Multimedia Presentations

This is a crowded, public place in California in 1845. In fact, it’s a traffic jam...

...and this is a crowded, public place in California in 1860.

Thanks to the Gold Rush and the steam ship, California was turned almost overnight into a bustling US state, with people pouring in from all over the globe. It was an instant cultural kaleidoscope, unprecedented in human history.

If an imaginary visitor had ventured to the northern forests or the Sierra in 1846, she would have found those remote regions still under the control of folks like these.

Expansionism was a popular policy back in Washington. In 1843, John C. Frémont was sent to explore the Far West. Frémont’s declared mission was to find the best route to speed emigration to Oregon – to forestall the British, who also claimed the area. Since he just happened to be in the neighborhood, Frémont decided to drop by and visit California. What he found there sent him back to Washington full of enthusiasm.

This is the battle of Buena Vista as it never happened. Note the spotless dress uniforms.

This is a symbol of “battle” – of who fought and who won. Before the advent of photography, this was the usual way of depicting war. It took Matthew Brady’s pictures of the Civil War dead to give the folks back home an idea of what actually goes on in armed conflict.

The biggest source of emigrants was the United States, here being led westward by Columbia, who is stringing telegraph wire as she floats along in her wispy attire. Just below her are the Argonauts, the seekers of the Golden Fleece, who lead our Westward Expansion.

Statehood quickly became an issue as California’s population exploded. Lawlessness was widespread and land disputes kept lawmen and judges busy. Californians wanted effective government, and they grew angry as Congress dawdled back East.

“One-man-one-claim” was the watchword of Gold Rush California. No miner – from either North or South – wanted to compete with slave-powered mining companies.

California’s request to enter the Union as a free state enraged the Southern congressional leadership.

John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, a giant of the Senate, stated flatly that the South would secede if California came in as a free state – and that war would surely follow.

Here is Calhoun’s hair standing on end at the very idea.

During the 1850’s, the traditional national political parties – the Whigs and the Democrats – broke up over regionalism and slavery. The Whigs disappeared completely, and the new Republican Party emerged in the North.

In the critical election of 1860, the Democratic Party split into Southern and Northern factions, as shown in this cartoon. When the dust settled, the voters were left with 4 candidates for president.

This map shows how scattered the political landscape of California really was. Lincoln won the Bay Area (except for the Peninsula) and San Bernardino and Nevada counties. Douglas captured the top quarter of the state and Santa Barbara and Ventura counties in the south. Breckinridge, the Southern candidate, won Los Angeles and a number of vast rural counties – and swept the Southern Mines.

California would have been fertile ground for a Confederate partisan campaign, based in the Southern Mines.

John Downey was Governor of California at the start of the war. He opposed using force to bring the Southern states back into the Union. His conduct in office was so alarming to Unionists that they petitioned the Secretary of War to leave regular US troops in California.

Their request was granted.

As if things weren’t bad enough for the Unionists, the man in charge of the US Army Department of the Pacific was a charismatic Southerner named Albert Sidney Johnston.

Johnston was a highly distinguished officer, whose appointment to the Western command was widely seen as part of a plot to place Southern officers in key positions in the event of war.

The hidden core of rebellion was the Knights of the Golden Circle, a secret society formed to support Southern ideals and expansionism.

One young Knight named Asbury Harpending was determined to act for the South in California.

Harpending was a Kentucky aristocrat who was born into one fortune and set out to win more in the gold mines of Northern California and Mexico.

In 1863, he helped organize the boldest scheme ever on behalf of the Confederacy in California.

Harpending planned a campaign of privateering along the Pacific Coast. His quarry were the Pacific Mail Steamships that carried California’s gold back East, where it backed the credit system that kept the Northern economy afloat.

If Harpending represents the romantic wing of Southern partisans in California, Captain Rufus Henry Ingram represents its opposite. We don’t have a picture of Ingram, but we do know where he learned his fighting. Ingram took part in Quantrill’s infamous raid on Lawrence, Kansas.

Stage coach robbery was a favorite form of outdoor fund-raising in California at the time...and Ingram and his men gave it a try.  They rode east to Placerville and held up a Wells Fargo shipment.

Ingram then handed the driver a receipt from the Confederate States of America – and rode off with $52,000 in silver and gold.

Loyal Californians were eager to show their support for the national government. Here is an ardently Unionist Angel of the Lord bearing the first telegraphic messages from California to the East in late 1861.

One of the first to have composed a message was the Reverend Thomas Starr King of San Francisco, the Union’s most devastating Weapon of Mass Instruction.

Starr King was a Unitarian preacher, freshly arrived from Boston, who enjoyed a considerable reputation

He was a slight, frail-looking man, whose appearance always disappointed people who came to see him – until he began to speak.

King was undaunted by his small stature. As he put it, “Though I weigh only 120 pounds, when I’m mad, I weigh a ton.”

California volunteers saw action all over the Western States. They helped repel the 1862 Confederate invasion of New Mexico. But most of their fighting was against native tribesmen.

California was a land populated almost overnight by many races and nationalities, all hoping to be reborn. The new American California fairly hummed with the energy generated by so many dreams.

In the midst of this bustling society of immigrants, the indigenous peoples struggle to keep their land and culture, but it is a desperate, uphill battle.  By  1860, the Nisenan people had all but disappeared from their ancient homeland.