the Spanish and Russians, which he considered the highlight of his narrative despite the
fact that it was ignored by both governments. Though he does insert various asides about
the “bitterness” the soldiers felt toward the missionaries and the “subjugated condition”
of the natives, the narrative is most notable for its patina of nostalgia. From a distance of
thousands of miles, and looking back on events roughly twenty years old, California
looks different to the ageing poet. The machinations of its bureaucracy suggest comedy;
its soldiers comedy and pity; even its natives seem to require less sympathy. Everything,
as it often has in the long history of narratives about California, looks better from a
distance, whether that distance appears in miles or years.
In this regard, Chamisso’s offers perhaps his most interesting commentary as he
sails from Alaska to California. Approaching the California coast, he says that the “chief
task was to escape the northern winter,” a remark that inspires him to comment on the
reason for living in warmer climates.
…I cannot and will not praise or honor it [wintering in cold climates]. We
winterlanders, however, still praise the divine wisdom that in such an
175
arrangement gives us the joy of spring. By analogy with this, should we
not demand of our authorities that they put thumbscrews on us half of the
day, so that we might look forward to the hour when they are taken off?
24
Chamisso goes on to say that man “has had the audacity to settle” in places where the
land lies “dead for half a year, under its shroud of snow.” For those foolish enough to
choose such inhospitable regions,
spring is the awakening from a long debilitating illness… Man lives more
fully and more rapidly under the direct rays of the sun, which, as in Brazil,
draws forth the abundance of life from the womb of the earth. Under a
sky without a radiant glow, on a land without fertility, he counts the days
more, counts the years more.
25
While clearly some of this diatribe against cold climates is delivered in jest, an element of
seriousness underlies Chamisso’s mocking of his own homeland. As if to assert his
conviction, he says, “In truth, I would like to live in the region of the palm trees and from
there see the old demon (winter) banned to the tops of the mountains.”
26
Notwithstanding the playful tone, there is more at work in Chamisso’s desire to
live “in the region of the palm trees” than at first appears. Notice, for example, the
emphasis on living “more fully” in warmer climates and how those regions are connected
to the “abundance of life” and the “womb of the earth,” images of paradise reminiscent of
its earliest figurations. Chamisso’s most interesting claim, however, emerges in his
description of people living in the opposite places, “without radiant glow” and “without
fertility.” In these regions, the long suffering resident “counts the days more, counts the
years more.” In other words, the struggle for survival makes people more aware of the
passage of time, whether from simple misery or from monotony he doesn’t say. The
ultimate effect, though, is the same; Chamisso argues that “winterlanders” are more
176
conscious of history, that they record it more conscientiously than those who live “under
the direct rays of the sun.” After having claimed that he would “not praise or honor” the
supposedly noble act of living in the cold, he essentially affirms the nobility of it.
27
Despite this apparent blossoming of love for palm trees and sunshine in his later
years, Chamisso engages in little of the rhapsodic descriptions that were common to
visitors to California. However, if Chamisso doesn’t fully indulge in the exuberance and
excess that of other writers, neither can he avoid concluding his recollections of
California with an image that suggests some of the languor of palm regions. He says, as
they sailed out of the harbor on November first,
Here we daily observed the play of the banks of fog, which were blown
across the sun-drenched land by the prevailing sea breeze where they
broke apart and became dissipated. The spectacle that they prepared for
us upon departure was especially fine, as they first enshrouded then
unveiled various peaks and areas of the coast.
28
The dismay of a scientist and ethnographer upon seeing the condition of the natives gave
way to softer notes of a narrator re-imagining California in a way more aligned with its
storehouse of circulating stories. If we are to believe what he says about escaping winter,
the “spectacle” of a “sun-drenched land” suggested more to him than just an “especially
fine” view. For many visitors to California, this “spectacle” suggested the interdependent
relationship between geography and culture that would color like a sunset or obscure like
a fog those interpretations of the places they sought to describe.
177
“A Country Inhabited by Spaniards”
After the Rurik, there was a break in visitors to California. Between 1818 and
1825, there were few written records of California.
29
During this time, a shift occurred in
the direction of the arrival of writers. While the first narratives were predominately
written by people coming to California in ships (with the exception of some Spanish
writers), in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, a new wave of writers began to
arrive by land. These writers were trappers, most of whom came from the eastern U.S.
and Canada, pushing southward and westward in search of new markets for pelts. These
trappers and their narratives, however, did not appear independently of the shipping
narratives that emerged in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. They were, in part,
inspired by those descriptions of enormous profits, and their organizational structure (in
terms of shares and investments) owed something to a long tradition of such companies
in ocean trade.
30
Furthermore, shipping continued to expand prodigiously during this
period, solidifying trade routes that had emerged roughly fifty years earlier. When the
overland trappers arrived, they were quickly integrated into those economic and cultural
circuits. Finally, the ocean-based shippers occasionally established trading posts on land
(as seen in the case of Russians in California), and missions often acted as intermediaries
between land and sea trade. The arrival of the overland trappers (and subsequent
dispersal of their texts) should thus be seen as a separate but related branch of a similar
phenomenon.
31
178
The arrival of the first Euro-American trappers from the eastern territories of
north America fits well with this general pattern. The Ashley-Smith explorations of the
years 1822-1829 emerged from market expansion driven by the fur trade. General
William H. Ashley operated a fur-trading company based in St. Louis (then the center of
such business) which employed Jedediah Strong Smith, already a veteran of trans-
Missouri trade. Ashley was impressed with Smith’s skills and eventually made him a
partner in the company. When Ashley retired to St. Louis, Smith became the leader of
the expeditions. It was in this role that Smith traveled from St. Louis to the Pacific Coast
and up to Oregon where he was eventually killed by Umpquah Indians.
32
His journal,
however, survived. But Smith’s journal was not the only one to survive. A partner of
his, also killed by an earlier attack on the group, Harrison Rogers, kept his own notes.
Both accounts were found and published posthumously, Smith’s in 1977 and Rogers’s in
1918. Despite their late publication dates, the accounts preserve examples of some of
earliest reactions to California, and as such are valuable for assembling the literary record
of the region.
33
Much like the Euro-American shipping narratives of the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth century, the trappers’ narratives of the early and mid nineteenth century
carried on the image of a California paradise, as well as added some new ideas to the
story. These trappers, who pushed westward across the plains and Rockies of North
America, brought more than half a century of ideas about the western side of the
continent. They imagined a place not only plentiful with animals that could make them
179
rich in the fur trade, but also an exotic land, a place populated by wild beasts and wilder
peoples.
As with those narratives of early explorers to the region, this predisposition
produced multiple, often contradictory effects. On the one hand, these trappers and
mountain men tended to view the cultures and people they found with disdain. They
compared everything they saw with the culture that they had left in the eastern part of the
continent and typically found the unknown region lacking in comparison: laws were
nonsensical or, if agreeable, poorly enforced; landscapes were unattractive or ill-suited
for cultivation; people were rude or cowardly or simply ill-mannered. On the other hand,
these trappers were, like many Euro-Americans, fascinated by novelty and fixated on the
notion of potential. If the land looked poorly suited for cultivation, that only meant that it
was badly managed and that under the patient, diligent hands of a hardworking (or
“white”) American, it might yield enormous crops and profits. If the regions were wild,
they were also filled with all the potential of wilderness, with more potential beaver,
otter, lumber, gold, and silver. In fact, the supposed bounty or plenty of the western
continent became a narrative in itself, one that matched the tales of savages in its
rhetorical sweep. And finally, if these places they encountered were badly governed, one
might always hope, they very deliberately suggested, that they could soon fall into the
hands of a more benevolent and wise government.
Like Shaler, Smith’s journal suggests two controlling forces, one related to the
other: desire for the land and disdain for those who currently controlled it. His motives
for his characterizations, though they are obscured by the premise of making general
180
observations, emerge from his particular situation and reveal an individual entangled in
cultural narratives of his day as well as immediate circumstances. At times his remarks
foreshadow the tenor of commentary moving toward the middle of the century and the
Mexican-American war.
34
Smith continues the ongoing construction of California as a paradise. This is
most evident in his entrance into southern California, where he writes passages very
similar to those of Pedro Font and Juan Crespi, who traveled roughly fifty years before
him. Here again the influence of geography is critical to his reactions. Like those
entering Alta California from the south (via the peninsula), those entering from the east
had to cross sections of very arid terrain, especially if they entered the southern part of
Alta California, terrain that Smith describes as “a dry rocky sandy Barren desert.”
35
Furthermore, the constructed nature of “California,” especially its dependence on
surrounding geography for its figuration in the imagination, emerges in Smith’s
description of southern California, after their passage across the desert. When his
company arrives at “Civilization” on the western side of the San Bernardino Mountains,
Smith, hardly an effusive writer in other parts of the journal, discusses at length the
change in landscape and its effect on them:
The country through which we passed was strikingly contrasted with the
Rocky and Sandy deserts through which we had so long been traveling.
There we had passed many high mountains rocky and Barren Many plains
whose sands drank up the waters of the river and spring where our need
was the greatest. There sometimes a solitary Antelope Bounded by to vex
our hunger and the stunted useless sedge grew as in mockery of the
surrounding sterility. There for many days we had traveled weary hungry
and thirsty drinking from springs that increased our thirst and looking in
vain for a boundary of the interminable waste of sands. But now the scene
181
was changed and whether it was its own real Beauty or the contrast with
what we had seen it certainly seemed to us enchantment.
36
This remarkable passage demonstrates not only the role of the desert in the construction
of California as an imaginative geography, but Smith’s own awareness of this fact. In
this passage, the “Beauty” of the new landscape rests almost entirely on the specific
details of the prior desert landscape that Smith has recently escaped, not the beautiful
one. Though in later sentences he calls the new region a “fertile and well watered valley”
with “herds of Cattle” and “bands of wild horses,” the most evocative and passionate
writing centers on the desert, not on the land of “enchantment,” which is described
mostly in vague adjectives. That Smith himself wonders “whether it was its own real
Beauty or the contrast” between the two places, makes the passage all the more
illuminating.
Though in one way Smith does react to the landscape of southern California like
the Spanish (finding it a paradise), in another way his reaction to the region was markedly
different. As he emerges from the mountains, leaving the desert behind him (following a
path similar to Pedro Font half a century before him), Smith writes,
Here we found a plenty of grass and what was still more pleasing we
began to see track of Horses and Cattle and shortly after saw some fine
herds of Cattle in many directions. As those sure evidences of Civilization
passed in sight they awakened many emotions in my mind and some of
them not the most pleasant. It would perhaps be supposed that after
numerous hardships endured in a savage and inhospitable desert I should
hail the herds that were passing before me in the valley as harbingers of
better times. But they reminded me that I was approaching a country
inhabited by Spaniards. A people whose distinguishing characteristic has
ever been jealousy a people of different religion from mine and possessing
a full share of that bigotry and disregard of the rights of a Protestant that
has at times stained the Catholic Religion.
37
182
As in the prior passage, the strength of his anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic fervor emerges
not simply in his description of “jealousy” and “bigotry,” but in the contrast with his
circumstances. Despite his depravation in the “savage and inhospitable desert,” he still
views entering “a country inhabited by Spaniards” as an unfortunate occurrence.
Considering the desperation of Smith and his companions, and the way that they
described the desert, one wonders how they might have described the Spaniards had they
encountered them in less dire circumstances. By Smith’s own admission, his reaction is
unusual, but he returns to his fear of the Spaniards again, immediately after remarking on
the “enchantment” of the place. Smith writes, “Even in the idea that we were
approaching comparative civilization there was a pleasure not however entirely unmixed
with dred [sic] for we knew not how we might be received.”
38
On the one hand, Smith was entering a foreign country without permission, and
there was evidence to suggest that he could be detained or jailed and his property
confiscated, a possibility that Smith kept foremost in his mind. In a nearby passage, he
writes, “They might perhaps consider me a spy imprison me persecute me for the sake of
religion or detain me in prison to the ruin of my business I knew such things had been
and might be again.”
39
And, in fact, though his trip begins well, Smith’s fears were in
part confirmed by his detainment in San Diego. On the other hand, Smith’s reaction to
the Spaniards and his focus on their religion as the basis for his fears, reveals a bias
unconnected to actual circumstances.
40
Further evidence of his prejudice appears in Smith’s unflattering description of
the mission priests. Describing his first dinner in the mission, “a Building of ancient and
183
Castle-like appearance,” Smith writes, “As soon as we were seated the Father said
Benediction and each one in the most hurried manner asked the blessing of heaven—and
even while the last words were pronouncing the fathers were reaching for the different
dishes.”
41
The image of the Spanish priest overwhelmed by his own appetites and half-
heartedly complying with the articles of his own faith was common in descriptions of
Catholics.
42
In the hands of a writer like Mark Twain, this passage might easily be read
as exaggeration for comic effect, and Smith on occasion writes with droll humor,
43
but he
seems to mean it seriously here because he returns to the incident later in his narrative,
during his stay at a farm on a journey southward. A dinner with the Yorbas recalls to
Smith his prior meal in the mission.
The blessing was asked by a boy 8 or 9 years old standing at the end of the
table with his hands raised. not being pronounced in the usual hurried
manner it had much more the appearance of devotion I then thought as
now that some of the learned fathers might learn the air of devotion if not
the substance from this little boy.
44
Once again Smith assumes deception to be the primary mode of the Catholic religion, and
in this second instance Smith suggests that the priests might only be capable of “the air of
devotion” rather than “the substance” of it. The description, contrasting air and
substance, recalls the classic dichotomies in California literature: real and fake,
substantial and insubstantial, consequential and inconsequential, etcetera. To this long
list of binaries, Smith adds his own religious element: innocent and corrupt. Smith’s
passage sounds remarkably similar to those written by Vancouver and his crew as they
described their interactions with the Spaniards, and their shared Protestant background
cannot be ignored as a factor in shaping their descriptions.
184
Smith’s affinity with other European and Euro-American writers appears in
another instance, namely his favorable reaction to the land and negative reaction to the
inhabitants. For Smith, the missions are typically beautiful while those who control them
are usually cruel to Indians and animals, capricious in their governmental affairs, and
lacking in understanding of business. For example, Smith’s description of mission San
Gabriel sounds overwhelmingly positive. Here he offers considerable detail, description
which, as with that of the desert, rises to a kind of rough literary quality.
The soil in the vicinity of the mission has the appearance of great
fertility... The hills produce Pine of different kinds and at their feet
Groves of Low Oak and small walnuts. The Streams are skirted with
Cotton wood Ash willow small Buck Eye and wild Grape vines. Two
thousand acres of land fenced in the manner I have before described and
so situated as to be easily watered by a small creek that runs through it
producing an abundance of Wheat Beans Peas and some Corn. An
extensive vineyard and orchards of Apples Peach Pear and Olive trees
some figs and a Beautiful grove of about 400 Orange trees render the
Mission of St Gabriel a scene on which the eye cannot fail to rest with
pleasure.
45
Furthermore, his description above highlights the cultivated aspects of the landscape, a
point reiterated in his remark about the “beautiful lands of the neighborhood [on which]
are grazing immense herds of Cattle and large bands of Horses.”
46
This human
modification of the landscape—a product of Spanish and Indian labor—ought to inspire
further gyrations of “dred” in Smith (given his prior reaction to their culture). Ironically,
it figures prominently in creating the paradise that Smith describes, a paradise that would
prove very attractive to the Euro-American imagination. Despite his earlier invectives
(and punctuation), Smith writes an idyllic pastoral scene that predates Helen Hunt
185
Jackson’s Spanish dreamland by more than fifty years. The primary difference between
them, however, is not stylistic but in their approach to the Spanish-Mexican population.
Smith’s vision of the Spanish-Mexican population was quite different from his
own vision of the mission, a contrast as stark as the difference between the desert and
“Civilization.” During his detainment, Smith bitterly remarks that his “fate depended on
the caprice of a man who appeared not to be certain of any thing or of the course his duty
required him to pursue and only governed by the changing whims of the hour…”
47
In
addition to their capricious behavior, Smith also described the Spaniards, with tropes that
echo the Black Legend, as “barbarous and unfeeling” in their treatment of horses, and
says that they mandated corporal punishment of the natives “for the most trifling offence
or neglect.” On the discipline of the neophytes, Smith writes, “They are whipped like
slaves the whip being used by an Indian soldier standing by with a sword to see that it is
faithfully done.”
48
Furthermore, Smith complains that while the mission “impart[ed] to
them [the natives] the benefits of religion,” it also gave Spaniards “the opportunity to
establish over them the most absolute power.”
49
In this system, the “Indian has no
individual right of Property” and, as “ignorant and superstitious beings,” they remain “in
their real slavery without the desire of freedom.”
50
The Spanish did, of course, treat the natives miserably; yet the point here is not
whether these incidents actually occurred, but whether Smith uses them for rhetorical
leverage against Spanish-Mexican culture. Despite appeals for liberation, this kind of
writing often had strategic purposes that shifted according to the context.
51
The image of
Indians was, especially for foreign visitors, highly malleable and often used to suit the
186
rhetorical occasion. When one wanted to demean the controlling regimes, the Indians
were slaves who needed to be liberated. However, when one’s own nation was in power
and trying to control or even decimate native populations, they were savages who were
incapable of being civilized, a stance common to US newspapers in the late nineteenth
century.
52
In addition, Smith’s apparent desire for egalitarian treatment rings hollow
given the fact that his own country currently enslaved thousands of Africans and had
done so for generations, a contradiction that Smith, of course, never mentions. Finally,
Smith’s apparent attempts to assist the natives are undermined by his own language. His
characterization of the Indians as “ignorant and superstitious” (and therefore helpless
pawns of the Spaniards) reveals the complex psychological forces at work in his
supposedly selfless plea for fellow humans.
Those seeking further political motives for his sympathies will find another
compelling passage in Smith’s praise of his “friend Capt Cunningham,” the commander
of a trade ship who apparently assisted Smith while in California.
Meeting in a distant country by routes so different gave an instance of that
restless enterprise that has lead and is now leading our countrymen to all
parts of the worlds that has made them travellers on every ocean until it
can now be said there is not a breeze of heaven but spreads an american
flag.
53
These appeals to nationalism, which become a hallmark of European and especially
Euro-American writing as the nineteenth century progresses, suggest the submerged
ideological foundation for many of Smith’s interpretations of California and foreshadow
the conflict that would develop between the two nations in roughly a quarter century. For
187
the moment, this nationalistic rhetoric appears under the guise of praise for a friend, but
in writers soon to appear this rhetoric would emerge as outright condemnation.
54
Clearly, the strategy in these texts, whether consciously or unconsciously
deployed, was denigration of Spanish-Mexican culture and simultaneous approbation of
European or Euro-American culture, a strategy which in turn undermined California’s
sovereignty and history. In a place half-civilized and ruled by capricious, foolish
officials, history did not occur; society and culture did not advance; science and
technology did not progress. According to these nineteenth-century visitors, the
Spaniards and Mexicans, distracted by the meaningless pantomime of their religious
rituals and hypnotizing their miserable native converts, spun like hopeless driftwood in
the eddies and backwaters of the onrushing river of European and Euro-American
history. Foreign visitors often claimed that they wanted to save this place from itself, yet,
in an eerie pre-figuration of the military doublespeak of the twentieth-century, their
arguments suggested that they would need to destroy the place in order to save it.
55
In
their eyes, this destruction was ultimately a trifling matter, however, because a place with
no history was hardly a place at all.
***
The “Daybook” of Harrison Rogers, one of Smith’s partners in the expedition,
confirms many of the ideological motivations that are suggested by Smith’s text.
Rogers’s manuscript, also recovered after his death and published many years after his
travels,
56
reveals the deeply religious tenor of these motivations. If Smith suggests a
Calvinist ideology, then Rogers advertises it. Despite this difference, Rogers reacted to
188
California in much the way that his partner Smith did: the landscape was beautiful, but
the Catholics were charlatans, cruel, and even sexually immoral.
His attraction to California is immediate and constant, shaping the place into more
of a paradise than Smith did. For Rogers, the mission (which he frequently calls the
“mansion”) sits in a “very handsome” location, with “pretty streams of water” and “rich
and fertile land,”
57
where the priests serve the trappers “an ellegant dinner.”
58
Furthermore, in passages that foreshadow the age of boosterism, Harrison frequently
comments on the pleasant weather, smitten by the fact that even in January, it “still
continues beautiful.” This attitude finally culminates in a remarkably boosterish
pronouncement. “This country in many respects is the most desirable part of the world I
ever was in, the climate so regular and beautiful; the thermomater stands daily from 65 to
70 degrees, and I am told it is about the same in the summer.”
59
The key word in the
passage, “desirable,” offers a window into the problem of California for foreigners,
suggesting not only their high estimation of the land in question, but also how much they
wanted it for themselves. Rogers, like Smith and other foreign writers, finds that he can’t
tolerate its controlling authorities, especially their religion. This assessment should be
read not as an unfortunate coincidence for Rogers, the proverbial thorn on the rose of
California, but as a direct outcome of his favorable reaction to California. Because of the
fact that he finds himself in a place he sees as a paradise, not in spite of it, the Spaniards
must appear depraved in inverse proportion to the beauty of the land that they control.
Echoing other Protestant writers who saw Catholicism as merely a heap of shiny
baubles pasted on a derelict populace, Rogers focuses on the apparent emptiness of its
189
ritual, which “appears more a form than a reality.”
60
This strategy is evident in his
recreation of a discussion with a priest, the tenor of which (if it actually occurred) one
can only imagine.
I very frankly informed him that I was brought up under the Calvinist
doctrine, and did not believe that it was in the power of man to forgive
sins. […] I further informed him that it was my opinion, that men ought
to possess as well as profess religion to constitute the Christian
61
Like the writers on Vancouver’s voyage, Rogers furthers the notion of religion and
authority in California as a sham, a notion of fakery and phoniness that remains
intractable. Up to the present, this narrative recurs in journalism, novels, films and other
narratives about the region.
62
As if to confirm the duplicity and immorality of the priests,
Rogers mentions a few entries later that “Sunday appears to be the day that the most
business is transacted at this Mission; the priest plays at cards both Sunday a weak a
days, when he has company that can play pretty expert.”
63
Having established his moral superiority to the supposed guardians of morality in
California, Rogers, like Smith, extends this argument to other topics. This deliberate
posturing, and its potential ramifications, can perhaps be seen most clearly in Rogers’s
discussion of women. For Rogers, the immorality of California extends even to the
Spanish-Mexican women, who are “very unchaste” and “appear very vulgar in their
conversation and manners.”
64
In order to demonstrate this immorality, Rogers relates a
specific incident.
one came to my lodgings last night and asked me to make her a Blanco
Pickanina, which, being interpreted, is to get her a white child, and I must
say for the first time, I was ashamed, and did not gratify her or comply
with her request, seeing her so forward, I had no propensity to tech her.
65
190
Whatever Rogers’s moralizing intentions in this passage, and they are murky at best, one
wonders what effect this narrative would have had on others reading about California.
Much like the sixteenth and seventeenth century narratives about California as an Edenic
island where the beautiful, sexually alluring heathen are rescued from the darkness of
their idolatry and brought to the purifying light of Christianity, this version of California
seems to suggest the potential for some rather immoral rewards for those who did the
saving. Rogers’s story of promiscuous women in California repackages Calafia and the
women of her island, who were also in need of rescue and happened to cavort in
armaments of pure gold in a distinctly sexual atmosphere. Thus, the apparently
extracurricular rewards of participation in the rescue were perhaps more enticing than the
moral satisfaction of the rescue itself. At the very least, a story like this could have
encouraged in many of Rogers’s readers desires of a wholly different nature than those
the story ostensibly attempts to encourage. Yet, in the literature of California, that seems
to have been exactly the point. Whether talking about women or presidios, a writer
claims to say one thing while the text leers in the opposite direction.
66
It’s also worth asking how Rogers himself would have reacted when not playing
the role of a moralizing white male refusing the favors of racialized, idolatrous women.
In this situation, he plays the part that his Protestant audience would have approved, but
it’s not necessarily true that he would have acted the same way outside the strictures of
the narrative. In fact, the text itself, because it ambiguously positions his moral
foundations (and punctuation), suggests that very possibility. The claim that he was
ashamed “for the first time,” raises questions about whether he was not ashamed in other,
191
somewhat less compromising situations. And was his refusal “to comply with her
request” based solely on the fact that she was “so forward,” rather than on the request
itself? In light of male fantasies about submissive women, would he have been more
receptive to a woman who made a coy rather than frank request? The clumsy pedantic
element of the first part of the anecdote, in which Rogers claims to interpret her request,
is undermined by the second half in which the explanation itself further clouds the light
of his morality.
Like Rezanov’s story of Concepcion, Rogers’s California woman desired those
who found her desirable; in fact, she desired them more than they desired her. This
vision of California, the willing accomplice of her liberators, the lovely but unlucky
product of a fanatical religion and degenerate culture, must on occasion be refused by her
liberators, especially if that refusal only makes her more desirable. As with narratives of
military conquest, the important aspects of the story were her current state of degradation
and her brazen yearning for conquest (military or sexual), both of which increased the
permissibility of take-over by foreign powers. The omnivorous mythology of California
continued to consume narratives that placed her flowering in the future while they
distanced themselves from her desiccated past.
A Californio’s Lament: José Bandini
Given the derogatory depictions of most California residents by visiting
foreigners like Smith and Rogers, one wonders what those residents actually thought of
192
these assessments, if they heard them, and what they thought of California themselves.
While visiting foreigners frequently published accounts of their time in California, there
were few if any publications by local residents, a situation that continued until after the
Mexican-American War.
67
It is therefore difficult to know how local residents reacted to
visiting foreigners or their descriptions, except through accounts (recorded or published
much later) that look back to the period before 1848. One interesting exception to this
situation is a short narrative by José Bandini, an undated document probably written
around 1828. Bandini’s “Decrision de l’Alta California,” composed of nineteen
handwritten pages, was found in the Bancroft Library and published in the early twentieth
century.
68
Though brief, it offers one example of a cultural and political world-view that
emerged among some Californios in the early Mexican period and suggests possibilities
for the imagination of California by a specific subset of its residents.
69
Little is known about José Bandini’s autobiography, but the little that is available
needs to be treated here because it helps to situate him in a specific economic and racial
context that sometimes goes unmentioned in accounts of early California. Bandini was
born in Cádiz, Spain, one of the major ports in that country, in 1771 and moved to South
America roughly twenty years later, eventually settling in Lima. Some time during the
early 1820s, he retired from the military and moved to San Diego, where he became a
wealthy merchant and lived for the remainder of his life.
70
He was what Spanish speakers
in the Americas would have called a “peninsular” Spaniard (peninsulares), meaning,
according to the elaborate caste system prevalent in the Americas, that he was born in
Spain and occupied the highest rung on the cultural ladder. Furthermore, as a wealthy
193
male member of this already elite socio-economic group, Bandini would have moved in
the most powerful circles of society.
71
One revealing detail in this regard is the fact that
Bandini’s description was written originally for Eustace Barron, the business partner of
Alexander Forbes, who would eventually write a history of California, a text (discussed
in Chapter Four) that was instrumental in shaping the notion of California as potential
collateral for Mexican debt or part of a British colonization scheme.
72
Bandini’s elite position, and his investment in maintaining it, illuminates many of
comments in his description of California. While the marginalization of Californios after
the Mexican-American War has drawn important critical attention to their lamentable
treatment by people from the U.S., this situation has at times obscured the vexed
relationship that existed between Californios and Native Americans and even between
Californios and other immigrants from Mexico (often Sonora), whom they saw as a lower
caste than themselves. In one sense, this attitude is a legacy of the colonial culture
throughout the Americas, a legacy which is evident in the texts of the Malaspina voyage,
discussed in Chapter Two.
73
In another sense, however, Bandini and his group are
different than the men of Malaspina’s voyage, not only because they were residents of
California who often deliberately forged an identity in contradistinction to Spain and
Mexico, but because of the way they at times repeated the mantras (about geography,
Natives, and industry) common to visiting foreigners. If nothing else, Bandini reveals the
complicated and shifting racial and cultural boundaries in California, where various
groups often sought leverage by shaping the depiction of those around them. Whether or
194
not, in doing so, they appropriated the language and attitudes of those visitors who
demeaned them, remains a separate question.
Bandini’s relationship to the Native Americans, whom he castigates throughout
the document, suggests the extent of this racism among the elites and the importance of
maintaining a safe distance between himself and them. One paragraph, from his
discussion of the missions, should suffice to convey the tenor of this rhetoric:
The Indians are by nature slovenly and indolent, and their powers of
understanding are greatly limited. In handicrafts they are imitators, never
creators. As their true character is one of vengeance and timidity, they are
inclined toward treachery. They do not recognize kindness, and
ingratitude is common among them. Their present education is not the
most suitable one for bringing out their intellectual powers, but even if it
were, I doubt that they would ever be capable of responding to good
influences.
74
The key terms of this passage, “slovenly,” “indolent,” “timidity,” “treachery” recall
earlier descriptions of Europeans and Euro-Americans, not only in their unwillingness to
acknowledge Native intelligence, but especially in their focus on productivity. Multiple
times in the description, Bandini returns to the notion of “industry” or, its opposite,
“idleness.” Perhaps most interesting, however, is that when Bandini uses these terms he
isn’t always talking about the Natives.
The friction between his description of the “Indians” and of the inhabitants of the
Pueblos demonstrates how important racial designations were to Bandini. He writes,
“The inhabitants of these pueblos are white people, and in order to distinguish them from
the Indians they are commonly called gente de razón.”
75
He also comments that “the
white people are robust, healthy, and well-built,” and that their “fecundity…is extreme.”
Indeed, the further Bandini describes California, the more it sounds like a rehash of
195
Edenic mythologies. He notes the very low death rate, and that “an age of eighty or one
hundred has always been quite common.” Furthermore, he says, “Most illnesses are
unknown, and the freshness and hardiness of the people demonstrate the beneficial effect
of the climate.” In keeping with a tendency to return to gender in narratives of paradise,
Bandini adds, “The women in particular always have roses in their cheeks.”
76
All of this fecundity and vigor, however, stands in contrast to the Natives, who,
Bandini says, are “weak and without vigor.”
77
While Bandini acknowledges that
“venereal disease” dramatically affects their population, he also argues that “their
customs” are to blame, and seems much more invested in the idea that their problems are
“innate” rather than learned, a point that he makes more than once.
78
In fact, Bandini
remarks in passing, “It should be noted that their constitutions are very susceptible to the
contagion,” but he never acknowledges the deplorable living conditions in the missions,
nor the fact that those “white people” he describes were often responsible for distributing
the disease, many times through forced sex.
79
The necessity of depicting Native depravity and infirmity as innate becomes clear
when he continues his treatment of the “white” residents. Despite the picture of health
that Bandini locates in the gente de razón, he admits that “most of them live in idleness.”
He continues in the tradition of Spanish and Mexican stereotypes, claiming, “They exert
themselves only in dancing, horsemanship, and gambling, with which they fill their days.
In most cases they ignore the arts, and I doubt if there is to be found anyone who
practices a trade.”
80
Over and over, Bandini returns to this theme, using words like
196
“industrious,” “indigence,” and “enterprise.”
81
As it turns out, these themes of indolence
and paradise are not unrelated, even in Bandini’s account.
The connection between industry and climate appears most clearly in a section
titled “Kingdoms of Nature,” where Bandini again evokes the rhetoric of paradise,
remarking that the “Vegetable Kingdom of this region cannot be surpassed.” His most
striking claim appears in this same section, in a statement that echoes with eerie
similarity the comments of Richard Henry Dana, who would visit California shortly after
Bandini’s text was written, and those already written by Vancouver, Shaler, and other
imperially minded writers. Continuing his enumeration of the fecundity of California,
Bandini writes,
Fowls are abundant, and the sea provides the most delicious fish. Among
amphibians one finds the rare otter, and the rivers of the interior offer
asylum to the useful beaver. What riches could be supplied by such a
variety of valuable animals! But, unfortunately, industry is unknown in
California.
82
It was a comment that anticipated not only the strategies of Dana, setting a fecund
landscape against the laziness of its inhabitants, but even some of the sentiment in its
suggestion of future potential. For instance, Dana’s quote (“In the hands of an
enterprising people, what a country this might be!”) highlights the future potential of
California by contrasting it with the beauty and torpor of the present.
Banndini, then, may seem to be something of an anomaly in the literature of
California in that he appears to appropriate the language of visiting foreigners and direct
it at the members of his own class. Given the argument that those visiting foreigners
were attempting to drive a wedge between the residents and the land, so that they could
197
justify their own calls for conquest, the adaptation of this rhetoric by Bandini might look
inexplicable. One might ask what he hoped to gain by adopting such strategies, when he
was already a resident in California, would not need to manufacture a rationale for
conquest, and would presumable gain nothing by it. A closer examination of some of his
description suggests that there was in fact much to be gained.
Bandini often sounds like visiting foreigners, especially those inclined toward
mercantile goals, because he actually has many of their same interests, namely, the
expansion and deregulation of markets. His commentary on the missions is revealing,
which he characterizes as consuming the territory and “always opposing the private
ownership of lands” around their own. Furthermore, he writes,
They have unfeelingly appropriated the whole region, although for their planting
and for the maintenance of their cattle they do not need all they possess. It is to
be hoped that the new system of enlightenment and the need for encouraging the
resident gente de razón will compel the government to take adequate measures to
reconcile the interests of all.
83
This battle with the church over land that might be profitable in the hands of merchants is
buttressed by a discussion of the overburdened tax system, into which the missions do not
have to pay and an extensive discussion of the problem with regulations on trade,
specifically the proposal to close most ports to foreign commerce. In fact, Bandini’s
“description” of California really amounts to a detailed complaint about government
regulation of merchants and an argument about the consequences of those proposed
regulations. Along the way, he happens to mention details about the Natives or the
pueblos or the Edenic landscape. Some of his section titles, like “Ports and Commerce”
198
and “Revenue” suggest this inclination, but his “Conclusion” makes most clear his
overall intent, in which he plainly lays out the financial goals of his plan.
Thus, given his position and his objectives, Bandini’s arguments shouldn’t look
so surprising. One might argue that Bandini has unwittingly adopted the language of the
colonizer, and while that might be true to some extent, his response likely originates in
more personal objectives.
84
His description of the Natives certainly fits with those
objectives, as it fortifies his position atop the racial hierarchy in California and further
undermines the authority of a class of people who performed the bulk of the labor on
those industrial ranchos he champions. His adoption of Edenic rhetoric in descriptions of
the landscape is likely influenced by circulating ideas, but also suits his purposes because
it serves to highlight the potential of California as a producer of mercantile goods. Even
his comments on the indolence of the gente de razón can be interpreted as buttressing his
own class position. On closer examination, for instance, he carefully notes, “Almost all
[of the families] are the descendants of a small number of individuals who came with
their wives from the Mexican mainland…”
85
Thus, the so-called lazy people in the
pueblo are not really part of Bandini’s class because, as a peninsular Spaniard and
successful landowner, he felt that he could safely distinguish himself from them.
Bandini’s frequent comments on indolence and his anxiety over California’s
future does, however, suggest that he may have felt less than certain about that social
position, especially if he were to lose his primary tool of social status, his wealth. This
anxiety reflects not only the fluid nature of racial boundaries in California, but also the
economic and political turbulence of the territory. Beyond the difficulties that Mexico’s
199
central government was having in supplying the distant territory (which contributed to
some of the bitterness Californios felt toward Mexico), radical political ideas began to
infiltrate California’s culture, especially its younger generation. Bandini’s earlier
comment on the “new system of enlightenment” highlights some of the political shifts
underway as he wrote, shifts that pitted older generations of Californios against younger,
Californios against Mexico and Spain, as well as merchants against the church. The
arrival in California of what is often called “liberalism,” including the secularization of
the missions, ushered in a period of complex and delicate negotiation between elites and
those they considered their social inferiors. Ultimately, despite the threat of a mass
redistribution of wealth, most of those conflicts were resolved without much change in
the basic structure of Californio society.
86
As Bandini demonstrates, however, this was a
fight that mattered to the elites. It also meant that he might employ some of the same
strategies that were being used by other foreigners against him, and that, in doing so, he
might contribute to notions of California as a place without a past.
Of Cows and Kingfishers
Around the same time that Smith and Rogers were writing their inimitable
ramshackle prose, one of the most erudite and well educated travelers sailed up and down
the coast of California. Auguste Duhaut-Cilly, a Frenchman commanding a trading
vessel that would eventually circle the globe, passed most of 1827 and 1828 in the same
places that had been visited by Vancouver and others before him. His text, which was
200
published in 1834-5, offers an unusual perspective in accounts by visiting foreigners.
87
First, Duhaut-Cilly had, for the world of commercial sailing, a somewhat unusual
background. Like Chamisso, he came from a noble French family that had weathered the
revolution, events which significantly colored his vision of the regime change in
California. Unlike Chamisso, he also had shipped to sea before he was seventeen, and
had considerable experience as a sailor before going to California; only the middle
portion of his journey, the part including South America, California, and China, was
unfamiliar to him, an aspect which likely affected his reaction to those places. Second, as
an educated and urbane French Catholic, unallied with the forces of the arch-enemy,
England, he was offered access into California culture that many other travelers might
have been refused. Perhaps not since the visit of Frenchman La Pérouse had this kind of
Catholic observer traveled to California. Finally, Duhaut-Cilly was an amateur artist
whose sketches of his travels suggest not only his artistic talent but an ability to
observe.
88
His literary background, perhaps even more than Chamisso, emerges numerous
times in the text, not merely in the many references he makes to literary works from Don
Quixote to Walter Scott, but simply in the fluidity of his style. Of course, these literary
allusions can be read as a reflection of his extensive education as well as a writer’s
attempt to advertise it and affirm his place in the world of those elites most likely to read
his text. The issue of education, in fact, is more than incidental. Despite his obvious
intelligence, Duhaut-Cilly suggests some of the ways in which California’s mythologies
201
were absorbed and transformed to suit the emerging ideologies of the nineteenth century,
especially those disseminated by the educated classes.
In at least one case, that of Rousseau, it might be argued that Duhaut-Cilly’s
education was a primary cause of his continuation of old mythologies. His visit to Baja
California, in particular the settlements around the mission of San Jose del Cabo and
Cabo San Lucas, provides a frame for his description and understanding of California as
a whole. He opens his narrative with an account of ranchers approaching on horseback,
men who, Duhaut-Cilly relates, “had quite the look of a troop of bandits. All were armed
with great knives, and several had sabers hanging from their saddles… [E]verything
about these men,” he concludes, “lent them a wild and savage aspect.”
89
The focus on
“wild and savage” acts as a preamble for further passages into the world of Rousseau.
Duhaut-Cilly recounts his interactions with the villagers, noting their “simplicity” and
“poverty,” and concluding with his transcription of a speech by Don Carrillo, the
“venerable patriarch” of one of the oldest Spanish families in Baja California.
90
The
setting for this scene and the speech itself—including an aside about the fertility of the
women, the presence of the numerous grandchildren, and the omnipresence of the natural
world—sound as if torn directly from the pages of Rousseau and transplanted to the
rocky tip of the peninsula.
Take a look, Don Agusto,” said the old man, “at this fine land. Can there
be any place richer and more handsome? If your eyes are better than
mine, they should be able to see the whole of an immense area. The
valley is boxed in here between these two hills, but it then spreads out into
a wide plain, covered with shrubs and grass, and stretches to a chain of
mountains, fifteen or twenty leagues away… I now can see only through a
kind of mist, but I so admired the scene when I was younger than I can
describe it from memory.
91
202
Carrillo continues with a detailed description of the ranch and concludes his speech with
a telling remark: “So be surprised no more at our comfort and take a lesson in
happiness.”
92
The lesson in this instance clearly is meant not for the purported observer
but for the reader, a lesson in the appeal of the unfettered life available to those on the
ragged fringe of advancing modernity.
If this lesson weren’t yet clear enough, Duhaut-Cilly further elaborates on its
objective in his description of a scene as they return to the ranch, a moment that
encapsulates the themes of fertility, beauty, and tranquility.
There we found the young ranch women setting a clean table with all the
good things of the farm—cheeses, both soft and hard; creams and various
milk products; watermelons, with fringes of jet-black seeds showing
against the rose-white fruit. The young rancheras were also busy cooking
the flat cakes of corn and wheat that are called tortillas; one of them was
mixing the flour into a batter while another rounded some of it into a ball
and then flattened by patting it between her pretty hands; a third spread it
on an iron stove where it soon swelled and turned golden; she then served
it to us with a covering of cheese and fresh butter. Nearly all these young
girls are pretty; a charming gaiety animated their features, showing the
openness of their souls and the inner contentment of innocence.
93
The attention to detail, especially in the contrast of colors, reveals Duhaut-Cilly’s abilities
as a writer; it also reveals his investment in the country life that he lovingly depicts, as
well as the way women (young, beautiful women) played a central role in this idyllic
invention. His focus on aesthetic beauty and the symbolic fertility of the fruit and milk,
serve not simply as background but actually lead to his final assessment about the
“openness of their souls,” their “inner contentment,” and their “innocence.” Indeed, the
condition of their souls is predicated on those aspects of fertility, beauty, and tranquility.
Considering the warrior-like women of Calafía’s island, women who were “literally
203
buried alive” by their ignorance of Christianity and the outside world, this was a
remarkable shift in perception.
This lifestyle appealed to Duhaut-Cilly specifically because he saw California as
isolated, a connection that he makes clear in a later passage about a family living in Cabo
San Lucas.
In this peaceful retreat there was living in patriarchal fashion an uncle of
Pedrin surrounded by a numerous family. These sole inhabitants of San
Lucas, separated from the town of San Jose by a chain of arid mountains
and by difficult roads, had only rare communication with their neighbors.
On festival days parties of young people from the ranch, going in turn,
mounted their best horses and journeyed to the mission to hear mass and
listen to the sermon of Fray Tomas. That was almost the limit of their
commerce with the rest of humanity. Where they less happy for this? I do
not think so. In the air around them one sensed the peace of the soul, the
absence of present cares, and confidence in the future.
94
Here, the narrator focuses not so much on the potential for extraction or exploitation, but
on the restorative powers of the location. California sounds like an early nineteenth-
century health spa or yoga retreat, where “peace of the soul” and “absence of cares”
rejuvenate frayed minds. Again, Duhaut-Cilly makes happiness the reward and focal
point of his argument for the simplified life. More than anything, however, California
remained a separate, static space. In order for California, Calafía’s isolated island, to
transform into a restorative wilderness, the escape that Rousseau found so invigorating, it
needed to be sheltered from the buffeting winds of modernity and progress.
If California was always over the horizon for early modern writers, a paradise
where one extracted its resources and returned home, then nineteenth-century writers
began to see it as a place where one might evade the encroaching storms of the
modernity. This represents a key shift in the approach to California as a literary image
204
and as an object of desire. While early modern writers desperately wanted California to
be an other-worldly paradise that reaffirmed the superiority of their own cultures,
nineteenth century writers began to see California as the last place they might find life
uncorrupted by their own cultures. Notice in the prior passage, for example, how
Duhaut-Cilly gives these inhabitants the reward of a future-potential (“confidence in the
future”), something typically reserved for the observer, not the observed, in California.
In this sense, he locates the paradise in the present and under local rule, rather than in
some imagined period when other people (usually the writer’s own) will have control.
Instead of a paradise awaiting conversion to modernity (or Christianity or democracy), as
in Montalvo’s island, Shaler’s republic, or any other of the imagined places, California
was a refuge from those forces. In either case, the crucial changes occurred not in
California itself but in the needs of those who described it.
In this refashioning of California, geography again played a key role, especially
its purported isolation, natural abundance, and aesthetic beauty. For example, it is clear
that Duhaut-Cilly believes that this “contentment” and “peace” derive at least partly from
the region in which Californians live. In these surroundings, even in a place that he calls
a “desert” (San Diego), there is such an “abundance of game” that Duhaut-Cilly says, “I
speak of it with some reluctance, fearing that the reader…may accuse me of
exaggerations.”
95
He apparently felt the same way near Santa Cruz, which he says “could
not be prettier.”
96
In a Rousseau-like passage on the same place, he writes,
One would like to change places with the sky-blue kingfisher that, from
his perch on a dry branch, peers through the shade at the fish below,
betrayed by a ray of light on its golden scales. And one might envy the
205
life of the red duck, ambling peacefully under the galleries of verdure, or
that of the white heron that here finds easy and abundant food.
97
Instead of the commonplace ravens of Vancouver’s narrative, living in ignorance of their
profligate lifestyle, the narrator finds a sky-blue kingfisher, red duck, and white heron.
And rather than mindless consumption, he finds peace and abundance. The crucial
change in the passage lies in its approach to “envy.” Instead of begrudging the ravens for
their bounty, Duhaut-Cilly wishes to “change places” with the birds, a radical
realignment in perspective that once again imagines paradise in California’s present
rather than under a future government.
Despite the significance of this change in perspective, Duhaut-Cilly’s descriptions
maintain some interesting continuities with prior visions. Approaching the coast near
Santa Barbara, Duhaut-Cilly again imagines the life of animals, but this time with cattle.
At certain hours of the day, watching from the ship, you can see these
animals leave the pasture and troop in long files to quench their thirst and
then return in the same order, but with slower steps, to the fields where
plenty and repose await them. But from time to time men on horseback
come to disturb this happy indolence. Then they all flee, seeking to evade
the deadly lasso. But in vain. Misfortune is the lot of those chosen by the
Californians for the bridle or the knife. They will not escape slavery or
death.
98
Duhaut-Cilly neglected to mention his desire to change places with the cow, and for
obvious reasons, but the key terms of the second passage remain the same. The focus on
“plenty,” “repose,” and “happy indolence” recalls earlier narratives about natives and
Spaniards lethargically plodding through the fields of paradise—and sinking into a moral
quagmire as a result. If read as an analogy of the human situation, however, the second
passage also suggests an alarming conclusion. One hesitates to read the entire passage as
206
directly analogous to the colonial regime or imperial destruction, but it’s hard to ignore
the sense of impending doom. After reading that “misfortune is the lot of those chosen
by the Californians,” it’s hard not to wonder what was the lot of Californians chosen by
the galloping emissaries of modernity.
Ultimately, the passage points to the costs of paradise, and in this sense it shows
how infiltrating romantic ideas began to reverse Enlightenment perceptions of California
as a degenerate backwater while reasserting narratives about the dangers of such places.
In effect, these narratives allowed writers to have their cake and eat it too because they
reimagined California as a paradise while simultaneously reaffirming the benefits of
observing from the outside and avoiding its ghastly effects. It was thus a self-
congratulatory exercise, one which meant that in the end California appeared to change
when it had not changed much at all.
In the imaginations of nineteenth-century Europeans, there was a price for
escaping modernity, and this cost was significant: a culture in paradise ceased to advance
according to the assessment of the modern world; the wheels of progress no longer
turned. Usually this stasis is attributed to a lack of desire or general laziness. For
example, the “indolence” that Duhaut-Cilly envies in the animals seeps into the people,
but with less appealing results. As he says in his general assessment of the region,
“Californians are indolent; the only work they have a taste for is taking care of the herds,
since this must be done on a horse.”
99
He even argues that it is a “natural indolence,”
suggesting a connection in their behavior to the environment or to some intrinsic aspect
of their culture.
100
207
The problem with California’s slow descent into stasis and ahistoricism, however,
comes from more than abundance or laziness. In the eyes of Europeans and Euro-
Americans, California lacked history because it lacked the European refinement needed
to produce it. In the nineteenth century, as in many centuries before and after, what
passed for refinement typically follows one crucial resource: wealth. Duhaut-Cilly
perfectly encapsulates this concept in a single description. On his approach to Santa
Barbara, in a passage that follows his description of the “indolent” cows, he writes,
The naked mountainsides, burned to a violet color, make a charming
contrast to this beautiful landscape, where nothing is lacking but a few
fine chateaux to make a magnificent picture. But California is still far
removed from the time when a richer and more numerous people will
adorn it with such structures.
101
Ironically, Duhaut-Cilly and his fellow travelers felt more than a little ambivalent
about their dream for magnificence in California. He recognized, like the inventors of the
Spanish fantasy roughly fifty years later, that just as there was a price for escaping
modernity, there was a price for absorbing it. In this case, the arrival of people with their
“fine chateaux” would necessitate the destruction of the simple life that Duhaut-Cilly
earlier praised. In fact, as he laments, he himself participates in this destruction. Just
after the remarks on how much he would like to be a kingfisher in California, Duhaut-
Cilly admits that
the scene would not be like this if Dr. Botta were to repeat often his work
of collecting bird skins from California. In the two days he spent in Santa
Cruz he did much to disturb the habits of these poor creatures, and in
justice I must admit that I took part in this cruel aggression.
102
To crudely simplify, in the first passage California has romance but lacks culture; in the
second, it has culture but lacks romance. It was a fine piece of self-contradictory logic,
208
and a constant conundrum for nineteenth-century visitors. Californians could not be free
from care if the modern world arrived to make its “magnificent picture,” especially when
this picture included those most symbolic of modernity and the Enlightenment, scientists
and intellectuals. Yet, for these same visitors, California was somehow incomplete
without the modernity they feared would destroy its appeal. Thus, the problem (cost) and
the appeal (benefit) of California came from the same sources: isolation, abundance, and
beauty. Given this cost-benefit equation, foreign observers couldn’t decide which
solution was worse.
Like the “young girls” cooking with their “pretty hands” that Duhaut-Cilly
describes at the opening of his narrative, California is romantic and beautiful to the extent
that it is not modern, to the extent that it lies outside the bounds of conventional history,
isolated and untouched. The romance of California does not produce history; instead
romance inhibits it, which was the crux of the problem for nineteenth-century visions of
California. Its appeal, for a European or Euro-American was inversely related to its
supposed modernity. The more romantic and picturesque it appeared, the less modern
and relevant; ultimately, the more romantic, the less historical. The problem for these
early nineteenth-century observers, whose behavior foreshadowed that of the tourists
stepping off the transcontinental trains and riding out to visit the missions, was that both
sides of this equation were, like California itself, appealing and repulsive to them. They
wanted the romantic aspects of California, yet couldn’t stomach the very lack of
refinement that made it romantic. They wanted the conveniences of modernity, but found
themselves increasingly disconcerted by its effects.
209
Duhaut-Cilly exhibits this same reasoning in discussing California’s inhabitants.
When he describes a chapel in California, he remarks,
The edifice would excite no surprise had it been built by Europeans, but
when we consider that it is the work of poor Indians taught by an
ecclesiastic, that it was erected in a country that, although it contains all
the needed materials, provides them only as they are found in nature, then
we cannot help admiring the patience of this friar…
103
Thus, the building appeals to him precisely because it is not the product of modern
techniques, to the extent that it remains a work of “poor Indians” working with unrefined
materials. Indeed, he elaborates in this very concept (the unrefined), comparing
California to Europe, where “all the materials” arrive “ready to be put in place” and
lacking only “the finishing touches.” In California, “on the contrary, everything is
unformed, including the men… Out of raw earth [the builder] had to make bricks and
tile…”
104
The key to his fascination lies in the “raw” or unfinished aspect of the church’s
construction. Because of his direct comparison with building practices in Europe, he
makes clear that California appeals to him to the extent that it lacks European or modern
characteristics.
He makes this equation of attraction even clearer when he elaborates on supposed
ill effects of European influence on the population. In a long passage about what appeals
to readers of travel narratives, Duhaut-Cilly argues that while
advanced nations and purely primitive peoples are equally worthy of
study, the same is not true of a population whose customs are debased and
no longer original. This is the case with California: a confusion of
Spanish, English, Mexican, Indian and other ways, a dull mosaic without
life or character.
105
210
Here again, Duhaut-Cilly seeks out the supposedly pure specimen, the unadulterated
cultural product, whether refined or primitive. It’s interesting to note how quickly his
theory devolves into racial critique, but just as intriguing to note how his preference
reveals the necessity of keeping California primitive. The addition of European culture to
California results in “a dull mosaic without life or character.” Yet, it was this very aspect
that he previously said California lacked.
His reaction offers a paradigmatic example of writing about California in the
nineteenth century. The two principle descriptive features of California, romantic and
debased, appear to oppose one another, while in fact they interlock and even mutually
reinforce each other. According to this cyclical logic, California is romantic because it is
debased, and debased because romantic. If all of this conflicting desire sounds confusing,
perhaps it makes more sense in light of what Duhaut-Cilly claims to be the purpose of
travel writing.
Describing the customs of a people is of real interest in only two
circumstances: first, when the people depicted are very little known and
their ways, compared to our own, are bizarre or unusual. Art is of no use
here; the attraction of the account arises from the contrast presented to our
imagination; the plain observation of facts provides the charm of the story.
[…]
These matters may also be of compelling interest when they
concern a civilized nation, especially a rival in power or wealth or
manners. But in that case it is not the busy navigator who should
undertake the task, but the historian.
106
Duhaut-Cilly provided a recipe for writing, one that tends to result in cooking very
particular kinds of dishes, as well as a key for interpreting the products of that recipe.
The focus on the “bizarre or unusual” in a culture, a reminder of the early-modern roots
of travel writing in California, helps to explain his need to see California as primitive,
211
isolated, and ahistorical. It also suggests why the admixture of European charm, while on
the one hand desirable to him, would ultimately undermine the “contrast presented to
[his] imagination.” To the extent that California replicated Europe, it lost its “interest” or
appeal. Also intriguing is his denial of artifice in travel writing. His claim that merely
“plain observation of facts provides the charm of the story” is undermined by the very
criteria that he establishes for producing that “charm.” Finally, most interesting for the
narrative of California as a place without history, Duhaut-Cilly argues that the travel
writer’s purview extends only to the “bizarre and unusual.” When writing about a
“civilized nation,” he recommends a very particular kind of writer: the historian. Perhaps
no one had ever made the rules—and the stakes—of travel writing so clear.
Noble Mansions and Miserable Mud Dwellings
Another foreign visitor who arrived about the same time as Duhaut-Cilly was the
English sailor Fredrick William Beechey, who circumnavigated the globe in the years
1825-28 and published his narrative in London in 1831.
107
Beechey’s voyage suggests
both the remarkable continuity of endeavors that were roughly three hundred years old as
well as enormous changes in sea exploration in the second quarter of the nineteenth
century. Unlike prior circumnavigators, who were often simply struggling to survive,
Beechey’s voyage was part of an elaborate three-pronged plan. Though he eventually
stopped twice in California (in San Francisco and Monterey) Beechey was actually
headed to the Arctic in order to meet up with two other British expeditions. On the one
212
hand, this destination reflected the fact that most of the Pacific had already been charted
and that the remaining blank spaces on European maps were generally in the polar
regions. On the other, California was still quite far from Europe; and Beechey had been
sent to the Arctic, in part, to find a Northwest Passage (a shorter route back to Europe),
the same objective that had lured ships to the Pacific shores of North America for
generations.
108
The quest for a Northwest Passage in itself suggests another kind of continuity
with prior European voyages, the ongoing pressure to find and fortify commercial routes
from the Pacific back to Europe. As in voyages past, commercial desire continued to
infiltrate and even finance expeditions that were advertised as scientific. In fact, the two
supposedly separate endeavors often reinforced and amplified each other: as further
exploration uncovered potential markets and resources for commercial exploitation, the
resulting expansion of commerce required additional markets and resources for its
increased appetite. Even the Geographical Society was caught up in this game,
acknowledging in its founding documents that exploration was “paramount to the welfare
of a maritime nation like Great Britain, with its numerous and extensive foreign
possessions…”
109
In this fight, at least three empires—England, Russia, and the United
States—consistently locked horns with the government that currently had control, Spain
and, later, Mexico.
110
(On occasion, the French made their presence felt as well.)
Beechey’s narrative offers insight into the convergence of these pressures on California
and the continued role it played as a site of envy and desire, especially as Spain lost
control and Mexico struggled to maintain it. The fact that California occupies a
213
prominent place in a narrative predominately about the Arctic—the fact that Beechey
even went to California at all—reveals the strategic importance and commercial potential
of the region in the eyes of Europe.
Finally, Beechey’s voyage, as others before it, became a sort of floating publisher,
generating at least four texts, three of which were published within a decade of each other
in the first half of the century. While not as extensive in output as the voyages of
Chamisso, Vancouver, or Cook, these accounts were nevertheless widely read. Even
those texts that treated what might be considered specialized topics, in this case a book on
zoology and another on botany, were devoured by an eager public that had begun to form
societies geared toward particular scientific branches.
111
Among those who were actually
using the information to sail, one of Beechey’s charts—that of San Francisco
bay—continued to be used for twenty-five years afterward.
112
After Beechey’s ship, the Blossom, arrived in San Francisco in 1826, he
proceeded to survey the land around the San Francisco Bay as other foreigners before
him had done. Beechey was well aware of those prior narratives and makes frequent
reference to them, especially to his fellow Englishman, Vancouver, whose presence on
the literary and cultural maps of California Beechey acknowledges as soon as he sails
into the harbor and anchors “in the spot where Vancouver had moored his ship thirty-
three years before.”
113
Furthermore, the demand for traveler’s narratives as well as the
abundance of them had changed the literary marketplace in the years since Vancouver’s
voyage. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, Beechey could count on a public
214
hungry for material on so-called exotic voyages, and he prepared his notes for publication
just after returning from the voyage.
114
Beechey’s account of his time in California is notable for the ways that it adheres
to the principle images of prior accounts, especially those of foreign Protestants. Once
again, the geography is consistently beautiful while the settlements are consistently
miserable, and it is this contrast that foreigners drive like a wedge between the residents
and the land. A single paragraph in Beechey’s account illustrates these rhetorical tactics.
The port of San Francisco … breaks upon the view and forcibly impresses
the spectator with the magnificence of the harbor … sufficiently extensive
to contain all the British navy—with convenient coves, anchorage in every
part, and, around, a country diversified with hill and dale, partly wooded
and partly disposed in pasture lands of the richest kind, abounding in herds
of cattle. In short, the only objects wanting to complete the interest of the
scene are some useful establishments and comfortable residences on the
grassy borders of the harbor, the absence of which creates an involuntary
regret that so fine a country, abounding in all that is essential to man,
should be allowed to remain in such a state of neglect.
115
The critical shift midway through the passage (beginning with “In short…”) brings into
bold relief the two poles of foreign desire. On the one hand, California was naturally
endowed in the “richest” way, with a harbor big enough “to contain all the British Navy.”
On the other hand, California still lacked some “objects…to complete…the scene,”
objects that “create an involuntary regret.” Here Beechey argues that California lacks
what sound like innocuous details: “useful establishments and comfortable residences.”
Yet one can’t help wondering what Beechey had in mind for the future if he could
already imagine the entire British navy comfortably ensconced in the harbor of San
Francisco. Because of the ambiguity of the passage, his comparison serves to illustrate
both the size of the harbor and the undercurrent of imperial desire.
215
If Beechey underplays his true designs initially, however, he chooses to display
them more clearly in the following passage. Especially important in the depiction of
California was the rhetorical function of foreign capital, which emerges in an account of
a trip into the hills surrounding San Francisco.
[T]he road … opened out upon a wide country of meadow land, with
clusters of fine oak free from underwood. It strongly resembled a
nobleman’s park: herds of cattle and horses were grazing upon the rich
pasture, and numerous fallow-deer, startled at the approach of strangers
bounded off to seek protection among the hills. The resemblance,
however, could be traced no further. Instead of a noble mansion, in
character with so fine a country, the party arrived at a miserable mud
dwelling, before the door of which a number of half-naked Indians were
basking in the sun. Several dead geese deprived of their entrails, were
fixed upon pegs around a large pole, for the purpose of decoying the living
game into snares, which were placed for them in favourable situations.
Heaps of bones also of various animals were lying about the place, and
sadly disgraced the park-like scenery around. This spot is named San
Matheo, and belongs to the mission San Francisco.
116
As in the prior passage, an obvious pivot occurs in this scene, one which seeks to
emphasize in the boldest strokes the contrast between the potential of a “nobleman’s
park” with the “miserable mud dwelling.” All of the details in this carefully constructed
miniature of California life—with its “half-naked Indians” exhibiting the requisite
indolence by “basking in the sun,” to the almost clinical detail of the “geese deprived of
their entrails”—further the notion of exotic and degenerate California. In some ways,
however, these details—graphic as they are—merely serve as window dressing for the
most important sentence of the passage, a sentence devoid of imagery but packed with
content: “This spot … belongs to the mission San Francisco.” The key word of the entire
passage, “belongs,” illustrated for foreign (especially British) readers exactly where to
216
find the root of these problems. This place, which ought to have been a “nobleman’s
park” instead languished in the hands of a truly unworthy culture.
But Beechey was not a writer of screeds; he was far too sophisticated for a one-
note attack on California’s governing authority. Unlike Shaler, for example, Beechey at
times writes passages in praise of the hospitality of his hosts, perhaps because he
understood the political consequences of an astringent assault on all cultural fronts. In
Shaler’s case—after being chased from the country—there was little to be gained from
circumspection, but Beechey was in theory a guest of the government. In one instance,
Beechey praises the local reaction after the death of one of his sailors, remarking that he
“cannot recollect ever having met with such conduct in any other foreign port.”
117
Still,
these few examples add up to little in the face of his more emphatic argument. Even his
praise often carries a whiff of patronizing and is overwhelmed by his other sentiment.
Further evidence of the more demeaning language is not lacking. Beechey
applies words like “sickly,” “dilapidated,” “broken down,” “miserable,” and “backward”
to the infrastructure as well as the culture in general. He depicts the presidio as “built in
the humblest style” and “little better than a heap of rubbish and bones,” outfitted with a
“tottering flagstaff,” “three rusty field pieces and a half accoutred sentinel.” As usual, all
of this neglect is attributed to the supposed indolence of the people, whose land is
“scarcely ever touched by the plow.” But, perhaps most importantly, he reminds readers
that “the establishment impresses a spectator with any other sentiment than that of its
being a place of authority” (emphasis added).
118
217
As with the Spaniards and Mexicans, the natives “possess neither the will nor the
patience to provide for themselves, and like “children” merely “execute, mechanically,
what they were desired and no more.” Once again, the Catholic church plays a role in
mesmerizing them; even “the gratification they appeared to derive from the music [in
church] furnished another proof of the strong hold this portion of the ceremonies of the
Romish church takes upon the uninformed minds.”
119
As if to prove the superficiality of
the religious rituals, Beechey remarks that these same natives, when given the
opportunity, “abandon themselves entirely to their favorite amusements, pastimes, and
vices.”
120
And California, fulfilling its role as a land of vices, contributed, one imagines,
to the delinquency of the residents and their lack of motivation.
Beechey crystallizes the cultural cost of living in a land of lotus eaters in his
description of the priests who, despite being “clever men,” “had been so long excluded
from the civilized world that their ideas and their politics, like the maps pinned against
the walls, bore date of 1772…”
121
If the political culture of California remained mired in
the eighteenth century, agriculture belonged to a time even deeper in the misty past.
Beechey writes, “Husbandry is still in a very backward state and it is fortunate that the
soil is so fertile…or I verily believe the people would be contented to live upon acorns.
Their plows appear to have descended from the patriarchal ages…”
122
In a punishment
similar to Calafia’s island, exclusion from Beechey’s European society means that while
the modern era plows quickly forward, islanders and their rudimentary tools are left in
ages past.
218
The general theme of these negative effects is exclusion or “exile in a distant and
barbarous country.” In the priests’ case this “exile” has been “voluntary,” and while that
may bestow on them an aura of nobility in the eyes of Europeans, they still pay a price
for having “relinquished many of the enjoyments of life.”
123
This price and the
ideological framework behind it are evident in the term exile itself. While writers of
travel narratives about California use exile and related terms like isolation so that the
meaning seems self-evident, the concept actually obscures as much as it illuminates.
Exile, often considered an absolute or culturally neutral term by these visitors to
California, serves primarily to denote the cultural center for the narrative and its intended
audience. In other words, the term says more about the text and its readers than the place
described, even though it typically implies universality. When these writers use a term
like exile or isolation they almost never say what others are exiled from. The operative
question is not where someone is exiled, but from what or whom? Beechey says that the
priests are exiled in a distant and barbarous country, but he never says explicitly that
California is distant and barbarous in relation to Europe because he assumes that his
reader uses that location as a point of reference.
Prior to missionization, Native Americans never felt “isolated” or “exiled” in
California. In fact, reversing the relationships of the participants offers some sense of the
manipulative nature of these supposedly self-evident descriptions. Could a native be
“exiled” in Rome, the seat of the Catholic religion and long a center of power in
Europe?
124
If exile simply means distance from the familiar surroundings of one’s own
culture, then natives would be exiles in Europe. But they are rarely (if ever) described as
219
such. For European writers, it was difficult to think of anyone, even natives, as exiles in
the citadels of modernity. For them, the centrality of Europe, no matter where one
originated, was self-evident. Thus for these writers, exile wasn’t simply a condition of
one’s origin, but tied to their belief in the superiority and centrality (geographically,
culturally, etcetera) of their own culture. When they say that a place is “isolated” they
really refer to its distance from the Royal Geographic Society of London, or the cafes of
Madrid, or the court life of Paris, those places they esteemed and with which they were
familiar.
125
Of course, in one of the many ironies of these narratives, it was this very
“isolation” that made places “exotic” in their minds, and therefore worthy of description.
As more than one writer remarked over the course of centuries of California descriptions,
it is the strange that attracts people in narratives, not the ordinary, and once a place
becomes familiar, it loses its attraction.
126
In fact, Beechey’s account of his departure
offers an excellent example of these motivations.
By Christmas day we had all remained sufficiently long in the harbor to
contemplate our departure without regret: the eye had become familiar to
the picturesque scenery of the bay, the pleasure of the chase had lost its
fascination, and the roads to the mission and presidio were grown tedious
and insipid. There was no society to enliven the hours, no incidents to
vary one day from the other…
127
Most notable in the passage is Beechey’s descent into ahistoricism, via boredom. The
“picturesque” has become “familiar” and therefore dull; without “incidents” there was no
way for him to distinguish “one day from the other.” It would be hard to imagine a better
depiction of a slide into the narcotic fog of lotus land. Yet, the comments also recall the
importance of capital, in the guise of “society,” to a full appreciation of California. When
220
he says that California lacked “incidents,” one gets the sense that it lacked a robust
marketplace and the fructifying light that commerce casts on the products of a culture;
that money not only assisted in creating the correct atmosphere for the growth of history
(or “incidents”), but that money was essential; that history could not exist without it.
Despite Beechey’s claims about the “remarkable salubrity” of the climate and the
“benefit that [his] seamen derived from it,” one wonders whether they left “without
regret” or whether they fled the coast, fearing some of the same narcotic effects they had
described in other residents and eager to escape their own transformation under the
beautiful but vapid influence of California.
The Society of Murderers and Robbers
Shortly after Duhaut-Cilly’s visit to California, another visitor arrived by land.
This trapper followed in the steps of Smith and Rogers, and like them, he emerged from a
much different world than the urbane and well-traveled captains of commerce from
Europe. Unlike Smith and Rogers, however, James Ohio Pattie lived to publish his tale.
In fact, he appears to have published his story as a way to survive. Pattie, a young
trapper who made his way from Kentucky to southern California in a saga that began in
1824 and ended in 1830, offers a perfect example of increasing tendencies to seek out
material on the western portion of North America for readers in the eastern U.S.
128
Pattie’s text, first published in 1831, is perhaps best summarized by his hilariously (and
typically) prolix title:
221
The Personal Narrative of James O. Pattie, of Kentucky, During an
Expedition from St. Louis, through the vast regions between that place and
the Pacific ocean, and thence back through the city of Mexico to Vera
Cruz, during journeyings of six years; in which he and his father, who
accompanied him, suffered unheard of hardships and dangers, had
various conflicts with the Indians, and were made captives, in which
captivity his father died; together with a description of the country, and
the various nations through which they passed.
129
Not only does the title summarize the story that Pattie wants to tell, but it also highlights
the sensational (or sensationalized) nature of that story, a story that recalls both the
attraction and the danger of the unknown. This mixture of danger and novelty was a
strong selling point, one that certainly influenced the shape, and probably the details, of
the narrative. In fact, Pattie’s editor (or ghost writer), Timothy Flint, had also written
novels himself before he bought and published Pattie’s story.
130
Given the influence that
Flint, the editor of the Western Monthly Review and a seasoned frontiersman, had on
Pattie’s style, one wonders how those story-telling tendencies influenced the actual
events as well.
While Pattie accompanied his father and probably experienced, in some fashion,
most of the incidents he records, scholarship dating back to Bancroft views Pattie’s
narrative with skepticism. According to accounts of other historical figures who had
contact with the expedition, Pattie tends to exaggerate his own role in the expedition,
making himself a central participant when his role was peripheral.
131
Still, this
exaggeration does not diminish the value of Pattie’s text for understanding ahistoricism
and the creation of images of California. William Goetzmann correctly points out that
“the dispute over its factual authenticity seems merely limiting, for above all else it is one
of the documents of American mythology.”
132
In fact, because Pattie perhaps more
222
deliberately and flagrantly modified his recollections, he may offer a more intriguing
example of the ways that ideology operates in regard to ahistoricism and nineteenth-
century literature. Because we can assume that most of the details in the narrative Pattie
or Flint deliberately chose to record, they likely recorded them the way they wanted
them, without feeling the obligation to accuracy.
Much like prior foreign visitors, Pattie continues the narrative of indolence. This
theme, by then molded into a stereotype by years of use, would prove especially
attractive to Protestant writers in the nineteenth century, and particularly those, like
Pattie, who were looking to turn a profit in California. In a passage packed with all of the
buzz words of his time, Pattie writes, “This province would be among the richest of the
Mexican country, if it were inhabited by an enlightened, enterprising and industrious
people. Nothing can exceed the indolence of the actual inhabitants.”
133
Here again the
themes of waste and potential recall earlier narratives of Edenic bounty in California.
Yet, as was typical for those who complained loudly about the supposedly lazy
Californians, Pattie found himself charmed, if not spellbound, by the landscape these
people occupied.
Every thing in this strange and charming country being new, we were
continually contemplating curiosities of every sort… We used to station
ourselves on the high pinnacles of the cliffs, on which this vast sea pours
its tides, and the retreating or advancing tide showed us the strange sea
monsters of that ocean, such as seals, sea otters, sea elephants, whales,
sharks, sword fish, and various other unshapely sea dwellers. Then we
walked on the beach, and examined the infinite variety of sea shells, all
new and strange to us.
134
Pattie reveals the extent of his fascination with novelty, using the word “strange” three
times in this short passage, alongside related terms like “new” (twice) and “curiosities.”
223
He also reveals his profound investment in the idea of strangeness itself. For California
to be interesting, it had to be “strange” and “new,” otherwise there was little reason to
write about it.
135
This attitude toward travel writing recalls both Duhaut-Cilly and
Chamisso in its focus on the unusual. In Pattie’s case, this investment was, furthermore,
decidedly financial.
When he approached Timothy Flint with a proposition to tell his story, Pattie
wasn’t just telling it; he was selling it. In an expanding market thirsty for narratives of
adventure and raised on everything from Cook’s tales of the Pacific to stories of Daniel
Boone, Pattie must have known that his story had to be better than average.
136
It was also
his last chance for a return on his investment, both financially and psychologically. The
initial trip organized by his father had lost all of its animal pelts, suffered costly delays,
and experienced several diplomatic humiliations—not to mention the death in prison of
Pattie’s father. When Pattie found Flint, he was at the tail end of a saga that had aged
him about ten years and left him penurious and despondent. Flint offered a chance to
recoup losses in dollars and status.
137
Seeing California as “strange” was, therefore, financially rewarding. In a
situation that rehearses the narratives of the sixteenth century, when narrators littered
their texts with references to gold and other potential riches in order to secure more
funding from the courts of Spain, Pattie sprinkles his text with the minerals that his
imagined audience would find most appealing: exotic people, curiosities, tales of the
strange. Flint knew this market as well as anyone, having written for it himself, and felt
he had struck gold in Pattie.
138
224
The psychological payoff in Pattie’s narrative is often just as evident as the
financial. In a perfect illustration of his vociferous attempts to show just how tough he
could be—and just how awful the Californios were—he describes in great detail a scene
which he must have thought displayed his most heroic side. Pattie writes that after he
had vaccinated thousands of people in California (a claim often disputed),
139
he was told
by a priest that he would be paid “after he [became] a Catholic, and a subject of this
[Mexican] government.” Pattie recalls, “I was struck dumb. My anger choked me.”
140
But he apparently soon found his voice (or did in this version of the story), and he
carefully records his exchange with the priest in a speech that might be titled, Death
before Catholic.
Upon this the priest’s tone became loud and angry as he said, ‘then you
regard my proposing that you should become a Catholic, as the expression
of an unjust and whimsical desire!’ I told him ‘yes, that I did; and that I
would not change my present opinions for all the money his mission was
worth; and moreover, that before I would consent to be adopted into the
society and companionship of such a band of murderers and robbers, as I
deemed were to be found along this coast, for the pitiful amount of one
thousand head of cattle, I would suffer death.
141
It is perhaps Pattie’s most proud and defiant moment in the narrative, and coming shortly
before the conclusion represents a climax in the story’s structure. The incident also
suggests the ferocity of the gathering anti-Catholic rhetoric and the ways it would
influence the image of California. It became another tool in the effort to wrest control of
California from the Mexican government. Pattie, like others before him, wanted to show
that the geography was good, but the people were bad.
If interpretation sounds too simplistic, we have only to read a concluding passage,
in which Pattie sums up his trip to California.
225
[T]his country is more calculated to charm the eye, than any one I have
ever seen. Those, who traverse it, if they have any capability whatever of
perceiving, and admiring the beautiful and sublime in scenery, must be
constantly excited to wonder and praise. It is no less remarkable for
uniting the advantages of healthfulness, a good soil, a temperate climate,
and yet one of exceeding mildness, and happy mixture of level and
elevated ground, and vicinity to the sea. Its inhabitants are equally
calculated to excite dislike, and even the stronger feelings of disgust and
hatred.
142
As the nineteenth century marched onward, this dichotomy between the landscape and
the inhabitants became, if anything, more pronounced. Here Pattie shows just how worn
the postures were; he had perfectly refined his rhetoric, suggesting the language of math
and science (“equally calculated”) in his turn from praise of the landscape to denigration
of the inhabitants. Even the passive construction of the final sentence, with its
disembodied calculating force, demonstrates (and conceals) the constructed nature of the
inhabitants. If they “are … calculated,” then by whom? Perhaps that element of the
equation was obvious to Pattie and his intended audience, people who would have known
exactly how to evaluate the residents of California in relation to the U.S.
Despite its nationalistic bravado and imperial implications, especially towards the
end of the text, Pattie concludes his Personal Narrative with a very interesting
admonition against traveling to foreign places.
143
After his supposedly heroic adventures
in which he was the foreigner traveling among strangers, Pattie returns home to find
himself, ironically, a stranger to those he left there:
They neither recognize me, nor I them. […] I look round for the dear
band of brothers and sisters. But one of the numerous group remains, and
he too young to know me… […] I left one sister, a child. She is married
to a person I never knew; one, who…can only regard me with the eye of a
stranger.
144
226
Pattie earlier compared nearly everything he saw with his home in the US, and found all
of it lacking. But when he finally arrives at home, he discovers that the culture he
glowingly described (itself an invention just as much as the place he visited) no longer
knows him and can no longer offer him the comfort he expected. Not only is he a
stranger in his former home, but the emotional price of his journey, coupled with its
paltry fiscal rewards, has been quite steep. Pattie recalls his father, “worn out by the
torture of his oppressors, and buried in the distant land of strangers and enemies.”
145
Furthermore, after all his bragging about war, vaccinations, and escape in California,
Pattie admits, with resignation verging on total despondency,
[T]he hopes of my youthful days are all vanished, and can never return. If
there is a lesson from my wanderings it is one…that counsels the young
against wandering far away, to see the habitations, and endure the
inhospitality of strangers.
146
Ironically, the same person whose narrative depicted California as a place outside
of history, a place beyond civilization, finds himself a part of that very narrative. Like
those he so frequently despises, he is now unknown, unrecognized, cut from the fabric of
history in his family’s home. Certainly he makes an attempt, with his narrative, to
reinsert himself in that history, and he never acknowledges any association with those
western “strangers” that he earlier demeaned, but his inadvertent association of his own
strangeness at home with the inhospitable strangers abroad makes for very ironic
connections. Indeed, the “inhospitality” of his family on his arrival back home, after
years of struggle to reach that place suggests that the “strange” is a very flexible
ideological tool, and one with potentially unforeseen consequences. As in the prior
227
chapter, writers often found themselves confronting the very ideological apparatus that
they had helped to construct, a pattern that recurs as the war approached.
Thus, while Pattie’s narrative seeks to exploit California, it also becomes a
testament to the dangers of California for those same people to whom his book would
have appealed. In this sense as well, Pattie rehearses sixteenth-century stories of
adventure in the Americas, recalling the initial focus on wonder and novelty—followed
by profound disappointments and a sense of regret in looking back at years spent chasing
rewards that never materialized or were squandered. Furthermore, Pattie’s lingering
nostalgia tracks with previous travelers and foreshadows those to come.
147
Finally, his
focus on California as the “land of strangers and enemies” illustrates the power of that
geography to change Pattie himself, a lesson that would profoundly influence the
anxieties of Euro-Americans headed to the same “strange” and “new” island, a vision
then approaching its three hundredth anniversary.
“Get Out of Our Country!”
Unlike most writers in the early nineteenth century, who journeyed into Pattie’s
“distant land of strangers and enemies” then returned home to write about it, Pablo Tac,
an Indian from the mission San Luis Rey, began at home and died in the land of strangers
and enemies. His case reverses the standard narrative because “home” did not mean
Madrid or Boston, but California; and the “distant land” did not mean America, but Italy.
228
Still more unusual, Tac did not leave his home in search of these distant lands or their
inhabitants. The strangers and enemies came to him.
His tribe, the Quechnajuichom, occupied the coastal hills and lowlands roughly
halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego, where, after centuries of sporadic
encounters with Europeans, they collided with Spanish colonization in the late eighteenth
century. Tac, born in the early nineteenth century into a protracted cultural struggle that
was already decades old, departed with some of these strangers, the Spanish priests,
having been convinced by them to sail back to Mexico City and eventually Rome, where
he died of illness (possibly smallpox) just short of his twentieth birthday. He had not yet
completed writing the history of his people and dictionary of their language.
148
For a mission Indian from California, Pablo Tac was in many respects an unusual
case. He appears to have had a close relationship with some of the priests and was given
access to aspects of Spanish culture often off-limits for natives. Furthermore, because he
showed remarkable aptitude for learning languages (and perhaps because of his
relationships with the priests), the missionaries educated him not only in Spanish but
Latin as well. Finally, the short document that remains from his abbreviated life, “Indian
Life and Customs at Mission San Luis Rey,” is the earliest known written narrative by a
California mission Indian. Composed sometime between 1835 and 1841, most likely
when Tac was twelve or thirteen, it is one of the only first person accounts written by a
mission Indian from this period.
149
Despite the tremendous opportunities that this text offers readers in the twenty-
first century, we cannot assume that it presents an unobstructed view into the lives of
229
nineteenth-century native Californians, nor the views of mission Indians, even taking into
account enormous differences in native cultures at the same mission. Clearly, Tac
absorbed a considerable amount of Catholic ideology; indeed his presence in Rome and
access to Spanish culture may reflect the degree to which the priests viewed him as an
example of successful indoctrination and acculturation.
150
Thus, his narrative can’t be
seen as purely an act of resistance to the priests or Californios, and certainly not to
Catholic ideology. For instance, on the first meeting between his tribe and the Spaniards,
Tac writes, “This was that happy day in which we saw white people… O merciful God,
why didst Thou leave us for many centuries, years, months and days in utter darkness
after Thou camest to the world?”
151
Obviously, these are not the words of one who
learned Latin and Spanish in order to write a polemical attack on the abuses of church
and state in California.
Neither, however, is the narrative a paean to mission life or the arrival of God and
civilization from Europe. If read closely, there are moments where a perspective
different from coeval Euro-American texts emerges. Even when Tac seems not
interested in deliberately depicting the tension in Indian-Spanish relations, he reveals the
resistance Indians offered to the colonists. For instance, in the scene quoted above, when
the missionary tries to speak to the leader of the Indians, the “captain” responds, “‘What
is it that you seek here? Get out of our country!’”
152
Given these juxtapositions and the
context for its composition, the interpretation of Tac’s text is, to put it mildly, a
challenge.
153
230
Scholars have differed about the various degrees of intentional resistance in his
narrative. Some have argued that Tac’s account of mission life is “positive,” an
interpretation which, given the very uneven nature of its treatment of the Spanish, sounds
euphemistic.
154
Others have argued that while writing in Rome Tac maintained “his sense
of outrage at Spanish occupation,” an interpretation which, considering his age and his
history with the church, probably errs in the opposite direction.
155
Yet neither position is
obligatory. To acknowledge that Tac may not have written his account as a covert attack
on the same people who potentially required its composition, does not necessarily
exclude the possibility of a narrative embedded with moments of resistance to Spanish
authority. In the same way that the texts of European and Euro-American writers often
reflect consciously and unconsciously the cultural mandates of the places that they called
home, Tac’s text reveals the complex layers of competing ideologies, filtered through the
perspective of a person simultaneously negotiating those competing pressures in daily
life. If his text appears to suggest one idea while arguing in favor of another, it would be
similar to the narratives written by generations of other observers whose texts often
demonstrate subsurface ironies. In other words, despite its complications, Tac’s narrative
remains incredibly valuable to the literature of California.
Besides offering an unusual perspective on colonialism in California, Tac
historicizes the pre-Spanish past, often by means of its violence. For example, Tac
writes, “The life of that time was very miserable because there was always strife. …
Thus we lived among the woods until merciful God freed us of these miseries through
Father Antonio Peyri…”
156
While Tac’s Spanish education clearly influences how he
231
depicts the past (with the present sounding more favorable because of the arrival of
Christianity), it is still important to recognize how much his version of the past differs
from the vacuum of paradise created by European and Euro-American writers.
157
Indeed,
the past, in Tac’s account, is not a promised land of milk and honey, but a place of misery
and war, which is to say, a place where events happened rather than a place where the
bounty of the land created a static, narcotic dream-space.
In an account of the name of his tribe, he writes “We called ourselves
Quechnajuichom, that is to say inhabitants of Quechla, when we were at peace, because
always there was war, always strife day and night with those who spoke in another
language.”
158
Here again it is crucial to recognize this kind of statement for what it does
not do: it does not portray the Indians as a group of happy idiots lounging in the gardens
of paradise; it does not claim that activity stagnated because of the climate; it does not
say that people lived to two hundred years of age (all claims which later European and
Euro-American writers would make about Indians living in California). Tac may
exaggerate the element of war because his Catholic indoctrination would have taught him
to see the past as barbarous and the present as civilized, but at the very least this
description stands in contrast to the kinds of descriptions that would emerge from writers
arriving in California within a decade.
159
Too much credit should not be given to
violence or misery as a maker of history, but active (rather than passive) roles in
challenging (rather than facile) circumstances have an effect on how history is depicted
and often whether it is depicted at all.
160
In this narrative, Tac’s people find themselves
embroiled in contests with competing societies for survival, a struggle similar to that of
232
the Europeans who described them, though those Europeans likely would not have
acknowledged this resemblance because they tended to connect their own struggles to a
teleological narrative of progress.
If the past in Tac’s account contains more events than typically allowed in
paradise, it also describes a people who see themselves as connected to that past, part of a
distinct place, and having a clear understanding of their interaction with those around
them.
161
In his account of building and naming the mission, Tac writes,
The Mission of San Luis Rey de Francia, thus Fernandino father named it
after having completed all the house, because our patron is St. Louis the
King. But we call it Quechla in our language. Thus our grandparents
called it, because in this country there was a kind of stones that were
called quechlam…”
162
On the one hand, Tac recites the missionary doctrine in connecting the mission’s name
back to the Spanish king and his patronage. On the other, he inserts into the story the
native history and its connection to the local geography. His version of the naming thus
provides an important corrective to prevailing European and Euro-American visions of
California as an uninhabited landscape and a place without a past. In Tac’s version the
geography, rather than demonstrating the absence of history in an undifferentiated
landscape, actually connects the natives to a historical narrative in a specific place. The
passage also ironically recalls narratives like Beechey’s in which the text pivots on a
word (“But”), deliberately contrasting two very different points of view. In Tac’s
narrative, however, the contrast serves to undercut the European narrative, while in
Beechey’s text it performs the opposite function.
163
233
In addition to trampling the gardens of paradise in the imagined past, Tac suggests
that the present might not be very romantic for the Indians either. Primarily, he
historicizes the devastating disease that swept through California and its toll on his
people. Tac writes, “In Quechla not long ago there were 5000 souls, with all their
neighboring lands. Through a sickness that came to California 2,000 souls died…”
164
It
is hard to imagine that 2,000 people could die of sickness in a “promised land” or
“garden of Eden.” Tac’s account sounds more like a plague from the book of Revelation,
but it additionally places those deaths in a historical context, within an established
tradition of a people conscious of their past.
165
While Tac’s explicit purpose may not be
to correct European misconceptions, his unvarnished details certainly have that effect.
His narrative also recounts the schedules of work forced on the Indians, another
decidedly un-romantic detail.
With the laborers goes a Spanish majordomo and others, neophyte
alcaldes, to see how the work is done, to hurry them if they are lazy…and
to punish the guilty or lazy one who leaves his plow and quits the field
keeping on with his laziness.
166
As with other passages in the text, Tac simultaneously offers a native perspective while
he repeats a Spanish rationalization. In this case he reveals the history of forced labor in
the missions while he also justifies it with Spanish ideology. “Laziness,” as here applied
to those working at the mission, certainly reflects a Spanish point of view, especially
since natives were not paid for their labor. Typically, the mission would hire out a native
work crew, taking the money earned into the mission’s coffers.
167
In light of the fact that
they were unpaid and working for people who often were able but unwilling to do the
work themselves, the natives likely wondered who was in fact the lazy party.
234
Further into his narrative, Tac reveals some of the contextual details that might
have contributed to the “laziness” of natives. For instance, Tac describes the mission
garden, simultaneously praising its scale and revealing the divisive structures that allow it
to flourish.
The garden is extensive, full of fruit trees, pears, apples or perones, …
peaches, quinces, pears [sic], sweet pomegranates, figs, watermelons,
melons, vegetables, cabbages, lettuces, radishes, mints, parsley and others
which I don’t remember. The pears, apples, peaches, quinces,
pomegranates, watermelons and melons are for the neophytes, the others
that remain, for the missionary.
While it may initially sound as if the neophytes are given generously from this
remarkable food source, the more coercive and punitive practices of the mission system
soon emerge, as well as the psychological indoctrination that made those systems of
coercion possible.
None of the neophytes can go to the garden or enter to gather the fruit.
But if he wants some he asks the missionary who immediately will give
him what he wants, for the missionary is their father. The neophyte might
encounter the gardener walking and cutting the fruits, who then follows
him to punish him, until he leaves the walls of the garden, jumping as they
know how (like deer in the mountains).
168
Ironically, Tac’s apparent acceptance of colonial authority and justice in California
(whether genuine or not) makes his account all the more devastating in its potential for
critique of that same system. His casual juxtaposition of the priest as a benevolent patron
with his henchman, the gardener, as a kind of sentry policing the perimeter of the
church’s agricultural resources and distributing punishment, creates an ironic discord in
the text that is just as powerful as any screed against the church.
235
If readers feel somewhat skeptical of Tac’s rationalization for the missionary’s
behavior (“who will immediately give him what he wants”), that skepticism will be
augmented by a later description of the priests. Tac writes,
In the Mission of San Luis Rey de Francia the Fernandino Father is like a
king. He has his pages, alcaldes, majordomos, musicians, soldiers,
gardens, ranchos, livestock, horses by the thousand, cows, bulls by the
thousand, oxen, mules, asses, 12,000 lambs, 200 goats, etc. The pages are
for him and for the Spanish and Mexican, English and Anglo-American
travelers.
169
Here again, what initially sounds like an encomium has the ironic effect of undermining
the very image of justice and religious austerity that the Spanish want to create. Instead
of looking like humble ascetics working by candlelight in bare rooms, the priest sounds
like a feudal lord or a king from the Old Testament. Clearly, circumstances contribute to
the natives’ “laziness” and imply that their reluctance to work was, at the least, a way of
registering a complaint, if not a deliberate strategy to undermine Spanish authority. This
is not to say that Indian society prior to missionization was free from labor or that work
was always fairly distributed. On the contrary, the life of Indians in California involved
ritualized cycles of work, much of it done by women.
170
They saw and received,
however, the benefits of this labor and thus had an entirely different relationship to it.
Finally, Tac offers a different ecological version of the region than we find in
narratives written by visitors, especially those of the first half of the nineteenth century.
For example, Tac historicizes the radical transformation of landscape by Spaniards during
the period of colonization. Contrary to the narrative that the missions occupied wild or
raw land, Tac reveals that the missionaries, soldiers, and settlers transformed the
landscape with grazing animals and farming practices.
171
Regarding this transformation,
236
Tac says, “Our country, before the Fernandino came, was a woods. He ordered them to
cut the trees and make in this fashion a clearing.”
172
Not only do the Spaniards remove
the natives from the “woods,” but they offer an explanation for doing so. According to
Tac, the natives “lived among the woods until merciful God freed [them] of these
miseries through Father Antonio Peyri…”
173
In other words, the Spaniards removed the
trees, an alteration in the land that, Tac explains, was designed to alleviate the “miseries”
that natives encountered while living among them. The sentence can therefore be read as
a symbol for the church “clearing” away the barbarous religion of the natives for
Christianity, and as a plain statement of fact, one which significantly altered the food
gathering practices of the natives. Thus, in Tac’s account, deforestation represents both a
change in ecology and a civilizing project; the Spanish prepared the ground for the
church and its civilizing influence. In effect, the missions cleared the woods to plant a
new history.
Ironically, while the Spaniards insisted on calling the native habitat a “woods,”
many of the visitors to the region where Tac’s people lived described it as a “desert.”
Vancouver, Duhaut-Cilly, Chamisso, and others consistently characterized the land
around the southern missions as barren and infertile, but this area in Tac’s narrative
differs vastly from the “desert” of later visitors. For instance, Tac describes “the old man
of the house” who “goes off to the distant woods which are full of bears and hares, deer
and thousands of birds,” and comes home “loaded with hares.”
174
Furthermore, Tac’s
depiction of the region is corroborated by the earliest Spanish descriptions of the area,
such as Crespi’s or Font’s diaries, which listed in almost ecstatic prose the trees, flowers,
237
and animals encountered as they traveled north of the peninsula.
175
Archeological
evidence also suggests that significant deforestation occurred, beginning with the
introduction of Spanish livestock and non-native plants, in places often regarded as
“naturally” barren.
176
Tac’s narrative, then, historicizes some of the changes that had
already occurred in this supposedly static paradise while it simultaneously implies a
political dimension for the polarity in descriptions. The Spanish, who considered
themselves the owners of California, saw it as a rich and fecund landscape, but the
English, who were interested in wresting control from the Spaniards, often saw it as
barren, dreary, and, of course, vulnerable to attack.
What is important about these descriptions is not determining whether Quechla
was actually a “woods” or a “desert,” but recognizing that these descriptions were
harnessed to ideological declarations and used to manipulate interpretations of California.
Much like “paradise” and “wasteland,” these terms served not as neutral descriptors but
as terms with potentially powerful rhetorical leverage. They could be used to shape
opinions, and ultimately actions, in a place that was increasingly important to a growing
number of competitors. If a writer wanted the place to sound uncivilized and barbarous,
it was a woods. If a writer wanted the place to sound vacant and worthless, it was a
desert. Ultimately, these rhetorical devices (and dozens of possible permutations),
different as they may sound, generally produced the same result: they stripped away
history. Whether California was a desert or woods, paradise or a wasteland, made little
difference from a European and Euro-American perspective; all of those places lay
beyond the civilizing, modernizing effect of history.
177
238
Of course, from the native perspective, none of these terms applied. Quechla was
neither woods nor desert, paradise nor wasteland. It was simply home. When Tac says
that the Indians “lived among the woods” the comment is intended to mean, for a
European audience, that they lived away from the civilizing influences of the church. In
this sense, the comment reveals not only the literal landscape before the arrival of the
Spaniards, but how the Spaniards taught the Indians to see the woods metaphorically,
through European eyes, as a frightening place opposed to civilization.
178
Though these and other European influences appear in Tac’s prose (such as his
reference to “Hercules” in a description of native sports), he also reveals scenes that
might not have been accessible to readers in later decades.
179
Furthermore, many of these
passages have an elegant literary quality that emerges despite, or perhaps because of, a
certain roughness in the prose, qualities evident even in translation. His description of
daily routines deserve quoting just for the rhythms of the syntax.
At twelve o’clock they eat together and leave the old man his share, their
cups of clay, their vessels of well-woven fiber which water cannot leak out
of, except when it is held before the face of the sun, their frying pans of
clay, their grills of wood made for that day, and their pitchers for water
also of clay. … The meal finished they return to their work. The father
leaves his son, the son leaves his sister, the sister the brother, the brother
the mother, the mother her husband with cheer, until the afternoon.”
180
Certainly these were vignettes that would have likely been lost had not Tac written them
in Rome. The beautifully spare sentences cut in two directions simultaneously, offering a
tantalizing glimpse of what Tac preserved of California culture and reminding us of all
that has been lost.
239
Chapter Three Endnotes

