USA > California > Merced County > A history of Merced County, California : with a biographical review of the leading men and women of the county who have been identified with its growth and development from the early days to the present > Part 2
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HISTORY OF MERCED COUNTY
Gentile Indians as corrupters of the neophytes. Mariano Payeras, who became president of the missions in 1815, expressed the opinion that the time had come to heed the Reglamento for founding estab- lishments east of the Coast Range-not merely missions but strong presidios. He says in his biennial report for 1817-1818:
"The object of our ministry being the propagation of the Faith among the Gentiles, and Gentiles no longer existing among the coast mountains, the padres of various missions have attempted to baptize those living in the district called the Tulares. They, however, have never succeeded. The Tulare Indians are inconstant. Today they come, tomorrow they are gone -- not on foot, as they came, but on horseback. With such guests, no horse is safe in the northern valley. And the worst of it is that having crossed the Tulare Valley and the mountains that surround it, they kill the horses and eat them. The government has not been neglectful in pursuing such deadly enemies, but little has been effected, because great lagoons surrounded by green tules shelter them from our horsemen. For this reason the padres and more intelligent officers think it needful to form in the Valley of the Tulares a new chain of missions with presidios. . . If this be not done, the time will come when the existence of the province will be threatened, and a region that up to a recent time has been a center of tranquility will be changed into an Apacheria."
Payeras writes to the padres in July, 1819 :
"The Governor of this province, Don Pablo Vicente de Sola, ad- vises me that he has been informed from the South of the scandalous abuse at certain missions (San Fernando and San Gabriel) of neo- phyte equestrianism. Neophytes take with brazenness, and in broad daylight, horses even though tied. They load them with women in the public roads. I am reminded by the Governor of the many royal cedulas forbidding Indians to ride and that even your reverences cannot give them permission to own or use a horse, if Law 33 of Book VI, Title 1, of the Recopilacion is observed. . . . In the Tu- lares (I am told by the Governor ) both Christians and Gentiles make their journeys on horseback. Even the women are learning to ride. Fairs are held at which horses stolen from the missions are put up for sale."
There were three other expeditions besides Moraga's in this year of 1806, but none of them appear to have come near Merced County. Chapman tells us that one set out from San Francisco, but that there is no account of its discoveries surviving. There is but little more of a second which set out from San Diego and seemingly went inland to the north of San Luis Rey. The third, under Lieutenant Francisco Ruiz, with Father Jose Maria Zalvidea as diarist, appears to have come across from Santa Ynez into Kern County to Buena
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Vista Lake, reaching its farthest north about the present site of Bakersfield.
Turning south they came on the fourth day, says Chapman, to a place where, years before, the Indians had killed two soldiers --- "an allusion to an otherwise unknown expedition." It is interesting to note that this is the second otherwise unknown expedition com- memorated by one lone incident, and of course it will not do to con- clude too dogmatically that there may not have been others.
The runaway neophytes had taught their wild kinsmen Spanish ways, the use of firearms, and their appetite for horseflesh. The problem therefore combined plans for saving the souls of the Indians and the horses of the Spaniards. Thus the search for mission sites which might serve as a means of defense as well as for the purposes of conversion, became a principal object in Governor Arrillaga's plans in sending out these expeditions.
Moraga confirmed previous accounts as to mission sites and Indians, Chapman tells us, and adds in the next sentence that his diarist Munoz's account mentioned the Merced River as the best location they had found, and spoke favorably of the Kings River, though a presidio would be required. Aside from them there were few promising sites, he says.
From this reference to the Merced, if what Moraga confirmed was what Munoz mentioned, apparently there had been an earlier expedition into the territory of this county, quite conceivably the ex- pedition of 1805.
Richman says that throughout 1806 local troops in search of fugitives, under Moraga and other commanders, ranged the Tulare region from Tejon Pass to the latitude of San Francisco. It is en- tirely possible, therefore, that others besides Moraga and his men may have reached the Merced that year. It is interesting also to note the early use of "Tulare"-clearly the place of the tules, and as clearly applied to the whole valley.
