Historical Footnotes
1. The Conquest of Los Angeles
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1. The Conquest of Los Angeles
No one speaks about the "Conquest of California" anymore. There seems to be no memory of it at all, even though the term is accurate and was universal in the first two generations of the U.S. state. But then, the entire embryonic period of Americans in California is lost to us today, especially in Los Angeles and Southern California generally.
The vision of an L.A. "history" in popular conception begins essentially with that attractive fiction modeled so impressively in Chinatown. In that fantasy, Los Angeles has always been American and white, with Mexicans and a smattering of Asians hanging on a thin periphery. Los Angeles, we are to think, effectively began when Hollywood began, right after World War One, when water was diverted from the East Sierra and real estate became the fountainhead of wealth with massive white migration from the colder, less attractive states.
That California had been conquered must be obvious from city names alone. San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose and Sacramento could not have been the labels that a gringo would conceive, and thus these places must have been Hispanic to begin with. Los Angeles was founded before America became a nation, and thus existed for at least three generations before yielding to the States twelve years before the Civil War. The first Americans who took it over did not grab it from the Indians. They moved in on a well-established Spanish-speaking city serving cattle ranchers long in trade with Boston merchants seeking hides to manufacture leather goods and fat for making candles.
The Conquest occurred rapidly, in two successive, independent stages. In 1846, with tensions between slave and free states building, turning eyes upon the West made sense politically. Americans believed their geographic destiny was manifest. The United States must ultimately rule the continent, all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Texas had already been secured, so it was time to move against the rest of Mexico's remote possessions in our path.
The military war with Mexico went easily. Our Army stormed the Capital. But the goal had always been to seize on California. It was temperate and fertile (unlike New Mexico and Utah), and fronted the Pacific Ocean with a world class anchorage, projecting U.S. power into Asia. It was common back in those days to speak about the U.S. taking China as a colony as Britain had with India. California was the keystone of this vision.
So the first stage of the California Conquest was the military one. It was nearly effortless because Mexico had no army to defend it, and most leading Californians were willing to accept a U.S. victory so long as they could keep their lands. After some small skirmishes, mostly to assert the pride and honor of the Californios, a treaty promised them their properties and all the rights of U.S. citizens, making them first Hispanics to become Americans when many still considered them akin to Indians. And indeed, most Californians were racially non-white, as we would say today.
When the locals acquiesced to military conquest, they took comfort in the likelihood their way of life would little change, perhaps for generations. It was extremely challenging, and enormously expensive, to sail to California from the Eastern States, all the way around the tip of South America. And it was even much more difficult, and highly dangerous, to trek across the continent and cross the High Sierra. California was unlikely to attract a mass of gringo immigrants, at least before a railroad could be built across two thousand miles of wilderness and mountains sometime in the future. Thus the military conquest was not at first perceived to be a cultural or human one that threatened Spanish California's Catholic faith, Latin manners, and its semi-feudal way of life.
But then, to the amazement of the world, gold was instantly discovered in enormous quantities, in the mountain foothills that the Californios had never penetrated. This set off the second Conquest, more momentous than the first. In 1849 alone, only a year after the treaty to conclude the war, more immigrants arrived — almost entirely by sea to infant San Francisco — than the entire population of existing Californians. And that was just the start because more people started flooding in from not just the United States, but from Sonora in the north of Mexico, from Chile, from Australia and even China.
In the north of California and the mines of the Sierra foothills, this could not be called a conquest because the Californios had never settled there at all or very much. San Francisco had been the title only of the bay, because there was no city yet, just a sandy cove called Yerba Buena, a small presidio (a fort) to guard the entrance to the Golden Gate, and a dilapidated mission site. San Jose was but a hamlet near another old Franciscan mission. The overwhelming Californian population lived south, especially around Los Angeles, and thus it was this southern region, and Los Angeles in particular, that required conquest.
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The Conquest of Los Angeles, and therefore all of Southern California happened in an unexpected way. At first the Californians assumed that the new immigrants, who came for gold, would never bother with Los Angeles, where there was little to attract them. But then that gold cascaded on Los Angeles in torrents because the northern population needed beef, and the rancheros of the Lower Country had lots of it. Men raising cattle for their hides and fat now gained a market for fresh meat, and stock that used to bring a silver dollar now commanded fifty or a hundred times as much, in gold. The rancher with a 10,000 head might be worth a million dollars, a sum almost impossible to comprehend when gold was only $16 to the ounce.
This fabulous bonanza meant two things. One was that Los Angeles was almost certainly the wealthiest city of a couple thousand souls in human history, and thus resentment toward the conquest became blurred by money-fueled intoxication. The other consequence was there was suddenly a reason for gringo immigrants to move in on Los Angeles. The place had gold, but little means to spend it, and therefore needed merchants, lawyers, doctors, gamblers and the rest of the accoutrements of urban life the nouveau riche of Spanish California now craved.
Thus began the final conquest as Americans descended on Los Angeles, changed it from a pueblo to an incorporated U.S. city and seized political control. For some few years, the Californios preserved a dominance in culture because they still were the majority and held the wealth of cattle lands. But their influence collapsed with the decline in gold production and the development of cattle herds up north, much closer to the market and stocked with better breeds. The great rancheros then discovered that, to pay the many debts they had incurred in flush times at astounding rates of interest, they were constrained to sell their properties to gringos at a fraction of their prior value. Los Angeles and all of Southern California quickly lost its classic Californian character to a growing population of white, mostly Protestant, Americans — speaking English, reading newspapers, and driving carriages instead of oxcarts.
Thank you!