1
Adelbert Von Chamisso, “Notes and Opinions,” in A Voyage Around the World with the
Romanzov Exploring Expedition in the Years 1815-1818, ed. and trans. Henry Kratz
(Honolulu: Univerisity of Hawaii Press, 1986), 243.
2
Adelbert Von Chamisso, “Journal,” in A Voyage Around the World with the Romanzov
Exploring Expedition in the Years 1815-1818, ed. and trans. Henry Kratz (Honolulu:
Univerisity of Hawaii Press, 1986), 7.
3
Chamisso, “Journal,” 105.
4
Ibid, 109.
5
Weber, The Spanish Frontier, 258 and 264.
6
Ibid, chapter 10.
7
Ibid, 300-301.
8
William H. Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire: the Explorer and the Scientist in the
Winning of the American West (New York: Knopf, 1966). See also LeRoy Hafen and
Janet Lecompte, French Fur Traders and Voyageurs in the American West: Twenty-Five
Biographical Sketches (Spokane: A.H. Clark, 1995).
9
Several of the narratives discussed here mention the presence of foreign trading vessels,
particularly US-based merchants. This was the case not only in California, but also in
Hawaii and other Pacific ports.
10
For background on the voyage see Edward Mornin, Through Alien Eyes: the visit of the
Russian Ship Rurik to San Francisco in 1816 and the Men Behind the Visit (New York:
Lang, 2002) as well as Edward Mornin, “Adelbert von Chamisso: a poet-naturalist and
his visit to San Francisco,” California History 78.1 (1999): 2-13. Further information on
Chamisso can be found in Harry Liebersohn, “Discovering Indigenous Nobility:
Tocqueville, Chamisso, and Romantic Travel Writing,” American Historical Review 99.3
(1994): 746-766; Harry Liebersohn, The Travelers’ World: Europe to the Pacific
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 58-76; Richard G. Beidleman, California’s
Frontier Naturalists (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 48-55; Valerie
Weinstein, “Reise um die Welt: the Complexities and Complicities of Adelbert von
Chamisso’s Anti-Conquest Narratives,” German Quarterly 72.4 (1999): 377-395;
Assenka Oksiloff, “The Eye of the Ethnographer: Adalbert von Chamisso’s Voyage
Around the World,” in Signs of Ethnic Difference (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 101-121.
240

11
See Mornin, Through Alien Eyes, for biographies of Chamisso (73-80) and Choris (81-
83). See also Henry Kratz, introduction to A Voyage Around the World with the
Romanzov Exploring Expedition in the Years 1815-1818, by Adelbert Von Chamisso
(Honolulu: Univerisity of Hawaii Press, 1986), for additional information on Chamisso.
12
Paddison, Joshua, A World Transformed, 136.
13
Mornin, Through Alien Eyes. Further contextual materials on Russians can be found in
Stephen Haycox, “Russian America: Studies in the English Language,” Pacific Historical
Review 59.2 (1990): 231; Leonid A. Shur and James R. Gibson, “Russian Travel Notes
and Journals as Sources for the History of California, 1800-1850,” California Historical
Quarterly 52.1 (1973): 37-63; and Kenneth N. Owens, “Frontiersman for the Tsar,”
Montana: the Magazine of Western History 56.3 (2006): 3-21. For an interesting
collection of contextual documents, see W. Michael Mathes, ed., The Russian-Mexican
Frontier: Mexican Documents Regarding the Russian Establishments in California,
1808-1842 (Jenner, CA: Fort Ross Interpretative Association, 2008).
14
Mornin, Through Alien Eyes, 7-8.
15
Chamisso, “Notes and Opinions,” 245.
16
See Kratz, introduction to A Voyage Around the World, xv; and Mornin, Through Alien
Eyes.
17
Chamisso, “Journal,” 103 and 102. Mornin, in Through Alien Eyes, translates this as
“Remarks and Opinions.”
18
See Kratz, introduction to A Voyage Around the World, xiv, and Mornin, Through
Alien Eyes. As both critics note, the name “Tagebuch” is misleading. Even though it is
based in part on his old notes, it is more accurately a reappraisal or even a recreation.
19
Chamisso, “Notes and Opinions,” 243.
20
Ibid, 245 and 244.
21
Ibid, 244. Compare this mention of native disease to Pablo Tac’s account at the end of
this chapter.
22
Ibid, 244.
23
Ibid, 245. Mornin translates this differently: “None of them, however, plant or sow,
though from time to time they burn the meadows to increase their fruitfulness.” Mornin,
Through Alien Eyes, 42.
241

24
Chamisso, “Journal,” 98.
25
Ibid, 99.
26
Ibid, 99.
27
If we are to accept Chamisso’s earlier claim (from 1821) that “[e]very fraction of the
history of mankind has importance,” then the person who “counts the days” must be, in
some way, doing something laudable. Chamisso, “Notes and Opinions,” 245.
28
Chamisso, “Journal,” 110.
29
A French ship, commanded by Camille de Roquefeuil, arrived in San Francisco in 1818
and was one of the exceptions. This narrative is not covered here because another French
narrative will be treated later in this chapter. For more information, see Abraham
Nasatir, French Activities in California: an Archival Calendar-Guide (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1945).
30
The Hudson’s Bay Company and John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company offer two
examples. See Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire, 9; Harrison Clifford Dale, The
Ashley-Smith Explorations and the Discovery of a Central Route to the Pacific, 1822-
1829; or Hafen and Lecompte, French Fur Traders, 15.
31
For general material on trappers and trade, see Robert Utley, A Life Wild and Perilous:
Mountain Men and Paths to the Pacific (New York: Henry Holt, 1997); Le Roy Hafen
ed., Fur Trappers and Traders of the Southwest: Twenty Biographical Sketches (Logan:
Utah State University Press, 1997); Robert Glass Cleland, This Reckless Breed of Men:
the Trappers and Fur Traders of the Southwest (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1976; rpt. 1950); David J. Weber, The Taos Trappers: the Fur Trade in the Far
Southwest, 1540-1846 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971).
32
George R. Brooks, The Southwest Expedition of Jedediah S. Smith: his Personal
Account of the Journey to California, 1826-1827 (Glendale: Arthur H. Clark, 1977), 18-
20. For more on the history of the manuscript, see 11-12.
33
Unlike Chamisso’s later reworking of his diaries, for example, these texts were not
rewritten after their journeys; and, in that sense, their views of California were not altered
by later reflection. Material on Smith and Rogers is abundant, though some of it
(especially older material) is marred by a somewhat hagiographic tone. See Barton H.
Barbour, Jedediah Smith: No Ordinary Mountain Man (Norman: University of
Okalahoma Press, 2009); Brooks, The Southwest Expedition; Dale L. Morgan, Jedediah
Smith and the Opening of the West (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953); Harrison Clifford
242

Dale, The Ashley-Smith Explorations and the Discovery of a Central Route to the Pacific,
1822-1829, revised ed., (Glendale: A.H. Clark, 1941); Maurice S. Sullivan, ed., The
Travels of Jedediah Smith: a Documentary Outline, Including the Journal of the Great
American Pathfinder (Santa Ana: Fine Arts Press, 1934); and David J. Weber, The
Californios versus Jedediah Smith, 1826-1827: a New Cache of Documents (Spokane:
A.H. Clark, 1990).
34
Smith can be usefully read alongside Richard Henry Dana, for example, and Alfred
Robinson, both treated in Chapter Four. See Weber, The Spanish Frontier, 336-341, for
a discussion of the difference between the North American southeast and southwest in
regard to writers’ motives.
35
Jedediah Strong Smith, The Southwest Expedition of Jedediah S. Smith: his Personal
Account of the Journey to California, 1826-1827, ed. George R. Brooks (Glendale:
Arthur H. Clark, 1977), 88. In his transcription of Smith’s journals, Brooks has chosen to
modify punctuation and spelling as little as possible. All quotes from Smith are,
therefore, often non-standard in this regard.
36
Smith, The Southwest Expedition, 96.
37
Ibid, 94.
38
Ibid, 97. Smith’s tendency toward rugged understatement becomes almost comic in
these passages, where the sense of decorum in a grandiloquent phrase like “not however
entirely unmixed” rubs against a word like “dred” and illuminates the context of the
writer and the writing.
39
Smith, The Southwest Expedition, 94. The issue of spying was not taken lightly, in
particular with regard to mapmaking. See also pages 122 and 124 for passages on the
power of maps to create controversy, a situation which recalls maps as secrets dating
back to the 16
th
century in California.
40
For an idea of the Mexican view of Smith, see David J. Weber, The Californios versus
Jedediah Smith, 1826-1827: a New Cache of Documents (Spokane: A.H. Clark, 1990).
41
Smith, The Southwest Expedition, 100 and 102.
42
See Weber, The Spanish Frontier, 336 for a good list of descriptors. For a view
focused specifically on religion, see Susan Griffin, Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-
Century Fiction.
43
For example, Smith wrote of his attempts to exchange letters with a priest, “…as I
could not read his Latin nor he my english it seemed that we were not likely to become
general correspondents.” Smith, The Southwest Expedition, 99.
243

44
Smith, The Southwest Expedition, 116.
45
Ibid, 104.
46
Ibid, 104.
47
Ibid, 122. For the Mexican view of Smith, see Weber, The Californios versus Jedediah
Smith.
48
Smith, The Southwest Expedition, 108-9.
49
Ibid, 128.
50
Ibid, 129.
51
See James Rawls, Indians of California: the Changing Image (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1984).
52
Two excellent anthologies document this hypocrisy in California: Clifford Trafzer and
Joel Hyer, eds., Exterminate Them: Written Accounts of the Murder, Rape, and Slavery of
Native Americans during the California Gold Rush, 1848-1868 (East Lansing: Michigan
State University Press, 1999) and Robert F. Heizer, ed., The Destruction of the California
Indians: a Collection of Documents from the Period 1847 to 1865 in which are Described
Some of the Things that Happened to Some of the Indians of California (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska, 1993).
53
Smith, The Southwest Expedition, 128.
54
Richard Henry Dana is one example. James Ohio Pattie is another.
55
Their attitude recalls the Vietnam war, in which military intelligence claimed that they
needed “to destroy the village in order to save it.”
56
It was published in 1918. See Brooks, introduction to The Southwest Expedition, 201,
for the story of the journal’s survival.
57
Harrison Rogers, “Journal of Harrison G. Rogers, Member of the Company of J.S.
Smith,” in Dale, The Ashley-Smith Explorations, 200. His use of “mansion” instead of
mission is so consistent that it suggests more than simply an orthographic error. It’s
possible that the use of “mansion” signified the wealth and over-weaning power that such
architecture symbolized for Rogers, and which would have represented a threat to him as
244

an interloper on the estate. It might also suggest a psychological connection with
southern slave plantations, especially given his frequent comparison of Indians to slaves.
58
Rogers, “Journal of Harrison G. Rogers,” 203.
59
Ibid, 227, 228.
60
Ibid, 209.
61
Ibid, 210.
62
The idea of California as a place of surfaces and appearances is firmly entrenched in
global culture, though now associated predominately with southern California and
especially Los Angeles. The notion of Los Angeles as postmodern because it “appears a
form more than a reality” has perhaps been influenced by these narratives, too.
63
Rogers, “Journal of Harrison G. Rogers,” 211.
64
Ibid, 220.
65
Ibid, 221.
66
Shaler and Vancouver offer prime examples of this tendency.
67
See Weber, Californios vs. Jedediah Smith, for an interesting compilation of historical
documents that tell another side of the Euro-American story.
68
Published in English as José Bandini, A Description of California in 1828, trans. Doris
Marion Wright (Berkeley: Friends of the Bancroft Library, 1951). All translations are
from this edition.
69
Some might argue with my designation of Bandini as a “Californio,” though this seems
to me to be the most appropriate description of him and his apparent political sympathies,
even though he was born in Spain and lived for some time in Peru. See Pubols, The
Father of All, for an excellent history of one Californio family as an example. For further
material on the Californios, see Rosaura Sánchez, Telling Identities: the Californio
Testimonios (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995) and Genaro Padilla, My
History, Not Yours: The Formation of Mexican-American Autobiography (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1993); and Leonard Pitt, The Decline of the Californios: a
Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846-1890 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1966), a dated, but still useful text. Further information can be gleaned
from the introductory materials in Antonio María Osio, The History of Alta California: a
Memoir of Mexican California, Beebe and Senkewicz, trans. and eds. (Madison:
245

University of Wisconsin Press, 1996); María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, The Squatter and
the Don, Sánchez and Pita, eds. (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1997); and Testimonios:
Early California through the Eyes of Women, 1815-1848, Beebe and Senkewicz, trans.
and eds. (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2006).
70
Scholarship on José Bandini is extremely scarce. This material comes from Doris
Marion Wright, introduction to A Description of California in 1828, vi-vii. See also F.
Arturo Rosales, “Fantasy Heritage Reexamined: Race and Class in the Writings of the
Bandini Family Authors and Other Californios, 1828-1965” in Recovering the U.S.
Hispanic Literary Heritage Vol. 2 (Houston: Arte Público, 1996), 81-87. There is more
material on his son, Juan Bandini, and some general details can be gleaned there.
71
Pubols, Father of All, 14-18.
72
Doris Marion Wright, introduction to A Description of California in 1828, vii.
73
Rosales, “‘Fantasy Heritage” Reexamined,” 94, correctly points out that the wider
context for Californio racism is important and often forgotten.
74
Bandini, A Description of California, 7.
75
Ibid, 9.
76
Ibid, 9-10.
77
Ibid, 7 and 9.
78
Ibid, 6, 7 and 18.
79
Ibid, 7. For material on rape and forced sexual encounters, see Steven W. Hackel,
Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial
California, 1769-1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 222-227
and Albert Hurtado, “Sexuality in California’s Franciscan Missions: Cultural Perception
and Sad Realities,” California History 71.3 (1992): 370-385.
80
Bandini, A Description of California, 9.
81
Ibid, 10, 12, and 16.
82
Ibid, 15.
83
Ibid, 7
246

84
See Stannard, “Native Infanticide,” for a gloss of this argument. Rosales, “‘Fantasy
Heritage’ Reexamined,” 94, also contests this explanation.
85
Bandini, A Description of California, 9.
86
See Pubols, Father of All, 149-195, for a lucid explanation of this process.
87
Auguste Duhaut-Cilly, A Voyage to California, the Sandwich Islands, & Around the
world in the Years 1826-1829, August Fruge and Neal Harlow, trans. and eds. (Berkelely:
University of California Press, 1999), xii. For additional background on the voyage,
especially its commercial aspects, see John Dunmore, French Explorers in the Pacific,
Vol. II: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 261-268. For a brief
consideration of French imperialism during the period, see Rufus Kay Willys, “French
Imperialists in California,” California Historical Society Quarterly 8.2 (1929): 116-129.
The most comprehensive overview of France’s connections to California is Abraham
Nasatir, French Activities in California: an Archival Calendar-Guide (Stanford: Stanford
UP, 1945). Material can also be found in Nasatir’s introduction to a series of articles and
documents, “The French Consulate in California, 1843-1856,” California Historical
Society Quarterly 11.3 (1932): 195-223. For additional contextual material, see Annick
Foucrier, The French and the Pacific World, 17
th
-19
th
Centuries: Explorations,
Migrations, and Cultural Exchanges (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), especially 17-30.
Michael J Heffernan, “A State Scholarship: The Political Geography of French
International Science during the Nineteenth Century,” Transactions of the Institute of
British Geographers 19.1 (1994): 21-45.
88
Duhaut-Cilly, A Voyage to California, xx-xxiii.
89
Ibid, 20-21.
90
Ibid, 22, 23, 26-27.
91
Ibid, 27.
92
Ibid, 27.
93
Ibid, 28.
94
Ibid, 47.
95
Ibid, 101.
96
Ibid, 65.
247

97
Ibid, 65.
98
Ibid, 75-76.
99
Ibid, 157.
100
Ibid, 130.
101
Ibid, 76.
102
Ibid, 65.
103
Ibid, 80.
104
Ibid, 81.
105
Ibid, 153.
106
Duhaut-Cilly, A Voyage to California, 152.
107
Frederick William Beechey, Narrative of a Voyage to the Pacific and Beering’s Strait,
to Co-operate with the Polar Expeditions (London: Colburn and Bentley, 1831).
108
The most extensive consideration of Beechey and his voyage is Barry Gough,
introduction to To the Pacific and Artic with Beechey: The Journal of Lieutenant George
Peard of H.M.S. ‘Blossom’, 1825-1828, by George Peard (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society at
the University Press, 1973). See also, A. Lincoln, “The Beechey Expedition Visits San
Francisco,” Pacific Discovery 22.1 (1969): 1-8; and A. Lincoln, “The Natural History of
the Beechey Expedition,” Pacific Discovery 22.4 (1969): 1-8. Additional information
regarding Beechey and the British conflict with the Russians can be found in Barry
Gough, Britain, Canada and the North Pacific: Maritime Enterprise and Dominion,
1778-1914 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2004), chapter IX. See also Barry Gough, The Royal
Navy and the Northwest Coast of North America, 1810-1914: a Study of British Maritime
Ascendancy (Vancouver, University of British Columbia Press, 1971), especially chapter
2, for Beechey within a wider British and global context. As Gough notes in Royal Navy,
2, the Northwest Coast of North America was “some eighteen thousand miles from
Europe by the shortest sea lane via cape Horn.” See To the Pacific, 16, for comments on
the northwest Passage in British exploration.
109
Gough, introduction to To the Pacific and Artic, 3-4.
110
Gough, The Royal Navy, 3. Regarding the primacy of commerce, see To the Pacific
and Arctic, 4-6.
248

111
Gough, introduction to To the Pacific and Artic, 3-4.
112
Ibid, 47.
113
Beechey, Narrative of a Voyage, 3. Gough also notes the use of an English translation
of Kotzebue’s narrative in the effort to coordinate the overall expedition. Gough,
introduction to To the Pacific and Artic, 16.
114
Paddison, A World Transformed, 170. See also Harry Liebersohn, Traveler’s World:
Europe to the Pacific (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 11-12; James
Duncan and Derek Gregory, eds., Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing (New
York: Routledge, 1999), 5-7; Tim Youngs, ed., Travel Writing in the Nineteenth Century:
Filling Blank Spaces (New York: Anthem Press, 200), 4-6; and Anthony Payne, “The
Publication and Readership of Voyage Journals in the Age of Vancouver, 1730-1830” in
Haycox, Barnett, and Liburd, eds., Enlightenment and Exploration in the North Pacific,
1741-1805 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997).
115
Beechey, Narrative of a Voyage, 4.
116
Ibid, 44.
117
Ibid, 65.
118
Ibid, 9-10. This description recalls Chamisso’s comic-opera description of Spanish-
Mexican government (105 and 108-109 especially). These two texts may suggest a way
to understand one type of reaction to the transition to Mexican authority.
119
Beechey, Narrative of a Voyage, 32.
120
Ibid, 13.
121
Ibid, 34.
122
Ibid, 38.
123
Ibid, 32-33.
124
Consider Pablo Tac (discussed in the last section of this chapter) going to Rome and
dying of European disease, or the Hawaiian islanders brought to Europe and exhibited as
museum pieces, or Ishi (for an example in California) who was brought to the museum in
San Francisco.
249

125
There are examples of European and Euro-American writers acknowledging some
sense of cultural relativism. Ben Franklin’s essay, “Remarks Concerning the Savages of
North America” is one example.
126
In this chapter Duhaut-Cilly offers the most memorable explanation of this tendency.
Duhaut-Cilly, A Voyage to California, 152. See also Chamisso for a discussion of
“strange land,” “strange people,” and “strange surroundings.” Chamisso, “Journal,” 8.
127
Beechey, Narrative of a Voyage, 63.
128
William H. Goetzmann, introduction to The Personal Narrative of James O. Pattie, by
James O. Pattie (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1962), vi.
129
James Ohio Pattie, The Personal Narrative (Cincinnati: John H. Woods, 1831).
130
Goetzmann, introduction to The Personal Narrative, v. For material on Flint, Pattie,
and a discussion of the cultural forces shaping western narratives, see Nathaniel Lewis,
Unsettling the Literary West: Authenticity and Authorship (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2003), especially 35-36.
131
Rosemary K. Valle makes a good case about his exaggerations, and she lists the other
doubters. See “James Ohio Pattie and the1827-28 Alta California Measles Epidemic,”
California Historical Quarterly 52.1 (1978): 28-36. There is even, however, dispute
about the doubters. See A.L. Kroeber, “The Route of James Ohio Pattie on the Colorado
in 1826,” Arizona and the West 6.2 (1964): 119-136. Commentary on the expedition can
also be found in Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire and Robert M. Utley, A Life Wild
and Perilous: Mountain Men and the Paths to the Pacific (New York: Henry Holt, 1997).
The only book-length study is Richard Batman, American Ecclesiastes: the Stories of
James Pattie (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984).
132
Goetzmann, introduction to The Personal Narrative, ix.
133
Pattie, The Personal Narrative, 107.
134
Ibid, 169.
135
For ideas of travel writing, see Duhaut-Cilly, A Voyage to California, 152 and
Chamisso, “Journal,” 8 for a discussion of “strange land,” “strange people,” and “strange
surroundings.”
136
The very presence of a figure like Flint is testament to this expanding market. See
Batman, American Ecclesiastes, 5. Chamisso’s comment on “Cook…lift[ing] the curtain
that still concealed an enticing world of marvels” suggests further background.
250

Chamisso, “Journal,” 8. See also, Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1970), especially 51-58 on Daniel Boone.
137
Goetzmann, introduction to The Personal Narrative, v.
138
Coronado and Fray Marcos are sixteenth century examples. See Goetzmann,
introduction to The Personal Narrative, vi, for comments on Flint.
139
See Valle, “James Ohio Pattie and the1827-28 Alta California Measles Epidemic,” for
this controversy.
140
Pattie, The Personal Narrative, 220.
141
Ibid, 221.
142
Ibid, 237. Interestingly, many of the terms here (“healthfulness, a good soil, a
temperate climate”) would be central to those of the late nineteenth-century boosters.
143
This situation recalls Shelley Streeby’s comments about the ironic contradictions of
Mexican-American war novels. See “American Sensations: Empire, Amnesia, and the
US-Mexican War,” American Literary History 13.1 (2001): 17 and 33.
144
Pattie, The Personal Narrative, 252-253.
145
Ibid, 252.
146
Ibid, 253.
147
See Richard Henry Dana (discussed in Chapter Four), for example, and the way his
experience turns on him in his “Twenty-Four Years After” in Two Years Before the Mast
(New York: Penguin Classics, 1981), 497-534.
148
Pablo Tac, “Indian Life and Customs at Mission San Luis Rey,” ed. and trans. Minna
Hewes and Gordon Hewes, The Americas 9.1 (1952): 91. Material on Tac is scarce, but
gradually increasing; some information can be gleaned from scholars who write about
Natives in California. See also Minna Hewes and Gordon Hewes introduction to “Indian
Life”; Lisbeth Haas, “Raise Your Sword and I Will Eat You”: Luiseño Scholar Pablo
Tac, ca. 1841,” in Steven Hackel, ed., Alta California: Peoples in Motion, Identities in
Formation, 1769-1850 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); David Wyatt,
Five Fires: Race Catastrophe, and the Shaping of California (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1997), 41-46; James A. Sandos, Converting California: Indians and Franciscans
in the Missions (New Haven: Yale UP, 2004), 154-158; Lisbeth Haas, Conquests and
251

Historical Identities in California, 1769-1936 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1995), 14-19.
149
Tac, “Indian Life and Customs,” 90.
150
Of course, some might argue that his presence in Rome only demonstrates that he was
a crafty survivor, not necessarily that he accepted Catholic doctrine, but those subtleties
of intent are impossible to determine.
151
Tac, “Indian Life and Customs,” 94.
152
Ibid, 94.
153
This is especially true when considering the various ways these same natives have
been manipulated for the changing needs of observers in California. See James Rawls,
Indians of California: the Changing Image (Norman: University of Okalahoma Press,
1986).
154
Joel R. Hyer, “We Are Not Savages”: Native Americans in Southern California and
the Pala Reservation, 1840-1920 (East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 2001), 28.
155
James A. Sandos, Converting California: Indians and Franciscans in the Missions
(New Haven: Yale UP, 2004), 155. Steven W. Hackel, Children of Coyote, Children of
Saint Francis, 241, says in a footnote that “he was anything but an independent or
objective informant.”
156
Tac, “Indian Life and Customs,” 93-94.
157
Forbes (Chapter Four), Duhaut-Cilly (Chapter Three), and Vancouver (Chapter Two)
offer examples of this vision, which focused on indolence and its connection to
geography as an inhibitor of culture.
158
Tac, “Indian Life and Customs,” 93.
159
Romantic or idealized descriptions of the pre-contact Native past don’t predominate
until statehood, not coincidentally when Natives were finally outnumbered by Euro-
Americas, but the ground for these later interpretations is prepared by idyllic descriptions
of landscape and an increasing tendency to view the supposed benefits of modernity with
skepticism. In this chapter Beechey and Duhaut-Cilly offer examples of both types of
writing. Later Euro-American writers, like Richard Henry Dana’s reappraisal of
California in 1869, suggest a stronger strain of this nostalgia.
252