Summing up the four expeditions in his biennial report in March, 1807, says Chapman, Father-President Estevan Tapis stated that they had visited twenty-four native villages with a total population of fifty-three hundred Indians. Mission sites were few and in any event a presidio would be necessary, he said, because of the remoteness of that section and the great number of Indians who dwelt beyond the regions lately explored. Referring, apparently, to Indians living in the Sierra Nevada, Richman says 192 of the 5300 Indians encoun- tered were baptized.
As to the location of the proposed mission site on the Merced, Eldredge tells us (Vol. II, p. 94) that it was on that stream, near the site of the present city of Merced, and leaves us to make what in-
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ferences we can from that. At any rate, none of the plans for establishing missions or presidios in the interior ever materialized.
The only remedy against the Indians of the interior continued to be small military expeditions similar to those of Moraga and the others in 1806. Moraga himself was the most prominent of the lead- ers, and commanded expeditions all the way from the Colorado to well north on the Sacramento. Chapman tells us that his service sheet of 1820 shows that he had taken part in forty-six such expedi- tions-"vastly more than the few of which the historians as yet have knowledge." We read of him successively as private, corporal, sergeant, color-sergeant, brevet-lieutenant, and lieutenant. He died at Santa Barbara, June 15, 1823.
In a remarkable expedition in 1808, in which he penetrated apparently about as far north as Butte City, and explored the Sierra rivers from about Stockton to Butte well up into the mountains, he turned south and in the latter part of October "made his customary up-river explorations," Chapman tells us, "of both the Tuolumne and Merced." How extensive these explorations were we can only judge from the fact that it was October 13 when he crossed the Feather River, "certainly not far from Oroville," and that after the long journey southward, the explorations in question and additional travel which involved "crossing the San Joaquin at the mouth of the Merced," and going northward to Pescadero on Union Island, he reached Mission San Jose on October 23.
He touched Merced County again in 1810, when he marched south from the vicinity of Walnut Creek up the west shore of the San Joaquin, and at some point in Merced County turned west along San Luis Creek and went through a pass in the mountains to San Juan Bautista-apparently Pacheco Pass. This was in August. In Octo- ber of the same year he was back again on a flying trip. Leaving San Jose on the 19th he struck east to Pescadero, next day captured eighty-one natives, fifty-one of whom were women, whom he pres- ently released, crossed to the right bank of the San Joaquin, ranged the country watered by the Stanislaus, Tuolumne, and Merced, with- out, however, capturing any more runaways, and on October 27th reached Santa Clara again.
""Neither on this expedition nor in that of August," says Chapman, "had he found suitable mission sites. Indeed the previously much praised Merced country was now characterized as unsuitable." Do we here possibly get a hint that 1810 was one of those abnormally dry years when the Merced carries only a third or a quarter of its normal flow? It must be confessed that the foundation for such an inference is slight, for the Spaniards had not found sites on ephemeral rivers unsuitable in the coast region.
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Perhaps the explanation is to be sought rather in the politico- ecclesiastical situation than in the foibles of nature, for it was just at this time that the plan of mission expansion in the interior was "superseded by the hitherto incidental factors of pursuing runaways, recovering stolen animals, and punishing the Indians who had com- mitted the robberies." That the mission plan was not given up without a struggle is indicated by the fact that an expedition four years later to the vicinity of Lake Tulare made search for a suitable site for one.
The presence of the Russians north of San Francisco Bay now drew attention that way, and the great central valley was somewhat neglected. There seems to have been no important expedition in 1812. In 1813, however, there was one, commanded by Sergeant Francisco Soto. With a hundred Indians from Mission San Jose and twelve soldiers who came from San Francisco by boat, he fought a battle, presumed to have been on the San Joaquin. The story is that there were a thousand Indians against him, of whom many were killed, while the Spaniards lost only one man, one of the mission In- dians. Making due allowance for the reluctance of the Spanish chronicler, whoever he may have been, to hew to the strict line of truth, the account probably gives a fair enough idea of how far from formidable the Indians of all this part of the State were.
