I have several personal connections to the controversial “Captain” Thomas Fallon monument that confronts motorists exiting Highway 87 into downtown San Jose. The triumphal equestrian statue is situated directly in front of the building I live in. It’s also right across the street from the building my mother worked in for nearly fifty years, and probably the place where she met Tom McEnery, the man largely responsible for erecting the statue. I inherited a copy of Captain Fallon’s fictionalized diary, California Cavalier: The Journal of Captain Thomas Fallon signed by the author, Tom McEnery. I live two blocks from Fallon’s old home, which incongruously faces the trendy San Pedro Square Market.
When I was completing my graduate work in American History at San Jose State, I also wrote a research paper about the Bear Flag Rebellion, which Fallon and his gang brought to San Jose in July of 1846. During my research, I was shocked to discover my own ignorance of the shabby coup d’etat that ultimately pried the Golden State from the hands of Mexico and made it part of the United States.
Since the study of United States History traditionally begins with the early English colonial settlements in Virginia and Massachusetts, and then gradually moves westward as the Republic expands across the continent, California history is usually treated as an afterthought. But what really blew my mind was the fact that I had grown up in California and never been taught any of the basic facts around the U.S. takeover of Mexican California. Why was that?
The Bear Flag Revolt officially started in Sonoma, California on June 14th, 1846, but other crucial events had set the stage. The United States had annexed Texas in December of 1845 after gringo immigrants had violently wrested the province from the Mexican government. In March of 1846, the “explorer” U.S. Captain John C. Fremont, who had been been given permission by the Mexican authorities of Alta California to pass through the valley of San Joaquin River, immediately violated the terms of his visit by leading his band of sixty armed men through San Jose, Santa Cruz and the Salinas Valley.
When Fremont received a warning from Mexican General Jose Castro to leave the province on March 5th, he defiantly took up a fortified position on Gavilan Peak northeast of Monterey and raised the American flag. After Castro assembled two-hundred and fifty troops to dislodge the Americans, Fremont fled with his men on March 9th.
After a brief sojourn in Oregon, Fremont returned to the Sacramento area in May of 1846. While in Oregon, Fremont had received letters from Secretary of State James Buchanan and other U.S. government officials that he later claimed in his memoirs made it “known to me now on the authority of the Secretary of the Navy that to obtain California was the chief objective of the President.”
On June 6th, Fremont sent horsemen throughout the Sacramento Valley carrying unsigned notices claiming that an army of Californios was marching on the valley, burning houses, driving off cattle and destroying crops. Anglo settlers, who were already agitated by wild rumors of Mexican depredations and many of whom believed themselves entitled to land by virtue of their cultural and racial superiority, mobilized and seized the undefended former military garrison town of Sonoma on June 14th.
Here is where our local hero enters the picture. By this time, Fallon, an Irish immigrant who had come west with the Fremont expedition of 1843 and remained in Alta California, had become a businessman and was living in Santa Cruz. Fallon had pursued opportunities unmolested since his arrival and was eagerly engaging in new enterprises when news of the revolt reached him.
Nonetheless Fallon rode into San Jose with nineteen armed men and on July 14th he raised the American flag over the courthouse. Mexican forces under Castro had fled San Jose after receiving the news that U.S. Commodore Sloat had seized Monterey, which was then the capital of Alta California, on July 7th. So here we have a man hoisting the flag of a country of which he was not even a citizen over the city of another country in which he had been welcomed as an immigrant.
Thomas McEnery, the former San Jose mayor, the man who had brought the Fallon statue to San Jose and author of Fallon’s fictionalized journal, has nothing to say about the ethics of Fallon’s behavior. The journal is full of scholarly footnotes on Fallon’s actions, much of it providing highly illuminating historical context. McEnery has a masters degree in history and studied Fallon closely, going so far as to visit his hometown in Cork, Ireland. But his hero’s participation in the armed seizure of a foreign country goes entirely unexamined. Fallon is portrayed as a swashbuckling adventurer rather than a paramilitary leader helping to facilitate the foreign conquest of a country that welcomed him as an immigrant.
This leads us directly to my question of why I had never learned the facts of the U.S. conquest of Mexican California while growing up in California. McEnery’ s fawning portrayal of Fallon is nothing new. The early historians of California in the decades after the annexation of California set the template.
In a nutshell the narrative is as follows. There were savages living in California, running around naked and picking wild berries. Then the Spanish came and built the beautiful missions, which sometimes exploited the Indians. The Mexicans revolted, secularized the missions, and the Californios enjoyed a brief period of pastoral paradise on their haciendas and ranchos. But they spent most of their time wearing fancy clothes, doing the fandango, bullfighting, and having fiestas, and they were not really using the land to its fullest potential. Then the bold, enterprising American immigrants rebelled against the Mexican tyrants, coincidentally, just as the United States was going to war against Mexico.
If you think I’m exaggerating, ponder this description of California’s Mexican society from Hubert Howe Bancroft, largely considered the father of California history, in his essay “Mexican California of Lotos-Land”:
They were not a strong community in any sense, either morally, physically, or politically; hence it was that as the savages faded before the superior Mexicans, so faded the Mexicans before the superior Americans. Great was their opportunity, exceedingly great at first if they had chosen to build up a large and prosperous commonwealth; and later no less marvelous, had they possessed the ability to make avail of the progress and performance of others. Many were defrauded of their stock and lands; many quickly squandered the money realized from a sudden increase in values. They were foolish, improvident, incapable…
The notion that the conquered were not making the most of their opportunities or building a proper civilization and thus must make room for their more industrious conquerors was the same justification used by settlers of the early North American colonies to decimate the Native Americans and seize their lands. To Bancroft’s credit, he does acknowledge that the Californios “were grossly sinned against by the people of the United States.” The scale of land theft and fraud perpetrated against Mexicans in California that followed the U.S. takeover was so great that it could scarcely be denied. But Bancroft argues that the “simple-minded patriarchs” of Alta California were easy marks for the shyster lawyers who robbed them of their lands.
Between the charlatan lawyers and aggressive squatters, Californios lost their lands at an alarming rate. According to Notre Dame Professor Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, author of Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States, “in 1850, 61 percent of them owned land worth more than $100 (in 1850’s money). By 1860 the figure had fallen to 29 percent, and it continued to fall.”
The squatters were the shock troops of the land theft. They squatted on owners’ lands, sometimes making humiliating offers to buy them, then used intimidation and violence to force the owners out if they refused to sell at the demanded price. The Berryessa family of San Jose, one of the largest landholding Californio families, provides a stark illustration of the fate of many local landowners at the hands of their new conquerors.
Before the land grab even commenced, the Berryessa family was the victim of an Anglo atrocity. Sixty-one year old Don Jose Reyes Berryessa and two of his teenage nephews were gunned down by Bear Flag rebels including Kit Carson, who later insisted the killings were ordered by John C. Fremont. The unarmed trio had arrived in San Rafael by canoe as the elder Berryessa sought to visit his sons who had had been taken prisoner by the Americans at Sonoma. After the conquest, Nemasio Berryessa and two of his brothers were lynched by Anglos struggling to seize control of the family’s mercury mine in San Jose. According to historian Linda Heidenreich, “In 1880 a remnant of the family continued to hold onto a small piece of property at the northern end of Napa. By the close of the century, they were landless.”
In 2005 Thomas McEnery’s daughter Erin showed “In Seach of the Captain,” her documentary about her father’s quest to mount the statue and the ensuing controversy at Cinequest, the San Jose film festival. The film apparently includes several city officials defending McEnery’s drive to fund and mount the statue and attacks his detractors as politically correct zealots.
It also downplays the fact that her father initially presented the Thomas Fallon journal California Cavalier as an authentic diary that had been discovered walled up in the old Fallon mansion during its renovation. In the original introduction, McEnery begins by describing how the journal was miraculously found and details his rising exuberance as he went from being skeptical of its authenticity to becoming enthralled by “the immense value of the document I held in my dusty hands.”
The admission that the journal was a work of pure fiction was not voluntary on McEnery’s part. It only came to light when Javier Salazar, one of the anti-statue protest leaders, insisted that McEnery produce the actual document for public viewing in 1978, the same year that McEnery was busy commissioning the statue at a cost of $820,000 without any public participation in the process. The book was republished with a disclaimer and the San Jose Public Library moved it from the non-fiction section to fiction.
Cinequest’s archives still has Erin McEnery’s film description, which boasts a breathtaking ignorance that only white privilege and mindless jingoism can spawn. “The statue commemorated the raising of the American flag and Californias (sic) inclusion into the United States during the Mexican-American War.” If only someone explained to the Californios who were stripped of their land or murdered that they were being “included” into the United States, they surely would have welcomed their fate. She does point out accurately that “not one shot was fired” when Fallon raised the flag, so kudos to the Captain for not shooting any of the civilians who were left to fend for themselves after Castro and his troops fled the town.
The filmmaker’s ignorance reminds me of my own when I wrote my research paper back when I was doing my graduate work. That ignorance is the product of a historiography entrenched in white supremacy, and McEnery’s perspective in 2005 illustrates that we have not advanced that far since the Hubert Howe Bancrofts of the world forged its foundation.
The history of the Bear Flag Revolt was shrouded in murky myths precisely because a clear examination of the details reveals a crude, forcible seizure of power and land based on paper thin pretenses. Arguments that the Mexican government was unstable and oppressed the local indigenous people certainly have merit, but would that justify its overthrow? If a group of Mexican immigrants today suddenly decided California was a badly mismanaged state, as many modern conservatives argue, would they be justified in staging an armed rebellion? Would gringos celebrate a statue of the Mexican leader of such a revolt years later, and accuse those who protested of being politically correct radicals?
Thankfully, the San Jose Arts Committee voted this month to remove the statue and put it into storage. Decades of activism by Hispanic protesters have brought us to this moment. While some have argued that Fallon was not the heinous criminal his most strident critics make him out to be, the rebellion and military conquest he participated in was a naked land grab that resulted in the deaths and loss of land and wealth of many Californios. The statue is clearly a triumphal, in-your-face celebration of that event. I see it every single day and I am sick of it. It is time for you go, Captain.
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