160
George Harwood Phillips, Chiefs and Challengers: Indian Resistance and
Cooperation in Southern California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 4-6.
Phillips argues similarly regarding native history.
161
Unlike, for instance, Boscana’s Chinigchinich, which describes the natives as
“possessing no idea of the past.” Geronimo Boscana, in Life in California, by Alfred
Robinson (Santa Barbara, Peregrine Press, 1970), 47.
162
Tac, “Indian Life and Customs,” 98.
163
See the discussion of Beechey in this chapter.
164
Tac, “Indian Life and Customs,” 98. Tac’s text is somewhat different than, for
instance, Chamisso’s comments on native disease because Tac recalls prior population
numbers while Chamisso only notes the present epidemic. See discussion of Chamisso in
this chapter.
165
Compare this, for example, to Gerinomo Boscana’s account of Indian conceptions of
the past in “Chinigchinich.” See Geronimo Boscana, in Life in California, by Alfred
Robinson (Santa Barbara: Peregrine Publishers, 1970), 47.
166
Tac, “Indian Life and Customs,” 99.
167
Jackson and Castillo, Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization: the Impact of
the Mission System on California Indians (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1995), 29.
168
Tac, “Indian Life and Customs,” 97.
169
Ibid, 100.
170
M. Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the
Management of California’s Natural Resources (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2005), 41-61.
171
See M. Kat Anderson, Michael G. Barbour, and Valerie Whitworth, “A World of
Balance and Plenty: Land, Plants, Animals, and Humans in a Pre-European California”
and William Preston, “Serpent in the Garden: Environmental Change in Colonial
California,” both in Contested Eden: California Before the Gold Rush, eds. Ramón
Gutiérrez and Richard J. Orsi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). See
Duhaut-Cilly (this chapter) for early formulations of wild or unaltered landscape. This
narrative gains traction throughout the nineteenth century.
253

172
Tac, “Indian Life and Customs,” note 21, page 95.
173
Ibid, 94.
174
Ibid, 100.
175
See discussion of these two texts in Chapter One.
176
See Bernice Eastman Johnston, “Vagrant Rivers” (172-175) and Francis M. Fultz,
“The Chaparral” (268- 272), in Los Angeles: Biography of a City, John Caughey and
LaRae Caughey, eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).
177
This explains, in part, why San Francisco became a “historical” place after the Gold
Rush while Los Angeles did not: San Francisco was “civilized” with Euro-American
money, while Los Angeles was not.
178
See John R. Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America, 1580-1845 (New Haven: Yale
UP, 1982), 7-11.
179
Tac, “Indian Life and Customs,” 105. Tac’s descriptions of the ball game and the
dance are interesting for the same reason.
180
Tac, “Indian Life and Customs,” 15.
254
Chapter Four:
Histories of Ahistorical Places, 1835-1840
In the early nineteenth century, California appeared more and more frequently in
the records of foreign governments. The Mexican war of independence brought new
governmental control, but not stability, to the region, and foreigners continued to gaze
with longing on California. These descriptions, though often emerging in institutional
and governmental reports, quickly infiltrated the popular literature of those appraising
nations. In fact, some of the most popular writers of the era were drawn to the idea of
California.
In particular, during the second quarter of the nineteenth century, California
witnessed a rise in the writing of histories, a remarkable trend for a place that writers
often depicted as lacking history. This trend also benefited from the convergence of two
significant cultural developments. The first was the rise in professions, especially the
profession of writing. The astounding sales of Scott and Byron in England demonstrated
the possibility of writing as a lucrative, and therefore respectable, occupation. Writers of
both history and literature increasingly defined their work in relation to a “marketplace”
where the success or failure of their “products” influenced their chosen topics and style.
In this marketplace, history began to outpace fiction in potential profit and stability of
returns. In fact, the economic success (or failure) of many writers coincides with the
degree to which they worked in “a historical mode.”
1
The second change, intimately
linked to the first in the United States, was the increasing prominence of “western”
255
writing as a subject with broad popular appeal and, therefore, with potential economic
reward.
2
The expanding marketplace for books drew much of its strength from the
expanding economic strength of the middle class. Between two financial crisis in the
US—the panics of 1819 and 1837—the nation experienced years of remarkable
prosperity, mostly fueled by skyrocketing land sales and speculation in property.
3
This
class with newly disposable income developed a taste for financial ventures on the
frontier as well as literary romances about it. Thus, the two developments reinforced
each other. The public’s thirst for narratives of western adventure allowed for the
existence of the professional writer, while the professional writer invented a discourse
and image that magnified the frontier’s appeal and responded to increasing demand by
producing similar products.
In part, these converging currents reflect the collapsing of distinctions between
government reports and popular history, a trend that arguably begins in the US with
Lewis and Clark, but continued to develop throughout the first half of the century. While
no one could claim that reports and romances were indistinguishable, the two genres
increasingly borrowed elements from each other. Writers of material for “diversion”
began to appropriate the tropes of governmental reports, and writers of reports began to
appropriate techniques of popular history.
4
These two cultural shifts (the growth of professions and the western marketplace)
exacerbated the clamor for control of California. If earlier conversations about the future
of California often displayed thinly disguised colonial desire, subsequent dialogue
reached a new intensity in the decade before the Mexican-American war. Foreign
256
governments perceived the instability of Mexican rule, and the simultaneous
encroachments of their adversaries, as a sign of an impending transfer of authority. The
obvious strategic importance of California to global trade, not to mention its often
exhorted natural resources, meant that foreigners were more eager than ever to place
themselves on the receiving end this imminent transfer of governance.
California, though not always part of these narratives about the west, followed the
general parameters of these changes, which were so powerful that it not only caught the
attention of itinerant trappers and traders (who often kept diaries for eventual sales to
newspapers and publishers), but also writers as varied as James Fennimore Cooper, Edgar
Allen Poe, and John Charles Frémont. The growing fascination with the supposedly
savage, unstoried west even caught the attention of the first professional writer in the US,
a man whose reputation, ironically, was intimately associated with the elite circles of
European society.
Columbus to California: Washington Irving Goes West
Despite the enduring image of Washington Irving as a patrician yarn-spinner for
elite European and Euro-American audiences, his books on the frontier of North America
reflect a contiguous pattern rather than a break with his prior aesthetic trajectory. Irving,
arguably the nation’s most prominent author by the 1830s,
5
was actually in a perfect
position to absorb the circulating mythologies of the far west and repackage them as
romantic histories. Having spent years as a diplomat in Spain, where he wrote books
257
about the supposed romance of that country, he was already acclimated to the fragrant air
of popular history drifting across the Atlantic.
6
In a sense, his three books about Spanish
history and culture—History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828), A
Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada (1829), and The Alhambra (1832)—prepared him
for exactly the kind of work he would begin upon returning to the US in 1832. This work
in Spain even anticipated his turn from fiction to history.
After the disastrous reception (and miserable earnings) of Tales of a Traveller
(1824), Irving published his book on Columbus, which earned him more than $25,000 (an
astronomical sum for writers in his time). Irving, no fool in matters of public taste,
included a historical dimension in every book he wrote for the rest of his life. Even if
Irving hadn’t been successful with his own historical venture, he had the example of
other historians (such as Hume and Gibbon) in England to suggest the incredible profits
in historical writing and to push his work in that direction.
7
Finally, Irving was conscious
of the potential to exploit metaphorical and historical connections between Spain and
western North America. Long before the boosters of western travel and tourism, Irving
realized there was cultural capital to be mined from treading the trails of the
conquistadors and noting the connections between the Spanish landscape and that of
western frontier.
8
Upon his return to the US in 1832, however, Irving had two problems to address.
First, he felt that his book sales were falling from the peaks he had reached with the
Sketch Book and Columbus. Second, he had endured critique from US commentators for
supposedly shedding his American sensibilities during his seventeen-year residence in
258
Europe. Thus, as he searched for his next book topic, Irving sought ideas that would
offer the same dramatic canvas he had found in his histories of Spain, but would also
fortify his position as a distinctly American writer. In order to address these goals
simultaneously, he turned—of course—to the growing infatuation of the US with the
West.
9
Irving could hardly have picked a better time to devote his energies to the topic.
Following Lewis and Clark’s expedition and publication of their journals, interest in
paths to the Pacific only increased. As noted in the prior chapter, their journey was
followed by a succession of trappers and traders, some of whom also published accounts
of their experiences. Novels and magazines devoted to “western” themes began to
appear.
10
James Fennimore Cooper began to publish his novels that combined the
materials of frontier adventure with romantic plots. By the time Irving attempted his first
book on the subject, interest in western narratives had multiplied many times. In fact, not
only were Irving’s contemporaries, like Cooper, exploiting the lucrative potential of
western literature, but even his friends and in-laws were participating in the burgeoning
literary trend.
11
Just as he had seen examples of historians in England turning books into
business, he saw proliferating examples of writers extracting the imaginative potential of
the western frontier in North America.
Irving wrote three books on the North American west, each of which, in a
trajectory that anticipated the arc of territory acquisition by the US, moved further
westward and southward in its geographical scope. Irving’s first foray into this region, A
Tour on the Prairies (1835), described his initiation into the western narrative, complete
259
with already standardized tropes of Yankee experience on the frontier, such as buffalo
hunting and trading with Indians on the plains. Astoria, or Anecdotes of an Enterprise
Beyond the Rocky Mountains (1836), chronicled the life of the legendary fur-trade
millionaire, John Jacob Astor and his attempts to create a trading outpost in the Pacific
Northwest, at the mouth of the Columbia river. This second book was more of a national
history than his first and continued with his general trend toward historical material—and
moving farther west. Like his books on Spain and Columbus, it was part history and part
romance; Irving’s intention was not so much to tell the facts as to find the “tale” within
them.
12
If the popularity of the book is any indication, he succeeded in his objective, and
he sought further material on the same topic.
13
The result of Irving’s last western endeavor, The Adventures of Captain
Bonneville, or Scenes Beyond the Rocky Mountains of the Far West, brought him to the
Pacific again, and finally down the Pacific coast. Bonneville is not a book wholly, or
even mostly, concerned with California. Instead, it tells the anecdotes of Benjamin
Bonneville, an Army captain on leave from service who traveled the Pacific coast and
sent an exploring party (led by Joseph Walker) through Alta California and down to the
peninsula. The portions of the text directly relating incidents that occur in that Mexican
province occupy roughly a dozen pages of a narrative stretching over two hundred fifty.
Yet, brief as it is, Irving’s retelling of the exploration merits extended attention because
Irving himself, his description of California, and his prominence in the culture created a
crucial bridge that brought California mythologies from history into canonical literature,
260
right at the moment when that literature developed more nationalist ideologies and
capitalist organization.
Much about The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, USA [United States Army]
14
remains clouded. If Irving’s three western works represent various types of authorial
speculation in the west, then Bonneville was the riskiest of the three (when risk is
measured by capital outlay). Irving gives his version of the story’s genesis in his
introduction to the book, where he says that while scouting the imaginative regions of the
Oregon territory, he happened on the story of Captain Bonneville, delivered from the
mouths of traders, “at the table of Mr. John Jacob Astor.” By remarkable coincidence,
Irving later found Bonneville at work on a manuscript in Washington, and he was
captivated not only by the stories he had heard, but also by the look of the man, whose
“high bald head of somewhat foreign cast…reminded [Irving] of some of those antique
pictures of authors…in old Spanish volumes.” Even the rooms of the captain, “fancifully
decorated with Indian arms, and trophies, and war dresses, and the skins of various wild
animals,” affected Irving. When Bonneville offered the manuscript to Irving “to fit it for
publication,” Irving accepted.
15
What Irving does not reveal is that he paid $1,000 for the
material with an eye to recouping his investment in another book on the far west.
16
Because Bonneville’s original manuscript has been lost, scholars have been
unable to determine to what degree Irving relied on Bonneville’s papers and to what
degree on his own imagination. In part, this situation amplified debates about the book’s
accuracy, with the scenes in California typically described as the least factual of the
material, if California was discussed at all.
17
Indeed, Bonneville itself is hardly
261
mentioned in most assessments of Irving. To the extent that this book is noted, most of
the general critique of Bonneville has focused on its failure as a work of literature,
especially in comparison to Irving’s earlier work. In fact, many critics disparage all of
Irving’s western books as hackwork produced to pay bills and often cite Bonneville as the
worst of these.
18
Mary Weatherspoon Bowden, echoing the feelings of other biographers
and critics, called Bonneville “the worst book Irving ever wrote.”
19
Peter Antelyes, who
focuses on the three western books and offers a nuanced reading of their position in
western literary culture, finds the book lacking “discernable adventures” and describes its
hero as a “failure at failure.”
20
Even those who defend the book attempt to do so on the
basis of its factual accuracy, an ironic turn of events for a writer who consistently and
deliberately distinguished his work from traditional history.
21
Yet, the critical obsession with so-called authenticity obscures important aspects
of this crucial narrative in western literary culture. Bonneville actually offers one of the
most interesting cases of the California mythology in action, and the wider controversy
surrounding the text helps bring these issues into focus. First, it is true that the
information that Irving used to describe California was at best second-hand. Bonneville,
who provided the manuscript to Irving, never actually went to California, but sent Joseph
Walker instead as the leader of a splinter group. Thus, Walker reported his findings to
Bonneville, who then passed them on to Irving.
22
Furthermore, Irving himself had never
been to California (nor anywhere else in the west since his month-long “celebrity” tour
on the prairies
23
) and therefore had no way to corroborate personally the material that
Bonneville gave him. Second, according to contemporary accounts, Bonneville was
262
essentially incompetent as a trapper, trader, or explorer; and most of the areas he claimed
to explore had been visited long before. In fact, some evidence suggests that the only
explanation for Bonneville’s presence in the far west was as a spy for the US
government.
24
Third, Irving was working with a literary market that he understood in
terms of its desire for romance, not economics or political intrigue. No matter what
Bonneville said to him or what Irving discovered in his own research, Irving was likely to
filter all the information through his romanticizing lens.
25
Of course, none of this is unusual. In each of these aspects, Irving repeats the
patterns of past accounts of California. His use of second-hand (or potentially fabricated)
information, his reliance on misguided or inept explorers, and even the suggestion of
spying—all of these elements recall narratives by Europeans and Euro-Americans in
California. In writing about people and places he had never seen and relying on
informants of dubious credibility, Irving continued traditions and supplied with his
imagination what he felt the narrative required. Whether or not the book accurately
reproduces the “facts” of Bonneville’s version of Walker’s version of an expedition to
California is far less interesting than the narrative Irving relates. In this case, what Irving
decided to include about the excursion to California reveals much about Irving and the
culture in which he wrote.
The intertwined nature of author and culture emerges most clearly in Irving’s
description of the benefits of industry and the costs of laziness. Shortly after arriving in
Monterey, the trappers were introduced into the life of pleasure. “They attended bull-
fights, and horse-races; forgot all the purposes of their expedition; squandered away,
263
freely, the property that did not belong to them, and, in a word, reveled in a perfect fool’s
paradise.”
26
Here Irving lists most of the elements of California that had long infused the
European and Euro-American imagination: vice, profligate spending, and amnesia.
Lured like fools (and, Irving suggests, by them) to the paradise of pleasure, they “forgot
all the purposes of their expedition” and wasted their resources—just what Europeans had
been claiming that Indians, Spaniards, and Mexicans were doing in California all along.
In these passages, Irving, always a keen observer of popular sentiment, might
simply be writing in line with public taste. As it happens, however, “idleness” was a
personal obsession with him. He consistently denigrated his own talents and the
importance of his work as a writer of stories, usually in deference to the more respectable
work of historians. As mentioned previously, Irving turned to history in part because of
the stable profits it offered, but he also turned away from fiction because of his sense that
it was trifling work, the occupation of an idler rather than a productive member of
society. In fact, early in his career, after his failures in business and before his major
success as a writer, he lamented that he was unfit for any occupation that required
diligent effort.
27
Thus, the circulating mythologies of California played perfectly into
Irving’s own fears about industry and productivity. It offered him an opportunity to
condemn the actions of the trappers in a culture that supposedly relished the very lifestyle
he subconsciously craved.
In keeping with Irving’s lifelong obsession with productivity as measured by
profits, he also uses the passage to warn readers about the potential loss of capital as a
result of such behavior and a particularly tempting locale. Irving relates that Bonneville’s
264
expedition was in “great danger of … becoming disheartened, and abandoning the
enterprise” because the resources of the trappers “had all been squandered at
Monterey.”
28
Thus, once again, a writer transformed the allure of California into
pernicious temptation. California was dangerous because its pleasures and attractions,
not in spite of them. This vision of disappointment stung the intellect as well as the
pocket book, where Yankee imaginations likely feared it most.
Yet, perhaps more than they feared losing their wallets, Yankees feared the loss of
California itself. This was a situation Irving understood well, and he continued the
tradition of describing the bounty of California, while reminding readers of its future
potential. Like so many writers before him, Irving includes the requisite sketch of
California’s geography and history, with occasional glances at the remarkable wealth and
power that control of California might bring. The fact that these discussions of natural
bounty come just after scenes of extreme deprivation only made California seem more
attractive. One paragraph suggests the power of these contrasts.
The sufferings of the travelers among these savage mountains were
extreme: for a part of the time they were nearly starved; at length, they
made their way through them, and came down upon the plains of New
California, a fertile region extending along the coast, with magnificent
forests, verdant savannas, and prairies that look like stately parks. Here
they found deer and other game in abundance, and indemnified themselves
for past famine.
29
Irving appropriates many of the popular motifs of description in marking the contrast
between the harsh region of deserts or mountains and the “fertile region” of “New
California.” The influence of earlier texts is especially apparent in his use of the phrase
“stately parks,” which recalls Beechey and his description of the nobleman’s park. Irving
265
also infuses the passage with economic language, calling the recovery an indemnity. His
choice of terms here reinforces his larger argument about the economic potential of the
west, especially the way it compensates or pays the travelers for their hardships.
Like Beechey, Irving noted the contrast between the wealth of the landscape and
its irresponsible managers, though Irving’s language suggests a more romantic, even
gendered, metaphoric world, and one that leans more heavily on exaggeration. In this
sense, and in his use of the passive voice, Irving recalls the writing of the earliest
Spaniards, such as Cortés, who used the passive voice to relate second-hand information
without risking the investment of his own credibility. For example, Irving says that “the
climate is described as a perpetual spring” not just in Alta California, but “all California,”
which, Irving claims, “is represented as one of the most fertile and beautiful regions of
North America.”
30
While he concedes that the “peninsula is traversed by stern and barren
mountains, and has many sandy plains,” he fixates on the idea of an environment almost
magical in its generative properties.
Wherever there is water, however, and vegetable mould, the ardent nature
of the climate quickens every thing into astonishing fertility. There are
valleys luxuriant with the rich and beautiful productions of the tropics.
There the sugar cane and indigo plant attain a perfection unequalled in any
other part of North America. There flourish the olive, the fig, the date, the
orange, the citron, the pomegranate, and other fruits belonging to the
voluptuous climates of the south…
31
The generative power of the soil and climate in this passage stands in marked contrast to
the harrowing deprivation surrounding California and the extensive record of description
of the peninsula that Irving uses as the setting for his straggling trappers. The landscape
is “ardent,” “luxuriant,” and full of “voluptuous” fruits. The influence of the Pacific and
266
the associations of sex and lethargy infuse the description, especially his glance toward
the “climates of the south” and the “beautiful productions of the tropics,” which attribute
a breathlessly fertile, hot-house atmosphere to land that virtually smokes beneath the heat
of the sun for most of the year.
32
Just as important as fertility to hungry empires was the availability of the
landscape, often conveyed via images of its emptiness. Irving cements these two key
concepts together in one description of the “now abandoned and desolate” mission of
Loreto, which sits in a “beautiful valley…without an inhabitant—not a human being
resides within thirty miles of the place!” Irving leads the reader like a fellow traveler up
to the mountain overlooking the mission, as if on an expedition and dramatically
discovering it, an armchair Balboa sighting the Pacific.
In approaching this deserted mission house from the south, the traveller
passes over the mountain of San Juan, supposed to be the highest peak in
the Californias. From this lofty eminence, a vast and magnificent prospect
unfolds itself; the great gulf of California, with the dark blue sea beyond,
studded with islands; and in another direction the immense lava plain of
San Gabriel. The splendor of the climate gives an Italian effect to the
immense prospect. The sky is of deep blue color, and the sunsets are often
magnificent beyond description.
33
To further connect California to existing images of leisure and languor, Irving adds the
Mediterranean to his “south seas” recipe, a technique that would become increasingly
popular with Euro-American writers promoting the area in the late nineteenth century. It
was this “vast and magnificent prospect,” the word prospect itself suggesting a potential
capital resource and recalling the world of mining, that beguiled foreign writers,
especially the detail that it was “without an inhabitant.” According to this image, lonely
and lovely California, abandoned like a nubile daughter by irresponsible parents, waited
267
for a suitor to sweep her off the international stage and protect her from further
depredations.
If California was unsupervised, she was also well dowered, offering an array of
rewards and pleasures to the suitor lucky enough to take her first. The additional
potential of this “prospect” is made clear in Irving’s description of the port of San
Francisco, a place that “combines advantages which not only fit it for a grand naval
depot, but almost render it capable of being rendered the dominant military post of these
seas” [sic].
34
The sense of encroachment of the other suitors, however, remained
omnipresent. Irving noted the leering gaze of the Russians and the English on the
California coast. Yet, if they and other foreign governments were painfully aware of
California’s potential resources, her irresponsible guardians were not. Irving argues,
Its inhabitants themselves are but little aware of its real riches; they have
not enterprise sufficient to acquaint themselves with a vast interior, that
lies almost a terra incognita; nor have they the skill and industry to
cultivate properly the fertile tracts along the coast…
35
Again, the cost of idleness, in relation to maximization of resources, is an overriding
theme. In implicating the Mexicans, Irving’s prose recalls the writing of the eighteenth-
century priest, Ascencion, who described the Indians as being ignorant of the real riches
of California. In fact, over the hundreds of years and dozens of descriptions of
California, it seems that foreigners often find that those who control California can’t
appreciate its true value. People more industrious, more skillful, more intelligent, more
humane always watch from the fringes, looking for a chance to prove their superiority.
Irving continued this tradition in his depiction of the irresponsibility and depravity
of the Mexicans. Like rulers of a “perfect fool’s paradise,” the horsemen of California
268
resembled in their dress the “vainglorious Caballero of Andalusia,” who “considers
himself the glory of California, and the terror of the universe.”
36
In addition to their
considerable pomp, Irving reminds his readers about the “infamous barbarities” of these
same horsemen in their pursuits of helpless Indians. He relates an incident in which the
Mexicans were “hunting the poor Indians like wild beasts, and killing them without
mercy.” Irving writes, “The Mexicans excelled at this savage sport; chasing their
unfortunate victims at full speed; noosing them round the neck with their lasos [sic], and
then dragging them to death!” He further notes that there may have been more details,
but that
such are all that captain Bonneville had the patience to collect: for he was
so … indignant at the atrocities related to him, that he turned with disgust
and horror from the narrators. Had he exerted a little of the Lynch law of
the wilderness, and hanged those dexterous horsemen in their own lasos, it
would have been a well-merited and salutary act of retributive justice.
37
These were likely some of the same Indians, incidentally, that Captain Bonneville’s
former employer, the US Army, would slaughter without mercy in the years following
the Mexican-American war. In fact, though the Mexican government’s record of Native
American killings in Sonora and Chihuahua is itself deplorable, the US government and
Euro-American vigilantes would prove to be equally blood-thirsty in their attacks on
natives in California.
38
Once in control of California, apparently, the new rulers forgot
their prior admonitions for peace. One wonders what “acts of retributive justice” their
behavior merited according to Irving’s “Lynch law of the wilderness.”
How might readers have reacted to these thinly disguised moments of Euro-
American self-congratulation? Irving offers some guidance in his description of the
269
hunting party. Despite the “horror and indignation felt by captain Bonneville” the stories
of slaughter “were favoured themes in the camp.” Furthermore, the scenes of revelry in
Monterey, the “glowing descriptions of Spanish bearbaits and bullfights…were listened
to with intense delight; and had another expedition to California been proposed, the
difficulty would have been, to restrain a general eagerness to volunteer.” Though the text
supposedly aligns itself with Bonneville, using his disgust as the moral compass by which
to guide interpretation, this passage tends to confirm what many foreign readers probably
felt, whether or not openly expressed.
39
In addition, given Irving’s “voluptuous” detail in
his descriptions of California and his critique of the controlling government, it would be
difficult to read his brief “sketch” of the region as discouraging conquest. If the trappers’
glee is any indication, it would seem that Irving’s image of California was having the
desired effect.
Indolence and Ignorance: Leonard Revisits California
In the years following Irving’s Bonneville, foreigners continued to arrive in—and
write about—California. Before Irving published his narrative, however, California was
part of official literature issued in Washington, at least as early as Coulter’s 1835
description for the Royal Geographical Society.
40
In 1838, William S.W. Ruschenberger,
a surgeon working in the US Navy, published A Narrative of a Voyage Round the World,
During the Years 1835, 36, and 37, which was his second book on the exotic attractions
of the Pacific.
41
The genre was, by this point, so well known that some writers were
270
already acknowledging the diminished utility of writing narratives of circumnavigation,
though this situation didn’t stop them from defending their own volumes based on other
criteria. Ruschenberger himself acknowledges the problem in his second book.
Voyages of circumnavigation have been so frequent of late years, this
being the fourth under-taken with in seven years by American vessels of
war alone, that much novelty must not be expected in the present Work...
I, therefore only promise the reader the latest news of the several remote
countries visited in relation to their manner, political state, commerce, and
religion…
42
Despite this entrenched literary genre, one which quite frequently involved visits to
California, Ruschenberger still claimed, “Upper California is but little known.”
43
Whether or not it was truly “known” and by whom depends on how one defines those
terms, but certainly it was sufficiently known to have generated its own narrative tropes.
Furthermore, it was known to stimulate continued popular interest. Here, of course, is the
recurring irony with California: it was a place widely known for being unknown. This
situation, dating back to Venegas’s catalogue of California’s contradictions in 1758,
tended to inspire more writing on California—and increased interest.
Popular calls for stories of the west and California led another participant in the
fur trade, Zenas Leonard, to write his own narrative. In fact, demand was strong enough
that he published an account, first in a Pennsylvania newspaper and shortly thereafter in a
book, about the very same expedition that Irving described in Bonneville.
44
As the book’s
editor notes in the original preface, his journey to the far west transformed Leonard into a
celebrity: “[S]o great was the curiosity manifested by them to hear him relate his
adventures, that he was continually beset by crowds of anxious inquirers…” It was due
to this public pressure, according to the nineteenth-century editor, that Leonard “finally
271
yielded to the importunities of his friends” to publish the material. In this way, instead of
having to repeat the story constantly, “all might have an equal opportunity to read it.”
45
In other words, Leonard saved himself time while also performing a public service. The
repeated emphasis on public pressure for more western material, and its community-wide
benefits, suggests both the expanding market for these texts and ways that writers
positioned themselves as providers of public assistance even while they personally
profited from their publications.
Because Irving’s narrative was published prior to his own, and was well-known, it
seems likely that Leonard read it before finishing his own version, and this may be one of
the reasons for his shift of emphasis. Unlike Irving, who made his venture into California
a small (though arguably important) part of his narrative, Zenas Leonard made California
a focal point of his text, entitled Narrative of the Adventures of Zenas Leonard (1839).
Leonard’s narrative, which follows the trials of a band of hunters trekking from St. Louis,
through the Rocky Mountains, to California, continues many of the same motifs of Irving
and those who came before him.
46
In particular, Leonard, born and raised in
Pennsylvania, prepares the way for hawkish US sentiment in regard to California,
principally by making California sound desirable while Mexicans and Natives sound
deplorable. It was a narrative strategy which his readers would have recognized. Even if
they weren’t familiar with the genre, it probably would have appealed to them.
Despite these similarities, Leonard, like other writers in this tradition, not only
appropriated the existing narrative, but shaped it in his own way. In particular, Leonard
joined indolence to ignorance in his descriptions of the Spaniards and natives.
47
Leonard
272
was obsessed with indolence. In his discussion of California, he mentions it almost ten
times. Yet more than simple laziness preoccupied him. Leonard was fixated on the
people he found in California and the ways they wasted the bounty of its resources.
Almost immediately on entering California, Leonard begins to compare the
Indians of California with those he has met previously, and he finds them deficient.
“These Indians are quite small, & much darker than those of the buffaloe [sic] country, as
well as more indolent & slothful.”
48
Leonard quickly connected this division in race and
culture to the environment, which often was used when writers in California needed to
explain something to their own advantage. In describing a group of natives near the San
Francisco Bay, Leonard remarks that they “all appeared equally ignorant and dillatory
[sic].” He describes them as nomadic, then adds, “In some parts the natives raise a small
quantity of corn, pumpkins, melons, &c., the soil being so very strong and mellow, that it
requires but little labor to raise good crops.”
49
It was exactly this kind of description that
allowed encroaching foreigners to “explain” native behavior, in particular their supposed
laziness. Leonard added to this well-worn theme of torpor his own fixation on ignorance.
Writers in the past had not given the natives credit for much intelligence, but they did not
call them “very ignorant and stupid,” as Leonard did, even when he admitted that they
“live well” and “raise an abundance of melons, which grow to an enormous size.”
50
For
Leonard, these two descriptions (indolent and ignorant) are frequently joined, and they
serve to reinforce the notion that California was bountiful and available. California was
bountiful because it provided even for the indolent (or made them that way), and
available because it could be easily wrested from the ignorant.
51
273
Yet these descriptions didn’t only apply to the natives. Spaniards were attacked
with equal ferocity. On his trip near Monterey, Leonard writes, “These people, generally,
are very ignorant and much more indolent—have little or no ingenuity—and only seem to
enjoy themselves when engaged in the chase. This is the only occupation of the wealthier
portion of Spaniards.”
52
Not only was the chase their only occupation, but wine was
“their principal drink.”
53
The Spaniards were thus well on their way to the image of
fiesta-loving, work-avoiding layabouts that would follow them into the twentieth century.
The movement from an assessment of Spanish laziness to the potential of the
country was an easy one for Leonard because, of course, the two concepts were often
connected. “The town has every natural advantage that a seaport could desire; and if a
proper sprit of enterprize [sic] prevailed among the inhabitants, it might be made to
flourish equal to any other town in the dominions of New Mexico.”
54
Much like
ignorance and indolence, these conceptual pairs reinforce each other. The laziness of the
Spaniards highlights the potential of the landscape, and the underutilized landscape
clarified the laziness of the Spaniards.
Of course, the Spanish weren’t simply lazy; they were also depraved. Leonard
notes that
vice of every description seems to be openly countenanced in some parts
of the settlements, such as horse racing, card playing, and even stealing.
The latter of which is carried on to a considerable extent by both male and
female, and is even recognized, under some circumstances, as one of the
established customs of the country. The men are always provided with
dirks [daggers], which they can use with superior skill.
55
Leonard remains focused on stealing, an ironic fetish given what eventually transpires
between the two nations, and this preoccupation inspires them to move quickly through
274
the country “in order to avoid a difficulty with a people of a ferocious and wicked
nature.”
56
These kinds of descriptions, however, hardly compare to the later sketch
Leonard gives of some Spaniards who met his party while apparently trying to chase
down horse thieves.
The story, as Leonard tells it, begins when some of Leonard’s party joins with the
newly arrived Spaniards to assist in capturing the natives, in exchange for half of the
recovered horses. The group chases the natives to the base of the mountains and prepares
to attack. But when they surprise what they assume is the native camp, they find “a few
old and feeble Indians, with some squaws and children.” The rest of the natives have
apparently fled into the mountains. At this point, Leonard writes, the Spaniards were
extremely disappointed and
gave our men some evidence of the depravity of the Spanish character. By
way of revenge, after they found that there was no use in following the
Indians into the mountain, the Spaniards fell to massacreing,
indiscriminately, those helpless creatures who were found in the wigwams
with the meat, and cutting off their ears. Some of them were driven into a
wigwam, when the door was barricaded, and a large quantity of
combustible matter thrown on and around the hut, for the purpose of
setting fire to it, and burning them all together.
57
Of course, these Spaniards offer the perfect foil for the heroic American trappers that
Leonard wants to describe. As Leonard says, “This barbarous treatment our men would
not permit and they went and released the prisoners, when the Spaniards went to work
and dispatched them as if they were dogs.”
58
Yet even in this telling, the American
heroes are unable to save the natives from the blood lust of the Spaniards. Ultimately, for
supporters of US conquest, these stories enabled writers like Leonard to show Spanish
depravity, even when faced with those Americans whose supposedly innate morality
275
attempted to control them. As noted in prior chapters, this kind of moral superiority
sounds more than a little hypocritical in light of the thousands massacred by US soldiers
and citizens in other parts of North America, and it sounds eerily similar to later
massacres in California by the US Army—after the US had already wrested control of the
region from Mexico. In other words, when looking at California from a foreign
perspective, it was easy to be critical—and absolutely necessary to the rhetoric of
conquest.
For Leonard, as for other foreign writers, the sense of encroachment by
competitive governments grew stronger each day. Describing the “vast waste of
territory,” in and around California, Leonard considers “its settlement and civilization,”
bemoaning the fact that the government does not act quickly enough, and alluding to
what he claims will be the likely result.
Will the jurisdiction of the federal government ever succeed in civilizing
the thousands of savages now roaming over these plains, and her hardy
freeborn population here plant their homes, build their towns and cities,
and say here shall the arts and sciences of civilization take root and
flourish? … But this is left undone by the government, and will only be
seen when too late to apply the remedy. The Spaniards are making
inroads on the South—the Russians are encroaching with impunity along
the sea shore to the North, and further North-east the British are pushing
their stations into the very heart of our territory, which, even at this day,
more resemble military forts to resist invasion, than trading stations. Our
government should be vigilant. She should assert her claim by taking
possession of the whole territory as soon as possible—for we have good
reason to suppose that the territory west of the mountain will some day be
equally as important to the nation as that on the east.
59
Much has been made of the Euro-American rhetoric of inevitability in conquest, what
came to be called the Manifest Destiny of the US. Leonard, like many others, wrote his
share of that rhetoric, claiming, for example, that “the white race … will have undisputed
276
dominion over this entire region before long.”
60
But there was another, perhaps equally
powerful, sense of urgency and anxiety among imperial powers to increase the speed of
conquest, to act immediately, before another power made off with the prize. It is this
sentiment that appears above and is most evident in Leonard’s narrative. As the fear of
losing California increased, so did the exhortations and justifications to appropriate it.
These justifications themselves produced a literature that continued to describe California
residents in such a way as to make conquest sound both easy and morally acceptable.
61
As in past narratives, Leonard helped his cause by describing California in
luxuriant, if not euphoric, terms. Furthermore, the shock of arriving in the region was
assisted by geography as well as narrative. For example, “after the broad Pacific burst
forth to view,” Leonard notes the change in their circumstances.
The scenes which we could now contemplate was [sic] quite different
from those we had beheld and dwelt amidst for months back. Here was a
smooth unbroken sheet of water stretched out far beyond the reach of the
eye—altogether different from mountains, rocks, snows & the toilsome
plains we had traversed.
62
This crisp division in the description of geography magnified the mythical status of
California and further incited the fervor for conquest. It also worked perfectly as a
shaping tool for their narratives, providing the happy conclusion to stories of struggle,
evidence of a reward for their journey all the way to the Pacific. It is interesting to
speculate how writers might have reacted to California if it were not surrounded by
mountains and desert, or if the land just east of the mountains had been more fertile,
rather than drastically less, than that west of the range. The strategic and commercial
potential of a Pacific port, of course, cannot be ignored, but clearly the drama of a
277
paradise at the end of a long struggle added a symbolic element to the narratives that
exerted an enormous imaginative power.
California’s geographical narrative continued to influence perceptions even after
they had crossed the mountains. In one particularly evocative passage, Leonard writes,
We also passed a great number of streams flowing out of the mountain,
and stretching afar towards the Pacific. The prairies were most beautifully
decorated with flowers and vegetation, interspersed with splendid groves
of timber along the banks of the rivers—giving a most romantic
appearance to the whole face of nature.
63
It was this “romantic” aspect of California that helped make conquest irresistible to
foreigners. As Leonard reminded his readers, California had “no winter nor freezing
weather,” further magnifying the desire of those warming themselves by stoves and fires
during New England winters.
64
In other words, it was bad enough that the land was full
of moral degenerates; worse that they were profligate slackers; but that they lived in a
romantic paradise was the cruelest blow of all, an affront to Christian justice.
Ironically, Leonard and other Euro-Americans had to feign disinterest. As part of
a strategy to demonstrate their own superiority, their narratives frequently included a
moment where they refused the offer of life in California. Leonard relates a story about
Joseph Walker, to whom the governor offered land in exchange for bringing settlers.
Capt. Walker was well pleased with the country, and said he had a great
mind to accept the Governor’s offer, as he had no doubt he could in a few
years emass [sic] a fortune, and be at the head of a rich and flourishing
settlement; but his love for the laws and free institutions of the United
States, and his hatred for those of the Spanish Government, deterred him
from accepting the governor’s benevolent offer…
65
As with James Pattie’s refusal, in Leonard’s story the hero not only shows moral
rectitude in denying himself certain rewards, but also denigrates California culture and
278
government at the same time. California, despite its attractions, was incomplete without
“the laws and free institutions of the United States.” In addition, the structure of this
story, like Pattie’s, allows Leonard’s hero, Captain Walker, to praise the landscape,
which had the effect of confirming for readers the potential of California as well as their
own steadfast morality in the face of those temptations. In other words, the better
Leonard made the region sound, the better Walker looked in his refusal. In the bizarre
logic of California narratives, this scene further strengthened Euro-American
justifications for conquest. The Mexicans, Spaniards, or natives simply did not deserve
such a place.
66
In order to cement the finality of their refusal, Leonard’s crew of trappers vow
never to return to California. In a scene again reminiscent of Pattie’s Personal Narrative,
some of the men decided to stay in California “with the determination of making a
permanent residence in the country, and never again returning to the states.” However,
Leonard quickly adds, “[M]ost of us were as determinedly bent on never again returning
to this region.”
67
As in Pattie’s narrative, the trapper elevates himself by refusal, by
fleeing the place he recently sought with fervor and proclaiming his disgust. These kinds
of comments stand in ironic contrast to Leonard’s prior statements, but also to the
behavior of the US just a few years later.
If there was any potential for reconciliation or moderation in attitudes towards the
Spanish, Leonard squashed it in his description of the men who stayed in California.
Their decision to stay, Leonard says, “will no doubt be profitable to themselves, and of
great advantage to the indolent and stupid Spaniards.”
68
Returning to the conceptual pair
279
that he had applied to natives, Leonard dispenses with veiled descriptions. Significantly,
he saves this moment for their last day, ending his description of the region with the
material most important to his narrative of California. It was important to visiting writers
to love California, but it was more important to hate natives, Spaniards, and Mexicans.
In fact, the more they loved the former, the easier they found it to hate the latter. The
relationship between these forces soon resulted in some of the first outright calls for
conquest or purchase of the region. While money had always been a factor in depictions
of California, a foreign writer living in Mexico was about to suggest just how much the
place was worth, and how little culture.
In Search of “Savage Happiness”: an English View of California
Alexander Forbes, an English merchant based in Tepic, Mexico, offers good place
to examine the contemporary literature outside the US and the way the rise of historical
writing tracks with imperial designs on California. Forbes, a founder in the firm Barron,
Forbes, & Company, worked in Buenos Aires before moving to Mexico. There he
partnered with Eustacio Barron, the British consul in Mexico, to create their very
profitable trading company. In 1835, he wrote the manuscript for a history of California
and sent it to London to be published. The publication was delayed three years, however,
which gave Forbes an opportunity to direct his history in a practical direction: the
addition of material on his proposed plan for the colonization of California and the future
benefits of steam navigation to international commerce in the Pacific.
69
280
Forbes’s history, first published in 1839 and typically lauded as the first English-
language history focused solely on California, also offers a prime example of colliding
economic and literary forces.
70
Forbes read and absorbed virtually all of the accounts
previously discussed, quotes from them generously, and synthesized them into a
document that offers, if not a complete portrait of European conceptions of California,
then an example of one very popular strain of thinking.
71
It is clear from later writers
that, regardless of how many held the views of Forbes before his history, many emulated
them afterward, and his text is crucial to understanding the period leading up to the
Mexican-American war.
72
Yet, the economic entanglements are at least as compelling as the literary ones,
and they reveal that Forbes was a “professional” writer in more than one sense. By 1836,
Mexico’s economy was deeply mired in debt. Beginning with two loans, made in 1823
and 1825, totaling thirty-two million dollars from companies in London, the country
struggled to pay its debt and interest over a period of years and culminating in a series of
schemes, some of which sought to secure the loan with Mexican land. These political
and economic machinations form the backdrop for Forbes’s own proposal in his history
of California, in which he argued that Mexico should give California to England in
exchange for forgiveness of the debt, which, by 1839, had reached roughly 46 million.
73
For Forbes, a merchant with a stake in investments throughout Mexico, the
importance of the California, and by extension the importance of its history, should have
been foremost in his mind, especially if he hoped to sell his book. Ironically, despite the
market-driven choices of most professional historians, Forbes does little or nothing to
281
defend his topic. Instead, he frequently apologizes for the “humble proceedings of the
Fathers, and their children the Indians” as well as the “puny wars of their Lilliputian
armies.”
74
Still not satisfied with his apology, however, he offers a stark caveat to the
reader in the midst of a narrative about Baja California.
Before proceeding with the detail of the humble proceedings of these good
men, I would warn the reader here…that if he is prepared to estimate the
importance of the history only according to the magnitude of the events or
the dignity of the actors, he had better pass over the following narrative.
75
It would be hard to imagine a historian with less confidence in the value of his topic, a
situation which initially seems to run counter to Forbes’s own reputation as a historian,
not to mention the potential effect of these statements on the sales of this particular book.
If one considers the broader patterns and motives, however, Forbes’s comments
begin to look less like an ill-advised quip and more like a complex strategy. As with
other foreign writers before him, Forbes had much to gain by deflating the current value
of California, prior to acquisition, and placing all of its value in its future (British)
potential. If California was presently of little value, it could be acquired for less money.
Of course, in order for California to be a worthwhile investment, it had to have some
future potential. Balancing these two competing interests helps explain some of the
vacillation in public assessments of California, and suggests a way to approach a
historian who had a stake in the outcome of the annexation and colonization that he
proposed as a “solution” to Mexico’s problems.
Forbes’s text demonstrates how deeply these strategies were embedded in his
thinking and how they influence the image of California. For instance, in his discussion
of the revolt at Mission San Diego, a passage that further reveals his apparent anxiety
282
about California as a worthy topic of history, he quotes at length from one of the primary
Franciscan historians, Francisco Palóu.
76
Then, at the conclusion of the narrative, Forbes
offers this explanation for the extended quotation.
I have given the description of this contest at full length, and in the
language of the Franciscan historian, in order to show, that a battle, when
the forces on one side only consisted of three soldiers, commanded by a
corporal, may be made nearly as much of on paper as when mighty armies
meet. The account of the defence [sic] of the kitchen fort, is given with as
much gravity and circumstantiality as if the narrative were of one of
Napoleon’s victories; and it must be confessed, that the issue was as
important to the individuals engaged in this Lilliputian combat, as was the
result of Austerlitz or Lodi to their victor.
77
Thus, European history, of course, measures what should be considered important to the
world. To extend the metaphor, Forbes sees California as a kind of miniature of life as
lived in the rest of the world, figurines which can be observed at arm’s length and even
analyzed, but whose relative importance and gravity is perfectly illustrated by the small
size of its stage and players.
The passage, however, does more than simply reveal Forbes’s position regarding
his subject; in contextualizing the battle, he acknowledges the different position of his
source, Palóu.
78
Forbes says that he relies on the Franciscan historian because in Palóu’s
version the battle at Mission San Diego (what Forbes calls the “kitchen fort”) can appear
“nearly” (but not equally) as important as the stories of “mighty armies.” Forbes argues
that “the issue was as important” to the missionaries and the natives as was the European
battles with which Forbes and his readers were familiar. In other words, for those in
California, this moment mattered.
283
Looking back on those eighteenth-century Spanish writers from the peaks of
nineteenth-century Eurocentric smugness, one aspect of the literary landscape that
becomes clear is the missionaries’ sense of California’s importance. For them the stakes
were high in California; in fact, they could not have been much higher. They saw
themselves engaged in a battle with the devil for the souls of natives, and, whatever one
might say about the goals or results of that endeavor, they clearly believed in its
importance relative to the events of any kings and courts in Europe.
The stakes were arguably high for the English, too, but their sense of value came
from different sources. For them, California was valuable only in some future context, as
a British possession, as collateral on Mexican debt, as a blockade against continental US
designs, as a position of defense for commercial traffic, or a port for expanding Pacific
trade. In short, California represented money and power on an international stage; the
natives (or their souls) had nothing to do with it.
Of course, the party most frequently neglected in determining the relative
importance of California was the native Californians.
79
While we have only Palóu’s
account of the fight over the mission, we can infer a great deal from the details that he
provides as well as from the context of California history. The quoted narrative, which
occupies five entire pages in Forbes’s text, contextualizes the battle (not surprisingly) as a
contest between the forces of Christianity and those of Satan, then offers a remarkable
number of details regarding the struggle, which resulted in the mutilation and death of a
priest as well as the deaths of several natives. For those natives living in the mission or
within its sphere of influence, this battle would have been vital to survival, not only for
284
asserting autonomy and authority, but in the struggle to maintain families, food sources,
and continued safety. The mission, for those natives not inclined to join themselves to its
rituals and regulations, represented a constant threat to maintaining the status quo, which
included everything from balancing power among tribes, deciding how natives could
marry and what deities they could worship, to what they could eat, what clothes they
could wear, where they could live, and what language they could speak. In other words,
the mission represented the wellspring for an entirely different worldview, one which
generally did not permit the existence of any other, certainly not that of the natives. Even
if the natives could learn to live with the mission, the mission could not learn to live with
them.
Thus, if the stakes were high for the missionaries, they were even higher for the
natives. The missionaries could, at least in theory, return to their missions in Mexico or
Mallorca, as long as they survived the battle. Unlike the natives, the loss of this
particular battle (or any other) in California never threatened the destruction of the
missionaries’ culture. Even if the missionaries lamented the loss of native souls, they
could take comfort in their religion’s assurances about the fate of their own souls, which
in their worldview were never in danger; in fact, many openly courted death in California
in the hopes of achieving martyrdom.
80
On the contrary, for the natives, Christianity
required that they renounce their former beliefs, and even if it was not entirely
unsuccessful in eradicating prior religious behaviors, missionary success potentially
meant their own losses in the afterlife. In short, if the natives lost the revolt, they had
285
another god to please; if the missionaries lost, they had only to wait for their next
opportunity. They were never in danger of being “converted” by the natives.
Forbes, of course, tends not to view California from a native perspective. Instead,
he tends to view it from what might be called Montalvo’s perspective: a place of
bountiful wealth that suffers from its lack of contact with the European world. Not
surprisingly, that viewpoint creates a place that sounds much like Calafia’s island. The
priests of California are “totally ignorant of the world” and, reflecting their entrapment in
the past, even “brought to one’s mind…the pilgrimages of the middle ages.”
81
The
soldiers are “undisciplined,” “idle,” and “good for nothing except to retake any of the
miserable Indians who might escape from the missions.”
82
The natives’ “rude senses” are
anesthetized by the iconography and “mechanical rites” of the Catholic religion, which
renders them “puny and feeble” and transforms them into “automatons.”
83
All of this denigration brings us back to a fundamental question about Forbes, his
history, and his plan for colonization: if California is really that bad, why would anyone
take the trouble to write about it, much less suggest relocating from England? This
question Forbes answers with one word, the same word that had lingered for centuries
like a coastal fog: potential. The potential of California was so great that it merited
attention. Ultimately, Forbes argues that it merits more than attention. It required new
leadership, and new leadership required annexation—or perhaps conquest.
One of the recurring reasons offered for conquest was that California was
underutilized, an argument that was in part based on its overabundance. Forbes gestures
286
toward what might be termed California’s perennial problem in a comment about the
bounty of Lower California fisheries and the trouble they invited.
The shores of California abound in the greatest variety of excellent fish,
although from ignorance or stupidity the natives derived much less benefit
from this exhaustless storehouse, than it was capable of affording. In one
respect, indeed, this storehouse was too productive for their happiness;
since it was the fame of its pearls which, ever since its first discovery, had
attracted so many adventurers to its shores, bent on enriching themselves
and altogether regardless of the welfare or even the lives of the natives
(23).
Forbes quite literally argues that California’s abundance inhibited native happiness, a
version of the “dangerous paradise” that recurs throughout the literature. His particular
explanation locates the problem in California’s tendency to attract the wrong kind of
people. In making this claim, he apparently ignored the history of his own countrymen’s
designs on California, who might be characterized as “bent on enriching themselves,” nor
did he consider the ironies of his own calls for the “annexation” of California into the
British empire in his theories of attraction.
84
He was, however, apparently considering
the “welfare” of the natives, wrapping himself in the fabric of a long tradition of
humanitarian concern in California.
Curiously, even as he professes concern for the natives, he blames their
“ignorance or stupidity” for the problems that contribute to their lack of happiness, yet
totally ignores the European role in creating the image of this bounty. California’s
bounty was not simply the background of an invention but a separate invention itself.
Perhaps nothing illustrates this concept better than the pearls Forbes uses as an example.
In narratives dating back to the sixteenth century, California was depicted as a treasure
house of pearls, a place where natives tossed them on the beach like trash because they
287
were ignorant of their intrinsic value. Obviously, there is nothing intrinsically valuable
about pearls or gold or numerous other objects which happened to be precious
commodities in European culture. The Indians discarded them on the beach because they
actually had little value to them, far less value than the meat of the shellfish they
consumed in order to survive. Yet, the pearls, not the shellfish, became the predominate
European signifier for the “exhaustless storehouse” of California, even in those passages
where the writer ostensibly focuses attention elsewhere. Thus the narrative of “bounty”
or “plenty” in California was an invention dictated by the terms of the invading culture.
To blame the Indians or the environment for unleashing an invasion of international riff-
raff is to turn the situation upside down.
85
Like other commentators on California, Forbes takes this argument about plenty
even further, suggesting that the bountiful environment also had a negative effect on
those who resided there, retarding cultural advancement. This argument appears in
Forbes’s description of the natives, whom he imagines “basking, in dreamy inactivity, on
the banks of their rivers, or on the shores of the ocean” before the advent of the
Spaniards.
86
This type of prelapsarian imagery not only recalls the idyllic and idealized
figurations of paradise from the sixteenth century, but also prefigures twentieth-century
Euro-American depictions of California as a paradise before urbanization. Furthermore,
these pleasures were decidedly physical, the only kinds of pleasures that natives were
thought capable of enjoying. As Forbes says in elaborating on the potential for happiness
outside of European modernity,
Admitting, which I most readily do, that the natives in this part of America
were and are very low in the scale of even savage happiness, surely we
288
must allow that their actual condition as domesticated animals—I will not
say as civilized men—is a degree even below this, when we look to the
mind, the only source, seat, and criterion of enjoyment, that deserves the
name of human.
87
Over and above the nauseating racism of this description, Forbes illuminates the degree
to which, in European conceptions of climatology, the development of the mind had been
neutralized by the surrounding environment, which presented dangers of the tempting
variety rather than the lethal.
Clearly this protean imagery derives energy from conceptions of geography.
European and Euro-American arrivals to California, staggered by the environment (and
searching for a method to undermine local authority), tried to explain Spanish-Mexican
and native culture as a consequence of those surroundings. In a long passage extolling
the advantages of the Spanish provinces over other parts of the world, Forbes offers an
example of those attempts: “All those immense advantages, however, had not the power
to rouse the dormant energies of the Spaniard. It appeared as if those extraordinary
bounties of nature had the effect of lulling them into apathy.”
88
The key words of the
passage (“dormant,” “lulling,” and “apathy”) appear in various guises in descriptions of
California through the war and even after the Gold Rush.
89
Of course, only a short step
lies between the metaphors of sleep and death, and Forbes soon takes this step, claiming
that “a death-like tranquility reigned in all the provinces.”
90
All of these descriptions
recall Calafia’s island and other early associations with California as a place of pleasure
and cultural death, isolated and narcotic, where people were “buried alive” because of
their lack of connection to Europe and its histories.
289
The important, and ironic, aspect of these narratives is the way they transform
what might seem positive aspects (ease, bounty, tranquility) into negative ones (death,
isolation, stagnation, stasis). In addition to the economic motives for these ironic
transformations, there are potentially psychological motives. One possibility is that the
positive aspects of California were so pleasant that they became suspicious (because they
were unusual) and even threatening or dangerous. Readers suspected, or psychologically
required, some negative element in these narratives of unusual paradise in order to make
themselves feel better about their own situations or to make the narratives compatible
with their idea of what was possible in the world. Furthermore, just the fact of its
unfamiliarity rendered it potentially threatening. The new and strange, epitomized by
California, was alluring but equally suspicious.
91
Again, California was, in a sense,
actually too good.
But too good for what—or whom? Too good for it to remain in the hands of
natives or Spaniards and Mexicans. The actual objective of Forbes’s narrative emerges in
his relationship to the residents of the region. While California is Lilliputian and puny, it
can be brought into the folds of history, which would mean that it would need to be
controlled by an “enlightened” people. As Forbes seeks to prove, this was exactly the
course of action required. For as it stands, California was wasting its potential. In order
to justify his complaint, Forbes writes,
Had this coast and the adjacent countries fallen to the lot of England, or
any other commercial and enterprising nation, what would have been their
state at this day? Would they not have rivaled Asia? Would they not have
been even superior in riches and commerce to that celebrated continent?
92
290
Forbes laments not only the loss of potential “riches and commerce” but also the injustice
of this profligacy in the face of human suffering in other parts of the world.
In Great Britain and Ireland, there are millions of human beings of
superior intellects, and varied acquirements, who find it utterly impossible
to get employment or food; and yet countries exist, in which the choicest
fruits of nature are left to waste for want of hands to gather them, and
where labour is hardly necessary to enable every one to live in plenty.
While in Europe lands can only be acquired by the rich and the powerful,
in some of the finest countries of the earth luxuriant soils are lying waste
without proprietors, and without cultivators.
93
The very existence of California, therefore, is a crime against humanity, a crime which
can only be remedied, of course, by the overthrow of the current government, the
perennial solution to California’s problems—and, increasingly, those of its suitors.
Forbes brazenly outlines the potential benefits.
If, on the contrary, this country was under an enlightened and liberal
government, which knew how to promote its colonization, and to
encourage the resort of industrious settlers from whatever quarter they
might come, it could not fail to become known and selected as a refuge by
the innumerable starving population of the old world.
94
Of course, Forbes’s justification for the conquest of California never considers
how the solution proposed for Europe replicates the problem in the Americas. In order to
solve the problem of unavailable land in Europe, he proposes to take land from those in
California. Ironically, those “rich and powerful” who control the land in Europe will
finance and supervise the acquisition of land in California. Thus, his solution doesn’t
really resolve inequities, but expands their scope.
As if to respond to this contradiction, Forbes rationalizes his acquisition by force
as a gesture toward advancement for those willing to do the work, claiming that “under
the present system, and while the population retain their present character of indolence
291
and total want of enterprize, it must stand still.”
95
In other words, the problem with
California is that it refuses progress, that catch-word of the nineteenth century; it refuses
to move forward, preferring to remain stagnant, like those happy but ignorant women
“buried alive” on Calafía’s island.
In his eagerness to rescue the “innumerable starving population of the old world,”
Forbes neglects to mention the fate of the innumerable starving population of the new
world under his modest proposal, and one wonders if they have been taken into account.
Indeed, given his penchant for references to Swift, he might have suggested that the
starving of the old world simply satiate themselves on the bodies of those people in the
new. In a sense, this is exactly what his plan proposes. In order to make California “one
of the most interesting and prosperous spots on earth” those less enterprising races must
make way for those with initiative—and firepower.
Forbes, ever the humanitarian, seeks to justify an invasion of California based on
the supposed injustice of its profligacy, yet its profligacy is based on his own descriptions
of its marvelous natural potential. Thus, narratives justifying conquest benefited from
depicting a bountiful California because they illustrated the shortcomings of the
occupants and the rewards to the invader. If Vancouver initiated this argument about
profligacy with his allusion to the biblical ravens, Forbes takes it a step further in
claiming that the profligacy deprives the world of a potential resource (in addition to
making people lazy and attracting scofflaws). Once again environment, race, and
ideology work together. But this commentary doesn’t emerge only from those usual
292
sources. As more and more Protestants write about a Catholic region, religious prejudice
becomes more pronounced, and it creates familiar consequences.
In Forbes’s history, religion makes several appearances. Typically, as with other
Protestant writers, Catholicism is the religion of fakery and empty gestures.
96
Forbes
makes clear his position in a description of its effect on the natives.
To a savage who must be chiefly taught through the medium of his senses,
the Catholic service is most fascinating. The whole ceremony of the mass
is performed by a sort of dumb shew, accompanied with music and
glittering ornaments, which may be said to be just as well understood by a
savage of California as by a Hidalgo of Spain.”
97
In this passage, religion also allows him to compress both natives and Spaniards into a
caricature of stupidity. The ritual levels the social distance between “Hidalgo” and
“savage” at the same time it further reinforces the standard image of sensual, rather than
mental, experience in California, with a focus on “music and glittering ornaments,” as
opposed to, for instance, a tightly argued lecture or harrowing sermon.
To implicate the “ceremony” of a religion means to implicate those who
administer it, and Forbes moves quickly from the laity to the clergy. The image of the
Catholic priest, a topic on which Forbes discourses at some length, even suggests a happy
frivolity totally opposed to the supposed gravity of the Protestant sects. Forbes writes,
There can hardly be a greater contrast than between a jolly, laughing friar,
cajoling his converts into his fold by indulging their innocent foibles and
propensities, and the spare, sour, ascetic Methodist who takes from his
followers all their pastimes and pleasures.
98
Clearly, the idea of the Catholic priest in this passage seems to have undergone drastic
revision since the days of the Black Legend. Yet, like many images in service of
ideologies, the changes might be explained by their utility. For example, this image,
293
likely influenced by the “White Legend,” also tracks almost exactly with the dominant
motifs in California.
99
The priest in California is “jolly” and doesn’t mind “indulging
innocent foibles,” (an example of those happy and harmless cultures) while the “spare,
sour, ascetic Methodist” (a representative of those industrious and enterprising cultures)
denies “pleasures.” The priest in California works with the “innocent” rather than serious
issues, “foibles” rather than sins. He “cajoles” and “indulg[es]” while the other “takes.”
One could hardly ask for a clearer illustration, in religious terms, of the dichotomy
between the image of California and that of Protestant Europe and the U.S.
Religion was even linked with material progress. Forbes makes this connection in
a passage about agriculture, discussing the advances available to farmers in Europe which
were still not available in California. He writes of the farming tools that “these are
refinements they never heard or dreamed of, and it would be as reasonable to expect, that
they should adopt such novelties, as that they would the doctrines of Luther or Calvin.”
100
These notions of Protestant religion as progress (and Catholic religion as stasis) were so
innate to Forbes (and his intended audience) that they even infiltrate a discussion of
farming tools. Thus, California not only refuses to advance on scientific fronts, but
religious as well—and refusal to adopt one implies refusal to adopt another.
Religion continued to rise to a prominent position as one of the tools available to
writers in the formation of ahistorical California, blending with already established tropes
of ahistoricism. Yet the message remained the same. California was inconsequential and
ahistorical because its potential was not maximized. It was this rhetoric that would lead
to writers like Richard Henry Dana and magnify the fervor for war.
294
Wars of History: Greenhow and Intellectual Weaponry
1840 looks, in retrospect, to have been quite a productive year in California, if
productivity is measured by the quantity of writing about it. Clearly, Alexander Forbes
wasn’t the only person compiling history with an eye on the future; the year after he
published his narrative, at least three others were published. One of these texts, written
by a US author, suggests the changes occurring at the official level in regard to
California. It also offers a window onto the increasingly entangled world of writers of
history and writers of literature, especially the ways in which politics, economics, and
culture collided on the shores of the Pacific.
Robert Greenhow’s Memoir, Historical and Political, on the Northwest Coast of
North America, and the Adjacent Territories was published in February of 1840 for the
Congress.
101
Greenhow, officially the translator and librarian to the State Department,
did not write a memoir in the sense that term is used today. Instead, he wrote (or perhaps
compiled) dates and data on geography, history, culture, and politics in order to create
what might be imagined as a dossier on the region, an enormous file in an ongoing
investigation. His salaried position as the chief informant on matters of history makes
him arguably the consummate professional, an image that he cultivated and to which he
was naturally inclined. Greenhow, a member of an elite family and a seasoned traveler,
was fluent in several languages (Spanish, French, German, and Italian), devoured maps
and manuscripts, and generally preferred the silence of the library to the chatter of
295
Washington. He seemed a perfect fit for the position when he was hired in 1828, and he
worked assiduously until 1854, when he fell from a boardwalk in San Francisco and died
from his injuries. When he fell to his death, Greenhow had been in San Francisco on a
specific assignment—researching land claims—that had occupied a large portion of his
career and dovetails with US sentiment regarding the uses of California and its
narratives.
102
Because of his expertise in languages and his familiarity with historical
documents, Greenhow made an ideal historian, especially at a time when the historical
profession increasingly relied on documentation for credibility (and as a way to
distinguish it from literature).
103
For these same reasons—expertise in languages and
familiarity with documents—Greenhow also made an ideal weapon of the State
Department in efforts to legitimize its own land claims on the Pacific coast and fend off
those of its rivals. In fact, that is exactly what Greenhow did, and he performed this
service as a writer of histories for the US government. Thus, at exactly the same time
that the writing of history professionalized, it also became an important tool of imperial
expansion. What began on the prairies with Washington Irving, and was echoed by
Alexander Forbes, quickly reached the marbled capitol of the US.
The fact that Greenhow wrote about both California and the Oregon territory
(including present-day Washington) points to the scope of US interests on the western
side of the continent and indicates that California was part of a larger, multi-faceted push
westward. Furthermore, the fact that Greenhow prepared this text in his official capacity
for the US government indicates the amount of interest the region was generating in
296
national politics. In that sense, this text was quite unlike, for example, James Ohio
Pattie’s Narrative. It had more in common with the official texts of Lewis and Clark or
Vancouver, though without any of their first-person experience. Finally, Greenhow’s
text, dry and spare as it looks today, suggests the crucial role that California’s
history—the narrative of exploration and conquest—played in foreign state governments.
The story of California—whether recorded by grizzled trapper or tonsured
priest—became a valuable asset, material that could be converted into political capital. It
was vital not simply for cultural background, which governments often disregarded, but
for claims to territory. As Greenhow says in his preface, his Memoir “is designed to
show the origin, nature, and extent of the several claims in order to afford the means of
correctly estimating the justice of each.” These “several claims,” Greenhow says, in a
remarkable example of understatement, “have for many years formed the subjects of
discussions between the Governments of the United States, Great Britain, and Russia.”
104
Thus, throughout Greenhow’s supposedly disinterested assemblage of dates and names,
he constantly attempts to deduce who was where first and who can maintain claims on
what territory, including whether or not that territory was worth having. This was the
story that readers in the US government most wanted to hear, and they likely read it with
careful attention to detail.
At the same time, foreign writers were still unprepared to acknowledge that
California had a history at all. Greenhow presents a clear example of this paradox when
he writes that the material of the Memoir is
arranged in the form of a regular narrative, so as to embrace a complete
history of the western portion of our continent—if it be allowable to speak
297
of the history of a country which still remains almost entirely in a state of
nature.
105
This strategy, of course, was perfectly aligned with the US government’s imperial goals
in the west. Places like California couldn’t have history if they were to remain available
to US claims of discovery or ownership. This situation applied to foreign governments
like Spain and England, but also to native tribes. Obviously, if the US government were
to acknowledge the historical presence of the numerous tribes on the Pacific coast, the
contest over first claims would have excluded all Europeans as well as the US.
However, as the US government was aware, when one creates the past one gets to
determine what counts as a “genuine claim,” and what counts as history. In this case, the
US sought to turn the difficulty of historical interpretation to its advantage. Like all
narratives, the story of California was also open to a certain amount of interpretation,
especially where the authenticity of dates was concerned. Greenhow acknowledges this
as well in his preface.
Great care has been taken to present the dates of the several occurrences,
and the authorities on which they are recounted, so that the reader will
have the means of satisfying himself as to the truth of each statement; with
regard to the reasonings [sic] and deductions, he must rely on his own
powers of discrimination.
106
Of course, precisely these “powers of discrimination” had been lacking throughout the
history of writing about California; or, seen from another angle, they had been all too
apparent. The reasoning and deduction of foreigners created problems not only for
themselves and their governments, but also (and especially) for those people already
living there. Of course, this attitude wasn’t unique to the US. Both the French and the
298
English were making belligerent gestures on the coast of California at the same time
politicians in the halls of congress enviously eyed it.
The writing of California’s history, therefore, gained force and prominence as an
imperial tool of foreign governments, while at the same time those governments
ironically claimed that the region had little history to speak of. These statements sound
remarkably similar to those made by Forbes, the English historian, just a year prior.
Forbes also announced that he was writing history about a place that had little of
importance to record, yet he too went on to compile, in almost obsessive detail, a history
of California. They also sound similar to statements made by Irving in his romantic
histories of the Pacific. The emergence of so many “histories” in the 1830s and 1840s
fits with a pattern in writing about the region, one in which California is elevated at the
same time it is denigrated, admired as it is despised, desired while it is rejected.
If 1840 seemed a productive year for those writing about California, it must have
felt somewhat counter-productive for those natives and Mexicans who lived there,
especially if they were exposed to the attitudes that produced the racist and imperialist
texts written by foreigners. And it seems likely that they were exposed at some point to
foreigners of this variety because, as the many examples show, these people were quite
common in California, and becoming more numerous.
107
Nor were these attitudes
exclusively emerging from the US, as is sometimes suggested by discussions of
“manifest destiny.” If California’s potential was global in scope, so was its appeal.
While narratives from the US became more common as the mid-century approached,
other foreigners were always involved in the process, right up to the Mexican-American
299
war. Still, the decade is remarkable for the increase in narratives from the US, and one
sailor’s narrative offers an example of the urgency of this rhetoric, the ways it emerged
from commerce, and how powerful it could become in the hands of a skillful writer.
Liberty Days and Customs of the Country: Dana in California
Richard Henry Dana casts a very long shadow over the pre-war literature of
California. In some respects, he is the most influential writer between Montalvo and the
Mexican-American war, especially among US readers and probably among all readers of
English.
108
His book’s sales figures alone tell a remarkable story, collecting $10,000
during the first two years in print and roughly $50,000 by the time the copyright reverted
back to Dana. This does not include, of course, the numerous pirated editions and
translations into at least seven foreign languages. Furthermore, the book was popular
with critics, earning high praise from a variety of publications in the US and abroad.
109
In
short, the book immediately and profoundly affected literary currents around the world,
and its influence remained long after Dana had shifted his focus away from writing to
other pursuits, such as his law career, political ambitions, and growing family.
Despite his literary influence, especially in California, Dana’s book tends to
appear more often in discussions of history.
110
If the book does appear in discussions of
nineteenth-century literature, critics typically mention its influence on Melville or use it
as an example of the currents of realism surging through contemporary thought.
111
This
is likely due, in part, to the format of the narrative, presented as a stark account of life
300
aboard a ship without the poisonous romance of Cooper or Scott. It must also be
ascribed, however, to conversations about Dana as a reformer or writer of protest
literature. Critics often treat Dana’s book as primarily an effort to rescue sailors from
brutal working conditions at sea via an unvarnished exposé of the sailor’s life. Yet the
sailing portion of the narrative and the famous flogging scene occupy a relatively small
part of the book, especially when weighed against the portions of the narrative that take
place ashore in California.
112
Furthermore, those scenes of the book that occur in
California, despite Dana’s apparent desire to eschew romance, create a place with a
highly crafted romantic appeal, one that recalls Montalvo as much as it anticipates
Melville.
Dana actually prepares the reader for the voyage to California with his comments
on the residents of Chile, whom he found similarly unmotivated, comments that reflect
the broad cultural prejudice against Latin Americans among Euro-Americans. Dana
remarked about the inhabitants of Juan Fernandez, an island off the coast of Chile, that
they “seemed to [him] to be the laziest people on the face of the earth. They did nothing
but take a paseo into the woods, a paseo among the houses, a paseo at the landing-
place…”
113
But his comments did not end there. He further elaborated on the supposed
laziness of the men.
The men appeared to be the laziest people upon the face of the earth; and
indeed, as far as my observation goes, there are no people to whom the
newly-invented Yankee word of “loafer” is more applicable than to the
Spanish Americans. These men stood about doing nothing, with their
cloaks, little better in texture than an Indian’s blanket, but of rich colors,
thrown over their shoulders with an air which it is said that a Spanish
beggar can always give to his rags; and with great politeness and courtesy
in their address, though with holes in their shoes and without a sou in their
301
pockets. The only interruption in the monotony of their day seemed to be
when a gust of wind drew round between the mountains and blew off the
boughs which they had placed for roofs to their houses, and gave them a
few minutes’ occupation in running about after them. One of these gusts
occurred while we were ashore, and afforded us no little amusement at
seeing the men look round, and if they found that their roofs had stood,
conclude that they might stand too, while those who saw theirs blown off,
after uttering a few Spanish oaths, gathered their cloaks over their
shoulders, and started off after them. However, they were not gone long,
but soon returned to their habitual occupation of doing nothing.
114
This passage, written in the light comic style, recalls Chamisso’s portrait of the Spanish
general. Both writers chose this mode as a way to communicate what writers like
Vancouver and Pattie said with rage and disgust. If longevity is any judge, Dana’s
technique, a blend of amusement and disdain, proved more memorable. Seen from the
viewpoint of those living in Latin America, it was more pernicious too. While the
writing is polished and the technique deft, nothing about the passage is new. By now
these descriptions of the colonial Spanish empire were well rehearsed: irony, formality
contrasted with poverty, extravagant but cheap clothing. Only the window-dressing for
these elements—the image of the men chasing after their roofs—is different. New details
tell the same story.
Dana even sets up the anecdote with the usual discourse on natural abundance,
remarking that one of the sailors “never saw or heard of such abundance” of fish. But he
doesn’t stop there. He notes the “abundance of the best water” as well as abundant wood.
Though “goats…were not abundant,” Dana hastened to add that “[h]ens and chickens”
were.
115
In fact, he uses some form of the word abundant more than half a dozen times in
roughly one page. As with other narratives, the theme of abundance put the laziness into
the strongest contrast, not only “explaining” profligacy, but making it all the more
302
distasteful for readers looking to correct injustice while availing themselves of productive
land in the process.
Having prepared the reader for the indolence of Spanish America in Chile, the
transition to the indolence of California was not difficult. Therefore, readers were likely
not surprised when, shortly after arriving in California, Dana made one of his first
pronouncements about the lifestyle of the Californians, by which he meant Mexicans.
“The Californians are an idle, thriftless people, and can make nothing for themselves.
The country abounds in grapes, yet they buy bad wine made in Boston and brought round
by us, at an immense price, and retail it among themselves…”
116
In addition to being
robbed by Boston merchants, Dana recounts how the residents of Monterey were slowly
being wrung dry by the “English and Americans” who lived among them. “Having more
industry, frugality, and enterprise than the natives,” Dana explains, “they soon get nearly
all the trade into their hands.”
117
This is hardly surprising given that Dana saw Monterey,
as Irving did, in the carnivalesque style, as a “great place for cock-fighting, gambling of
all sorts, fandangos, and every kind of amusement and knavery.”
118
Taking all the
individual strands of his California narrative and stitching them together, Dana finally
proclaimed, “Nothing but the character of the people prevents Monterey from becoming a
great town. The soil is as rich as man could wish; climate as good as any in the world;
water abundant, and situation extremely beautiful.”
119
It was a conclusion predicated not
on half a dozen pages of prose but on more than three hundred years of imagining and
inventing.
303
Whether or not Dana consciously participated in this tradition, he aligned his
narrative with its salient features. As in the past, the geography is “rich” “abundant,” and
“extremely beautiful.” However, the people stand in the way of the greatness of the
place. Not only were they obstructing the potential of the land, but they also obstructed
the vision of various imperial governments whose looking-glasses were trained on the
same resources. If precedent suggests an interpretation, the people of Monterey
obstructed in this regard more than any other. In fact, when Dana imagines “a great
town” what he really envisions is an American one.
These challenges to appropriation and integration of California appear throughout
the text. Dana offers an extended discussion of race and its influence on caste in
California. In comments that recall the casta paintings of New Spain, Dana writes,
Their complexions are various, depending—as well as their dress and
manner—upon their rank; or, in other words, upon the amount of Spanish
blood they can lay claim to. Those who are of pure Spanish blood, having
never intermarried with the aborigines, have clear brunette complexions,
and sometimes, even as fair as those of English women. […] From this
upper class, they go down by regular shades, growing more and more dark
and muddy, until you come to the pure Indian, who runs about with
nothing upon him but a small piece of cloth… Generally speaking, each
person’s caste is decided by the quality of the blood, which shows itself,
too plainly to be concealed, at first sight.
120
Dana’s descent from the fair upper classes into the mud of the natives reveals just how
concerned he and others were with issues of complexion. The fact that for Dana and his
countrymen there were “but few” of the good stock and many more of the “dark and
muddy” variety highlighted the difficulty of absorbing California’s culture into that of the
US. Especially for Dana, a person whose own social standing in Boston had more than a
little to do with the “quality of the blood,” these distinctions were crucial. As a wealthy
304
and well-connected young man sailing among the lowest of his own culture, Dana
constantly beat back the creeping effects of the lower castes, of becoming “a sailor in
every respect, mind and habits, as well as body,” a situation that he found both
invigorating and threatening.
121
Even the upper classes, however, had their problems. Much like the women of
Califia’s island, or the beautiful Concepción of Rezanov’s Russian romance, the women
of Dana’s California were frivolous and overly fond of ornament.
The fondness for dress among the women is excessive, and is often the
ruin of many of them. A present of a fine mantle, or of a necklace or pair
of ear-rings, gains the favor of the greater part of them. Nothing is more
common than to see a woman living in a house of only two rooms, and the
ground for a floor, dressed in spangled satin shoes, silk gown, high comb,
and gild, if not gold ear-rings and necklace.
122
The passage draws its power from the contrast between the dirt floors and the “spangled
satin shoes,” between poverty and finery, rustic California and dignified Boston. The
contrast recalls, in miniature, the frequent contrast drawn between culture and geography,
with the former being poor and the latter rich—though wasted by those with out the sense
to use it properly.
123
In addition to their obsession with decoration, Dana later reminds us
that “the women have but little education, and a good deal of beauty, and their morality,
of course, is none of the best.”
124
With these lines, he completes the connection to the
beautiful and wealthy, but wanton, women of Montalvo’s romance, who occupy an island
overloaded with gold and under-supervised by men who would take responsibility for
their protection.
If the upper classes presented problems to Dana’s acquisitive nation, the natives
produced something like disgust and dread. Among the “Indians’ huts,” where “little
305
children were running about … stark naked, and the men were not much better,” Dana
encounters a people speaking
the most brutish and inhuman language, without any exception, that I ever
heard, or that could well be conceived of. It is a complete slabber. The
words fall off the ends of their tongues, and a continual slabbering sound
is made in the cheeks…
125
This distinction in language fits with a general distinction Dana wants to make between
the Mexicans and the natives. Earlier, he carefully notes how much he enjoyed “the
fineness of the voices and beauty of intonations” among Spanish speakers.
126
Thus, Dana
reaffirms the distinction Spanish-speakers sought to make between gente de razon and
gente sin razon in California, a distinction that reinforced the authority of the former at
the expense of the latter. Thus, if Dana saw a gap between his own culture and that of the
Mexicans, he saw a gulf between himself and the natives.
This native culture not only disgusted him, but appeared decayed and wizened,
ready to give way to more robust forces. Using an anecdote that would become very
popular among tourists in the late nineteenth century, Dana recounts meeting a symbolic
representative of that fading culture.
Here, among the huts, we saw the oldest man I had ever seen; and, indeed,
I never supposed that a person could retain life and exhibit such marks of
age. He was sitting out in the sun, leaning against the side of a hut; and
his legs and arms, which were bare, were of a dark red color, the skin
withered and shrunk up like burnt leather, and the limbs not larger round
than those of a boy of five years. …[H]e was so feeble that, when we
came up to him, he raised his hands slowly to his face, and taking hold of
his lids with his fingers, lifted them up to look at us; and being satisfied,
let them drop again. […] I asked his age, but could get no answer but
“Quien sabe?”…
127
306
This was the culture, Dana and his cohorts argued, that was to make way for the young
and vigorous nation; these were the people who “naturally” would fade away. This
rhetoric was part of a growing national trend to see the supposed extinction of native
peoples as part of a Darwinian logic whose outcomes were as inevitable as they were
comprehensive.
128
Dana’s depiction anticipates an onslaught of writing that grew out of
tourism in California, and each of the details in this passage might have been pulled from
the pages of any number of travel guides or used to describe scores of early photographs.
What gives these passages their power is their ability to mask the deliberate actions of
individuals—their wars, land swindles, and sexual diseases—and replace these actions
with the slow, invisible, intractable force of “nature.” The popularity of this mode of
discourse suggests not only Dana’s position as a lynchpin joining pre-war imperialism to
post-war tourism, but also the ways that native cultures, for a certain set of writers,
appeared to offer ready-made metaphors for expression of their desires.
Further evidence of Dana’s anticipation of later Euro-American writing comes
from his description of the missions. While riding their horses on the beach, Dana and
his companions encountered a funeral procession, a “peculiar sight,” which they followed
to the mission. As if cut from the pages of a gothic novel, the passage describes a “little
coffin…borne by eight girls” and “two men…one on each side of the coffin, carrying
muskets in their hands, which they continually loaded and fired into the air.” Adding to
the air of mystery, Dana remarked, “Whether this was to keep off the evil spirits or not I
do not know. It was the only interpretation I could put upon it.” While it seems unlikely
that Dana forgot about the guns fired from US sailing vessels at the funeral of a sailor, or
307
that he believed those too were to ward off evil spirits, his suggestion of exotic ritual
would have been enough for most Protestant readers to forget their own rituals and
assume the most bizarre explanations for those in Catholic California.
The gothic panorama culminates in the funeral’s arrival at the mission itself, a
primary location for the beautiful and bizarre in Protestant visions of Catholicism.
As we drew near the mission, we saw the great gate thrown open, and the
pádre [sic] standing on the steps, with a crucifix in hand. The mission is a
large and deserted-looking place, the out-buildings going to ruin, and
everything giving one the impression of decayed grandeur. A large stone
fountain threw out pure water, from four mouths, into a basin, before the
church door; and we were in the point of riding up to let our horses drink,
when it occurred to us that it might be consecrated, and we forbore. Just
at this moment, the bells set up their harsh, discordant clang; and the
procession moved into the court.
129
The importance of decay and death links this passage to the former description of the
native man, but the palpable scent of romance that infuses the passage, especially in key
words like “grandeur,” looks forward to books like Ramona and legions of tourists
seeking the charm of the past in California. The details of the scene—the crucifix, the
fountain, the “harsh, discordant” bells—suggest a stolen glimpse from an outsider into an
exotic culture or a kind of dream that ends with the clang of the bell. Even the
trepidation of Dana at letting his horses drink from the fountain casts an air of mystery
and magic over the moment. There is a sense of the sacred and foreign, of ritual and
supernatural rites, all of which was frightening and fascinating to Protestant readers, and
all of which would shape in various guises the Spanish romance of the latter part of the
century.
308
There were other elements to this package, however, and Dana manages to
squeeze most of them into a single day ashore. Immediately following the scene at the
church, he and his companion stumble upon a “great crowd” “drawn together by bantam
cocks.” The cock-fighting, itself a substitute for a cancelled bull-and-bear fight, was
immediately followed by a horse race, which then culminated in music and dancing, with
“the violin and guitar screaming and twanging away under the piazza, where they had
been all day.”
130
The most important phrase in this last passage is the one that marks
time, informing the reader that they had been playing “all day.” The supposed frivolity
of California both attracted and repelled US readers, and Dana magnified this theme by
packing these moments of frivolity together and packaging them to facilitate easy
Protestant consumption. The passage reads almost like a medley on themes of dissipation
or a series of stage sets, in which actors walk across the stage while the background
changes behind them.
In order to confirm this impression, and tie all the separate scenes together with
the opening of the chapter, Dana concludes the episode with a short scene from the
Monday after Easter, during which he and his men work in the rigging of the ship and
watch an Italian vessel nearby.
After breakfast, we had the satisfaction of seeing the Italian ship’s boat go
ashore, filled with men, gaily dressed, as on the day before, and singing
their barcarollas. The Easter holydays are kept up on shore during three
days; and being a Catholic vessel, the crew had the advantage of them.
For two successive days, while perched up in the rigging, covered with tar
and engaged in our disagreeable work, we saw these fellows going ashore
in the morning, and coming off again at night, in high spirits. So much for
being Protestants. There’s no danger of Catholicism’s spreading in New
England; Yankees can’t afford the time to be Catholics.
131
309
In a passage that perfectly encapsulates both the allure and the threat of California for
foreign Protestants, Dana transforms the bare rhetoric of prior writers into a memorable
scene that conveys the same message but more effectively and efficiently. Time was
indeed one of many problems for foreigners in California—how it was spent, how much
of it remained before conquest, and how long it had dragged along without a change of
regime. These foreigners used time, however, to suggest the superiority of the onlookers
to the observed. In a sense, two days was a relatively short time for Dana to endure the
celebration. For more than three hundred years, perched in the rigging and tangled in
their disagreeable work, foreign observers of California had watched the party commence
on shore and seen the fortunate residents return in “high spirits.” Dana correctly asserts
that there was little danger in Catholicism converting New England (just as there was no
danger of natives converting the Spanish). The danger was in absorbing the Catholics
into the approaching fleets of US nationhood.
It was this concern, hovering like storm clouds on the sea’s horizon, that most
animated the writing of Dana and other land-hungry observers. And as much as the thrill
of potential urged them onward, their vision of California inspired more than a little
concern. When Dana hears that his boat might remain in California much longer than the
assumed two years, the news sends him into despondent rumination. “Here we were, in a
little vessel, with a small crew, on a half-civilized coast, at the ends of the earth, and with
a prospect of remaining an indefinite period, two or three years at least.” The sense of
scale weighs heaviest on Dana’s mind, the sudden shrinking of his culture and the
simultaneous expansion of the void around them, a void of time, space, and civilization.
310
Suddenly the game feels serious; the lark of a young man in foreign lands transforms into
a horrible trial. And it was the cultural and social aspect that worried Dana most. Dana,
who saw himself as part of a separate class from his fellow sailors, worried that the
additional time would be harder on him than them. “This [extended voyage] was bad
enough for them, but still worse for me, who did not mean to be a sailor for life; having
intended only to be gone eighteen months or two years. Three or four years would make
me a sailor in every respect, mind and habits, as well as body…”
132
Yet it was not merely
the effect of sailing that he feared, but, like prior writers, the effect of California itself,
and he returns immediately to this theme. “Besides the length of the voyage, and the hard
and exposed life, we were at the ends of the earth; on a coast almost solitary; in a country
where there is neither law nor gospel…”
133
This country without law or gospel, loomed
in his imagination as a curse rather than a blessing, something to fear rather than a
harmless curiosity. It was not only different from the safe harbors of Brahmin Boston,
but it lay beyond the reach of those powerful families and figures who might help him.
For this reason, Dana celebrates the finding of some books in a sea chest during
his time as a hide collector on the beach. In particular, a romance by William Godwin,
Mandeville, thrills him. Dana exclaimed,
…[A]fter all the wretched trash I had devoured, anything bearing the name
of a distinguished intellectual man, was a prize indeed. I bore it off, and
for two days I was up early and late, reading with all my might, and
actually drinking in delight. It is no extravagance to say that it was like a
spring in a desert land.
134
Finding an intellectual spring in a cultural desert was a popular metaphor for travelers to
California, and it suggests the symbolic connections they made between the land and the
311
people who lived there.
135
That so many writers eagerly appropriated the imagery of the
desert as a way to “explain” California reveals something about their places of origin. It
also reveals how they sought a vehicle to facilitate their desires for conquest. The desert
and its ready-made symbolic associations offered an opportunity for them to characterize
both the geography and the culture in a way memorable to other foreign readers.
Ironically, this scenery remained alluring to foreign readers for many of the same
reasons that they were supposed to fear it. Even Dana’s prior description of the mission
suggests some of the allure under the tawdry decay. Although it was a “decayed
grandeur,” the mission represented a kind of grandeur nonetheless, and at a moment
when the US was beginning to search for its own cultural traditions, the notion of ruined
vestiges of another grand culture had its appeal.
136
The mystery of age and the
recollection of empires past conjured up the elements of romance and fantasy that were
emerging in literature at this time, and these elements suited perfectly the long-standing
images of exoticism in California. This signals a shift from writers like Pattie who, in his
narrative just a decade before Dana, told the mission father that he wouldn’t trade all of
the cattle of the missions for his US citizenship, a theme echoed by other visitors after
him. For Dana and later writers, however, that citizenship seemed to lack something
intangible: the air of antiquity.
Yet it wasn’t just the image of decaying missions that fired the imaginations of
visiting Euro-Americans like Dana. The very isolation and solitude that he earlier
claimed to dread was itself attractive. During a foray on the beach to collect hides, Dana
and his crew “strolled about, picking up shells, and following the sea where it tumbled in,
312
roaring and spouting among the crevices of the great rocks.” Here, in this scene cut from
the pages of the Romantic tradition, Dana reacts quite differently to California.
What a sight, thought I, must this be in a southeaster! The rocks were as
large as those of Nahant or Newport, but, to my eye, more grand and
broken. Beside, there was a grandeur in everything around, which gave
almost a solemnity to the scene: a silence and solitariness which affected
everything! Not a human being but ourselves for miles; and no sound
heard but the pulsations of the great Pacific! and the great steep hill rising
like a wall, and cutting us off from all the world, but the “world of
waters!”
137
This sounds like the very thing that Dana feared would permanently transform him, the
same forces that might make him a sailor and unmake him for Boston Brahmin life.
Dana even elaborates on the potential benefits of this isolation in the same passage, as he
further removes himself from the other sailors.
I separated myself from the rest, and sat down on a rock… […] It was
almost the first time I had been positively alone—free from the sense that
human beings were at my elbow, if not talking with me—since I had left
home. My better nature returned strong upon me. Everything was in
accordance with my state of feeling, and I experienced a glow of pleasure
at finding that what of poetry and romance I ever had in me, had not been
entirely deadened by the laborious and frittering life I had led. Nearly an
hour did I sit, almost lost in the luxury of this entire new scene of the play
in which I had been so long acting.
138
Instead of corrupting his blue blood, the wilds of California reinvigorate Dana’s “better
nature,” including his sense of “poetry and romance.” Instead of the terror of isolation,
solitude itself allows him to feel “free.” Strangest of all, Dana actually depicts labor as a
negative influence. To be fair, he describes a certain kind of labor, physical and
associated with “frittering,” but to hear a New England blueblood like Dana say anything
negative about work is unusual.
313
If these vacillations and contradictions sound confusing, they are, at least,
consistent with those written before him and place him in line with hundreds of years of
similar reactions to California. Like the images of islands that stretch back at least five
hundred years before Dana’s voyage, California remained simultaneously a place of exile
and a place of refuge, both a threat and a temptation. Writers feared its physical and
psychological effects while they desired the “luxury” of its seductive rewards.
Despite these whip-sawing changes in emotion, Dana’s writing never lacked
purpose. His over-arching desire, the material that holds together his reflections on
California, appears most clearly in his chapter that summarizes “the character and habits
of the people, as well as of the institutions under which they live.”
139
In roughly half a
dozen pages, Dana coolly assesses three hundred years of European exploration and
colonization in California, beginning with Cortés and ending with the Mexican
government. The chapter sits almost exactly in the center of the narrative and
consolidates the more scattered bits of ideology into a single location. While it may not
be the focal point for the action of the book, it certainly has its claim as the book’s
ideological centerpiece.
Moving quickly from Cortés and Vancouver, through the organization of
presidios, to the secularization of the missions and ruin of California by “men of
desperate fortunes,” Dana arrives at his description of the government, which “is an
arbitrary democracy; having no common law, and no judiciary,” and whose “laws are
only made and unmade at the caprice of the legislature, and are as variable as the
legislature itself.” Furthermore, Dana notes, “Revolutions are matters of constant
314
occurrence…got up by men who are at the foot of the ladder and in desperate
circumstances… [whose] only object, of course, is the loaves and fishes.” Tearing
another page from the narratives of past visitors, Dana adds, “As for justice, they know
no law but will and fear.”
140
This summary and characterization (or perhaps character assassination) rests on
the authority of a few anecdotes. One tells the story of a “Yankee, who had been
naturalized and become a Catholic, and had married in the country,” and was murdered in
his home, which began a skirmish between the “Kentucky hunters” and the “hungry,
drawling, lazy half-breeds.” Another tells the story of Indians murdered without
punishment. Dana concludes the anecdotes with the following remark: “These few
instances will serve to give one a notion of the distribution of justice in California.”
141
If
these comments sound as arbitrary as the laws and legislature of the country he describes,
he makes no mention of it. He does on one occasion acknowledge the politics of his own
country in a phrase (“as with us”), but this kind of reflective analysis remains in short
supply. Instead, he uses the discussion of justice as a springboard for further commentary
on the “domestic relations” of the people.
One long paragraph has the dubious distinction of demonstrating how a “vice”
could be construed as a controlling moral force in the community.
The men are thriftless, proud, and extravagant, and very much given to
gaming; and the women have but little education, and a good deal of
beauty, and their morality, of course, is none of the best; yet the instances
of infidelity are much less frequent than one would at first suppose. In
fact, one vice is set over against another; and thus, something like a
balance is obtained. The women have but little virtue, but then the
jealousy of their husbands is extreme, and their revenge deadly and almost
certain.
142
315
Dana here raises the back-handed compliment to a kind of art form, simultaneously
castigating the Mexicans at the same time that he makes claims for “something like a
balance” in society achieved through the clash of powerful vices. In a familiar portrait,
ramshackle order survives in California despite (or because of) its extremes: its beauty
(typically feminine), its passions (often sexual), and its violence (usually irrational and
racial). It was a sketch that had developed its salient features long before Dana arrived
on the scene, and one that would endure long after he sailed back to Boston.
Of course, the natives fared no better than the Mexicans in this sketch of
California. Dana characterizes them, the “poor Indians,” in less than a paragraph.
Indeed to show the entire want of any sense of morality or domestic duty
among them, I have frequently known an Indian to bring his wife, to
whom he was lawfully married in the church, down to the beach, and carry
her back again, dividing with her the money which she had got from the
sailors.
143
What Dana, the arbiter of “morality,” neglects to mention is that he likely participated in
this sexual exchange while camped on the beach and madly drinking from the spring of
culture he found in his sea chest. Other sailors present on the voyage, upon reading his
book, complained that Dana omitted significant details about his time living as a
beachcomber and the numerous native women who “visited” him there.
144
Dana himself
acknowledged that a certain coarseness had to be sanded from the decks of his narrative
before it could sail into public view, but this apparently didn’t prevent him from
pronouncing judgment on the morality of the very people who satisfied his own desires.
Indeed, he quickly washed off the mire of sailing culture and merged back into polite
society within a day of returning to Boston, a privilege unavailable to the Mexicans,
316
Natives, or even the sailors he wrote about. His religious conversion, shortly after
returning home, perhaps suggests how he felt about his actions on the voyage as well as
his need to distance himself from it.
145
Like later miners who lived recklessly in
California, then exchanged their playing cards and whiskey bottles for cravats and
fountain pens upon returning to Eastern society, Dana preferred to keep some of the
rewards of his journey secret and separate from his Boston life.
146
Nevertheless, Dana finds serious flaws in the culture of California, flaws that
appear in bold relief when set against the romantic geographic backdrop. These
sentiments he delivers in classic fashion in what may be the book’s most famous passage.
Such are the people who inhabit a country embracing four or five hundred
miles of sea-coast, with several good harbors; with fine forests in the
north; the waters filled with fish, and the plains covered with thousands of
herds of cattle; blessed with a climate, than which there can be no better in
the world; free from all manner of diseases, whether epidemic or endemic;
and with a soil in which corn yields from seventy to eighty fold. In the
hands of an enterprising people, what a country this might be!
147
Dana offers an example of the argument for conquest in California. All of the usual
features of this argument—the bounty of the landscape described in myriad
ways—appear to set in high relief the indolence and incompetence of its residents.
Furthermore, the potential of the region, the dream of the future, that constant idea in all
calls for conquest of California, hangs off the end of the quote like a taunt or a dare to
those with money and power. Dana neatly encapsulates the promise of the place and the
desire of his readers in a single sentence, subtly reinforcing their own vision of
themselves (“an enterprising people”) by using one of their favorite terms.
317
It is one of the most famous quotes in the literature of California, as memorable
for its economy as for its galling snobbery. It is not, however, original. In fact, little
about the quote can be said to originate with Dana, except the phrasing. Dana merely
consolidates and repeats the sentiments of centuries, perhaps more memorably, but not
before anyone else. This point needs to be underscored because of all the attention given
to Dana as a kind of progenitor for literary California. In a sense, he did, of course,
deeply influence writers, consciously and unconsciously, from Helen Hunt Jackson to
Joan Didion. But in no sense did Dana formulate these ideas. They were passed on to
him, absorbed by him, and even reshaped by him, but they existed long before he ever
wrote about California, long before he ever traveled there, long before he was born.
Furthermore, this quote is often deceptively cut from its context. In the crucial
sentence of the argument, Dana appears to say, “What a country this might be!” What he
actually says is somewhat different and reflects one of the powerful undercurrents in
California’s conquest narratives.
In the hands of an enterprising people, what a country this might be! we
are ready to say. Yet how long would a people remain so, in such a
country? The Americans (as those from the United States are called) and
Englishmen, who are fast filling up the principal towns, and getting the
trade into their hands, are indeed more industrious and effective than the
Spaniards; yet their children are brought up Spaniards, in every respect,
and if the “California fever” (laziness) spares the first generation, it always
attacks the second.
148
While the often-quoted section appears to culminate in a brassy triumph, the statement is
actually a carefully qualified shift into another, related discussion. Dana’s qualification
(“we are ready to say”) suggests this long history of anxiety about California and
preempts what he suspects most readers are already thinking. Most importantly, it
318
signals a turn from the brassy notes of triumph, to a more reflective and cautious tone.
Dana’s next question suggests the other side of the coin of California and expresses the
fear that always lingered beneath these bold calls to action: “Yet, how long would a
people remain so, in such a country?” Just after he had finished claiming that California
was free from “all manner of diseases,” he admits the existence of the disease Yankees
feared most, what he calls “the ‘California fever’ (laziness).”
It was probably unnecessary for Dana to define the phrase for his reader in
parenthesis because they had worried about this possibility for just as long as they had
celebrated the supposed bounty of California. In much the same way that romantic
geography was a requirement for demonstrating the indolence and ignorance of
California culture, these traits became linked to the landscape as products of it. Thus, just
as Dana enumerates the fabulous potential of California, he worries about what might
happen to enterprising people “in such a country.” In the same way Dana expresses
anxiety about the sailor’s habits seeping into his blue blood, he wonders how long that
supposed vigor of the US might last in California. Earlier Dana claimed that there was
no danger of Catholicism seeping into the US because Protestants didn’t have time for it,
but here he speaks with far less conviction. He finds himself, much like earlier writers
who complained about the “indolence” of the people, wondering if California might in
fact be too much of a good thing.
These anxieties might be explained as a subconscious expression of guilt or fear,
emerging to undercut the brash rhetoric of conquest. Regardless of the roots of the
sentiment, the presence of this fear was certainly ironic, for its source (California’s over-
319
abundance) was just as much their own invention as was the result (indolence). Thus,
like Forbes and the English, the land-hungry Euro-Americans were afraid of notions that
they themselves had invented. If anyone had reason for concern, of course, it was the
natives and Mexicans of California, the people whose very existence was an impediment
to the desires of arriving foreigners. This concept almost never surfaces in foreign
narratives, however, and Dana’s chapter, instead of ending on what was supposed to be a
note of triumph, speculates about the coming danger to the enterprise of a hungry nation.
Despite winning the eventual war, this was a fear that would pursue Euro-Americans well
into the following century.
320
Chapter Four Endnotes