In 1815 Governor Sola arrived and sent out his so-called "great expedition" into the tulares after runaways. It seems to have con- sisted of simultaneous expeditions from various points. Accounts of two survive. Sergeant Juan Ortega, with Father Cabot and thirty soldiers, marched from San Miguel into the southern part of the great valley. Sergeant Jose Dolores Pico, commanding the other, with Father Jaime Escudo, started from San Juan Bautista on No- vember 3. Five days later, somewhere near the junction of the Kings and the San Joaquin, he fell upon a village and captured sixty- six Indians, fifty of whom were Christians. Ortega with his party soon after joined him, and they marched to the San Joaquin. It is recorded that on one occasion they saw two hundred and fifty horses, most of them recently killed. They recovered a large band of animals and sent them back to the missions. At Mariposa Slough, the Indians by some artifice misled the Spaniards and enabled a number of renegades to escape. On November 29 Pico reached San Juan Bautista with ten sick soldiers and nine prisoners. There does not seem to have been much foundation for Governor Sola's boast that the "great expedition" had been a pronounced success.
By 1817, after several years of rather slight attention, the Indians had become more troublesome, and Governor Sola sent out three expeditions-one under Sergeant Sanchez, which fought a "great" battle with the Mokelumnes at or near modern Stockton: a
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HISTORY OF MERCED COUNTY
second under Lieutenant Jose Maria Estudillo, which went from Monterey into the Kern country and returned down the Kings and the San Joaquin and turned westward to San Juan Bautista and Monterey; and the third, under Gabriel Moraga, now a lieutenant, against the Mojaves far to the south.
In 1823 the last and one of the greatest expeditions of the Spaniards to the interior marched into the Sacramento Valley to investigate a rumor of a party of Americans or Englishmen some forty or fifty leagues to the north of San Francisco. It was com- manded by the famous Luis Arguello, included fifty-nine officers and soldiers, Father Blas Ordaz as chaplain and diarist, John Gilroy as interpreter, and a number of mission Indians. It seems to have found no Anglo-Saxons. Who they were does not appear-most probably Hudson's Bay Company trappers.
Spanish rule gave place to Mexican in that year. Punitive expeditions did not cease under the Mexicans, but internal problems distracted them pretty completely from any plans of founding mis- sions in the interior.
Hittell tells us of one of the Mexican expeditions of several years later :
"In 1839 an expedition of nine soldiers and six rancheros, under the command of Ensign Pedro Mesa, marched against the Tularenos in the San Joaquin Valley with the object of punishing horse-thieves and recovering stolen stock, but soon found that the Indians were much more formidable than they had anticipated. Mesa and six of his men were severely wounded; three were killed; and all might perhaps have lost their lives if a second expedition, consisting of twenty-seven whites and an auxiliary force of fifty friendly Indians, had not marched to their relief."
Seemingly the Indians had been improving in the art of war- perhaps the horse was an aid to them, perhaps they had acquired some of the methods and arms of the whites, perhaps both. Dr. Bunnell's account of the fighting in the Indian war of 1851 in the foothills of Mariposa and Madera Counties bears this out.
The day of the Spaniard and Mexican was drawing near its close. Their numbers had always been insignificant. With the secu- larization of the missions the neophytes fell away or died off ; soldier bickered with priest and priest with soldier. Like all of Spain's at- tempts at colonization in the new world, the whole occupation was weak in provisions both for industry and for human liberty. A few white men had crossed the Sierras as early as 1819, Payeras says. "There had been some wanderers who had gone from village to village, selling their clothing for food, and making their way to San Jose. One wonders," says Chapman, "who they were!" Whether any of them were Americans it is doubtful if we shall ever know, but even
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as early as this it seems about as likely that they should have been Americans as Spaniards. Lewis and Clark's and Pike's expeditions were then more than a decade in the past, and a large fur trade, carried on by as resourceful and venturesome a lot of men as ever lived, had already grown up west of the Missouri.
Up to the end of the second decade of the nineteenth century- to a century ago today-we have no certain records of Americans in the San Joaquin Valley. In the third decade there is the perfectly well established expedition of Jedediah Smith, referred to in the next chapter, who came in 1827, and trapped on a stream supposed to have been the Merced. Other trapping and trading expeditions followed-Americans and Hudson's Bay Company parties-for the next twenty years, but it was only at the end of that time that settle- ment began, shortly before the discovery of gold.
