Two Californias: The Myths And Realities Of A State Divided Against Itself

By Michael Di Leo and Eleanor Smith

Two Californias explores for the first time the pervasive folk myth that Northern and Southern California should really be separate states. You hear it all the time in the media and on the street - but is it true?

Michael DiLeo and Eleanor Smith look closely and discover that there are profound truths embedded in the folk tradition. And equally profound misconceptions. Probing the surprising and little-known history of the split-state movement, the authors find that its underlying sentiments have been part of California politics and culture since territorial days. What the issues are today, what their implications are for our lives in the 1980s, and what we can do about them are the focus of this fascinating book.

The current water controversy, perhaps the most crucial in the state's history, cannot be resolved until the two Californias make peace with each other. No other book confronts the environmental and philosophical problems that plague California and have nationwide echoes as thoroughly and as intelligently as Two Californias does. Two Californias is entertaining – and it also thought-provoking. It is very likely to change the ways we think about living together and sharing resources in the 1980s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Apr 24, 2013
• ISBN: 9781610913515

Book preview

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1

The Golden State 1820-1914

Wishing he’d never come to Monterey, the new governor of Alta California looked out on a dark, surly ocean. A blast of wind chilled his thin, juiceless body. He sighed and started to cough, cursing the fates that had brought him here. The year was 1825.

Jose Maria Echeandia was brooding about more than his health and the weather. The love of his life, the dazzling Senorita Josefa Carrillo, was living in San Diego, hundreds of miles to the south. While the governor attended to the tedious affairs of state, he wondered if some young suitor was bidding for her heart. Just the thought made him begin coughing again.

A division of the state into two or more states is a political necessity which will be recognized by all parties sooner or later.

—Sacramento Union, 1853

He gazed out once more onto the stormy Pacific. The weather seemed so oppressive. The swirling fog was turning the misshapen conifers along the coast into strange apparitions. He hated this gloomy place.

On that wintry day in 1825, Echeandia, the third Mexican governor of Alta California (the territory north of modern-day Baja California), made a decision: he would leave Monterey and move to San Diego. There was just one problem. Monterey had been the seat of the territorial government since 1775. That didn’t stop Echeandia, though; he simply took the government with him. Upon his arrival in San Diego, a short time later, he named that town the new capital.

The residents in and around Monterey, called arribenos (uplanders), were furious. They felt betrayed and abandoned. The abajenos, residents of the southern part of the territory, were delighted. By this move south, Echeandia planted seeds of bitterness, seeds that would produce armed conflict a few years later.

Thus was born one of the first of many feuds between the northern and southern halves of the place we call California. For more than a century and a half, this rivalry has continued. Its ebbs and flows have played a large part in shaping the destiny of what is now America’s largest state.

Two Californios

Actually, the idea of dividing California in two arose as early as the eighteenth century. The Franciscan fathers proposed that the Spanish territory of Alta California be severed at the Tehachapi Mountains, at a point just north of Santa Barbara. The padres felt that the region, which extended some 600 miles from San Diego to Sonoma, was simply too large to administer as one unit. Because the area was so sparsely populated, the plan was rejected as unnecessary.

Although he did not win the heart of Josefa Carrillo (she ran off with an American sea captain), Governor Echeandia won the praise of many Californios —as the Mexicans who lived in the remote district were known—for his efforts to secularize the wealthy, omnipotent missions. His mistake was to foolishly let his soldiers—former convicts sent to this distant backwater as punishment and who had stayed in Monterey—nearly starve to death. In 1828, the army rebelled and headed south to oust him. The insurgents met the governor’s men at Santa Barbara and were forced to withdraw. Echeandia soon recaptured Monterey and sent the rebellious soldiers back to Mexico. Then the governor retired.