1
See William Charvat, The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800-1870 (Columbus:
Ohio State University Press, 1968), 29, for comments on England. See William Charvat,
Literary Publishing in America, 1790-1850 (Amherst: University of Massasschusetts
Press, 1993), 54 and 75, for his comments on Irving and history. See also George
Callcott, History in the United States, 1800-1860: its Practice and Purpose (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins, 1970) for a general introduction to writing history in the US; and Gregory
M. Pfitzer, Popular History and the Literary Marketplace, 1840-1920 (Amherst:
University of Massassachusetts Press, 2008), especially 35-40, for a discussion of Irving
and the interface between history and literature.
2
See Peter Antelyes, Tales of Adventurous Enterprise: Washington Irving and the
Poetics of Western Expansion (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), especially
Chapter One, for an excellent discussion of the connection between market forces and
writing about western North America.
3
Charvat, The Profession of Authorship, 49-66.
4
Irving and Frémont are just two examples of either side of this phenomenon.
5
Significantly, Irving’s only competition for this distinction is Cooper, another writer
who built his fortune on the fascination with frontier romance.
6
For an interesting discussion of Irving’s writing on Spain, see Pere Gifra-Adroher,
Between History and Romance: Travel Writing on Spain in the Early Nineteenth-Century
United States (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000); and Ivan Jaksic,
The Hispanic World and American Intellectual Life, 1820-1880 (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007).
7
Charvat, The Profession of Authorship, 75-76.
8
Wayne R. Kime, “The Author as Professional: Washington Irving’s ‘Rambling
Anecdotes’ of the West” in Critical Essays on Washington Irving, ed. Ralph M.
Alderman (GK Hall & Co: Boston, 1990), 240.
9
Antelyes, Tales of Adventurous Enterprise, 46-52. Ironically, Irving felt compelled to
travel beyond US national boundaries to solidify his “American” credentials. While this
discussion relies primarily on Antelyes, Rubin-Dorsky has also made a significant impact
on scholarship about Irving, though his argument focuses on Irving in Europe. See
Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky, Adrift in the Old World: the Psychological Pilgrimage of
Washington Irving (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). For additional
comments on Irving and his relationship with western North America, see Stephanie
321

LeMenager, “Trading Stories: Washington Irving and the Global West,” American
Literary History 15.4 (2003): 683-708.
10
Of particular importance are James Hall, Timothy Flint (publisher of Pattie’s Personal
Narrative), and James Paulding. See, for example, Antelyes, Tales of Adventurous
Enterprise, 31-36.
11
Ibid, 31-43.
12
See Antelyes, Tales of Adventurous Enterprise, for a discussion of Irving’s strategy as
a writer of “romance,” especially 79-84.
13
Richard H. Cracroft, Washington Irving: the Western Works (Boise: Boise State
University Press, 1974), 23, describes the book as “an instant success.” Edgeley Todd,
“Editor’s Introduction,” The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, USA, by Washington
Irving (Norman: University of Okalahoma Press, 1986), remarks on the popularity of the
general subject (xliv).
14
This title was a revision of an earlier version, called The Rocky Mountains, and reflects
Irving’s drift toward a nationalized and dramatized narrative.
15
Washington Irving, Adventures of Captain Bonneville, or Scenes Beyond the Rocky
Mountains of the Far West (Paris: Baudry’s European Library, 1837), 1-4.
16
On the payment, see Antelyes, Tales of Adventurous Enterprise, and Edgeley Todd,
“Editor’s Introduction,” The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, USA. (Norman: U of
Okalahoma P, 1986), p. xxxvii.
17
Todd, “Editor’s Introduction,” xlv.
18
The aesthetic dimension of this argument won’t withstand scrutiny (as it would suggest
that any writer who wrote for money necessarily wrote badly and vice-versa), but this is
an interesting contention in relation to arguments about western writing and market
forces. There is evidence that Irving did view his writing during this period as a way to
pay for building his residence, though he was often careful to blur the distinction between
art and commerce. See Kime, “The Author as Professional,” 238.
19
Mary Weatherspoon Bowden, Washington Irving (Boston: Twayne, 1981), 165.
Andrew Burstein, The Original Knickerbocker: the Life of Washington Irving (New
York: Basic Books, 2007), 288, says that Bonneville was “quite possibly the worst
writing Irving ever did.” For an alternative view see Cracroft, Washington Irving: the
Western Works, 31 and 35.
322

20
Antelyes, Tales of Adventurous Enterprise, 196, 198.
21
See Cracroft and Todd for this defense, as well as Bernard DeVoto, Across the Wide
Missouri (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co, 1947), for a historian’s take on the same issue.
See Charvat, Literary Publishing, 77-78, for a discussion of Irving’s feeling about his
own work and his use of pseudonyms. For a discussion of authenticity and western
writing, see Nathaniel Lewis, Unsettling the Literary West: Authenticity and Authorship
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), especially 36-37 and 39.
22
For a discussion of Irving and Bonneville’s journal, see John Francis McDermott,
“Washinton Irving and the Journal of Captain Bonneville,” Mississippi Valley Historical
Review 43.3 (1956), 459-467.
23
See Antelyes, Tales of Adventurous Enterprise, 74, for a description of this visit.
24
See Bil Gilbert, Westering Man: the Life of Joseph Walker (New York: Antheneum,
1983), 99, for an interesting argument about Bonneville as a spy.
25
Cracroft, Washington Irving, 33 and 36, talks about Irving’s need to subordinate the
economics of the fur trade to the romance of exploration. Gilbert, Westering Man, 125-
126, argues for Irving’s need to develop a literary scapegoat. For the romantic stereotype
created by Irving in this text, see Harvey Lewis Carter and Marcia Carpenter Spencer,
“Stereotypes of the Mountain Man” Western Historical Quarterly 6.1 (1975): 17-32.
26
Irving, Adventures of Captain Bonneville, 212.
27
Charvat, Literary Publishing, 76-77. See also Antelyes, Tales of Adventurous
Enterprise, 58-60.
28
Irving, Adventures of Captain Bonneville, 215.
29
Ibid, 208.
30
Ibid, 208. Emphasis added.
31
Ibid, 208.
32
Irving’s mixture of sex with lethargy highlights his equally ambivalent relationship to
women. For an introduction to these themes, see Jenifer S. Banks, “Washington Irving,
the Nineteenth-Century American Bachelor” in Critical Essays on Washington Irving, ed.
Ralph M. Alderman (GK Hall & Co: Boston, 1990), 253-265.
33
Irving, Adventures of Captain Bonneville, 210.
323

34
Ibid, 211.
35
Ibid, 211. Incidentally, this sentence (with its awkward repetition of “render” and
“rendered”) is one potential example of the haste that some critics have attributed to these
books.
36
Ibid, 212.
37
Ibid, 214.
38
For discussions of the brutal treatment of Natives after statehood, see Benjamin
Madley, “California’s Yuki Indians: Defining Genocide in Native American History,”
Western Historial Quarterly 39.3 (2008): 303-332; and Benjamin Logan Madley,
“American Genocide: the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873,” PhD diss, Yale
University, 2009. See also Clifford E. Trafzer, “Exterminate Them”: Written Accounts
of the Murder, Rape, and Slavery of Native Americans During the California Gold Rush,
1848-1868 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999); and Robert F. Heizer,
ed., The Destruction of the California Indians: a Collection of Documents from the
Period 1847 to 1865 in which are Described Some of the Things that Happened to Some
of the Indians of California (Santa Barbara: Peregrine Smith, 1974).
39
For a consideration of Irving’s attitude toward the Indians, see Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr.,
“Washington Irving and the American Indian,” American Indian Quarterly 5.2 (1979):
135-154.
40
Thomas Coulter, “Notes on Upper California,” in Journal of the Royal Geographic
Society of London (London: John Murray, 1835), 59-70.
41
Scholarly material on Ruschenberger is scarce, especially for the part of his life
connected to these sailing narratives. See Harold D. Langley, A History of Medicine in
the Early U.S. Navy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1995), 345-6, for a brief gloss. For
material on his later life as a museum advocate, see Steven Conn, Museums and
American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
42
W. S. W. Ruschenberger, A Narrative of a Voyage Round the World, During the Years
1835, 36, and 37 (London: Richard Bentley. 1838), vol. 1, v.
43
Ruschenberger, Narrative of a Voyage, vol. 2, 416.
44
See John C. Ewers, “Editor’s Introduction,” Adventures of Zenas Leonard, by Zenas
Leonard (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1959), xvi-xxiv, for a brief background
to the work.
324

45
Zenas Leonard, Adventures of Zenas Leonard, Fur Trader and Trapper, ed. W.F.
Wagner (Cleveland: Burrows Brothers, 1904), 156.
46
Most of the scholarship on Leonard is historical. For some representative examples,
see Robert M. Utley, A Life Wild and Perilous (New York: Henry Holt, 1997); Francis P.
Farquhar, History of the Sierra Nevada (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965);
Thomas Howard, Sierra Crossing: First Roads to California (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1998); and Bil Gilbert, Westering Man: the Life of Joseph Walker (New
York: Atheneum, 1983), 122-47. One book with a more literary-cultural focus on
Leonard’s text is David Wyatt, The Fall into Eden: Landscape and Imagination in
California (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 2-3 and 8-14. See also
Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1973), 22-23, for a different interpretation of Leonard’s attitude toward
California’s residents.
47
This technique recalls a passage in Irving’s Bonneville, though Leonard returns to the
idea much more than Irving.
48
Leonard, Adventures, 184.
49
Ibid, 189.
50
Ibid, 193.
51
This circular reasoning recalls, especially, Vancouver.
52
Leonard, Adventures, 205.
53
Ibid, 206.
54
Ibid, 211.
55
Ibid, 218.
56
Ibid, 219.
57
Ibid, 222.
58
Ibid.
59
Ibid, 192-193.
325

60
Ibid, 211.
61
Stephanie LeMenager argues for a countervailing anxiety in literature that is often
thought to be imperialist, though she attributes the discourse to anxiety about the chaos of
the marketplace, rather than foreign pressure. See “Trading stories: Washington Irving
and the Global West,” American Literary History 15.4 (2003): 683.
62
Leonard, Adventures, 188.
63
Ibid, 229.
64
Ibid, 208.
65
Ibid, 213.
66
This convention, refusing California, is traceable back to Drake, but it didn’t become
formalized until the early 19
th
century. See earlier discussions of Jedediah Smith and
James Pattie for examples.
67
Leonard, Adventures, 226.
68
Ibid, 226.
69
Material on Forbes is scarce, but can be gleaned from materials on general British
activity in the Pacific and Mexico. See Lester G. Engelson “Proposals for the
Colonization of California by England: In Connection with the Mexican Debt to British
Bondholders 1837-1846,” California Historical Society Quarterly 18.2 (1939): 136-148;
Ephraim D. Adams, “English Interest in Annexation of California,” The American
Historical Review 14.4 (1909): 744-763; and Herbert I. Priestley, review of A History of
California, by Alexander Forbes, Catholic Historical Review 6.1 (1920): 100-104. See
also A.P. Nasatir, “International Rivalry for California and the Establishment of the
British Consulate,” California Historical Society Quarterly 46.1 (1967): 53-70.
Incidentally, Alexander Forbes should not be confused with James Alexander Forbes.
See Nasatir, “International Rivalry,” 64.
70
Alexander Forbes, California: a History of Upper and Lower California from their
First Discovery to the Present Time (London: Smith, Elder and Co, 1839). For the
examples of historians’ interpretation of his work, see Kevin Starr, Americans and the
California Dream, 1850-1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 11; or
Priestley, review of A History of California, 100.
71
Forbes says he is especially fond of “La Perouse, Vancouver, Langsdorff, and
Beechley.” Forbes, History of California, viii. British sentiment was, however, not
326

universally in favor of annexation or colonization of California. Engelson “Proposals for
the Colonization of California,” and Adams, “English Interest in Annexation of
California,” for other views.
72
See Norman A. Graebner, “American Interest in California, 1845,” Pacific Historical
Review 22.1 (1953), 15-17.
73
See Engelson, “Proposals for the Colonization of California,” for a summary of the
various stages in this debt crisis. For a recent study, see Richard Salvucci, Politics,
Markets, and Mexico’s “London Debt,” 1823-1887 (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2009).
74
Forbes, History of California, 25. This reference to Swift recalls a similar discussion in
Chapter Two.
75
Forbes, History of California, 81.
76
See Chapter One for a treatment of Palóu’s work.
77
Forbes, History of California, 125.
78
He also, however, quotes from Venegas, whose opinion is perfectly in line with Forbes,
denigrating the subject and importance of the region. Forbes, History of California, 25.
79
See Carrey McWilliams, Southern California: an Island on the Land (Santa Barbara:
Peregrine Smith, 1946) for an older, but still quite good, account of the neglected
viewpoint of native Americans.
80
For zealous missionaries, such as Serra, martyrdom was a powerful motivator. Far
from fearing death at the hands of Indians, for some of them nothing could have been
more desirable. For a discussion of Serra and Franciscan religions training, see Sandos,
Converting California, 33-54.
81
Forbes, History of California, 138.
82
Ibid, 205.
83
Ibid, 213, 217, 224.
84
Ibid, especially 309-325.
85
This is not to suggest that pearls (or all other resources) were a complete fabrication.
Europeans often did two things: 1) they exaggerated and/or invented elements of
geography; 2) they brought a value system that radically changed the worth of items
327

already present in California. For a history of the pearl industry in Baja California, see
Peter Gerhard, “Pearl Diving in Lower California, 1533-1830,” Pacific Historical Review
25.3 (1956): 239-249.
86
Forbes, History of California, 233.
87
Ibid, 232. Emphasis in original.
88
Ibid, 288.
89
For a discussion of on Los Angeles and “sleepy,” see William Deverell, Whitewashed
Adobe: the Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of its Mexican Past (University of
California Press, 2004), 26-27.
90
Forbes, History of California, 289.
91
There is some evidence that the Spanish felt the same way about the new. See Ramón
Menéndez Pidal on “novedad” or novelty being equated with “no verdad” or untruth.
The Spaniards and their History (New York: Norton, 1966), 32. Comments in the late
nineteenth century on the fear of electricity offer an amusing example of US reactions to
the unfamiliar.
92
Forbes, History of California, 331.
93
Ibid, 310.
94
Ibid, 314.
95
Ibid, 314.
96
Catholicism is often feminized as well, portrayed as frivolous and shallow the way
women and their activities are often described by men in California. For a discussion of
Protestant reactions to Catholicism, see Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: the Antebellum
Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
97
Forbes, History of California, 242.
98
Ibid, 245.
99
Weber, in The Spanish Frontier in North America, discusses the “White Legend,” a
stereotype in opposition to the “Black Legend,” 341-46.
100
Forbes, History of California, 247.
328

101
Robert Greenhow, Memoir, Historical and Political, on the Northwest Coast of North
America, and the Adjacent Territories (Washington: Blair and Rives, 1840).
102
Greenhow’s life is mostly preserved in scholarship about his wife, Rose O’Neal
Greenhow, a spy for the Confederacy. See Ishbel Ross, Rebel Rose (New York: Harper,
1954), 12-24 and 32-44; and Ann Blackman, Wild Rose: a Civil War Spy (New York:
Random House, 2005). For a discussion of state scholarship and Greenhow, see Anna
Brickhouse, “Scholarship and the State: Robert Greenhow and Transnational American
Studies, 1848/2008,” American Literary History (2008): 695-722. A brief biography can
be found in David Rankin Barbee, “Robert Greenhow,” William and Mary Quarterly
13.3 (1933): 182-183.
103
See John Burrow, A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries
from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century (London: Allen Lane, 2007) on
the professionalization of history.
104
Greenhow, Memoir, Historical and Political, iv. He leaves out France, which had no
colonial outposts in California, but had long maintained an interest in the region and in
the Pacific generally.
105
Ibid, iv. Italics in original.
106
Ibid, v.
107
Bancroft estimates that 150 foreigners per year came to California between 1830 and
1840. See A. P. Nasatir, “International Rivalry for California and the Establishment of
the British Consulate,” California Historical Society Quarterly 46.1 (1967): 60.
108
One example of the book’s longevity is this article: Marlene Smith-Baranzini,
“Milestones in California History: Two Years Before the Mast: Its Significance 150
Years After Publication,” California History 69.4 (1990).
109
Thomas Philbrick, introduction to Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana
(New York: Penguin, 1981), 18. These are, of course, nineteenth-century dollars.
110
Despite D.H. Lawrence’s attempt to assert Dana’s importance to American literature,
the majority of criticism on Dana remains historical, even when that history leans in a
literary direction, such as in Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream or James
D. Hart, New Englanders in Nova Albion: Some 19
th
Century Views of California
(Boston: Trustees of the Public Library of the City of Boston, 1976). See D.H.
Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Seltzer, 1923). For
biographical materials, see Samuel Shapiro, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., 1815-1882
329

(Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1961); Robert L. Gale, Richard Henry Dana,
Jr. (New York: Twayne, 1969); Richard Henry Dana, An Autobiographical Sketch, ed.
Robert F. Metzdorf (Hamden: Shoe String Press, 1953); and James David Hart, “The
Education of Richard Henry Dana, Jr.,” New England Quarterly 9.1 (1936): 3-25.
111
See Thomas Philbrick, James Fenimore Cooper and the Development of American Sea
Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1961), 117-120, for an example. Other books do
assess Dana with a more literary approach. See David Wyatt, The Fall into Eden:
Landscape and Imagination in California (Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1986), 2-8.
Jeffrey Hotz devotes a chapter to Dana and Melville in Divergent Visions, Contested
Spaces: The Early United States through the Lens of Travel (New York: Routledge,
2006), but he is primarily concerned with a later addendum to Dana’s narrative (which
will be discussed in the conclusion of this dissertation).
112
Shapiro, Richard Henry Dana, Jr, 188-190, presents a compelling argument about the
aims of the book. See Gale, Richard Henry Dana, Jr, 61-62, for an alternative viewpoint.
As an example of the enduring image of Dana’s book as protest, see Jill B. Gidmark, ed.,
Encyclopedia of American Literature of the Sea & Great Lakes (Westport, CT:
Greenwood, 2000), 108, which says, “Perhaps the most powerful scene … is a
description of a flogging, after which the young narrator vows to help redress the
grievances suffered unjustly by common sailors.” Incidentally, the hijacking of reform
by romance anticipates another very famous California book, Helen Hunt Jackson’s
Ramona.
113
Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast, ed. Thomas Philbrick (New York:
Penguin, 1981), 85.
114
Ibid, 89.
115
Ibid, 88-89.
116
Ibid, 125.
117
Ibid, 131.
118
Ibid, 132.
119
Ibid, 133.
120
Ibid, 126-127.
121
Ibid, 143. See also Philbrick’s introduction, 25-28.
330

122
Dana, Two Years Before the Mast, 127.
123
This contrast also recalls the one drawn in Chile, between dress and demeanor. Dana,
Two Years Before the Mast, 89.
124
Ibid, 236.
125
Ibid, 173.
126
Ibid, 127.
127
Ibid, 173. This passage also presages the rhetoric of health and longevity in
California, which would become prominent in the late nineteenth century. Such passages
allowed writers to accomplish two goals simultaneously. First, they demonstrated the
health benefits of California via longevity. Second, they suggested the aging (and
passing) of the Native population. These images often appeared with images of Euro-
American babies to clarify the message. See issues of Land of Sunshine for examples.
128
This conversation continued long after Dana. See discussions surrounding the
photography of Edward Curtis for an example.
129
Dana, Two Years Before the Mast, 189.
130
Ibid, 190-191.
131
Ibid, 192.
132
Ibid, 143.
133
Ibid, ibid.
134
Ibid, 226.
135
Writers still drag out this cliché, as evidenced by articles in the Los Angeles Times.
The notion has probably been around since Venegas (if not before), but it became more
popular in the nineteenth century. See Doyce Nunis, Books in their Sea Chests: Reading
along the Early California Coast (Berkeley: California Library Association, 1964), for
other examples.
136
See David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985). The romantic vision of the missions is typically associated with
the late nineteenth century, when it was widespread, though it has its roots in earlier texts.
331