As we have seen, the troubles of the people west of Pacheco Pass, whom we should now call Mexicans, but who were then known as Californians, continued with the Indians in the matter of horse- stealing, as witness Pedro Mesa's expedition in 1839. The plans for missions and presidios in the interior valley came to naught, and there had been no settlement there by people of Spanish blood. There was a little settlement under the later part of the Mexican regime ; there are today on the West Side four large ranches which had their origin as Mexican grants, and a generation ago there were a few ranchitos tucked away in little valleys back among the hills of the east slope of the Diablo Range. Wild cattle and especially wild horses, the overflow of the ranches west of the range, were a heritage which the San Joaquin received from the Spaniards and Mexicans. and many place names from their language survive today.
CHAPTER II AMERICAN EXPLORERS
The first American arrival which we have a certain record of was that of Jedediah Strong Smith in 1827. He was born in the Mohawk Valley in New York State, in 1798, moved to New Hamp- shire, came in touch with fur traders in Canada, and was a clerk on a freight boat on the Great Lakes while yet a boy. At the age of twenty he turns up in St. Louis, then the center of Western enterprise, and begins a career as a fur trader and explorer.
After expeditions with David E. Jackson, William Ashley, An- drew Henry, Thomas Fitzpatrick, and others to the upper Missouri and the Yellowstone, and even to Great Salt Lake and the head- waters of the Columbia, he set out in the summer of 1826 to explore the unknown country between Great Salt Lake and the California coast. The expeditions of Lewis and Clark to the Northwest and of Pike to the Southwest had left this vast unknown region between. It is only within the last few years that his work has come to be recognized, or even known.
David E. Jackson and William L. Sublette, at Salt Lake in the summer of 1826, were joined by Ashley and Smith, coming from St. Louis with a supply of goods for the Indian trade. Ashley sold out to the three others, and it was under the direction of the new firm that Smith's expedition was undertaken. New fur fields were the primary object, which necessarily involved exploration, and probably also exploration for its own sake and also, it is believed, the estab- lishment of a station on the Pacific Coast for carrying on the fur trade with China.
They left Salt Lake on August 22, and proceeded southwest to Utah Lake, thence up the Sevier River, across a range of mountains, and down a river which Smith named Adams "in compliment to our President," but which was afterwards called the Virgin after one of Smith's men. Traveling down this stream twelve days, they reached the Colorado, down which he traveled four days more, when he rested and recruited his horses among the Mojaves. Then, he writes : "I traveled a west course fifteen days over a country of complete barrens. . . . " Cleland conjectures that his route followed approxi- mately that of the Santa Fe Railroad; at any rate he crossed the Sierra Madre Mountains through Cajon Pass and on November 27 camped a few miles from San Gabriel Mission.
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There was trouble ahead, for the presence of his party in the province was contrary to Mexican law. Leaving his party, Smith went to San Diego to see Governor Encheandia and attempt to obtain passports. These the Governor was not willing to issue on his own responsibility. After nearly a month, with the aid of a present of beaver skins and with the assistance of Captain Cunningham of the hide-and-tallow ship "Courier," he secured papers of a sort; but the best that the Governor would permit him was to return un- molested the way he had come, though he had wished to go north through the settled portions of California.
He returned to San Gabriel, purchased horses from the ranchos around Los Angeles, put his equipment in order, and on January 18, 1827, set out, ostensibly to follow out the letter of Encheandia's permits. But he had no intention of quitting California so directly, and when he reached the eastern mouth of the Cajon, turned north- ward and entered the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley, either through the Tejon or the Tehachapi Pass.
"Traveling leisurely down the valley," says Cleland, "which he found inhabited by large numbers of Indians, very backward in civil- ization, living only on acorns, roots, grass, and fish, armed only with bows and arrows, but in no way hostile or dangerous, Smith and his men came at length to one of the numerous rivers which flow into the valley from the Sierras. This was probably the Stanislaus or the Merced, but here again the record is too incomplete to fix the matter definitely.