Rebellions, uprisings, conspiracies, and intrigues colored the entire Mexican era in California, from the time of liberation from Spain in 1821 to the American conquest in 1847. The Californios resented the arrogant, self-serving governors appointed by Mexico City. Because the federal capital was so far away, they felt little fear of reprisal if they took up arms against these incompetent, often ruthless rulers. Eventually, some group or other would brandish their weapons against each new appointee and send him scurrying back to Mexico. After Echeandia, California had nine governors in 15 years.

Californios also fought with each other. Los Angeles, which by then was the most populous pueblo in the territory, kept trying to snatch from Monterey the capital and the customs house with its essential revenues, writes David Lavender in California: A Bicentennial History.¹

In 1831, Echeandia overthrew his successor, the militant Manuel Victoria. He installed himself as governor, for the second time, in San Diego. Stewing since his first administration, the arribenos of Monterey induced Agustin V. Zamarano to challenge the impudent abajeno and declare Monterey the capital. Each leader marshalled his troops for battle but eventually compromised by dividing California into two territories.

Echeandia ruled the southern half, which extended as far north as the San Gabriel Mission. Zamarano wielded the scepter of power in the north, the southern limit of which was the San Fernando Mission. In between the two territories lay a no-man’s land. If one side’s army crossed over the line, the other would instantly begin a war game.

After a year of this, Mexico City sent Jose Figueroa to govern California. Figueroa united the torn territory and made Monterey his official residence. For a time peace reigned, but the end of the controversy was not yet—the politicians of the south were placid, but they were plotting, historian J. M. Guinn wrote.²

In fact, one prominent Angeleno persuaded the Mexican Congress to declare Los Angeles the capital of both Baja and Alta California. The citizens of the southern pueblo, overjoyed, sent a request to Monterey for the government archives and for the governor to move at once to the new capital.

Taking umbrage, the northern politicians responded with a demand of their own. They insisted that a suitable palacio for the governor be found before the government moved to Los Angeles. Representatives were dispatched to find one, but to no avail. The officials stayed in Monterey and proceeded to taunt Angelenos with invidious comparisons—their lack of polish, their provincialism, and their poverty.

In 1844, Pio Pico and his followers ousted the last Mexico-City-appointed governor of California, the arrogant Manuel Micheltorena. A native of Southern California, Pico declared himself governor and Los Angeles the capital. But Monterey kept the coveted customs house; there Jose Castro, the new military commandant, ruled as if ultimate power were his. Within two years it was clear the two Californios would cross swords.

In 1846 Pico set out with a small contigent of abajenos to teach Castro and the plotting politicians of Monterey a lesson. The group got as far north as San Luis Obispo when it encountered a messenger. With shock, Pico learned that an American, Commodore Robert Sloat, had captured Monterey and taken possession of California in the name of the United States. He retreated to Los Angeles. The war between the arribenos and abajenos was over; the two factions united in the face of a common enemy, the Yankees.

Halcyon Days

From 1846-1847, the Californios fought valiantly against the invading Americans. In one particularly bloody battle, near the Indian village of San Pasqual (near San Diego), General Stephen Kearny’s force encountered the troops of General Andres Pico, brother of Governor Pico. The Americans had marched all the way from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and were exhausted. In spite of this, a cold mist, and a fog-shrouded and unfamiliar battlefield, Kearny attacked Pico’s men early on the morning of December 6, 1846.

The Americans were no match for the lance-equipped and superbly mounted Californios, wrote historians Beck and Williams.³ Kearny lost 21 men with 18 wounded, but Pico lost only one man. This was the most significant battle ever fought on California soil—and also the last victory for the Californios.

A month and a half later, Andres Pico—whom we’ll meet again later—surrendered on behalf of all his compatriots to General John C. Fremont. The Cahuenga Capitulation ended the hostilities in January 1847. The following year, the United States got what it had been after for several years: the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo formally ceded California to the US. Between 1848 and 1850, the interim preceding statehood, a series of military governors, appointed by Washington, ruled the far western territory. Much like their Mexican predecessors, they argued constantly over who ruled which part of the state.