See Phoebe Kropp’s California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006) for later examples.
137
Dana, Two Years Before the Mast, 197.
138
Ibid.
139
Ibid, 231.
140
Ibid, 233-4.
141
Ibid, 234-6.
142
Ibid, 236.
143
Ibid, 237.
144
See Dana, Two Years Before the Mast, John Haskell Kemble, ed. (Los Angeles: Ward
Ritchie Press, 1964). Dana actually had a history with prostitutes that extended beyond
this voyage. See Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 44-45.
145
Philbrick, introduction to Two Years Before the Mast, 12-13.
146
To be fair, Dana seems genuinely to enjoy the friendship of his “Kanaka” companions
in the beach hut and often portrays them favorably. See Dana, Two Years Before the
Mast, 204-29.
147
Dana, Two Years Before the Mast, 237.
148
Ibid.
332
Chapter Five:
Imperial Rescue, 1841-1846
In the years leading up to the Mexican-American war, three governments
struggled with each other for control of a region they increasingly viewed as crucial to
mastery of the Pacific. France, England, and especially the United States watched with a
mixture of anxiety and anticipation as California endured waves of political instability.
The anxiety emerged from fears that the other powers might, via diplomacy or war, take
the prize from a weakened and distracted government in Mexico. The anticipation
emerged, of course, from the hope that they might, via similar tactics, take the prize for
themselves.
One of the by-products of this political chess game was a large body of literature,
at least ten major publications in roughly five years. Many of these publications were
sponsored by individual governments, which often responded both directly and indirectly
to the claims of other imperial powers. Not surprisingly, these publications tended to
favor the position of the sponsoring governments. However, writers outside the
institutional fold also expressed their national affections. Alongside these governmental
publications, there was a simultaneous increase in privately produced and published
narratives that duplicated this nationalist sentiment for conquest. In particular, narratives
from the US, a later arrival to the race for global empire, voiced a growing fervor for
California.
333
Whether published by an individual or institution, these narratives often sought to
justify, with an array of strategies, intervention in California, a region that they depicted
as verging on collapse or capitulation. In order to save California—from other
governments, from Mexico, from itself—these writers carefully framed their narratives
within a context that suggested California needed to be saved. In these narratives, taking
California was rarely something desired; it was, rather, something required, for the good
of everyone involved. California would not be conquered; instead, it would be rescued.
The French Return: Two Reports from the Mast
Before Richard Henry Dana had a chance to publish his account of California, a
French captain, Cyrille P. T. La Place, arrived in California, after having made stops in
Tahiti and the Sandwich Islands, on orders to negotiate treaties with the natives, by force
if necessary.
1
He would eventually publish a six-volume narrative of his travels,
beginning in 1841 and ending in 1854.
2
Before he left, however, La Place sent a report,
in October of 1839, to the French authorities describing California. It was a report
designed to instruct the French in their actions with regard to California as well as other
imperial powers. La Place, like other French observers, was at least as concerned with
the actions of English as he was with those of his own country. In fact, one might argue
that his first priority was not to secure California for the French, but make sure that it was
not acquired by the English. Because of this rivalry, he tended to see the new player in
the Pacific world, the US, with less animosity than might be expected. So long at the US
334
kept California out of English hands, the French government would be safe and satisfied.
Of course, there remained the continual threats from the Russians, the uncertain role of
the Mexicans, and the unpredictable Californios, whose allegiance to Mexico was often
questioned by visitors.
Thus, when La Place arrived in California, he was embroiled in the ongoing
political currents, in addition to the usual layers of cultural influences. These cultural
influences appear very quickly in the report, especially in regard to geography.
At first, one is astonished that this latter country, so beautiful, so fertile
and at the same time so easy to take, has not yet become the prey of the
great nations of the Old World; but on looking more closely one soon
recognizes that its isolation from the lands occupied by Europeans, the
sparseness of its population, and its strictly agricultural nature are its
guarantee from all foreign aggression and the cause of its obscurity. It
has, none the less, had its revolutions like all parts of the New World
formerly subject to Spain, and like them also has been delivered to
disorder and anarchy.
3
The suggestions of debased California and the contradictions of geography and culture
align with those of prior writers. Though France is not often mentioned as an imperial
power with interests in California, they were a powerful force in the Pacific and just as
hungry for acquisition as England or the US, though they perhaps lacked the former’s
resources and the latter’s proximity to the prize.
4
Furthermore, the French were just as
conscious of the so-called racial aspects of the conquest.
In an echo of earlier (and later) Euro-American writers, the French captain
predicted what he thought would happen in California, if “progress” were to continue: a
racial cleansing of California by Europeans. La Place speculated that California, though
populated by those “ignorant, lazy, [and] unlearned in the principles of true liberty, …has
335
made some progress in civilization,” even if “she owes this to foreigners, who exercise a
great influence on her, drawing her along willy nilly to better ways.”
5
In La Place’s
vision, feminized and racialized California, despite a “beautiful countryside which unrolls
almost without interruption,” still lacks something.
6
What it lacks, La Place makes clear,
is the racial superiority of European blood. He paints a deliberate picture of racial
amelioration in California precipitated by foreign invasion. “California will be invaded
by a new race and its present population, mixed with the other, will promptly disappear.”
7
The victor, in this scenario, is the US, whom La Place argues is not a threat to the French
because they are merely “a representative of the white race.” La Place adds, “Let them
populate California, even add another star to their flag; as long as we do not attack the
general interests of their population, I repeat, we shall have nothing to fear from them.”
8
The shifting alliances in and around California complicated the political picture in
the first half of the nineteenth century. Despite these shifting alliances, the foreign
imagination of California remained largely consistent. As La Place demonstrates, even
though the French warily regarded the US and despised England, they would in an instant
collapse these divisions to unify under the banner of “the white race” when faced with the
culture of California. Race, ethnicity, geography, and nationalism influenced these texts
in varying degrees and different ways, but the outcomes were remarkably similar.
California remained feminine, available, and degraded, but laden with potential and
productive power for those international powers who would stoop to conquer her. This
context, widespread in imperial powers, suggests that when Richard Henry Dana’s Two
Years before the Mast was written, it drew from an array of international cultural tropes
336
and found a highly receptive audience in part because those readers already had been
taught how to understand California, if not by the French then by one of the many
available literatures.
9
In fact, by the time readers encountered Dana’s narrative, arguably
the most famous pre-war narrative of California, the story of the voyage should have
sounded quite familiar. Versions of it had been circulating for decades.
***
The French captain Joseph de Rosamel sailed into Monterey in June of 1840,
looking to avenge the unjust treatment of some resident Frenchmen by the Mexicans. He
had heard of the Graham affair while in Mazatlán, Mexico, and when he arrived in
California in his man-of-war, he threatened to flatten the town, something which Mexican
officials, understandably, tried to talk him out of. Rosamel had apparently heard an
exaggerated rumor, and he was convinced not to fire on Monterrey, but they weren’t able
to stop him from writing a report of his own, which described California in a way that
was likely to attract more warships and cannons.
10
Rosamel’s report offers a short preview of an argument that would be expanded
by later writers, one that actually looked to the past as a strategy to undermine the
present. For Rosamel, the secularization of the missions was a disaster inflicted on
California and its natives by in incompetent government.
To be sure, all of the mission Indians were rather like slaves; however,
they were fed, clothed, and given perfect treatment. They were a
thousand times happier than at the present when their idleness,
incompetence, and love of wandering have returned them to that savage
state from which they had been dragged with so much difficulty. […]
Today when you locate and question these unhappy people [White men
and half-breeds], they curse the absurdity and improvidence of a
government which, guided by a stupid policy, has ruined an entire
337
country; a government which, in seizing the missions, has replaced the
energetic and industrious Fathers with thieving and inept administrators.
11
The key distinctions of the argument are temporal. An idealized past is set against a
degenerate present in a passage that makes use of the usual terms of description: idleness
and incompetence; energetic and industrious. Despite the air of righteous anger in the
passage, one ought to suspect the source of the indignation in Rosamel’s rant, especially
given the history of French interest in California and the larger history of imperial
writing. Though Rosamel wants to suggest that he has the best interests of the Indians in
mind, his disgust for them shows through the veneer of patronizing concern. In fact, he
has no higher opinion of the natives before their missionization. Nor do the Mexicans
escape his anger, though most of this anger merely serves as a smokescreen for
sentiments which emerge at the end of the report.
Ultimately, Rosamel returns to the classic assessment of California, the one that
Dana made famous, but which, as the following passage demonstrates, he did not invent.
By 1840, this technique was as common and well-understood as the shipping routes along
the coast of California. Rosamel writes,
Upper California is a very fertile land and is ideally suited for raising
animals, grains, and vines. If this country had originally been colonized
by a hardworking and industrious people, today it would occupy a high
rung on the commercial ladder; one might also say it would be the
granary, the warehouse of all the lands of the Pacific. […] But
depopulated, prey to civil discord, inhabited by a people for whom life’s
supreme happiness consists of horseback-riding and sleeping, what can
you expect from her? Nothing, except conquest by the first people who
take the trouble to seize her!
12
Rosamel’s passage presents a perfect, if perfectly awful, example of the kind of writing
emerging from self-interested foreign governments in California. Using a structure
338
similar to Dana’s passage and many others that came before it, Rosamel praises the
geography and its future potential on a local and even global scale. He then uses this
very flattering portrait as a foil for his denigration of the Mexicans, who cannot hope to
live up to the majesty of the place they occupy. Included in this unflattering portrait of
the Mexicans are standard details about cultural laziness and appetites for pleasure.
Finally the passage concludes with the requisite call to conquest, framed, as was often the
case, by the notion of its inevitability. “[W]hat can you expect from her?” Rosamel asks.
He might have asked the same question of France or the other imperial powers closing
ranks around California. The question might have elicited the same answer: nothing but
conquest.
The Road to Ruin
Though La Place and Rosamel produced short reports on California that were not
circulated widely, a lavish publication followed soon after. Before La Place ever arrived
in California, yet another French writer on his way around the world had stopped to
observe the geography and culture of this Mexican province. Abel Du Petit-Thouars
arrived in Monterey in October of 1837, where he remained almost a month before
continuing on his journey back to France, returning in 1839. He began to publish his
narrative of the voyage the next year. Like La Place, the narrative of Du Petit-Thouars
was a massive governmental publication, totaling eleven volumes of text and four folio
atlases when finally completed over a period of fifteen years. The volume that covers his
339
time in California appeared in 1841, just as sustained tensions between France and
Mexico were increasing.
13
The writing of Du Petit-Thouars has been praised by historians as insightful and
accurate, yet it essentially repeats the major themes of early California narratives. In fact,
the narrative of Du Petit-Thouars is most notable for the ways it conforms to well
established tropes. The major idea of the narrative is the occupation and control of
California, and he approaches this topic from a variety of directions. Once again, the
writer assumes not if but when California will become a prize for another nation, and he
spends most of his time speculating about which nation will have the good fortune to
wrest control of the region from the Mexicans. Using a variety of strategies, the narrative
seeks to drive a wedge between the people and the landscape, usually by denigrating the
former and celebrating the latter.
One of the most obvious methods that Du Petit-Thouars uses in denigration is the
idea of laziness. Very early in the narrative, he recounts how he had ordered supplies
prepared for his ship. When they weren’t ready at his arrival, he commented,
I had thought better of their punctuality. Some orders had been given, it is
true, but the habitual laziness of the inhabitants won out over their
interests and had not let them begin the project they had formed of making
us biscuit and salt meat.
14
Du Petit-Thouars does not admit, or does not realize, that lack of supplies and payments
from Mexico’s central government might have something to do with the situation.
Instead, he remains convinced of cultural explanations for the troubles. California is
infused with “people given over to laziness and habituated to living at the expense of
society,” he claimed.
15
It was “too weak by itself to be independent and too backward in
340
civilization to administer itself.”
16
According to Du Petit-Thouars, the connections
between these shortcomings and culture were obvious. “Californians have made little
advance in civilization. Education is almost wholly lacking. They are dominated by a
mass of prejudices… No doubt one need seek for the cause no further than in their
customs and religion.”
17
Yet, these were only his assessments of the “reasoning people” (gente de razon);
it was worse for the natives. They “abandon[ed] themselves to unreserved laziness,
[gave] themselves over to drunkenness and shameful debauch … [and] dissipated all they
owned by gambling.”
18
Not only were they “dull and unintelligent,” but they were ugly
as well. Du Petit-Thouars’s description of the natives is one of the most vicious in early
California literature.
…[T]hey have a stupid air which in general corresponds to their
intelligence, not much higher than that of animals. They are usually short
in stature, have spindling legs and rarely are fat. The women are not
pretty. I have not seen a single one who had a passable face; nevertheless
they do have one feature of considerable beauty, their teeth are admirably
white but, alas! in everything else these women are horribly dirty and
repulsive.
19
Of course, his focus on women and aesthetic beauty aligns with centuries of writing
about California. Indeed, this theme is hardly unique to this region. The sexual attraction
or repulsion of traveling males in foreign societies fills more than a few pages of text in
travel literature from around the globe. Still, it’s worth noting that he only thinks to
judge women on their appearance, even when confronted with an object of true
innovation, the woven baskets. Du Petit-Thouars, however, quickly brushes this
evidence aside: “They make nothing but baskets so closely woven that they hold water.”
20
341
Returning to one of the key words of the period, he even claims that the “natives have no
industries.”
21
Besides the fact woven baskets able to hold water was a marvel in itself,
one which other commentators had noted, Du Petit-Thouars hammers on initiative and
intelligence because this strategy undermines the natives’ claim to California; it makes
them unworthy of the place.
He also wants to connect the natives to the Spaniards, to tar them with the same
brush. His most effective strategy for putting them together is to blame the Spaniards for
the state of the Indians. In an extended passage on this topic, he remarks,
One cannot help thinking that perhaps the state of idiocy in which they are
found may be due to the cloistered life and to the slavery to which they
have been bound since infancy. What seems to confirm this opinion is
that the entirely independent Indians who live far from the missions … are
not lacking, so I am assured, in a certain cleverness usual among men
raised in a state of nature.
22
While it is certainly true that the missions crippled native culture, Du Petit-Thouars’s
claim that the missions turned them into idiots confuses the issue. The natives he saw in
the missions were a people suffering profound psychological and physical shock.
Disease was rampant; various tribes, often traditional enemies, were mixed together;
languages and cultures were scrambled; diets and daily activities were radically altered.
Under these conditions, mere survival was an accomplishment. What Du Petit-Thouars
offers instead of understanding was essentially a variant of the Black Legend. This
argument, in addition to making the Spanish or Mexican culture responsible for ruining
the natives, had the benefit of showing the “natural” side of California in the best light.
According to this line of thinking, the Spanish-Mexican attempt at settlement was a
complete failure; indeed, it hardly qualified as a “European” settlement. An element of
342
Rousseau’s fondness for the so-called natural man likely infects Du Petit-Thouars’s
assessment of the natives, especially in his final sentence, but ultimately the attraction to
the geography receives the most emphasis.
For instance, during a walk to the mission with one of the priests, Du Petit-
Thouars offers an example of this two-pronged argument.
On leaving Monterey we … [traveled] by a road whose surface hardly
indicated that it was beaten by pilgrims led by devotion or curiosity to San
Carlos. Already it could be seen by the grass that grew there and was
effacing the track that the faith was no longer lively and that the road led
only to a ruin and to the desert!”
23
Readers could not have requested a more lucid metaphor for Du Petit-Thouars’s
assessment of the Spanish missions, an assessment shared by the majority of foreign
visitors. The road to Catholicism leads to ruins and the desert, two of the most potent
symbols for cultural decline in California. In fact, both of these symbols would be
virtually enshrined in the late nineteenth century by the arriving boosters and real estate
hawkers, though these groups transformed them into stage props for historical fantasy
and self-realization gimmicks.
Of course, the march to Hades wasn’t so bad if one appreciated scenery, which
Du Petit-Thouars hastened to point out in one of his most extensive descriptions.
The weather was beautiful, the air was refreshed by a nice breeze from the
north… In fact this walk was delightful. On our right and left immense
pines whose tops were lost in the sky and great evergreen oaks, scattered
irregularly and without undergrowth, gave this road the appearance of a
park. These ancient evergreen oaks, covered with long festoons of white
lichens which, hanging from the highest branches down to the ground,
bore witness to the almost constant humidity of the atmosphere, and gave
to this forest by these mourning draperies a solemnity increased by the
murmur of the wind in the high tops of the venerable pines.
24
343
If it weren’t for the juxtaposition of the two passages, the second one might be
unremarkable. It treads fairly common ground, even rehearsing the idea of California as
a kind of park. Yet, coming immediately after the road to ruin, the second passage might
elicit derisive laughter. Indeed, there is a kind of fatalistic revelry in the second
description because of its proximity to the first. The residents of California happily
march down the road to their destruction, with the pied piper masquerading as a priest—
but what a way to go! The resonance of this description with countless pieces of current
journalism on California is remarkable. Elite intellectuals watching the smoking
wreckage of civilization from their poolside patios provide the contrast needed to
highlight the aesthetic beauty around them.
For Du Petit-Thouars’s readers, this message suggested not only the superiority of
their own cultures, but an opportunity to return to California and restart the process of
colonization, with their own government doing the colonizing, of course. California,
always the place of new beginnings, offers just that kind of opportunity in an early
description.
On doubling Point Pinos and from all along the shore there is not to be
seen the slightest sign of the nearness of a European establishment. On
the contrary everything seems to be completely virgin and such as one
imagines it must have appeared to the first discoverers on their arrival.
25
Du Petit-Thouars eventually admits that a fort stands on the coast, but his description of
its “dilapidated condition” ensures that it remains sufficiently harmless to future
endeavors of discovery. In any case, the work of imagining had already been done for
those arm-chair explorers longing to recoup the losses of France’s prior colonial
territories. The coast remains, if one can imagine it, as it first appeared, available to
344
conquest, “completely virgin” more than three hundred years after it was claimed by
Spain, and centuries after it was populated by native Americans.
The separation of the land from the culture required beautiful landscape as much
as it required incompetent and ugly people. Du Petit-Thouars makes clear the contrast in
a detailed description of his first sight of Monterey.
Among the houses which may amount to thirty or forty several are
whitewashed, some have a second story and a certain appearance of
comfort, but the greater part are miserable boxes roofed with reeds or the
branches of trees. Almost none have courtyards or gardens and on the
slopes of the hills by which this establishment is surrounded there is not
the slightest trace of cultivation to be seen. It looks as if the colony had
just been founded, everything around it appears just as it did in the days of
the first disembarkation. This uncared for and abandoned condition is the
more astonishing since the mountains that stand near Monterey are fertile
and wooded right up to their summits, which gives a decidedly picturesque
aspect to the countryside.
26
The eagerness of Du Petit-Thouars to demonstrate the fragility of the Spanish imprint on
California is only matched by his desire to demonstrate the beauty of the landscape. It
was a classic recipe, intended to produce a standard conclusion: wasted potential.
In a discussion of the politics and government of California, he quickly makes
that point even more evident, for those readers unfamiliar with the strategies and
conclusions of this genre of literature.
The central government seemed to attach only secondary importance to
this fine possession, to occupy the country only in the spirit of jealousy
and as a means to prevent its being possessed by another people. That
government thus appears to have misunderstood the immense value of this
colony from the agricultural point of view and to be ignorant of the profit
which could be drawn from a fertile territory in so fine a climate.
27
Once again, California is “misunderstood,” and the oversight relates to the key terms of
the passage, “value” and “profit.” The attempts of Dupetit-Thouars to slander the
345
motives for Spanish colonization (as if armed occupation might be possible in a spirit of
goodwill and kindness) only make the passage more ridiculous and transparent. Perhaps
he imagined that the years of surveillance by Russia, England, France, and the U.S.
suggested evidence of a desire to share California with other imperial powers. Or
perhaps he had convinced himself that French motives were somehow different. In any
case, his comment reveals the inane contradictions and assumptions of the literature.
Despite his apparent mission of colonial brotherhood, Du Petit-Thouars advertises
the military aggression at the root of his observations. Like past writers, he suggests that
California only lacks a government to properly manage the benefits of the geography.
“This magnificent and fertile country endowed with an excellent climate still cannot fail
to prosper and flourish as soon as the population, increasing in numbers, is placed under a
good administration, especially a strong and just government.”
28
Yet his apparently
neutral, disinterested comments reveal a different kind of thinking when he speculates
about the future of California. “Today it would be difficult to say to which nation this
excellent port will some day belong, but the power which has the fortunate boldness to
seize it by a de facto occupation will not be disturbed in its possession.”
29
The passage
echoes writers like Beechey and Shaler, visitors who tried to conceal their imperial
ambitions beneath supposedly disinterested observations. Yet, as the long literary record
demonstrates, foreign observations were anything but neutral or disinterested. Instead,
they were deeply invested in the present and future of California, and they used their texts
to try to shape the way it was understood.
346
“Violence and Stratagem were Requisite”
Richard J. Cleveland, William Shaler’s trading partner in the early nineteenth
century, finally published his own version of events, thirty-four years after Shaler. It
contained many of the requisite elements of US narratives about California: degraded
Indians, pompous Mexicans, and noble Americans sowing the seeds of liberty along the
Spanish Main while they smuggled their goods in and out of port. For Cleveland, the
Indians were “miserable,” “spiritless,” and “allied to the brute.”
30
The Mexican captain
“was an exceedingly vain and pompous man” who commanded “the most jealous and
suspicious [people] on earth.”
31
And the smuggling Americans, of course, showed their
“humanity and generosity” in their “acts of magnanimity.”
32
It was, perhaps, what one
might expect from a US sea captain looking back on events more than thirty years ago
and eager to show himself in the best light.
33
He does, however, provide perspective on
the consolidating forces of US expansion, especially the ways writers looked to the past
as a way to shape the future.
Like many of the narratives that came before his, Cleveland’s text argued for a
slow and backward culture in California that needed to be supplanted by a new
government. Unlike many of those prior texts, however, Cleveland actually engaged in
attempts to bring converts to the light of his own version of democracy. Cleveland
recounts, often with more detail, how he and Shaler plied the coast of North and South
America trying to distribute the good news of US-style liberty to the huddled masses
enslaved by the Spanish crown. Throughout his narrative, he reminds readers of the
347
“intolerant and bigoted” priests as well as the “treachery and hostility” of the Spaniards,
all of which served to justify his own behavior. As it turns out, the Spanish had reason to
be suspicious of Cleveland, a man who consistently and flagrantly broke their laws.
Cleveland, however, cast himself in the role of liberator, a person persecuted by a
hostile and deceitful government. In a long passage after leaving the coast of California
for the Sandwich Islands, he writes,
The relief and freedom from care, experienced by being once more beyond
the reach of a power whose most dreaded arms are deceit, dissimulation,
and treachery, are more easily imagined than described. Fifteen months
had elapsed since our arrival at Valparaiso, and it will be seen, that in each
of the three ports which we had entered, a state of hostility had existed
between the government and ourselves, which was probably always the
more rancorous, for the decided part the people took in our favor. A
circumstance which we knew to be owing less to their affection for us,
than to their deadly hatred to the officers of government.
34
While Cleveland pretends to show his modest side in admitting that the affection of the
locals came more from their hatred of the Spanish government, he has hardly conceded
anything important in the admission. As with prior writers, the main goal of the text was
to undermine Spanish authority in order to justify foreign conquest, something that this
passage still allows him to do, even as he appears to demonstrate his own humility.
Of course, all of this modesty sounds ironic in light of the smuggling and violent
skirmishes in which Cleveland participated. Yet even this behavior Cleveland sought to
justify, and it is in this regard that Cleveland’s rhetorical strategy most clearly emerges.
In a reflective passage after parting with his longtime partner, Shaler, Cleveland remarks,
Something ought to be said, if not to justify, at least to extenuate, the
undertaking and prosecuting an enterprise, for the success of which,
violence and stratagem were requisite. It is notorious, that no civilized
people on the face of the earth were ever subjected to so degrading a state
348
of vassalage as the Creoles, or native inhabitants of Spanish America. It is
equally notorious, that they were sensible of it and were grateful to those
strangers, who supplied them with clothing at half the ordinary prices
demanded by their own merchants, who sympathized with them and made
known to them the course, which their countrymen had taken, in precisely
similar circumstances, to achieve their independence.
35
As soon as Cleveland establishes the fraternal and patriotic bond between himself and
those of the Spanish colonies, using their “degrading … vassalage” and apparent
gratitude for US intervention as rhetorical leverage, he is able to argue that his methods
are not only acceptable but noble. While the Spanish colonists may indeed have been
unhappy with Spanish rule and thankful for the cheaper and more various goods on
foreign vessels, the conclusions that Cleveland draws from those details benefit his own
balance sheet in a way that casts suspicion on his reasoning. Furthermore, the fact that he
includes the “native inhabitants of Spanish America” in his assessment of injustice is
highly ironic, given the horrendous treatment of natives by the US government, not to
mention his hypocritical discourse on “vassalage” while slavery was still legal in the US.
When Cleveland continues, it is with the intention of further augmenting his
moral position in regard to the use of violence.
As it respected our intercourse with this people, viewed separately from
the government, it was precisely in conformity with the golden rule of
“doing unto others as in like circumstances we would have others do unto
us.” Hence we lost no opportunity of confirming the advocates of free
government, and convincing the wavering of the self-evident proposition,
that governments were instituted for the happiness of the people, and not,
exclusively, for that of the rulers; that all power of right belongs to and
emanates from the people, whose servants the rulers are. Consequently,
when by force, stratagem, or any other manner, this relation between
people and rulers had become reversed, it was a palpable usurpation on the
part of the latter, which it was proper and becoming to resist under any
circumstances, but more especially when the usurped power was used to
oppress and enslave.
36
349
Again, the passage exhibits many of the hallmarks of California writing. Cleveland
carefully separates the government from the people in order to set up the argument, even
though he often conflates these two groups in broad-brushed denigrations at other times
in the text. He buttresses his position with biblical references, and appears to take the
position of the downtrodden so that intervention sounds more like rescue rather than
aggression. Finally he invokes the language of slavery and oppression, even though one
wonders if he would have bravely advocated the same resistance “under any
circumstances” in his own country, where Africans had been enslaved for generations.
The fact that he moves from violence to the most prim language (“proper and becoming”)
without hesitation or compunction suggests the power and fluidity of this line of thinking
in regard to California. Though Cleveland’s narrative recounts a period from the early
part of the nineteenth century, his position was crucial to the moral rationale for the use
of violence in California, a position that played an important role in the justification of
the Mexican-American war. This kind of rhetoric, as we will see in later texts, only
becomes more flagrant in ongoing agitation for violence in California by foreigners.
An “Immense Field for Capital”: Two English Narratives
Captain Edward Belcher (1799-1877), an English sailor, took command of a
surveying expedition that had formerly been under the orders of a writer earlier
mentioned, Captain F.W. Beechey, when Beechey became sick in Valparaiso. If he is
remembered at all today, Belcher is most often remembered as one of the many leaders of
350
attempts to rescue John Franklin in the Arctic, an expedition which was a singular failure
resulting in the loss of numerous ships and in his court-martial. Yet before that
unfortunate voyage, Belcher, like many other navigators during this era, sailed
throughout the Pacific, looking to fill the blanks in the maps of Vancouver and Cook. He
reached California twice, in 1837 and 1839, and when he finally returned to England he
published Narrative of a Voyage Round the World… in 1843.
37
The book is remarkable for its melancholy tone in regard to California and
unusual for its retrospection (an element that would become increasingly common as the
region became more widely known and populated). Belcher had actually visited many of
the ports that he describes during a voyage that he took with Beechey ten years
previously, and he spends a considerable amount of time ruminating on the differences
between the California of those earlier days and that of his present voyage, with the latter
having degenerated over the years. Belcher, who was despised by his crew and infamous
for his bilious disposition, likely colors these descriptions with his personal misery, yet
the passages align perfectly with the pattern of declension in other assessments of the
culture. For example, Belcher writes of the missions,
Since the missions have been taken from the padres, and placed under the
administradores, they have fallen entirely into decay and ruin; and it is not
improbable that the whole country will ere long either fall back into the
hands of the Indians, or find other rulers. […] The garden, also famed in
former days for its excellence, has now fallen entirely into decay.
38
Even the garden, long a symbol for plenitude and fertility in California narratives, falls to
the forces of degeneration. As with predictions about the future wealth of California,
predictions of its eventual passage to new political control ride the rails of inevitability.
351
There are moments when Belcher’s reflections suggest a nostalgic connection with a
vision of California’s past and a genuine lament for the present. Yet, more often,
imperial desires overwhelm sentiments of solidarity with California’s residents.
Belcher’s own position, the importance of California as a monetary investment,
and his acute awareness of British interests, emerges clearly in the following passage.
Taking into consideration the whole part of San Francisco, the
Sacramento, and minor streams, there is immense field for capital, if the
government could protect its citizens or those inclined to reside. At this
moment (December, 1837) they are reduced to almost their extreme gasp;
harassed by their own servants (who are natives) deserting and carrying
off their property; threatened by the Delawares, who have piratically
ranged the country, taking away horses and cattle; disturbed by their late
declaration and recantation of independence; they sadly want the
interposition of some powerful friend to rescue them. To Great Britain
their hopes are directed; why, I cannot learn, but I am much inclined to
think that it is rather from a pusillanimous fear, and want of energy to
stand by each other and expel their common enemies, than from any
friendly feeling to Great Britain.
39
The fact that Belcher concludes that this “powerful friend” is Great Britain, the foreign
power that may rescue and recoup its expenses in an “immense field for capital,” is
hardly surprising. If Belcher had not indicated his allegiance to capital investment, one
would still have been suspicious of his motives for “rescue.” He loses no opportunity to
denigrate those whom he supposedly assists: even Mexico’s attempts at friendship he
derides as based on “pusillanimous fear” and “want of energy.” With such friends, why
would Mexico need enemies? Thus, his general attitude toward the Mexican government
and culture reveal that his rescue operation would not be worthwhile without the windfall
sure to follow.
352
Despite his generally poor reputation among his crew, Belcher wasn’t the only
one on his ship with these kinds of opinions. One of the young sailors on the boat,
eighteen year-old Francis Guillemard Simpkinson, kept a journal of the voyage that
sounds remarkably like that of his superior. For instance, he makes clear the bounty of
the landscape, which is especially evident on his arrival to San Francisco.
The first idea that strikes one on arriving in this port is the sight that such
an immense tract of rich and beautiful land, abounding in every thing that
is necessary for the comfort of man should be left uncultivated and be
almost uninhabited.
40
Here he makes use of the usual contrast between potential and waste. Not only was he
ignorant of the imprint of natives on the landscape, but he continues the pattern of
adapting the landscape to familiar urban analogues, as if he and other visitors were
unable to see the geography outside of those cultivated spaces they already knew.
In Monterey, for instance, his comments actually surpass the others in adulation,
again focusing on the fecundity of the land and its park-like appearance.
After looking about the town I walked out some way into the country
which in point of beauty and fertility far exceeds anything I saw about San
Francisco. I can give no better description of it than by saying that it
resembles as near as possible a gentleman’s park in England, only on a
bolder and more extensive scale. The large knots of pine and oak were
beautifully grouped and the land distributed into equal portions of hill and
dale covered with rich pasture on which numerous herds of cattle were
grazing, the whole presenting a picture of the prodigality of nature never
to be equalled [sic] by the hand of man.
41
The comparison to the “gentleman’s park,” a comparison used at least four times in the
text, recalls statements made by Beechey, Simpkinson’s fellow Englishman, but also
neatly incorporates the notion of money into the geography. Though part of his emphasis
lies in symmetry and order, Simpkinson also picked a comparison most likely to suggest
353
wealth, both current and future, a theme likely on the minds of his shipmates and one that
he highlights in his mention of the “prodigality of nature.” When applied to potential
profits, prodigality was exactly what foreign writers wanted. It is highly ironic that,
when compared to the state of the settlement, this same prodigality was used to denigrate
the people living in California.
Of course, foreigners were quick to underscore the contrast between what we
might call the two kinds of prodigality. One, the human version, was wasteful and
deplorable; the other, nature’s version, was profitable and desirable. This contrast is
evident in a classic passage by Simpkinson describing the people of San Francisco.
Lazy and indolent in the extreme, they possess all the bad qualities of their
predecessors, the Spaniards, with out any of the frankness and generosity
which characterizes the Spanish character. In possession of a beautiful
and fertile country where anything might be produced, and blessed with a
climate like that of Italy the Californians might if they pleased soon raise
themselves to wealth and importance, but that unfortunate spirit of
indolence which alike pervades all classes completely destroys these
blessings and returns the people to the utmost poverty, they being in
general totally destitute of many of the common necessaries of life.
42
Just as in Dana’s famous passage, Simpkinson compares the laziness of the current
inhabitants with the productive potential of the landscape, which is to say, the future
potential. The image of the future, so often used as a lure to investment and settlement,
could also be used as a rhetorical weapon. In this case, the “blessings” that ought to
bring the Mexican “wealth and importance” are squandered, and it is the image of an
unfulfilled potential that is used to argue that Mexicans have invalidated their rights to
the land. Once Simpkinson has convinced readers that Mexicans have forfeited their
rights to the land, he uses that supposition as a wedge to separate Mexicans from it.
354
One might make the argument that Simpkinson, Belcher, and other foreigners
simply wanted California to be ruled by a just and energetic government, that their
interests in the territory were not self-serving but altruistic. Simpkinson himself attempts
to show that both he and his country are uninterested in having California. For example,
Simpkinson mentions rumors “about Mexico ceding California to [England] as part
payment of the debt” incurred during the war of independence. Simpkinson dismisses this
idea, however, and claims, “I should not think it at all likely we should accept of it,
having at present more colonies than we can well manage.”
43
Even this gesture, however,
rehearses the standard refusal of the territory. Furthermore, it stretches credulity to claim
that the English would have refused the opportunity to control the same piece of land that
they had been carefully monitoring for decades. And the English certainly wouldn’t have
allowed one of their competitors to acquire California. In the world of international
diplomacy, the next best thing to capturing a place for oneself is making sure that one’s
competitors don’t get it either. Thus, while alliances were constantly shifting, the English
would certainly have wanted to keep France, the US, and Spain out of the region, which
means that rule by Mexico would have been preferable to rule by most foreign powers.
Despite this situation, Simpkinson clearly believes that Mexicans are unfit to rule
themselves and that all their attempts at reorganizing governance amount to little more
than silly games. As he says immediately following his musings on ceding California to
Mexico, “The Californians themselves are talking about establishing their independence
and freeing themselves from the yoke of Mexico. How absurd! A country with about
500,000 inhabitants talking about creating itself an independent nation!”
44
At other
355
times, he mocks the results of the revolution and argues that the Mexicans themselves
were despondent because of “their inability to govern themselves.”
45
Belcher wrote with
similar sentiments. Thus, it sounds unlikely that Simpkinson or Belcher would condone
either foreign takeover by a power other than the English or continued rule by the
Mexicans or Californios. Given their fascination with the abundance of California and
the mismanagement of its resources, claims of indifference to English rule sound
disingenuous at best.
Captain Marryat and Travels “Written at Home”
In addition to the traveling merchants, scientists, and statesmen, other writers
were taking more interest in California. In fact, there was increasing evidence of the
interchange of ideas between the so-called literary writers and the historians. Simpkinson
himself mentions one of the writers having a wide influence on perceptions of North
America at the time. In a passage about “American hunters who come across the Rocky
Mountains into California,” Simpkinson says that one of these men, Isaac Graham,
“answers the description exactly of Hawk-eye or Leather-stocking in Cooper’s novels.”
46
In addition, Belcher, late in his career, wrote a three volume work of fiction, Horatio
Howard Brenton: a Naval Novel (1856), which he based on his travels. In other words,
many of the writers of ostensibly scientific reports weren’t deriving all of their
impressions from direct observation; and writers of fiction weren’t simply inventing what
356
they wrote. The texts of both groups were augmented, at least in part, by the writings of
the “opposing” genre.
Cooper never wrote about California, but he wasn’t the only person with a wide
audience, sailing experience, and an interest in the romantic potential of North America
and the Pacific. One of Belcher’s own countrymen, a writer well known for tales of
swashbuckling seamen, published a book during the same year as Belcher that
demonstrated the expanding interest in writing about California, even (or especially)
when one had never been there.
Captain Frederick Marryat’s Narrative of the Travels and Adventures of Monsieur
Violet in California, Sonora, and Western Texas (1843) capitalized on the growing fame
of the far western side of North America, especially California.
47
By the time Marryat, a
captain in the British navy, published his text, news of California and speculation on the
events of the Mexican territories was becoming fodder for newspapers and political
gossip. In fact, the subject was so popular that Marryat appears to have foregone the
necessity of inventing it for himself and instead cobbled together a variety of prior
reports. When his book appeared, he was attacked as a plagiarist, not only in the US but
in England as well.
48
Even before this incident spilled into international literary waters, Marryat had not
been a popular author in the US. His Diary in America, published in 1839, was savaged
by US critics, at least in part for its unflattering portrayal of the country. Therefore, when
he published Monsieur Violet, he was already under close supervision. As soon as the
first reports emerged of entire passages pilfered from an array of well-known writers,
357
including Dana, Bancroft, Farnham, even Lewis and Clark, his story was drawn and
quartered in the pages of literary reviews, often as savagely in England as in the US.
These copied passages, often lifted without any alteration, concerned not only California,
but also Texas and other parts of the North American borderlands.
49
Yet, if these reviewers had been reading carefully the prior three hundred years of
writing about California or northwestern America, they might have been less surprised, if
equally enraged. Marryat’s tactics were by no means atypical, though they may have
been more extreme. In the early Spanish texts describing California and the Pacific side
of the Americas, plagiarism was not only common but one of the main engines driving
the fervor of fantasy. Writers routinely pilfered ideas, images, concepts, and geography
in order to supplement their spotty understanding of a place they had never seen for
themselves. In fact, the mythology of California as an island endured in part because of
writers who preferred to copy their maps and concepts from earlier writers rather than try
to acquire new information.
Early Modern notions of plagiarism, of course, were different than those of the
mid-nineteenth century.
50
It also seems fair to say that, within his context, Marryat’s
examples of word-for-word cribbing look more egregious than those earlier writers who
lived in a world with greater impediments to distant travel. Nevertheless, Marryat’s
plagiarism certainly followed a long-standing California tradition. This is especially true
when we consider that Marryat never went to California and entirely invented the
sections of the narrative that he didn’t copy from others. This was not only a tradition in
358
writing about California, but also in travel literature as a whole, a tradition with which
Marryat was quite familiar.
His entire narrative (and indeed much of the literature of California) ought to be
read alongside Marryat’s merciless lampoon of travel literature, the essay “How to Write
a Book of Travels,” in which one character, Barnstaple, gives advice to a hapless writer,
Ansard, about writing. In the dialogue, Ansard complains that he has been assigned by
his publisher to write about the Rhine, a place he has never visited; in fact, he has “never
been out of England” in his life. When Barnstaple advises him to write the volume
anyway, Ansard laments,
Yes, it is very well to say write it; but how the devil am I to write it?
Write what I have never seen—detail events which never
occurred—describe views of that which I have not even an idea—travel
post in my old armchair.
51
To this seemingly reasonable complaint, Barnstaple retorts that Ansard is a “greenhorn,”
and he proceeds to catalogue what might be called a recipe for travel writing in California
as well as the Americas generally.
You are told to write what you have never seen; but if you have not, others
have, which will serve your purposes just as well. To detail events which
have never occurred—invent them, they will be more amusing. Describe
views, &c. of which you are ignorant—so are most of your readers; but
have we not the art of engraving to assist you? To travel post in your
armchair—a very pleasant and a very profitable way of travelling, as you
have not to pay for the horses and postilions, and are not knocked to
pieces by continental roads. Depend upon it, the best travels are those
written at home…
52
Marryat, in the guise of Barnstaple, continues to outline all that his uninitiated writer
must do to finish the book, including “wading through all the various ‘Journies on the
Rhine’” and using the best version as his “guide.”
53
Proceeding point by point through
359
his examples, Marryat skewers nearly every convention of travel writing. Barnstaple’s
cavalier attitude only adds to the humor; in fact, the parody gets funnier as his advice
more flagrantly contradicts the accepted rules of etiquette.
His laughable advice, however, sounds eerily familiar when read in light of
writing about California and the Americas. What could Washington Irving, to take just
one example, have said to Barnstaple regarding his portrayal of California, a place Irving
never visited? Irving appears to have taken Barnstaple’s advice, particularly the notion
that this kind of travel could be “profitable.” Just as Barnstaple recommends, many
writers turning to California sailed the seas of their own libraries, from the comfort of
their armchairs, rather than risk an actual visit. Even the captain’s quarterdeck was too
much trouble for them, never mind overland travel. And for those who did visit their
geographic and cultural subjects, their writing was often so colored by accounts of
previous writers (many of whom had themselves copied from prior writers) that original
observations were subsumed by tropes of the genre.
Sometimes this strategy applied to general tone and theme, but it might also apply
to specific lines or images. Barnstaple and Ansard have an exchange about this very
subject, when the latter again finds himself desperate for material. “But, Barnstaple,”
complains Ansard,
I have very few effective passages as yet. I have remodeled several
descriptions of mountains, precipices, waterfalls, and such wonders of the
creation… I have lost my way twice—met three wolves—been four times
benighted… All is incident, and I am quite hard up for description. Now,
I have marked down a fine passage in -------’s work—a beautiful
description of a cathedral…”
54
360
Ansard reads the passage aloud and remarks how his own work could use a few lines of
such quality, but that he can’t “borrow” it. Barnstaple, stepping into his cynical role,
exclaims, “But you shall borrow it—you shall be even finer than he is, and yet he shall
not dare to accuse you of plagiarism.”
55
When Ansard, again playing the flummoxed but
apparently sensible writer, asks how that could be possible, Barnstaple replies,
You have as much right to visit a cathedral as he has, and as for the
rest—here is the secret. You must visit the cathedral at night. Instead of
“glorious beams,” you will talk of “pale melancholy light”…
56
The passage perfectly dissects the strategy of many travel writers, while simultaneously
illuminating the anxiety that writers and publishers felt as they attempted to curtail the
piracy that increasing eroded their profits. Indeed, the very existence of anxiety about
copyright and plagiarism is partly a function of the lucrative expansion of travel writing
into the Americas.
What is most amusing, and appropriate, about the entire situation is that Marryat
actually took the advice of Barnstaple, the cynical plagiarist. In a blatant rehearsal of all
the ideas he had earlier lampooned, Marryat (or his narrator) claimed that Monsieur
Violet, a book shamelessly assembled from the passages of other writers, was actually a
piece of first-person testimony. Using a technique quite common to the genre of
adventure that he himself partially invented, Marryat claimed that he had merely
transcribed the tale of a French noble who had gone to America to live with the Indians,
hoping to escape the “hollow and heartless … refinement” of civilization.
57
Marryat
writes that the “notes and memoranda” of this unnamed person formed the basis for the
story, and that he fully believes the “authenticity and correctness” of the events.
58
In an
361
effort to solidify credibility, and protect his own reputation, Marryat further distances
himself from the ostensible creator of the story. “If the reader discovers an air of
romance in this narrative, it must not be laid upon my shoulders. […] I can only say that
accounts … have been submitted to the severest investigation.” Finally, in a classic
gesture, Marryat claims that he is merely the amanuensis for the story, a transcriber of the
fantastic. “The opinions and occasional remarks which may be met with are not mine; I
have merely written the work…”
59
For years the issue of this narrator and whether he actually existed or not was
ignored by Marryat’s biographers and denied by his family. Even today the issue
remains unresolved.
60
However, whether or not an invention in whole or part, Marryat’s
narrator offers him some interesting strategic angles, not the least of which is the
possibility of narrating the story from the position of a European noble and native insider.
Depending on the situation, Marryat exploits both of these positions at various points in
the narrative, including during the depiction of events in California.
The larger valence of writing in western North America is important because of
the more specific narrative currents in California culture. Recall that Marryat’s character
wants to escape the “refinement” of European culture, which he describes as “hollow and
heartless.” He contrasts this life with the “charms and attraction” of a “wild life” among
the Indians. In part, the narrator explains, these men are drawn to this life by “love of
adventure.” However, something else impels them to remain, something that never
happens, he argues, to Indians living “with the pleasures and luxuries of a great city.” A
362
powerful force pulls on these “civilized” men who venture into the wild, and it grows in
strength the longer they remain. The narrator concludes,
This appears strange, but it is nevertheless true. Any intelligent traveller,
who has remained a few weeks in the wigwams of well-disposed Indians,
will acknowledge that the feeling was strong upon him even during so
short a residence. What must it then be on those who have resided with
the Indians for years?
61
The charms and attractions of the western life, as described here, formed part of the
foundation of nineteenth-century popular culture. This was the classic argument for the
appeal of the west: it offered an escape from the deadening strictures of so-called
civilized culture, an alternative to the rigors of polite society. As such, it was both
alluring and threatening, attractive and repulsive, exciting and frightening. It also
sounded similar to California.
Wallace Stegner has argued that California is like the rest of the US, only more
so.
62
Marryat’s narrator here offers an example of the way that this description functions
within the framework of North American culture. California had, for centuries, offered a
place of escape from the strictures of conventional life, a place with an incredible
magnetic force on those who visited it. Yet it also remained repulsive and frightening,
especially when the cultural effects of the place were considered. When the narrator
writes that the attraction to life in the west “was strong upon him even during so short a
residence” and wonders how strong it might be on those who remain for years, he
essentially sketches out the dilemma of residence in California, the fear that Dana
articulated when he mused on the “California fever” passing through generations.
363
The escalating attraction to so-called wilderness can be explained in part by an
accelerating dissatisfaction with the same civilized places with which they were
juxtaposed. When the rewards of modernity, increasing mechanization, and
standardization proved unable to live up to their promise, the allure of their supposed
opposite increased. The disaffection with so-called civilized society emerged at the same
time as romanticism gained strength. Thus the romantic allure of the wilderness was at
least partly a reaction to the growing disaffection with the urban life that had been
championed in the eighteenth century.
63
Hints of this shift to a romantic sensibility in
narratives of California appeared as far back as Duhuat-Cilly, but they became more
pronounced as the century advanced.
Despite his residence among the Shoshone, when Marryat’s narrator arrives in
California, he says many of the same things that other foreigners before him said. For
instance, he immediately attacks the “ignorance and venality” of the government and its
revolutions led by “men of broken fortunes and desperate characters.”
64
Furthermore, the
locals, he claims, only rarely resist these infringements because of their “lazy
disposition,” “docility and moral apathy.” Of course, as soon as one of these revolutions
is deposed, the locals “returned to their usual pleasures and apathy, just as if nothing
extraordinary had happened.”
65
Thus, Marryat’s narrator, supposedly a nineteen year old
raised among the Shoshone, talks quite a bit like the French nobles from whom he
apparently descended.
Given that opening commentary, we should not be surprised when this young
narrator says that seeing Monterey “raised in [his] mind the project of rendering the
364
whole of California independent” and that “it was [his] ambition to become the liberator
of the country.”
66
Of course, he makes this declaration just after his critique of those who
themselves attempted revolutions. In this regard, despite having “seen nothing of
civilized life,” this narrator curiously echoes the contradictory motivations of the long
line of Europeans and Euro-Americans who wrote about California before him. Unlike
his predecessors, however, he actually leads a revolution, at least according the careful
assessment of his transcriber, Fredrick Marryat.
California, our young narrator reminds us, presented an ideal location for
revolution. It had “great resources” and “impassable barriers to any large body of men
who would invade it from the central parts of Mexico.” After the French nobleman
decided that the prospects for revolution were favorable enough to undertake, he
proposed to assist in the battle by providing troops culled from the ranks of his native
friends. However, he also added that if he assisted in the revolution, he “expected to
have a share in the new government.”
67
This request, though made to sound as a just
recompense for services offered, looks highly ironic in context with prior comments.
Shortly after disparaging the mercenary governments who pursued revolution in the name
of perks and spoils, Marryat’s narrator essentially requests exactly what he formerly
denounced. This kind of about-face should not come as a complete surprise, however,
given the general tendency toward contradiction in California literature. Nor would this
be the last of these moments in Monsieur Violet.
While awaiting news of his pending revolution, the narrator lives with “some jolly
Franciscan monks” who permit him to stay at the mission, where he discourses with them
365
on their “disaffection” with the Mexican government, and where the reader learns that
their grievances come from tariffs and duties on merchandise. Furthermore, much like
the foreign visitors, these priests “were more than willing to separate California from the
Mexican government.”
68
With this revelation alone, one might easily understand our
narrator’s affection for the monks and their “disaffection.” Indeed, as “men of sound
education,” they represent an ideal foil for the debased and debauched Mexicans. The
fact that they were smart and agreed with a general plan for the capture of California
made them that much more useful. Finally, the priests offered to assist in the revolution
with that most vital of resources: cash. As our narrator writes, with perhaps a measure of
glee, “They gave me to understand that the missions would, if necessary for my success,
assist me with 15, 20, nay, 30,000 dollars.”
69
The more that the narrator writes of his
revolution, the more that it sounds like the corrupted affair of one of the petty tyrants that
he previously lamented.
Yet this was not the most interesting aspect of the narrator’s time with the priests.
In addition to all his convivial conversation, the narrator points out the marvelous
lifestyle of the padres. Calling them “bon vivants,” our narrator gives an abundance of
detail in regard to this decadent lifestyle in the savage wilderness.
Their cellars were well filled with Constantia wine, their gardens highly
cultivated, their poultry fat and tender, and their game always had a
particular flavour. Had I remained there a few months more, I might have
taken vows myself, so well did that lazy, comfortable life agree with my
taste…
70
The passage is intriguing for two reasons. First, it replicates the standard depiction of the
“lazy, comfortable life,” an image that was itself borrowed from earlier writers, that
366
would circulate in California for generations. Second, it recalls the temptations of
California, the allure that the region represented in images of its culture. The narrator
admits that the life “agree[d] with [his] taste,” a surprising revelation in light of his
denouncements of those indolent residents of Monterey. He even suggests that he “might
have taken vows” of allegiance, the passage implies, to the Catholic church. This taking
of vows was a very delicate issue at a time when national and religious allegiance (or
perhaps national and religious enmity) clouded almost all conversations about California.
James Pattie’s proudest moment in his trip to California, for example, comes when he
refuses the priest’s request to take a vow of loyalty to the government and church,
denouncing both institutions in the process. Therefore, expression of a desire to take
vows in this passage not only implies a willingness to align himself with the “lazy,
comfortable life,” but also all the political and religious stereotypes that came with it.
Marryat’s narrator’s statements are especially intriguing, however, in comparison
with his comments about the allure of the west at the outset of the book. Recall, for
instance, his remarks about “the charms and attraction which a wild life offers to the man
of civilization,” and his further speculation that “the feeling” grows stronger the longer
one stays.
71
This was, in essence, the attraction and repulsion that California represented
in the minds of foreign observers. The primary difference is that in California the
inducements or “charms” tended toward gross exaggerations of sloth or immorality that
produced an equally powerful revulsion or deterrent. Thus, these polarizing images were
not only self-reinforcing, but an outgrowth of a larger cultural situation. When Stegner
remarked that California is like America, only more so, he likely meant the US. He
367
might easily have added, however, that California magnified cultural tropes that could be
found in writings about Mexico, Latin America, and even the Pacific.
Ultimately, our narrator’s revolution fails, or at least it fails after those he has
liberated turn on him. In an imaginative reconstruction of those ideologies he had been
trying to inculcate in the reader, the narrator’s own experience shows how the residents
of California turn traitors to their liberator. In this version of events, he lays the fault
with the American residents of Monterey and the corrupt Mexican officials who
successfully bribe them to turn over the leaders of the revolution at a prearranged “meal
of Judas.”
72
The fact that this change in sentiment is partially achieved by Mexican
journalism, where the “truth may be perverted” suggests itself deeper ironies. These
newspapers, our narrator reminds us, “are the organs through which the people of Europe
are enlightened, as to the events of these distant regions.”
73
Thus, in a final duplication of
the long-standing arrangement in California, our narrator complains about the
manipulation of published stories to achieve political ends. He could hardly have stated
the problem more accurately.
Regarding Claims, Regarding History
In 1844, Robert Greenhow, librarian to the US department of state, published
another book on the west coast of North America, one more focused on Oregon and
California.
74
A History of Oregon and California and the Other Territories on the
Northwest Coast of North America covers much of the same territory as his 1840 book,
368
Memoir, Historical and Political, on the Northwest Coast of North America, and it uses
the same chronological format. The text of this later book, like the former, consists
mostly of a summary of historical events and might appear innocuous at first glance. The
reasons for such a publication, however, and what they suggest about the direction of
discussion regarding California, are critical to understanding the US just prior to the
Mexican-American war.
Greenhow’s objective, as stated in his preface, is “to present the facts relative to
the discovery and settlement of those countries, fairly; and to investigate, and judge the
claims which have been deduced from them, agreeably to the immutable principles of
right, and the general understanding of civilized nations.”
75
As it turns out, this was also
the goal of his previous book, something which Greenhow acknowledges in his preface to
the later volume. The publication of the two texts raises questions about why Greenhow
would feel the need to write again on what was essentially the same material just four
years later. Greenhow claims that the second book offered an opportunity to correct
“errors of fact as well as of reasoning” based on new documents and resources.
Furthermore, Greenhow notes the accumulation of rumor and falsehood in the
rapidly expanding body of literature, noting what might be called California’s perennial
problem. “In the most popular histories of other countries, and especially of Great
Britain, the circumstances relating to North-West America, are in every material point,
misrepresented, either from neglect on the part of the authors, or from motives less
excusable.” This situation, Greenhow writes, leads to problematic popular notions
because the histories are “universally read and received as true.” Greenhow concludes
369
that, given the misinformed writers and gullible public, “it is not astonishing, that
erroneous ideas should be generally entertained.”
76
All of these deductions about the
dissemination of myth and rumor regarding California are accurate (though rather dated),
but Greenhow’s statement does not allude to the motivation behind the resolve to find
and perhaps correct information. At any given moment, of course, there are potentially
infinite numbers of circulating mythologies and misinformed histories. Why would the
department of state assume the scholarly responsibility to intervene in the literature of a
territory on the other side of the continent, under control by a foreign power?
The motives behind the push for more material on California and the Pacific coast
emerge more clearly in other statements Greenhow makes about the region, statements
almost comic in the ways they underplay the fervor of interest in the Pacific coast. In this
perfectly understated prose, for example, Greenhow notes that “events are now in
progress which seem calculated, ere long, to direct towards [the territories] the views of
the governments and people of many powerful nations.”
77
This process, of course, had
been underway for roughly three hundred years, though with gradually increasing
intensity. It was the result of this long, contested process that now caught the attention of
Greenhow’s sponsoring institution, the United States government. In other words, claims
mattered; and because they mattered, their history mattered too.
The importance of claims and the inability to separate them from literature and
history emerges in a paragraph that deserves quoting at length because it substitutes a
treasure trove of understatements and dry summation for years of acrimonious threats,
manipulation, and even combat.
370
Every part of this division of America is in fact claimed by some civilized
state as its exclusive property, in virtue either of discoveries or settlements
made by its citizens or subjects… On these points, the principles of
national law are by no means clearly defined; nor is it easy to apply such
as are most generally admitted, to particular cases; nor are governments
ordinarily found ready to relinquish claims merely because they are
proved to be unfounded: and disputes have in consequence arisen between
different states asserting the right of possession to the same portion of
Western America, which have more than once threatened to disturb the
peace of the world. Attempts have been made to settle the questions at
issue by negotiation; and certain lines of boundary have been agreed on by
treaties between one and another of the claimant powers: but the
arrangements thus made, can scarcely in any instance be considered
definitive, as they have not received, and will probably never receive, the
assent of the other parties interested.
78
His repeated assertion of what may seem obvious to readers, such as the fact that
governments aren’t usually eager to give up claims to territory, makes the passage sound,
against the backdrop of California’s history, like something written by Mark Twain for
the speech of a pontificating fool. For the parties involved, however, this situation was
deadly serious. Actually, the situation was long past dire for “the tribes of wandering
savages” whom Greenhow says are the only inhabitants for the majority of the territory
and, it seems, have no claims to any of the land.
79
But Greenhow, like other members of
“powerful nations,” was only concerned with the claims of those who had the
international authority and muscle to defend them.
Principally, the publication of this narrative suggests just how engaged the world
had become in the Pacific coast in general, and California in particular. Despite its
apparent isolation and desolation, California commanded the attention of quite a few
people in the elite strata of global power, people who were more invested in
understanding, and shaping, the image of that place than we might imagine. Literature
371
and literary figures were always a part of this endeavor, as the quote from Coleridge’s
“Table Talk” on the title page of Greenhow’s text suggests.
The possible destiny of the United States of America, as a nation of a
hundred millions of freemen, stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific,
living under the laws of Alfred, and speaking the language of Shakespeare
and Milton, is an august conception.
This possible destiny, however, was constantly threatened by manifold concerns,
concerns which inspired the writing of these histories. In fact, it is ironic that, given the
tendency to elide the history of California in an effort to solidify one’s own claims on the
land, at this moment, when the fervor for conquest nears its climax, the writing of history
becomes more important than ever, and the production of California histories
significantly increases.
These writers realized, of course, that time was short. As Greenhow relates, with
his usual dry tone, “[T]hese territories are daily becoming more important… The
difficulty of effecting an amicable partition of the territories thus becomes daily greater,
and more urgent therefore is the necessity of endeavoring to attain that object with out
delay.”
80
While Greenhow assumes the tone of a diplomatic negotiator, others did not.
Instead, the sense of urgency only magnified the fervor of already strident voices.
Farnham’s California: “Objects of Pleasure, Utility, or Industry”
In the history of writing about California, Thomas J. Farnham was one of the
more strident voices. In his 1844 text, Travels in the Californias and Scenes in the
Pacific Ocean, Farnham exemplifies the new tenor in writing about California, one that
372
looks back to Shaler in its thinly veiled calls for conquest, but one that also expands on
the tools of racist discourse to achieve its rhetorical effects. It was discourse that aligned
itself with the mythology of the American frontiersman and pitted that increasingly
powerful imagery against a stockpile of standard motifs from California. The result is a
narrative that combines the patriotic fervor of Pattie with the historical gestures of the
expansionist US government.
Farnham’s book not only occupies a distinct niche within Euro-American writing
about California, but also fits within a carefully plotted trajectory in his own writing
about the North American west.
81
Farnham’s first book, Travels in the Great Western
Prairies, the Anahuac and Rocky Mountains, and in the Oregon Territory (1843),
supposedly surprised him with its popularity. Regarding its success, he writes, “I did not
comprehend the extensive interest felt in journeyings over the wild and barren realms of
uncultivated Nature.”
82
However, Farnham himself traveled west of the US boundaries,
all the way to the Pacific, propelled by the very forces he claimed not to recognize. As he
notes in the very first sentence of his two-volume work, “The Oregon Territory … is an
object of much interest on both sides of the Atlantic.”
83
His claims of serendipity,
therefore, look more calculated in light of the cultural context and his own comments.
Furthermore, the entire purpose of that first expedition is made evident by the ten-page
introductory discussion of the various claims to the disputed Oregon territory, a
discussion which leads Farnham, not surprisingly, to the conclusion that the US alone
maintains rights to the region.
373
His second book, Travels in the Californias and Scenes in the Pacific Ocean,
continues in the tradition of the first, especially in its professed desire to educate the
public about distant places and to draw lessons from these regions. Indeed, it was the
success of the first enterprise that led him “to conclude that such matters…are valued [by
the public] as useful knowledge.”
84
He frames his book on California and the Pacific as
another edifying foray into the natural world, helping people to learn from the “pulseless
solitudes,” but with a different geographic focus. This is the learning experience that
Farnham argued was the engine of his success. Yet, the political situation in the US, with
an increasing public clamor for westward expansion, suggests that the reasons for
Farnham’s popularity have less to do with “lessons of awe” and more to do with lessons
of a practical sort. His lurid appeals to the racist sentiments of the US, as well as the way
these appeals were marshaled to the service of imperial conquest, necessitate closer
examination.
Even before Farnham arrives in California, he begins to prepare the reader for it.
After leaving the Hudson’s Bay Company, Farnham and the rest of his crew sailed to the
Sandwich Islands from Oregon, remaining there for three months and reacting favorably
to the Hawaiians.
85
During the trip from the islands to California, Farnham takes his first
opportunity to place the Californios in the proper light. On his boat, he meets a “fine
honest fellow” who has been wronged by California. He worked but wasn’t paid for his
labor, and he tried to marry a “Spanish brunette” but she broke her promise of marriage.
The “want of fidelity” in this woman’s relationship with the despondent Yankee perfectly
maps the approaching shores of California.
86
Farnham even allows his wronged young
374
Yankee to voice the most important lesson of the narrative, the importance of separating
the land from the people, in a quote that is remarkable for the way it clarifies in a few
sentences the intent of thousands of pages.
California itself, not including the bodies and souls of its people, he
thought a desirable country. The very atmosphere was so delicious that
the people went half naked to enjoy it. Hard to abandon was that air, and
the great plains and mountains covered with horses, black Spanish cattle,
wild game. The fried beans too, the mussels of the shores, and the fleas
even, were all objects of pleasure, utility or industry… But that loved
one! she was beautiful, she was kind, alas! too kind. He loved her, she
was wayward; but was still the unworthy keeper of his heart; still a golden
remembrance on the wastes of the past—lovely, but corroded and
defiled.
87
While packing an incredible number of key words and concepts into a short passage,
Farnham’s jilted Yankee manages to harness the abstract goals of imperialist rhetoric to
the very concrete and memorable details of his failed romance. California is “desirable,”
so long as one excludes the people. Indeed, California, allegedly a version of
prelapsarian paradise where “the people went half naked to enjoy it,” practically bathes
the senses in pleasure. The despondent Yankee elevates some of these tropes to comic
proportions, so that even fleas are “objects of pleasure, utility or industry.” Despite his
general disdain for the people, some of the women, of course, remain desirable. Like
California, these women are, “lovely, but corroded and defiled.” In order for California
to be redeemed, it must be cleansed of the “wastes of the past” part of which includes its
human inhabitants. It was a fortunate coincidence that these two men met on the ship
bound for California because this was exactly what Farnham set out to accomplish.
In a series of depictions that can only be called caricatures, Farnham ensures that
the Mexicans sound so despicable that no one would feel any compunction about
375
wresting California from their control. For example, the first Mexican official that
Farnham meets “swelled his person into dignity, ate heartily, drank deeply … and at
length rolled his greasy form out of doors.”
88
The next official, governor Alvarado,
displays “the clearly marked mien of a pompous coward.”
89
This man Farnham
constantly calls “Excellentissimo” a man characterized by silly displays of “most sublime
rage” in which he “strode through his apartment, bellowing fearfully, and raising a very
dense cloud of dust!”
90
Farnham even tries to fix in the reader’s imagination the facial
features of this caricature, describing at length one man, “Pinto, the captain of the guard.”
This Pinto was a small pattern even of a coward, but what there was of
him one could not doubt was the genuine article. He had a small narrow
head, very black stiff hair, a long thin nose with a sharp pendant point;
small snakish [sic] eyes, very near neighbors, and always peering out at
the corners of the sockets; a very slender sharp chin, with a villainous tuft
of bristles on the under lip; a dark swarthy complexion burnished with the
grin of an idiotic hyena.
91
These kinds of descriptions suggest the effort Farnham expended in order to undermine
local authority and the crudity of the tools he used in those efforts. These passages, in
fact, were the more elaborate caricatures, the moments when Farnham expended more
energy in denigration. More often he relied on facile epithets like “Californian Arabs” or
“brown devils,” a shorthand method that he felt would elicit the desired visceral reaction
from his audience.
92
In addition to his focus on the physical features of Mexicans, Farnham resorted to
many of the standard comments on governance and character. In California, for instance,
“the right to life, property, and the pursuit of happiness is … construed to authorize both
individuals and States to defraud, plunder and murder, if they found it safe and lucrative
376
to do so…”
93
Furthermore, the Mexicans themselves were incapable of fidelity or
gratitude of any sort. Using the broadest brush possible, Farnham remarks, “Like
Spaniards of all ages and countries, after having been well served by his friends, he
rewarded them with the most heartless ingratitude.”
94
And later, when a Spaniard breaks
a promise to the US trappers, he comments, “The fellow promised. But why speak of a
Spaniard’s promise? It can be likened to nothing so well as his justice. Both are …
unreliable…”
95
Spaniards were, of course, incredibly lazy, too. Farnham speaks of leaving the
“idleness of the shipboard for the enjoyment of Castilian industry ashore: to wit,
lounging, grinning, sleeping, and smoking…”
96
His desire to show their laziness goes to
comic extremes. In one instance he claims that a portrait in the mission of Santa Barbara,
which depicts “a king and a monk up to their middle in the flames of purgatory,” shows
the Spanish love of indolence. Instead of fear or pain, “they wear rather the quiet aspect
of persons who love their ease, and have an indolent kind of pleasure in the scenes
around them.”
97
Even while enduring fiery punishment, it seems, Mexicans managed to
be lazy.
If the effect of this characterization on the reader remains subject to speculation,
its effect on the other characters in the narrative is obvious: everybody in Farnham’s text
despises the Mexicans. Despite the American Revolution, the war of 1812, and
continued competition between the US and England in regard to California, Farnham
describes the men of both nations singing patriotic songs together, a moment when the
Americans celebrate the singing of “Rule Britannia.”
98
Of course, this is a world in
377
which “the ruined Indian and white man put on the red paint of battle, band together,”
and fight the Mexicans, their common enemy.
99
Americans also find themselves joining
with other Europeans, “allied by the blood of a common ancestry.”
100
Even the Mexicans
don’t like Mexicans. According to Farnham, the Mexican women didn’t like Mexican
men, if given the chance to choose Americans and Britons. “[T]he Senoritas, the dear
ladies, in the plenitude of their taste and sympathy for foreigners, preferred them as
husbands.”
101
Just as suggested, however, by the jilted lover who sets up the narrative before
Farnham arrives in California, the landscape can be separated from the residents so that
the fruits of California might be enjoyed. On various occasions Farnham reminds his
readers that the land is as heavenly as the people are hellish. He describes it as a nearly
magical place, capable of invigorating the body.
No one born and dwelling in the rugged, changing seasons of the North
can know, without experiencing, the delights of a climate like that of
California. From spring to spring again all is friendly; from morning till
morning comes again all is pleasant to breathe and see; from hour to hour
the body feels in the air a balmy blessing; from moment to moment the
blood leaps vigorously through the frame.
102
Again, the focus on the physical, sensual aspects of California occupy Farnham’s
thoughts, a focus that highlights, of course, the ironic and hypocritical elements of the
most critiques of California’s residents. According to foreign accounts, California’s
natives, Spaniards, and Mexicans were shamefully lolling in California’s physical
pleasures. Yet, when these same foreign writers praised California, they were sure to
mention the attractions of those same physical pleasures they had recently denounced.
The real issue, of course, was that this physical reward, according to Farnham and other
378
visiting writers, rightfully belonged to a select group of people. Farnham reminds his
readers of their rights to California just as often as he reminds them of its attractions. “It
is a beautiful wilderness; a country for the wild horse, the mighty grisly [sic] bear, the
undomesticated cattle of a thousand hills; a blithe domain for the human race, when true
and valiant men shall govern it.”
103
His pairing of the beautiful landscape with the
injustice of its governance reveals just as much as his allusion to the Old Testament: “For
every beast of the forest mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills.” Psalms 50, with its
extended enumeration of the just and the wicked, as well as its litany of God’s natural
possessions, offers exactly the context that Farnham wanted in the minds of his readers as
he talked about ownership and California.
104
Of course, in Farnham’s world, issues of ownership and justice extended beyond
the landscape. As in prior narratives that cast a desirous eye on the women of California
at the same time they lambasted the men, Farnham’s text suggests the potential prize for
conquest includes not only the fruit of the land alone. Or, seen from another perspective,
the so-called fruit of the landscape was a very inclusive category. In a passage that
demonstrates the remarkable conflation of women and food, Farnham describes a picnic
given by the “Californian lasses” for the foreigners in California.
We ate and drank freely. Who could do otherwise? The mellow laugh of
childhood, the holy kindness of maternal care, the pride of the paternal
heart, the love of woman, the sky and fragrant breezes of a Californian
lawn, the open sea, the giant woodlands, the piping insects, the carolling
[sic] of a thousand birds, the voices of boundless hospitality, invited us to
do so. The finest dish of all the goodly array of fat things, the brunette lips
excepted, was the roasted mussels.
105
379
His deliberately coy inclusion of “brunette lips” with the other dishes of “fat things”
perfectly illustrates the way women were imagined as part of the material reward in
California, a product as delicious as the land and climate.
106
One hardly wonders, after reading such passages, why people found Farnham’s
book on the “wilderness” of California so edifying—and made it so popular. He gave
readers in the US a picture of California that they not only recognized but desperately
desired. By the time that Farnham finished his account of the revolutionary events that
transpired during his stay in California, he had prepared his audience for history the way
he wanted it told. Pulling a page from an increasingly popular playbook, Farnham ends
his text with a very long summary of the history of California, a history that actually
occupies the majority of his text. This might sound like a counterproductive strategy for
a foreigner who wants to show how California floats on the “wastes of the past” and
awaits its foreign future, but historical narrative was a highly effective tool in asserting
control over California.
Farnham deliberately leads the reader into the topic in a way that illustrates his
relationship to the material. He begins with an evening spent, not surprisingly, with a
group of women, and he builds a scene of calculated domesticity around them. The
contrast between these figures and the world beyond them is remarkably stark.
A stroll, a tete-a-tete, and the sweet guitar! The air was balmy; the smiles
were deeply sympathizing; the laugh savored richly of the dearest
impulses of the soul; the music was the warm breath of the great living
principle of the best affections. All beyond was barbarism and wilderness!
The vast pampas, the unexplored streams, the unpruned forests, the
growling hosts of beasts that war with life and gnaw each other’s bones;
the roaring seas; the wild men, women, and children, unlocated,
380
homeless,—the untamed fields of earth and the deserts of the human heart
lay outside; within was our little company.
107
After drawing a line between civilization and “barbarism,” Farnham and his “little
company” begin the business of telling stories. And it was quite serious business.
Farnham deliberately creates this setting for the history of California to illustrate the
authority from which these facts emerge as well as the direction in which California is
tending. This little company, a “Californian spouse” and “her sister” suggest a kernel, a
seed for the American future in California grafted from the local women and American
elites. These people, Farnham suggests, will guide California to its future. He beckons
to the reader, using an intimate tone for his intimate setting.
Will the reader tarry here awhile and listen to tales of olden times? They
tell of heroic deeds, of martyrdoms, and glorious conquests. They will
bring back events of buried years; will show the deeds of those who acted
here and died; and as the scene moves on, this charming land, with all its
countless beauties and its grey and noiseless wastes, will appear.
108
Farnham, the patriotic traveler who blasts the hapless residents of California, suddenly
transforms into an old storyteller returning to “heroic deeds … and glorious conquests.”
The same person whose critique of the present relies on the obfuscation of the past wants
to resurrect “events of buried years.” Most appropriately, he tells the reader that
California “will appear” during his stories; it will be conjured, like a figure of the
imagination from these “tales of olden times.” Considering the way he had shaped that
place in his text, it was probably the most prescient sentence he ever wrote.
381
A Spanish Apologist and the New French America
Eugene Duflot de Mofras, a French diplomat living in Mexico, traveled to
California in 1841 and published a narrative of his visit in 1844. Like other voyages in
the years just before the Mexican-American war, the visit was not without controversy.
In fact, De Mofras stirred up the ire of Mexican officials before he even left Mexico, and
the controversy reached so deeply into diplomatic circles that he was ordered by the
French government to return to Paris. De Mofras went to California anyway.
109
Ultimately, the source of the dispute, wearing official Mexican regalia in public
without permission, may have been overshadowed by the acrimony that followed, but the
incident reveals something about the mood in Mexico regarding foreigners in general,
and the French in particular. By the 1840s, the Mexicans were certain that the eyes of
foreign governments were on them, and that this observation was of a decidedly hostile
nature. They were correct on both counts. England, the US, and France had turned their
chronometers (and sometimes their cannons) toward the shores of Mexico, especially
since the events of the war of independence had further destabilized political control in
the regions, like California, most distant from the capital. Furthermore, the Mexicans
were deeply suspicious of the French following the so-called Pastry war, a French
invasion of Mexico to secure claims for damages to French nationals in Mexico.
110
This
was actually not the first instance of a French threat to Mexico, following belligerent
claims by a French warship in California.
111
In fact, it was the presence of foreigners in
Mexico, especially in California, that concerned Mexican officials, who felt it was only a
382
matter of time before a foreign government, aided by their patriotic residents in
California, invaded under the guise of protecting the rights of their citizens abroad.
The French had contemplated plans along these very lines. Following the loss of
Canada and Louisiana, they were desperate to acquire additional territory to assuage the
pain of those colonial reverses, and they specifically looked to the Pacific for this
territory. This sentiment Duflot De Mofras makes clear in a comment from his Memoirs.
Obviously France has never been in a more propitious position than she
now is to replace the deplorable loss of Canada and Louisiana. Already
mistress of the Marquesas and Tahiti she could materially enhance her
power by assuring herself of one of the Sandwich Islands, by purchasing
the settlement at Port Bodega, which would be a preliminary step toward
acquiring the entire harbor of San Francisco, the key to the Pacific Ocean;
by grouping around this the French-Spanish Catholics of the country, by
opening to our countrymen who are constantly going out to settle in the
United States, Buenos Ayres, and Chile, a vast field for national
colonization, and by establishing on a continent over which our flag has so
long floated, a New French America!”
112
Therefore, though it may appear at first glance that the Mexicans overreacted to De
Mofras parading in Guadalajara in Mexican military colors, they certainly had their
reasons for their reaction. The Mexicans likely saw the Frenchman in their national
uniform as a living symbol of French designs, a walking prophecy on the streets of their
city. At the least, De Mofras was guilty of very poor timing and worse judgment.
De Mofras’s reception in California was not always much better. If we are to
believe accounts of local residents, such as Governor Alvarado, he “arrived … imbued
with false ideas about [Mexican] character.” One woman, Señora de la Guerra Hartnell,
savaged him in a testimonio years later, claiming that he entered her home without
permission and proceeded to drink until he passed out. He was so ill that De Mofras was
383
incapacitated for three days, and had to be nursed back to health. During his
convalescence, rather than expressing shame or gratitude, he made himself so
comfortable that he gave orders to the servants.
113
Furthermore, even in his own
correspondence, De Mofras exhibits some of the condescension attributed to him,
remarking on one occasion that “the people [of Mexico] possess all the worst qualities of
the Spaniards and few of their virtues.”
114
Incredibly, despite the political context and what may have been some blights on
his character, Duflot De Mofras wrote one of the more balanced accounts of California
on record. Perhaps drawing on his early training in scholarship, the text is filled with
data rather than anecdotes or pronouncements, and, as a consequence, even where he
critiques the culture or institutions, the narrative often lacks the malicious or racist
overtones present in other writers. On the other hand, De Mofras is clearly a Spanish
apologist who needs to denigrate Mexico in order to elevate Spain. As such, the narrative
becomes one of declension and diminution, in which the supposed prosperity and
benevolence of the past is compared to the apparent chaos and depravity of the present.
Mofras advertises his feelings early in the narrative, when he argues against the
“imaginary cruelties inflicted on the Indians” and further claims that Spain was “kind and
tolerant” to the colonies. In a familiar pattern, he compares the Spanish treatment with
that of the “Anglo-Saxon race [who] annihilated the unfortunate natives of Pennsylvania,
New England, and the Carolinas.”
115
This general argument about the Spanish colonies,
he later applies specifically to California. In a passage unusual for its sputtering rage,
Mofras attacks earlier visitors who wrote reports about California.
384
For foreign writers to slander the Spanish clergy from whom they have
received the most generous hospitality is indeed deplorable. With typical
English coldness, Captain Beechey and Mr. Forbes, men imbued with the
intolerance of Protestantism, are inclined to ridicule and cast insinuations
on the activities of the Fathers.
116
If this line of argument appears initially to have some merit, Mofras quickly undermines
his position and advertises his Catholic bias when he attempts to argue that in Spanish
colonies “Catholicism has extended its benign influence” while the “Methodists,
Anabaptists, and other sects” exterminated natives wherever they went. Mofras neglects
to mention, of course, the equally deplorable record of native deaths in California,
especially in Baja California, an area where he himself admits that “any distinction
between” various Indian tribes “has largely been obliterated” by mass extinction.
117
Furthermore, he willfully ignores the relationship between Spanish missions and rampant
death in Sacramento, where a “mysterious malady has destroyed whole tribes.”
118
Ultimately, the theme of the narrative becomes one of diminution, comparing the
Spanish past with the Mexican present. Near the outset of the text, Mofras argues that
“the prosperity and tranquility that at one time were universal throughout New Spain
have now been superseded by constant unrest, widespread misery, and definite signs of
disintegration.”
119
In order to illustrate this narrative, he visits each of the missions, using
mission secularization and Mexican independence as a foil for his figures and
conclusions. In a typical example, he writes,
Mission San Juan Capistrano is now in ruins, despite the resistance made
to its devastation by the Spanish Father… In its prime this mission
controlled some 2,000 Indians, 70,000 cattle, 2,000 horses, and more than
10,000 sheep. […] Today only 100 Indians, 500 cattle, 150 horses, and
not a single sheep remain.
120
385
While Mofras tends to use data and scholarship in a way that sets him apart from other
writers, this tendency did not protect him from drawing some of the same facile
conclusions about Mexican culture.
In particular, Mofras describes the Mexicans in much the same way that Beechey,
Forbes, and others—men whom Mofras despises for their slander—had done before him.
Like them, he appears to attack governance rather than people, but these comments are
often so caustic that they fall to the level of mockery. The book opens with the claim that
sets the tone for Mofras’s relationship between Mexico and its independence: “What was
left to this impoverished country by way of compensation for its disasters and errors, was
nothing more than an idle and sonorous word called liberty.”
121
Mofras never strays too
far from this idea, constantly reminding his readers of the “absurd pronunciamientos” and
“deplorable condition” of the Mexican government.
122
While the Mexican government
did struggle with corruption and swings in power, Mofras’s critique, like that of the
supposedly intolerant Protestants before him, on occasion moves into territory that
reveals troubling tendencies.
After a discussion of the Mexican army and its use of prisoners and Indians for
soldiers, Mofras asks, “What can Mexico expect with soldiers of this character?” He
adds, “In Mexico, …the difference between a soldier and a galley slave is
imperceptible.”
123
From this position, Mofras merely makes a short leap to commentary
about the “lazy habits, of the settlers [of Los Angeles], who are disinclined to work.”
124
It
is true that in these same passages, Mofras defends the natives, “poor wretches,” who do
the work of the pueblo and are “often mistreated.” But even his defense of the Indians
386
seems more focused on attacking the Mexicans, as in the following comparison where he
writes that the “Indians displayed both docility and a willingness to work, whereas the
white men [Mexicans or Spaniards] spent their time gambling, drinking, and dissipating.”
Furthermore, he quotes approvingly the words of Father Peyri, who says, “‘In this
country there are two distinct races, the barbarians, and the semi-barbarians; the semi-
barbarians are our poor Indians, the barbarians are the so-called gente de razon, who
seem devoid of all reason.’”
125
While there are no shortage of moments when those who
fashioned themselves as the so-called reasoning race made decisions that look
remarkably unreasonable, Peryi’s defense of the natives, much like that of Mofras,
suffers from its patronizing tone. The “poor Indians” of Peyri’s sermon sound too much
like the “poor wretches” of Mofras’s illustration of labor in Los Angeles. Though the
practice of indentured labor created intolerable living conditions, Mofras seems less
interested in elevating the Indian than in denigrating the Mexican. Thus, for Mofras, the
Indian becomes a foil to show depravity in the Mexicans, just as he uses the Mexicans as
a foil to highlight the benevolence of the Spaniards.
As Mofras leans toward some of the cultural clichés of California, he also has
moments of imperial cliché. In a paragraph that echoes Dana, Mofras writes, “In the
hands of any other power, the port of San Diego would soon acquire importance…”
126
When discussing the Sacramento river, he declares, “Undoubtedly, this stream, traversing
virgin land and emptying into one of the finest ports in the world, will become extremely
important at the time—and the day is not remote—when California changes masters.”
127
These pronouncements suggest that although Mofras desires to intervene in the
387
discussion about California, using his scholarly training and first-hand knowledge, his
overriding colonial imperatives push his discussion into many of the same problems that
plagued his forerunners. Mofras believes that his paean to the Spanish will distinguish
him from those apparently intolerant Protestants he often mentions, but, despite his
distaste for the Englishmen who disparaged California before him, he writes more like
them than he realizes.
Yet, Mofras connects to later writers in California in a way that the other English
writers don’t. His adoration for the Spanish in California creates a longing for the
past—and a simultaneous disgust with the present—that recurs in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century. In fact, Mofras can be seen as one of the early progenitors of the
Spanish fantasy that Carey McWilliams outlined. Much like the boosters who praised the
Spanish past at the expense of the Mexican present, Mofras looks back to a time of
supposed benevolence, when the colonial empire made everyone happy and prosperous.
The creation—invention—of this idyllic past serves predominately to undermine the
present. If Mofras writes less flowery prose than the boosters to come, or less strident
critique than the sailors he follows, that does not change the fact that his goals were
ultimately the same as both of those groups: control of the cultural narrative in order to
control the culture itself.
388
Fremont’s Descent into Spring
John Charles Fremont’s Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky
Mountains in the year 1842, and to Oregon and North California in the Years 1843-’44,
was probably second only to Dana’s book in its reach and popularity. In some ways this
narrative, published in 1845, was probably more influential than Dana’s because of the
far greater political power of Fremont at the time of its publication. While Fremont’s
text, written along with his wife, did not inspire the enduring public affection that Dana’s
narrative inspired, it was very popular at the time of publication, further elevating an
already popular public figure.
128
Fremont’s text, despite the use of “report” in its title, is unquestionably a story in
the western genre, with a clear narrative arc, heroes and villains, and even an extended
pursuit by natives. Though these features don’t transform this government document into
a thriller, they suggest Fremont’s sense of the dramatic and his desire to shape his
expedition into something people would remember. This is not to argue that nothing
dramatic ever occurred during Fremont’s journey, but merely that the shape of the story
works very well to construct a specific image of California.
Fremont’s image of California, essentially a version of environmental paradise,
prefigures late nineteenth-century booster publications, complete with references to Italy
and perfumed flowers. Fremont begins this characterization as soon as he enters the San
Joaquin valley and never relents until he reaches the desert. In at least a dozen different
places, Fremont remarks on the beauty of the landscape, each time seeming to top the
389
superlatives of the prior passage until the passages run together in a giant heap of scented
petals. He and his men encounter “the most beautiful valley in which [they] had ever
travelled.”
129
They name a stopping place “Beautiful Camp” because the “beauties of
scenery made so strong an impression.”
130
Another place is “surpassingly beautiful” and
“unequalled for the pasturage of stock by any thing we had ever seen.”
131
Many places
remind Fremont of parks, orchards, and gardens because they seem cultivated and lush to
him. This general sentiment influences his description of places he hasn’t even seen,
such as southern California, “where the country is so beautiful that it is considered a
paradise, and the name of its principal town (Puebla de los Angeles) would make it
angelic.”
132
At times the writing is suffused with so many colors and scents that one
wonders whether Fremont assumed his duties as a leader of a military expedition held
equal importance as his interest in botany.
133
…[W]e came again among innumerable flowers; and a few miles further,
fields of the beautiful blue-flowering lupine… We here found this
beautiful shrub in thickets, some of them being 12 feet in height.
Occasionally three or four plants were clustered together, forming a grand
bouquet…the whole summit covered with spikes of flowers, the perfume
of which is very sweet and grateful. A lover of natural beauty can imagine
with what pleasure we rode among these flowering groves, which filled
the air with a light and delicate fragrance.
134
The repetition of flowers and beauty along with the evocations of scent lend the scene an
other-worldly air. If Fremont’s readers in the US weren’t already excited by California,
they would have been enraptured by these passages.
In fact, the sense of transport and intoxication was stated directly. Stopping to
look at some live oaks beside a stream, Fremont writes that “the summer green of their
beautiful foliage, with the singing birds, and the sweet summer wind which was whirling
390
about the dry oak leaves, nearly intoxicated [them] with delight…”
135
Like former
narratives of sailors intoxicated with the landscape, some of Fremont’s men begin to ask
to leave or simply desert when they encounter the world Fremont describes.
136
It’s no
surprise that they wanted to stay, especially if they reacted as Fremont did to the
psychological and sensual power of the territory. More than any other narrative, Fremont
shapes the psychological geography of California with his use of contrast. Getting to
California wasn’t just intoxicating; it was a tremendous relief.
Sailing narratives often highlighted the fecundity of California relative to life at
sea. California provided a relief from wormy biscuit or even the onset of scurvy. But the
land narratives magnified the element of salvation represented by arrival in California.
These narratives were assisted by some formidable geographic features, namely deserts
and mountains that blocked easy entrance to the region. When Fremont and his men
arrived in California, there were no definitive Euro-American boundaries to determine
where California began and another place ended. Thus, they were free to decide what
constituted “California,” and they located it where they began to feel relief from
suffering, ensuring that it remained enshrined as a figurative paradise.
137
Even before they arrived in “California,” they fashioned it as “the genial country
of which we had heard so many glowing descriptions.”
138
They gazed from the cold
mountains down on what they described as “deep-blue sky and sunny climate of Smyrna
and Palermo.”
139
After a period of struggle in the sierra Nevada, Fremont wrote that the
party was “rapidly descending into the spring, …leaving [the] snowy region far
behind.”
140
Fremont’s description of their arrival was a perfect metaphor for California in
391
the Euro-American imagination: traveling down into sensual pleasure, intoxication, and
freedom from suffering. California waited at the end of a long downward slide. Yet, as
powerful as these desires were, they remained mixed with feelings of caution and fear.
Indeed, the metaphor applies here as well; while it was easy to slide down into California,
it was much harder to climb out again. And the pleasures that one found on arrival were
themselves a part of this threat. Fremont remarks, upon their arrival in Sacramento, that
the meal of
beef, excellent bread, and delicious salmon…[was] their first relief from
the sufferings of the Sierra, and their first introduction to the luxuries of
the Sacramento. It required all of [their] philosophy and forbearance to
prevent plenty from becoming as hurtful to [them] now as scarcity had
been before.
141
This comment recalls the fear of satisfied desire that had long been part of California’s
image, but it also recalls the element of contrast, the extremes of emotion that were
equally powerful and also had a long lineage.
More than most writers, Fremont emphasized these contrasts, and he especially
located them symbolically in the geography. Even at moments of his highest praise and
rapture, the memory or the sight of former suffering is near. For example, on a page
exceptional for its profusion of flowers and perfume, Fremont writes the following
sentence. “Our road was now one continued enjoyment; and it was pleasant, riding
among this assemblage of green pastures with varied flowers and scattered groves, and
out of the warm green spring, to look at the rocky and snowy peaks where lately we had
suffered so much.”
142
On the one hand, it is a somewhat strange sentence. Fremont
essentially says that in the midst of pleasure, he enjoyed looking back to a scene of pain,
392
enjoyed seeing the memento of that suffering epitomized by the peaks of the Sierra
Nevada. Yet, he takes pleasure in this memory because of his current vantage point, not
(one imagines) because he takes pleasure in remembering the pain itself. In fact, it
appears that the pleasure of the current vantage point is increased by its proximity to
scenes of suffering, that, in other words, the flowers look more beautiful because they
perfume the air within sight of the treacherous mountains. It was an idea that Fremont
would use throughout his text, and it became very powerful in shaping the way people
understood California. This interpretation not only magnified the sense of California as a
place of contrasts, but also reinforced the idea of California as metaphorical island, both
of which remain current today and contribute to notions of the region’s strangeness and
isolation.
Each time that Fremont sights the mountains or desert, he emphasizes this
contrast, even personifying the opposing elements, so that the mountain “frowned down
upon” them.
143
These personified enemies could also sound like aesthetic monstrosities,
as when the vegetation of the desert, a yucca tree’s “stiff and ungraceful form,” appears
“the most repulsive tree in the vegetable kingdom.”
144
Fremont set these idyllic and
frightful elements against each other whenever he had the chance. Gazing at the desert
from a mountain pass, he writes,
It was indeed dismal to look upon, and hard to conceive so great a change
in so short a distance. One might travel the world over, without finding a
valley more fresh and verdant—more floral and sylvan—more alive with
birds and animals—more bounteously watered—than we had left in the
San Joaquin: here, within a few miles ride, a vast desert plain spread
before us, from which the boldest traveller turned away in despair.
145
393
Again the focus in the passage lies in the difference between the two places, a difference
that serves to magnify the properties of each. Thus, the desert seems more frightening
and the valley more comforting because of their proximity.
While it is true that many geographic regions of California display marked
differences, these contrasts weren’t simply bare renderings of physical detail. They had
psychological functions, some of which could be useful to Fremont the writer and
surveyor for the US. For one, the contrasts certainly heightened the drama of the
narrative, lending a familiar structural arc to what might otherwise have been a dry
recitation of measurements. They made readily available stories of adversity and
triumph, risk and reward, villains and heroes. Fremont might have imagined his book
would be more readable, and popular, with such touches. But this aspect wasn’t only
important for expanding his audience; it also made California the “reward” in such
equations. In this story, California was the place one wanted to be, the place one wanted.
If California wasn’t already desirable enough with its flowers and perfume,
Fremont made sure that the desert was as horrifying as the former place was beautiful.
During a passage through the desert, Fremont’s narrative, which had been a story of
success and reward, suddenly turns violent. Long before Frank Norris’s dentist takes a
harrowing journey into Death Valley, Fremont leaves the peace and serenity of
“California” to enter the territory of death and murder. For example, he recounts one of
the most gruesome scenes with graphic detail, in which Fremont’s men attack and kill a
group of natives, then mutilate the bodies within sight of the escaping survivors.
The scalps of the fallen were instantly stripped off; but in the process, one
of them, who had two balls through his body, sprung to his feet, the blood
394
streaming from his skinned head, and uttering a hideous howl. An old
squaw, possibly his mother, stopped and looked back from the mountain
side she was climbing, threatening and lamenting. …[Fremont’s men] did
what humanity required and quickly terminated the agonies of the gory
savage.”
146
According to Fremont, the natives were just as vicious. In another scene, a man has
“[o]ne of his hands, and both his legs…cut off.”
147
The people responsible for these
atrocities, we are told, are the local natives, “American Arabs, who lie in wait to murder
and plunder the innocent traveller.” These natives are quite different from those Fremont
encountered back in “California.” Instead of being depicted as tractable and at least
partially civilized, these “Arabs of the New World”
148
were more bestial, with “an
expression of countenance resembling that in a beast of prey” and “actions of wild
animals.” Furthermore, Fremont wrote that “there is a want of mind—an absence of
thought—and an action wholly by impulse, strongly expressed, and which constantly
recalls the similarity [to animals].”
149
That the desert appeared more aligned with these natives was no accident.
Fremont makes this connection explicit in his discussion of the Great Basin. “From all I
heard and saw, I should say that humanity here appeared in its lowest form, and in its
most elementary state.”
150
Thus, the desert—horrifying, repulsive, savage—surrounded
California, heightening the effect of the idyllic (and isolated) paradise located within
those confines. This description increased the value or appeal of what Fremont called
California (primarily the coastal region or area of Spanish and Mexican settlement) at the
same time that it diminished the appeal of those lands east of that zone. If the US
395
government and its citizens were to move westward, this picture suggested, they had
better go all the way to the coast, the real prize in this race between imperial powers.
Finally, this contrast increased the sense of a defensible paradise. California was
a location difficult to reach, much less attack, and easy to defend. Descriptions of its
barbaric hinterlands would have effectively augmented its strategic advantages,
especially when combined with its position on the Pacific coast. Fremont was well aware
of this situation and highlighted it in a comparison with the Atlantic coast of North
America, which he describes as “low and open,” and “accessible everywhere.”
The Pacific coast, on the contrary, is high and compact, with few bays,
and but one that opens into the heart of the country. The immediate coast
is what the seamen call iron bound. A little within, it is skirted by two
successive ranges of mountains, standing as ramparts between the sea and
the interior country; and to get through which there is but one gate, and
that narrow and easily defended. This structure of the coast, backed by
these two ranges of mountains, with its concentration and unity of waters,
gives to the country an immense military strength, and will probably
render Oregon the most impregnable country in the world.
151
The Oregon territory, here considered alongside the Pacific coast of north America, was
part of a comprehensive plan for pushing westward, including California. Whoever
controls the Columbia river, Fremont argues, controls Oregon and California. It was a
message that benefited from his imagination of California, and one that in turn shaped the
way people imagined it.
396
Rigged: the US Exploring Expedition and the Sale of California
Charles Wilkes, a lieutenant in the US navy, wrote and published what was the
last important survey of California by the US government, The Narrative of the United
States Exploring Expedition (1845), before the Mexican-American war. It was a lengthy
and lavish publication, in five volumes with numerous illustrations, an expenditure in
keeping with the outlays for the voyage itself. Because of its great cost, the US
government refused to publish more than one hundred copies, many of which were
earmarked for select institutions and governments. Thus, the book was not nearly as
widely circulated as, for instance, the narrative of Fremont. Nor did Wilkes have the
benefit of Jessie Benton Fremont as his editor and ghost writer to dramatize the narrative
(though there is considerable evidence that Wilkes stole entire passages from the journals
of his sailors and scientists). Furthermore, the personality of Wilkes, a person described
as cold, arrogant, cruel, and domineering, likely affected his reception in Washington and
among historians. Indeed, Wilkes and his expedition were largely ignored when they
returned home after an expedition of almost four years. Compared to the adulation given
to Fremont, Wilkes found a country that treated him with near indifference and sailors
who so despised him that they began court-martial proceedings. Today, to the extent that
Wilkes is remembered at all, he is usually recalled for his role in the Trent affair, a crisis
of international diplomacy involving the British during the Civil War.
152
This does not mean, however, that Wilkes’s publication wasn’t influential. First,
though the narrative initially had a small circulation, those who had access to it were
397
people with power and influence, often heads of state or foreign governments. Second,
because Wilkes was so intent on using the publication as a vehicle for his own
ascendancy to prestige, he tirelessly advocated for its dissemination, even going so far as
to publish his own edition, versions of which were more widely circulated. Finally,
evidence of the narrative’s cultural importance can be seen in its influence on Cooper and
Melville, both of whom borrowed details for their fiction. Melville, in particular,
borrowed copiously for constructing various characters in Moby-Dick, especially Captain
Ahab (a point that conveys some of the ferocity of Wilkes’s personality).
153
If the publication is notable for its cost and lavish illustrations, it is just as notable
for its fastidious continuation of the rhetoric used to describe California for decades.
Indeed, Wilkes’s Narrative is most remarkable for the vehemence of its denigration,
especially regarding Californio culture. The controlling theme of his text seems to be the
degraded culture and character of the Californios, a notion that he repeats at every
opportunity. Like many writers before him, Wilkes sees the Californios as a degenerate
version of the Spaniard, with “all their vices,” but “without a proper share of their
virtues.”
154
This theme, the vice without the virtue, was by this time proverbial, and it
suggests some of the rhetorical importance of distinguishing the current residents of
California from the Spanish (and European) colonists.
In the nineteenth century, US readers looked to Spain in particular and Europe
more generally with increasing fascination and envy, especially in matters of “tradition.”
Washington Irving’s books on Spanish history both tapped this latent desire and
increased its prominence.
155
By mid century, US authors often found themselves praising
398
the charm of Spanish cultural traditions while they simultaneously deplored what they
felt were its shortcomings (relative to the strengths of US culture, of course). This
backdrop figured prominently in strategies for their appraisal of Californio culture
because it offered them a ready-made and, in effect, more facile template for denigration.
In this formula, there was no need to temper the acknowledged romance of Spanish
culture before a delineation of the accompanying vices. They could simply argue that the
Californio was a variety of the species that had lost all of the virtues of its progenitor,
leaving only the vices.
In almost all cases, the enumeration of vices borrows liberally from circulating
clichés, most of which were at one time applied to the Spanish. For instance, Wilkes
describes their lifestyle in this way:
Their amusements are cock-fighting, bull and bear-baiting, and dancing;
these are the predominant occupations of their lives, always accompanied
by excessive drinking. Parties of amusement…are frequent; these
generally last three days, and rarely break up without some quarrel.
156
Wilkes goes on to separate his castigation according to various categories, again in
keeping with the stereotypes of California writing.
The female portion of the community are ignorant, degraded, and the
slaves of their husbands. They are fond of dress, and will make any
sacrifice, even their own honor, to gratify it. The men have no trades, and
depend for every thing upon the Indians at the missions, some of whom
are quite ingenious… The whites are so indolent, and withal have so
much pride, as to make them look upon all manual labor as degrading; in
truth, they regard all those who work as beneath them; they, in
consequence, can never be induced to labour. An anecdote was related to
me of one who had been known to dispense with his dinner, although the
food was but a few yards off, because the Indian was not at hand to bring
it to him.
157
399
Wilkes’s view of women is particularly interesting, given its long lineage in California,
traceable all the way back to Calafía’s island and the Russian narratives where women
were fond of ornaments. It’s also worth noting that Wilkes, as many others before him,
was willing to elevate the natives as a strategy for making the Californios look worse.
Once the US took control of California, however, these same natives were merely an
impediment to progress; in fact, they are later discussed by the US government with
many of the same adjectives that Wilkes applies to the Californios.
Wilkes continues this assault on the culture, attacking its moral foundations
especially, with a particular focus on cleanliness, ignorance, indolence, corruption, decay,
and love of drink and dancing. Given all of these pronouncements, it is no surprise that
Wilkes concludes that California really had no history worthy of mention either. As he
prepares to launch into the ubiquitous sketch of the territory, he remarks that “its history
is of little importance.”
158
Also not surprising, but ironic given the context, is the continued attraction to
California displayed by the sailors, who desert the expedition despite the feelings of
disgust exhibited by Wilkes and other apparently more discerning parties. Wilkes admits,
“This is a common circumstance in this port, and very few vessels visit it without losing
some of their crews. The dissolute habits of the people form such strong temptations for
sailors, that few can resist them.”
159
Thus, one of the continuing ironies of these
narratives is that despite its salacious figuration in the literary imagination (or perhaps as
a result of this figuration), California remained powerfully attractive to visitors. This
400
continued attraction further reinforced displays of disgust by those who claimed to be
immune to its cheap charms.
Yet one often wonders if these complaints were genuine, or if the frequency and
fervor of the complaints suggests a different inclination on the part of those who refused
to stoop to California’s level. When he’s not bludgeoning Californio culture, Wilkes
praises the climate as “resembl[ing] that of Andalusia in Spain” and claims that “none
can be more salubrious.”
160
Furthermore, San Francisco has “one of the finest, if not the
very best harbour in the world.”
161
Therefore, though Wilkes disdains the people and
culture of California, he feels differently about the place itself, another attitude that puts
him in line with tradition.
Finally, Wilkes considered the future of California, and despite his disgust with its
current state, he had some definite ideas about where it was headed. Exhibiting an
attitude typical of the proponents of Manifest Destiny, Wilkes saw the capitulation of
Mexican California to a foreign power as inevitable while he simultaneously pushed his
own country closer to conflict.
The situation of Upper California will cause its separation from Mexico
before many years. […] It is very probable that this country will become
united with Oregon, with which it will perhaps form a state that is destined
to control the destinies of the Pacific.
162
The fate of Oregon was already an openly debated question; in joining California to
Oregon, Wilkes suggested what he assumed about the fate of the entire Pacific coast. In
fact, Wilkes admitted to some of the US residents of California that his reason for
stopping in the Pacific northwest on a trip to the Arctic had little to do with exploration
and everything to do with conquest. One resident recalled years later that Wilkes and his
401
crew remarked that California would shortly become a US possession, triumphantly
declaring, “This is ours!”
163
Not only is California politically destined for US control, but it is racially destined
for conquest, an argument that he based, in part, on the climate. For example, Wilkes
claims that
this western coast, enjoying a mild climate in many respects superior to
any other in the Pacific, possessed as it must be by the Anglo-Norman
race, and having none to enter into rivalry with it but the indolent
inhabitants of warm climates, is evidently destined to fill a large space in
the world’s future history.
164
Remarkably, in his march toward racial conquest, Wilkes journeys from one end of
historical value to the other, beginning in a place of historical insignificance and
concluding in a place destined to command the attention of the world—so long as those
people are “Anglo-Norman.” This rhetoric was, unfortunately, all too familiar by 1845,
and it gives Wilkes the distinction of being not only a racist, but also one of the
ideological adherents of Manifest Destiny.
Just before ending his narrative of California, Wilkes leaves the reader with a
final anecdote, a scene that he wants to include because it “is probably peculiar to a
country like California.” In roughly one page, Wilkes describes what might appear
innocuous at first glance: an auction in which his party must sell their traveling supplies
before departing. Yet this scene, perhaps more than any other in Wilkes’s narrative,
illustrates the situation in California. It is the concluding moment for Wilkes’s land
party, which cannot return to the ship with the supplies that they acquired for the
overland portion of the journey. According to Wilkes, the residents know that the sailors
402
must sell their supplies and hope to take advantage of the situation. Wilkes writes, “I
make no doubt that good bargains were anticipated, or rather a determination made that
they would have all for little or nothing.”
165
He then describes the pre-auction process of valuation, how each horse and pack-
saddle was examined and found wanting in quality by the same people who would
eventually be doing the purchasing.
In the first place, it was discovered that many of the horses were not
marked, and therefore, agreeably to the laws of the country, they belonged
to the government; secondly, that many of them were beyond recovery
from their worn-out condition; thirdly and lastly, that if they did recover,
they would be worthless. These same faults were applied to the pack-
saddles, parfleshes, and appichemens, …which had caused so much
trouble to procure. Their value, in the eyes of these gentlemen, was next
to nothing.
166
These “worthless” items were then to be auctioned, in a process that Wilkes felt had been
rigged by the authorities to keep down the prices. Wilkes describes the scene that
followed.
The horses had been put in lots, as was likewise the case with the
accoutrements. Each of these was announced first in English, then in
Spanish, and last in French, which gave the auctioneer a full opportunity
to descant upon their sore backs, lameness, visible ribs, and sorry
appearance. The Spanish language seemed to be more copious in words to
express their condition, for it certainly produced many jeers and much
laughter among the motley throng.
167
At each stage in the process, Wilkes calls attention to the alcalde (or mayor), “the only
person in authority” and “a man of much rotundity and little height,” who, according to
Wilkes, “arranged things well enough with those under his authority.”
168
The scene
depicts a well-known type of corruption, in which those in power use their authority to
control the market for their own benefit. Yet the methods of control appear to go beyond
403
governance. Even the language of the local residents seems to conspire against Wilkes,
forcing him into the position of helpless observer as his possessions are continually
driven down in value by a marketplace that serves its own interests while simultaneously
rendering him powerless.
Wilkes wants this passage to serve as an illustration of the political and cultural
situation in California, yet, ironically, it might serve the same purpose for the attitude of
imperial powers in California, especially Wilkes’s own government. For years, the US
and other foreign powers had, on the one hand, used “copious words” to describe the
“sorry appearance” of California’s government and culture, deliberately and artificially
pushing its value downward, while, on the other hand, they made plans to claim the
region for themselves at fire-sale prices. Rather than depicting the local government or
culture, the scene at Wilkes’s auction resembled in miniature the international
marketplace and its continued efforts to control rhetoric and value, all with the ultimate
purpose of acquiring territory at a reduced price. It was in fact an excellent illustration of
a situation “peculiar to California,” only it illustrated the strategies that Wilkes most
wanted to conceal.
Last Dispatch Before the War: Alfred Robinson
Coming from a long-time resident of California, Alfred Robinson’s Life in
California (published in 1846 and revised in 1891) suggests the possibility of another
writer making an intervention into well-established California narratives. In fact, in the
404
sense that Robinson responds to Richard Henry Dana, this book offers perhaps the first
evidence of critique coming from the Euro-American perspective. While there are
certainly examples of critique from Californios in the late nineteenth-century narratives
that Bancroft recorded for his archives as well as in some of their self-published histories,
Robinson appears to offer the first instance of a Euro-American living in and writing
from California with the interests and perspective of its residents in mind.
Indeed, simply because Robinson lived in California, he offers a significant
alteration from the usual pattern of shipping, trapping, exploratory, and scientific
narratives, in which the visitor observed then returned to a home or career someplace
else, typically in Europe or on the eastern seaboard of the US. Robinson, on the other
hand, had worked in California since at least 1829, lived there for many years before the
war with Mexico, and was an established figure in the region by the time many later
writers, such as Dana, first visited.
169
This is not to say, however, that Robinson did not have connections with, or
allegiance to, Euro-American markets like the other US merchants of the era. He first
arrived in California via a merchant ship out of Boston, but, unlike most traders working
the California coast, he decided to stay. He married a woman from a wealthy Californio
family (the de la Guerras of Santa Barbara) and set himself up as a merchant, using the
property he acquired through marriage to start a thriving business in hides and tallow. He
also converted to Catholicism and learned to speak Spanish.
170
Thus, in many senses,
Robinson emerges as a Euro-American not only integrated into Californio culture, but
dependent on its customs, traditions, and especially its financial resources. Indeed, it’s
405
fair to speculate about whether Robinson would have survived in California without his
family connections and especially their extensive property.
Robinson, then, appears perfectly positioned, as a Euro-American insider, to give
another viewpoint, and in some respects, Robinson’s Life in California responds critically
to the rhetoric generated over the decades and popularized in the US by Dana, six years
previous. In fact, much of the difference between the narratives of Dana or Beechey and
Robinson emerges in the adjectives that convey his attitude toward the region. Robinson
often uses words like beautiful, pleasant, fine, and magnificent to describe California.
Even the Catholic priests are occasionally described as “kind and generous”
171
and the
interior of churches as “imposing” and “attractive.”
172
Robinson makes this distinction early in his narrative. On his arrival in Monterey,
for instance, at the moment he “was to look for the first time upon those shores which
were to become for some years [his] home,” he writes this description.
Its external appearance, notwithstanding it was built of adobe or brick,
made by the mixture of soft mud and straw, modelled [sic] and dried in the
sun, was not displeasing; for the outer walls had been plastered and
whitewashed, giving it a cheerful and inviting aspect.
173
While not an exclamatory endorsement, this description stands in marked contrast to
those of many visitors, such as Duflot de Mofras, Dana, Beechey, and others. Nor is this
an isolated passage. Later, he describes Monterey as “situated on the declivity of a
beautiful rising ground, the top of which is crowned with stately pines.”
174
Of course, these isolated examples don’t necessarily mean anything about
Robinson’s overall intentions. After all, many other writers were perfectly willing to
praise the beauty of the natural landscape, then, in the next sentence, denounce the
406
natives and Californios as lazy, stupid, and immoral. In other words, a few kind words
about a mission or the pine trees doesn’t necessarily alter the overall message of the text.
Perhaps the primary difference between Robinson and other writers is his willingness to
praise both human (or cultural) features as well as natural features. Praising the natural
environment, something almost all visitors to California did, required no concessions to
the abilities of the local inhabitants; indeed, as other chapters have demonstrated, this was
often part of a strategy to marshal excitement for conquest and depict the inhabitants as
lazy. On the other hand, praising a church, tradition, or mode of living did require the
acknowledgement of certain local capabilities. Given most writers’ arguments about the
need for intervention in California, not to mention their beliefs in the superiority of their
own cultures, the first kind of praise was much easier to stomach than the second.
Beyond his penchant for more liberal praise, Robinson also seems genuinely
attracted to certain elements of Californio culture, and his narrative gains credibility in
this regard because of its variety of comments. The text is filled with anecdotes, many of
them humorous, that testify to his daily connection to Californio society. In this sense,
the text almost reads like the collected articles of a local journalist’s newspaper column.
In one instance, a priest, trying to escape another priest in a water fight, grabs a bedpan
and “let[s] it fly, contents and all, full into the face” of the other priest.
175
In another, the
father at Mission San Luis Obispo regales Robinson with English phrases that he learned
from a Scottish traveler, totally unaware that he had been taught only insults instead of
salutations.
176
These anecdotal moments, combined with his familial connections, might
407
suggest that Robinson offers an escape from both the Spanish apologists, like De Mofras,
and the foreign imperialists, such as Dana or Beechey.
However, these moments don’t necessarily mean Robinson had saintly intentions.
Despite his willingness to praise, there are indications of economic motivations in his
attitudes. In part, the attitude suggested by his account of California reflects Robinson’s
position (at the time of composition) as a member of the elite Californio society, a
convert to Catholicism, and a merchant with a financial and social stake in that society’s
reputation. For instance, Robinson’s support of the Catholic missions looks incongruous
with his Protestant New England background until one considers the enormous role the
missions played in his financial future as the most lucrative clients in his profession.
177
In addition, Robinson wrote his share of conventional commentary. He blasted
the government throughout the text as lacking “sagacity” and “energy” and claimed that
California “can never be in worse hands than the present.”
178
In keeping with the
standard discourse on appetites, the typical Californio is a “lover of good eating,”
gambling on Sundays, and “excessive indolence.”
179
Some priests, because of a “delicate
constitution,” cannot perform their duties without their daily ration of chocolate.
180
A
military commander is described as a “little dried-up piece of vanity, who made up in
boastful words what he lacked in physical proportions.”
181
Of course, despite all of these
problems, Robinson finds the compassion within himself to praise the women. For him,
California surpasses all the rest of Mexico in its “display of female beauty.” He writes,
“No part of Mexico can show so large a share of bright eyes, fine teeth, fair proportions,
and beautiful complexions.”
182
Significantly, none of this praise extended beyond the
408
physical. Finally, his assessment of natives was even more condescending than his
occasional remarks about the elite of California society. For example, the church was
“well adapted to captivate the simple mind” of the California native, who, despite this
apparent indoctrination, “indulges to the most criminal excess” in gambling and other
vices on the Sabbath. All of this material suggests troubling tendencies and might have
been torn from the pages of a dozen other narratives including Dana’s, the very person he
was supposedly chastising for his characterizations of local culture.
Perhaps Robinson sounds like Dana in certain passages because, despite his
residence in California, he ultimately wants the same thing Dana wants: conquest. By the
conclusion of the text, Robinson does reveal himself to be more of a nationalist than he
initially pretends, and his loyalty (either to the US or to California) appears to be directed
by financial, rather than cultural or political, concerns. Though there is a more positive
depiction of some Mexicans and Mexican culture in general, those positive elements are
peppered with typical allusions to “indolence” and other stereotypes. By the conclusion
of the book, Robinson casts off any attempt at disguise or diplomacy and baldly states
that California is a “grand region for colonization.”
183
He even lists the areas that are
“unoccupied” and “attainable” for this purpose,
184
then continues into a rehash of the
tropes of Manifest Destiny, claiming, “The northern American population must roll on
southward, and overwhelm, not only California, but other more important states.”
185
But Robinson saves his moment of most fervent advocacy for the last paragraphs
of the book. Here his rhetoric rises to a pitch that alters the tone of the entire text. He
imagines, in a classic gesture, the future of California as a political rescue.
409
…[W]hy not extend the ‘area of freedom’ by the annexation of California?
Why not plant the banner of liberty there, in the fortress, at the entrance of
the noble, the spacious bay of San Francisco? It requires not the far-
reaching eye of the statesman, nor the wisdom of a contemplative mind, to
know what would be the result. Soon its immense sheet of water would
become enlivened with thousands of vessels, and steamboats would ply
between the towns, which, as a matter of course, would spring up on its
shores. […] The whole country would be changed… Everything would
improve; population would increase; consumption would be greater, and
industry would follow.
All this may come to pass; and indeed, it must come to pass, for
the march of emigration is to the West, and naught will arrest its advance
but the mighty ocean.
186
Robinson cleverly fuses the notion of futurity with inevitability, so change in California
becomes imminent and inexorable; it happens “as a matter of course.” Not only is this
change inevitable, but it is entirely positive. In Robinson’s world, “Everything would
improve.” In keeping with this rhetoric, and in order to present a contrast with the
imagery of the present, that future image relies on motion and activity, associated with
the conquerors, as opposed to stagnation and indolence, associated with the Californios.
All of this, of course, is justified by the rhetoric of progress, though the change that he
describes doesn’t mean improvement for everyone involved.
When this kind of commentary is considered alongside some of the more
favorable passages, Robinson looks more troubling, and his usefulness as a counterpoint
to Euro-American rhetoric in the mid-nineteenth century is diminished. Most interesting
in Robinson’s turn of character is his invocation of Alexander Forbes, the English
historian and imperial apologist. In fact, Robinson himself sounds like an apologist, but
one for US imperialism rather than English. In this sense, he was the ultimate insider,
410
bringing change from within the culture, though perhaps for the benefit of those on the
outside, looking in.
Conclusion
In one sense, the massive increase in literary production that occurred during the
years 1841-1846 truly signals a shift in the literature of California. Often writers look
back to this period this moment as the first sign of a burgeoning literature. The literary
deluge that leads up to the Mexican-American War, however, ought to be understood not
as the beginning of California’s literature, but as the amplification of a very old facet of
it. It is hardly accidental that the years between Dana’s call for the conquest of California
(1840) and the onset of the war (1846) were years filled with increasingly vociferous
plans to “rescue” California. If this period signals anything, it signals the eager response
of three imperial nations (France, England, and the US) to Dana’s call to arms, which was
itself a consolidation and reiteration of very old themes.
The incredible variety (and quantity) of these texts should put to rest the notion
that conquest was the fevered dream of a few select individuals, or even of one particular
nation. The writers discussed here come from many segments of society, including not
only the frontiersman typically figured in discussions of Manifest Destiny, but also
merchants, soldiers, naval captains, common sailors, government officials, traveling
diplomats, and writers of romance. Some, like Duflot de Mofras, were actually attracted
to Spanish culture. Others, like Alfred Robinson, had married into the families of
411
powerful California residents. It is true that all were men (excluding Jessie Benton
Frémont’s participation in the writing of John Frémont’s narrative). It is also true that
most wrote from the perspective of a nationalist with something to gain. Still, their
individual differences are perhaps most striking in light of the similar rhetoric that they
produced.
It is important not to flatten the differences between these individuals, however, in
order to make the point about their often similar stances. They wrote from particular
circumstances and, if read carefully, did in fact view California in subtly different ways.
Despite these differences, they each recalled elements of California’s circulating tropes,
and each added to the long genealogy of ahistoricism. This chain of narratives, extending
back into the sixteenth century, was not broken by the Mexican-American War. Instead,
the period that begins just as Robinson published his text signals an added link, an
extension of it.
412
Chapter Five Endnotes