"Smith called this stream the Wimmulche (Wimilche), after an Indian tribe which lived beside it. Here he trapped a short time, finding 'a few beaver, and elk, deer, and antelope in abundance.' He then endeavored to cross the Sierras and return to the Great Salt Lake. Nothing definite is known of the pass through which Smith sought to lead his men on this occasion. He speaks of the attempt having been made across Mount Joseph." The route, Cleland tells us, can only be conjectured, and he cites Harrison C. Dale as the best authority on the expedition and says that his conjecture is that Mount Joseph is Mt. Stanislaus, and that Smith's course lay up the middle fork of the Stanislaus River.
At any rate, they were forced back by deep snow. Leaving the greater part of his party on the Wimilche, Smith with two companions, seven horses, and two mules set out on May 20 for a second trial, and succeeded in crossing in eight days. They lost two horses and a mule in the crossing, and twenty days later, with only one horse and one mule of the original nine alive, and more dead than alive themselves, the three men reached Great Salt Lake.
He met his partners here, tarried a month, then set out, July 13, 1827, with a second expedition of nineteen men to rejoin his
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companions on the Wimilche. He followed his old route to the lower Colorado, and here the Mojaves, apparently friendly at first, set upon them when they were separated while crossing the river and killed ten of their number. The survivors, abandoning most of their belongings, arrived after nine days and a half of hardship at San Gabriel again, where Smith left two of his men, obtained such pro- visions as he could, and set out for the San Joaquin.
The men he had left behind were about out of food; a new stock was necessary for the return journey, and as there was no other way for it, Smith with Indian guides set out for San Jose, which he reached in three days, probably crossing over the Pacheco Pass.
He found Father Duran at the mission there far less obliging than Father Sanchez at San Gabriel, and was imprisoned on a charge of enticing away neophytes. He obtained his release and went to Monterey, and the Governor, whom he sought there, proved to be the same Encheandia whom he had met the previous year in San Diego. For a long time Encheandia threatened to send Smith a prisoner to Mexico, but he was at length prevailed upon by several American ship captains, whose ships were at Monterey, to permit the Americans to secure necessary supplies and leave the country in peace. Smith gave a bond of $30,000 to insure his departure from the province and was allowed to go. His men meanwhile, being in want, had journeyed north to San Francisco. They obtained food and clothing there, and Smith attempted to secure American and English recruits, but was prevented by the Mexicans. The party then pro- ceeded northward up the "Bonadventure"-the Sacramento-and about the middle of April, 1828, left the river and traveled north- westerly through the Coast Range of what is now Trinity and Hum- boldt Counties, to the sea.
The route was extremely rough and difficult, and they lost a considerable number of their horses in falls, in fording streams, and in other accidents. From near the mouth of the Klamath to that of the Umpqua they traveled along the coast. Here, before they could reach the headwaters of the Willamette, Indians suddenly set upon their camp, on July 14, 1828, and killed all except Smith himself, Arthur Black, and John Turner. Ignorant of Black's escape, Smith and Turner together proceeded to the Hudson's Bay Company post at Vancouver, where Black had arrived the day before.
Smith did not touch California again. He continued the fur trade and exploration in the Rocky Mountain region until the spring of 1831, when he was killed in an Indian ambush.
James Ohio Pattie and his father Sylvester Pattie, who came into southern California between Smith's first and his second expedi- tion, do not appear to have touched the San Joaquin Valley. After almost incredible hardships and the loss of a number of their men
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in a battle with the Indians, the Patties reached civilization in southern California, and found it not too civilized. Governor Encheandia, who had been disturbed by the advent of Smith across the desert, was still more disturbed by this arrival so soon afterwards of a second party of Americans, and threw them into prison, where the elder Pattie, already reduced in strength by the hardships of the trip, died.
The son finally obtained his liberty by the possession of some rough medical skill and a small supply of vaccine on his part and the coming of an epidemic of smallpox. It is related that he vaccinated Mexicans and Indians by thousands all the way up the coast as far as Sonoma. But it does not appear that he extended his medical min- istrations to the interior.
These expeditions of Smith and Pattie, small in size as they were, ushered in an important era. They were followed by other trapping and trading expeditions, and they made certain the great overland advance of settlers in the forties both before and after the discovery of gold, and equally certain that California would pass from Mexican to American control.
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