Pala Mission. Courtesy, the Bancroft Library

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When the Americans took over in California, they discovered a life-style wholly different from their own. While a few Californios had taken arms against their oppressive governors, the incessant rebellions did little to interfere with the lives of the majority, who lived on the ranchos—large cities unto themselves. This was, according to historian Robert Glass Cleland, the day of the Dons, an idyllic interlude during which a people of simple wants, untroubled either by poverty or by the ambition for great wealth, gave themselves over wholeheartedly and successfully to the grand and primary business of the enjoyment of life.⁴

The ranchos were actually former mission holdings, which had been divided up as part of the secularization plan. The Mexican governors granted large chunks of land to a number of Californios and to a few foreigners. To qualify for a grant, the applicants had only to promise to use and stock the land with at least 2000 head of cattle. Between 1834 and 1846, more than 800 land grants containing 13 to 14 million acres—about one-fourth of the land area in California—were authorized. Most were in Southern California.

Rancho life was easy-going. Cattle grazed on open ranges, so there was little fence building and repair to be done; mission-raised Indian laborers did the mundane work; and a few vaqueros handled the branding and butchering.

Raising cattle for hides and tallow was extremely profitable. Each year, the Californios sold, as a group, some 75,000 hides for an average of $2.00 each, states Lavender.⁵ Very little of this income was taxed for the support of education, social services, transportation, or defense. As a result, the rancheros and their families lived the life of Riley. Their huge profits went for "fancy suits emblazoned with gold and silver braid, showy cowhide boots made in Boston, ornate saddles, and broad-brimmed beaver hats. For the women, there were satin slippers, rustling petticoats, and rebozos of Chinese silk that might cost $150 or more apiece."

All That Glitters

One of the foreign ranchers enjoying these halcyon days was John Sutter, a Swiss immigrant whose vast settlement in the Sierra foothills near Coloma had become a refuge for early travellers crossing the mountains into California. Sutter was called the baron of Sacramento Valley, and with his associates, raised stock, farmed, traded, and harvested timber at Sutter’s Fort. One fateful decision Sutter made was to build a sawmill on the American River to process the fort’s timber.

James W. Marshall, a skilled wheelwright and itinerant carpenter, had been named foreman of the sawmill crew. To broaden the channel where the water would supply the mill with power, the crew allowed the river to run through a tailrace at night. One morning in January 1848, Marshall recalled later, I went down as usual and after shutting off the water from the race, I stepped into it near the lower end, and there upon the rock, about six inches beneath the surface of the water, I discovered the gold.⁶

Marshall tested the golden flakes to make sure they were not fool’s gold. Satisfied, he told Sutter about his finding. Sutter swore his foreman and everyone else at the fort to secrecy. Then he sent two employees to Monterey to ask the military governor to grant him the piece of land upon which the sawmill was being built. The governor refused and sent Sutter’s envoys back to Coloma. But the secret was out.

Sluice boxes used to trap placer gold during the 1850’s

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Within weeks, prospectors from all over Northern California began to arrive at Sutter’s Fort. Trespassers butchered Sutter’s cattle, overran his lands, and stole his property. Not nearly as lucky as others, who carted away barrels of gold, Sutter and Marshall fared only moderately well as miners. Sutter ultimately went bankrupt, the victim of several unwise business deals.

The discovery of gold in California rocked the world. Like wildfire, the news spread across the country and leapt over the oceans. From as far away as France and China, not to mention the East Coast and the Midwest, men dropped their guns, their pens, their plows, or whatever else they were holding at the time, and rushed off to the goldfields of the Sierra Nevada. They kissed their wives goodbye and promised to be home soon with a sackful of nuggets that would end all their worries forever. Single men left in a jiffy, with promises to no one but themselves to strike it rich fast. They traveled across the Great Plains in wagon trains, or took boats to San Francisco, then hurried to the foothills. Of course, those who already lived in California had the advantage of getting to the goldfields first to stake out claims. In 1848, nearly all of the residents of San Francisco and Monterey up and left; armed with shovel and pick, they headed east to the Mother