1
His name was also written as “Laplace.” For scholarship on La Place, see John
Dunmore, French Explorers in the Pacific, vol. II (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1969), 228-258 and especially 317-336, which covers the second voyage that includes
California. For a brief consideration of French imperialism during the period, see Rufus
Kay Willys, “French Imperialists in California,” California Historical Society Quarterly
8.2 (1929): 116-129. The most comprehensive overview of France’s connections to
California is Abraham Nasatir, French Activities in California: an Archival Calendar-
Guide (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1945). Material can also be found in
Nasatir’s introduction to a series of articles and documents, “The French Consulate in
California, 1843-1856,” California Historical Society Quarterly 11.3 (1932): 195-223.
2
Cyrille P. T. La Place, “The Report of Captain La Place on His Voyage to the
Northwest Coast and California in 1839,” ed. and trans. George Verne Blue, California
Historical Society Quarterly 18.4 (1939): 315-328. Because the volume that treats La
Place in California was published after the period of this study (Campagne de
Circumnavigation…, Tome Sixiéme, Paris: 1854), I have chosen to discuss his report
instead. While the report is much narrower in scope, it is clear that he wrote it in 1839.
Work on his six-volume government report began when he returned from the voyage in
1840; but, it lasted almost fifteen years. It is not clear when he finished writing the sixth
volume, thus I am reluctant to discuss that material as if it were written without
knowledge of (and uninfluenced by) later events, such as the Mexican-American War.
An excerpt of the California portion of his voyage can be found in Visit of Cyrille Pierre-
Theodore Laplace to Fort Ross and Bodega Bay in August 1839, trans. and ed., Glenn
Farris (Jenner, CA: Fort Ross Interpretative Association, 2006).
3
La Place, “The Report,” 319.
4
For a general account, see Mary Ellen Birkett, “Forging French Foreign Policy in the
Pacific,” French Colonial History 8 (2007): 155-169. For an account of French interest
in Hawaii, see George Verne Blue, “The Project for a French Settlement in the Hawaiian
Islands, 1824-1842,” Pacific Historical Review 2.1 (1933): 85-99.
5
La Place, “The Report,” 323.
6
Ibid, 322.
7
Ibid, 323.
8
Ibid, 324.
413

9
Obviously, most US readers could not have been “taught” by a private (and likely
classified) report written in French for the French government. Instead they likely would
have gleaned their understanding from the many circulating narratives in English.
10
For an introduction and discussion of the report and historical context, see Joseph de
Rosamel, “California Prior to Conquest: A Frenchman’s Views,” ed. and trans. William
Finley Shepard, California Historical Society Quarterly 37.1 (1958): 63-77.
11
Rosamel, “California Prior to Conquest,” 66.
12
Rosamel, “California Prior to Conquest,” 71.
13
Du Petit-Thouars, Voyage of the Venus: Sojourn in California, trans. Charles N.
Rudkin (Fairfield: Ye Galleon Press, 1995). For material on the voyage and the French
in California, see John Dunmore, French Explorers in the Pacific, vol. II (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1969), 283-316; and Abraham Nasatir, French Activities in California: an
Archival Calendar-Guide (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1945); as well as some brief comments
by Rudkin in the introduction to Voyage of the Venus. For material on science, see
Richard G. Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2006), 89-93.
14
Du Petit-Thouars, Voyage of the Venus, 4.
15
Ibid, 18.
16
Ibid, 33.
17
Ibid, 36.
18
Ibid, 39.
19
Ibid, 48.
20
Ibid.
21
Ibid.
22
Ibid, 77.
23
Ibid, 51.
24
Ibid, 51-52.
414

25
Ibid, 9.
26
Ibid, 11.
27
Ibid, 13.
28
Ibid, 43.
29
Ibid, 37.
30
Richard J. Cleveland, A Narrative of Voyages and Commercial Enterprises
(Cambridge: J. Owen, 1842), 210.
31
Cleveland, Narrative of Voyages, 211 and 212.
32
Ibid, 218.
33
For scholarship on Cleveland and background to the voyage, see Roy F. Nichols,
Advance Agents of America Destiny (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1956), 55-82 and 149-156; Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of California, vol. II, 1801-
1824 (San Francisco: A.L. Bancroft & Co, 1885), 10-16; Arrell Morgan Gibson, Yankees
in Paradise: the Pacific Basin Frontier (Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1993), 103-
130 and 171-191; Jean Heffer, The United States and the Pacific: History of a Frontier,
trans. W. Donald Wilson (Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 2002), 35-37; James J.
Rawls, Indians of California: the Changing Image (Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1984),
46-47 and 55; Franklin Walker, A Literary History of Southern California (Berkeley: U
of California P, 1950); Robert Glass Cleland, A History of California: The American
Period (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 13-17. See also: H.W.S. Cleveland, Voyages of a
Merchant Navigator of the Days That Are Past (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1886);
Ralph Delahaye Paine, The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem (New York: Outing Pub. Co.,
1909); Magdalen Coughlin, “Boston Smugglers on the Coast (1797-1821): An Insight
into the American Acquisition of California,” California Historical Society Quarterly
46.2 (1967): 99-120; David Igler, “Diseased Goods: Global exchanges in the Eastern
Pacific Basin, 1770-1850,” American Historical Review 109.3 (2004): 693-719; John
Ryan Fischer, “Domesticating the Pacific Frontier: An Environmental History of the
Conquest of California and Hawai’i,” (PhD diss., University of California Davis, 2008).
34
Cleveland, Narrative of Voyages, 226.
35
Cleveland, Narrative of Voyages, 247.
36
Cleveland, Narrative of Voyages, 248.
415

37
Scholarship on Belcher is relatively scarce. To the extent that he is discussed, most
scholarship focuses on his search for Sir John Franklin in the Arctic. For some
background and introductory material on Belcher and the voyage, see Pierce and
Winslow, eds., H.M.S. Sulphur on the Northwest and California Coasts, 1837 and 1839:
the Accounts of Captain Edward Belcher and Midshipman Francis Guillemard
Simpkinson (Ontario: Limestone Press, 1979). For material on science and the voyage,
see Richard G. Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists (Berkeley: U of California
P, 2006), 71-82. Material on his first voyage to California (with Beechey) can be found
in Barry M. Gough, ed., To the Pacific and Arctic with Beechey (Cambridge: Hakluyt
Society, University Press, 1973). Material regarding Belcher and British interest in
California and especially Oregon can be found in Barry M Gough, The Royal Navy and
the Northwest Coast of North America, 1810-1914 (Vancouver: U of British Columbia P,
1971), 43-48.
38
Edward Belcher, Narrative of a Voyage Round the World, Performed in Her Majesty’s
Ship Sulphur, During the Years 1836-1842, Including Details of the Naval Operations in
China, from Dec. 1840, to Nov. 1841, (London: Henry Colburn, 1843), vol. I, 326-327.
39
Belcher, Narrative of a Voyage, 133.
40
Francis Guillemard Simpkinson, H.M.S. Sulphur on the Northwest and California
Coasts, 1837 and 1839, Pierce and Winslow, eds. (Ontario: Limestone Press, 1979), 117.
Pierce and Winslow offer a brief biographical sketch of Simpkinson.
41
Simpkinson, H.M.S. Sulphur, 132.
42
Ibid, 127.
43
Ibid.
44
Ibid, 128.
45
Belcher, Narrative of a Voyage, 116.
46
Simpkinson, H.M.S. Sulphur, 122.
47
Frederick Marryat, Narrative of the Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet in
California, Sonora, and Western Texas (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1843).
48
For material on Marryat, see Jules Zanger, Foreword to Diary in America, by Frederick
Marryat (London: Nicholas Vane, 1960), 9-32; and Louis J. Parascandola, “Puzzled
which to choose”: Conflicting Socio-Political Views in the Works of Captain Frederick
Marryat (New York: Peter Lang, 1997). There are biographies of Marryat, but they are
416

dated or uneven. See Florence Marryat, Life and Letters of Captain Marryat (Leipzig:
Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1872); and David Hannay, Life of Frederick Marryat (London:
Walter Scott, 1889); Christopher Lloyd, Captain Marryat and the Old Navy (Longmans,
1939); Oliver Warner, Captain Maryat: a Rediscovery (London: Constable, 1953); and
Tom Pocock, Captain Marryat: Seaman, Writer, and Adventurer (Mechanicsburg, PA:
Stackpole Books, 2000). For a discussion of Marryat and nationalism, see Tim Fulford,
“Romanticizing the Empire: the Naval Heroes of Southey, Coleridge, Austen, and
Marryat,” Modern Language Quarterly 60.2 (1999): 190-195.
49
For background on the plagiarism controversy, see Jules Zanger, “Marryat, Monsieur
Violet, and Edward La Salle,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 12.3 (1957): 226-231 as well
as Parascandola, “Puzzled which to choose,” 116. See also the excellent letter that
catalogues many of the most egregious examples, which were still going unnoted by
scholars in the 1950s. Kenneth Scott in Times Literary Supplement, October 1, 1954:
632.
50
Early Modern views were discussed in Chapter One. See, for example, Anthony
Pagden, introduction to Bartolome de las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the
Indies, (New York: Penguin, 1992). See also Thomas Mallon, Stolen Words: the Classic
Book on Plagiarism (New York: Mariner Books, 2001).
51
Marryat, Olla Podrida, vol. III (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, &
Longmans, 1840), 213.
52
Marryat, Olla Podrida, 214.
53
Ibid, 215.
54
Ibid, 233.
55
Ibid, 234.
56
Ibid.
57
Marryat, Narrative of the Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet in California,
Sonora, and Western Texas (Leipzig: Tauchnitz Jun, 1843), 3.
58
Marryat, Narrative of the Travels and Adventures, v.
59
Ibid, vi.
60
Jules Zanger, “Marryat, Monsieur Violet, and Edward La Salle,” 226-231.
417

61
Marryat, Narrative of the Travels and Adventures, 3.
62
This now legendary quote, which first appeared in a Golden State edition of Saturday
Review magazine, has been somewhat decontextualized. The original reads, “Like the
rest of America, California is unformed, innovative, ahistorical, hedonistic, acquisitive,
and energetic—only more so.” Saturday Review 50.5 (1967).
63
For a discussion of this cultural shift, see Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American
Mind, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale UP, 1973), 44-66, especially 51 and 57.
64
Marryat, Narrative of the Travels and Adventures, 111-112.
65
Ibid, 112.
66
Ibid, 118.
67
Ibid, 119.
68
Ibid.
69
Ibid, 120.
70
Ibid.
71
Ibid, 3.
72
Ibid, 130.
73
Ibid, 126.
74
Robert Greenhow, A History of Oregon and California and the Other Territories on the
Northwest Coast of North America (Boston: Charles Little and James Brown, 1844). For
scholarship on Greenhow, see the previous discussion of his work in Chapter Four.
75
Greenhow, A History of Oregon and California, xi.
76
Ibid, x.
77
Ibid, viii.
78
Ibid.
79
Ibid, vii.
418

80
Ibid, viii-ix.
81
For an analysis of Farnham, see Charles B. Churchill, “Thomas Jefferson Farnham: An
Exponent of American Empire in Mexican California,” Pacific Historical Review 60.4
(1991): 517-537. See also Churchill, Adventurers and Prophets: American
Autobiographies in Mexican California, 1828-1847 (Spokane: Arthur H. Clark, 1995).
Some biographical materials can also be found in R. G. Thwaites, ed., Early Western
Travels, 1748-1846, vol. XXVIII (Cleveland: A.H. Clark, 1907), 10-15. Material on
Eliza Farnham, his wife and a well known writer in the nineteenth-century, can be found
in JoAnn Levy, “American Biography: Eliza W. Farnham,” American History 40.2
(2005): 26-30 and 75; and JoAnn Levy, Unsettling the West: Eliza Farnham and
Georgiana Bruce Kirby in Frontier California (Berkeley: Heyday, 2004).
82
Thomas J. Farnham, Travels in the Great Western Prairies, the Anahuac and Rocky
Mountains, and in the Oregon Territory, vol. I (London: Richard Bentley, 1843), iii.
83
Farnham, Travels in the Great Western Prairies, ix.
84
Ibid, iii.
85
Churchill, “Thomas Jefferson Farnham: An Exponent of American Empire in Mexican
California,” ibid, 523-524. Churchill correctly points out that Farnham could see the
Hawaiians with sympathy, at least in part because they were not a threat to US
imperialism. The same might be said of Dana.
86
Thomas Jefferson Farnham, Travels in the Californias, and Scenes in the Pacific Ocean
(New York: Saxton and Miles, 1844).
87
Farnham, Travels in the Californias, 25.
88
Ibid, 53.
89
Ibid, 54.
90
Ibid, 80.
91
Ibid, 87.
92
Ibid, 90 and 82.
93
Ibid, 55.
419

94
Ibid, 66.
95
Ibid, 114.
96
Ibid, 55.
97
Ibid, 111.
98
Ibid, 87.
99
Ibid, 86.
100
Ibid, 79.
101
Ibid, 67.
102
Ibid, 94.
103
Ibid, 108.
104
Psalms 50:10.
105
Farnham, Travels in the Californias, 97.
106
For a discussion of this tendency, see Yolanda Venegas, “The Erotics of Racialization:
Gender and Sexuality in the Making of California,” Frontiers 25:3 (2004): 63-89.
107
Farnham, Travels in the Californias, 116.
108
Ibid, 116.
109
For material on de Mofras and this specific voyage, see Marguerite Eyer Wilbur,
introduction to Travels on the Pacific Coast: a Report from California, Oregon, and
Alaska in 1841, by Eugene Duflot de Mofras (Santa Barbara: Narrative Press, 2004),
reprint, 1937. Additional material can be found in Abraham P. Nasatir, French Activities
in California: an Archival Calendar-Guide (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1945);
as well as Huburt Howe Bancroft, History of the Pacific States of North America, vol.
XVI, California, vol. IV, 1840-1845 (San Francisco: A.L. Bancroft, 1886). General
material on the French in the Pacific can be found in Mary Ellen Birkett, “Forging French
Foreign Policy in the Pacific,” French Colonial History 8 (2007): 155-169; Rufus Kay
Willys, “French Imperialists in California,” California Historical Quarterly 8.2 (1929):
116-129; Annick Foucrier, “The French Presence in the Pacific Ocean and California,
1700-1850,” in The French and the Pacific World, 17
th
-19
th
Centuries: Explorations,
420

Migrations, and Cultural Exchanges (Burlington: Ashgate, 2004); and Marguerite Eyer,
“French Expansion into the Pacific in the 17
th
, 18
th
, and 19
th
Centuries,” Historical
Society of Southern California 11.1 (1918): 5-23.
110
For an extended discussion of this conflict, see William Spence Robertson, “French
Intervention in Mexico in 1838,” The Hispanic American Historical Review, 24.2 (1944):
222-252.
111
As mentioned already in this chapter, Rosamel arrived in California to threaten
Mexico with French naval power.
112
Emphasis in original. Quoted in Wilbur, introduction to Travels on the Pacific Coast,
21.
113
Quoted in Wilbur, introduction to Travels on the Pacific Coast, 18.
114
Quoted in Wilbur, introduction to Travels on the Pacific Coast, 12. This comparison
of Mexicans with the Spanish (with Mexicans having Spanish vices but not Spanish
virtues) becomes a common refrain in writing about California, one well suited to
political goals of the time.
115
Eugene Duflot de Mofras, Travels on the Pacific Coast: a Report from California,
Oregon, and Alaska in 1841, ed. and trans. Marguerite Eyer Wilbur (Santa Barbara:
Narrative Press, 2004; rpt. 1937), 32.
116
Mofras, Travels on the Pacific Coast, 170.
117
Ibid, 146.
118
Ibid, 232.
119
Ibid, 28.
120
Ibid, 209.
121
Ibid, 29.
122
Ibid, 183.
123
Ibid, 39.
124
Ibid, 215.
421

125
Ibid, 209.
126
Ibid, 204.
127
Ibid, 274.
128
Critical material on Fremont is abundant; unfortunately, much of it is marred by a
nationalist perspective. See Larry McMurtry, “Mountain Man,” New York Review of
Books, October 9, 2003 for an assessment of scholarship and legacy. The most recent
book is Tom Chaffin, John Charles Fremont and the Course of American Empire (New
York: Hill and Wang, 2002); for a psychological study, see Andrew Rolle, John Charles
Frémont: Character as Destiny (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).
Material on science can be found in Michael A. Bryson, Visions of the Land: Science,
Literature, and the American Environment from the Era of Exploration to the Age of
Ecology (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), 3-31; and Richard G.
Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists (Berkeley: U of California P, 2006), 163-
184. Literary assessments can be found in Stephen Fender, Plotting the Golden West:
American Literature and the Rhetoric of the California Trail (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1981) and David Wyatt, The Fall into Eden: Landscape and Literary Imagination in
California (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986). Additional material on Fremont’s journey
can be found in Francis P. Farquhar’s History of the Sierra Nevada (Berkeley: U of
California P, 1965), 53-63; and William H. Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire.
Material on Jessie Benton Fremont’s work on the report can be found in Pamela Herr,
Jessie Benton Fremont: a Biography (New York: Franklin Watts, 1987), especially 103-
113. For a much older—though very interesting and highly critical—response to
Fremont and his motives, see Josiah Royce, California: a Study of American Character
(Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2002; rpt. 1886).
129
John Charles Fremont, Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in
the year 1842, and to Oregon and North California in the Years 1843-’44 (Washington:
Gales and Seaton, 1845), 242.
130
Fremont, Report, 243.
131
Ibid, 244.
132
Ibid, 258.
133
For Fremont’s interest in botany, see Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists,
163-164.
134
Ibid, 249.
422

135
Ibid, 238.
136
Ibid, 247-48.
137
This selective naming strategy recalls 18
th
century Spanish texts, where writers
decided the fertile part of California was “new” while the drier part was “old.”
138
Fremont, Report, 236.
139
Ibid, 237. Significantly, both of these locations are in the Mediterranean and recall
sites of classical learning and history. This projection of a past civilizations onto the
present and future map of California, such as Los Angeles as the “New Rome,” became
increasingly common in the 19
th
century.
140
Fremont, Report, 240.
141
Ibid, 246. Emphasis in original.
142
Ibid, 249.
143
Ibid, 255.
144
Ibid, 256.
145
Ibid.
146
Ibid, 263. Passages like this one raise interesting questions about Jessie Benton
Fremont’s role in shaping the narrative and her complicity in this kind of writing.
147
Ibid, 265.
148
Ibid, 269.
149
Ibid, 267.
150
Ibid, 276.
151
Ibid, 275. Emphasis in original. His use of the term “Oregon” here includes a more
expansive geographic region and reflects a common usage at the time.
152
Though neglected for years, Wilkes and the expedition have garnered more attention
recently. The latest book on the expedition is Nathaniel Philbrick, Sea of Glory:
America’s Voyage of Discovery: The U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842 (New York:
423

Viking, 2003). This book, however, hardly mentions California. See also William
Stanton, The Great United States Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1975); Herman J. Viola and Carolyn Margolis, eds.,
Magnificent Voyagers: the U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842 (Washington, DC:
Smithsonian Press, 1985); Barry Alan Joyce, The Shaping of American Ethnography: the
Wilkes Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001);
Beidleman, California’s Frontier Naturalists, 94-110; Goetzmann, Exploration and
Empire, 233-240. Numerous other publications related to the voyage are now available,
including journals by other participants, such as Voyage to the Southern Ocean: the
Letters of Lieutenant William Reynolds from the U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842,
Anne Hoffman Cleaver and E. Jeffrey Stann, eds. (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press,
1988); and Jessie Poesch, Titian Ramsey Peale, 1799-1885, and His Journals of the
Wilkes Expedition (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1961). The most
complete (though dated) source on the many publications of the expedition is Daniel C.
Haskell, The United States Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842 and its Publications 1844-
1874 (New York: New York Public Library, 1942). For a discussion of the official
governmental publication, see Joan Boudreau, “Publishing the U.S. Exploring
Expedition: The Fruits of the Glorious Enterprise,” Printing History 3 (2008): 25-40.
153
For a discussion of Melville and Wilkes, see David Jaffé, The Stormy Petrel and the
Whale: Some Origins of Moby-Dick (Baltimore: Port City Press, 1976). For material on
Cooper, see W.B. Gates, “Cooper’s The Crater and Two Explorers,” American Literature
23.2 (1951): 243-46.
154
Charles Wilkes, Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition, During the Years
1838, 1839, 1840, 1841, and 1842 (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1845), vol. v., 175.
155
For example, Irving published The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828),
The Chronicles of the Conquest of Granada (1829), and Voyages and Discoveries of the
Companions of Columbus (1831) in quick succession.
156
Wilkes, Narrative, 175.
157
Ibid, 176.
158
Ibid, 161.
159
Ibid, 183.
160
Ibid, 156.
161
Ibid, 157.
424

162
Ibid, 171.
163
William Heath Davis, Sixty Years in California: a History of Events and Life in
California (San Francisco: A.J. Leary, 1889), 128.
164
Wilkes, Narrative, 171-172.
165
Ibid, 249.
166
Ibid.
167
Ibid, 250.
168
Ibid, 249 and 250.
169
The best sources on Robinson are Charles B. Churchill, Adventurers and Prophets:
American Autobiographers in Mexican California, 1828-1847 (Spokane: Arthur H.
Clark, 1995), 17-35; and Adele Ogden, “Alfred Robinson, New England Merchant in
Mexican California,” California Historical Society Quarterly 23.3 (1944); 193-218.
Biographical material can also be found in Andrew Rolle, introduction to Life in
California, by Alfred Robinson (Santa Barbara: Peregrine, 1970); Maynard Geiger, ed.,
The Letters of Alfred Robinson to the De la Guerra Family of Santa Barbara, 1834-1873
(Los Angeles: Zamorano Club, 1972); and Adele Ogden, “Business Letters of Alfred
Robinson,” California Historical Society Quarterly, 23.4 (1944): 301-334. For
background on shipping and trade, see Adele Ogden, The California Sea Otter Trade,
1784-1848 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1941); Terrence J. Barragy, “The
Trading Age, 1792-1844,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 76.3 (1975): 197-224; and Bruno
Fritzsche, “‘On Liberal Terms’: The Boston Hide-Merchants in California,” Business
History Review 42.4 (1968): 467-481. For treatments of the Californio society and
marriage, see Louise Pubols, The Father of All: the de la Guerra Family, Power, and
Patriarchy in Mexican California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 105-
147; Albert Hurtado, Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Old California
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), 21-44; María Raquél Casas,
Married to a Daughter of the Land: Spanish-Mexican Women and Interethnic Marriage
in California, 1820-1880 (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2007); and Deborah
Moreno, “‘Here the Society is United’: ‘Respectable Anglos and Intercultural Marriage in
Pre-Gold Rush California,” California History 80.1 (2001): 2-17.
170
Ogden, “Alfred Robinson.” Rolle, introduction to Life in California, v-vi. Material on
the de la Guerras can be found in Pubols, The Father of All.
171
Alfred Robinson, Life in California, ed. Andrew Rolle (Santa Barbara: Peregrine,
1970), 22.
425

172
Robinson, Life in California, 18.
173
Ibid, 7.
174
Ibid, 8.
175
Ibid, 96.
176
Ibid, 74-75.
177
Churchill, Adventurers and Prophets, 25, makes a compelling case for the influence of
finance in some of Robinson’s contradictory remarks. Robinson was most likely
financially adept, given his years in the hide trade. See Bruno Fritzsche, “‘On Liberal
Terms’: The Boston Hide-Merchants in California,” Business History Review 42.4
(1968): 467-481, especially 475.
178
Robinson, Life in California, 11 and 138.
179
Ibid, 55, 67, and 99.
180
Ibid, 65.
181
Ibid, 66.
182
Ibid, 50.
183
Ibid, 150.
184
Ibid, 151.
185
Ibid, 155.
186
Ibid, 157.
426
Conclusion:
Twenty-Four Years After, and One Hundred Years Later
While the beginning of the Mexican-American War doesn’t necessarily mark a
clean shearing point with the literature before 1846, it does at least offer a point of
cultural and historical distinction, a moment when simmering hostilities were formally
declared. The Mexican-American War produced its own particular genre of literature,
which shared some elements with the prior centuries of writing about California,
especially in its concern with racial hierarchies and its need to justify conquest. This later
literature, however, distinguished itself in important ways, perhaps most obviously in that
what was once a literature suggesting, even pleading, for conquest became a literature of
actual war.
1
That war and the subsequent victory by the US also offered to arriving Euro-
Americans (and some Europeans) a ready example of the supposed superiority of their
own culture. Though this war literature arguably begins before the war and ends after it,
the war itself still offers a helpful, if not precisely demarcated, place to conclude the
dissertation.
The Mexican-American War, and its use as a symbol of Yankee triumph, framed
the Gold Rush in a way that magnified stereotypes about the promise of California.
Indeed, because of the rhetoric surrounding California, the region was remarkably
positioned for the events of 1848; the subsequent outpouring of sentiment, metaphor, and
calamity looks almost scripted in retrospect. It was also an event that, though quite
different than the war, produced a staggering amount of literature.
2
427
Using these two cultural moments (the Mexican-American War and the Gold
Rush) as a point of departure, one celebrating conquest (though often in the guise of
“rescue”), the other celebrating wealth (though often in the guise of “opportunity”), I
want to look forward and highlight some of the dominant themes to come. Rather than
argue that literature on California remained unchanged, I want to suggest some of the
ways that the ideas of the years before the war and Gold Rush persisted, especially tropes
about ahistorical California. Despite the swift rise of societies and clubs for the
preservation of history, California never shook its attachment to ahistoricism. Instead,
long-standing narratives were repackaged and redeployed, creating new tropes that still
resonate in writing about California today. Though meant to be suggestive instead of
comprehensive, these examples point to the flexibility and power of these images and
offer potential avenues for further research.
In particular, I want to focus on one text, an emendation to (and revision of)
Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast. Since his book was a focal point of early critical and
imaginative work on California, Dana offers an excellent example of the ways that
images of California endured and adapted amid the changing political and cultural
landscape. Furthermore, because Dana returns to the site of his former travels and
remarks on the changes that have occurred since he last visited, he also offers a perfect
opportunity to see a writer reckon with the old images and ideologies years later,
especially one who played a key role in shaping them. Published in 1869 and called
“Twenty Four Years After,” the new text appeared in a second edition, for which Dana
wrote a new conclusion that replaced his original.
3
428
The addendum provides a fascinating example of the ambivalence and
contradictions in Euro-American attitudes toward California. Indeed, Dana’s new
conclusion is an instance of the writing that emerged after the calamity of the wars and
expansions of the mid-century. This literature often oscillated between extremes of
emotion and revealed uncertainty about a writer’s relationship with the past. In texts like
Dana’s that emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the contradictions
exemplify the recalibration of old images and ideas in California.
Ironically, for someone who will soon lament nearly every change in California,
Dana begins his chapter with bravado, celebrating in typical Yankee fashion the changes
in San Francisco brought by US control. He opens with a recollection of his previous
visit to California, during the years 1835-1836, and describes the landscape with
language that should, by now, sound familiar. He notes the “dreary sand hills,” the
“ruinous presidio,” and the mission “as ruinous as the presidio.” The key terms in his
assessment of the location are “barren” and “deserted,” terms that reflect his scorn and set
up his description of the new California.
4
Dana immediately contrasts this earlier description with the contemporary city of
San Francisco, where he arrives by steamer, a modern mode of transport that suits his
description of the city. The passage deserves quoting at length because of the ceremonial
and symbolic nature Dana gives to his arrival.
On the evening of Saturday, the thirteenth of August, 1859, the superb
steamship Golden Gate, gay with crowds of passengers, and lighting the
sea for miles around with the glare of her signal lights of red, green, and
white, and brilliant with lighted saloons and staterooms, …neared the
entrance to San Francisco, the great center of a worldwide commerce.
Miles out at sea, on the desolate rocks of the Farallones, gleamed the
429
powerful rays of one of the most costly and effective lighthouses in the
world. […] We bore round the point toward the old anchoring ground of
the hide ships, and there, covering the sand hills and the valleys, stretching
from the water’s edge to the base of the great hills, and from the old
presidio to the mission, flickering all over with the lamps of its streets and
houses, lay a city of one hundred thousand inhabitants. Clocks tolled the
hour of midnight from its steeples, but the city was alive from the salute of
our guns…
5
Dana is as invested in extolling the new as he is in reminding the reader of the old; the
desolation of the past acts as counterpoint to the marvels of the present, marvels
exemplified by the words “costly and effective.” Thus, even as he describes the wonders
of San Francisco, he amplifies those elements with flashes of the past. The lights and life
of the city set against the desolation of the sea rocks and the memory of the “old
anchoring ground” dramatizes his arrival. The color and prosperity of this second
passage stands in opposition to the “dreary,” “barren,” “ruinous,” and “deserted” place
that he described at the outset. The brassy notes of Yankee triumph echo throughout the
scene.
And these notes of triumph continue to resonate after Dana arrives. The steamers
transform into “bodies of dazzling light”; Dana walks on “well-built and well-lighted
streets, as alive as by day” even though it’s well past midnight; and he ends his journey
“comfortably abed in a commodious room, in the Oriental Hotel, which stood … on the
filled-up cove, and not far from the spot where [they] used to beach [their] boats from the
Alert.” Euro-Americans, the race that liked to believe it never slept, in contrast to those
whom Dana had described as living in a perpetual siesta, had erected a monument to
progress and hard work on the location of his former toils and within sight of those relics,
430
like the “ruinous presidio,” that reaffirmed the magnificence of their endeavor. It was not
just a marvel, but a symbol of all that he had affirmed twenty-four years earlier.
Furthermore, this parade of Yankee ingenuity extended past transformations of a
purely material nature. Not only could San Francisco impress the reader with its
“storehouses, towers, and steeples…courthouses, theaters, and hospitals…daily
journals…fortresses and lighthouses…wharves and harbor”;
6
it also transformed the
people. Dana tells the story of a “strict and formal deacon” he knew from New England,
a man who had moved to California and whom Dana met on his return there. “He was a
deacon still, in San Francisco,” Dana remarked,
…[T]he same internally, but externally—what a change! Gone was the
downcast eye, the bated breath, the solemn, non-natural voice, the
watchful gait, stepping as if he felt responsible for the balance of the moral
universe! He walked with a stride, an uplifted open countenance, his face
covered with beard, whiskers, and mustache, his voice strong and
natural—and in short he had put off the New England deacon and become
a human being.
7
Passages like this, describing the transformative powers of the West, were common in the
nineteenth century, especially in the years after the Civil War, when increasing
industrialization stoked fears about the feminization of US culture. Men were
encouraged to flee the deadening and constricting forces of polite society to reanimate
their emasculated spirits and physiques on the frontier.
8
In that sense, the passage
reaffirms the tenants of Dana’s opening description. The deacon had transformed himself
with “California life” and exemplified the restorative powers of this new “American”
place. California by that measure was a success, made so by the ingenuity of the Yankee.
431
Yet the undercurrents of dissent and dissatisfaction appear even in what seems
like a celebration of Yankee resolve and gumption. Dana admits, as he gazes from his
hotel room on the morning after his arrival, that the changes were almost too much for a
person to comprehend. He writes, [W]hen I saw all these things, and reflected on what I
once was and saw here, and what now surrounded me, I cold scarcely keep my hold on
reality at all, or the genuineness of anything…”
9
Thus, even as he proudly catalogues the
city outside his window, an eerie light colors his celebration.
These undercurrents become clearer when, ironically, Dana relates an episode
with local historical groups, like the Pioneer Society, who have invited Dana to speak at a
dinner “to celebrate the settlement of San Francisco.” Dana finds that this group of
people, rather than focusing on the past, as one might imagine, has an incredibly short
memory. Dana remarks, with perhaps a measure of incredulity, “Any man is qualified
for election into this society who came to California before 1853. What moderns they
are!” Indeed, Dana is described as a “veteran pioneer” in local newspapers, and he finds
himself reminding his hosts of the enormous changes that had occurred since 1835, like
an old sage, even though he is just over forty.
10
This suggestion of disbelief is only the beginning of Dana’s woes. When he
walks down to a former cove and landing for hide boats, “now filled up and built upon,”
Dana spots an island where he used to gather wood, except that it is “clean shorn of
trees.” The “bare rocks of Alcatraz Island” have been transformed into “an entire
fortress.” For the first time, Dana’s tone modulates into confusion or dismay. He writes,
I have looked at the city from the water, and at the water and islands from
the city, but I can see nothing that recalls the times gone by, except the
432
venerable Mission, the ruinous presidio, the high hills in the rear of the
town, and the great stretches of the bay in all directions.
This confusion alone suggests a shift in attitude from the brassy pride of the steamer’s
arrival, but the passage is also notable for the change in his evaluation of the architecture
and landscape of the past. Suddenly, the mission, which had initially been “ruinous,”
becomes “venerable.” Rather than the “dreary sand hills,” he replaces the “steep and
barren” geography behind the town with “high hills,” a description that, if not expressing
veneration, certainly refrains from the scorn of the earlier passage. These vacillations
hint at the instability of Dana’s former confidence, early tremors that signal an oncoming
collapse.
The collapse that eventually occurs draws its power from the very foundations of
Dana’s faith in “costly and effective” development and his overwhelming desire to
believe that change has brought benefits to California. Modernity itself, that onrushing,
implacable force that Dana and other writers had championed in books about California,
suddenly sounds less benevolent, less beneficial. When Dana rides to visit the mission
again, he finds it surrounded by “the most uncongenial, rapidly growing modernisms; the
hoar ages surrounded by the brightest, slightest, and rapidest of modern growths.” In this
remarkable transformation, two of the very things that Dana had earlier praised—the light
and speed of San Francisco—become slanders against modernity. Here, when he says
that the “modern growths” were the “brightest” and “rapidest,” it’s clear, even without
the aid of “slightest,” that he uses those words in a pejorative sense, that the growths were
cheap and facile, that they oppose the impressive “hoar ages,” that they recall not grace
and strength, but cancer.
433
When Dana walks down to the wharves and finds a stack of hides, the
transformation is complete. The sight of the object of his former labors, like Proust’s
madeleine, sends him into a reverie.
Here was something to feelingly persuade me what I had been, to recall a
past scarce credible to myself. I stood lost in reflection. […] How they
called up to my mind the months of curing at San Diego, the year and
more of beach and surf work… I was in a dream of San Diego, San
Pedro—with its hills so steep for taking up goods, and its stones so hard
on our bare feet—and the cliffs of San Juan! All this, too, is no more!
The entire hide business of California is of the past, and to the present
inhabitants of California a dim tradition. […] [N]ow not a vessel pursues
the—I was about to say dear—the dreary, once hated business of gathering
hides upon the coast, and the beach of San Diego is abandoned, and its
hide houses have disappeared.
11
The irony of Dana, a man who once summarized the history of California in half a dozen
disdainful pages, lamenting the short memories of California’s new residents is almost as
incredible as his newfound love of the work of hide collectors, work that he “once hated.”
His vacillation here, his inclination to say “dear” when he once thought it “dreary,”
indicates the depth of his transformation. From this moment forward, his points of
reference realign; the things he once despised will become cherished, and those things he
once cherished, he will despise.
The steamer itself offers an example of Dana’s new attitude. Once a symbol of
modernity with its speed and independence from ocean conditions, the steamer becomes
a symbol for all that has changed for the worse in California. Even though he
acknowledges that the steamer completes “in two or three hours” the same course
“which, in the Alert, under canvas, with head tides, variable winds, and sweeping currents
to deal with, took … full two days,” Dana still laments the steamer as “an unromantic,
434
sail-less, spar-less, engine-driven hulk!”
12
Indeed, according to Dana’s new system of
values, the rewards of modernity—speed and independence—are insufficient to
recompense the losses. Dana, if he is to be believed, wants transit that takes longer and
requires more effort; rather than “costly and effective,” he longs for cheap and wasteful.
Compounding the ironic reversals, Dana makes these comments as he gazes at
Santa Barbara and describes the place with language that reinforces his remarkable shift
in tone.
[Y]et little is it altered—the same repose in the golden sunlight and
glorious climate, sheltered by its hills; and then, more remindful than
anything else, there roars and tumbles upon the beach the same grand surf
of the great Pacific as on that beautiful day when the Pilgrim, after her
five months’ voyage, dropped her weary anchors here; the same bright
blue ocean, and the surf making just the same monotonous, melancholy
roar, and the same dreamy town, and gleaming white mission…
13
The fact that Dana calls Santa Barbara “dreamy” reveals more about his total shift in
attitude toward the past than whole pages of description. That single word implies a soft
focus that starkly contrasts with the sweat, gales, and subservience of his earlier journey.
Along with “dreamy,” the “repose” of the town recalls Spanish-Mexican California’s
frequent association with sleep and stillness, as opposed to the constant activity of
Yankee San Francisco. However, here the recumbent pose, “golden sunlight,” and
“glorious climate” point toward the suddenly positive aspects of inactivity, another
referendum on the supposed benefits of modernity and Dana’s earlier rhetoric of
efficiency.
Activity and its frequent partner, change, usually appear as benefits of the forces
of modernity. Yet this, too, could be turned on its head. Just as important to this passage
435
as its “dreamy” setting is the fact that it remains unchanged. Five times in the passage,
Dana emphasizes that the town is “the same” as it was before, that the points of reference
remain just as he remembered them. Even the adjective “monotonous,” applied to the sea
in this context, seems to have a beneficent aura, suggesting a dependable and comforting
repetition. Where his prior description of San Francisco dwelled on the drama of change,
the old and desolate contrasted with the new and vibrant, this description of Santa
Barbara lingers on the glories of almost total stagnation. When Dana says that it has
hardly been altered, he expresses relief rather than disgust.
A reader who recalls Dana’s earlier writing ought to be forgiven for feeling
confused about these reversals in tone. Indeed, Dana himself was thoroughly confused.
On occasion, he tries to reassert the old paradigm, comparing the “enterprising Yankee
nation” to the “lifeless Mexican town” and talking about how the residents do “just
enough to keep the town from going backwards,” but the old paradigm won’t hold. It
collapses just as he reasserts it, leaving Dana to wrestle with his conflicted emotions. He
walks the beach and watches the waves, remarking,
How softening is the effect of time! It touches us through the affections. I
almost feel as if I were lamenting the passing away of something loved
and dear—the boats, the Kanakas, the hides, my old shipmates! Death,
change, distance lend them a character which makes them quite another
thing from the vulgar, wearisome toil of uninteresting, forced manual
labor.
14
Though he acknowledges his attachment to the past, he remains unable to reconcile his
feelings of attachment with “the vulgar, wearisome toil” that he still remembers. Even
the people from the voyage, the Kanakas and his old shipmates, he remembers “as if”
they were “something loved and dear,” and even this statement he further qualifies by
436
saying that he “almost” feels it. His continued inability to comprehend these emotions
demonstrates his uncertain relationship with the past and the instability of his ideologies
in the face of these emotional storms.
In San Diego, Dana reaches his emotional nadir. After continuing southward
down the coast, passing San Pedro and San Juan Capistrano, he stops in San Diego, the
site of his former hide house on the beach. The passage is as remarkable for its
unvarnished despair as was the arrival in San Francisco for its brassy triumph.
I wished to be alone, so I let the other passengers go up to the town, and
was quietly pulled ashore in a boat, and left to myself. The recollections
and the emotions all were sad, and only sad. “Fugit, interea, fugit
irreparabile tempus.” The past was real. The present, all about me, was
unreal, unnatural, repellant.
15
Dana, the reserved, blue-blooded lawyer from New England, uncorks the bottled despair
from previous scenes. Not only does he release his emotions, but, perhaps for the first
time in the chapter, they seem to get the upper hand. And they push him further
downward.
The quote, from Virgil’s Georgics, glosses the themes of the situation: time’s
passage, its implacability in the face of human transience. These lines certainly express
his dismay, but the rawest emotions, and the most radical backtracking, come in the two
sentences that follow Virgil: “The past was real. The present, all about me, was unreal,
unnatural, repellant.” Here Dana sets up a binary relationship that sounds as if it were
written by another person. The same man who meticulously crafted an image of
California as a place in desperate need of a Yankee future suddenly throws his desire
437
headlong into the past and spits out his disgust for the present. Not only does he long for
the past, but he also claims that the past was “real” while the present was “unreal.”
Like his emotional realignment, this shift to validate the reality of the past over
the unreality of the present highlights the coming of a new way of describing California
and its history. The boosters and pageant organizers of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century might have read the first edition of Dana’s book with appreciation, but
they would have read these words as if they had been delivered by a prophet. Dana
anticipates the longing of generations to come in California, both those who produced
nostalgia and those who consumed it.
For example, in a passage remarkable for the ways it mimics the actions of
nostalgia peddlers to come, Dana assuages his present pain with a recreation of the past.
Like those hawkers of longing for “days gone by,” Dana responds to his discomfort with
the present by drifting into a reverie of the past, a moment that seemed more “real” to
him. He writes,
I saw the big ships lying in the stream, the Alert, the California, the
Rosa…; the poor dear old Pilgrim, the home of hardship and hopelessness;
the boats passing to and fro; the cries of the sailors at the capstan or falls;
the peopled beach; the large hide houses, with their gangs of men; and the
Kanakas interspersed everywhere.
16
In this Whitman-esque catalogue, Dana’s vision, colored by the dreamy lens he uses to
imagine the past, even “hardship and hopelessness” take on the patina of nostalgia and
become something desired. In his efforts to soften the rough edges of his memories,
Dana’s catalogue even resembles the pageants and parades that would dominate images
of California as the nineteenth century ended. Though the material of his reverie is
438
different than most of the booster materials to come, the instinct, the urge to turn to
California’s past as a method for dealing with dismay in California’s present, resonates
with writing that occurs years later.
Ultimately, Dana admits that the world he reckons up from the past cannot
survive. The vision of his former life founders on the shoals of the present, and he is
shaken from his dream by the recognition of the silent wreckage around him.
All, all were gone! Not a vestige to mark where one hide house stood.
The oven, too, was gone. I searched for its site, and found, where I
thought it should be, a few broken bricks and bits of mortar. I alone was
left of all, and how strangely was I here! What changes to me! Where
were they all? Why should I care for them—poor Kanakas and sailors, the
refuse of civilization, the outlaws and beachcombers of the Pacific! Time
and death seemed to transfigure them.
17
In one sense, Dana struggles to confront and come to terms with loss. It isn’t exactly
emptiness that he faces, but the remnants of people and places he recalls. Even worse,
the few vestiges that remain offer evidence of his solitary existence rather than comfort.
One way to read Dana’s lament is that it recalls the medieval poetic tradition of
“ubi sunt,” and that Dana rehearses this rhetorical mode because of the loss of friends and
familiar surroundings.
18
The problem with this reading is that, while it might easily have
been familiar to Dana, a highly educated and literate writer, it is contradicted by the lines
that immediately follow: “Why should I care for them—poor Kanakas and sailors, the
refuse of civilization, the outlaws and beachcombers of the Pacific!” Dana reacts to his
longing by questioning the value of what he desires. Dana doesn’t really mourn the loss
of people because he can’t decide if those people are truly worth mourning.
439
Another possible reading is that Dana simply mourns for his youth, an
interpretation strengthened by his dismay at his own alteration when he exclaims, “What
changes to me!” He associates his youth with the prior visit to California, and therefore
the physical change in the place he associates with these memories forces him to confront
his own mortality. This sentiment falls in line with later comments about the futility of
status in staunching the loss of youth: “To rally myself by calling to mind my own better
fortune and nobler lot…was impossible.” Despite staking so much of his fortune on his
family and reputation, Dana admits that even his blue blood can’t save him from this
malaise. Thus, even though he discards the human “refuse” from his past, he concedes
that his own Boston Brahmin nobility won’t rescue him from the “depression” that
pushes him further downward. In this sense, he laments that all people, no matter how
blue-blooded, waste away just as everyone else does. It’s not perhaps the most noble
sentiment, and certainly not the most egalitarian, but it falls in line with proverbial
notions about human transience.
This interpretation, however, weakens when read alongside later commentary.
For example, a clue to a more powerful source of his malaise comes when Dana remarks
on the lack of animals. He writes, “Even the animals are gone—the colony of dogs, the
broods of poultry, the useful horses; but the coyotes bark still in the woods, for they
belong not to man, and are not touched by his changes.” The key phrase, “his changes,”
suggests that not only is change a factor in his dismay, but changes caused by people. In
Dana’s vision, the so-called natural environment, here represented by coyotes, exists in a
separate sphere, not affected by the human influence and, just as importantly, not
440
participating in altering the world either. Dana even distinguishes the domestic animals
from the wild as he makes his point. Thus, Dana laments not simply the passage of time
(though that certainly troubles him), but agents of change connected to people, forces that
people control or set in motion.
Dana won’t win much sympathy from twenty-first century readers when he calls
the Kanakas and sailors “the refuse of civilization,” but his uncertainty about his feelings
for them, his questions about their value, touch the core of the problem for Dana and
other Euro-American writers in California. Despite what Dana says, time and death had
not, in fact, transfigured the people of California’s past; Dana himself had, according to
his vision of the world. He had transfigured them, consciously or unconsciously, because
he had changed his relationship to the present.
The ideological narrative that Dana had previously believed without much
reservation was one that validated the cultural, political, and technological changes in
California, putting its faith in the future. Dana had not only believed it; he had been one
of its exponents and creators. Yet, upon returning to that future he had imagined twenty-
four years prior, he discovered that it was not as he had envisioned. Even as he walked
among the “well-lit streets” and dined in staterooms, the material benefits of this
narrative, he felt an incredible longing for that which had been displaced and destroyed.
This deeply confounds him because it runs counter to everything he has been taught
about “progress.” He cannot comprehend why he should long for something when it has
been replaced by something else that is supposedly better. It is not logical, Dana laments,
to long for toil and inefficiency or for the trash of civilization, when one has the benefits
441
of ease, order, and good manners. One does not lament the relics under the rubble when
one has erected the balustrades and parapets of a grand civilization on top of them.
Instead, Dana seems to mourn the loss of something more difficult to pinpoint, a
malaise increasingly common in the US and other industrializing nations. Between the
time of Dana’s second visit in 1859 and the year that Dana published “Twenty-Four
Years After,” in 1869, the violence and upheaval of the Civil War roiled the US. Not
once does Dana mention it. Indirectly, he alludes to the conflict when he includes a brief
notice, at the conclusion of the narrative, about the burning of his old ship, the Alert, by a
confederate steamer. The destruction of his ship by fire Dana characterizes as “a victim
in the cause of her country,” thus folding the last mention of his sailing life into national
narratives and marking that remembrance with a ceremonial pyre.
19
Recalling the
background of the Civil War in Dana’s narrative perhaps accounts for some of the
despondency that occasionally overtakes the writing. Indeed, Dana’s avoidance of the
Civil War, other than his one oblique allusion, suggests its psychological significance,
rather than insignificance, in his consciousness at the time of composition, revision, or
publication. Yet, the Civil War remains only part of the context for Dana’s reaction to
the world he encountered on his return to California.
20
In 1869, the extending arms of the transcontinental railroad met at Promontory
Summit, in the Utah territory. While the railroad was not yet complete when Dana
visited California for the second time (in 1859), the pressure of the changes it would
bring were already being felt in California, especially by the time of the second edition’s
publication. The notion of being able to travel from one side of the US to the other in
442
days rather than months, and in ease rather than peril, conjured up confusing images of
the future. Those like Dana who had experienced the difficulties of sailing around the tip
of South America or who had crossed the continent by land were forced to reckon with a
society that significantly eased practical restrictions for journeying to California.
In many ways, the transcontinental railroad, however, marked the culmination of
changes, rather than the beginning. Much had already changed in the nearly quarter
century since Dana had seen the California coast. A railroad had been built across the
isthmus of Panama, significantly lowering barriers to travel and decreasing travel time.
Dana’s own manner of moving from port to port was, as already mentioned, vastly
different. When in port, instead of having to barter with the captain to obtain permission
to leave the boat or having to walk to a rancho where he might procure horses, he simply
took one of the express carriages into town. Ironically, in response to these conveniences
of the modern era, Dana responded as many other people in the US and other
industrialized nations responded: he sank into despondency.
Instead of seeing these changes as the herald of a new and better era, which is
what the rhetoric of progress claimed they were, Dana saw them as harbingers of
destruction; the old way of doing things, which he now saw as poetic, romantic, and
superior, was vanishing under the crushing wave of modernization, a change for the
worse. After suffering the rigors of a regular seaman on a trade ship, we might expect
that Dana would be thrilled to have the easier passage afforded by changes not only in
technology but also in government and culture. These were the very changes that he
championed in his book. Instead, Dana yearns for the very opposite. He longs for the
443
struggles of the “real” life of a sailor rather then the comforts of a well respected (and
well paid) lawyer.
21
Even more ironic is the fact that he pines for the very culture
(Mexican-Spanish) that he scorned in the first edition of Two Years Before the Mast.
Dana, of course, was not alone in his dismay with rapid industrialization. In the
years after the Civil War, this sentiment became increasingly common as writers turned
their focus from the war itself to the remarkable infrastructure that surrounded them.
22
These changes were particularly evident in the northern and eastern parts of the country,
but the western part of the US, and especially California, also industrialized on an
incredible scale.
23
Principally this was the result of mining operations that fueled not
only the massive increases in population, but also, working in tandem with capitalism,
very rapid advances in machinery, which then spread to other facets of society, such as
agriculture. Because California was still considered a “frontier” state, a place in
imaginative opposition to the northeast, the presence of such rapid industrial growth was
both more evident to Euro-Americans and more disconcerting.
24
Therefore, a more interesting interpretation is that Dana gives us a classic
example of Renaldo Rosato’s “imperialist nostalgia,” in which people mourn for cultural
changes that they themselves helped to precipitate.
25
In the same way that Euro-
American elites would eventually mourn the loss of the Spanish-Mexican culture that
they helped to undermine, Dana decries the “modern” clap-trap that surrounds the
“venerable ruins” of missions, forgetting that his book contributed to the rhetoric of
conquest that built the same clap-trap he decries; and, furthermore, those “ruins” that he
444
finds so appealing were the same ones that he used as examples of architectural decay in
his first version of the book.
Despite the scholarly focus on late nineteenth-century boosters as originators of
this kind of ambivalence in California, Dana foreshadows not only their intense
uncertainty about modernity, but also their almost pathological longing for the past

.
26
As
Dana says near the end of the narrative, “The past was real. The present, all about me,
was unreal, unnatural, repellant.” This attitude, that the past was somehow superior
because it was more “real” in comparison to an “unreal” present, only increased as the
twentieth century approached and industrialization increased. Ironically, the general
fawning over the past increased in almost direct proportion to bombastic rhetoric about
the glories of the future. As the century marched onward, the presence of ports, railroads,
electricity, water projects, and finally the automobile profoundly affected the culture and
even the geography of California. And each of these developments was heralded as the
key to a life of modernity and progress, while at the same time bitterly denounced as
devastations for the “real” culture of California.
27
Because of the way his first and second text straddle the mid-century period in
California, Dana offers insight into the transition from the pre-war narratives of early
nineteenth-century California to the booster narratives that emerge in the post-war
landscape of the 1870s.
28
If migrations of the prior period were driven chiefly by
mercantile expansion, with hide and tallow as the primary fuel in that economy,
migrations in the latter period were increasingly driven by tourism and real estate, with
the railroad as the primary fuel in that economic engine. In fact, as Dana’s own story
445
suggests, it was the ease of travel, which the railroad and other technologies provided,
that, perhaps more than anything else, initiated both rapid population increases and,
paradoxically, a concomitant revulsion toward the by-products of that increase in
population.
Despite Protestant fascination with hard work, it was not exactly the hardship of
his years as a seaman that Dana missed; to say that he was a masochist who yearned for
the misery of his former duties exaggerates the point. What Dana actually missed was
the idea of hardship, the notion that the toil he associated with his former life somehow
purified his purposes, that hard work made the earlier life more noble, in a sense more
“real.” Here emerges the moral connection between Euro-American attitudes toward
work and their reaction to existing cultures in California whom they saw as lazy. Euro-
American writers associated work with ingrained ideologies (often, but not always,
Protestant) and saw this devotion to work as evidence of their superiority over other races
and cultures. Thus, not working hard enough was truly a morally degenerative existence
for them, threatening to undermine their own justification for status.
Ironically, Dana and others like him discovered that the fruits of their labor in
California (conveniences like rail and steam travel, new houses and roads, cities with
restaurants and entertainment) were the very things eroding their claim to hard-working
lifestyles. The frontier could no longer be a “proving ground” if one arrived via Pullman
car or steamship while eating pheasant and drinking sherry. Two Years Before the Mast
became Two Weeks Before the Dining Car.
29
Thus, these writers found themselves in a
very confusing position, where each step forward in their conversion of Spanish-Mexican
446
indolence to Protestant productivity was simultaneously a step back to that vision of
California that they sought to eradicate. In a sense, then, Dana missed the very things
that he tried to destroy in his first narrative: California as a site of languor and stasis.
It’s important to recall that writing about California had frequently evoked both
the future and the past, and that one was often used in context with the other. Thus, Dana
is not a key figure in this shift of perception simply because he writes about the past in
context with the present. As previously discussed, for those writers prior to Dana, and for
Dana himself in his first edition of Two Years Before the Mast, the past was a necessary
tool, a foil, to show the promise of the future. Dana’s “Twenty Four Years After,”
however, reveals a moment when the value of the future relative to the value of the past
became uncertain and confusing, when writers from this imperialist tradition became
disenchanted with the present and felt less confident about the future. At this moment,
they turned back to the past with longing and regret, and created a very popular template
for California writing to come.
This shift becomes clear when looking at the interacting temporal elements of
Dana’s new conclusion. At least three imaginative spaces operate simultaneously in
Dana’s text: the place he remembers from 1835-36, the place he thought California would
become “in the hands of an enterprising race,” and the place he sees in 1859. When he
returns to California, expecting to find that future he imagined during his first voyage,
he’s disappointed, and that disappointment (in concert with other forces) causes him to
turn back to the past with nostalgia. This reaction—hoping for the future, finding it
disappointing in the present, and turning to the past for solace—becomes a common
447
template for writing about California. Of course, expectation and disappointment had
long been a theme in California, dating back to the sixteenth century. The difference here
is the way that his disappointment emerges from comparisons with a remembered or
imagined past. Prior to Dana’s “Twenty Fours Years After,” writers typically used the
past to demonstrate the superiority and desirability of the future. Suddenly that equation
was turned on its head, with superiority and desirability located in the past, upstaging the
present.
This template did not produce, however, uncomplicated reappraisals of the past
and future. Instead, it produced frequent, jarring fluctuations of emotion and allegiance,
in one moment longing for the past and in the next loathing it, in one passage praising the
future and in the next fearing its consequences. It is this uncertainty that is evident
throughout Dana’s new conclusion and which resonates in later texts about California.
Indeed, writing about California from this point onward is marked by an increasing
tendency to champion the future as well as the past. Furthermore, writers put their faith
in the future as a compensation for something irrevocably lost in the past.
Consider, for example, Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872), a book that mocks both
the West and Eastern tendencies to see the region as exotic. The narrator sarcastically
describes “tourists” who “go into ecstasies” describing California, and throughout the
narrative, the older, wiser narrator derides a naive protagonist who sees California as
enthralling.
30
Yet, this supposedly jaundiced narrator also has this to say about San
Francisco during the Gold Rush:
It was a driving, vigorous, restless population in those days. … It was the
only population of its kind that the world has ever seen gathered together,
448
and it is not likely that the world will ever see its like again. For, observe,
it was an assemblage of two hundred thousand young men—not
simpering, dainty, kid-gloved weaklings, but stalwart, muscular, dauntless
young braves… No women, no children, no gray and stooping
veterans,—none but erect, bright-eyed, quick-moving, strong-handed
young giants—the strangest population, the finest population, the most
gallant host that ever trooped down to the startled solitudes of an
unpeopled land. […] It was a splendid population—for all the slow,
sleepy, sluggish-brained sloths staid at home …
31
Twain’s narrator, though able to pull the veil from peddlers of nonsense about the West,
still looks back to the past in San Francisco with evident nostalgia. His longing for this
vanished place and moment, saturated with references to masculinity and youth, full of
ecstasies and exoticisms, makes plain how the past realigned for writers after the mid-
century. Just as clear as the narrator’s longing for his vision of San Francisco is his sense
that it no longer exists, that it remains beyond the reach of his contemporary society.
Indeed, his sense that this historical and cultural moment will never return magnifies the
narrator’s longing for it. The passage would be striking enough in any guidebook, but the
fact that it appears in a send-up of the West, and without a trace of ironic distance, makes
it all the more notable.
Twain wasn’t the only writer confused about his relationship to California and the
future imagined there. Walt Whitman, in his poem “Facing West from California’s
Shores,” strikes a similar note of unease and uncertainty. Like Dana, Whitman begins in
a place of inquisitive exuberance, locating himself at the symbolic terminus of Euro-
American continental expansion. “Facing west from California’s shores, / Inquiring,
tireless, seeking what is yet unfound, / I, a child, very old, over waves, towards the house
of maternity, the land of migrations, look afar…” At the outset, the poem replicates
449
many of the features of the pre-war narratives, especially with its focus on the horizon
and the future-directed implications of that perspective. When the poem concludes,
however, after a journey “round the earth,” the speaker sounds far less certain in his
excitement. His last lines, delivered in parenthesis, like a transcription of some unformed
but nagging afterthought, reveal his uncertainty. “(But where is what I started for so long
ago? / And why is it yet unfound?)” This slide into disillusionment, placed by the
speaker in a global context, again recalls the disappointment of Dana as he remembers an
older California. The poem’s comparison of past to present is implied rather than overt,
yet the speaker clearly locates his dismay with the present in comparison with a desire
that motivated him in the past.
Though it became very popular, this was not a narrative that all writers embraced.
After the Mexican-American War, voices outside the European and Euro-American
tradition became more common. John Rollin Ridge’s novel about a Mexican bandit in
California, Joaquin Murieta (1854), does not lament the death of a once-promising past
in California. The narrator of that story certainly complains about the indignities of the
US takeover in California, but those complaints feel quite different in tone (and emerge
from different social contexts) than the complaints of Dana and his cohorts.
32
The
narrator of Joaquin Murieta, in addition to supporting the Californio bandits rather than
their Euro-American victims, tells a remarkably violent tale. It is a tale of retribution, of
payment for past wrongs. Dana’s lament looks impossibly patrician in comparison;
indeed, one has the sense that Dana would have categorized as “refuse” the very people
that Joaquin Murieta champions.
450
The texts of elite Spanish-Mexican families present a more complicated case.
These narratives, such as The Squatter and the Don or the testimonios of Californio
families from the late nineteenth century, do look back to the past with nostalgia, but
their relationship to that past remains fundamentally different from that of Euro-
Americans, in part because they had not staked so much of their happiness on a fantasy
future and in part because they had not sought to supplant Spanish-Mexican culture.
They had, however, often leveraged their social and economic status by standing on the
backs of Native Californians. Many of the characters in The Squatter and the Don are
deeply invested in representations of their own status as distinguished from that of Native
Californians, if they are even conscious of their existence. One character’s comment
typifies the situation and suggests this relationship between elite Californios and the
Native Americans: “‘You have never dressed yourself without someone to help you at
home, whether it was my squaw, your squaw, or Mamma’s or the other girls, or whether
it was your own Madame Halier—you always had an attendant.’”
33
This kind of attitude wasn’t unique to the characters of the novel. Other members
of this elite class were similarly conservative, deeply invested in their racial superiority
over Native Americans, and blind to the claims of Natives in their own homes, which
proved an especially ironic situation when these same elites complained about unjust
treatment at the hands of rapacious Euro-Americans. Men like Mariano Vallejo and José
de la Guerra built remarkable commercial empires in California before the war, and they
did so in part as a consequence of their abilities to leverage certain racial and social
structures.
34
Arguing that the lives of elite Californios often undermined their complaints
451
about post-war injustice does not mean, however, that they can be equated with Boston
merchants. Clearly, Vallejo and Dana come from different cultural backgrounds; and it is
just as clear that the cultural narrative that US conquest laid over the map of California
favored Dana more than it did Vallejo. In retrospect, it is remarkable that Vallejo’s name
is remembered at all.
35
For a certain strain of California writing, however, Dana’s narrative remained
very seductive. In order to illustrate the lasting attraction of these themes, it is helpful to
return to a writer with whom the dissertation began: Joan Didion and her collection
Slouching toward Bethlehem. Roughly one hundred years after Dana returned to
California and reevaluated his understanding of that place, Joan Didion undertook a
similar project. Despite more than a century between them, the idea of rupture in
California’s past and its relation to an ahistorical present had not disappeared. If
anything, it was stronger.
In her essay, “Notes from a Native Daughter,” Didion returns to her hometown,
Sacramento, and struggles to come to terms with the place she finds there. Though her
relationship with California is different than Dana’s (a former home instead of a former
workplace), her reactions are remarkable for the extent to which they recall his. Note for
example her description of returning to Sacramento and what it means for understanding
herself in the present:
Going back to California is not like going back to Vermont, or Chicago;
Vermont and Chicago are relative constants, against which one measures
one’s own change. All that is constant about the California of my
childhood is the rate at which it disappears.
36
452
Like Dana, she laments the speed with which California shifts under her feet, unmooring
her from any solid connection to the past. Like Dana, when she returns to California,
Didion looks for the places she remembers and struggles to locate them. She writes, “It is
hard to find California now, unsettling to wonder how much of it was merely imagined or
improvised…”
37
The “now” in this passage suggests that at some earlier point, California
must have been easier to find, but this notion is undercut by others who wrote generations
before her. Just as Whitman looks for a place (psychological as much as physical) that he
never quite locates, Didion remarks on how “the destination flickers chimerically on the
horizon, ever receding, ever diminishing.”
38
Just as Dana was troubled by what he found
in California, confounded by both his exhilaration in modernity and his dismay with its
results, Didion writes,
California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian
loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some
buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work out here,
because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of
continent.
39
In this passage she also echoes Whitman, locating her sense of hope in the ability to
continue continental expansion. Like Whitman, she is “troubled by some buried but
ineradicable suspicion” that confronts her in California.
Most troubling for Didion, perhaps, is the sense that the present in California is
somehow disconnected from the past. She concludes her essay with a story about a
wealthy local family and the relics left on the landscape they inhabited. More interesting
than the story itself, however, is her reaction to it. Speaking of her negotiation with the
past and future in Sacramento, she writes,
453
That is a story my generation knows; I doubt that the next generation will
know it… Who would tell it to them? […] “Old” Sacramento to them
will be something colorful, something they read about in Sunset. They
will probably think that the Redevelopment has always been there, that the
Embarcadero, down along the river, with its amusing places to shop and
its picturesque fire houses turned into bars, has about it the true flavor of
the way it was. […] They will have lost the real past and gained a
manufactured one…
40
The sense of loss, and the way this loss hinges on a disconnection with the past, recalls
Dana’s frequent laments as he tried to find traces of his former life in California. The
passage also echoes Dana in its fixation on a “true” or “real” past. Indeed, the key word
of the passage is arguably “manufactured” because it brings to the foreground not only
the loss of the “real” past, but the notion that what has replaced it has been invented, a
cheap version created for amusement or decoration.
It may be unsettling for Didion to consider how Sacramento had changed in the
years since she left there for Los Angeles and, later, New York. Far more unsettling,
however, is the fact that for Didion Sacramento of the 1950s and earlier was a relative
constant, that the mansions erected in wheat fields during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century somehow symbolized stability and tradition. Ironically, these were the
same structures that heralded change and destruction for Dana. In fact, the new buildings
that Dana laments likely came before the ones that Didion remembers, and were
themselves buried by later structures. But Dana participates in this mythography, too.
The missions, adobe towns, and hide houses he fondly remembers on the coast of
California were not signs of stability in California but evidence of radical cultural
upheaval, when the social order of the Native Americans was reinscribed by Spanish
454
colonization. Thus, even in their gestures toward history in California, writers continued
to elide critical components of the past.
455
Chapter Six Endnotes

1
Of course, this literature included commentary on Texas, New Mexico, and other parts
of the Mexican territory, as well as California. For an excellent discussion of this
literature, see Robert W. Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas: the Mexican War in
the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); and Shelley
Streeby, “American Sensations: Empire, Amnesia, and the US-Mexican War,” American
Literary History 13.1 (2001): 1-40. See also Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest
Destiny: the Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1981). This war literature also showed a marked shift from the multi-
lingual writing of earlier centuries to dominance by English-language texts and an
increase in fiction as opposed to non-fiction.
2
See Michael Kowalewski, ed., Gold Rush: a Literary Exploration (Berkeley: Heyday,
1997); J.S. Holliday, The World Rushed In: the California Gold Rush Experience (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1981); Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream,
1850-1915 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973), 49-68.
3
Dana actually visited California in 1859, even though he didn’t publish the account until
1869. In part, this may have been due to copyright laws; Dana’s text reverted back to
him in 1869. It may also have been due to difficulties of publishing during the
intervening Civil War. While scholars remain uncertain about exactly when the new
chapter was composed, he appears to have written part of it in 1859 and part of it in 1869.
See Jeffrey Hotz, Divergent Visions, Contested Spaces: The Early United States through
the Lens of Travel (New York: Routledge, 2006), 207.
4
Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast (New York: Penguin, 1981), 342.
5
Dana, Two Years Before the Mast, 342-343.
6
Ibid, 343-344.
7
Ibid, 345.
8
See Joseph L. Coulombe, Mark Twain and the American West (Columbia: U of
Missouri P, 2003), 72-73. See also Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream,
1850-1915 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973), 64; and Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America:
a Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996), 44.
9
Dana, Two Years Before the Mast, 344.
10
Ibid, 347.
456

11
Ibid, 348.
12
Ibid, 349 and 351.
13
Ibid, 351.
14
Ibid, 352.
15
Ibid, 354. The Latin translates roughly as, “Time meanwhile is flying, flying beyond
recall.” Thomas Philbrick, ed., Two Years Before the Mast (New York: Penguin, 1981),
513.
16
Dana, Two Years Before the Mast, ibid.
17
Ibid, 354-355.
18
This phrase roughly translates as “where are they?” and has a very long tradition in
literature, dating at least to Medieval writing, though with possible precedents in earlier
materials and across a variety of traditions, including nineteenth-century fiction about the
North American frontier. For representative examples, see Donald Darnell, “Uncas as
Hero: the Ubi Sunt Formula in The Last of the Mohicans,” American Literature 37.3
(1963) 259-266; and Cynthia Robinson, “Ubi Sunt: Memory and Nostalgia in Taifa Court
Culture,” Muqarnas 15 (1998): 20-31; and Anne Rooney, “The Book of the Duchess:
Hunting and the ‘Ubi Sunt’ Tradition,” 38.151 The Review of English Studies (1987):
299-314.
19
Dana, Two Years Before the Mast, 371.
20
For a discussion of the Civil War and its possible influence on Dana’s text, see Jeffrey
Hotz, Divergent Visions, Contested Spaces: The Early United States through the Lens of
Travel (New York: Routledge, 2006), 210.
21
Perhaps this can be understood alongside the narrative of US political culture, which, at
least since Andrew Jackson and probably since Ben Franklin, has favored a “common
man” instead of an “elite” person. In this narrative, Americans despise being called half-
civilized by the Europeans and, therefore, embrace and cultivate their supposed
brutishness, until they desire to be more “ordinary” and even fear the “elitism” they see in
Europeans.
22
Studies of memory offer context, such as David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign
Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), Michael Kammen, Mystic
Chords of Memory: the Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York:
Knopf, 1991), or David Glassberg, Sense of History: the Place of the Past in American
457

Life (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001). Though concerned with a later
period, Pheobe Kropp, California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American
Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), offers helpful analysis of memory
and modernity in southern California.
23
Kevin Starr, California: a History (New York: Modern Library, 2005), 103-129.
24
Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), offers another way to read these passages. See
also Dana’s comment on “worlds not realized”: “I could scarcely keep my hold on reality
at all, or on the genuineness of anything…” (344).
25
Renato Rosaldo, “Imperialist Nostalgia,” Representations 26 (1989): 107-122.
26
Writers like William Alexander McClung, Landscapes of Desire: Anglo Mythologies of
Los Angeles (Berkeley: U of California P, 2000) usually locate this sentiment in the late
nineteenth or early twentieth century, rather than tracing it back to Dana.
27
For comments on one particular city and its relationship to the future, see William
Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe: the Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of its Mexican
Past (Berkeley: U of California P, 2004). One of the best examples of nostalgia is J.
Smeaton Chase, California Coast Trails (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), though
the same sentiments fill pages of promotional material published in California from the
1870s onward.
28
Charles Nordhoff, California for Health, Pleasure, and Residence (New York: Harper,
1872) was an early example of what became an onslaught of similar titles in the last years
of the nineteenth century.
29
Thanks to Steve Park for inventing this hilarious title. For a discussion of the West as
challenge, see Joseph L. Coulombe, Mark Twain and the American West (Columbia: U of
Missouri P, 2003), 72-73. Anne F. Hyde talks about the way changing modes of travel
influenced perception of landscapes in “Cultural Filters: the Significance of Perception,”
A New Significance: Re-Envisioning the History of the American West, ed. Clyde A.
Milner (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996), 184-188.
30
Mark Twain, Roughing It (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996), 409.
31
Twain, Roughing It, 415.
32
For a discussion of this narrative and its cultural context, see John Carlos Rowe,
Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: from the Revolution to World War II (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 2000), 97-119.
458

33
María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, The Squatter and the Don (Houston: Arte Público
Press, 1997), 183.
34
For a study of one member of this class, see Louise Pubols, The Father of All: the de la
Guerra Family, Power, and Patriarchy in Mexican California (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2009).
35
There are an increasing number of books on this period and Californio writers in
particular. See Genaro Padilla, My History, Not Yours: the Formation of Mexican
American Autobiography (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993); Ramón
Gutiérrez and Genaro Padilla, eds., Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage
(Houston: Arte Público Press, 1993); Antonio María Osio, The History of Alta
California: a Memoir of Mexican California, Beebe and Senkewicz, eds. (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1996); Rosaura Sánchez, Telling Identities: the Californio
Testimonios (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
36
Joan Didion, Slouching Toward Bethlehem (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978),
176.
37
Didion, Slouching, 177.
38
Ibid, 171.
39
Ibid, 172.
40
Ibid, 185-186.
459
Bibliography
Ackroyd, Peter R., et al. The Cambridge History of the Bible. Cambridge: University
Press, 1963.
Adams, Ephraim D. “English Interest in Annexation of California.” The American
Historical Review 14.4 (1909): 744-763.
Aderman, Ralph M. Critical Essays on Washington Irving. Boston, Mass.: G.K. Hall &
Co., 1990.
Adorno, Rolena. “The Discursive Encounter of Spain and America: the Authority of
Eyewitness Testimony in the Writing of History.” William and Mary Quarterly 49.2
(1992): 210-228.
Alatas, Hussein. The Myth of the Lazy Native: A Study of the Image of the Malays,
Filipinos and Javanese from the 16th to the 20th Century and its Function in the
Ideology of Colonial Capitalism. London: F. Cass, 1977.
Allen, Edward Weber. “Jean Francois Galaup de Lapérouse: A Check List.” California
Historical Society Quarterly 20.1 (1941): 47-64.
Anderson, Kat. Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of
California's Natural Resources. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
Antelyes, Peter. Tales of Adventurous Enterprise: Washington Irving and the Poetics of
Western Expansion. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.
Baegert, Jacob, M. M. Brandenburg, and Carl L. Baumann. Observations in Lower
California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952.
Ballantyne, Tony. Science, Empire and the European Exploration of the Pacific. Vol. 6.
Aldershot, Hants, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004.
460
Bancroft, Hubert Howe. The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft History of California:
Vol. I, 1542-1800. San Francisco: A.L. Bancroft, 1884.
Bancroft, Hubert Howe. The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft. San Francisco: A. L.
Bancroft & company, 1882; 1890.
---. History of California, vol. I, 1542-1800 (San Francisco: The History Company,
1886).
Bandini, José. A Description of California in 1828. Berkeley: Friends of the Bancroft
Library, 1951.
Barbee, David Rankin. “Robert Greenhow.” William and Mary Quarterly 13.3 (1933):
182-183.
Barbour, Barton H. Jedediah Smith: No Ordinary Mountain Man. Norman: University
of Oklahoma Press, 2009.
Barragy, Terrence J. “The Trading Age, 1792-1844.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 76.3
(1975): 197-224.
Batman, Richard. American Ecclesiastes: The Stories of James Pattie. San Diego:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984.
Batman, Richard. The Outer Coast. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985.
Bean, Lowell John, and Thomas C. Blackburn. Native Californians: A Theoretical
Retrospective. Ramona, Calif.: Ballena Press, 1976.
Beebe, Rose Marie, Robert M. Senkewicz. Lands of Promise and Despair: Chronicles of
Early California, 1535-1846. Santa Clara, CA; Berkeley, CA: Santa Clara
University; Heyday Books, 2001.
Beebe, Rose Marie, and Robert M. Senkewicz. Testimonios: Early California through
the Eyes of Women, 1815-1848. Berkeley: Heyday Books; The Bancroft Library,
University of California, Berkeley, 2006.
461
Beechey, Frederick William. Narrative of a Voyage to the Pacific and Beering's Strait :
To Co-Operate with the Polar Expeditions: Performed in His Majesty's Ship
Blossom, Under the Command of Captain F.W. Beechey ... in the Years 1825, 26,
27, 28 . London: H. Colburn and R. Bentley, 1831.
Beidleman, Richard G. California's Frontier Naturalists. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2006.
Belcher, Edward, et al. H.M.S. Sulphur on the Northwest and California Coasts, 1837
and 1839: The Accounts of Captain Edward Belcher and Midshipman Francis
Guillemard Simpkinson. Kingston, Ont.: Limestone Press, 1979.
Belcher, Edward, et al. Narrative of a Voyage Round the World : Performed in Her
Majesty's Ship Sulphur, during the Years 1836-1842, Including Details of the Naval
Operations in China, from Dec. 1840, to Nov. 1841. Published Under the Authority
of the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty. London: H. Colburn, 1843.
Berkeley, George, and Alexander Campbell Fraser. The Works of George Berkeley;
Including Many of His Writings Hitherto Unpublished. with Prefaces, Annotations,
His Life and Letters, and an Account of His Philosophy. Oxford: The Clarendon
press, 1871.
Birkett, Mary Ellen. “Forging French Foreign Policy in the Pacific.” French Colonial
History 8 (2007): 155-169.
Blackman, Ann. Wild Rose : A Civil War Spy. New York: Random House, 2005.
Blue, George Verne. “The Project for a French Settlement in the Hawaiian Islands,
1824-1842.” Pacific Historical Review 2.1 (1933): 85-99.
Bolton, Herbert Eugene. Spanish Exploration in the Southwest, 1542-1706. New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1916.
Book Club of California, and W. Michael Mathes. Spanish Approaches to the Island of
California, 1628-1632. San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1975.
462
Boscana, Gerónimo. Chinigchinich: A Revised and Annotated Version of Alfred
Robinson's Translation of Father Gerónimo Boscana's Historical Account of the
Belief, Usages, Customs, and Extravagancies of the Indians of this Mission of San
Juan Capistrano Called the Acagchemem Tribe. Banning, Calif.: Malki Museum
Press, Morongo Indian Reservation, 1978.
Boudreau, Joan. “Publishing the U.S. Exploring Expedition: The Fruits of the Glorious
Enterprise.” Printing History 3 (2008): 25-40.
Bouvier, Virginia Marie. Women and the Conquest of California, 1542-1840 : Codes of
Silence. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001.
Bowden, Mary Weatherspoon. Washington Irving. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981.
Brickhouse, Anna. “Scholarship and the State: Robert Greenhow and Transnational
American Studies, 1848/2008.” American Literary History (2008): 695-722.
Bryson, Michael A. Visions of the Land: Science, Literature, and the American
Environment from the Era of Exploration to the Age of Ecology. Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 2002.
Burrow, J. W. A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from
Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century. London: Allen Lane, 2007.
Burstein, Andrew. The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving. New
York: Basic Books, 2007.
Callcott, George H. History in the United States, 1800-1860; its Practice and Purpose.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970.
Calloway, Colin G., Gerd Gmunden, and Susanne Zantop. Germans and Indians:
Fantasies, Encounters, Projections. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002.
Cameron, J. M. R. “Western Australia, 1616-1829: An Antipodean Paradise,”
Geographical Journal 140.3 (1974): 373-385.
463
Carter, Harvey Lewis and Marcia Carpenter Spencer, “Stereotypes of the Mountain Man”
Western Historical Quarterly 6.1 (1975): 17-32.
Casas, Bartolomé de las, and Nigel Griffin. A Short Account of the Destruction of the
Indies. London, England; New York, N.Y.: Penguin Books, 1992.
Casas, Maria Raquél. Married to a Daughter of the Land : Spanish-Mexican Women and
Interethnic Marriage in California, 1820-1880. Reno: University of Nevada Press,
2007.
Castañeda, Antonia I. “Gender, Race, and Culture: Spanish-Mexican Women in the
Historiography of Frontier California.” Frontiers: a Journal of Women Studies 11.1
(1990): 8-20.
---. “Presidarias y Pobladoras: Spanish-Mexican Women in Frontier
Monterey, Alta California, 1770-1821,” PhD diss, 1990.
Caughey, John Walton, LaRee Caughey, and Ward Richie Press. California Heritage: An
Anthology of History and Literature. Los Angeles: Ward Richie Press, 1962.
Caughey, John Walton, and LaRee Caughey. Los Angeles: Biography of a City.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.
Caughey, John Walton, Norris Hundley, and John A. Schutz. The American West,
Frontier & Region: Interpretations. Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie Press, 1969.
Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. Don Quixote of La Mancha. Trans. and Introd., Walter
Starkie. New York: New American Library, 1964.
Chaffin, Tom. Pathfinder: John Charles Frémont and the Course of American Empire.
New York: Hill and Wang, 2002.
Chapman, Charles E. A History of California : The Spanish Period. New York: The
Macmillan company, 1921.
464
Charvat, William. Literary Publishing in America, 1790-1850. Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1993; 1959.
---. The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800-1870; the Papers of William Charvat.
Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968.
Chase, J. Smeaton. California Coast Trails; a Horseback Ride from Mexico to Oregon.
Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1913.
Chavez-Garcia, Miroslava. Negotiating Conquest: Gender and Power in California, 1770s
to 1880s. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004.
Chevalier, Jean, and Alain Gheerbrant. A Dictionary of Symbols. London and New York:
Penguin Books, 1996.
Churchill, Charles B. Adventurers and Prophets : American Autobiographers in Mexican
California, 1828-1847. Spokane, Wash.: A.H. Clark Co., 1995.
Cleland, Robert Glass. A History of California: The American Period. New York:
Macmillan Co., 1922.
Cleveland, Richard J. A Narrative of Voyages and Commercial Enterprises. Cambridge:
J. Owen, 1842.
Cleveland, Richard Jeffry, and Horace William Shaler Cleveland. Voyages of a Merchant
Navigator of the Days that are Past : Compiled from the Journals and Letters of the
Late Richard J. Cleveland. New York: Harper & Bros., 1886.
Coetzee, J. M.,. White Writing : On the Culture of Letters in South Africa. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1988.
Conn, Steven. Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1998.
Cortés, Hernán, and Anthony Pagden. Letters from Mexico. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1986.
465
Coughlin, Magdalen. “Boston Smugglers on the Coast (1797-1821): An Insight into the
American Acquisition of California.” California Historical Society Quarterly 46.2
(1967): 99-120.
Coulombe, Joseph L. Mark Twain and the American West. Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 2003.
Coulter, Thomas. Notes on Upper California. London: Published for the Journal of the
Royal Geographical Society by John Murray, 1835.
Cowan, Robert Ernest, et al. A Bibliography of the History of California and the Pacific
West 1510-1906. San Francisco: The Book club of California, 1914.
Cracroft, Richard H. Washington Irving, the Western Works. Boise, Idaho: Boise State
University, 1974.
Crespí, Juan, Alan K. Brown, and San Diego State University. A Description of Distant
Roads : Original Journals of the First Expedition into California, 1769-1770. San
Diego, CA: San Diego State University Press, 2001.
Crosby, Harry. Antigua California : Mission and Colony on the Peninsular Frontier,
1697-1768. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994.
Crow, Charles L. A Companion to the Regional Literatures of America. Malden, MA:
Blackwell Pub., 2003.
Cunha, Euclides da, and Ronald Sousa The Amazon: Land without History. Oxford; New
York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Churchill, Charles B. “Thomas Jefferson Farnham: An Exponent of American Empire in
Mexican California.” Pacific Historical Review 60.4 (1991): 517-537.
Cutter, Donald C. California in 1792: a Spanish Naval Visit. Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1990.
466
---. “Plans for the Occupation of Upper California: a New Look at the ‘Dark Age’ from
1602-1769.” Journal of San Diego History 24.1 (1978).
---. Malaspina & Galiano: Spanish Voyages to the Northwest Coast, 1791 & 1792.
Vancouver; Seattle, Wash.: Douglas & McIntyre; University of Washington Press,
1991.
Dakin, Susanna Bryant, Lawton Raphael Kennedy, and Theo H. Crook. Rose, Or Rose
Thorn?: Three Women of Spanish California. Berkeley, CA: Friends of the Bancroft
Library, 1963.
Dale, Harrison Clifford, William Henry Ashley, and Jedediah Strong Smith. The Ashley-
Smith Explorations and the Discovery of a Central Route to the Pacific, 1822-1829:
With the Original Journals. Cleveland: The Arthur H. Clark Co., 1918.
Dana, Richard Henry, and Thomas Philbrick. Two Years before the Mast: A Personal
Narrative of Life at Sea. New York: Penguin Books, 1981.
Dana, Richard Henry, and John Haskell Kemble. Two Years before the Mast: A Personal
Narrative of Life at Sea. Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie Press, 1964.
Dana, Richard Henry, and Robert Frederic Metzdorf. An Autobiographical Sketch.
Hamden, CT: Shoe String Press, 1953.
Darnell, Donald. “Uncas as Hero: the Ubi Sunt Formula in The Last of the Mohicans.”
American Literature 37.3 (1963) 259-266.
Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. London; New York:
Verso, 1990.
Davis, William Heath. Sixty Years in California : A History of Events and Life in
California : Personal, Political and Military, Under the Mexican Regime : During the
Quasi-Military Government of the Territory by the United States, and After the
Admission of the State into the Union: Being a Compilation by a Witness of the
Events Described. San Francisco: A.J. Leary, 1889.
467
De Voto, Bernard Augustine. Across the Wide Missouri. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.,
1947.
Delumeau, Jean. History of Paradise: The Garden of Eden in Myth and Tradition. New
York: Continuum, 1995.
Deverell, William and Greg Hise. Land of Sunshine: An Environmental History of
Metropolitan Los Angeles. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005.
Deverell, William. Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of
its Mexican Past. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
Díaz del Castillo, Bernal, and John Ingram Lockhart. The Memoirs of the Conquistador
Bernal Diaz Del Castillo Written by Himself, Containing a True and Full Account of
the Discovery and Conquest of Mexico and New Spain;. London: J. Hatchard and
Son, 1844.
Didion, Joan. Slouching Towards Bethlehem. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968.
Du Petit-Thouars, Abel. Voyage of the Venus: Sojourn in California. Fairfield, Wash.:
Ye Galleon Press, 1995.
Duflot de Mofras, Eugene. Duflot De Mofras' Travels on the Pacific Coast. Trans.
Marguerite Eyer Wilbur. Santa Ana, Calif.: The Fine Arts Press, 1937.
Duhaut-Cilly, Auguste Bernard. A Voyage to California, the Sandwich Islands & Around
the World in the Years, 1826-1829. Trans. August Frugé, and Neal Harlow.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Duncan, James S., and Derek Gregory. Writes of Passage : Reading Travel Writing.
London; New York: Routledge, 1999.
Dunmore, John. French Explorers in the Pacific. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965.
---. Pacific Explorer : The Life of Jean-Francois De La Pérouse, 1741-1788. Annapolis,
Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1985.
468
---. Visions & Realities : France in the Pacific, 1695-1995. Waikanae, N.Z.: Heritage
Press, 1997.
Edmond, Rod. Representing the South Pacific colonial discourse from Cook to Gauguin.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Engelson, Lester G. “Proposals for the Colonization of California by England: In
Connection with the Mexican Debt to British Bondholders 1837-1846,” California
Historical Society Quarterly 18.2 (1939): 136-148.
Engstrand, Iris H. Wilson. “Of Fish and Men: Spanish Marine Science during the Late
Eighteenth Century.” Pacific Historical Review 69.1 (2000): 3-30.
Espinosa y Tello, Josef. The Voyage of the Sutil and Mexicana, 1792: The Last Spanish
Exploration of the Northwest Coast of America. Spokane, Wash.: Arthur H. Clark
Co., 1991.
Fagan, Brian M. Before California : An Archaeologist Looks at our Earliest Inhabitants.
Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.
Fages, Pedro. A Historical, Political, and Natural Description of California. Trans.
Herbert Ingram Priestley. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1937.
Farnham, Thomas Jefferson. Travels in the Great Western Prairies : The Anahuac and
Rocky Mountains, and in the Oregon Territory. New York; London: Wiley &
Putnam, 1843.
Farquhar, Francis Peloubet. History of the Sierra Nevada. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1965.
Fender, Stephen. Plotting the Golden West: American Literature and the Rhetoric of the
California Trail. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Fireman, Janet R. “The Seduction of George Vancouver: a Nootka Affair,” Pacific
Historical Review 56.3 (1987): 427-443.
469
Fischer, John Ryan. “Domesticating the Pacific Frontier: An Environmental History of
the Conquest of California and Hawai’i,” (PhD diss., University of California Davis,
2008).
Fisher, Robin, and H. J. M. Johnston. From Maps to Metaphors: The Pacific World of
George Vancouver. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1993.
---. Vancouver's Voyage: Charting the Northwest Coast, 1791-1795. Vancouver: Douglas
& McIntyre, 1992.
Flint, Richard, and Shirley Cushing Flint. Documents of the Coronado Expedition, 1539-
1542 : "They Were Not Familiar with His Majesty, Nor Did They Wish to Be His
Subjects". Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 2005.
Flint, Richard. No Settlement, no Conquest: A History of the Coronado Entrada.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008.
Font, Pedro. Font's Complete Diary, a Chronicle of the Founding of San Francisco;
Trans. and Ed. Herbert Eugene Bolton. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1931.
Forbes, Alexander. California: A History of Upper and Lower California from their First
Discovery to the Present Time, Comprising an Account of the Climate, Soil, Natural
Productions, Agriculture, Commerce, &c. A Full View of the Missionary
Establishments and Condition of the Free and Domesticated Indians. with an
Appendix Relating to Steam Navigation in the Pacific. London: Smith, Elder, 1839.
Foucrier, Annick. The French and the Pacific World, 17th-19th Centuries: Explorations,
Migrations, and Cultural Exchanges. Burlington, VT: Ashgate/Variorum, 2005.
Frémont, John Charles, et al. Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains
in the Year 1842: And to Oregon and North California in the Years 1843-44.
Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1845.
Franchot, Jenny. Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with
Catholicism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
470
Fritzsche, Bruno. “‘On Liberal Terms’: The Boston Hide-Merchants in California.”
Business History Review 42.4 (1968): 467-481.
Fulford, Tim. “Romanticizing the Empire: the Naval Heroes of Southey, Coleridge,
Austen, and Marryat.” Modern Language Quarterly 60.2 (1999): 190-195.
Gale, Robert L. Richard Henry Dana, Jr. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1969.
Gates, W.B. “Cooper’s The Crater and Two Explorers.” American Literature 23.2
(1951): 243-46.
Gerhard, Peter. “Pearl Diving in Lower California, 1533-1830.” Pacific Historical
Review 25.3 (1956): 239-249.
Gibson, Arrell Morgan, and John S. Whitehead. Yankees in Paradise: The Pacific Basin
Frontier. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993.
Gidmark, Jill B., ed. Encyclopedia of American Literature of the Sea & Great Lakes.
Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000.
Gifra-Adroher, Pere. Between History and Romance: Travel Writing on Spain in the
Early Nineteenth-Century United States. Madison N.J.; Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh
Dickinson University Press, London; Associated University Presses, 2000.
Gilbert, Bil. Westering Man: The Life of Joseph Walker. New York: Atheneum, 1983.
Gioia, Dana, Chryss Yost, and Jack Hicks. California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the
Present. Santa Clara; Berkeley: Santa Clara University; Heyday Books, 2004.
Glassberg, David. Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life. Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2001.
Goetzmann, William H. Exploration and Empire: the Explorer and the Scientist in the
Winning of the American West. New York: Knopf, 1966.
471
Gough, Barry M. Britain, Canada and the North Pacific : Maritime Enterprise and
Dominion, 1778-1914. Vol. CS786. Aldershot, Hampshire, Great Britain;
Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004.
---. The Royal Navy and the Northwest Coast of North America, 1810-1914; a Study of
British Maritime Ascendancy. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press,
1971.
Graebner, Norman A. “American Interest in California, 1845.” Pacific Historical Review
22.1 (1953), 15-17.
Greenhow, Robert. History of Oregon and California, and the Other Territories on the
North-West Coast of North America: Accompanied by a Geographical View and
Map of those Countries, and a Number of Documents as Proofs and Illustrations of
the History. Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1844.
Greenhow, Robert, United States Dept. of State, and United States Congress, Senate,
Select Committee on the Oregon Territory. Memoir, Historical and Political, on the
Northwest Coast of North America and the Adjacent Territories. Washington D.C.:
Blair and Rives, 1840.
Greer, Margaret Rich, Walter Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan. Rereading the Black
Legend: the Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance
Empires. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Griffin, Eric J. English Renaissance Drama and the Specter of Spain: Ethnopoetics and
Empire. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.
Griffin, Susan M. Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Cambridge; New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Gutiérrez, Ramón A., Genaro M. Padilla, and María Herrera-Sobek. Recovering the U.S.
Hispanic Literary Heritage. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1993.
Gutiérrez, Ramón A., and Richard J. Orsi. Contested Eden: California before the Gold
Rush. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
472
Haas, Lisbeth. Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769-1936. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995.
Hackel, Steven W. Alta California : Peoples in Motion, Identities in Formation, 1769-
1850. Berkeley: University of California Press, and Huntington Library, San
Marino, California, 2010.
---. Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis : Indian-Spanish Relations in
Colonial California, 1769-1850. Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early
American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia; University of North Carolina
Press, 2005.
---. “Sources of Rebellion: Indian Testimony and the Mission San Gabriel
Uprising of 1785,” Ethnohistory 50.4 (2003): 643-669
Hafen, LeRoy Reuben, and Janet Lecompte. French Fur Traders and Voyageurs in the
American West: Twenty-Five Biographical Sketches. Spokane, Wash.: A.H. Clark
Co., 1995.
Hale, Edward Everett. His Level Best, and Other Stories. New York: Garrett Press,
1969.
Hampden, John. Francis Drake, Privateer: Contemporary Narratives and Documents.
University: University of Alabama Press, 1972.
Hanna, Warren Leonard. Lost Harbor: The Controversy Over Drake's California
Anchorage. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.
Hannay, David. Life of Frederick Marryat. New York: Haskell House, 1973; 1889.
Hart, James David. New Englanders in Nova Albion: Some 19th Century Views of
California. Vol. 3. Boston: Trustees of the Public Library of the City of Boston,
1976.
---. “The Education of Richard Henry Dana, Jr.” New England Quarterly 9.1 (1936): 3-
25.
473
Haskell, Daniel Carl. The United States Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842, and its
Publications, 1844-1874: A Bibliography. New York: New York Public Library,
1942; 1940.
Haslam, Gerald W. Many Californias: Literature from the Golden State. Reno: University
of Nevada Press, 1992.
---. “Literary California: ‘The Ulitmate Frontier of the Western World,’” California
History 68.4 (1998/1990): 188-195.
Haycox, Stephen W., et al. Enlightenment and Exploration in the North Pacific, 1741-
1805. Seattle: Published for the Cook Inlet Historical Society in the Anchorage
Museum of History and Art by the University of Washington Press, 1997.
---. “Russian America: Studies in the English Language,” Pacific Historical Review 59.2
(1990): 231.
Heffer, Jean, and William Donald Wilson. The United States and the Pacific: History of a
Frontier. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002.
Heffernan, Michael J. “A State Scholarship: The Political Geography of French
International Science during the Nineteenth Century.” Transactions of the Institute
of British Geographers 19.1 (1994): 21-45.
Heizer, Robert F., and Alan F. Almquist . The Other Californians: Prejudice and
Discrimination Under Spain, Mexico, and the United States to 1920. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1971.
Heizer, Robert Fleming. The Destruction of California Indians; a Collection of
Documents from the Period 1847 to 1865 in which are Described some of the Things
that Happened to some of the Indians of California. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Peregrine
Smith, 1974.
---. Elizabethan California : A Brief, and Sometimes Critical, Review of Opinions on the
Location of Francis Drake's Five Weeks' Visit with the Indians of Ships Land in
1579. Ramona, Calif.: Ballena Press, 1974.
474
---. Francis Drake and the California Indians, 1579. Vol. 42, no. 3. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1947.
Herr, Pamela. Jessie Benton Fremont: A Biography. New York: F. Watts, 1987.
Hicks, Jack. The Literature of California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
Hittell, Theodore Henry. History of California. San Francisco: 1885; 1897.
Holliday, J. S., and William Swain. The World Rushed In: The California Gold Rush
Experience. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981.
Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fitzgerald. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books,
1963.
Horsman, Reginald. Race and Manifest Destiny: the Origins of American Racial Anglo-
Saxonism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981.
Hotz, Jeffrey. Divergent Visions, Contested Spaces: The Early United States through the
Lens of Travel. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Howard, Thomas Frederick. Sierra Crossing: First Roads to California. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998.
Hurtado, Albert L. Indian Survival on the California Frontier. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1988.
---. “Sexuality in California’s Franciscan Missions: Cultural Perception and Sad
Realities,” California History 71.3 (1992): 370-385.
Hyde, Anne Farrar. An American Vision: Far Western Landscape and National Culture,
1820-1920. New York: New York University Press, 1990.
Hyer, Joel R. We are Not Savages: Native Americans in Southern California and the Pala
Reservation, 1840-1920. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2001.
475
Igler, David. “Diseased Goods: Global exchanges in the Eastern Pacific Basin, 1770
1850.” American Historical Review 109.3 (2004): 693-719.
Irving, Washington. The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, U.S.A., in the Rocky
Mountains and the Far West. Ed. Edgeley W. Todd. Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1961.
Irving, Washington, and Benjamin Louis Eulalie de Bonneville. Adventures of Captain
Bonneville, Or, Scenes Beyond the Rocky Mountains of the Far West. London: R.
Bentley, 1837.
Jackson, Donald. “Ledyard and Laperouse: a Contrast in Northwestern Exploration.”
Western Historical Quarterly 9.4 (1978): 495-508.
Jackson, Robert H., and Edward D. Castillo. Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish
Colonization the Impact of the Mission System on California Indians. Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1997.
Jaffé, David. The Stormy Petrel and the Whale: Some Origins of Moby-Dick. Baltimore:
Port City Press, 1976.
Jaksic, Ivan. The Hispanic World and American Intellectual Life, 1820-1880. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Jane, Lionel Cecil. Select Documents Illustrating the Four Voyages of Columbus.
London: printed for the Hakluyt Society, 1930.
Jefferson, Thomas. Jefferson Writings Notes on the State of Virginia. New York, NY:
The Library of America, 1984.
Johannsen, Robert Walter. To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the
American Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Jordan, Sarah. The Anxieties of Idleness: Idleness in Eighteenth-Century British
Literature and Culture. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press; Associated
University Presses, 2003.
476
Joyce, Barry Alan. The Shaping of American Ethnography: The Wilkes Exploring
Expedition, 1838-1842. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001.
Kammen, Michael G. Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in
American Culture. New York: Knopf, 1991.
Kelsey, Harry. Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo. San Marino: Huntington Library, 1986.
---. Sir Francis Drake : The Queen's Pirate. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.
---. “Mapping the California Coast: the Voyages of Discovery, 1533-1543.” Arizona and
the West 26.4 (1984): 307-324.
---. “Did Francis Drake really visit California?” Western Historical Quarterly 21.4
(1990): 444-462.
Kendrick, John. Alejandro Malaspina : Portrait of a Visionary. Montreal: McGill-Queen's
University Press, 1999.
Kiberd, Declan. Inventing Ireland. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996.
Kimmel, Michael S. Manhood in America : A Cultural History. New York: Free Press,
1996.
Kowalewski, Michael, and California Council for the Humanities. Gold Rush: A Literary
Exploration. Berkeley: Heyday Books in conjunction with the California Council for
the Humanities, 1997.
---. “Visions of California.” The Gettysburg Review 9.3 (1996): 481-496.
Kroeber, A.L. “The Route of James Ohio Pattie on the Colorado in 1826.” Arizona and
the West 6.2 (1964): 119-136.
477
Kropp, Phoebe S. California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
La Pérouse, Jean-Francois de Galaup, and John Dunmore. The Journal of Jean-Francois
De Galaup De La Pérouse, 1785-1788. London: Hakluyt Society, 1994; 1999.
La Pérouse, Jean-Francois de Galaup, and Malcolm Margolin. Monterey in 1786: The
Journals of Jean Francois De La Pérouse. Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1989.
La Place, Cyrille P. T. “The Report of Captain La Place on His Voyage to the Northwest
Coast and California in 1839.” Ed. and trans. George Verne Blue. California
Historical Society Quarterly 18.4 (1939): 315-328.
---. Visit of Cyrille Pierre-Theodore Laplace to Fort Ross and Bodega Bay in August
1839, trans. and ed., Glenn Farris. Jenner, CA: Fort Ross Interpretative Association,
2006.
Langley, Harold D. A History of Medicine in the Early U.S. Navy. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1995.
Langsdorff, G. H. von, Victoria Joan Moessner, and Richard A. Pierce. Remarks and
Observations on a Voyage Around the World from 1803 to 1807. Kingston, Ont.;
Fairbanks, Alaska: Limestone Press, 1993.
Langum, David J. “Californios and the Image of Indolence.” Western Historical
Quarterly 9.2 (1978): 181-196.
Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. New York: T. Seltzer, 1923.
Lee, W. Storrs, and W. Ralph Merrill. California: a Literary Chronicle. New York: Funk
& Wagnalls, 1968.
LeMenager, Stephanie. “Trading Stories: Washington Irving and the Global West.”
American Literary History 15.4 (2003): 683-708.
478
Leonard, Irving. Books of the Brave: Being an Account of Books and of Men in the
Spanish Conquest and Settlement of the Sixteenth-Century New World. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1992.
Leonard, Zenas, and William Finley Wagner. Leonard's Narrative: Adventures of Zenas
Leonard, Fur Trader and Trapper, 1831-1836. Cleveland: Burrows Bros., 1904;
1839.
Leonard, Zenas. Adventures of Zenas Leonard, Fur Trader. Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1959.
Levy, Jo Ann. Unsettling the West: Eliza Farnham and Georgiana Bruce Kirby in
Frontier California. Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2004.
---. “American Biography: Eliza W. Farnham.” American History 40.2 (2005): 26-30
and 75.
Lewis, Nathaniel. Unsettling the Literary West: Authenticity and Authorship. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2003.
Liebersohn, Harry. Aristocratic Encounters: European Travelers and North American
Indians. Cambridge, U.K.; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
---. “Discovering Indigenous Nobility: Tocqueville, Chamisso, and Romantic Travel
Writing.” American Historical Review 99.3 (1994): 746-766.
---. The Travelers' World: Europe to the Pacific. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2006.
Lightfoot, Kent G. Indians, Missionaries, and Merchants: The Legacy of Colonial
Encounters on the California Frontiers. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2005.
Lincoln, A. “The Beechey Expedition Visits San Francisco.” Pacific Discovery 22.1
(1969): 1-8.
479
---. “The Natural History of the Beechey Expedition.” Pacific Discovery 22.4 (1969): 1-
8.
Lincoln, Margarette. Science and Exploration in the Pacific: European Voyages to the
Southern Oceans in the Eighteenth Century. Boydell Press in association with the
National Maritime Museum, 1998.
Littlefield, Daniel F. Jr. “Washington Irving and the American Indian.” American Indian
Quarterly 5.2 (1979): 135-154.
Lloyd, Christopher. Captain Marryat and the Old Navy. New York: Longmans, Green
and co, 1939.
Lowenthal, David. The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1985.
Luthin, Herbert W. Surviving through the Days: Translations of Native California
Stories and Songs : A California Indian Reader. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2002.
Lyon, Thomas J. The Literary West: An Anthology of Western American Literature.
New York: Oxford University, 1999.
Madley, Benjamin. “California’s Yuki Indians: Defining Genocide in Native American
History.” Western Historical Quarterly 39.3 (2008): 303-332.
---. “American Genocide: the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873,” PhD diss, Yale
University, 2009.
Malaspina, Alessandro. The Malaspina Expedition, 1789-1794: Journal of the Voyage by
Alejandro Malaspina. London: Hakluyt Society in association with the Museo
Naval, Madrid, 2001.
Mallon, Thomas. Stolen Words: Forays into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism. New
York: Ticknor & Fields, 1989.
480
Margolin, Malcolm. The Way We Lived: California Indian Stories, Songs &
Reminiscences. Berkeley: Heyday Books; California Historical Society, 1993.
Mariscal, George. “The Role of Spain in Contemporary Race Theory.” Arizona Journal
of Hispanic Cultural Studies 2 (1998): 7-22.
Marryat, Florence. Life and Letters of Captain Marryat. New York: D. Appleton & Co.,
1872.
Marryat, Frederick. Diary in America. London: N. Vane, 1960.
---. Narrative of the Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet: In California, Sonora, &
Western Texas. Copyright ed. Leipzig: B. Tauchnitz, 1843.
Martínez Reverte, Javier. The Malaspina Expedition: A Scientific and Political Voyage
Around the World, 1789-1794. Barcelona; New York: Turner; Distributed Art
Publishers, 2010.
Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden : Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America.
35th anniversary ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000; 1964.
Mathes, W. Michael. “Early California Propaganda: The Works of Fray Antonio de la
Ascensión.” California Historical Quarterly 50.2 (1971): 195-205.
---. “The Mythological Geography of California: Origins, Development, Confirmation
and Disappearance.” The Americas 45.3 (1989): 315-341.
---, ed. The Russian-Mexican Frontier: Mexican Documents Regarding the Russian
Establishments in California, 1808-1842. Jenner, CA: Fort Ross Interpretative
Association, 2008.
McClung, William A. Landscapes of Desire : Anglo Mythologies of Los Angeles.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
McDermott, John Francis. “Washington Irving and the Journal of Captain Bonneville.”
Mississippi Valley Historical Review 43.3 (1956), 459-467.
481
McWilliams, Carey. California, the Great Exception. Berkeley; London: University of
California Press, 1999; 1949.
---. Southern California: An Island on the Land. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Peregrine Smith,
1979; 1946.
Menéndez Pidal, Ramón. The Spaniards in their History. Trans. Walter Starkie. New
York: Norton, 1950.
Michaels, Leonard, David Reid, and Raquel L. Scherr. West of the West: Imagining
California: An Anthology. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1989.
Mignolo, Walter. The Idea of Latin America. Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.
Miller, Robert Ryal. “Cortés and the First Attempt to Colonize California.” California
Historical Quarterly 53.1 (1974): 4-16.
Milner, Clyde A., and Allan G. Bogue. A New Significance: Re-Envisioning the History
of the American West. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Moreno, Deborah. “‘Here the Society is United’: ‘Respectable Anglos and Intercultural
Marriage in Pre-Gold Rush California.” California History 80.1 (2001): 2-17.
Morgan, Dale Lowell. Jedediah Smith and the Opening of the West. Indianapolis: Bobbs-
Merrill, 1953.
Mornin, Edward, et al. Through Alien Eyes : The Visit of the Russian Ship Rurik to San
Francisco in 1816 and the Men Behind the Visit. Oxford; New York: P. Lang, 2002.
---. “Adelbert von Chamisso: a poet-naturalist and his visit to San Francisco.” California
History 78.1 (1999): 2-13.
Morrissey, Katherine G. Mental Territories: Mapping the Inland Empire. Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1997.
482
Nasatir, Abraham Phineas. French Activities in California: An Archival Calendar-Guide.
Stanford, CA; London: Stanford University Press; H. Milford, Oxford University
Press, 1945.
---. “The French Consulate in California, 1843-1856,” California Historical Society
Quarterly 11.3 (1932): 195-223.
---. “International Rivalry for California and the Establishment of the British Consulate,”
California Historical Society Quarterly 46.1 (1967): 53-70.
Nash, Roderick. Wilderness and the American Mind. Rev ed. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1973.
Nichols, Roy Franklin. Advance Agents of American Destiny. Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1956.
---. “William Shaler: New England Apostle of Rational Liberty.” The New England
Quarterly 9.1 (1936).
Nordhoff, Charles. California, for Health, Pleasure, and Residence : A Book for
Travellers and Settlers. New York: Harper, 1873; 1872.
Nunis, Doyce Blackman. Books in their Sea Chests: Reading Along the Early California
Coast. Berkeley: California Library Association, 1964.
Nuttall, Donald A. The Señoras Gobernadoras of Spanish Alta California: A Comparative
Study. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation, 1998.
Nuttall, Donald Andrew. “Pedro Fages and the Advance of the Northern Frontier of New
Spain, 1767-1782.” Ph.D. diss, 1964.
---. “Light Cast Upon Shadows: the Non-California Years of Don Pedro Fages.”
California Historical Quarterly 56.3 (1977): 250-269.
Ogden, Adele. The California Sea Otter Trade, 1784-1848. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1941.
483
---. “Alfred Robinson, New England Merchant in Mexican California.” California
Historical Society Quarterly 23.3 (1944): 193-218.
---. “Business Letters of Alfred Robinson.” California Historical Society Quarterly 23.4
(1944): 301-334.
Oksiloff, Assenka. “The Eye of the Ethnographer: Adalbert von Chamisso’s Voyage
Around the World,” in Signs of Ethnic Difference (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 101-
121.
Olivas, Daniel A. Latinos in Lotusland : An Anthology of Contemporary Southern
California Literature. Tempe, Ariz.: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingue, 2008.
Osio, Antonio María, Rose Marie Beebe, and Robert M. Senkewicz. The History of Alta
California : A Memoir of Mexican California. Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1996.
Owens, Kenneth N. “Frontiersman for the Tsar: Timofei Tarakanov and the Expansion
of Russian America.” Montana the Magazine of Western History 56.3 (2006): 7.
Paddison, Joshua. A World Transformed: Firsthand Accounts of California before the
Gold Rush. Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1998.
Padilla, Genaro M. My History, Not Yours: The Formation of Mexican American
Autobiography. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993.
Parascandola, Louis J. Puzzled which to Choose: Conflicting Socio-Political Views in the
Works of Captain Frederick Marryat. New York: P. Lang, 1997.
Pattie, James O. The Personal Narrative of James O. Pattie. Philadelphia: Lippincott,
1962.
Peard, George, Barry M. Gough, and Hakluyt Society. To the Pacific and Arctic with
Beechey; the Journal of Lieutenant George Peard of H.M.S. Blossom, 1825-1828.
Cambridge: Published for the Hakluyt Society at the University Press, 1973.
484
Peterson, Martin Severin. Joaquin Miller, Literary Frontiersman. London: Stanford
University Press; H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1937.
Pfitzer, Gregory M. Popular History and the Literary Marketplace, 1840-1920. Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2008.
Philbrick, Nat. Sea of Glory: America's Voyage of Discovery: The U.S. Exploring
Expedition, 1838-1842. New York: Viking, 2003.
Philbrick, Thomas. James Fenimore Cooper and the Development of American Sea
Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961.
Phillips, George Harwood. Vineyards and Vaqueros : Indian Labor and the Economic
Expansion of Southern California, 1771-1877. Norman, Oklahoma: Arthur H Clark,
2010.
Phillips, George Harwood. Chiefs and Challengers : Indian Resistance and Cooperation
in Southern California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975.
Pierce, Frank. Amadís De Gaula. Boston: Twayne, 1976.
Pierce, Richard A., E. H. Iversen, and Maurice M. O'Moore. The Romance of Nikolai
Rezanov and Concepción Arguello: A Literary Legend and its Effect on California
History. Kingston, Ont.; Fairbanks, Alaska: Limestone Press, 1998.
Pitt, Leonard. The Decline of the Californios; a Social History of the Spanish-Speaking
Californians, 1846-1890. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966.
Pocock, Tom. Captain Marryat: Seaman, Writer, and Adventurer. Mechanicsburg, PA:
Stackpole Books, 2000.
Poesch, Jessie J. Titian Ramsay Peale, 1799-1885, and His Journals of the Wilkes
Expedition. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1961.
485
Polk, Dora Beale. The Island of California: A History of the Myth. Spokane, WA: Arthur
H. Clark Company, 1991.
Powell, Lawrence Clark. California Classics: The Creative Literature of the Golden State:
Essays on the Books and their Writers. Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1982; 1971.
Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London; New
York: Routledge, 1992.
Priestley, Herbert I. Review of A History of California, by Alexander Forbes, Catholic
Historical Review 6.1 (1920): 100-104.
Pubols, Louise. The Father of All: The De La Guerra Family, Power, and Patriarchy in
Mexican California. Berkeley: Published for the Huntington-USC Institute on
California and the West by University of California Press and Huntington Library,
San Marino, Calif., 2009.
Quinn, Ronald D., and Sterling C. Keeley. Introduction to California Chaparral.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
Rabasa, José. Without History: Subaltern Studies, the Zapatista Insurgency, and the
Specter of History. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010.
Raup, H. F. and William B. Pounds, Jr., “Northernmost Spanish Frontier in California:
As Shown by the Distribution of Geographic Names.” California Historical Society
Quarterly 32.1 (1953): 43-48.
Rawls, James J. Indians of California: The Changing Image. Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1984.
Reyes, Bárbara. Private Women, Public Lives: Gender and the Missions of the
Californias. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009.
Reynolds, William, Anne Hoffman Cleaver, and E. Jeffrey Stann. Voyage to the
Southern Ocean: The Letters of Lieutenant William Reynolds from the U.S.
Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1988.
486
Richman, Irving Berdine. California Under Spain and Mexico, 1535-1847; a Contribution
Toward the History of the Pacific Coast of the United States, Based on Original
Sources (Chiefly Manuscript) in the Spanish and Mexican Archives and Other
Repositories. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1911.
Ridge, John Rollin. The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, the Celebrated
California Bandit,. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955.
Roberts, Norman C. Baja California Plant Field Guide. La Jolla: Natural History Pub.
Co., 1989.
Robertson, William Spence. “French Intervention in Mexico in 1838.” The Hispanic
American Historical Review 24.2 (1944): 222-252.
Robinson, Alfred. Life in California during a Residence of several Years in that Territory,
Including a Narrative of Events which have Transpired since that Period when
California was an Independent Government. Santa Barbara: Peregrine Publishers,
1970.
Robinson, Alfred, Maynard J. Geiger, and Richard J. Hoffman. The Letters of Alfred
Robinson to the De La Guerra Family of Santa Barbara, 1834-1873. Los Angeles:
Zamorano Club, 1972.
Robinson, John W. Gateways to Southern California: Indian Footpaths, Horse Trails,
Wagon Roads, Railroads and Highways. City of Industry, Calif.: Big Santa Anita
Historical Society, 2005.
Robinson, Cynthia. “Ubi Sunt: Memory and Nostalgia in Taifa Court Culture.”
Muqarnas 15 (1998): 20-31.
Rodríguez de Montalvo, Garci, and William Thomas Little. The Labors of the Very
Brave Knight Esplandián. Binghamton, N.Y.: Center for Medieval and Early
Renaissance Studies, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1992.
Rolle, Andrew F. John Charles Frémont: Character as Destiny. Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1991.
487
Rooney, Anne. “The Book of the Duchess: Hunting and the ‘Ubi Sunt’ Tradition.”
The Review of English Studies 38.151 (1987): 299-314.
Rosaldo, Renato. Culture & Truth : The Remaking of Social Analysis : With a New
Introduction. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993.
---. “Imperialist Nostalgia,” Representations 26 (1989): 107-122.
Rosales, F. Arturo. “Fantasy Heritage Reexamined: Race and Class in the Writings of
the Bandini Family Authors and Other Californios, 1828-1965” in Recovering the
U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Vol. 2 (Houston: Arte Público, 1996), 81-87.
Rosamel, Joseph de. “California Prior to Conquest: A Frenchman’s Views,” ed. and
trans. William Finley Shepard. California Historical Society Quarterly 37.1 (1958):
63-77.
Ross, Ishbel. Rebel Rose; Life of Rose O'Neal Greenhow, Confederate Spy. New York:
Harper, 1954.
Rowe, John Carlos. Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism from the Revolution to World
War II. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Royce, Josiah, and Ronald Wells. California: A Study of American Character: From the
Conquest in 1846 to the Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco. Berkeley:
Heyday Books, 2002; 1886.
Rubin-Dorsky, Jeffrey. Adrift in the Old World : The Psychological Pilgrimage of
Washington Irving. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Ruiz de Burton, María Amparo, Rosaura Sánchez, and Beatrice Pita. The Squatter and
the Don. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1997.
Ruschenberger, W. S. W., et al. Sketches in California, 1836. Los Angeles: G. Dawson,
1953.
488
Ruschenberger, W. S. W. A Voyage Round the World. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea &
Blanchard, 1838.
Salvucci, Richard J. Politics, Markets, and Mexico's "London Debt," 1823-1887. New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Sánchez, Rosaura. Telling Identities: The Californio Testimonios. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1995.
Sandos, James A. Converting California: Indians and Franciscans in the Missions. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.
Scafi, Alessandro. Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth. Chicago: University
of Chicago, 2006.
Schoenherr, Allan A. A Natural History of California. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1992.
Shaler, William, and Lindley Bynum. Journal of a Voyage between China and the
Northwestern Coast of America, made in 1804. Claremont, Calif.: Saunders Studio
Press, 1935.
Shapiro, Samuel. Richard Henry Dana, Jr., 1815-1882. East Lansing: Michigan State
University Press, 1961.
Sheridan, Thomas E. “How to tell the Story of a ‘People without History’: Narrative
versus Ethnohistorical Approaches to the Study of the Yaqui Indians through
Time.” Journal of the Southwest 30.2 (1988): 168-189.
Shur, Leonid A. and James R. Gibson, “Russian Travel Notes and Journals as Sources for
the History of California, 1800-1850.” California Historical Quarterly 52.1 (1973):
37-63.
Smith, Bernard. European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768-1850; a Study in the
History of Art and Ideas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960.
489
Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970; 1950.
Smith, Jedediah Strong. The Southwest Expedition of Jedediah S. Smith: His Personal
Account of the Journey to California, 1826-1827. Ed. George R. Brooks. Glendale,
CA: A. H. Clark Co., 1977.
Smith, Jedediah Strong. The Travels of Jedediah Smith: A Documentary Outline
Including the Journal of the Great American Pathfinder. Ed. Maurice S. Sullivan.
Santa Ana, CA: Fine Arts Press, 1934.
Smith-Baranzini, Marlene. “Milestones in California History: Two Years Before the
Mast.” California History 69.4 (1990).
Stannard, David E. “Recounting the Fables of Savagery: Native Infanticide and the
Functions of Political Myth.” Journal of American Studies 25.3 (1991): 381-417.
Stanton, William Ragan. The Great United States Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975.
Starr, Kevin. California: A History. New York: Modern Library, 2005.
Starr, Kevin. Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1973.
Stilgoe, John R. Common Landscape of America, 1580 to 1845. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1982.
Streeby, Shelley. “American Sensations: Empire, Amnesia, and the US-Mexican War.”
American Literary History 13.1 (2001).
Teja, Jesús F. de la, and Ross Frank. Choice, Persuasion, and Coercion: Social Control on
Spain's North American Frontiers. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
2005.
Tac, Pablo. “Indian Life and Customs at Mission San Luis Rey.” Ed. and trans. Minna
Hewes and Gordon Hewes, The Americas 9.1 (1952): 91.
490
Thrower, Norman Joseph William. Sir Francis Drake and the Famous Voyage, 1577-
1580: Essays Commemorating the Quadricentennial of Drake's Circumnavigation of
the Earth. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
Thwaites, R. G. ed. Early Western Travels, 1748-1846, vol. XXVIII. Cleveland: A.H.
Clark, 1907.
Trafzer, Clifford E., and Joel R. Hyer. "Exterminate them": Written Accounts of the
Murder, Rape, and Slavery of Native Americans during the California Gold Rush,
1848-1868. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999.
Twain, Mark. Roughing It. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Utley, Robert Marshall. A Life Wild and Perilous: Mountain Men and the Paths to the
Pacific. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1997.
Valle, Rosemary K. “James Ohio Pattie and the1827-28 Alta California Measles
Epidemic.” California Historical Quarterly 52.1 (1978): 28-36.
Vancouver, George, and W. Kaye Lamb. A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific
Ocean and Round the World, 1791-1795. London: Hakluyt Society, 1984.
Venegas, Yolanda. “The Erotics of Racialization: Gender and Sexuality in the Making of
California,” Frontiers: a Journal of Women Studies 25.3 (2004): 63-89.
Venegas, Miquel. A Natural and Civil History of California: Containing an Accurate
Description of that Country, its Soil, Mountains, Harbours ... the Customs of the
Inhabitants ... before their Conversion to the Christian Religion ... Together with
Accounts of the several Voyages. London: Rivington and Fletcher, 1759.
Viola, Herman J., and Carolyn Margolis. Magnificent Voyagers : The U.S. Exploring
Expedition, 1838-1842. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985.
Nancy Vogeley, “How Chivalry Formed the Myth of California.” Modern Language
Quarterly 62.2 (2001): 165-187.
491
Von der Porten, Edward, et al. “Who Made Drake’s Plate of Brass? Hint: It Wasn’t
Francis Drake.” California History 81.2 (2002): 116-133.
Von Chamisso, Adelbert, and Henry Kratz. A Voyage Around the World with the
Romanzov Exploring Expedition in the Years 1815-1818 in the Brig Rurik, Captain
Otto Von Kotzebue. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1986.
Voss, Barbara L. “Domesticating Imperialism: Sexual Politics and the Archaeology of
Empire.” American Anthropologist 110.2 (2008): 191-2003.
Wagner, Henry Raup. Sir Francis Drake's Voyage Around the World: Its Aims and
Achievements. San Francisco, CA: J. Howell, 1926.
---. Spanish Voyages to the Northwest Coast of America in the Sixteenth Century. San
Francisco: California Historical Society, 1929.
---. “Spanish Voyages to the Northwest Coast in the Sixteenth Century: Introduction.”
California Historical Society Quarterly 6.4 (1927): 293-331.
Walker, Franklin. A Literary History of Southern California. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1950.
Warner, Oliver. Captain Marryat, a Rediscovery. London: Constable, 1953.
Wathen, Bruce. Sir Francis Drake: The Construction of a Hero. Cambridge; Rochester,
NY: D.S. Brewer, 2009.
Weber, David J. The Californios Versus Jedediah Smith, 1826-1827: A New Cache of
Documents. Spokane, Wash.: A.H. Clark, 1990.
---. The Spanish Frontier in North America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.
---. The Taos Trappers; the Fur Trade in the Far Southwest, 1540-1846. Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1971.
492
---. “Here Rests Juan Espinosa: Toward a Clearer Look at the Image of the ‘Indolent
Californios,’” Western Historical Quarterly 10.1 (1979): 61-69.
Weber, Francis J. Prominent Visitors to the California Missions, 1786-1842. Los
Angeles: Dawson's Book Shop, 1991.
Weinbaum, Batya. Islands of Women and Amazons : Representations and Realities.
Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999.
Weinstein, Valerie. “Reise um die Welt: the Complexities and Complicities of Adelbert
von Chamisso’s Anti-Conquest Narratives.” German Quarterly 72.4 (1999): 377-
395.
White, Lynn Townsend Jr. “Changes in the Popular Concept of ‘California.’” California
Historical Society Quarterly 19.3 (1940): 221-222.
White, Richard. "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own": A History of the American
West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991.
Williams, Glyndwr. Captain Cook: Explorations and Reassessments. Woodbridge, UK ;
Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2004.
Rufus Kay Willys, “French Imperialists in California.” California Historical Society
Quarterly 8.2 (1929): 116-129.
Wilson, Derek A. The Circumnavigators. New York: M. Evans, 1989.
Winship, George Parker, Donald C. Cutter, and Pedro de Castañeda de Nájera . The
Journey of Coronado, 1540-1542. Golden, Colo.: Fulcrum Pub., 1990.
Wolf, Eric Robert. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1982.
Wright, J. Edward. The Early History of Heaven. New York: Oxford University Press,
2000.
493
Wyatt, David. The Fall into Eden: Landscape and Imagination in California. Cambridge;
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
---. Five Fires: Race, Catastrophe, and the Shaping of California. Reading, Mass.:
Addison-Wesley Pub. Co., 1997.
Youngs, Tim. Travel Writing in the Nineteenth Century: Filling the Blank Spaces.
London; New York: Anthem Press, 2006.
Zanger, Jules. “Marryat, Monsieur Violet, and Edward La Salle.” Nineteenth-Century
Fiction 12.3 (1957): 226-231.
Zantop, Susanne. Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial
Germany, 1770-1870. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract More than most regions, California generates epithets: lotus land, the cultural desert, or the big nowhere. Perhaps most frequently, California is characterized as a strange, insular place where, in Joan Didion’s words, “no one remembers the past.” Yet, this notion of an ahistorical California has, ironically, a long tradition extending back at least to the sixteenth century. In fact, the inhabitants of Didion’s late twentieth-century landscape share elements in common with the women of Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo’s California, the early sixteenth-century “island” that he claimed was so culturally isolated it “buried alive” those who chose to remain there.

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Lahontan: a novel; and "A million miles from God, three feet from hell": aesthestics and the literature of Nevada

PDF

Cowboys of the waste land: modernism and the American frontier

PDF

A bag of shocking pink: occult imagery in contemporary American fiction by women

PDF

The monstrous city: urban sprawl, Los Angeles, and the literature of the fantastic

PDF

The haunted frontier: troubling gothic conventions in nineteenth-century literature of the American west

PDF

Let us fake out a frontier: dissent and the settler colonial imaginary in U.S. literature after 1945

PDF

Blue‐collar, white‐collar: Raymond Carver's and John Cheever's versions of the American (anti) pastoral (a critical study); and, Beyond the lights and other stories (a short story collection)

PDF

Concrete utopia: the development of roads and freeways in Los Angeles, 1910-1950

PDF

The politics of eros: writing under the auspices of Ovid's Cupid in early modern English literature

PDF

The future Americans: race, gender, and citizenship in American utopian fiction, 1888-1912

PDF

Authority and the failed justification of evil in Cormac McCarthy's Blood meridian, or The evening redness in the West

PDF

The new old motion: contemporary poetry, nostalgia, and the American West

PDF

The Pacific Slope superstorms and the Big Winter of 1861−1862

PDF

Going beyond the victory garden: War, gender, and women of national concern

PDF

The organic metaphor demystified: rhetoric of environmental change and environmental preservation in contemporary American nature writing

PDF

Self-representation, cultural formation, and Mexican-American modernism

PDF

Theatre, culture and performance: contemporary Irish drama and the Celtic Tiger

PDF

Those secret exhibitionists: women's diaries at the turn of the twentieth century

PDF

"This strange and distant land:" isolation, problem groups, and the incorporation of California, 1846-1882

PDF

Archiving the absence: female infanticide in nineteenth-century British India

Asset Metadata

Creator Myhren, Brett Garcia (author)

Core Title Ahistoricism and the literature of California, 1510-1846

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 05/02/2013

Defense Date 03/25/2011

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag California,history,Literature,OAI-PMH Harvest

Place Name California (states), USA (countries)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Rowe, John Carlos (committee chair), William Deverell (committee member), William Handley (committee member)

Creator Email myhren@usc.edu,myhren2000@yahoo.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3838

Unique identifier UC1185733

Identifier etd-Myhren-4518 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-460866 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3838 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Myhren-4518.pdf

Dmrecord 460866

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Myhren, Brett Garcia

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu