Volume 90, Number 1 - California Historical Society
Volume 90, Number 1 - California Historical Society
Volume 90, Number 1 - California Historical Society
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california history<br />
volume <strong>90</strong> number 1 2012<br />
The Journal of the <strong>California</strong> <strong>Historical</strong> <strong>Society</strong>
A year built<br />
in the Bay Area<br />
The Golden Gate Bridge is the setting of a spectacular fireworks display<br />
during the 75th anniversary celebration on May 27, 2012.<br />
wellsfargo.com<br />
© 2012 Wells Fargo Bank, N.A.<br />
All rights reserved. ECG-733888<br />
Photo credit: Chales Leung<br />
2012, what a year!<br />
The 75th anniversary<br />
of the Golden Gate<br />
Bridge. Twelve months<br />
of food, fun, fireworks,<br />
and the Bay Area<br />
coming together to celebrate the golden<br />
icon that brings us together every day.<br />
The Golden Gate Bridge and Wells Fargo<br />
have been American icons throughout<br />
their histories. We’ve been honored<br />
to share the celebrations of the Golden<br />
Gate Bridge 75th anniversary with<br />
you throughout the year, and hope<br />
you have enjoyed them all.<br />
Visit goldengatebridge75.org for<br />
75th anniversary news and updates.<br />
The Golden Gate Bridge<br />
and Wells Fargo —<br />
built in the Bay Area
Executive Director<br />
anthea hartig<br />
Editor<br />
Janet FireMan<br />
Managing Editor<br />
Shelly Kale<br />
Reviews Editor<br />
JaMeS J. raWlS<br />
Design/Production<br />
Sandy bell<br />
Editorial Consultants<br />
LARRY E . BURGESS<br />
ROBERT W . CHERNY<br />
JAMES N . GREGORY<br />
JUDSON A . GRENIER<br />
ROBERT V . HINE<br />
LANE R . HIRABAYASHI<br />
LAWRENCE J . JELINEK<br />
PAUL J . KARLSTROM<br />
SALLY M . MILLER<br />
GEORGE H . PHILLIPS<br />
LEONARD PITT<br />
<strong>California</strong> History is printed in<br />
Los Angeles by Delta Graphics.<br />
Editorial offices and support for<br />
<strong>California</strong> History are provided by<br />
Loyola Marymount University,<br />
Los Angeles.<br />
california history<br />
volume <strong>90</strong> number 1 2012 The Journal of the <strong>California</strong> <strong>Historical</strong> <strong>Society</strong><br />
From the Editor: Changes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2<br />
Collections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3<br />
Courtship and Conquest:<br />
Alfred Sully’s Intimate Intrusion at Monterey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4<br />
By Stephen G. Hyslop<br />
“With the God of Battles I Can Destroy All Such Villains”:<br />
War, Religion, and the Impact of Islam on Spanish<br />
and Mexican <strong>California</strong>, 1769–1846 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18<br />
By Michael Gonzalez<br />
Joaquin Miller and the Social Circle at the Hights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40<br />
By Phoebe Cutler<br />
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62<br />
Reviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70<br />
Donors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75<br />
Spotlight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80<br />
on the front cover<br />
(Detail) The artist and U.S. Army officer Alfred Sully (1821–1879) held posts in Monterey<br />
and Benicia, <strong>California</strong>, during the years immediately following the American conquest<br />
of <strong>California</strong>. As Stephen Hyslop observes, Sully described people and scenes of Californio<br />
society in his letters and artwork. This untitled painting, created circa 1850, is an idealized<br />
view of the life to which he aspired at the time (see pages 4–17).<br />
www.encore-editions.com<br />
contents<br />
1
2<br />
CALIFORNIA HISTORY, December 2012<br />
Published quarterly © 2012 by <strong>California</strong><br />
<strong>Historical</strong> <strong>Society</strong><br />
LC 75-640289/ISSN 0162-2897<br />
$40.00 of each membership is designated<br />
for <strong>California</strong> <strong>Historical</strong> <strong>Society</strong> membership<br />
services, including the subscription to <strong>California</strong><br />
History.<br />
KNOWN OFFICE OF PUBLICATION:<br />
<strong>California</strong> <strong>Historical</strong> <strong>Society</strong><br />
Attn: Janet Fireman<br />
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Los Angeles, CA <strong>90</strong>045-2659<br />
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POSTMASTER<br />
Send address changes to:<br />
<strong>California</strong> History CHS<br />
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THE CALIFORNIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY is a<br />
statewide membership-based organization designated<br />
by the Legislature as the state historical<br />
society. The <strong>California</strong> <strong>Historical</strong> <strong>Society</strong> inspires<br />
and empowers <strong>California</strong>ns to make the past a<br />
meaningful part of their contemporary lives.<br />
A quarterly journal published by CHS since 1922,<br />
<strong>California</strong> History features articles by leading<br />
scholars and writers focusing on the heritage<br />
of <strong>California</strong> and the West from pre-Columbian<br />
to modern times. Illustrated articles, pictorial<br />
essays, and book reviews examine the ongoing<br />
dialogue between the past and the present.<br />
CHS assumes no responsibility for statements<br />
or opinions of the authors . MANUSCRIPTS for<br />
publication and editorial correspondence should<br />
be sent to Janet Fireman, Editor, <strong>California</strong><br />
History, History Department, Loyola Marymount<br />
University, One LMU Drive, Los Angeles, CA<br />
<strong>90</strong>045-8415, or jfireman@lmu.edu. BOOKS FOR<br />
REVIEW should be sent to James Rawls, Reviews<br />
Editor, <strong>California</strong> <strong>Historical</strong> <strong>Society</strong>, 678 Mission<br />
Street, San Francisco, CA 94105-4014 .<br />
<strong>California</strong> historical <strong>Society</strong><br />
www.californiahistoricalsociety.org<br />
from the editor<br />
changes<br />
David Bowie wrote and recorded the song “Changes” in 1971. Perhaps he meant<br />
the mysterious lyrics to reflect his chameleon-like persona or technological<br />
changes in the music industry. Whatever the inspiration, countless listeners<br />
have found tender value in Bowie’s admonition to “Turn and face the strange<br />
changes . . . but I can’t trace time.”<br />
Neither could <strong>California</strong>ns trace or control the changes time brought over the<br />
centuries. For Native Americans when Spaniards established missions, presidios,<br />
and towns, and for Californios of Spanish and Mexican descent when<br />
Americans conquered Alta <strong>California</strong>, achieved statehood, and built a burgeoning<br />
state, time did anything but stand still.<br />
Change, of course, is what history is about, and in this issue, three essays encapsulate<br />
much of the chronology and many effects of sweeping social, political, economic,<br />
cultural, and personal changes that people—and time—brought about.<br />
In his essay, “‘With the God of Battles I Can Destroy All Such Villains’: War,<br />
Religion, and the Impact of Islam on Spanish and Mexican <strong>California</strong>, 1769–<br />
1846,” Michael Gonzalez asks how much, and in what form, the Muslim idea of<br />
sacred violence influenced the Franciscan priests and Spanish-speaking settlers<br />
who lived in <strong>California</strong>.<br />
In “Courtship and Conquest: Alfred Sully’s Intimate Intrusion at Monterey,”<br />
Stephen G. Hyslop brings perspective to the complexities of personal relationships<br />
between conquered peoples and their conquerors, relating U.S. Army<br />
Lieutenant Sully’s intimate social interactions with Californios, Native Americans,<br />
and Southerners during his long military career.<br />
Phoebe Cutler, in “Joaquin Miller and the Social Circle at the Hights,” provides<br />
a colorful sketch of the controversial and magnetic “Poet of the Sierras.” Once a<br />
gold miner, Indian fighter, Pony Express rider, backwoods judge, and journalist,<br />
Miller envisioned his Oakland Hills outpost “the Hights”—built in the mid-<br />
1880s—as an artists’ retreat. His vision became reality as <strong>California</strong>’s literati,<br />
artists, and political figures flocked to him and his eccentric ranch at the turn of<br />
the last century.<br />
As if to demonstrate the incontrovertible permanence of change with the passage<br />
of time, this issue—vol. <strong>90</strong>, no. 1—is the last print edition of the journal,<br />
as decided by the Board of Trustees of the <strong>California</strong> <strong>Historical</strong> <strong>Society</strong>. An electronic<br />
issue, vol. <strong>90</strong>, no. 2, will be published in April 2013 as the last appearance<br />
of <strong>California</strong> History, terminating its ninety-year existence.<br />
Janet Fireman<br />
<strong>California</strong> History • volume <strong>90</strong> number 1 2012
collections<br />
Mexican <strong>California</strong>na<br />
Among the examples of early <strong>California</strong>na<br />
in the Geil J. Norris collection<br />
is this pairing: a photograph of<br />
Manuel Castro, prefect of Monterey,<br />
in his later years and in military regalia,<br />
and an English translation of his<br />
March 5, 1846 letter to Captain John C.<br />
Frémont ordering him to remove his<br />
forces from Monterey. The letter was<br />
written at a time of escalating tensions<br />
between the United States and<br />
Mexico culminating in the Mexican<br />
War (1846–48).<br />
Photograph of Manuel Castro (undated) and English translation of his<br />
letter to John C. Frémont (March 5, 1846), Geil J. Norris family papers,<br />
Vault MS 156 [f.10].001.tif<br />
The grouping represents a collection<br />
rich in correspondence, broadsides,<br />
baptismal certificates, land records,<br />
and ephemera documenting the political,<br />
military, economic, and social life<br />
of Norris’ prominent Mexican ancestors.<br />
Other noteworthy examples from<br />
the collection—the majority of which<br />
are in Spanish—are an 1844 broadside<br />
announcing Thomas O. Larkin’s<br />
appointment as U.S. consul; letters by<br />
Larkin, Agustín Zamorano, and Pío<br />
Pico; and documents pertaining to the<br />
Mexican War.<br />
Norris was a descendant of the Cota,<br />
Pico, Castro, and Sanchez families,<br />
whose members—notably Pío Pico,<br />
Manuel Castro, Juan B. Castro, and<br />
Rafael Sanchez—were leading figures<br />
in the affairs of Mexican <strong>California</strong>.<br />
3
4<br />
Courtship and Conquest: Alfred Sully’s<br />
Intimate Intrusion at Monterey<br />
By Stephen G. Hyslop<br />
lfred Sully was not born to conquer, but<br />
as a young man seeking distinction<br />
in an era of relentless American expansion,<br />
he found that path laid out for him. The<br />
son of painter Thomas Sully of Philadelphia, one<br />
of the nation’s leading portraitists, he entered<br />
West Point in 1837 at the age of sixteen, hoping<br />
to put his creative talents to constructive use as<br />
a draftsman and engineer. A decade later, however,<br />
during the Mexican War, he took part as an<br />
infantry commander in the shattering American<br />
assault on Veracruz, which fell to forces led by<br />
General Winfield Scott in March 1847 after being<br />
blasted by artillery fire. “Such a place of destruction<br />
I never again wish to witness,” Lieutenant<br />
Sully wrote. He was sorry to say that women and<br />
children were among the victims, but faulted<br />
the populace for not fleeing the city in advance:<br />
“General Scott gave them warnings of his intentions,<br />
but, Mexican-like, they depended too much<br />
on the strength of the place.” 1 A<br />
That was mild<br />
criticism compared with the aspersions cast on<br />
Mexicans by some Americans who invaded their<br />
homeland and wrought destruction without<br />
regret. Sully seemed better suited for the role of<br />
reconstructing a defeated country and reconciling<br />
its people to conquest. Such was the task that<br />
awaited American occupation forces when he<br />
landed in Monterey, <strong>California</strong>, in April 1849 as<br />
quartermaster.<br />
<strong>California</strong> History • volume <strong>90</strong> number 1 2012<br />
The society Sully encountered there had a tradition<br />
of accommodating newcomers through<br />
hospitality, courtesy, and courtship. Ever since<br />
Spanish colonial rule ended and barriers to foreign<br />
trade and settlement were lowered, Mexican<br />
residents of Spanish ancestry, known as Californios,<br />
had compensated for their small numbers<br />
and inadequate defenses by incorporating as<br />
friends and kin Americans and other foreigners<br />
who might otherwise have remained alien and<br />
potentially hostile. That policy also brought economic<br />
benefits in the form of partnerships with<br />
merchants and captains who arrived by sea and<br />
traded, mingled, and intermarried with Californios.<br />
Far less obliging to them were the mountain<br />
men and land-hungry pioneers who entered<br />
<strong>California</strong> overland from the United States and<br />
actively opposed Mexican authorities as war<br />
loomed in early 1846. 2<br />
After American forces occupied their territory<br />
in July 1846, Californios had reason to fear that<br />
their new rulers might behave less like the adaptable<br />
Yankee traders of old than the confrontational<br />
overlanders who had ignited the Bear Flag<br />
Revolt a month earlier and ushered in the conquest.<br />
Those two groups represented contrasting<br />
aspects of the American character and American<br />
expansion, which was inherently contradictory,<br />
for it transformed a republic that was born in
ebellion against imperial rule into an imposing<br />
empire in its own right. Thomas Jefferson, in a<br />
letter to his presidential successor James Madison<br />
in 1809, tried to resolve that contradiction in<br />
writing by referring to the dynamic young nation<br />
he helped foster and expand as an “empire for<br />
liberty.” 3 But did that mean liberty and justice<br />
for all those incorporated within the emerging<br />
American empire in decades to come, including<br />
Indians and people of Spanish heritage? Or<br />
was the true purpose of westward expansion to<br />
subdue and dispossess those of other races or<br />
nationalities and clear the way for settlement<br />
by Anglo-Americans, for whom liberty was<br />
reserved?<br />
Alfred Sully (1821–1879) was a brigadier<br />
general in the United States Army when<br />
he made this self-portrait around 1864,<br />
a decade or so after leaving <strong>California</strong><br />
for duties elsewhere. Known primarily<br />
for his rigorous campaigns against<br />
defiant Indian tribes during and after the<br />
Civil War, he was also a keen observer<br />
and chronicler of war and peace in the<br />
American West and the Mexican borderlands,<br />
which he documented in hundreds<br />
of revealing letters, sketches, and paintings.<br />
During his years as an officer in<br />
<strong>California</strong> (1849–53), he witnessed the<br />
Gold Rush and massive influx of Anglo-<br />
Americans.<br />
Yale Collection of Western Americana,<br />
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library<br />
Under the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe<br />
Hidalgo that ended the Mexican War, all Californios<br />
were to become American citizens unless<br />
they chose to remain Mexican citizens. In either<br />
case, their property was to be respected and protected.<br />
But that guarantee was threatened by a<br />
vast influx of Anglo-Americans, many of whom<br />
came to <strong>California</strong> seeking gold but remained<br />
as settlers, often infringing on Californios’ property<br />
rights, which were not, in fact, protected<br />
under American law. When Alfred Sully arrived<br />
in <strong>California</strong>, that convulsive American takeover—to<br />
which the Mexican War was merely a<br />
prelude—was just beginning. Uncertain of their<br />
5
6<br />
A portrait of Alfred Sully as a young lieutenant during the Mexican War (1846–48) was featured in<br />
this 1914 article in the New York Times, along with drawings he made during that conflict and an<br />
excerpt from a letter he wrote describing the American assault on Veracruz in 1847. Identified here as<br />
the son of the renowned painter Thomas Sully, Alfred became newsworthy in his own right at a time<br />
when public attention was focused on “the present trouble in Mexico”—the article’s reference to the<br />
Mexican Revolution, which erupted in 1910 and led to American military intervention in that country.<br />
The New York Times, May 3, 1914<br />
<strong>California</strong> History • volume <strong>90</strong> number 1 2012
fate, wealthy Californios fell back on the custom<br />
of accommodating respectable Americans and<br />
trying to win them over. For their part, Sully<br />
and other officers welcomed those overtures<br />
and found interacting with their Hispanic hosts<br />
enjoyable and instructive.<br />
Sully would follow the example of earlier American<br />
captains and traders by entering this hospitable<br />
society through marriage. But his union<br />
would end tragically, and he bore some responsibility<br />
for setting that tragedy in motion. Although<br />
he had more in common with the appreciative<br />
maritime visitors who courted Californios in earlier<br />
times than with the defiant overlanders who<br />
spurned them, he came into <strong>California</strong> as a conqueror,<br />
and his marriage amounted to a personal<br />
conquest, which he achieved by imposing on<br />
those over whom he had authority. This ill-fated<br />
marriage was the first of three such relationships<br />
Sully entered into during his military career, all<br />
of them with women from groups subsumed<br />
forcefully within the expansive nation he served.<br />
Professionally and personally, he wrestled with<br />
the contradictions inherent in Jefferson’s goal of<br />
an empire for liberty—a problematic objective<br />
that could not be pursued without taking liberties<br />
in the process.<br />
hoSting the oCCupierS<br />
Soon after landing in Monterey, Sully made the<br />
acquaintance of Angustias de la Guerra, whose<br />
Spanish-born father, José de la Guerra y Noriega,<br />
had commanded the presidio at Santa Barbara<br />
and whose husband, Manuel Jimeno Casarín,<br />
had served as an official in Monterey before<br />
American forces occupied the town in 1846. She<br />
had long and close ties to Anglos. Among her<br />
in-laws were the American merchant Alfred Robinson<br />
and the English trader William Hartnell,<br />
both of whom had become Catholics and Mexican<br />
citizens before entering her family. Annexation<br />
by the United States, she concluded, was a<br />
Professionally and<br />
personally, he wrestled<br />
with the contradictions<br />
inherent in Jefferson’s<br />
goal of an empire for<br />
liberty—a problematic<br />
objective that could not be<br />
pursued without taking<br />
liberties in the process.<br />
better fate for <strong>California</strong> than continuing “on the<br />
road to utter ruin” under a poor and politically<br />
unstable Mexico. American forces took Monterey<br />
unopposed, and she and other prominent residents<br />
saw no reason to spurn polite American<br />
officers such as Lieutenant Edward Ord, brother<br />
of Dr. James Ord, an army physician whom she<br />
married following the death of Jimeno. In her<br />
wartime diary, she referred to Edward Ord fondly<br />
as “Don Eduardo,” observing that “he looks<br />
like one of us. He is very charming and dances<br />
divinely.” But her friendship with him and other<br />
American officers did not ease her fears that this<br />
new regime might bring wrenching changes to<br />
her country. “Putting the laughter and dancing<br />
aside,” she wrote, “we are all ill at ease because<br />
we do not know how we, the owners of all this,<br />
will end up! May God be with us!” 4<br />
7
8<br />
In his illustrated recollection of his adventures in <strong>California</strong>, William Redmond Ryan offered this view<br />
of Monterey in February 1848 and observed: “The portly <strong>California</strong>n, under his ample-brimmed sombrero<br />
and gay serapa, the dark-skinned and half-clad Indian, and the Yankee, in his close European<br />
costume, intermingled or chatting apart in groups of threes and fours, imparted an irresistible charm<br />
of novelty to the scene.” Alfred Sully was disappointed when he arrived the following year and found<br />
Monterey’s prominent “Spanish” residents frosty at first encounter. “They are generally to strangers<br />
somewhat cold in their manners,” he wrote. “But once acquainted all restraint is thrown off.”<br />
Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library<br />
Señora de la Guerra’s ambivalence toward the<br />
occupiers was aptly summarized by an American<br />
acquaintance, the merchant William Heath<br />
Davis, who married into this society. Prior to the<br />
Mexican War, Davis wrote, the women of <strong>California</strong><br />
“were wholly loyal to their own government<br />
and hated the idea of any change; although they<br />
respected the Americans, treated them with great<br />
cordiality and politeness, and entertained them<br />
hospitably at their homes, they would not countenance<br />
the suggestion that the United States or<br />
any foreign power should assume control of the<br />
country.” Angustias de la Guerra—who followed<br />
Spanish tradition by retaining her maiden name<br />
but was referred to by Davis as Mrs. Jimeno—<br />
<strong>California</strong> History • volume <strong>90</strong> number 1 2012<br />
shared those sentiments and was initially hostile<br />
to invading Americans. “In a patriotic outburst,”<br />
Davis related, she “exclaimed one day that she<br />
would delight to have the ears of the officers of<br />
the United States squadron for a necklace, such<br />
was her hatred of the new rulers of her country.”<br />
But whenever an American officer was taken<br />
sick, he added, “Mrs. Jimeno was the first to visit<br />
the patient and bestow on him the known kindness<br />
so characteristic of the native <strong>California</strong><br />
ladies.” 5<br />
Angustias’s policy of dealing charitably with<br />
Americans in the hope that they would respond<br />
in kind continued after the war, affording Sully<br />
and other officers a gracious hostess to look after
them. In a letter written to his family not long<br />
after he reached Monterey, Sully described her<br />
as “a tall majestic looking woman, about 30 or<br />
35, remarkably handsome . . . very agreeable, very<br />
good natured & very smart. In fact she is a well<br />
read woman & would grace any circle of society.”<br />
With her husband away temporarily and there<br />
“being no male in the house,” he added, “Me<br />
Madre (that is the name she calls herself though<br />
she is rather young & handsome to have so old<br />
a boy as me) requested me to make her house<br />
my home.” This might have been considered<br />
improper if she lived alone, but the house was<br />
brimming with servants and family members,<br />
including her eldest daughter, Manuela, who was<br />
fifteen and of marriageable age. Manuela was<br />
“remarkably pretty & gay,” he wrote, and “like all<br />
Spanish girls, monstrous fond of a flirtation. I<br />
fear she finds this rather a hard job with me, for<br />
my bad Spanish always sets her a laughing.” 6<br />
Sully was captivated by Manuela and eventually<br />
proposed marriage. But until he made his<br />
intentions clear he remained quite close to her<br />
mother, who served officially as godmother to<br />
many youngsters in <strong>California</strong> and continued in<br />
that capacity informally by taking Sully under her<br />
wing. She was only six years older than he was,<br />
and he at first found her a more congenial companion<br />
than Manuela, who struck him initially as<br />
too young and impulsive for an officer approaching<br />
thirty. In letters home, he mentioned the<br />
mother more often than the daughter and used<br />
language that caused family members to worry<br />
that he was straying into an affair. “Could I come<br />
across another Doña Angustias de la Guerra,” he<br />
wrote in August 1849, “I don’t think I would long<br />
be an old bachelor. She has given me a piece of<br />
gold from which I wish you to have made a ring.”<br />
To ease his family’s concerns, he later explained<br />
that he wanted the ring “to adorn my person &<br />
at the same time show my respect for the lady<br />
(who is by-the-by a married lady with 7 children).”<br />
There was, in fact, nothing improper in<br />
Angustias de la Guerra (1815–18<strong>90</strong>) sat for this portrait sometime<br />
after her marriage to Dr. James Ord in 1856. The daughter<br />
of José de la Guerra y Noriega (1779–1858), one of Mexican<br />
<strong>California</strong>’s leading figures, she told of her experiences in a diary<br />
she kept during the Mexican War and in a lengthy dictation to<br />
Thomas Savage, who interviewed her in 1878 while conducting<br />
research for Hubert Howe Bancroft’s multivolume History of<br />
<strong>California</strong>. Perhaps because the subject remained painful to her,<br />
she made little mention of her beloved daughter by her first marriage,<br />
Manuela Jimeno (1833–1851), who died ten months after<br />
wedding Alfred Sully without parental consent.<br />
<strong>California</strong> <strong>Historical</strong> <strong>Society</strong>, CHS2012.1014.tif<br />
his relationship with Angustias, but he was less<br />
than truthful when he claimed that he had “not<br />
yet seen anybody in this country good enough for<br />
me.” 7 Indeed, when later deprived of the company<br />
of Angustias and Manuela he found that<br />
they had been almost too kind and too good for<br />
him and left a void in his life that he found hard<br />
to fill.<br />
9
10<br />
Sully drew this sketch of the Royal Presidio Chapel at Monterey in 1849, around the time that Monterey<br />
became a diocese and the chapel became the cathedral of San Carlos Borromeo. Founded in 1770 at a site<br />
shared by the Monterey presidio and Mission San Carlos Borromeo, the chapel remained part of the presidio<br />
after the mission was relocated to the Carmel River in 1771. Rebuilt in 1794–95, it is the oldest continuously<br />
functioning church in <strong>California</strong>.<br />
The Bancroft Library, University of <strong>California</strong>, Berkeley<br />
When Angustias befriended Sully, her marriage<br />
was strained. (She and Jimeno were at odds over<br />
financial and family matters and would separate<br />
before he died in 1853.) She found solace in the<br />
attention this courtly young American paid her,<br />
but she allowed Manuela to enjoy his company<br />
as well. On one occasion when Manuela asked to<br />
attend a dance with friends, Angustias suggested<br />
that Sully serve as her chaperon. “If my son<br />
Don Alfredo will take my daughter to the ball,”<br />
she declared, “she can go.” 8 Angustias trusted<br />
in Sully and must have been shocked when he<br />
asked for Manuela’s hand in marriage a short<br />
time later, but she and her husband did not rule<br />
out the match. Their chief concern was that Sully<br />
was not a Catholic, and they told him that they<br />
would have to consult relatives, including Manuela’s<br />
paternal uncles Antonio and José Joaquín<br />
<strong>California</strong> History • volume <strong>90</strong> number 1 2012<br />
Jimeno, who served as priests to small communities<br />
of Christian Indians still living at <strong>California</strong>’s<br />
decaying missions.<br />
Unlike Robinson, Hartnell, and other foreign<br />
settlers who adopted the customs and creed of<br />
their hosts, Sully had no intention of converting<br />
to Catholicism. Fearing that he would never<br />
gain parental consent and would lose the popular<br />
Manuela to another suitor, he took strong<br />
measures that he admitted were “not altogether<br />
according to Hoyle,” or in keeping with the<br />
rules that gentlemen were supposed to observe.<br />
He arranged for the wife of a fellow officer,<br />
Captain Elias Kane, to invite Manuela to their<br />
home, where she arrived in the company of an<br />
admirer, a “young gentleman” of Monterey who<br />
was favored by Angustias. While another officer<br />
distracted that unfortunate suitor, Mrs. Kane<br />
escorted Manuela into the kitchen, where she and
Sully were promptly married by the local priest,<br />
who was later removed from his post for performing<br />
this ceremony without parental consent. Sully<br />
appeared unaware that his actions might have<br />
compromised the priest and insulted the young<br />
admirer who had unwittingly escorted Manuela to<br />
her wedding, but he could not ignore the offense<br />
he caused her parents. “The old folks are as mad<br />
as well can be,” he wrote. “I went to see them &<br />
was invited never to show my face again.” 9<br />
a “JudgMent FroM god”<br />
Manuela’s parents had reason to feel cheated, but<br />
for Angustias the betrayal was deeply personal,<br />
coming as it did from someone she had treated<br />
as a member of her family. The betrayal was symbolized<br />
by the gold ring that Sully had intended<br />
to wear in her honor. In June 1850, a month after<br />
his furtive wedding, he wrote home to thank his<br />
family for sending it: “The steamer of yesterday<br />
brought me two letters & the ring, which is pronounced<br />
beautiful. Manuela has it.” 10<br />
Angustias was slower than her husband to forgive<br />
Sully, but she reconciled with him when she<br />
learned that Manuela was pregnant. By imposing<br />
on this proud family and violating the code by<br />
which they lived, however, Sully had set the stage<br />
for tragedy. In late March 1851, less than two<br />
weeks after giving birth, Manuela fell violently<br />
ill and died after eating what Sully called a “fatal<br />
orange” sent to her as a present. It was rumored<br />
afterward that the gift came from a disappointed<br />
suitor, who had poisoned the fruit. Sully had<br />
urged her not to eat the orange, fearing that it<br />
might be bad for her, but her mother thought it<br />
would do her no harm and consulted the physician<br />
(her future husband, James Ord), who gave<br />
his consent. “Thus by the ignorance of a doctor<br />
I have been robbed of a treasure that can never<br />
be replaced,” Sully lamented. His black servant,<br />
Sam, who was devoted to Manuela, became so<br />
distraught after her death that he killed himself,<br />
believing “that in the world to come we would all<br />
be united once more together.” The final blow for<br />
Sully came a short time later, when Angustias,<br />
who had recently given birth, took Manuela’s<br />
infant to bed with her to nurse the boy and fell<br />
asleep with him in her arms. “When she woke<br />
up he was dead,” Sully wrote. “She had strangled<br />
it in her sleep. The doctor persuaded her it<br />
died of a convulsion, but to me alone he told<br />
the true story.” 11<br />
In his shock and grief, Sully may have misinterpreted<br />
these terrible events. The “fatal orange”<br />
was just one possible cause of the sudden intestinal<br />
torments Manuela suffered before she died<br />
(she may have contracted cholera). And Sully’s<br />
assertion that Angustias “strangled” the infant<br />
in her sleep hinted perhaps at an unconscious<br />
motive on her part—lingering hostility toward<br />
him—that existed only in his imagination. But<br />
whether those deaths and Sam’s demise were the<br />
result of “ignorance & violence,” as he put it, or<br />
random misfortunes beyond anyone’s control,<br />
Sully had reason to feel that dreadful punishment<br />
had been visited on him and his in-laws.<br />
“It appears like a judgment from God for some<br />
crime that I or her family have committed,”<br />
he wrote. 12<br />
aFter the Fall<br />
Sully was surely aware that the act he believed<br />
set this tragedy in motion—eating a forbidden<br />
fruit—was like the original sin that brought God’s<br />
judgment on Adam and Eve. The fact that his<br />
new family’s devastating fall from grace occurred<br />
in <strong>California</strong>, a bountiful land likened to Eden,<br />
made that biblical precedent hard to ignore. But<br />
there were other reasons, rooted not in myth but<br />
in history, for Sully to feel that he, as a representative<br />
of the expanding American empire, or<br />
his in-laws, as heirs to the old Spanish imperial<br />
11
His personal conquest<br />
of Manuela—achieved by<br />
defying the values and<br />
customs of people over<br />
whom he had power as an<br />
occupier—was not unlike<br />
the exploits of wealthy<br />
Californios and their<br />
colonial predecessors,<br />
who claimed Indians<br />
as mistresses or menial<br />
laborers.<br />
order, were being punished for their sins. His<br />
personal conquest of Manuela—achieved by defying<br />
the values and customs of people over whom<br />
he had power as an occupier—was not unlike the<br />
exploits of wealthy Californios and their colonial<br />
predecessors, who claimed Indians as mistresses<br />
or menial laborers. Sully compared their way of<br />
life to that of a “rich Southern planter, only in<br />
place of Negroes they have Indians for servants.” 13<br />
Although not a slaveholder, Sully had a black servant,<br />
whose death added to the burden of guilt he<br />
bore as a master and conqueror and shared with<br />
12 <strong>California</strong> History • volume <strong>90</strong> number 1 2012<br />
those of Spanish heritage who once dominated<br />
this country.<br />
The bitterness and resentment that overcame<br />
Sully when the seemingly safe harbor he had<br />
found in <strong>California</strong> was shattered gradually<br />
receded, allowing him to resume cordial relations<br />
with his in-laws. He and Angustias grew even<br />
closer than they had been before, linked now by a<br />
sense of loss that was too great for either to bear<br />
alone.<br />
Before leaving for Benicia—a transfer he sought<br />
in order to distance himself from Monterey<br />
and its painful associations—he visited Santa<br />
Barbara with Angustias to pay his respects to<br />
her father. Sully characterized that venerable<br />
figure as a “queer old specimen of an old Spanish<br />
gentleman, very polite, very dignified & very<br />
hospitable, but very bigoted & very tyrannical<br />
but not unkind.” As indicated by that ambivalent<br />
assessment, Sully found saving graces in the old<br />
colonial regime of cross and crown that his late<br />
wife’s grandfather represented. Wishing to see<br />
the church where Manuela had been confirmed,<br />
he visited the hilltop mission overlooking the<br />
town and admired “the altar at which she had as<br />
a child so often knelt, & at the foot of the altar<br />
the tomb of her grandmother, who was more<br />
than a mother to her.” Saddened, he left the sanctuary<br />
and walked behind the mission, where an<br />
aqueduct built by Indians under the supervision<br />
of padres now lay in ruins. “It is wonderful what<br />
those old Spanish priests were able to accomplish<br />
with the means at hand,” he wrote. “How they<br />
civilized the Indians & taught them every branch<br />
of useful knowledge & then with the workmen of<br />
their own creation erected works that would do<br />
credit to any part of the world.” 14<br />
Sully’s appreciative view of the mission system<br />
echoed that of Alfred Robinson and other foreigners<br />
with close ties to this society and contrasted<br />
sharply with the skeptical assessments<br />
of American visitors who remained aloof from
Alexander F. Harmer’s nineteenth-century drawings of the <strong>California</strong> missions are acknowledged for their realistic rendering<br />
and detail. Among them are these drawings of the construction of the first permanent Santa Barbara mission buildings at the<br />
Chumash Indian village of Tay-nay-án (“El Pedregoso,” or “Rocky Mound”) and of worshippers leaving the mission church<br />
circa 1860. The mission’s construction began in 1787 with buildings of thatch roofs and log walls and the church was completed<br />
in stone in 1820. Sully visited the church in 1851 and described it as a “noble old building” that would “put to blush<br />
many churches in Philadelphia.”<br />
<strong>California</strong> <strong>Historical</strong> <strong>Society</strong>/USC Special Collections<br />
13
14<br />
In the summer of 1847, the surveyor and draftsman William Rich Hutton illustrated this section of the<br />
Santa Barbara mission’s water works. Along with agriculture, the Franciscans taught the Chumash irrigation.<br />
They constructed a dam in Pedregoso Creek, high above the mission, and diverted water to the<br />
mission via aqueducts. Some of the water system’s ruins are visible today.<br />
Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, <strong>California</strong><br />
Hispanic <strong>California</strong> and saw little to admire in<br />
the spiritual conquest of the padres, dismissed by<br />
some critics as slave drivers. 15 Were the missions<br />
good or evil? This question, which remains with<br />
us today, was hotly argued long before the American<br />
takeover of <strong>California</strong>. That event, in turn,<br />
contributed to a larger historical debate about the<br />
virtue of conquest in general, whether intended<br />
to assimilate Indians and save their souls or to<br />
further democracy and extend what Jefferson<br />
called an empire for liberty across the continent.<br />
The fact that American expansionists saw it as<br />
their manifest destiny to seize <strong>California</strong> from<br />
the descendants of Spanish colonists—who had<br />
regarded their own conquest as pious and providential—raised<br />
doubts about such competing<br />
<strong>California</strong> History • volume <strong>90</strong> number 1 2012<br />
claims. Skeptics wondered why God would favor<br />
one imperial venture over another, or bless either<br />
party with success when neither had motives as<br />
pure as they professed. What Josiah Royce said<br />
of his own assertive countrymen in the insightful<br />
history of <strong>California</strong> he composed in the late<br />
1800s could be said as well of earlier Spanish<br />
colonizers: “The American wants to persuade not<br />
only the world but himself that he is doing God<br />
service in a peaceable spirit, even when he violently<br />
takes what he has determined to get.” 16<br />
For Alfred Sully, praising the missionaries was a<br />
way of paying tribute to Manuela and the world<br />
that nurtured her. He did not stop to consider<br />
that the good done by the padres might be linked
to such evils as placing Indians under demoralizing<br />
restraint and punishing them bodily if<br />
they defied those strictures. Nor did he dwell on<br />
the moral complexities of his own position as<br />
a conqueror. Good might have come from the<br />
offense he caused by abducting Manuela had<br />
she and their child survived and his ties to her<br />
family lengthened and deepened, making him a<br />
bridge between the old regime here and the new.<br />
But the tragic consequences of that elopement<br />
prevented him from remaining long in Monterey<br />
as a guest of Angustias de la Guerra—who kept<br />
Manuela’s room just as it was before she married—and<br />
sent him into exile. He ended up on<br />
the Great Plains, that vast field of toil and strife<br />
east of Eden, where he served long and hard as a<br />
tenacious Indian fighter.<br />
intruSion and aCCoMModation<br />
Sully spent almost his entire career in the West.<br />
His one notable tour of duty in the East occurred<br />
in 1862, when he campaigned as a colonel in the<br />
Union Army during General George McClellan’s<br />
unsuccessful bid to seize the Confederate capital,<br />
Richmond. By then he had met the woman who<br />
would become his second wife, Sophia Webster,<br />
a resident of Richmond with whom he corresponded<br />
during the war. According to Langdon<br />
Sully, Alfred Sully’s grandson and biographer,<br />
“Sophia was a Southern sympathizer. When<br />
Alfred sent a note to her through the lines that<br />
he could ‘see the lights of Richmond,’ she sent<br />
a reply that he might see the lights but that he<br />
would never reach them.” 17 Before wedding her,<br />
In 1863–65, Sully commanded two far-ranging expeditions against hostile Sioux in the Dakota Territory. This photo-<br />
graph of an encampment Sully established during his campaigns suggests its isolation and primitive conditions.<br />
Of Sully’s leadership, Colonel M. T. Thomas of the Minnesota brigade wrote: “His perceptions were remarkably<br />
clear, and he appeared to know intuitively just where the Indians were and what they would do. These instinctive<br />
qualifications . . . rendered him fully competent for the duty to which he had been assigned, and, added to these, a<br />
genial temperament made him an agreeable commander.”<br />
Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library<br />
15
16<br />
In 1854, Sully began frontier service on the northern Plains, building or repairing forts in the Dakotas,<br />
Minnesota, and Nebraska. The proximity of Indian encampments to the forts inspired his paintings of<br />
Sioux Indians, including this representation of Sioux Indian Maidens. While serving at Fort Pierre in<br />
what is now South Dakota, he fathered a daughter, named Mary Sully, by a Sioux woman.<br />
Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library<br />
he returned in 1863 to the northern Plains and<br />
led troops against rebellious Sioux and their<br />
tribal allies.<br />
Sully’s marriage in 1866 to Sophia, with whom<br />
he had two children, was preceded by a relationship<br />
he entered into before the Civil War with<br />
a young Yankton Sioux woman he met while at<br />
Fort Pierre in what is now South Dakota. In 1858,<br />
she gave birth to a daughter named Mary Sully<br />
(also known as Akicitawin, or “Soldier Woman”),<br />
<strong>California</strong> History • volume <strong>90</strong> number 1 2012<br />
who later wed Philip Deloria (Tipi Sapa), an Episcopal<br />
missionary to his fellow Yanktons and other<br />
Sioux. Among their descendants were several<br />
notable Native American authors, including their<br />
daughter Ella Deloria and their grandson Vine<br />
Deloria, Jr., who wrote about the family’s ties to<br />
Alfred Sully in his book Singing for a Spirit: A<br />
Portrait of the Dakota Sioux. He identified a Yankton<br />
Sioux pictured in a group portrait painted<br />
near Fort Pierre by Sully—a capable artist if not
an accomplished one like his father—as Pehandutawin,<br />
the woman who bore Sully’s child.<br />
Langdon Sully did not mention Alfred’s relationship<br />
with her in his biography, but reproduced<br />
that painting and hinted at its significance by<br />
noting: “Alfred’s second wife, Sophia, was aware<br />
of the relationships between soldiers and Indians<br />
of the Sioux tribes on the frontier. She refused to<br />
let her husband hang the picture of the Indian<br />
girls in her house.” 18<br />
All three women with whom Sully had children<br />
belonged to groups whose homelands were occupied<br />
by American troops and claimed—or, in the<br />
case of the Confederate Virginians, reclaimed—<br />
by the nation he represented. Sully’s role as an<br />
officer and occupier was complex and involved<br />
both conquest and conciliation. One might say<br />
that he was inclined to sleep with the enemy, but<br />
none of the societies to which he was linked as<br />
a husband or father was intrinsically hostile to<br />
his own. All had traditions of accommodating<br />
outsiders or newcomers through hospitality and<br />
exchanges of gifts, goods, and intimacies.<br />
Sully, in return, welcomed such give-and-take<br />
and was more tolerant and appreciative of rival<br />
cultures than many American expansionists of<br />
his day. Yet, he could not enter as freely into<br />
those cultures as did civilians like those obliging<br />
Yankee merchants who settled in <strong>California</strong> during<br />
the Mexican era, for whom accommodating<br />
foreigners was their stock in trade. The official<br />
role he played in Monterey after annexation did<br />
not allow for full immersion in the society he<br />
joined briefly by wedding Manuela. His position<br />
was more like that of some earlier American settlers<br />
who defied categorization as either docile<br />
assimilationists or hostile intruders.<br />
Benjamin D. Wilson, for example, who arrived<br />
overland from New Mexico in 1841 and settled<br />
as a rancher near present-day Riverside with his<br />
wife, Ramona Yorba, whom he wed in 1844, was<br />
known respectfully as Don Benito to his many<br />
Hispanic relatives and compañeros. Yet, his close<br />
ties to Californios did not stop him from volunteering<br />
to fight those who opposed the American<br />
occupation in 1846. 19<br />
U.S. officers serving in <strong>California</strong> during the<br />
Mexican War could not easily avoid being cast<br />
in the role of hostile intruders. But those who<br />
remained or came here after the fighting ended,<br />
as Sully did, found themselves in an ambiguous<br />
position as warriors by profession whose task<br />
was to help restore order and stability to an occupied<br />
country.<br />
Sully’s courtship of Manuela was, in one sense,<br />
an act of accommodation like that of previous<br />
American visitors who entered this society<br />
through marriage. But it was also an intimate<br />
intrusion and personal conquest by an occupying<br />
officer, not unlike the advances made by Americans<br />
in uniform in later times as they extended<br />
their nation’s reach across the Pacific to the<br />
Philippines and beyond and acquired women in<br />
occupied countries as wives or mistresses. Intent<br />
on annexing his beloved Manuela, or winning<br />
her on his own terms, Sully took liberties with<br />
his hosts, for whom incorporation in America’s<br />
“empire for liberty” was, at best, a mixed blessing.<br />
Like earlier Spanish colonizers who subjected<br />
Native <strong>California</strong>ns to spiritual conquest,<br />
he demonstrated that intrusions made with<br />
seemingly good intentions could have tragic consequences<br />
and that no conquest, however well<br />
meaning, was truly innocent or innocuous.<br />
Stephen G. Hyslop is an independent scholar who has<br />
written extensively on American history and the Spanish<br />
American frontier. He is the author of Contest for <strong>California</strong>:<br />
From Spanish Colonization to the American Conquest and<br />
Bound for Santa Fe: The Road to New Mexico and the American<br />
Conquest, 1806–1848 and coauthor of several books published<br />
by the National Geographic <strong>Society</strong>. He also served as editor<br />
of a twenty-three-volume series on American Indians for<br />
Time-Life Books.<br />
17
18<br />
“With the God of Battle# I Can<br />
De#troy All Such Villain#”<br />
War, Religion, and the Impact of Islam<br />
on Spanish and Mexican <strong>California</strong>, 1769–1846<br />
By Michael Gonzalez<br />
ike Othello, “the valiant Moor” who welcomed<br />
the “flinty and steel couch of war,”<br />
we, too, gird for battle and ask how much,<br />
and in what form, the Muslim idea of sacred<br />
violence influenced the Franciscan priests and<br />
Spanish-speaking settlers who lived in <strong>California</strong><br />
between 1769 and 1846. 1 L<br />
For our purposes,<br />
violence means the killing and suffering loosed<br />
during wartime. As for dignifying what would<br />
be a horrific and murderous undertaking, Islam,<br />
more than Christianity, seemed better disposed<br />
to include war amongst the holy deeds that<br />
defined the sacred.<br />
Such was the case in <strong>California</strong>. Because the<br />
priests and settlers often treated war’s fury as an<br />
act of worship—so much so that they exceeded<br />
Christian practice—the search for precedent<br />
requires us to look beyond the example of<br />
knights and princes who fought in the Crusades.<br />
Only Muslims, who once used the dictates of<br />
their faith to make battle sacred, would transmit<br />
the lessons the residents of <strong>California</strong>, and even<br />
Crusaders, chose to follow. 2<br />
<strong>California</strong> History • volume <strong>90</strong> number 1 2012<br />
Jihad, one such dictate, instructed the faithful<br />
that any task they performed, no matter how<br />
violent, could glorify God, while another, ribat,<br />
admittedly a term describing many different<br />
activities, spoke of the unity believers experienced<br />
when they collected as one. Each dictate<br />
complemented the other. But of the two, jihad<br />
was the more prominent. Regardless of how<br />
believers interpreted ribat, jihad helped reconcile<br />
the differences by suggesting there were various<br />
ways to exalt the spirit.<br />
Meaning “effort” or “striving,” jihad emphasized<br />
the struggle to resist temptation, or the duty to<br />
fight infidels and apostates. 3 The obligations need<br />
not be separate. To earn God’s favor, the believer<br />
had to meet and defeat any challenger, whether<br />
it was a sinful heart or an enemy brandishing a<br />
weapon. With piety and violence thus aligned, the<br />
two pursuits found full expression between 711<br />
and 1492, when Muslims occupied part, or nearly<br />
all, of Spain.
Franciscan priests and soldiers saw the settlement of Spanish <strong>California</strong> as a spiritual and military exercise. Leon<br />
Trousett’s 1876 painting of Father Junípero Serra celebrating Mass at Monterey in 1770 suggests their partnership,<br />
one that may have its origins in the Islamic practice of sacred violence.<br />
<strong>California</strong> <strong>Historical</strong> <strong>Society</strong> Collections at the Autry National Center; Bridgeman Art Library, CAH 331445<br />
Beginning in the ninth century, and perhaps<br />
earlier, Muslim mystics and pilgrims met in fortresses—one<br />
of the meanings of ribat—to study<br />
holy texts. On occasion, they did not collect in a<br />
redoubt to perform their duties. But regardless<br />
of how and where they gathered, they followed<br />
a religious leader. Although they did not come<br />
from the ranks of a professional army, they<br />
nonetheless trained for war between sessions of<br />
prayer and reflection. When Christians or other<br />
Muslims attacked or threatened to attack, mystics<br />
and pilgrims followed their leader into battle,<br />
convinced that their spiritual and martial exertions<br />
secured their place in paradise. “There are<br />
two times when the gates of heaven are opened,”<br />
declared the Muwatta, one of the works they<br />
studied. “It is during the azhan”—the call to<br />
prayer—and “in a rank of people fighting in the<br />
way of Allah.” 4<br />
The legacy of jihad earned scant notice in <strong>California</strong>.<br />
No priest or settler mentioned the term in<br />
any document, much less admitted its influence.<br />
It is also unlikely that anyone possessed a Qur’an<br />
or a Quranic commentary that explained the<br />
word’s meaning. Even if the Spaniards and<br />
Mexicans who settled <strong>California</strong> knew that Muslims<br />
had occupied Spain centuries earlier, many<br />
would still profess ignorance of jihad and its<br />
19
workings. Nonetheless, when battling enemies,<br />
the priests and settlers followed patterns first<br />
conceived by Muslims. They performed acts<br />
of sacrifice, spoke of their obligation to smite<br />
foes for God, and sometimes considered war a<br />
sacred enterprise. During the campaign to fight<br />
the pirate Hippolyte Bouchard in 1818, a settler<br />
asked heaven to bless his efforts: “Under the<br />
protection of the God of battles I believe I can<br />
destroy all such villains as may have the rashness<br />
to set foot upon this soil.” 5 A priest, meanwhile,<br />
mortified the flesh to seek divine support against<br />
Bouchard. According to a witness, the cleric<br />
prayed, abstained from food, and whipped himself<br />
so God would grant his compatriots victory. 6<br />
At the same time, and up through the 1830s,<br />
some priests accompanied military expeditions<br />
into <strong>California</strong>’s interior to capture or punish<br />
defiant Indians. If hostilities seemed certain, they<br />
said Mass for the soldiers and militia and then<br />
marched into battle beside the troops.<br />
Any claim about jihad’s influence in <strong>California</strong><br />
may sound far-fetched or confused. To some,<br />
jihad urges the believer to improve his character<br />
and nothing more. Others admit that Muslims<br />
did invoke jihad to make war, but some historical<br />
context is needed. In the first years of Islam,<br />
when Muhammad and his companions battled<br />
for their survival, they proclaimed jihad to convince<br />
believers that God was on their side. 7 It is<br />
also worth wondering if war in Muslim Spain was<br />
as prevalent as we suppose. There is no argument<br />
that Christians and Muslims fought one another,<br />
but just as notable, and perhaps for longer periods<br />
of time, the two sides, along with a sizable<br />
Jewish population, lived together in peace. 8<br />
There is also some question about the nature<br />
of war and its practitioners. Even if Muslims in<br />
Spain saw war as a religious obligation, it seems<br />
unlikely that such a practice would surface centuries<br />
later in <strong>California</strong>, a place thousands of miles<br />
20 <strong>California</strong> History • volume <strong>90</strong> number 1 2012<br />
away. Moreover, Franciscan priests had little in<br />
common with Muslims who saw war as an act<br />
of devotion. The Muslim mystics and pilgrims<br />
who supposedly went to battle abounded in<br />
great number, whereas the Franciscans, at least<br />
in <strong>California</strong>, were few, and those who joined<br />
campaigns fewer still. 9 The intrepid priests who<br />
accompanied troops into the field do not prove<br />
that all Franciscans saw war as a holy endeavor.<br />
(The sharp-eyed reader could add that Islam has<br />
no ordained clergy or sacraments, at least in<br />
the Christian, especially Catholic, sense.) As for<br />
the settlers in <strong>California</strong>, the most fundamental<br />
understanding of human nature shows that<br />
individuals do not need divine approval to fight.<br />
If religion did impel believers to take up arms,<br />
Christianity, not Islam, provided enough cause.<br />
The Book of Revelation, by itself, with its descriptions<br />
of bloodshed and beasts on the loose, could<br />
fire the imagination of any Christian warrior.<br />
Nonetheless, these doubts, while valid, and which<br />
will be addressed in due time, reflect a misunderstanding.<br />
The point is not that Muslims or Christians<br />
relished bloodshed. What matters more is<br />
how and under what circumstances Muslims and<br />
their Spanish-speaking counterparts considered<br />
war a sacred effort. But caution is in order. Professing<br />
similar attitudes, whether about war or<br />
anything else, does not mean one side mirrored<br />
the other. Although Muslims were the first to<br />
consecrate violence, Christians in Spain, when<br />
following suit, did not blindly imitate Islamic<br />
habits. Instead, they ensured that the prosecution<br />
of war conformed to their beliefs. Over time,<br />
as the Spanish-speaking inhabitants of <strong>California</strong><br />
would confirm, Christians had introduced<br />
so many changes that the Muslim imprint had<br />
largely disappeared. What remained, though,<br />
despite the overlay of Christian ritual and practice,<br />
was the Muslim conviction that war was a<br />
sacred calling. Thus, regardless of their faith,<br />
the men-at-arms knew when, and against whom,<br />
they could make piety assume lethal proportions.
the Setting<br />
If jihad’s purpose seems clear, ribat, its counterpart,<br />
is less so. One authority laments that ribat<br />
may be impossible to define. 10 The meaning of<br />
ribat varied from place to place in the Islamic<br />
world. Even when focusing on a single locale like<br />
Spain, the term’s definition continues to baffle<br />
because it acquired different meanings over time.<br />
As some scholars claim, ribat described a fortress<br />
that emerged in northern or central Spain where<br />
Muslims and Christians confronted one another.<br />
A ribat could even be a citadel in the central part<br />
of a city or a watchtower where soldiers observed<br />
an enemy’s movements. 11 But whatever its function,<br />
a ribat was a fortified place that offered protection<br />
or allowed men to train for battle. To date,<br />
investigators have uncovered the ruins of a ribat<br />
near the city of Alicante in southeastern Spain. 12<br />
Although the site is far from the interior parts of<br />
Spain, where ribats supposedly flourished, other<br />
scholars have looked at Muslim writings from the<br />
early Middle Ages to find mention of believers<br />
assembling in fortresses. 13<br />
Some historians prefer different meanings.<br />
Because ribat comes from the Arabic root r-b-t,<br />
which means to tie together, as one would tether<br />
a herd of livestock, the term could describe a<br />
caravansary, a structure that invited traders and<br />
travelers to secure their horses or camels before<br />
resting. In this sense, there is nothing to imply<br />
that ribats were fortresses. They offered protection<br />
along a trade route, but they did not exist<br />
to make war, much less provide a setting for<br />
prayer and study. 14 If the meaning is broadened<br />
to describe a place where warriors on horseback<br />
could rest their mounts, ribat may still refer to<br />
trade because its occupants defended caravans<br />
making their way through hostile territory. By the<br />
thirteenth century, especially in Muslim Spain,<br />
the meaning of ribat had evolved to describe a<br />
monastery for Sufis, mystics who formed brotherhoods<br />
to pray and who, as the following pages<br />
will make clear, often preferred more vigorous<br />
displays of faith. 15 Even so, when some Sufis supplied<br />
lodging for a caravan or footsore traveler,<br />
their monastery earned the name ribat.<br />
To reach consensus on the word’s definition,<br />
it may be best to move beyond descriptions of<br />
a structure with different uses and give ribat<br />
a more literal reading. The term could refer<br />
to believers bound together by their devotion.<br />
Accordingly, when this collection of believers<br />
made war or collected as one to repel an<br />
approaching enemy, the building where they<br />
gathered would resemble a fortress to observers.<br />
But in other instances, and depending on the<br />
region where they dwelled, the believers would<br />
prefer to pray rather than fight. Thus, regardless<br />
of their intent, when believers were tied to one<br />
another to perform various duties, they fulfilled<br />
the most elemental meaning of ribat. 16<br />
The spiritual and military dimensions of ribat<br />
proved quite popular in Muslim Spain. The<br />
historian Manuela Marín explains that by the<br />
ninth century, men periodically left cities and<br />
towns to gather in places along the coast or in<br />
frontier outposts near Christian territory. In<br />
most instances, they set the terms of their commitment.<br />
They could “make ribat” or “perform<br />
ribat”—the expressions they used to describe<br />
their devotion—for a number of days or months.<br />
When they finished their obligation, they were<br />
free to leave. Participants could also perform<br />
ribat for any number of reasons. A few used the<br />
time away from home to contemplate their flaws<br />
and weaknesses. Others went on ribat during<br />
Ramadan, the month Muslims set aside for fasting<br />
and prayer. 17 But a great many more believed<br />
that fighting could express their faith. We do<br />
not speak of the professional soldier, though he,<br />
as well, appreciated the mystical properties of<br />
violence. Of greater interest is the believer who<br />
volunteered his time to make war.<br />
continued on p. 24<br />
21
22<br />
<strong>California</strong> History • volume <strong>90</strong> number 1 2012<br />
Islamic Influences on <strong>California</strong><br />
Mission Architecture<br />
Muslim architectural techniques influenced the Spaniards<br />
and Mexicans who settled <strong>California</strong>. Roofless inner<br />
courtyards and fortress-like walls are two elements that<br />
found expression in the Franciscan missions.<br />
The Mexican art historian Miguel Toussaint has noted that the mission’s patio “is without a doubt not a Christian plaza”<br />
and “more akin . . . to the patio of a mosque.” Its rectangular courtyard recalls the immense patio and surrounding<br />
arched galleries and columns of Tunisia’s Great Mosque of Kairouan, built at the start of the seventh century.<br />
Creative Commons<br />
An 1884 reconstruction of Mission San Juan Capistrano<br />
(founded 1775) depicts the arched, open-air corridors of<br />
the court, or patio, adapted from Spanish-style dwellings.<br />
Many of the missions’ chambers, work spaces, and living<br />
quarters opened up onto the patio, a place of refuge in case<br />
of attacks by neighboring Indians or revolts by mission<br />
neophytes.<br />
<strong>California</strong> <strong>Historical</strong> <strong>Society</strong>/USC Special Collections
The model for Mission San Gabriel Arcángel<br />
(founded 1771) (left) may have been La<br />
Mezquita, the Great Mosque in Córdoba,<br />
Spain (above), which has been converted into<br />
a Catholic cathedral. Likely designed by the<br />
Córdoba-born Franciscan priest Father Antonio<br />
Cruzado, the mission’s capped buttresses, tall<br />
and narrow windows, arched shell decorations,<br />
and fortress-like appearance display a strong<br />
Moorish architecture influence.<br />
Mission: <strong>California</strong> <strong>Historical</strong> <strong>Society</strong>,<br />
CHS2012.1012.tif; West Wall, La Mezquita:<br />
Courtesy of Ali Eminov<br />
23
24<br />
The historian Elena Lourie notes that Muslims<br />
may have used the practice of ribat to conquer<br />
Spain in the eighth century. 18 The Almoravides,<br />
a fundamentalist group from northern Africa<br />
that came to Spain in 1086, considered ribat an<br />
important act of worship. They used the practice<br />
of ribat to train young men in a monastic<br />
setting where they prayed and participated in<br />
military drills. 19 As for the Almohades, another<br />
fundamentalist group from Africa that arrived in<br />
Spain in 1147, it is not clear how they regarded<br />
ribat. But it is unlikely they would let the practice<br />
lapse. 20 Some scholars contend that ribat<br />
lost its military character by the twelfth century<br />
and emphasized prayer and study. Nevertheless,<br />
the more militant expressions of ribat endured<br />
for some time. As late as 1354, Ibn Hudhayi,<br />
a scholar from Almería in southern Spain,<br />
described ribats as fortresses that defended Muslims<br />
from Christian advances. 21<br />
If Muslims in Spain associated ribat with war,<br />
they could consult sacred texts to confirm the<br />
connection. 22 It is not enough to cite Quranic<br />
passages that speak about the believer’s duty<br />
to do battle. 23 The attitudes that emerge in the<br />
Qur’an are more telling. The religious scholar<br />
Richard Martin explains that in the first centuries<br />
after Muhammad’s death many Muslims believed<br />
that it was their duty to supersede the flawed<br />
tenets of Christianity and Judaism and convert<br />
humanity to Islam. Once the world accepted the<br />
one true faith, Muslims would restore the perfection<br />
that God had created at the beginning of<br />
time. To set individuals “on the path of God,” it<br />
was incumbent on believers to “command the<br />
good and forbid evil.” 24<br />
When Islam was slow to spread, at least by the<br />
reckoning of some Muslims, the world could<br />
assume a stark, violent cast. The faithful, along<br />
with unbelievers who acknowledged Muslim<br />
authority, dwelled within Dar al-Islam, the House<br />
<strong>California</strong> History • volume <strong>90</strong> number 1 2012<br />
of Islam. Beyond emerged Dar al-Harb, the<br />
House of War, the regions where infidels resisted<br />
Islam’s advance. With humanity divided, and<br />
abiding in uneasy accord, Muslims could use<br />
violence to subsume the House of War within the<br />
House of Islam. Until the conversion of all, or<br />
at minimum until the infidels honored Islam’s<br />
primacy, peace would never prevail. Any cessation<br />
of hostilities would be but a truce, according<br />
to Martin, and once conditions proved favorable,<br />
the faithful would press the attack to make Islam<br />
supreme. 25<br />
If war was to be, the believer could learn how<br />
his efforts on the battlefield would bring divine<br />
reward. Many Muslims in Spain followed the<br />
Malikite school of jurisprudence, one of four<br />
schools of thought recognized by the Sunnis,<br />
the largest branch of Islam. The Malikites took<br />
their name from Malik ibn Anas, a Muslim<br />
scholar from the eighth century who compiled<br />
the Muwatta, a collection of teachings attributed<br />
to the prophet Muhammad and his companions.<br />
26 Malik emphasized the simple, unadorned<br />
piety of the first Muslims—Muwatta means “the<br />
simplified”—in which the faithful remembered<br />
their obligation to make Islam a universal religion.<br />
By the ninth century, the Malikites had<br />
established themselves in Spain as the jurists<br />
and scholars whose interpretation of Islamic<br />
law influenced the course of daily life. With the<br />
Muwatta in hand, some Malikites declared that<br />
should a believer kill or be killed, the shedding of<br />
blood amounted to a sacrifice whose significance<br />
increased his status and the blessings he would<br />
accrue in the afterlife. Verse 21.15.34 instructs<br />
the warrior that “the bold one fights for the sake<br />
of combat, not for the spoils. Being slain is but<br />
one way of meeting death, and the martyr is the<br />
one who gives of himself, expectant of reward<br />
from Allah.” 27<br />
The consecration of war deepened over time. By<br />
the mid-ninth century, scholars in ancient Persia<br />
and elsewhere composed siyars, histories of
Muhammad’s military campaigns, to remind the<br />
faithful they had a duty to fight infidels and apostates.<br />
Three in particular, the siyars of Abu Ishaq<br />
al-Fazari, Abu al-Awzai, and Abdullah ibn al-<br />
Mubarak, which, together, earned the title Kitab-<br />
Fadl al-Jihad (Book on the Merit of Jihad), held<br />
great appeal in Muslim Spain. Ibn abi Zamanin,<br />
a tenth-century resident of Córdoba, contributed<br />
to the corpus of militant works by composing<br />
Qidwat al-Ghazi (The Fighter’s Exemplar). Sometime<br />
in the twelfth century, Abu Muhammad<br />
ibn Arabi, a scholar and mystic from Murcia,<br />
elaborated on the Malikite theme of purity and<br />
simplicity in Al Futuhat al Mekkiya (Meccan<br />
Illuminations). At least a hundred years later,<br />
Muhammad al-Qurtubi, another Malakite jurist<br />
from Córdoba, composed Al-tadhkira fi awhal<br />
al-mawtawaumar al-akhira (Remembrance of the<br />
Affairs of the Dead and Matters of the Hereafter).<br />
Al-Qurtubi argued that Islam’s promise to renew<br />
humanity depended on the piety of Spanish Muslims.<br />
Once they emulated the Prophet and his<br />
companions, they would assume their destiny to<br />
extend Dar al Islam. 28<br />
Thus, the man making ribat in Spain had ample<br />
reason to think war was an appropriate form<br />
of worship. He dwelled on the margins of the<br />
Islamic world where he faced the threat of Christian<br />
attack. Feeling besieged or, if so inclined,<br />
eager to prove his piety by going to battle, he<br />
could overlook the Quranic injunctions commanding<br />
that only a caliph, the recognized leader<br />
of the Islamic community, had the authority to<br />
declare war. He could follow his own conscience<br />
to go on the attack or, more likely, heed a mystic<br />
who reminded the faithful how a warrior could<br />
find glory. 29<br />
If battle loomed, the warrior could approach his<br />
calling as would a pilgrim who left home to participate<br />
in a sacred exercise. While any pilgrimage<br />
in the Muslim or Christian world involves a<br />
trip to a holy place, the greater and perhaps more<br />
important element of the journey often requires<br />
the believer to hunger and fast to repent for his<br />
sins. If no different from a pilgrim who makes<br />
penance, the murabit—the man making ribat—<br />
would also see the violent deed, or the potential<br />
of its unleashing, as a spiritual act. He reclined<br />
in a sacred moment where the pious deed, even<br />
if belligerent, promised redemption. Verse 21.1<br />
of the Muwatta, for instance, discussed the similarities<br />
when saying that the man on jihad was<br />
like “someone who fasts and prays constantly.”<br />
Other works expanded the theme. Al-Mubarak,<br />
whose siyar was part of the Book on the Merit of<br />
Jihad, argued that the murabit who “volunteered”<br />
for battle resembled the pilgrim who fasted and<br />
made the haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. 30 In The<br />
Fighter’s Exemplar, al-Zamanin, the tenth-century<br />
scholar from Córdoba, explained how the pilgrim<br />
performing ribat during times of war could atone<br />
for his sins. When making ribat, even if briefly,<br />
he erased some of his sins and lessened the<br />
chance of punishment in the afterlife. Indeed,<br />
the longer his commitment, the more likely he<br />
cleansed his soul. 31<br />
By the eleventh century, the murabit, if he conducted<br />
himself as a pilgrim on a sacred journey,<br />
acquired the confidence that his salvation,<br />
and that of those around him, lay in war. The<br />
historian Maribel Fierro writes that a teaching<br />
attributed to Muhammad—“Islam began as a<br />
stranger and shall return to being a stranger<br />
as it began”—convinced believers in Spain that<br />
they could elide the boundary between mysticism<br />
and warfare. To be fair, the teaching, what<br />
Muslims call a hadith, had more innocent applications.<br />
According to some Muslim scholars in<br />
the Middle Ages, Muhammad prophesied that<br />
Islam would become corrupt when the faithful<br />
neglected to honor God. To see that believers<br />
remembered their obligations, the scholars, and<br />
any person who wished to share their sacrifice,<br />
set a pious example by retreating from society to<br />
pray and perform acts of charity. 32<br />
25
26<br />
But for other Muslim scholars, the search for<br />
solitude justified the use of violence to purge<br />
corruption. 33 While cleansing their own spirits,<br />
the scholars and their followers believed they<br />
could restore the integrity of Islam by attacking<br />
infidels or unrepentant Muslims. As a consequence,<br />
little distinguished the pilgrim from the<br />
murabit who used force. The temporal, human<br />
exigencies that regulated behavior lapsed, and<br />
any deed the believer performed, no matter how<br />
violent, became holy and blessed. Once the pilgrim<br />
and the murabit completed their task, the<br />
narrow, mortal principles that defined existence<br />
re-emerged, and the mystical state that graced the<br />
believer came to an end.<br />
The prospect of equating war with piety attracted<br />
many adherents. In 1120, for instance, Abu Ali<br />
al-Sadafi, a distinguished religious scholar and<br />
jurist, joined an army of thousands to fight<br />
Christians in northern Spain. 34 He perished in<br />
the effort. Two decades later, Abu Ahmad ibn<br />
al-Husayn ibn al-Qasi from Silves, a Portuguese<br />
city in the south that sits close to the Spanish<br />
border, formed a “fighting brotherhood,” a Sufi<br />
order dedicated to making war. A mystic and religious<br />
scholar, al-Qasi believed that ignorance and<br />
selfishness blinded humans to the truth that they<br />
were one with God. To address the moral blight,<br />
al-Qasi called on the more extreme dictates of<br />
ribat. He prescribed religious exercises to his followers<br />
so they could clear their minds and commune<br />
with divinity. Once they had purged their<br />
souls, or at least claimed to, they stood ready to<br />
battle sin in other quarters.<br />
By punishing Muslims they deemed corrupt,<br />
as well as recalcitrant Christians, al-Qasi and<br />
his followers would sweep away the encumbrances<br />
that distracted the mind and spirit. What<br />
remained after the purging of falsehood, al-Qasi<br />
said, would be “no God, but God.” Al-Qasi no<br />
doubt possessed the serenity of any person who<br />
<strong>California</strong> History • volume <strong>90</strong> number 1 2012<br />
believes he performs God’s bidding. He likened<br />
himself to the Mahdi, a messianic figure popular<br />
with Muslim mystics, and raised an army to<br />
attack Almoravid governors who lacked sufficient<br />
faith and rigor. In time, al-Qasi fell victim to the<br />
devotion he inspired. When he tried to make alliances<br />
with Christians in 1151, his followers killed<br />
him. 35<br />
The thought of Muslims on ribat, some with<br />
weapons at the ready, encompassed the reach<br />
and depth of the Christians’ world. The Spanish<br />
philologist Américo Castro says ribat formed the<br />
root of some Iberian words that commemorated<br />
or conveyed the experience of suffering an attack.<br />
Some Spanish and Portuguese towns carry the<br />
name Rábida or Rápita. The Spanish term rebato<br />
means “sudden attack.” Arrebatar is to “snatch<br />
away,” while arrobda speaks of an “advance<br />
guard.” 36 The historian Thomas Glick adds that<br />
war against Muslims convinced Christians they<br />
suffered a perilous existence. Confined to the<br />
northern reaches of Spain, especially in the years<br />
prior to the tenth century, they viewed the Muslims<br />
across a desolate frontier that held untold<br />
dangers. The boundaries marking Christian<br />
territory, even if fixed by castles and other defensive<br />
sites, could easily be penetrated by Muslim<br />
attackers ensconced in a fortress. 37 In sum,<br />
the murabit who saw war as a form of worship<br />
embodied nearly every aspect of the Christians’<br />
existence. The men on ribat threatened violence,<br />
but in the same instant they granted Christians,<br />
and their heirs in the New World, the means to<br />
challenge and defeat any foe.<br />
tranSMiSSion<br />
When Christians in Spain employed their enemies’<br />
tactics and religious beliefs, they neglected<br />
to describe the process of incorporation. They left<br />
no written accounts discussing how they adopted<br />
the Muslim approach to sacred violence. None-
theless, it is baffling that the borrowing of ribat,<br />
and of course jihad, escaped comment. In matters<br />
removed from war, various witnesses, some<br />
from beyond Spain, enumerated the ways Christians<br />
absorbed or admired Islamic habits.<br />
Upon hearing about Córdoba’s wealth and<br />
beauty, Hroswitha of Gandersheim, a tenthcentury<br />
German nun, described the Muslim city<br />
as “the ornament of the world.” About the same<br />
time, the Christian thinker Álvaro of Córdoba<br />
lamented: “My fellow Christians delight in the<br />
poems and romances of the Arabs; they study<br />
the work of Muslim theologians and philosophers.<br />
. . . At the mention of Christian books they<br />
disdainfully protest that such works are unworthy<br />
of notice.” Adelard of Bath, an English philosopher<br />
from the eleventh century, admitted that he<br />
cited Arabic authors to make his writings more<br />
acceptable. According to the art historian D. Fairchild<br />
Ruggles, by the fourteenth century Christian<br />
kings of Spain ordered craftsmen to employ<br />
Islamic ornamentation in churches and other<br />
buildings to project a sophisticated air. After the<br />
re-conquest of Spain, Muslim culture continued<br />
to impress. Cardinal Ximénez de Cisneros, Archbishop<br />
of Toledo and confessor to Queen Isabella,<br />
begrudged the Muslims some praise. “We<br />
lack their works,” he admitted, but “they lack<br />
our faith.” 38<br />
When seeking to imitate, or at least respect,<br />
Islamic achievements in architecture and philosophy,<br />
it is likely Christians also embraced<br />
the practice of sacred violence. As did Muslims<br />
who performed ribat to make war, some Spanish<br />
monks and laymen exhibited similar fervor.<br />
In the eleventh and twelfth century, they formed<br />
military societies like the Knights of Calatrava or<br />
Santiago. 39 Like Muslim warriors who claimed<br />
that “a thousand angels” would aid them during<br />
battle, the military societies summoned their own<br />
celestial defender and believed that Santiago,<br />
or Saint James, would fight on their behalf. 40<br />
The men on ribat<br />
threatened violence, but<br />
in the same instant they<br />
granted Christians, and<br />
their heirs in the New<br />
World, the means to<br />
challenge and defeat<br />
any foe.<br />
The saint did not disappoint. According to one<br />
source, he aided Christians in thirty-eight battles<br />
against Muslims. 41 When Muslims claimed that<br />
a pilgrimage to Mecca was one of the pillars of<br />
their faith, Christians responded in kind. Knights<br />
and commoners alike worshipped at the shrine<br />
to Santiago in Compostela, a holy site in northwestern<br />
Spain that still receives pilgrims from all<br />
over the Christian world. 42 Thus, on the strength<br />
of circumstantial evidence, it appears that the<br />
Christian approach to war, as well as other sacred<br />
activities, followed Muslim examples.<br />
Of course, one could say Christians did not need<br />
any instruction in the arts of war. The Knights<br />
Templar, for instance, who emerged in the Holy<br />
Land in 1118 to defend Christian pilgrims from<br />
Muslim attacks, may have influenced the rise of<br />
military societies in Spain. 43 But enough doubts<br />
exist to question the possibility. The military<br />
societies often emerged in places where Muslims<br />
had performed ribat for centuries, suggesting the<br />
27
28<br />
conveyance of ideas from one group to another.<br />
Christian teachings also profess some reluctance<br />
about the morality of violence. Jesus, in whose<br />
name the Christian warrior made war, discourages,<br />
if not forbids, attacks against others. He<br />
tells His disciples to “turn the other cheek” and<br />
“love your enemies.” Jesus also shows no interest<br />
in creating a new political order, thereby implying<br />
that He renounces violence or any other<br />
display of force to implement His teachings. He<br />
tells skeptics to “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s<br />
and to God what is God’s.” When answering<br />
Pilate’s questions if he is a king, Jesus responds,<br />
“My kingdom is not of this world.” 44<br />
Jesus’ condemnation of violence had particular<br />
impact. Many clergymen and philosophers<br />
believed that violence, regardless of the cause,<br />
brought limited benefit. The historian Jay Rubenstein<br />
explains that prior to the First Crusade in<br />
1095, the Church promoted the doctrine of just<br />
war in which only principalities, at the behest of<br />
their leaders, could fight one another as a last<br />
resort. When war did occur, the killing of soldiers<br />
and noncombatants was, at most, a morally<br />
neutral act, a regrettable event brought on by circumstances<br />
that no one could control or foresee.<br />
The warrior who killed, as he was obligated to<br />
do when in service to his leader, received no special<br />
virtue or promise of reaching heaven. 45 For<br />
some clerics, the fact that the warrior killed at all,<br />
although tolerated in light of war’s exigencies,<br />
proved so reprehensible that it required redress.<br />
As late as 1066, for instance, Norman bishops<br />
commanded that any knight who killed during<br />
the Battle of Hastings had to make penance for<br />
a year. 46<br />
In Spain, the Christians’ reliance on sacred<br />
violence, with priests as convinced as laypeople<br />
that they fought on behalf of God, reveals that<br />
Muslims supplied the justifications that were<br />
lacking in Christian belief. When Christians<br />
<strong>California</strong> History • volume <strong>90</strong> number 1 2012<br />
went to fight, the duration of their commitment,<br />
and the words they pronounced to sanctify their<br />
efforts, were but Muslim habits recast in new<br />
ways. Even if the written evidence for the transmission<br />
of habits from one group to another is<br />
absent, anthropological theory may document the<br />
exchange.<br />
Elena Lourie says that the concept of “stimulus<br />
diffusion,” or “idea diffusion,” a methodology<br />
first proposed by the anthropologist Alfred<br />
Kroeber, can describe the connections between<br />
Muslims and Christians that witnesses failed to<br />
record. 47 Throughout history, Kroeber says, there<br />
are many examples of different, even hostile<br />
societies, residing side by side, who in time will<br />
adopt one another’s practices. In most instances,<br />
what makes the transaction more likely is that<br />
the donor culture possesses a superior technology<br />
or concept, while the recipient culture is<br />
bereft of any comparable advancement that will<br />
simplify life. But, to complicate matters, even<br />
if the recipient culture acknowledges its rival’s<br />
sophistication and is desirous of taking on better<br />
habits or routines, it will not necessarily emulate<br />
everything it admires. Instead, it will take the<br />
new approaches and alter them according to prevailing<br />
beliefs. In essence, the recipient culture<br />
adopts what it pleases and discards the rest.<br />
On this note, Kroeber explained why the<br />
exchange of ideas could escape comment. The<br />
recipient culture, if disposed to see the donor<br />
culture as an enemy, would not want to acknowledge<br />
its debt to the other. The members of the<br />
recipient culture, then, who have the ability to<br />
document their impressions, would not mention<br />
the exchange for fear of confessing that<br />
they owed their achievements to a rival. Kroeber<br />
concludes, with Lourie in agreement, that if the<br />
transmission of ideas features a recipient culture<br />
loath to admit how it adopted a new way of life,<br />
the “diffusion could take place below the surface<br />
of the historical record.”
Below: Following the fall of Constantinople<br />
in 1453, the Italian Franciscan<br />
St. John Capistran amassed an army to<br />
defend against the Turks. Armed with<br />
a crucifix and carrying a banner on<br />
which were inscribed the initials of the<br />
holy name, I.H.S., he led a crusade of<br />
40,000 Christians into Hungary in a<br />
decisive victory.<br />
<strong>California</strong> <strong>Historical</strong> <strong>Society</strong>,<br />
CHS2012.1016.tif<br />
Left: St. John Capistran’s crusader<br />
legacy found a home in <strong>California</strong> in<br />
1775, when he was designated patron<br />
saint of Mission San Juan Capistrano.<br />
Here, in the central niche of the altar of<br />
the Serra Chapel, he presides, holding<br />
his crusader banner. The 400-year-old<br />
gold altar is not original to the mission<br />
chapel, but was brought over from<br />
Spain during a 1920s restoration.<br />
© Jim Shoemaker,<br />
www.jimshoemakerphotography.com<br />
29
When confronting Muslims inspired by jihad<br />
and ribat, Christians, to counter the menace, did<br />
not find the support they needed in their own<br />
traditions. They took the principles that caused<br />
consternation, and perhaps no small amount of<br />
admiration, and called them their own without<br />
acknowledging Muslim contributions. 48 As a<br />
consequence, Christians in Spain and other parts<br />
of Europe borrowed and altered, especially as the<br />
years progressed, Muslim deeds and beliefs that<br />
best suited their purposes.<br />
In the first instance, when waging war against<br />
Muslims, Christians invoked their enemies’<br />
doctrines that honored the warrior who died in<br />
battle. 49 True enough, when priests and theologians<br />
praised the warrior’s sacrifice, they often<br />
spoke of knights or professional soldiers. But<br />
as did Muslims, though arguably to a lesser<br />
degree, Christians also professed that the humble<br />
believer of no means or military training could<br />
receive blessings in battle. In any event, after the<br />
knights of the First Crusade had seized Jerusalem<br />
and tried to secure their prize from Muslim<br />
attack, priests and chroniclers celebrated their<br />
heroes with praises that echoed the descriptions<br />
of jihad. When writing to Hughes de Payens,<br />
a French noble who established the Knights<br />
Templar, St. Bernard declared around 1128: “To<br />
be sure, precious in the eyes of the Lord is the<br />
death of his holy ones, whether they die in battle<br />
or bed, but death in battle is more precious as<br />
it is more glorious. . . . How secure, I say, is life<br />
when death is anticipated without fear; or rather<br />
when it is desired with feeling and embraced<br />
with reverence.” 50<br />
The Christians, coming from a recipient culture,<br />
would not describe how they adapted Muslim<br />
ideas. But because the church doubted the purpose<br />
of violence, even if employed to defend the<br />
place of Christ’s ministry, Christians knew that<br />
Islam, and not their own faith, would provide<br />
30 <strong>California</strong> History • volume <strong>90</strong> number 1 2012<br />
the reasons to honor warriors who risked their<br />
lives in the Holy Land. Thus, Bernard’s remarks,<br />
when matched with Muslim writings about the<br />
value of a warrior’s sacrifice, pose unspoken connections<br />
between Christianity and Islam.<br />
Even more, the example of ribat, its significance<br />
amplified and justified by jihad, reverberated<br />
throughout Christendom. But, when following<br />
Muslim ways, Christians revealed the conceit,<br />
and perhaps the insecurity, of a recipient culture<br />
whose members believed that they, and no one<br />
else, produced the ideas they implemented. The<br />
pretense, though, cannot stand up to scrutiny.<br />
In almost every sense, the behaviors Christians<br />
admired, and changed, corresponded to the Muslim<br />
idea of how a believer acquired blessings<br />
when he reported to a fortress or retreated into<br />
seclusion to follow a spiritual leader.<br />
Various texts describe Christians performing<br />
what is, in essence, their version of ribat with<br />
words and phrasing that refer to the Muslim<br />
practice of linking piety and violence. In The<br />
Fighter’s Exemplar, al-Zamanin, when explaining<br />
how the man making ribat could speed his way to<br />
paradise, raises points Christian authors repeated<br />
in their own way: “For he who performs ribat for<br />
ten days, God will pardon him for one quarter of<br />
the time he must spend in hell; for he who does<br />
twenty days, he will be pardoned for half; for he<br />
who does thirty days, three quarters of his punishment<br />
[will be pardoned]; for he who performs<br />
ribat for 40 days, God will free him from hell.”<br />
Each idea presented by al-Zamanin—that the<br />
believer made what was essentially a pilgrimage;<br />
that regardless if he makes war or prays, each<br />
deed equates with the other and thus is consecrated;<br />
that the rewards he receives in the afterlife<br />
correspond to the number of days he spends<br />
on ribat—provided Christians with material for<br />
their own designs. 51<br />
At the Council of Clermont in 1095, for instance,<br />
Pope Urban II urged the assembly to approve
what would be the First Crusade and liberate the<br />
Holy Land. Although much of what Urban said<br />
is now lost, his remarks apparently conveyed the<br />
following declaration: “Whoever might set forth<br />
for Jerusalem to liberate the church of God, can<br />
substitute that journey for all penance.” 52 Al-<br />
Zamanin’s principles now conformed to Christian<br />
sensibilities. Previously, only the pilgrim<br />
traveling to Jerusalem could atone for his sins.<br />
But, in Urban’s formulation, the indulgence—<br />
that is, the idea that the pilgrim could repent<br />
of his sins—now extended to the knight or any<br />
other person who enlisted to fight Muslims.<br />
Urban treaded carefully on this point. Violence<br />
alone would not help knights or anyone else gain<br />
admission to heaven. As long as they focused<br />
their energies on freeing Jerusalem and had confessed<br />
their sins, their actions, no matter how<br />
deadly, could count as penance. When judgment<br />
day came, God would weigh the sincerity of their<br />
repentance, a moral condition that presumably<br />
involved the dispatch of enemies, and dispense<br />
His mercy accordingly. Although Urban did not<br />
say the Christian could kill to reach heaven, a<br />
privilege supposedly possessed by the murabit,<br />
he nonetheless suggests the comparison. By the<br />
eleventh century, many Christians had contended<br />
with Islamic expansion for hundreds of years and<br />
knew firsthand how some Muslims making ribat<br />
considered war an act of faith. Thus, even when<br />
Christians did not mention it outright, or refer<br />
to a scholar like al-Zamanin who celebrated its<br />
virtues, they nonetheless paid tribute to ribat, and<br />
the devotions it encouraged. 53<br />
In Spain, where contact with Muslims was more<br />
frequent and had endured for a longer time,<br />
ribat assumed an intimacy that impelled Christians<br />
to take on more of its attributes. 54 In 1122,<br />
the founders of the confraternity of Belchite,<br />
one of the first military societies established in<br />
Spain, echoed al-Zamanin’s provisions. In their<br />
regulations the founders stated: “Any Christian,<br />
whether cleric or layman, who should wish to<br />
become a member of this confraternity . . . and<br />
at the castle of Belchite, or any other castle suitable<br />
for this enterprise, should undertake to fight<br />
in the defense of the Christian people and in<br />
the service of Christ for the rest of his life will,<br />
after having made confession, be absolved of all<br />
his sins as if he were entering upon the life of a<br />
monk or hermit. Whoever should wish to serve<br />
God there for one year will receive remission for<br />
his sins as if he had marched to Jerusalem. Whoever<br />
has been obliged to fast every Friday for a<br />
year shall have this penance remitted if he undertakes<br />
to serve God there for one month. . . . If<br />
anyone should wish to make a pilgrimage and for<br />
a number of days would have spent on pilgrimage<br />
serves God there in battle. His reward from<br />
the Divine Benefactor will be doubled.” 55<br />
The founders of Belchite took and embellished<br />
ideas afforded them through their contact with<br />
Muslims. War and violence, when directed<br />
against Muslims, remain, and arguably assumed<br />
more prominence as, penitential exercises. The<br />
man who confessed wrongdoing could seek forgiveness<br />
by going to battle. The pilgrimage to<br />
Jerusalem, meanwhile, while no doubt an important<br />
duty, now became one of several exercises<br />
that the Christian warrior could perform. The<br />
more time he committed to the confraternity, and<br />
thus the greater his penance, the more likely he<br />
could expiate his sins in equal measure. But, in<br />
every instance, and in synchrony with the military<br />
obligations of ribat, the confraternity’s rule<br />
instructed members that they, as well, resided in<br />
a sacred moment that once had graced pilgrims<br />
on a journey to Jerusalem. This consecrated existence<br />
would last as long as they “served God in<br />
battle.” In addition, and again reflecting Muslim<br />
example, the allowance to see violence as worship<br />
could accommodate priests and monks<br />
31
who wished to join the fight. Admittedly, there is<br />
some debate if the confraternity of Belchite and<br />
other military societies truly regarded knights<br />
and clerics as the same. To resolve the question<br />
would take us too far afield. 56 But, what matters<br />
more is that priests and monks, like Muslims<br />
who made ribat, could consider battle part of<br />
their vocation.<br />
A year later, in 1123, the First Lateran Council<br />
convened by Pope Callistus II in Rome continued<br />
the consecration of war. War as pilgrimage<br />
could now encompass the liberation of Spain as<br />
well as Jerusalem. Like a pilgrim who saw his<br />
journey as a sacred duty to lessen his punishment<br />
in the afterlife, the council decreed that<br />
Opposite: The panoramic views that illustrate Bernhard von<br />
Breydenbach’s fifteenth-century account of his pilgrimage to the<br />
Holy Land (1483–84) are among the first detailed and accurate<br />
printed illustrations of major cities along the pilgrimage<br />
route, including Jerusalem, a section of which is illustrated in<br />
this detail. In consideration of his somewhat reckless youth, the<br />
wealthy Breydenbach, dean of Mainz Cathedral, had resolved to<br />
undertake this pilgrimage in the hopes of obtaining salvation.<br />
Panoramic View of Jerusalem, from Hugh Wm. Davies, Bernhard<br />
von Breydenbach and His Journey to the Holy Land, 1483–4:<br />
A Bibliography (London: J. & J. Leighton, 1911)<br />
Left: Breydenbach’s account described various eastern peoples<br />
he met en route, including these illustrations of Saracens and<br />
the Arabic alphabet, believed to be the first printed specimen<br />
of that language. His report included the birth, life, and death<br />
of Muhammad; the Quranic laws; and the “Manners and<br />
Errors of the Saracens.” Influenced by Arab and Muslim culture,<br />
Spanish explorers brought Islamic art and architecture to<br />
Mexico and <strong>California</strong>.<br />
General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library,<br />
Yale University<br />
the Christian warrior now had two places to seek<br />
penance: “To those who set out for Jerusalem<br />
and offer effective help towards the defense of<br />
the Christian people and overcoming the tyranny<br />
of the infidels, we grant remission of their sins,<br />
and we place their houses and families under<br />
the protection of blessed Peter and the Roman<br />
church. . . . Those who have put crosses on their<br />
clothes, with a view to journeying to Jerusalem or<br />
to Spain, and have later taken them off, we command<br />
by our apostolic authority to wear crosses<br />
again and to complete their journey. . . . Otherwise,<br />
from that moment we cut them off from<br />
entry into church and forbid divine services in all<br />
their lands.” 57<br />
33
34<br />
Again, the equation of the Christian warrior and<br />
pilgrim reflected, and owed a debt to, the man on<br />
ribat. The Muslim scholar, mystic, or any other<br />
person with spiritual ambitions acquired the<br />
authority to fight for God. Once the ribat ended<br />
and his obligation was done, the special moment<br />
he occupied, no matter how holy the cause,<br />
ceased to grant spiritual advantages. In like fashion,<br />
as the council’s proviso explained, the warrior<br />
who tried to liberate his brethren in Spain<br />
or Jerusalem, and thus must wear markings to<br />
validate his mission, could slay his enemies,<br />
and presumably repent for his sins, only while<br />
he honored his commitment. Once the warrior<br />
finished his task or abandoned his calling to<br />
attack another target, the quest, like a pilgrimage<br />
that had run its course, was complete.<br />
By the fifteenth century, Christians had taken<br />
ribat and made it their own. As Kroeber hypothesized,<br />
Christians assimilated, and then transformed,<br />
their rivals’ ideas. Employing Muslim<br />
precedents, whose shape and contours now sat<br />
obscured, Christians presented their efforts to liberate<br />
Spain as a santa empresa (holy undertaking)<br />
or una santa romería (holy pilgrimage). 58 War, like<br />
a pilgrimage, retained a finite quality. Once Christians<br />
had completed their task, whether it was<br />
the attempt to liberate Spain or Jerusalem, they<br />
had fulfilled their obligation. There is no need to<br />
stretch the point and wonder if we see a Christian<br />
variation of the House of War superseded by the<br />
House of Islam, though the thought is intriguing.<br />
It is enough to say that Christians valued<br />
the process that combined war and pilgrimages.<br />
Each venture involved a journey whereby the<br />
participants proved their devotion by asking for<br />
forgiveness and performing certain duties, which<br />
included, if need be, the chance to go to battle.<br />
<strong>California</strong> History • volume <strong>90</strong> number 1 2012<br />
denoueMent<br />
We have come full circle. The ties between Muslim<br />
Spain and provincial <strong>California</strong>, especially<br />
concerning the making of war, confirm the<br />
endurance of certain habits. 59 Spanish Christians<br />
who followed Muslim ways, and their descendants<br />
elsewhere who perpetuated these patterns,<br />
bear out Kroeber’s ideas about culture. The sum<br />
of habits and routines that regulate and organize<br />
human existence, culture is far from an inert,<br />
stolid mass of behaviors that individuals cannot<br />
control. Rather, as Kroeber noted, culture may<br />
be best described as a collection of practices that<br />
individuals can choose, refine, or reject when<br />
circumstances merit. The selection of traits that<br />
constitute culture may involve ways to defeat enemies.<br />
Even when choosing habits from rivals, the<br />
members of any culture do so with the intent of<br />
ensuring their survival and prosperity. The habits<br />
that promise success, although they may emanate<br />
from a rival, strengthen and grow more rooted<br />
over time when they bring benefit. Accordingly,<br />
because the Muslim approach to war seemed<br />
superior, Christians of Spain picked through the<br />
practices of both jihad and ribat. They selected<br />
what they needed, altered the choices to their liking,<br />
and employed them when necessary.<br />
At its most basic, the Muslim legacy of mystics<br />
and scholars going to war set the example that<br />
Christians followed throughout the Spanishspeaking<br />
world. In many instances, and in cases<br />
that seemed removed from the establishment of<br />
military societies that accepted clergy, priests and<br />
monks in Spain served alongside, or replaced,<br />
knights and soldiers. As early as the tenth century<br />
in the Kingdom of León in northern Spain,<br />
monks and military men who had become<br />
“Arabicized” secured responsible positions in<br />
the church hierarchy and civil government. 60 By<br />
the twelfth century, Cistercian monks occupied<br />
an abandoned castle in the southernmost portions<br />
of the province of Castilla and assumed<br />
the role of soldiers. 61 Centuries later, in 1568,
after the re-conquest of Spain, Franciscan priests<br />
from the Monastery of Saint Francis assembled<br />
with weapons at the ready to fight Muslims who<br />
rebelled against the Crown. (It is not clear if the<br />
priests went to battle.) During the same episode,<br />
four Franciscans and an equal number of Jesuits,<br />
doubting the bravery of Spanish soldiers, offered<br />
their services to one of the military commanders,<br />
declaring that they “wished to die for Jesus<br />
Christ.” 62 He denied their request.<br />
In the Americas, some clergy found more opportunities<br />
to take up the sword. The buildings missionaries<br />
constructed, or at least asked others to<br />
construct on their behalf, embodied the principle<br />
that force and faith were compatible. As the<br />
art historian George Kubler explains, when the<br />
Franciscans and other missionary orders proselytized<br />
Mexico’s Indians, they employed “the<br />
extremely unusual habit of fortifying the church.”<br />
The priests built churches surrounded by “a vast<br />
courtyard” with “crenellated walls.” The Arabist<br />
T. B. Irving adds that many Mexican churches<br />
during the colonial era resembled the “open-air<br />
congregational type of mosque which was built<br />
by Muslims for army worship.” 63<br />
Apart from churches, some seminaries in Mexico<br />
that trained priests to establish missions recalled<br />
the shape and function of the ribat as fortress.<br />
Admittedly, any resemblance may be accidental.<br />
But however inadvertent, the seminary’s purpose,<br />
and the descriptions it prompted from observers,<br />
brings to mind the Muslim effort to prepare the<br />
mind and body for any challenge. Father Francisco<br />
Palóu, Junípero Serra’s biographer, hinted<br />
at the parallels when he repeated a colleague’s<br />
description of how priests and novices in the<br />
eighteenth century prepared for their calling.<br />
“What praise and appreciation,” he recounted,<br />
“may reach the merit of these men who, ordinarily<br />
observing within the cloister walls of their<br />
college [seminary] an austere religious life, busy<br />
continually with their divine services, find their<br />
recreation in going out . . . to sanctify with their<br />
missions all of North America.” 64<br />
The buildings missionaries<br />
constructed, or at least<br />
asked others to construct<br />
on their behalf, embodied<br />
the principle that force and<br />
faith were compatible.<br />
Through the years, other clergy consecrated<br />
war in their own manner. Francisco López de<br />
Gómara, a secular priest who became Cortés’s<br />
chaplain and biographer, noted that war helped<br />
spread the Gospel. He claimed that Cortés<br />
told his men on the march to the Aztec capital<br />
Tenochtitlán that “it is foreign to our Spanish<br />
nation” to refuse the challenge of war and forsake<br />
the chance “to exalt and increase Our Catholic<br />
Faith.” 65 Juan Ginés Sepúlveda, a Dominican<br />
priest, argued that the “Spaniards were especially<br />
noted for warfare and government, and hence<br />
best [suited] for the mission of bringing the gospel<br />
and civility to the conquered peoples of the<br />
Americas.” 66<br />
In the late eighteenth century, Father Romualdo<br />
Cartagena, rector of the College of Santa Cruz in<br />
Querétaro, claimed that “soldiers” with “glistening”<br />
swords were more effective than “the voice<br />
of five missionaries.” 67 A century later, a commentator<br />
praised Father Isidoro Felix de Espinosa<br />
for writing about the conversion of Mexico’s<br />
Indians with a soldier’s resolve: “He was the<br />
Julius Caesar of New Spain [Mexico], for like that<br />
ancient Roman, he fought by day . . . and wrote<br />
by night.” 68<br />
35
36<br />
Some priests wanted to experience, rather than<br />
write about, the chance to fight on God’s behalf.<br />
When Father Miguel Hidalgo led Mexico’s fight<br />
for independence in 1810, he unfurled banners<br />
upon which his followers had emblazoned an<br />
image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Rallying his<br />
troops, he proclaimed that all should align themselves<br />
with God and deliver Mexico from the<br />
Spaniards who had fallen sway to the anti-Catholic<br />
ideas of the French Revolution. 69 José María<br />
Morelos, another rebel priest, proved quite adept<br />
at guerrilla warfare, and in 1813 he approved the<br />
Constitution of Chilpancingo that recognized<br />
Catholicism as the supreme faith of Mexico. 70<br />
Priests in <strong>California</strong> seemed no less vigorous. 71<br />
In 1810, Father José Viader twice accompanied<br />
expeditions from Mission San José to capture<br />
Indian converts who had escaped. Viader draws<br />
no distinction between himself and the soldiers.<br />
In all instances, he indicates “we” to show he<br />
participated in every activity. On one expedition,<br />
Viader, “in the company of Lieutenant<br />
Gabriel Moraga, 23 other soldiers, and about 50<br />
armed Christian Indians,” describes an attack<br />
on an Indian village to apprehend runaway<br />
neophytes. “We placed our people in position<br />
to attack a dance [being carried on] by heathen<br />
Indians and fugitive Christians,” he noted in his<br />
report. At dawn, the next day, “we assaulted a village<br />
. . . [and] . . . took it entire. The prisoners in<br />
all included 15 San José Christians, 18 heathen<br />
men, and 51 heathen women.” 72<br />
In a few cases, priests commanded troops in<br />
the field, or at least seemed quite comfortable<br />
about conducting themselves as soldiers. In<br />
1816, Father Juan Luís Martínez, rector of Mission<br />
San Luis Obispo, led an expedition into<br />
the southern part of <strong>California</strong>’s Central Valley.<br />
It is not clear how many men joined him, but<br />
whatever the number, they obeyed the priest’s<br />
orders to round up fugitive converts and pagan<br />
Indians so that they could learn of the “True God,<br />
without [whom] no one can live well or enjoy<br />
<strong>California</strong> History • volume <strong>90</strong> number 1 2012<br />
any good fortune.” Returning home, Martínez<br />
and his companions visited a village they had<br />
called upon during the first part of their journey.<br />
But the village had moved, and Martínez, who<br />
“was . . . astonished at their fickleness,” ordered<br />
his men to look for the settlement. When they<br />
found the village, the Indians attacked. Martínez<br />
is not clear about the succeeding chain of events,<br />
but he adds that the “next day the village was<br />
burned and everything in it destroyed because<br />
the people in it had taken up arms against<br />
those [the priest and his men] who had treated<br />
them well. . . . This village [deserved] severe<br />
punishment.” 73<br />
In 1817, Father Narciso Durán, as rector at Mission<br />
San José, asked Governor Pablo de Solá for<br />
permission to pursue fugitive neophytes. Durán<br />
explained that his “breviary” and santo cristo<br />
(image of Jesus Christ) would serve, in Hubert<br />
Bancroft’s paraphrase, as “weapons.” In case<br />
these sacred instruments failed, Durán requested<br />
a cañóncito (little cannon) to convince the fugitives<br />
to return to the mission. 74 Meanwhile,<br />
Father Xavier de la Concepción Uría demonstrated<br />
that he could acquit himself well in battle.<br />
During the Chumash rebellion in 1824, Uría,<br />
then rector at Mission Santa Inés, awoke from a<br />
nap as insurgents approached his quarters. A witness<br />
recalled he jumped out of bed and “shot and<br />
killed” two Indians with his shotgun. 75<br />
The exploits of bellicose priests and their contemporaries<br />
abided by patterns that long had<br />
presented war as a sacred endeavor. Given the<br />
practices bequeathed them by medieval Spain,<br />
the priests and settlers of <strong>California</strong> drew upon<br />
ideas that enabled them to define and overcome<br />
an enemy’s defiance. When contesting<br />
Indians and the pirate Hippolyte Bouchard,<br />
individuals who imperiled the very nature of<br />
their existence—Bouchard supposedly professed<br />
the atheism of the French Revolution and thus<br />
threatened the sanctity of religion—they consecrated<br />
war. But when the residents of Mexican
Spain established presidios in San Diego, Monterey<br />
(above), San Francisco, and Santa Barbara to hold<br />
<strong>California</strong> against foreign rivals and control the native<br />
populations. A number of presidio soldiers were assigned<br />
to the missions to protect the missionaries and civilians,<br />
discipline the neophytes, and bring back runaways.<br />
The Bancroft Library, University of <strong>California</strong>, Berkeley;<br />
drawing by Jose Cardero<br />
In 1824, the Chumash Indians rebelled against Franciscan<br />
missionaries at Santa Barbara (right), Santa Ynez,<br />
and La Purísima Concepción. Soldiers from the Santa<br />
Barbara and Monterey presidios were sent to quell the<br />
revolt, including about 100 soldiers from Monterey who<br />
fought the natives at Mission Purísima Concepción with<br />
infantry, cavalry, and artillery after the Chumash’s nearly<br />
month-long occupation. As did their Spanish predecessors<br />
centuries before, troops in the field could compare their<br />
efforts in battle to a pilgrimage to atone for their sins.<br />
<strong>California</strong> <strong>Historical</strong> <strong>Society</strong>; drawing by Alexander<br />
Harmer, CHS2012.1017.tif<br />
37
38<br />
<strong>California</strong> fought each other or the Americans in<br />
1846, war lacked the sense of annihilation that<br />
inflamed the spirit.<br />
Only battles against infidels required the services<br />
of pious warriors. When Father Palóu spoke<br />
about the establishment of Mission San Diego<br />
in 1769, he declared that “exactly as through the<br />
power of that sacred emblem the Spaniards had<br />
gained a great victory over the barbarous Mohammedans,<br />
in the year 1212, they [i.e., the priests]<br />
might also win a victory by raising the standard<br />
of the Holy Cross, and putting to flight all the<br />
army of hell, [and] bring under the subjection to<br />
the gentle yoke of our Holy Faith all the savage<br />
tribes . . . who inhabited . . . <strong>California</strong>.” Later,<br />
when Indian converts rebelled at Mission San<br />
Diego in 1775, Palóu praised a “blacksmith [who<br />
surpassed all other Spaniards in the fight] for<br />
without a doubt the Holy Communion which he<br />
had just received filled him with extraordinary<br />
courage and though he had no leather jacket to<br />
protect him he went out among the houses and<br />
shacks crying out, ‘Long live the Faith of our Lord<br />
Jesus Christ, and let these dogs of enemies die<br />
the death.’” 76 When Bouchard raided settlements<br />
along the coast, Father Mariano Payeras, rector<br />
of Mission La Purísima Concepción, used terms<br />
that echoed the Muslims’ willingness to fight<br />
and die for their faith, writing: “Long live God,<br />
long live [our Catholic] religion, long live the<br />
king, long live the fatherland [in whose] precious<br />
defense we will conquer or die.” 77<br />
The settlers used similar terms. Luis Arguello,<br />
when describing an expedition to recover fugitive<br />
neophytes, reported to the governor that he had<br />
confronted “heathen overwhelmed with error”<br />
whom God “has placed under the conquering<br />
banner of the most Catholic and pious monarch.”<br />
In the interest of “propagating our holy religion,”<br />
Arguello announced, “I am ready to sacrifice<br />
my comfort and my life and all the power of my<br />
mind.” 78 When troops marched from Los Ange-<br />
<strong>California</strong> History • volume <strong>90</strong> number 1 2012<br />
les to pursue the Indians who participated in the<br />
Chumash rebellion, they serenaded each member<br />
of the expedition with such lyrics as “Sergeant<br />
Carlos, who for the Trinity, dressed for war.” 79<br />
But above all, the shadow of ribat lingered. It<br />
bears repeating that the legacies of ribat dwelled<br />
beyond memory. Nonetheless, the strategies and<br />
ideas of ribat provided lessons that Christians in<br />
Spain did not find in their own doctrines. After<br />
borrowing and then changing certain elements<br />
to reduce any reference to Islam, Christians<br />
reimagined ribat as a religious exercise that<br />
could include the warrior’s labors in battle. In<br />
<strong>California</strong>, the image of the warrior and pilgrim<br />
conflated into one personage, thereby bequeathing<br />
to believers a repertoire of behaviors that<br />
could sanctify the most violent deeds. When<br />
enemies lurked, who, for the most part would<br />
be Indians, the priests and settlers also found<br />
the opportunity to abolish the sin and imperfection<br />
that engulfed their hearts. Like Spanish<br />
Christians centuries before, <strong>California</strong>’s warriors<br />
believed that for the duration of their quest, the<br />
slaying of enemies would serve as penance or<br />
professions of worship.<br />
And so they marched. In 1806, when describing<br />
an expedition to pursue fugitive neophytes,<br />
Father Pedro Muñoz wrote in his diary that<br />
on the first day the men set out, they “were<br />
informed in a formal address of the purpose<br />
toward which God was guiding them in the present<br />
expedition and the merit they would acquire,<br />
if following the Voice of God as transmitted<br />
through their chief, they fulfilled their duty.”<br />
Twenty years later, Sergeant José Dolores Pico<br />
said of another expedition that the men “recited<br />
the rosary” at least twice during their hunt for<br />
fugitive neophytes. The rosary, whose prayers<br />
include multiple recitations of the “Hail Mary”<br />
where believers ask the “Mother of God to pray<br />
for us sinners,” testified once more to the penitential<br />
qualities of a military effort. 80
At times, an expedition was the consummate<br />
exercise whereby soldiers and militia repented of<br />
their sins and, at least for the moment, restored<br />
their place in the Christian community. In 1828,<br />
Sergeant Sebastian Rodríguez reported that during<br />
the hunt for fugitive converts, the soldiers<br />
twice heard Mass. 81 The most sacred ceremony<br />
of the Catholic faith requires believers to confess<br />
their sins. According to the Latin Rite, which<br />
would be the liturgy followed by the residents of<br />
<strong>California</strong>, the congregation prays, “I have sinned<br />
exceedingly in thought, word, and deed, through<br />
my fault, through my most grievous fault.” After<br />
the priest asks that “the Almighty and Merciful<br />
Lord grant us pardon . . . and [the] remission of<br />
our sins,” any person who wishes could receive<br />
Communion, and once more sit at the Lord’s<br />
table. 82 Even Indians taken prisoner during these<br />
expeditions received the chance to repent. In<br />
1837, José María Amador of San Jose led “soldiers<br />
and civilians” into the Central Valley to recover<br />
stolen horses. Of the two hundred Indians captured<br />
by the party, one hundred were fugitive<br />
neophytes, with the remainder being gentiles, or<br />
“heathen.” Amador told the Christian Indians<br />
to “pray the creed.” In other words, they could<br />
renounce sin by professing their faith. He then<br />
ordered their execution with “two arrows in the<br />
front and two in the back.” To make sure that the<br />
pagan Indians did not die in a state of sin, Amador<br />
“baptized” them and commanded his men to<br />
shoot the prisoners “in the back.” 83<br />
In the end, the way the priests and settlers used<br />
violence testifies to connections that span generations.<br />
Muslims in Spain conveyed certain practices<br />
to their Christian rivals, who then passed<br />
them to the settlers and colonists of the New<br />
World. Although rendered into Christian form,<br />
the Muslim ideas of jihad and ribat nonetheless<br />
possessed some of their original shape and intent.<br />
In some instances, war became a pilgrimage in<br />
which the warrior performed penance, and thus<br />
obtained the opportunity to fight his way into<br />
Like Spanish Christians<br />
centuries before, <strong>California</strong>’s<br />
warriors believed that for<br />
the duration of their quest,<br />
the slaying of enemies<br />
would serve as penance or<br />
professions of worship.<br />
paradise. But if war is an act of faith, there come<br />
beguiling questions. Did the residents of <strong>California</strong>,<br />
like their predecessors in Spain, use religion<br />
to justify war? Or did they really think war was a<br />
form of religious expression? The answer to these<br />
questions depends on the reader’s approach to<br />
faith. But even so, the association of war with a<br />
pilgrimage addresses contemporary concerns.<br />
When one reads about Muslim militants invoking<br />
God to justify violence, or remembers that in<br />
2003 an American president said that war would<br />
usher in a “New Age” and fulfill biblical prophecies,<br />
the priests and settlers of <strong>California</strong> sound<br />
quite modern. 84 They are not, then, a remote<br />
populace lost to us through time and distance;<br />
rather, in their use of war they behaved as we do,<br />
sometimes repelled, sometimes emboldened, but<br />
all the while fascinated by the clarion call to muster<br />
ranks and fight.<br />
Michael Gonzalez is an associate professor of history at<br />
the University of San Diego. He teaches <strong>California</strong> history,<br />
Chicano history, Cold War history, and Middle Eastern history<br />
and terrorism. He also is the director for the history master’s<br />
program.<br />
39
40<br />
Joaquin Miller<br />
and the social Circle<br />
at the Hights<br />
this verse from the poem “Columbus,”<br />
1 a few schools, a park, and an<br />
annual poetry series in Washington,<br />
D.C., are the visible remnants of the man who,<br />
at the turn of the last century, was arguably<br />
the most famous poet in America. Currently,<br />
Joaquin Miller is experiencing a mini-revival. A<br />
comprehensive Web site spans 166 years of his<br />
writing and ongoing bibliographical references.<br />
Two symposiums have been held, in Ashland in<br />
2004 and in Redding in 2005. In 2013, following<br />
the launch of a three-year exhibition at the<br />
Mt. Shasta Sisson Museum, a third gathering<br />
will celebrate the centenary of the Poet of the<br />
Sierras’ death. 2<br />
<strong>California</strong> History • volume <strong>90</strong> number 1 2012<br />
By Phoebe Cutler<br />
Behind him lay the gray Azores,<br />
Behind the Gates of Hercules;<br />
Before him not the ghost of shores,<br />
Before him only shoreless seas.<br />
The good mate said: “Now must we pray,<br />
For lo! the very stars are gone.<br />
Brave Adm’r’l, speak; what shall I say?”<br />
“Why, say: ‘Sail on! Sail on! and on!’”<br />
Born in Indiana, raised in Oregon’s Willamette<br />
Valley, tested in the mountains of northern <strong>California</strong><br />
and on the plains of Idaho and Montana,<br />
then feted in two European capitals, this backwoods<br />
scribe, at the age of nearly fifty, settled<br />
down in the hills behind Oakland. 3 There, what<br />
his final, almost three decades lacked in an earlier<br />
adventurous life—Indian skirmishes, bear<br />
encounters, and frozen Pony Express rides—was<br />
compensated for by a whirl of activity of a different<br />
kind. Newly self-styled as a “fruit grower<br />
and poet,” 4 Miller transformed seventy stony<br />
acres into a virtual forest and garden spectacle.<br />
With his pre-established reputation and continuing,<br />
prodigious, and varied output, the novice<br />
Opposite: Joaquin Miller (ca. 1839–1913), celebrated western writer and public personality, found fame and<br />
influence across continents. In addition to his poems—a number of them written in his last decades, when this<br />
portrait was made—the self-promoting Poet of the Sierras wrote essays, fiction, plays, and autobiography. In<br />
1879, the architect Arthur Gilman affirmed: “Almost every one of our leading American poets is of handsome or<br />
striking appearance. But none of them—the kindly-eyed Longfellow, the aged and Socratic Bryant, the brownhaired<br />
Lowell, the shaggy Whitman—is more noticeable on the street than Joaquin Miller.”<br />
<strong>California</strong> <strong>Historical</strong> <strong>Society</strong>/USC Special Collections
42<br />
rancher’s domain became an attraction for both<br />
the anonymous tourist and the aspiring artist.<br />
Witty, for the most part, gregarious, egoistic but<br />
also strongly idealistic, Joaquin Miller and his<br />
Hights—the name he gave his acreage—were<br />
major players in Oakland’s lively, turn-of-thelast-century<br />
cultural scene.<br />
SoCial CliMbing<br />
When, in the spring of 1887, Miller purchased<br />
his piece of the Contra Costa hills, he was an<br />
acclaimed poet with multiple books and four<br />
plays to his name. At the age of ten, Cincinnatus<br />
Hiner Miller, as he was named, moved with his<br />
family from Libertyville, Indiana, to Oregon.<br />
Thirty years later and an aspiring writer, this child<br />
of the Wabash River and the Conestoga wagon<br />
became the sensation of the drawing rooms of<br />
London. Sporting long hair and a Wild West outfit<br />
of sombrero, scarlet shirt, scarf, and sash, the<br />
onetime gold miner, Indian fighter, Pony Express<br />
rider, newspaper publisher, and judge captivated<br />
the haute monde of Britain. A dozen years before<br />
William Cody’s Buffalo Bill show packaged the<br />
mythos, this self-called Byron of the Rockies<br />
introduced an old-world audience to the romance<br />
and adventure of the western frontier.<br />
Having acquired his Oakland holding, Miller<br />
built a tiny log hut as temporary shelter. At this<br />
phase of his life, he would amass an amorphous<br />
total of three wives and seven, mostly absent,<br />
children (two, however, soon showed up, causing<br />
no end of trouble). 5 His third spouse, Abbie<br />
Leland Miller, was back in New York, where,<br />
along with Newport or Saratoga Springs, she preferred<br />
to remain. 6 Several factors eased Miller’s<br />
plan to settle permanently in northern <strong>California</strong>.<br />
Having lived in the Shasta/Siskiyou areas on and<br />
off between 1853 and 1859, he knew the wilds of<br />
that part of <strong>California</strong>. Subsequent visits to San<br />
Francisco in 1863, 1870, and again in 1871–72,<br />
<strong>California</strong> History • volume <strong>90</strong> number 1 2012<br />
combined with some early writing, had laid down<br />
tracks for an eventual return. In the 1870s and<br />
1880s, his prodigious output during his residency<br />
in Europe and on the East Coast had distinguished<br />
this frontiersman as one of the West’s<br />
most prolific writers. Along with his adventurous<br />
life, in the sixteen years (1870–86) preceding his<br />
return, he had produced six books of poetry, four<br />
novels, two works of romanticized nonfiction,<br />
and ten plays, only two of which were actively<br />
produced. Of those two, The Danites in the Sierras<br />
was both a Broadway and a London success (it<br />
was performed in London by the first American<br />
troupe to travel abroad). Two collections of verse,<br />
Pacific Poems (London, 1871) and Songs of the Sierras<br />
(London and Boston, 1871), had even earned<br />
the Oregonian a <strong>California</strong> title, namely, Poet of<br />
the Sierras. 7 All of this acclaim had the beneficial<br />
effect of securing Miller a job in advance of his<br />
arrival. Harr Wagner, the new editor of a revived<br />
Golden Era magazine, had offered the Washington,<br />
D.C.–based Miller the position of associate<br />
editor. This allowed him to pick up way ahead of<br />
where he left off.<br />
Miller’s cumulative achievements, combined<br />
with his bonhomie, made him a natural candidate<br />
for one of San Francisco’s leading social<br />
fraternities, the Bohemian Club. Founded in<br />
1872 by a group of journalists, this society had<br />
expanded early on to include artists and their<br />
patrons. By 1888, Miller had joined Mark Twain,<br />
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Warren Stoddard,<br />
and Ina Coolbrith as an honorary member.<br />
(His continuation in that status may be explained<br />
by both his early fame and his persistent state<br />
of penury.) According to an account by the neophyte<br />
journalist Elodie Hogan, this membership<br />
paid immediate dividends. A few of Miller’s club<br />
mates contributed their talents to the construction<br />
of the Abbey, the chapel-like cottage that the<br />
writer built for himself while living in the log<br />
hut at the Hights. One, possibly Martinez native<br />
and man-about-the-arts Bruce Porter, fashioned
At the Hights, Miller built four cabins: one for<br />
receiving guests, one for his brother, one for his<br />
mother, and one for sleeping and writing, which<br />
he called the Abbey (above), after his absent wife,<br />
Abbie Leland Miller, and Westminster Abbey,<br />
final resting place for many of Miller’s heroes. The<br />
central room, or “chapel,” was Miller’s office-cumbedroom.<br />
The two wings on either side were the<br />
“deaneries,” in one of which Miller regularly performed<br />
an Indian rain chant.<br />
<strong>California</strong> <strong>Historical</strong> <strong>Society</strong>, de Young Collection,<br />
CHS2010.301.tif<br />
Miller transformed what had been rugged land<br />
into a forested slope with extensive rock walls,<br />
stone terracing, small ponds, numerous fountains,<br />
and a network of quixotic monuments, as detailed<br />
in this sketch by his daughter Juanita Miller<br />
(1880–1970). After his death, Juanita—described<br />
in a newspaper account as “beautiful and very<br />
unconventional”—sold souvenirs from one of the<br />
cabins and converted another into a sanctuary<br />
stocked with relics of her father.<br />
Courtesy of Phoebe Cutler<br />
43
the multicolored glass set in the two peaked windows<br />
adjoining the front door. Similarly, fellow<br />
Bohemian and sculptor Arthur Putnam could<br />
well have carved the rising sun, described as “an<br />
Aztec nimbus,” that sat above the door, while<br />
Putnam or another craftsman from the gregarious<br />
coterie contributed the scarlet cross that<br />
arose from the gable and the silver Moslem crescent<br />
on the door. 8<br />
The Bohemian Club provided Miller with a base<br />
in the city for drinking and socializing and, until<br />
the 1<strong>90</strong>6 earthquake and fire demolished its<br />
building and the majority of its contents, a place<br />
to archive some of his papers. He participated in<br />
the “jinkses” that related to his own experience,<br />
such as the 1<strong>90</strong>3 theatrical and musical evening<br />
honoring a companion of his London days, fellow<br />
miner and longtime rival Bret Harte. Five<br />
years later, he joined in a comparable celebration,<br />
the “Days of ’49,” with fellow performers<br />
“Sunset Norris” (Frank Norris of Octopus fame),<br />
“Sundown Field” (Charles K. Field, editor of<br />
Sunset magazine and Bohemian Club president<br />
from 1913 to 1914), and Arthur (repackaged as<br />
“Coyote”) Putnam. 9<br />
So much did the Poet of the Sierras enjoy his<br />
Bohemian experience that not long after its<br />
launch in 1<strong>90</strong>4, he joined the Sequoia Club,<br />
society figure Ednah Robinson’s revival of a<br />
short-lived earlier group, a female response to<br />
the Bohemian Club. 10 Uniquely for its time, the<br />
reorganized Sequoia Club integrated genders.<br />
Headed by Charles S. Aiken, editor of Sunset (and<br />
shortly to be Robinson’s husband), the Sequoia<br />
Club signaled its revival with a dinner at the<br />
St. Francis Hotel honoring the author Gertrude<br />
Atherton. Other receptions followed, along with<br />
concerts and art exhibits. Harr Wagner, who<br />
became Miller’s close associate and first biographer<br />
(and the Sequoia Club’s third president),<br />
commented that the poet was inspired to host a<br />
barbecue at his ranch for a hundred of his fellow<br />
Sequoians. 11<br />
44 <strong>California</strong> History • volume <strong>90</strong> number 1 2012<br />
Given the logistics of transport, entertaining one<br />
hundred guests at home would have been marginally<br />
more demanding than attending the San<br />
Francisco gatherings. The Bohemian schedule<br />
of performances at 9 p.m., with dinner following<br />
at 11, would have been a challenge for any<br />
member who wished to be home the same night,<br />
especially if that home happened to be in the<br />
hills behind the decorous suburb of Fruitvale and<br />
ten miles from the center of Oakland. With the<br />
last San Francisco–Oakland ferry leaving around<br />
midnight and connecting streetcars on the other<br />
side running only every hour, Miller could not<br />
have lingered long over dinner. In a few lines of<br />
a surviving note, he reassured a concerned friend<br />
that he did his “stint at the Bret Harte jinks, then<br />
caught the boat and walked up the hill to the<br />
Hights and slept in my own bear skins, as I told<br />
you I would.” 12<br />
As with almost everything connected with Miller,<br />
the facts, as related by both him and observers,<br />
are contradictory. However, almost all accounts<br />
concur in describing the hike up the “tawny hill”<br />
as a strenuous one. Commencing at the little<br />
settlement of Dimond at the intersection of Hopkins<br />
(now MacArthur) and Fruitvale Avenues,<br />
the purported length of the trip varied markedly<br />
depending on the age and fitness of the traveler.<br />
What was two miles for a couple of college students<br />
in 1892 was five for the author, publisher,<br />
and arts-and-crafts manufacturer Elbert Hubbard<br />
a decade later. At least by the time the two Baptist<br />
students attempted the trip, the electric Highland<br />
Park and Fruitvale line had replaced the horsedrawn<br />
Brooklyn and Fruit Vale (as the name of<br />
the suburb was originally spelled) streetcar and<br />
now extended from Fruitvale center to Dimond.<br />
But even under ideal circumstances—a private<br />
carriage driven all the way from City Hall at<br />
14th and Broadway—the trip to the Hights was<br />
a two-hour trek. 13 Usually Miller made good use<br />
of a horse and buckboard when commuting up<br />
and down his hill. Returning from San Francisco<br />
after the Bret Harte musicale, he made the best
By 1<strong>90</strong>0, the crossroads settlement of Dimond, where Miller picked up his mail and his less robust guests, hosted four<br />
unruly watering holes. From Saratoga Springs, New York, in February 1<strong>90</strong>3, the poet wrote his brother regarding his<br />
nephew’s wanderings: “I do not allow him to hang around Dimond: It is low, low: I never knew a boy about there<br />
that did not go to the bad.”<br />
Oakland History Room, Oakland Public Library<br />
In 1910, Frank C. Havens of Realty Syndicate<br />
purchased from his partner, Francis<br />
“Borax” Smith, the East Bay’s mass<br />
transit company. Included in the sale was<br />
this streetcar, featured in a 1911 postcard<br />
describing East 14th Street in Fruitvale<br />
as “the road of a thousand wonders.”<br />
Havens was now in charge of 13,000<br />
acres—including the land surrounding<br />
the Hights—in the Berkeley-Oakland<br />
hills. For his part, Miller had joined the<br />
land rush as early as 1887, when he purchased<br />
several Oakland lots. By 1<strong>90</strong>9, he<br />
was focusing his resources on that siren<br />
the eucalyptus, ordering and planting<br />
that year thousands of trees.<br />
<strong>California</strong> <strong>Historical</strong> <strong>Society</strong>,<br />
CHS2012.1011.tif<br />
45
46<br />
of it, closing the aforementioned note with the<br />
description: “The little baby moon had gone<br />
to bed, but all the heaven was a pin cushion of<br />
gold-headed stars and I was neither lonely or<br />
leg weary: all this to show what the steps (?) and<br />
stairs (?) out door air will do for a fellows [sic]<br />
legs and lungs.” 14<br />
Although it lacked exact complements to the<br />
Bohemian and Sequoia Clubs, late-nineteenth-<br />
century Oakland could boast its share of fraternities.<br />
It was a town, in the words of its mayor,<br />
where “Science, art, and letters thrive[d]” along<br />
with “morality and general education.” 15 In addition<br />
to upscale areas with “handsome and costly<br />
houses,” the Alameda County seat hosted sixteen<br />
educational establishments. The Vermonter Miss<br />
Mary Snell, principal of the Snell Seminary, filled<br />
in as a patron of the city’s budding art scene.<br />
When the reformer Baroness Alexandra Gripenburg<br />
of Finland sought, in 1887, to meet the East<br />
Bay’s famous new resident, they rendezvoused at<br />
the seminary. 16 In this way and in others, Miller<br />
improvised his social life on the Contra Costa<br />
side of the bay.<br />
Spiritual heightS<br />
Above almost all else, the church was a unifying<br />
force in the middle-aged bard’s new northern<br />
<strong>California</strong> life. Although Miller claimed loyalty<br />
to no single religion, his father’s Quakerism<br />
and the fundamental Christian practice in the<br />
Willamette Valley of his youth strongly shaped<br />
his outlook and his writing. (The Bible, he frequently<br />
asserted, was the only reference book he<br />
needed.) Halfway up the hill on the trail that led<br />
to his private cemetery, he erected the Bishop’s<br />
Gate, honoring William Taylor, Methodist bishop,<br />
powerful gold rush preacher, and heroic missionary<br />
to Africa. What would have further attracted<br />
Miller, Taylor enjoyed a reputation as one of the<br />
first, if not the first, importer of eucalyptus to<br />
<strong>California</strong>. 17<br />
<strong>California</strong> History • volume <strong>90</strong> number 1 2012<br />
Simultaneously with Miller settling at his<br />
ranch was the establishment of the Unitarian<br />
Church’s first East Bay branch. Known as a sect<br />
with advanced views and led by a succession of<br />
dynamic ministers, the First Unitarian Church<br />
of Oakland attracted a distinguished congregation.<br />
18 Although Miller habitually spent his<br />
Sundays propped up at work in the big brass bed<br />
that doubled as his office, he formed strong ties<br />
to the church’s Reverend Charles W. Wendte,<br />
his successor William Day Simonds, the freefloating<br />
Reverend Benjamin Fay Mills, and, even<br />
more importantly, two of the church’s staunchest<br />
parishioners, Charles J. Woodbury and<br />
John P. Irish.<br />
Son of a German immigrant and a gifted leader<br />
who grew up in Boston and San Francisco,<br />
Wendte established twelve new Unitarian<br />
churches in a six-year period during his stay in<br />
Oakland. To a large degree self-educated, he promoted<br />
literature as well as music during these<br />
years (1886–98) in the burgeoning town. 19 True<br />
to the liberal outlook of his chosen denomination,<br />
he offered the pulpit of the newly built First<br />
Unitarian Church to both the radical feminist<br />
Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Indian mystic<br />
Swami Vivekananda, founder of the Vedanta<br />
<strong>Society</strong>. Under his aegis, a fundraiser for a<br />
memorial to a deceased poet drew almost a complete<br />
complement of writers from the area. On<br />
another occasion, Miller sat by bemused while an<br />
embarrassed Unitarian from across the bay parodied<br />
his versifying. 20<br />
Relocated to southern <strong>California</strong> by 1<strong>90</strong>4, Rev.<br />
Mills was less a literary figure and more a spirited<br />
reformer with a socialist agenda. Miller,<br />
whose writing inveighed against the evils of<br />
unfettered capitalism (ignoring his own inveterate<br />
land speculations), enjoyed an easy rapport<br />
with Mills. Elbert Hubbard recalled the Hights<br />
proprietor waylaying him and the minister during<br />
a visit. Miller had appeared from the trees
Miller’s friendship with the journalist John P. Irish (1843–1923) dated to the first year of his return to San<br />
Francisco. In the February 1914 issue of Out West magazine, Irish described Miller’s influence: “There<br />
occurred at his mountain home certain things which in literary interest have probably not been equaled<br />
in the history of any genius. . . . The arms of his hospitality were opened to the maimed and spent and the<br />
stranger, who, in the atmosphere that was around him discovered talents that they had not suspected.”<br />
Charles Wood Irish Papers, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa<br />
The Irrepressible John P . Irish . . . Colonel<br />
John P. Irish was a dervish. Prior to<br />
arriving in <strong>California</strong> in 1882 at the<br />
age of thirty-nine, he had trained as a<br />
lawyer, served two terms in the Iowa<br />
legislature, run for governor, and been<br />
publisher of the Iowa State Press. Within<br />
six or seven years of arriving in Oakland,<br />
he became editor and chief owner<br />
of the Oakland Times and the last managing<br />
editor of San Francisco’s venerable<br />
Daily Alta. 1 Within that same period,<br />
he served on a committee to oversee<br />
the Southern Pacific, led another committee<br />
to overhaul the city’s sewer system,<br />
and was elected head of the West<br />
Oakland Improvement Association.<br />
Simultaneously, he shared responsibility<br />
for the Home for the Adult Blind and<br />
the Women’s Sheltering and Protective<br />
Home. In sum, for the next forty years,<br />
he was ubiquitous as a civic leader,<br />
writer, and speaker.<br />
Large, with an oversized head, and<br />
(later) flowing white hair—and always<br />
without a tie—this public figure poured<br />
himself into conservative causes. He<br />
opposed women’s right to vote, Prohibition,<br />
and the ceding of Yosemite<br />
to the federal government. He campaigned<br />
nationwide against silver and<br />
for the gold standard. Ambrose Bierce,<br />
not a fan of Irish, nevertheless recognized,<br />
in a backhanded way, his omnipresence:<br />
“Ah, no, this is not Hell,” I cried;<br />
“The preachers ne’er so greatly lied.<br />
“This is Earth’s spirit glorified!<br />
“Good souls do not in Hades dwell,<br />
“And, look, there’s John P. Irish!”<br />
“Well,The Voice said,<br />
“that’s what makes it Hell.” 2<br />
From 1894 to 1910, Irish held the sinecure<br />
(which earned him the title of<br />
Colonel) of Naval Officer of Customs,<br />
Port of San Francisco. He never gave<br />
up farming, eventually operating a<br />
thousand acres near Bakersfield. In the<br />
penultimate year of his life, he made a<br />
triumphant visit to Japan, where he was<br />
received as a hero, since he had campaigned<br />
ardently against Asian discrimination<br />
laws. He was greeted by Yone<br />
Noguchi, a member of the Japanese<br />
parliament, who, as a stowaway at age<br />
thirteen, wandered into West Oakland<br />
and the Irish home. The family took<br />
him in and educated him. According to<br />
the lore, this future parliamentarian was<br />
the first Japanese the Iowa native had<br />
ever seen.<br />
47
48<br />
intoning, “The collection will now be taken.”<br />
He then welcomed the entrepreneurial Hubbard,<br />
declaring, “Ben said you were coming, but<br />
preachers are such damn liars.” 21<br />
Given the centrality of religion to the social and<br />
literary life of early Alameda County, it is apt<br />
that Miller’s first documented social outing was<br />
sponsored by Charles and Lucia Woodbury in<br />
the summer of 1887. The Woodburys invited the<br />
poet, the Irishes, and the Wendtes to meet the<br />
simpatico Reverend John K. McLean and his wife<br />
of the Congregational Church. 22 Charles’s ties<br />
with the Unitarian sect came naturally. Born in<br />
Massachusetts, but raised partially in Michigan,<br />
he returned to his native state to attend Williams<br />
College, where he became a disciple of the eminent<br />
thinker and onetime Unitarian minister,<br />
Ralph Waldo Emerson. Their acquaintance lasted<br />
on and off for five years. At the time of his Oakland<br />
entertainment, Woodbury, head of a growing<br />
family and president of a varnish company, was<br />
writing a book about his life-changing relationship<br />
with Emerson twenty years earlier. For the<br />
remainder of his life, besides playing the violin<br />
and penning the occasional religious poem and<br />
book review, this devout Unitarian gave lectures<br />
on the Concord philosopher and his circle. 23<br />
It was to this learned patriarch’s warm and welcoming<br />
household that Miller repaired—“wet,<br />
dripping, draggled, muddy hands and face, torn<br />
clothes, and worn-out body and mind from my<br />
long walk and contact with wire fences”—en<br />
route to speak at the First Presbyterian Church.<br />
Along with his fire and “sundry cups of hot tea,”<br />
Miller, in kind with the audiences who gathered<br />
for his friend’s talks, would have valued Woodbury’s<br />
New England associations. During one<br />
of his several trips to Boston, he wrote Abbie<br />
and their daughter, Juanita, that he had visited<br />
Longfellow’s grave and was going to the “classic<br />
ground” of Concord and Lexington. 24<br />
<strong>California</strong> History • volume <strong>90</strong> number 1 2012<br />
The three compatriots—Woodbury, Irish, and<br />
Miller—arrived in <strong>California</strong> about the same<br />
time. Although all were individuals of some<br />
significance, Woodbury was, for the most part,<br />
a private figure. Miller, a prolific writer with a<br />
national reputation to maintain, required a degree<br />
of isolation to do his work. In contrast, Irish, the<br />
poet’s most intimate ally, was 95 percent in the<br />
public eye. Now forgotten but at the time judged<br />
one of <strong>California</strong>’s “most picturesque public<br />
figures,” he deserves separate treatment. 25<br />
literary liaiSonS<br />
Keeping very quiet, for understandable reasons,<br />
about her religious preferences (she was the<br />
daughter of the younger brother of Joseph Smith,<br />
the founder of Mormonism 26 ), Ina Coolbrith was<br />
judged by Harr Wagner as Miller’s closest literary<br />
friend. Without a doubt, she was his longestrunning<br />
female friend. This much-esteemed<br />
figure in the <strong>California</strong> pantheon of writers was<br />
a beautiful young woman of twenty-nine when<br />
the Indiana-born poet first met her in 1870 during<br />
the second of his early visits to San Francisco.<br />
Miller had come to her attention the previous<br />
year with the receipt at the Overland Monthly<br />
offices of the slim book of verse Joaquin, et al.<br />
A divorcée and transplant from Los Angeles,<br />
Coolbrith, herself a contributor to the journal,<br />
urged editor Bret Harte to review the curious<br />
submission from the backwoods Oregon judge.<br />
When, following the review’s appearance, Miller<br />
himself arrived at the journal’s offices, Coolbrith<br />
kindly took charge of the newcomer. Almost<br />
twenty years later, still single and guardian to her<br />
orphaned niece and nephew, she lived in a modest<br />
house on Webster Street, not far from her<br />
job as Oakland’s—and the state’s—first public<br />
librarian.<br />
Miller owed this attractive colleague more than<br />
one debt. He was en route to greater arenas of<br />
glory when he spent a day with Coolbrith gathering<br />
olive branches in Marin County to make a
Ina Coolbrith (1841–1928), one of the Bay Area’s most prominent literary figures, met Miller when she was<br />
about twenty-nine, when this studio portrait was made. Coolbrith and Miller were bound by their shared<br />
Conestoga wagon past, Midwest origins, long acquaintance, involvement with literature, and unconventional<br />
single states. That closeness did not preclude Coolbrith from complaining that Miller did not credit her for his<br />
changed name and had reneged on his promise to provide her housing on his hill.<br />
Oakland Public Library, photograph by Louis Thors<br />
49
50<br />
wreath for Byron’s grave. At this juncture, she<br />
convinced the aspiring poet to change his name<br />
from Cincinnatus to Joaquin, in honor of the<br />
fabled Mexican bandit and Miller’s poem in the<br />
just-reviewed, eponymous book. 27 When two<br />
years later, Miller—now returned from Britain—<br />
was notified that the half-Wintun daughter he<br />
had fathered thirteen or fourteen years earlier<br />
and had left behind in Shasta County needed<br />
to be rescued from a bad situation, he arranged<br />
for the teenager to reside with Coolbrith. Callie<br />
lived with her mentor—part of the time as a<br />
quasi-domestic—for an extended period. The two<br />
formed a strong bond. 28<br />
Until she moved back to San Francisco in 1899,<br />
Coolbrith was one of the anchors of the East<br />
Bay’s literary life. Well known is the help she<br />
gave to a disadvantaged and youthful Jack London.<br />
Less known is her support of more established<br />
writers, in particular George Wharton<br />
James. This restless young Brit, a minister by<br />
training, arrived with his family in 1887 (coincidentally<br />
the same year Miller put down stakes<br />
in the hills just to the south) for an almost<br />
two-year stay in Oakland. At the beginning of a<br />
remarkable writing career that spanned mental<br />
well-being, the Grand Canyon, the Southwest<br />
Indians, and southern <strong>California</strong>, James was<br />
offered a small loan by Coolbrith, who also wrote<br />
the introduction to one of his first literary efforts,<br />
a manual on physiology for youth. Extending<br />
her graciousness even further, she took her new<br />
friend to the Hights, the first of James’s many<br />
visits over the next two and a half decades. 29<br />
Coolbrith introduced two other literary figures to<br />
the frontier poet: the New York poet and painter<br />
Edmund Russell and the Rhode Island–raised,<br />
utopian reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman.<br />
Russell spent six months in San Francisco and<br />
Oakland in the early 18<strong>90</strong>s, during which time<br />
he was inspired to compile an anthology of contemporary<br />
<strong>California</strong> poetry. During her longer<br />
Oakland stay, from 1891 to 1894, Gilman pub-<br />
<strong>California</strong> History • volume <strong>90</strong> number 1 2012<br />
lished her still-admired, semiautobiographical<br />
short story, The Yellow Wallpaper. The grandniece<br />
of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Harriet’s brother,<br />
the fiery (and scandal-tainted) Reverend Henry<br />
Beecher, Gilman’s impecunious state required<br />
her to take charge of a boardinghouse directly<br />
across from Coolbrith’s household. 30 Here, this<br />
remarkable woman composed poetry, fiction,<br />
and nonfiction for at least five different journals<br />
and newspapers; lectured; and engaged in social<br />
protest (sanitation, temperance, kindergartens,<br />
unemployment). For some of this time, she<br />
tended a dying mother (Swedenborgian minister<br />
Joseph Worcester visited and advised her to get<br />
help). And, for almost all of it, she looked after a<br />
young daughter. 31 Gilman may have been singular<br />
in her productivity, but she stood out as being<br />
one of the few women who was utterly resistant<br />
to the bard’s spell.<br />
A stalwart daughter of Presbyterian New England,<br />
Gilman confided her disgust with Miller to<br />
her diary, calling him a “dirty person.” The highminded<br />
Gilman also expressed her contempt in<br />
her description of the scene that George Wharton<br />
James, a less-exacting Methodist, was delighted<br />
to capture for the ages four years later: both visitors<br />
had discovered the writer in his standard<br />
working position, in bed, but, in Charlotte’s case,<br />
with a cigar, whose ashes he carelessly dropped<br />
on the floor. 32<br />
hillSide boheMia<br />
Gilman—her scorn not withstanding—and James<br />
were welcome guests at the Hights. Torrents<br />
of curiosity seekers were not. The bard railed<br />
against the “lion-hunters” who would “purloin<br />
his manuscripts, steal his books, peer through<br />
his windows, and even carry off his coats, gloves<br />
and handkerchiefs.” The incident inciting this<br />
outburst was the appearance of four female “pilgrims<br />
to the shrine of poesy,” who steadfastly<br />
refused to acknowledge Miller’s attempt to take<br />
his “rapidly cooling” bath. 33
George Sterling (1869–1926) recalled his first glimpse of Miller in the late 1880s at the Hights: “We stood and stared,<br />
and staring, made out the form of a man lying propped up on a bed in the nearest cabin. The presence wore a red skullcap.<br />
Yellow hair foamed out on the pillow. It must be our god of the western lyre.” Years later, George Wharton James<br />
(1858–1923) made this photograph of the poet at work in his bed on Christmas Day, 1896, capturing some of the idiosyncrasies<br />
of his lifestyle: his small room with exposed rafters and unstained walls; clippings, photos, letters, and animal<br />
skins coating the walls; the ceiling hung with flags, whips, and arrows; and a stack of unanswered mail next to the bed.<br />
The one constant amidst the clutter was the all-important jug of whiskey under the bed.<br />
Library of Congress; photograph by G. Wharton James<br />
When directed toward his friends, Miller’s hospitality<br />
was warm and welcoming. He appeared<br />
to entertain effortlessly. Among his long list of<br />
prior occupations was that of cook for a camp of<br />
gold miners. Even his estranged Native American<br />
daughter conceded that her father was a good<br />
chef. The importance Miller assigned to food<br />
and meals was indicated in James’s description<br />
of his first visit with Coolbrith to the Hights.<br />
James “solemnized his heart” when the poet at<br />
last revealed the “holy of holies,” pulling back<br />
a pair of beautiful Persian shawls to expose his<br />
greasy stove and kitchen table. His protégée<br />
and live/work assistant Yone Noguchi cited his<br />
pronouncements, “Remember this is a sacred<br />
service” and “Eat slowly, think something higher<br />
and be content.” 34<br />
In pursuit of this contentment and in kind with<br />
its neighboring hardscrabble ranches, the Hights<br />
had its complement of cows and chickens. The<br />
resourceful and frequently cash-strapped poet<br />
foraged for greens and shot local game and fowl.<br />
He fussed over his three small purpose-built<br />
ponds that provided fish and frogs. “Every available<br />
place” was “planted to corn and vegetables,”<br />
while the roadside, as writer and traveler Charles<br />
Warren Stoddard described the drive from<br />
Dimond, yielded watercress. 35 Noguchi recalled<br />
Miller heading out to bag a quail for his mother’s<br />
breakfast but returning with a sparrow. One<br />
guest was disappointed that he was served not<br />
the promised pheasant, but “wild geese fresh<br />
from the wheat field.” He was lucky compared to<br />
the easterners for whom Jack London prepared<br />
rattlesnake under the guise of rabbit. 36<br />
51
52<br />
Neither pheasant nor geese could have been all<br />
that plentiful, because by all accounts the most<br />
common meal for entertaining purposes was<br />
Miller’s “bandit luncheon,” a meat stew with<br />
onions and vegetables cooked in a large pot over<br />
an open fire for two to three hours. A variation<br />
was the “Hungarian bandit luncheon,” a<br />
kebob of small steak, bacon, and a slice of onion<br />
on skewers. 37 From the early 18<strong>90</strong>s, when the<br />
Hights began to welcome a steady stream of<br />
both transient and resident Japanese, the cuisine<br />
diversified to include tea and sushi. Goose or<br />
kebob, these meals took place among the redwoods<br />
in the canyon along Palo Seco Creek on<br />
the property’s northern border, or near the Abbey<br />
under what was variously described as an arbor,<br />
an arbor with roses, or “a bower of white roses.”<br />
In unseasonable weather, the repasts were moved<br />
a dozen yards east to Margaret Miller’s, Joaquin’s<br />
mother’s, winter cottage. 38<br />
The guest list of one such bandit lunch combined<br />
Berkeley artist William Keith and his<br />
wife; the author Cora Older, wife of local editor<br />
and reformer Fremont Older; the author Bailey<br />
Millard, at the time in between San Francisco<br />
and New York editing jobs; and resident artist<br />
and aristocrat the Hungarian count Geyza S.<br />
de Perhacs. All during his Oakland period, but<br />
especially in the early 19<strong>90</strong>s when he was a<br />
stringer, Miller drew heavily from his acquaintances<br />
among the contributors and staff at the<br />
venerable San Francisco Morning Call (after 1895,<br />
the San Francisco Call). One dinner was prefaced<br />
by a pitcher of water containing one of Miller’s<br />
stocks of goldfish, described by guest and Call<br />
“auditor” Howard Hurlbut, a would-be poet and<br />
recent sojourner among the Crow Indians. Also<br />
in attendance were Ethel Brandon, a local leading<br />
lady, and her sister, a poetry contributor to the<br />
Call. To honor the departing New Yorker Edmund<br />
Russell, Upper Fruitvale’s most prominent<br />
host again called upon poets, in this instance<br />
Edwin Markham, David Lesser Lezinsky, and<br />
Coolbrith. 39<br />
<strong>California</strong> History • volume <strong>90</strong> number 1 2012<br />
Although Miller was inclined toward more intimate<br />
entertaining, near the end of his presence in<br />
Fruitvale Heights he also annually held what he<br />
called Whitaker Day, in honor of Herman “Jim”<br />
Whitaker, his wife, and their seven children. 40<br />
The son of English wool manufacturers, Whitaker<br />
had arrived in Oakland in 1895. He worked odd<br />
jobs while moving his family from one cheap<br />
immigrant neighborhood to another. Eventually,<br />
this close confrere of Miller’s was to enjoy success<br />
with his novel The Planter, an exposé of conditions<br />
on Mexican rubber plantations.<br />
Superficially, Whitaker shared much in common<br />
with John Herbert Evelyn Partington, another<br />
intimate. Both men were British, Oakland-based,<br />
and the father of seven children. The resemblance<br />
ended there, however, because Partington,<br />
a graphic artist, had a going business, a school<br />
for newspaper illustration. Also, in contrast<br />
with Whitaker’s earthier progeny, the Partington<br />
children were destined to become artists of one<br />
kind or another. Gertrude painted Miller’s portrait.<br />
Blanche and Richard were familiar figures<br />
at the Hights. Blanche, the Call’s drama and<br />
cultural critic and a much-admired beauty, was<br />
a confidante of Ambrose Bierce and a source of<br />
romantic interest for Noguchi. 41 Until the quake<br />
wreaked havoc with the city’s theaters and art<br />
schools, young Dick worked at the family’s San<br />
Francisco school. Afterward, he ran the art gallery<br />
that real estate developers Francis Marion<br />
“Borax” Smith and Frank Havens opened in the<br />
upscale suburb of Piedmont.<br />
As Havens’s nephew and right-hand man,<br />
George Sterling would have been instrumental in<br />
securing the gallery position for Dick. A wouldbe<br />
poet, Sterling was the dashing, unannounced<br />
leader of a group of young men that included<br />
Dick, Ambrose Bierce’s younger son, Leigh,<br />
and the journalist Austin Lewis, who along with<br />
Bierce’s brother Albert and his son Carleton were<br />
regular imbibers of Miller’s store of 110 proof.
Miller’s friendship with George Sterling and Charles Warren Stoddard (1843–1<strong>90</strong>9) extended beyond the<br />
Hights to Carmel, where Sterling had cofounded an artist’s colony. In a letter to Ambrose Bierce, Sterling<br />
described the trio’s visit in October 1<strong>90</strong>5 to Carmel Mission, where Miller flirted outrageously with the sexton’s<br />
daughter. Later, after a liberal ingestion of spirits, he went off, half-cocked, to lecture at the Monterey<br />
County Teachers’ Institute.<br />
The Bancroft Library, University of <strong>California</strong>, Berkeley<br />
From their doings arise some of the more colorful<br />
anecdotes regarding life at the Hights. Sterling,<br />
a genuine fan of Miller’s poetry, recalled<br />
Miller’s insistence on demonstrating his skill<br />
with a tomahawk, an expertise he claimed had<br />
often saved his life during his Shasta days.<br />
Fueled with “an appreciable amount of moonshine,”<br />
the bard flung the hatchet at a tree four<br />
times, each time missing his target. After the<br />
fifth attempt, he hit the tree with the butt end of<br />
the handle. Commenting on this incident, Miller<br />
biographer M. M. Marberry surmised that the<br />
poet, who was famously resistant to the effects<br />
of alcohol, most likely had never thrown a tomahawk<br />
before. 42<br />
A busy Socialist (and onetime candidate for governor),<br />
Austin Lewis would not have been one of<br />
the more frequent denizens of the Hights, but<br />
even he recalls the group’s rollicking picnics.<br />
From an orchard in Piedmont, the picnickers<br />
would progress over the hills to Fruitvale. Lewis,<br />
one of Sterling’s three boyhood pals who followed<br />
him from Long Island, recalled that in<br />
a quarry near Miller’s they would discuss “the<br />
affairs of the universe” and listen “to the rhapsodical<br />
lies of the old bard.” 43<br />
Visits to the Hights were not all whiskey and talk.<br />
Miller’s friends sometimes helped with the ranch<br />
work. One well-circulated photograph circa 1<strong>90</strong>9<br />
depicts Miller supervising Whitaker and two<br />
53
54<br />
by 1893, the oregonbred<br />
poet had<br />
penned “Columbus”<br />
(“Sail on! Sail<br />
on! and on!”). . . .<br />
His “shelf of the<br />
mountain” was<br />
slowly beginning<br />
to resemble the<br />
“hillside bohemia”<br />
he had been<br />
bruiting about since<br />
the early 18<strong>90</strong>s.<br />
writers, Luke Pease and James H. MacLafferty,<br />
pitching hay. The sturdier among Miller’s circle<br />
fitted rocks for his network of monuments: the<br />
pyramid to Moses, the tower to Robert Browning,<br />
the turret to John C. Frémont, and, grandest<br />
of all, the funeral pyre intended for Miller’s own<br />
personal use. 44<br />
By 1893, the Oregon-bred poet had penned<br />
“Columbus” (“Sail on! Sail on! and on!”), the<br />
verses that would, on October 12 each year, make<br />
him the bane of at least two generations of children.<br />
His “shelf of the mountain” was slowly<br />
beginning to resemble the “hillside Bohemia” he<br />
<strong>California</strong> History • volume <strong>90</strong> number 1 2012<br />
had been bruiting about since the early 18<strong>90</strong>s.<br />
One of the first to arrive was his disciple Edwin<br />
Markham. As early as 1888, a solitary Miller had<br />
written to Markham in Placerville in an effort to<br />
attract a sympathetic and muscular workmate to<br />
the barren hillside he termed a “doleful, grewsome<br />
[sic] place.” 45 Four years later, after the<br />
electrification of the tram line, Markham, who<br />
for about three years had been living downtown<br />
near the Oakland elementary school where he<br />
was principal, moved within a half-mile of the<br />
Hights. 46 There, in 1899, he produced “Man with<br />
the Hoe,” one of the most popular and lucrative<br />
poems of all times.<br />
About the time Markham took the job in Oakland,<br />
the first of Miller’s long line of Japanese<br />
youths began to appear. They were of two kinds,<br />
well-to-do students on their way home from Ivy<br />
League colleges and poorer young men who may<br />
have been working elsewhere in menial jobs.<br />
Both types raised the ire of the locals. (In his<br />
rambling semiautobiography, The Building of the<br />
City Beautiful, Miller described a confrontation<br />
with a “committee for the protection of white<br />
labor,” whose threats forced some of the early<br />
live/work residents to leave. 47 ) Elbert Hubbard,<br />
recalling his late 1<strong>90</strong>2 visit, reported on the effect<br />
of these outlanders on the rough slopes above<br />
Dimond: “Soon a whole little village smiled upon<br />
us from a terraced outlook, that seemed surrounded<br />
and shut in by tall pines. The houses<br />
were about as large as dry goods cases—say eight<br />
by twelve. There were a dozen of them . . . of all<br />
sorts and color and shapes.” 48<br />
Musing on the same sight, Jim Whitaker’s<br />
daughter Elsa remembered visiting “the beautiful<br />
little Japanese paper houses up through the<br />
woods.” She described them as “well made”<br />
and mostly composed of paper. 49 Hubbard was<br />
met by “an Oriental, all dressed in white,” who<br />
escorted him to his cottage. On his one and only<br />
stay at the Hights, Charles Warren Stoddard, a<br />
founder with Coolbrith and Harte of the Overland
Monthly, marveled at the cultural attainments<br />
of these young Asians, who “talked freely” of<br />
“Emerson, Wordsworth, Longfellow, of Shakespeare”<br />
and also of Bunyan, “Victor Hugo, Walt<br />
Whitman, and even Bernard Shaw.” In addition,<br />
they were more versed in Russian literature than<br />
were their American equivalents. 50<br />
In contrast to the passing students, the Japanese<br />
live/work servants were indispensable to the<br />
Hights’s operation. Speaking to a reporter in the<br />
spring of 1895, Margaret Miller referred to the<br />
“two young Japanese” who had been “living with<br />
us here for a long time receiving instruction in<br />
English from Joaquin.” A more accurate description<br />
of the pedagogy would be Miller’s encapsulation<br />
of his relationship with Yone Noguchi, who<br />
arrived in the spring of 1895 and stayed for five<br />
years: “This boy is the right sort; he does just as<br />
he pleases—lives in the cabin yonder. I never go<br />
into it. Sometimes he comes in here and we talk<br />
of men and books.” 51<br />
Although honored to be at the famed Hights,<br />
Noguchi and his peers were essentially houseboys.<br />
However, unlike their comrades elsewhere,<br />
they received no compensation (Noguchi stated<br />
that the only object he received from his host<br />
were two pairs of woolen socks to replace his<br />
tattered ones). 52 A revealing photo (page 56)<br />
of Miller with three Japanese youths and two<br />
horses (unusual among archival photos of casual<br />
scenes in that it bears a specific date, June 6,<br />
1891) gives a sense of their status. In this image,<br />
the poet is every bit the proud ranch owner. One<br />
arm is tossed casually over his horse. Two of<br />
the Japanese hold the horses. A third looks out<br />
shyly from behind Miller. The front steps of the<br />
Abbey appear to the right and in the distance are<br />
a lordly view of Fruitvale’s eponymous orchards<br />
and a snatch of County Road #2509. The “fruit<br />
grower and poet,” as he had once again listed<br />
himself in the local directory, is showing off his<br />
steeds, his servants, and his domain. 53<br />
In 1893, student-laborer Yonejiro (Yone) Noguchi (1875–1947)<br />
took up residence at the Hights, where he began his English literary<br />
career and embarked, in 1897, on a correspondence with<br />
Charles Warren Stoddard. This autographed portrait, made on<br />
July 4, 1897, was one of three he sent to Stoddard, each posed in<br />
western rather than Japanese dress, a preference acknowledged<br />
by Miller during Noguchi’s almost decades-long residence in the<br />
United States. Noguchi, Miller explained to the San Francisco<br />
Chronicle, “objects to that sort of interest, saying that he wants<br />
to write for America, and depend solely on the value of his<br />
work.”<br />
Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, <strong>California</strong><br />
The following year brought Takeshi Kanno, the<br />
longest, most continuous Japanese inhabitant.<br />
A self-styled philosopher, Kanno was to become<br />
embroiled in two scandals: his interracial marriage<br />
to the sculptress Gertrude Boyle and her<br />
desertion of him for one of his much younger<br />
countrymen. This regrettable fate, including his<br />
eventual remarriage with Boyle, has not been<br />
sufficient to win lasting fame for the luckless<br />
Kanno. 54<br />
55
56<br />
Of Miller’s Japanese residents, wrote Charles Warren<br />
Stoddard, “Never were gentler souls than these<br />
who have found a welcome and a shelter at The<br />
Heights.” Miller himself confessed enjoying their<br />
“exquisite refinement . . . their willingness and<br />
eagerness to add in some way to your comfort and<br />
pleasure; their delicacy and reserve,” attributes<br />
that “make them a model for every nation under<br />
the sun!” On their part, Miller observed, the “open<br />
little houses here and the meditative life among the<br />
flowers and birds remind them all the time of ‘beautiful,<br />
beautiful Japan.’”<br />
<strong>California</strong> <strong>Historical</strong> <strong>Society</strong>, CHS2010.301.tif<br />
The Japanese poet-philosopher Takeshi Kanno<br />
(1877–n.d.) married Gertrude Boyle (1876–1937),<br />
Miller’s portrait sculptor of choice, in 1<strong>90</strong>7. In<br />
this 1914 photograph, the Kannos are performing<br />
Takeshi’s 1913 “vision drama,” Creation Dawn.<br />
Gertrude described Takeshi’s affinity to the Hights<br />
as “a spot in harmony with the meditative spirit so<br />
strong within him. . . . Here he has remained in the<br />
silence of dream, sunk deep in the ocean-thought<br />
of the universe; anon awakening to whisper his<br />
fancies, his sea-murmurings, to the soft breezes, to<br />
voice his soul-dreams to my ear.”<br />
Library of Congress<br />
<strong>California</strong> History • volume <strong>90</strong> number 1 2012
Kanno lived at the Hights for over ten years, writing<br />
one poem and a “vision drama,” with very<br />
limited exposure. In contrast, within a year of<br />
moving to the Hights, Noguchi produced idiosyncratic<br />
poetry that created a small sensation. His<br />
efforts were collected into Seen and Unseen, or<br />
A Monologue of a Homeless Snail (1897), the first<br />
and only book to emerge from Gelett Burgess<br />
and Porter Garnett’s Bohemian Press. 55 By the<br />
time he returned to Japan in 1<strong>90</strong>4, having left<br />
the Hights some four years earlier, Noguchi had<br />
published four books (and fathered the sculptor<br />
Isamu Noguchi). Repatriated, he established himself<br />
as one of the reigning authorities on English<br />
literature. Today his accomplishments are the<br />
subject of an extensive Web site, the object of<br />
study in courses on Asian Americans, and material<br />
for an exhibition at the Oakland Asian Cultural<br />
Center. 56<br />
Ironically, of all the once-prominent literati who<br />
gathered at Miller’s bastion, this penniless quasiservant<br />
is arguably the most feted. Noguchi was<br />
the comet whose tail still shimmers: the first<br />
Japanese to compose poems in English, a talented<br />
crafter of words, and a pioneer in bringing<br />
Western literature to Asian shores. The lesser<br />
lights who were drawn to the Oregonian’s “steeps<br />
and heaps of stones” for the most part could<br />
just watch. They, however, did their service stoking<br />
the numerous publications that made San<br />
Francisco a West Coast literary center at the turn<br />
of the last century. John P. Irish, George Sterling,<br />
Herbert Bashford, George Wharton James,<br />
Henry Meade Bland, Harr Wagner, Charles Warren<br />
Stoddard, Bailey Millard, and more—Miller’s<br />
boon companions—were the writers and editors<br />
of Sunset, Overland Monthly, and Golden Era magazines<br />
and the city’s four principal newspapers.<br />
Drawn to the Hights by its owner’s esprit, they<br />
sunned themselves in his larger-than-life personality,<br />
drank his whiskey, and chawed his barbecue.<br />
Some—Bland, Wagner, and the newspaper<br />
editor and poet Alfred James Waterhouse—even<br />
lived there for different periods. 57<br />
Miller was the<br />
“center of our<br />
solar system,”<br />
charles stoddard<br />
reported. . . .<br />
ambrose bierce<br />
conceded that<br />
miller was “as<br />
great-hearted a<br />
man as ever lived.”<br />
Not only writers gathered at the Hights. The fiery<br />
Xavier Martinez, first painting teacher at the <strong>California</strong><br />
Academy of Arts and Crafts in Oakland<br />
(later the <strong>California</strong> College of Arts and Crafts),<br />
came with and without his wife, Elsa Whitaker.<br />
Gertrude Boyle Kanno was one of the most talented<br />
artists to take up residency. A refugee from<br />
the 1<strong>90</strong>6 earthquake, she moved there when her<br />
studio (at the same Pine Street address as the<br />
Partington School) was destroyed. Boyle was<br />
the sculptor of choice for the eminences grises of<br />
the day, including Edwin Markham, John Muir,<br />
Joseph LeConte, and, of course, Miller.<br />
Miller was the “center of our solar system,”<br />
Charles Stoddard reported, describing the dullness<br />
that followed his absence from the ranch.<br />
Ambrose Bierce, who may not have worked on<br />
the stone monuments but who was known to<br />
join family members on excursions into the<br />
hills, conceded that Miller was “as great-hearted<br />
57
58<br />
notes<br />
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám<br />
In late 1<strong>90</strong>3 or early 1<strong>90</strong>4, Miller was asked to pose for photographer<br />
Adelaide Marquand Hanscom’s (1875–1931) illustrated<br />
version of the classic selection of poems, the Rubáiyát<br />
of Omar Khayyám (left).<br />
In a 1<strong>90</strong>6 interview, Hanscom described waiting for Miller’s<br />
reply: “We had about given up on hope, thinking he had<br />
ignored us entirely, when one day a tall, long bearded, long<br />
haired and long coated old man came into our studio and,<br />
without waiting to introduce himself, extended both his<br />
hands above our heads and said, ‘Bless you, my children,<br />
bless you.’ He then took each in turn by the hand, bowed<br />
low, and kissed the fingertips. It is a ceremony, we soon<br />
learned, that he seldom omits.”<br />
<strong>California</strong> History • volume <strong>90</strong> number 1 2012<br />
The poet Charles Keeler (1871–1937) also posed for Hanscom<br />
(right). Keeler, she recalled, “hazarded his life by sitting upon<br />
the edge of an upturned circular table pouring, or imagining he<br />
was pouring, bubbles from a huge, heavy brass bowl. It was the<br />
only available thing I could make to represent this big, round<br />
earth of ours.”<br />
Courtesy of Michael Shreve; www.michaelshreve.com
a man as ever lived.” 58 At least one contemporary<br />
book other than Miller’s own output attests to<br />
the force of the poet’s personality. In his Sunset<br />
review of Adelaide Hanscom’s pictorial interpretation<br />
of the classic The Rubáiyát of Omar<br />
Khayyám, George Wharton James recounts how<br />
Miller, who had agreed to pose for several photogravures,<br />
corralled Sterling, the poet Charles<br />
Keeler, and James himself to stand in for various<br />
characters. As a result of Miller’s intervention,<br />
we have an enduring record of George Sterling<br />
as a thoughtful, retreating soul, Charles Keeler as<br />
an angel shape with a cask of grapes, and James<br />
as a sultan. 59<br />
“bright, partiCular Star”<br />
At the end—February 17, 1913—Miller’s two original<br />
circles reclaimed their own. Five days later,<br />
the First Unitarian Church held a memorial service<br />
with eulogies by the minister, Professor William<br />
Dallam Armes of UC Berkeley, and John P.<br />
Irish. 60 In May, the Bohemian Club orchestrated<br />
a scattering of Miller’s ashes at the Hights. The<br />
Call estimated that five hundred people tromped<br />
up the hill to the site of the poet’s funeral pyre.<br />
Coolbrith “chanted her lines in a full voice that<br />
reached out in the neighboring pines and acacias.”<br />
61 Irish lit the flames, above which the old<br />
gold miner’s ashes were flung. At that point, a<br />
sixty-voice chorus from the club burst forth with<br />
the bard’s own three-verse farewell to himself<br />
titled “Goodby.” The first verse read:<br />
Yon mellow sun melts in the sea,<br />
A somber ship sweeps silently<br />
Past Alcatraz toward Orient skies,<br />
A mist is rising to the eyes,<br />
Good by, Joaquin; good by, Joaquin; good<br />
night, good night. 62<br />
It was more than a goodbye to Miller. It was also<br />
a goodbye to the locale’s literary and social scene:<br />
Stoddard had died four years before; Bierce disappeared<br />
in the Mexican desert one year later;<br />
London died two years after that. The same year<br />
as Miller’s demise, Sterling went on a binge and<br />
his wife initiated a divorce. By 1919, Whitaker<br />
was dead in New York. Despite this disintegration,<br />
the Poet of the Sierras’ influence among<br />
the community lived on. In 1<strong>90</strong>9, a group had<br />
formed the <strong>California</strong> Writers Club with Austin<br />
Lewis as president. Incorporating on February<br />
28, 1913, the association adopted a ship as its<br />
logo and Sail On, from Miller’s poem “Columbus,”<br />
as its motto. In 1919, Oakland’s parks<br />
department acquired most of the Hights, which<br />
became Joaquin Miller Park, where for thirty<br />
years the <strong>California</strong> Writers Club held memorial<br />
activities, culminating in 1941 in the building<br />
of a 1,400-foot-long, Italian-style cascade using<br />
stone brought from the Sierra. Miller would have<br />
been pleased.<br />
The death of the flamboyant author received<br />
national recognition. His reputation had been<br />
building since his, to many Americans, inexplicable<br />
acclaim abroad in the 1870s. By 1893,<br />
the log cabin he had built and lived in for two<br />
years—near the White House—was on exhibit at<br />
the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.<br />
Distinguished in the eyes of his neighbors and<br />
others by his outlandish dress and self-prepared<br />
funeral pyre, Miller was viewed as an eccentric,<br />
but no Bay Area literary event was complete without<br />
him. One local organizer seeking his presence<br />
at an industrial exposition addressed Miller<br />
as Oakland’s “bright, particular star” (the “star”<br />
agreed to lecture; his chosen topic: “The Size of<br />
the Dollar”). 63<br />
By early 1915, various women’s groups were leading<br />
a campaign to preserve the Hights. In 1917,<br />
Abbie, encouraged in her negotiations by John P.<br />
Irish, settled on a price with the city of Oakland<br />
for the Hights while securing lifetime tenure for<br />
herself and a quarter acre for Juanita. Joaquin<br />
Miller Park was duly the largest of Oakland’s<br />
parks for years to come.<br />
59
60<br />
“Some day I shall sit down and not get up any more,” Miller wrote John P. Irish in a “directory letter” in<br />
1889. “I want to leave my ashes on my ‘Hights,’ among the trees I have planted, and I want you to see to it<br />
that my body is burned on my tomb here; and quietly, secretly if necessary. Let no one meddle. It should be<br />
of far less concern to the world than the planting of one of my thousands of trees.” On May 23, 1913, three<br />
months after Miller’s publicly celebrated funeral, members of San Francisco’s Bohemian and Press Clubs<br />
gathered to burn the urn containing the poet’s ashes, scattering them about his beloved Hights.<br />
The Bancroft Library, University of <strong>California</strong>, Berkeley<br />
<strong>California</strong> History • volume <strong>90</strong> number 1 2012
The 1920s witnessed the first signs of a reassessment<br />
of the poet’s merit. Despite his wife<br />
and daughter’s best efforts to fan the altar<br />
flame, a University of Illinois professor conducting<br />
research during the summer of 1921 for<br />
a compendium of Joaquin’s poems could find<br />
no copies of any of Miller’s books in a dozen<br />
Bay Area bookshops. This neglect presaged an<br />
opening fusillade on the frontier bard’s reputation.<br />
64 Concurrently, the Hights was falling into<br />
a state of disrepair. A journalist visiting it in 1923<br />
described the Abbey’s broken windows and wideswinging<br />
doors, Margaret Miller’s cottage on the<br />
verge of collapse, the stone monuments vandalized,<br />
great trees felled, and the acacia thickets<br />
“ruthlessly cut away.” 65 Resisting this decline of<br />
home and reputation, one or two of Miller’s bestknown<br />
verses would habitually appear, at least<br />
until the 1950s, in American poetry anthologies.<br />
While a handful of poems lived on, the prolific<br />
writer’s journalism more or less died with him.<br />
Yet Miller, more than one biographer acknowledges,<br />
regarded his prose more highly than his<br />
poetry. Indeed, journalism came easily to him.<br />
In Oregon in the early 1860s, he ran two shortlived<br />
newspapers. Throughout his career, he was<br />
writing constantly about his travels, initially in<br />
personal diaries and, later, on assignment for<br />
newspapers. His outspoken prose—both frank<br />
and moralistic—was spiked with humor and<br />
country argot. With the same brio with which he<br />
confronted swindlers and marauding indigenous<br />
people in the Sierra, he lambasted crooked land<br />
speculators and irresponsible politicians.<br />
One of his early pet complaints was the deplorable<br />
condition of Oakland’s roads. In a characteristically<br />
exaggerated account of a real event,<br />
he described his attempt to give a lecture in the<br />
neighboring settlement of Walnut Creek. Confronting<br />
the men who had invited him to speak<br />
with the lack of passable roads and his inability<br />
to walk due to prior war injuries, Miller was<br />
asked if he could swim: “Yes.” “Then swim to<br />
Contra Costa,” he was advised. “Splendid good<br />
swimming all the way. Take the water at the San<br />
Francisco wharf, swim the bay of San Francisco,<br />
then the San Pablo Bay, then Suisun Bay, then<br />
up the Sacramento river, then up Walnut Creek<br />
to the schoolhouse, where the committee will<br />
be out on the porch with banners and bands to<br />
receive you.” 66<br />
Miller’s blend of candor and the vernacular<br />
enjoyed wide appeal. Besides the New York–based<br />
Independent, two other journals, the Chicago<br />
Times and the San Francisco Call, regularly carried<br />
his byline. With the wide proliferation of<br />
Miller’s poetry and his prose, the hospitality of his<br />
barbecues, and the eccentricity of his ranchero<br />
life and appearance, it is not surprising that the<br />
Hights and its environs became, by the 18<strong>90</strong>s, a<br />
habitation for area artists and a destination for<br />
visiting celebrities and local curiosity seekers.<br />
When Elbert Hubbard and Benjamin Fay Mills<br />
descended from the tram that terminated in the<br />
little settlement of Dimond, the conductor counseled<br />
them, “Take that road and sail on.” “He<br />
smiled,” Hubbard recalled, “in a way that indicated<br />
that he had sprung the allusion before and<br />
was pleased with it.” 67<br />
Phoebe Cutler is an independent scholar. Recipient of<br />
the Heritage/Preservation Award (National Endowment for<br />
the Arts, 2001) and the Rome Prize (American Academy in<br />
Rome, 1988–89), she is the author of The Public Landscape of<br />
the New Deal (Yale University Press, 1986), “Joaquin Miller’s<br />
Trees, Pts. 1 & 2,” Eden: The Journal of the <strong>California</strong> Garden<br />
& Landscape <strong>Society</strong> 13, nos. 2 and 3 (2010), “Sutro Baths:<br />
Caracalla at Lands End,” Eden: The Journal of the <strong>California</strong><br />
Garden & Landscape <strong>Society</strong> 12, no. 1 (2009), and “The Rise<br />
of the American Municipal Rose Garden, 1927–1937,” Studies<br />
in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 25, no. 3<br />
(July–Sept. 2005).<br />
61
62<br />
notes<br />
courtship and conquest: alfred<br />
sully’s intimate intrusion at<br />
monterey, By stephen g. hyslop,<br />
pp 4–17<br />
This article is adapted from my book Contest<br />
for <strong>California</strong>: From Spanish Colonization to<br />
the American Conquest (Arthur H. Clark and<br />
the University of Oklahoma Press, 2012),<br />
vol. II in the series Before Gold: <strong>California</strong><br />
under Spain and Mexico, edited by Rose<br />
Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz.<br />
Caption sources: William Redmond Ryan,<br />
Personal Adventures in Upper and Lower<br />
<strong>California</strong>, vol. 1 (London: William Shoberl,<br />
Publisher, 1852), 72–73; Langdon Sully, No<br />
Tears for the General: The Life of Alfred Sully,<br />
1821–1879 (Palo Alto, CA: American West<br />
Publishing Company, 1974), 42, 75; http://<br />
www.sancarloscathedral.org/history; www.<br />
mchsmuseum.com/san carlos; Walker A.<br />
Tompkins, Santa Barbara Past and Present<br />
(Santa Barbara, CA: Tecolote Books, 1975);<br />
completion date of 1820 per http://www.<br />
sbthp.org/soldados/SBMission and other<br />
sources; “Campaign of General Alfred<br />
Sully Against the Hostile Sioux in 1864, as<br />
Transcribed in 1883 from the Diary of Judge<br />
Nicholas Hilger,” in Contributions to the<br />
<strong>Historical</strong> <strong>Society</strong> of Montana, vol. 2 (Helena,<br />
MT: State Publishing Company, 1896), 322.<br />
1<br />
Langdon Sully, No Tears for the General: The<br />
Life of Alfred Sully, 1821–1879 (Palo Alto, CA:<br />
American West Publishing Company, 1974),<br />
23–24.<br />
2<br />
Doyce B. Nunis, Jr., “Alta <strong>California</strong>’s Trojan<br />
Horse: Foreign Immigration,” in Contested<br />
Eden: <strong>California</strong> before the Gold Rush,<br />
ed. Ramón A. Gutiérrez and Richard J. Orsi<br />
(Berkeley: University of <strong>California</strong> Press, in<br />
association with the <strong>California</strong> <strong>Historical</strong><br />
<strong>Society</strong>, 1998), 299–330.<br />
3<br />
Jefferson to Madison, Apr. 27, 1809, in<br />
Joseph J. Ellis, et al., Thomas Jefferson:<br />
Genius of Liberty (New York: Viking Studio,<br />
in association with the Library of Congress,<br />
2000), 118, 133.<br />
4<br />
Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz,<br />
trans. and eds., Testimonios: Early <strong>California</strong><br />
through the Eyes of Women, 1815–1848<br />
(Berkeley: Heyday Books, in association<br />
with The Bancroft Library, 2006), 265,<br />
277–78; Louise Pubols, The Father of All: The<br />
de la Guerra Family, Power, and Patriarchy<br />
<strong>California</strong> History • volume <strong>90</strong> number 1 2012<br />
in Mexican <strong>California</strong> (Berkeley and San<br />
Marino: University of <strong>California</strong> Press and<br />
the Huntington Library, 2009), 262–69.<br />
5<br />
William Heath Davis, Seventy-Five Years in<br />
<strong>California</strong>, ed. Harold A. Small (San Francisco:<br />
John Howell, 1967 [1889]), 37, 66–67;<br />
Susanna Bryant Dakin, The Lives of William<br />
Hartnell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University<br />
Press, 1949), 280–81.<br />
6<br />
Letter of June 14, 1849, Alfred Sully<br />
Papers, Western Americana Collection, Beinecke<br />
Rare Book and Manuscript Library,<br />
Yale University (hereafter cited as Alfred<br />
Sully Papers); Sully, No Tears for the General,<br />
41–42; Beebe and Senkewicz, Testimonios,<br />
193–97.<br />
7<br />
Letters of Aug. 19, 1849, and Dec. 29,<br />
1849, Alfred Sully Papers.<br />
8<br />
Letter of May 1, 1850, Alfred Sully Papers;<br />
Sully, No Tears for the General, 57, 85, 239–<br />
40 n. 5.<br />
9<br />
Letters of May 28, 1850, and Aug, 28,<br />
1850, Alfred Sully Papers; Sully, No Tears for<br />
the General, 61–63, 237 n. 3.<br />
10<br />
Letter of June 23, 1850, Alfred Sully<br />
Papers.<br />
11<br />
Letter of Apr. 30, 1851, Alfred Sully<br />
Papers; Sully, No Tears for the General,<br />
69–71.<br />
12<br />
Letter of Apr. 30, 1851, Alfred Sully<br />
Papers.<br />
13<br />
Letter of June 14, 1849, Alfred Sully<br />
Papers; Sully, No Tears for the General, 42.<br />
14<br />
Letter of June 1851, Alfred Sully Papers;<br />
Sully, No Tears for the General, 72–75.<br />
15<br />
Alfred Robinson acknowledged that<br />
mission Indians were subjected to severe<br />
discipline but regarded plans to emancipate<br />
them and secularize the missions,<br />
undertaken by José María Echeandía and<br />
later governors of Mexican <strong>California</strong>, as<br />
misguided assaults on what conscientious<br />
padres with whom he did business had<br />
accomplished at their religious communities.<br />
“These flourishing institutions, as they<br />
had been, were in danger of immediate subversion<br />
and ruin,” Robinson wrote in Life in<br />
<strong>California</strong> before the Conquest (San Francisco:<br />
Thomas C. Russell, 1925 [1846]), 129. For a<br />
contrasting assessment of the mission system<br />
by an American who traded with Californios<br />
but did not enter into their society,<br />
see William Dane Phelps, Alta <strong>California</strong>,<br />
1840–1842: The Journal and Observations<br />
of William Dane Phelps, Master of the Ship<br />
“Alert,” ed. Briton Cooper Busch (Glendale,<br />
Calif.: Arthur H. Clark, 1983), 197–98.<br />
16<br />
Josiah Royce, <strong>California</strong>: A Study of American<br />
Character (Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books,<br />
2002 [1886]), 119.<br />
17<br />
Sully, No Tears for the General, 150–51.<br />
18<br />
Sully, No Tears for the General, 119–25,<br />
243 n. 13; Vine Deloria, Jr., Singing for a<br />
Spirit: A Portrait of the Dakota Sioux (Santa<br />
Fe, NM: Clear Light Publishers, 2000),<br />
59–60. For more on the history of the<br />
Deloria family, see Philip J. Deloria, Indians<br />
in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University<br />
Press of Kansas, 2004), 109–35. Alfred<br />
Sully’s connection to the Deloria family is<br />
mentioned in biographical articles on Ella<br />
Deloria by Raymond J. DeMallie in Barbara<br />
Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green, eds.,<br />
Notable American Women: The Modern Period<br />
(Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University<br />
Press, 1980), 183–85; and by Charles<br />
Vollan in David J. Wishart, ed., Encyclopedia<br />
of the Great Plains (Lincoln: University of<br />
Nebraska Press, 2007), 59–60.<br />
19<br />
Benjamin D. Wilson, “Benjamin David<br />
Wilson’s Observations of Early Days in<br />
<strong>California</strong> and New Mexico,” Annual Publications<br />
of the <strong>Historical</strong> <strong>Society</strong> of Southern<br />
<strong>California</strong> (1934), 74–150; Hubert Howe<br />
Bancroft, History of <strong>California</strong> (San Francisco:<br />
History Company, 1886), 5: 777.<br />
“With the god of Battles i can<br />
destroy all such Villains”: War,<br />
religion, and the impact of islam<br />
on spanish and mexican california,<br />
1769–1846, By michael gonzalez,<br />
pp 18–39<br />
Caption sources: Edna Kimbro, Julia G.<br />
Costello, Tevvy Ball, The <strong>California</strong> Missions:<br />
History, Art, and Preservation (Los Angeles:<br />
Getty Conservation Institute, 2009); Hugh<br />
Wm. Davies, Bernhard von Breydenbach and<br />
His Journey to the Holy Land, 1483–4: A Bibliography<br />
(London: J. & J. Leighton, 1911); Fr.<br />
Zephyrin Engelhardt, Santa Barbara Mission<br />
(San Francisco: James H. Barry Company,<br />
1923), 125, <strong>California</strong> <strong>Historical</strong> <strong>Society</strong><br />
979.402 MSa51e.<br />
1 William Shakespeare, Othello, in The Yale<br />
Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. Wilbur<br />
Cross and Tucker Brooke (New York: Barnes<br />
and Noble Books, 1993), I.i.52 and I.iii.247.
The lines describe Othello’s mission to<br />
confront a Turkish fleet bearing down on<br />
Cyprus.<br />
2<br />
Some commentators may insist that Muslims<br />
still see jihad as a religious obligation.<br />
There is no need to enter the controversy.<br />
Commentary in the text and in the notes<br />
will provide sufficient explanation about the<br />
function of jihad in history.<br />
3<br />
Jihad invites contentious discussion. For<br />
a sampling of the debate, see Malise Ruthven,<br />
A Fury for God: The Islamist Attack on<br />
America (London: Granta Books, 2002);<br />
Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam: Holy<br />
War and Unholy Terror (New York: Random<br />
House, 2004), esp. 29–32; Bernard Lewis<br />
also edited the entry for “Djihad” in The<br />
Encyclopedia of Islam, New Edition, 13 vols.<br />
(Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1991),<br />
2:538–40; Laurent Murawiec, The Mind of<br />
Jihad (Cambridge: Cambridge University<br />
Press, 2008); Dan Diner and Steven Rendall,<br />
Lost in the Sacred: Why the Muslim<br />
World Stood Still (Princeton: Princeton<br />
University Press, 2009); Karen Armstrong,<br />
Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time (New<br />
York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2009); and<br />
John Calvert, Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of<br />
Radical Islamism (New York: Columbia University<br />
Press, 2010).<br />
4<br />
Verse 3.1.7, Al-Muwatta, http://bewley.virtualave.net/muwcont.html,<br />
also see, the version<br />
of the Muwatta at http://www.sultan.<br />
org/books/Muatta.pdf. All references to the<br />
Muwatta come from these versions.<br />
5<br />
Hubert Howe Bancroft, The History of <strong>California</strong>,<br />
7 vols. (San Francisco: The History<br />
Company, 1883), 2:223. The speaker is Pablo<br />
de la Guerra, resident of Santa Barbara.<br />
6<br />
Ibid., 2:236.<br />
7<br />
For a sophisticated and passionate defense<br />
of Islam as a contemplative faith whose<br />
approach to war is misunderstood, see<br />
Ziaddun Sardar, Reading the Qur’an: The<br />
Contemporary Relevance of the Sacred Text of<br />
Islam (New York: Oxford University Press,<br />
2011). For a more personal approach to the<br />
subject, see Ed Husain, The Islamist: Why I<br />
Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I Saw<br />
Inside, and Why I Left (New York: Penguin<br />
Books, 2007).<br />
8<br />
We are speaking about the idea of convivencia,<br />
the hypothesis that the different<br />
religions and cultures of Spain learned<br />
to accept and work with one another. The<br />
argument is controversial. I give a sampling<br />
of the literature. For a classic description,<br />
see Américo Castro, The Structure of Spanish<br />
History, tr. Edmund King (Princeton:<br />
Princeton University Press, 1954). Other<br />
scholars support the idea: Jerrilyn D. Dodds,<br />
Architecture and Ideology in Early Medieval<br />
Spain (University Park: The Pennsylvania<br />
State University Press, 19<strong>90</strong>), 58; Jerrilyn<br />
Dodds, María Rosa Menocal, and Abigail<br />
Krasner, The Arts of Intimacy (New Haven:<br />
Yale University Press, 2008), 117–20; and<br />
Dominique Urvoy, “The ‘Ulama of Al-<br />
Andalus,” ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, 2 vols.,<br />
The Legacy of Muslim Spain (New York: E. J.<br />
Brill, 1994), 2:850. Some scholars express<br />
their doubts or at least say the subject is<br />
prone to overstatement: L. P. Harvey, Islamic<br />
Spain: 1250–1500 (Chicago: University of<br />
Chicago Press, 19<strong>90</strong>); Henry Kamen, The<br />
Disinherited: Exile and the Making of Spanish<br />
Culture (New York: HarperCollins Publishers,<br />
2007); and Dario Fernández-Morera,<br />
“The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise,”<br />
The Intercollegiate Review (Fall 2006): 23–31.<br />
Finally, I would be remiss if I did not<br />
mention Robert I. Burns and his views on<br />
convivencia. Burns writes that the question<br />
deserves subtle treatment and must allow<br />
for exceptions and outright deviations. As<br />
one example of his work, see Muslims, Christians,<br />
and Jews in the Crusader Kingdom of<br />
Valencia: Societies in Symbiosis (Cambridge:<br />
Cambridge University Press, 1984).<br />
9<br />
Some may say we even misunderstand<br />
Franciscan devotion. To put the matter<br />
bluntly, they did not want to kill so much<br />
as they wanted to be killed and earn the<br />
martyr’s crown. For further discussion on<br />
Franciscan spirituality in the New World,<br />
see John Leddy Phelan, The Millennial Kingdom<br />
of the Franciscans in the New World, 2nd<br />
ed. (Berkeley: University of <strong>California</strong> Press,<br />
1970). Also see Jacques Lafaye, Quetzalcoatl<br />
and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican<br />
National Consciousness, tr. Benjamin Keen<br />
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press,<br />
1976).<br />
10<br />
Jacqueline Chabbi, “Ribat,” in The Encyclopedia<br />
of Islam, New Edition, 8:493–506.<br />
To complicate matters, a ribat could also<br />
take the name zawiyya. See Mustafa ‘Abdu-<br />
Salam al-Mahmah, “The Ribats in Morocco<br />
and their influence in the spread of knowledge<br />
and tasawwuf” [the Islamic practice<br />
of spiritual development] from al-Imra’a<br />
al-Maghribiyya wa’t-Tasawwuf (The Moroccan<br />
Woman and Tasawwuf in the Eleventh<br />
Century), http://bewley.virtualave.net/ribat.<br />
html. One could also argue that ribat could<br />
compare with a hisn, a Muslim castle. For<br />
more on this subject, see Thomas F. Glick,<br />
From Muslim Fortress to Christian Castle:<br />
Social and Cultural Change in Medieval Spain<br />
(Manchester, England: Manchester University<br />
Press, 1995).<br />
11<br />
Manuela Marín, “La práctica del ribat en<br />
al-Andalus,” El ribat califal: Excavaciones<br />
y estudios (1984–1992), ed. Rafael Azuar<br />
Ruiz (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2004),<br />
191–201, esp. 191–92.<br />
12<br />
For further discussion, see the collection<br />
of essays in El ribat califal: Excavaciones y<br />
estudios. Also consult Robert Hillenbrand,<br />
Islamic Architecture: Form, Function, and<br />
Meaning (New York: Columbia University<br />
Press, 1994), esp. 331–38; Peter Harrison,<br />
Castles of God: Fortified Religious Buildings<br />
of the World (Woodbridge, England: Boydell<br />
Press, 2004), 225–26; andMustafa ‘Abdu-<br />
Salam al-Mahmah, “The Ribats in Morocco.”<br />
13<br />
For further discussion see, Carmen Martínez<br />
Salvador, “Sobre la entitad de la rábita<br />
andalusí omeya, una cuestión de terminología:<br />
Ribat, Rábita y Zawiya,” in El ribat<br />
califal: Excavaciones y studios, 173–89, esp.<br />
176–86.<br />
14<br />
For criticism about the ribat as fortress,<br />
see Chabbi, “Ribat,” 493–506; and Jorg<br />
Feuchter, “The Islamic Ribat: A Model<br />
for the Christian Military Orders? Sacred<br />
Violence, Secularized Concepts of Religion<br />
and the Invention of a Cultural Transfer,”<br />
Religion and Its Other: Secular and Sacral<br />
Concepts and Practices and Interaction, eds.<br />
Heike Bock, Jorg Feuchter, Michi Knecht<br />
(Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag,<br />
2008), 115–41.<br />
15<br />
For other views of the Sufi brotherhoods<br />
in the Islamic world, see Eric Wolf, “<strong>Society</strong><br />
and Symbols in Latin Europe and in the<br />
Islamic Near East: Some Comparisons,”<br />
Anthropological Quarterly 42, no. 3 (July<br />
1969): 287–301; Richard J. A. McGregor, “A<br />
Sufi Legacy in Tunis: Prayer and the Shadhiliyya,”<br />
International Journal of Middle East<br />
Studies 29, no. 2 (May 1997): 255–77; and<br />
Gerald Elmore, “New Evidence on the Conversion<br />
of Ibn Al-Arabi to Sufism” Arabica<br />
45, no. 1 (1998): 50–72.<br />
16<br />
Michael Bonner, Jihad in Islamic History<br />
(Princeton: Princeton University Press,<br />
2006), 2, 136; Elena Lourie, “The Confraternity<br />
of Belchite, Ribat, and the Temple,”<br />
Viator 13 (1982): 156–79, esp. 165.<br />
63
64<br />
notes<br />
17 Marín, “La práctica del ribat en al-Anda-<br />
lus,” esp. 196–97.<br />
18 Lourie, “The Confraternity,” 167–68.<br />
19<br />
Dodds, Menocal, and Balbale, The Arts<br />
of Intimacy, 130. For more examples of<br />
Almoravid fervor, see Alejandro García-<br />
Sanjuán, “Jews and Christians in Almoravid<br />
Seville as Portrayed by the Islamic Jurist<br />
Ibn ‘Abdun,” Medieval Encounters 14 (2008):<br />
78–98, esp. 82. On another note, the word<br />
Almoravid may come from the Arabic al-<br />
Murabitun, meaning “those bound together”<br />
or “those who perform ribat.”<br />
20<br />
Fernández-Morera, “The Myth of the<br />
Andalusian Paradise,” 24. One scholar suggests<br />
that the Almohades practiced some<br />
form of ribat; see Gerald Elmore, “New<br />
Evidence on the Early Life of Ibn al-‘Arabi,”<br />
Journal of the American Oriental <strong>Society</strong> 117,<br />
no. 2 (Apr.–June 1997): 347–49.<br />
21<br />
José Enrique López de Coca Castañer,<br />
“Institutions on the Castilian-Granadan<br />
Frontier,” in Medieval Frontier Societies, eds.<br />
Robert Bartlett and Angus Mackay (Oxford:<br />
Clarendon Press, 1989), 127, and “Ibn Hudhayl<br />
al-Andalusi, 1354–1362,” Schola Forum,<br />
Martial Arts, History and Warfare for Adults,<br />
http://www.fioredeiliberi.org/phpBB3/<br />
viewtopic.php?f=17&t=18439.<br />
22<br />
Richard Martin, “The Religious Foundations<br />
of War, Peace, and Statecraft in Islam,”<br />
in Just War and Jihad, <strong>Historical</strong> and Theoretical<br />
Perspectives on War and Peace in Western<br />
and Islamic Traditions, eds. John Kelsay and<br />
James Turner Johnson (New York: Greenwood<br />
Press, 1991), 96–97.<br />
23<br />
By no means do we wish to promote the<br />
idea that Islam is a faith dedicated to war.<br />
Other commentators, though, have no trouble<br />
making the claim. See Pamela Geller,<br />
Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical<br />
Guide to the Resistance (Washington, DC:<br />
WNDBooks, 2011), and Robert Spencer, The<br />
Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the<br />
Crusades) (Washington, DC: Regnery Press,<br />
2005). Mr. Spencer also maintains the website<br />
Jihad Watch. In any event, one does not<br />
have to read far to find verses like 4:95, in<br />
which God says that He will honor “those<br />
who fight, above those who stay at home,”<br />
or 9:5, also known as “the sword verse,”<br />
where the faithful learn that “when the<br />
sacred months are over, slay the idolaters<br />
wherever you find them.” Also see Helen<br />
Adolf, “Christendom and Islam in the Mid-<br />
<strong>California</strong> History • volume <strong>90</strong> number 1 2012<br />
dle Ages: New Light on ‘Grail Stone’ and<br />
‘Hidden Host,’” Speculum 32, no. 1 (January<br />
1957): 103–15, esp. 107–8.<br />
24<br />
All ideas about using war to “command<br />
the good and forbid evil” come from Martin,<br />
“The Religious Foundations of War, Peace,<br />
and Statecraft in Islam,” 96–97, 106–7.<br />
One version of the phrase can be found in<br />
Qur’an, 3:104.<br />
25<br />
Martin, “The Religious Foundations of<br />
War, Peace, and Statecraft in Islam,” esp.<br />
102–11.<br />
26<br />
Malik produced the Muwatta sometime<br />
in the eighth century. See Maribel Fierro,<br />
“Mawali and Muwalladun in al-Andalus” in<br />
Patronate and Patronage in Early and Classical<br />
Islam, eds. Monique Bernards and John<br />
Nawas (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, Academic<br />
Publishers, 2005), 202–4 and Fernández-<br />
Morera, “The Myth of the Andalusian<br />
Paradise,” 28. On another note, some commentators<br />
say Sunnis have more than four<br />
schools of thought. We let others decide the<br />
debate. For more views of Malik, see Mu’li<br />
Yusuf ‘Izz al-Din, Islamic Law from <strong>Historical</strong><br />
Foundations to Contemporary Practice<br />
(Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University<br />
Press, 2004); Fierro, “Mawali and Muwalladun<br />
in al-Andalus,” esp. 202–4.<br />
27<br />
Admittedly, warriors did not receive<br />
license to indulge in unrestrained carnage.<br />
Their violence occurred within a holy, limited<br />
moment where they alone risked death<br />
and destruction. The weak, or any other<br />
person or thing incapable of giving offense,<br />
should suffer no harm. In the Muwatta,<br />
verse 21:3.11 says that men at war must<br />
not “kill women and children, or an aged,<br />
infirm person.” Furthermore, the warriors<br />
learn that they cannot “cut down fruitbearing<br />
trees” and “destroy an inhabited<br />
place.” Even the distribution of treasure and<br />
livestock seized from the enemy followed a<br />
certain protocol. Verse 21:6 counseled that<br />
only “free men who have been present at<br />
battle” could receive a share of booty. Still,<br />
the Muwatta praised the warrior’s efforts.<br />
In Verse 21.1, the Muwatta proclaims that<br />
“someone who does jihad” follows the way<br />
of God. Muhammad adds: “Allah laughs at<br />
two men. One of them kills the other, but<br />
each of them will enter the garden; one<br />
fights in the way of Allah and is killed, then<br />
Allah turns [in forgiveness] to the killer<br />
so he fights [in the way of Allah] and also<br />
becomes a martyr.” Verse 21.14.27 features<br />
Muhammad saying, “I would like to fight in<br />
the way of Allah and be killed, then brought<br />
to life again so I could be killed, and then<br />
brought to life again so I could be killed<br />
again.”<br />
28<br />
Some siyars seemed spurious, a question<br />
that need not concern us at this time. For a<br />
more thorough discussion, see Muhammad<br />
Munir, “Islamic International Law (Siyar):<br />
An Introduction,” Research Papers, Human<br />
Rights Prevention Centre (HRCPC) 7, no. 1–2<br />
(2007): 923–40, http://papers.ssrn.com/<br />
sol3/papers.cfm; Bonner, Jihad in Islamic<br />
History, 111; Jean-Pierre Filiu, Apocalypse in<br />
Islam, tr. M. B. DeBevoise (Berkeley: University<br />
of <strong>California</strong> Press, 2011), 32, 36–37.<br />
29<br />
Michael Bonner, “Some observations<br />
concerning the early development of Jihad<br />
on the Arab-Byzantine Frontier,” Studia Islamica<br />
no. 75 (1992): 5–31, esp. 7.<br />
30<br />
Ibid., 23–26.<br />
31<br />
Marín, “La práctica del ribat en al-Andalus,”<br />
197.<br />
32<br />
For more comment on this subject of<br />
holy men going to fight, see,Bonner, “Some<br />
observations,” 7; Maribel Fierro, “Spiritual<br />
Alienation and Political Activism: The<br />
guraba in al-andalus during the Sixth/<br />
Twelfth Century,” Arabica 47, no. 2 (2000):<br />
230–60, esp. 233–34, 236.<br />
33<br />
Fierro, “Spiritual Alienation,” 247.<br />
34 Bonner, Jihad in Islamic History, 112.<br />
35 Fierro, “Spiritual Alienation,” 257.<br />
36<br />
Castro, The Structure of Spanish History,<br />
204. The Diccionario de la Lengua Española,<br />
2 vols. (Madrid: Real Academia Española,<br />
1992) provides the etymology for each of<br />
the above words and illustrates their Arabic<br />
origins.<br />
37<br />
Thomas Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain<br />
in the Early Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton<br />
University Press, 1979), 50–55.<br />
38<br />
Mariam Rosser-Owen, Islamic Arts<br />
from Spain (London: V&A Publishing,<br />
2010), 21; Maria Rosa Menocal, The Ornament<br />
of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and<br />
Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in<br />
Medieval Spain (New York: Little, Brown,<br />
and Company, 2002); Álvaro of Córdoba<br />
quoted in William Dalrymple, “Inside the<br />
Madrasas,” The New York Review of Books, 52<br />
(Dec. 1, 2005), http://www.nybooks.com/<br />
articles/18514; Alejandro García-Sanjuán,<br />
“Jews and Christians in Almoravid Seville as<br />
Portrayed by the Islamic Jurist Ibn ‘Abdun,”<br />
Medieval Encounters 14 (2008): 78–98, esp.
91; D. Fairchild Ruggles, “Representation<br />
and Identity in Medieval Spain: Beatus<br />
Manuscripts and the Mud jar Churches of<br />
Teruel,” in Languages of Power in Islamic<br />
Spain, ed. Ross Brann, (Bethesda, Maryland:<br />
CDL Press, 1997), 99–12, esp.103.<br />
Ruggles even speculates that the Christian<br />
kings used Islamic ornamentation to create<br />
a Spanish “identity” and reject French<br />
influence. Cisneros quoted in R. Brooks<br />
Jeffrey, “From Azulejos to Zaguanes: The<br />
Islamic Legacy in the Built Environment of<br />
Hispano-America,” Journal of the Southwest<br />
45 (Spring-Summer 2003): 289–327. The<br />
exact quotation reads, “They lack our faith,<br />
but we lack their works.”<br />
39<br />
Elena Lourie, “A <strong>Society</strong> Organized for<br />
War: Medieval Spain,” Past and Present 35<br />
(Dec. 1966): 54–76, esp. 67–8.<br />
40<br />
Qur’an, 8:9<br />
41<br />
Adolf, “Christendom and Islam in the<br />
Middle Ages,” esp. 107–9. Also see Javier<br />
Domínguez García, “Santiago Mataindios:<br />
La continuación de un discurso medieval en<br />
la Nueve España,” Nueva Revista de Filología<br />
Hispánica, 54, no. 1 (2006): 33–56 (41).<br />
42<br />
Luce López-Baralt, Islam in Spanish Literature:<br />
From the Middle Ages to the Present<br />
(Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill 1992), 25.<br />
43<br />
Elena Lourie discusses, and dismisses,<br />
the possibility that the Knights Templar<br />
inspired the rise of Spain’s military societies.<br />
See “The Confraternity,” 159–70.<br />
44<br />
Matthew 5–7; Mark 12:17; John 18:36.<br />
45<br />
Jay Rubenstein, Armies of Heaven: The<br />
First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse<br />
(New York: Basic Books, 2011), 24.<br />
46<br />
Lourie, “The Confraternity,” 164n.23.<br />
47 Alfred L. Kroeber, “Stimulus Diffusion,”<br />
American Anthropologist 42, no. 1 (Jan.–Mar.,<br />
1940): 1–20, esp. 1–2, 20. Also consult Lourie,<br />
“The Confraternity,” 163–64; Thomas<br />
Glick and Oriol Pi-Sunyer, “Acculturation as<br />
an Explanatory Concept in Spanish History,”<br />
Comparative Studies in <strong>Society</strong> and History<br />
11, no. 2 (1969): 136–54, esp. 151–52; Glick,<br />
“Muhtasib and Mustasaf: A Case Study of<br />
Institutional Diffusion,” Viator 2 (1971):<br />
59–81; and Dodds, Menocal, and Babale,<br />
The Arts of Intimacy, esp.130–31. All references<br />
to Kroeber will draw on these other<br />
works that use his ideas to discuss the<br />
spread of Muslim ideas to Christians.<br />
48<br />
For one more view on the matter, see<br />
Andrew Wheatcroft, Infidels: A History of the<br />
Conflict Between Christendom and Islam (New<br />
York: Random House, 2003), chapter 3,<br />
eBook, http://books.google.com/books?id=p<br />
2QM1fKXOggC&printsec=frontcover&<br />
source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onep<br />
age&q&f=false.<br />
49<br />
Qur’an 4:74: “Let those who fight in the<br />
way of Allah who sell the life of this world<br />
for the other. Whoever fights in the way<br />
of Allah, and he is slain, or is victorious,<br />
on him We shall bestow a vast reward.”<br />
Muwatta, Verse 21.15.34 emphasizes the<br />
rewards awaiting the warrior who sacrifices<br />
himself during wartime: “Being slain is but<br />
one way of meeting death, and the martyr<br />
is the one who gives himself, expectant of<br />
reward from Allah.”<br />
50<br />
St. Bernard, “”De Laudibus Novae Militiae”<br />
or “In Praise of the New Knighthood,”<br />
http://webpages.charter.net/sn9/notebooks/<br />
bernard.html.<br />
51<br />
Zamanin, supposedly citing a hadith<br />
(teaching of Muhammad), in Marín, “La<br />
práctica del ribat en al-Andalus,” esp. 197;<br />
Rubenstein, Armies of Heaven, 24.<br />
52<br />
Rubenstein, Armies of Heaven, 24.<br />
53<br />
Ibid., 23–25. For more on the example<br />
of ribat, see Lourie, “The Confraternity,”<br />
167–68, 174.<br />
54<br />
See Roberto Marín Guzmán, “Jihad vs.<br />
Cruzada en al-Andalus: La Reconquista<br />
española como ideología a partir del siglo<br />
XI y sus proyecciones en la colonización de<br />
América, Revista de Historia de América no.<br />
131 (Jul.–Dec., 2002): 9–65.<br />
55<br />
Lourie, “The Confraternity,” 167.<br />
56<br />
Ibid., 165–66, 169.<br />
57<br />
Canon 10, The First Lateran Council,<br />
http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Councils/<br />
ecumo9/htm.<br />
58<br />
Cited in Angus MacKay, “Religion, Culture<br />
and Ideology on the Late Medieval<br />
Castilian-Granadan Frontier,” Medieval Frontier<br />
Societies, ed. Robert Bartlett and Angus<br />
MacKay (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1989),<br />
229.<br />
59<br />
Some scholars say the struggle against<br />
the Muslims had nothing to do with the<br />
conquest of the Americas. See Charles<br />
Gibson, “Reconquista and Conquista,” in<br />
Homage to Irving A. Leonard: Essays on Hispanic<br />
Art, History and Literature, ed. Raquel<br />
Chang-Rodríguez and Donald A. Yates (East<br />
Lansing: Michigan State University, 1977),<br />
19–28.<br />
60<br />
Miguel Asín Palacios, Islam and the Divine<br />
Comedy, tr. and ed. Harold Sutherland (London:<br />
Frank Cass and Co., Ltd., 1968 [1926]),<br />
243n.1.<br />
61<br />
Lourie, “A <strong>Society</strong> Organized for War,” 67.<br />
62<br />
Castro, The Structure of Spanish History,<br />
205.<br />
63<br />
George Kubler, “Mexican Urbanism in the<br />
Sixteenth Century,” The Art Bulletin 24, no.<br />
2 (June 1942): 160–71, esp. 166–68; T. B.<br />
Irving, “Arab Craftsmanship in Spain and<br />
America,” The Arab World 15 (Sept. 1969):<br />
18–26, esp. 25. Also consult Manuel Toussaint,<br />
Arte Mudéjar en America (Mexico, D.<br />
F: Editorial Porrua, 1946), 26.<br />
64<br />
The quotation comes from a letter cited<br />
by Palóu. Father Francisco García Figueroa<br />
and Father Manuel Camino to Father Francisco<br />
Palóu, March 12, 1787, in Francisco<br />
Palóu, <strong>Historical</strong> Account of the Life and Apostolic<br />
Labors of the Venerable Father Junípero<br />
Serra, ed. George Wharton James, trans. C.<br />
Scott Williams (Pasadena: George Wharton<br />
James, 1913), xxix–xxxi.<br />
65<br />
Francisco López de Gómara, The Life<br />
of the Conqueror by His Secretary, ed. and<br />
trans., Lesley Byrd Simpson (Berkeley: University<br />
of <strong>California</strong> Press, 1964), 113–14.<br />
66<br />
Cited in D. A. Brading, Prophecy and Myth<br />
in Mexican History (Cambridge: Cambridge<br />
University Press, 1984), 11.<br />
67<br />
Cited in Herbert Bolton, “The Mission<br />
as a Frontier Institution in the Spanish-<br />
American Colonies,” The American <strong>Historical</strong><br />
Review 23, no. 1 (Oct. 1917): 42–61.<br />
68<br />
Fray Isidro Felix de Espinosa, Crónica de<br />
los colegios de propaganda fide de la Nueva<br />
España (México, 1746), ed. Lino G. Canedo,<br />
O.F.M. (Washington, DC: American Academy<br />
of Franciscan History, 1964), frontispiece.<br />
The quotation is attributed to José<br />
Mariano Beristain de Souza, Biblioteca Hispano-Americano<br />
Septentrional (México, 1816).<br />
69<br />
Hugh Hamill, The Hidalgo Revolt (Gainesville:<br />
University of Florida Press, 1966),<br />
122–23.<br />
70<br />
D.A. Brading, The First America: The<br />
Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the<br />
Liberal State (Cambridge: Cambridge University<br />
Press, 1991), 578–81.<br />
65
notes<br />
71<br />
For other interpretations about the way<br />
priests and settlers conducted themselves<br />
in <strong>California</strong>, see James Sandos, Converting<br />
<strong>California</strong>, Indians and Franciscans in the<br />
Missions (New Haven: Yale University Press,<br />
2004); Steven W. Hackel, Children of Coyote,<br />
Missionaries of St. Francis: Indian-Spanish<br />
Relations in Colonial <strong>California</strong>, 1769–1850<br />
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina<br />
Press, 2005); Louise Pubols, The Father<br />
of All: The de la Guerra Family, Power and<br />
Patriarchy in Mexican <strong>California</strong> (Berkeley:<br />
University of <strong>California</strong> Press, 2010); Carlos<br />
Salomon, Pio Pico: The Last Governor of<br />
Mexican <strong>California</strong> (Norman: University of<br />
Oklahoma Press, 2010); and Quincy Newell,<br />
Constructing Lives at Mission San Francisco:<br />
Native <strong>California</strong>ns and Hispanic Colonists,<br />
1776–1821 (Albuquerque: University of New<br />
Mexico Press, 2011).<br />
72<br />
“Report of Father José Viader, From 19 to<br />
27 October, 1810,” in Sherburne Cook, Colonial<br />
Expeditions to the Interior of <strong>California</strong>,<br />
Central Valley, 1800–1820 (Berkeley: University<br />
of <strong>California</strong> Press, 1960), 259.<br />
73<br />
Father Martínez to Prefect Sarría, in<br />
Cook, Colonial Expeditions, 271; ibid., 272.<br />
74<br />
Bancroft, The History of <strong>California</strong>, 2:328–<br />
29n14.<br />
75<br />
Antonio María Osio, “Historia de la <strong>California</strong>”<br />
copia facilitada por John J. Doyle,<br />
Esq., 1878, 61–65, Calisphere, http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/.<br />
76<br />
Palóu is referring to the pivotal battle of<br />
Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, in which Christians<br />
soundly defeated Muslims and all but<br />
made the reconquest inevitable. Francisco<br />
Palóu, <strong>Historical</strong> Account of the Life and Apostolic<br />
Labors of the Venerable Father Junípero<br />
Serra, 79, 81.<br />
77<br />
Bancroft, The History of <strong>California</strong>,<br />
2:489n16.<br />
78<br />
Luis Arguello “Report to Governor Pablo<br />
de Sola, May 26, 1817,” in Cook, Colonial<br />
Expeditions, 276.<br />
79<br />
José del Carmen Lugo, “Vida de un ranchero,”<br />
ms. 1877, 6–7. Calisphere, http://<br />
content.cdlib.org/ark:/.<br />
80<br />
“Diary of Pedro Munoz,” in Cook, Colonial<br />
Expeditions, 248; “Report of José Dolores<br />
Pico of the Expedition to the San Joaquin<br />
and Kings Rivers,” in Cook, Colonial Expeditions,<br />
182–83.<br />
81<br />
Sergeant Sebastián Rodriguez, “Diary,” in<br />
Cook, Colonial Expeditions, 184–85.<br />
66 <strong>California</strong> History • volume <strong>90</strong> number 1 2012<br />
82<br />
“Medieval Sourcebook: Mass of the<br />
Roman Rite Latin/English,” http://www.<br />
fordham.edu/halsall/basis/latinmass2.asp.<br />
83<br />
José María Amador,“Memorias sobre la<br />
historia de <strong>California</strong>,” ms. 1877, 36-40,<br />
Calisphere, http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/.<br />
84<br />
In 2003, when trying to convince President<br />
Jacques Chirac of France to participate<br />
in the attack on Iraq, President George W.<br />
Bush said, “This confrontation is willed by<br />
God, who wants to use this conflict to erase<br />
his people’s enemies before a New Age<br />
begins.” See Clive Hamilton, “Bush’s Shocking<br />
Biblical Prophecy Emerges: God Wants<br />
to ‘Erase’ Mid-East Enemies ‘Before a New<br />
Age Begins,’” AlterNet, http://www.alternet.<br />
org/news/140221/bush’s_shocking_biblical_<br />
prophecy_emerges.<br />
Joaquin miller and the social circle<br />
at the hights, By phoeBe cutler,<br />
pp 40–61<br />
Caption sources: “Joaquin Miller,” in<br />
Arthur Gilman, Poet’s Homes: Pen and Pencil<br />
Sketches of American Poets and Their Homes<br />
(Boston: D. Lothrop and Company, 1879),<br />
73; “In the Public Eye,” Munsey’s Magazine<br />
13, no. 1 (Apr. 1895), 181; The Pittsburg Press,<br />
Aug. 28, 1921, 73; Juanita Miller, About the<br />
Heights with Juanita Miller, 2nd ed. (Oakland,<br />
CA: Bray & Mulgrew, 1919); quoted in<br />
Beatrice B. Beebe, ed., “Letters of Joaquin<br />
Miller,” Frontier 12 (Jan. 1932), 121; George<br />
Sterling, “Joaquin Miller,” The American<br />
Mercury 7, no. 26 (Feb. 1926), 220; Roger<br />
K. Larson, ed., Dear Master: Letters of George<br />
Sterling to Ambrose Bierce, 1<strong>90</strong>0–1912 (San<br />
Francisco: Book Club of <strong>California</strong>, 2002);<br />
“Monterey County Teachers’ Meeting,” San<br />
Francisco Call, Oct. 25, 1<strong>90</strong>5; San Francisco<br />
Chronicle, Nov. 22, 1896, in Amy Sueyoshi,<br />
“Miss Morning Glory: Orientalism and<br />
Misogyny in the Queer Writings of Yone<br />
Noguchi,” Amerasia Journal 37, no. 2 (2011),<br />
23; Charles Warren Stoddard, “Joaquin<br />
Miller at the Heights,” National Magazine<br />
24, no. 1 (Apr. 1<strong>90</strong>6), 26; Joaquin Miller, “A<br />
Study of Japanese,” San Francisco Call, Aug.<br />
25, 1895; Takeshi Kanno, Creation-dawn (A<br />
Vision Drama): Evening Talks and Meditations<br />
(Fruitvale, CA: Takeshi Kanno, 1913), 7–8;<br />
Adelaide Hanscom, The Rubáiyát of Omar<br />
Khayyám, trans. Edward Fitzgerald (Dodge<br />
Publishing Co., 1<strong>90</strong>5), George Wharton<br />
James, review of Adelaide Hanscom’s The<br />
Rubaiyát of Omar Kháyyám, Sunset Maga-<br />
zine (Mar. 1<strong>90</strong>6); http://en.wikipedia.org/<br />
wiki/Adelaide_Hanscom_Leeson, “How<br />
Joaquin Miller Posed for Pictures in Omar<br />
Khayyam’s Rubaiyat,” Seattle Post Intelligencer,<br />
Sept. 20, 1<strong>90</strong>6, Canadian Bookseller<br />
and Library Journal 18, no. 1 (Mar. 1<strong>90</strong>5), 32;<br />
John P. Irish, “Some Memories of Joaquin<br />
Miller,” Out West 7, no. 2 (Feb. 1914): 84-86.<br />
1<br />
Miller composed his popular poem<br />
“Columbus” in 1892, marking the 400th<br />
anniversary of the discovery of America;<br />
Joaquin Miller, Songs of the Soul (San Francisco:<br />
The Whitaker & Ray Company, 1896),<br />
154–55.<br />
2<br />
http://www.joaquinmiller.com/1872intro.<br />
html. The symposium is scheduled for<br />
October, the exhibition for the spring;<br />
museum@mtshastamuseum.com, www.<br />
mtshastamuseum.com.<br />
3<br />
The poet’s birth date has been much<br />
debated. Miller authority Margaret Guilford-<br />
Kardell has settled upon 1839; e-mail<br />
message to the author, May 12, 2010. The<br />
much misstated date is only one of many<br />
fallacies that have flourished in the confused<br />
wake of the celebrity author’s elaborations<br />
and modifications. Four full-length<br />
biographies—Harr Wagner, Joaquin Miller<br />
and His Other Self (San Francisco: Wagner<br />
Publishing Company, 1929); Martin Severin<br />
Peterson, Joaquin Miller: Literary Frontiersman<br />
(Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University<br />
Press, 1937); M. M. Marberry, Splendid<br />
Poseur: Joaquin Miller—American Poet (New<br />
York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1953);<br />
and O. W. Frost, Joaquin Miller (New York:<br />
Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1967)—all contain<br />
factual errors. The section on Miller in Ray<br />
Longtin’s bibliography, Three Writers of the<br />
Far West: A Reference Guide (Boston: G. K.<br />
Hall, 1980), helps to clarify sources and<br />
dates. Margaret Guilford-Kardell and Scott<br />
McKeown’s A Joaquin Miller Chronological<br />
Bibliography and Study Guide. (http://www.<br />
joaquinmiller.com/index.html) is even more<br />
comprehensive. Guildford-Kardell’s Joaquin<br />
Miller Newsletter 1, no. 9 (Jan. 2001) through<br />
3, no. 8 (Aug. 2008) further corrected the<br />
record.<br />
4<br />
Oakland, Alameda, and Berkeley City Directory<br />
(San Francisco: McKenney Directory<br />
Co., Oct. 1888), 538.<br />
5<br />
Miller’s children by the first two of his<br />
three producing alliances vie with each<br />
other for tragic endings. Of the two girls,<br />
according to Harr Wagner, Calla-Shasta
died of alcoholism at an early age; Maud<br />
was a failed, much-married actress. What<br />
ultimately happened to George and Harry<br />
is not recorded, but both boys—Harry more<br />
than George—served time in jail for larceny.<br />
Wagner, Joaquin Miller and His Other Self,<br />
239.<br />
6<br />
Abbie’s preference for East Coast watering<br />
holes did not prevent her from enlarging<br />
her absent husband’s property by the<br />
purchase of 221 /2 contiguous acres in 1891.<br />
Information regarding this speculative purchase<br />
did not find its way into the variant<br />
of the Miller legend promoted by his and<br />
Abbie’s only child, Juanita. Consequently,<br />
with the exception of William W. Winn,<br />
“Bohemian Club Memorial,” <strong>California</strong> <strong>Historical</strong><br />
<strong>Society</strong> Quarterly 32, no. 3 (Sept. 1953),<br />
237, Miller biographies have uniformly credited<br />
him with buying the entire 72.5 acres.<br />
7<br />
The first documented use of “Poet of the<br />
Sierras” appeared while Miller was still in<br />
London in the “Personal and Literary” feature<br />
of Missouri’s St. Joseph Herald on Feb.<br />
2, 1872. That paper, in turn, was quoting the<br />
Portland [Oregon] Herald.<br />
8<br />
Elodie Hogan, “An Hour with Joaquin<br />
Miller,” The <strong>California</strong>n, Mar. 1894, Joaquin<br />
Miller Collection, H1938.1, Special Collections,<br />
Honnold/Mudd Library, Claremont<br />
University Consortium (hereafter cited as<br />
Joaquin Miller Collection). Two years after<br />
he wrote this article, Hogan (1816–1914)<br />
married the English writer Hilaire Belloc<br />
and moved to the United Kingdom. Bruce<br />
Porter is best known as the publisher of the<br />
literary journal The Lark and as the landscape<br />
designer (1915–17) of William Bourn’s<br />
Filoli in Woodside, <strong>California</strong>.<br />
9<br />
The Annals of the Bohemian Club: comprising<br />
text and pictures furnished by its<br />
own members (San Francisco: The Club,<br />
1898).<br />
10<br />
“<strong>Society</strong> Chat,” San Francisco Chronicle,<br />
May 1, 1<strong>90</strong>4.<br />
11<br />
Wagner, Joaquin Miller and His Other Self,<br />
125.<br />
12<br />
“Oaklanders Pay an Extra Fare,” San<br />
Francisco Call, Nov. 27, 1<strong>90</strong>3. Joaquin Miller,<br />
postscript fragment, n.d. (ca. Oct. 25, 1<strong>90</strong>3),<br />
Joaquin Miller Collection. Fruitvale did not<br />
merge with Oakland until 1<strong>90</strong>9.<br />
13<br />
The Students’ Pen, Nov. 1892, 11, a publication<br />
of The Rockefeller Rhetorical <strong>Society</strong><br />
of <strong>California</strong> College, a short-lived Baptist<br />
college in neighboring Highland Park, heav-<br />
ily funded by John D. Rockefeller. Mayor<br />
John L. Davie describes the carriage ride in<br />
John L. Davie, His Honor the Buckaroo: Autobiography<br />
of John L. Davie, ed. and revised by<br />
Jack W. Herzberg (Oakland, CA: Jack Herzberg,<br />
1988 [1931]), 192–93.<br />
14<br />
“Oaklanders Pay an Extra Fare,” San Francisco<br />
Call.<br />
15<br />
William R. Davis, “Nature and Human<br />
Nature as They Appear in Oakland and<br />
Environs,” Oakland Tribune, Jan. 1, 1888.<br />
16<br />
Ernest J. Moyne, “Joaquin Miller and Baroness<br />
Alexandra Gripenburg,” The Markham<br />
Review 4 (Feb. 1974), 69.<br />
17<br />
A modern Taylor Memorial United Methodist<br />
Church, in the same location on 12th<br />
St. in Oakland as the 1920s original, honors<br />
this heroic clergyman. Taylor wrote the<br />
highly popular Seven Years’ Street Preaching<br />
in San Francisco, <strong>California</strong>; Embracing Incidents,<br />
Triumphant Death Scenes, Etc. (New<br />
York: Carlton & Porter, 1856), http://www.<br />
taylorchurch.org/churchhistory/.<br />
18<br />
Besides Woodbury and Irish, the congregation<br />
included philanthropist Jane K.<br />
Sather, business leaders Phineas Marston<br />
and P. N. Remillard, of brick-manufacturing<br />
fame, and San Francisco Bulletin editor<br />
W. C. Bartlett. Charles W. Wendte, “Unitarianism,”<br />
Oakland Tribune, Jan. 1, 1888.<br />
19<br />
Unitarian Church of Berkeley, http://<br />
www.uucb.org/index.php/worship/sermonarchives-and-podcasts/610-uu-mosaic-makers-what-we-make-together.html;<br />
“Notable<br />
American Unitarians 1740–1<strong>90</strong>0,” http://<br />
www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/uu_addenda/<br />
Charles-William-Wendte.php. In 1885,<br />
Wendte co-authored, with Julia Ward Howe,<br />
Louisa M. Alcott, and others, a book of<br />
Christmas carols. The Rev. William Day<br />
Simonds wrote five books, most notably a<br />
biography of the Rev. Thomas Starr King<br />
(Starr King in <strong>California</strong> [San Francisco: Paul<br />
Elder and Company Publishers, 1917]). Perhaps<br />
even more remarkable was Simonds’<br />
status as a pioneer commuter: by 1910 he<br />
was living with his family in Marin while<br />
preaching at the First Unitarian Church<br />
across the bay; U.S. Census Bureau, 1910<br />
Census of Population.<br />
20<br />
In attendance for the charity event were<br />
Miller, Rev. John K. McLean, Ina Coolbrith,<br />
John Vance Cheney, Edwin Markham, David<br />
Lesser Lezinsky, Alexander G. Hawes, Ella<br />
Sterling Cummins, and Edmund Russell.<br />
The deceased poet was the English-born<br />
adventurer Richard Realf. Joseph Eugene<br />
Baker, ed., Past and Present of Alameda<br />
County, <strong>California</strong> (Chicago: S. J. Clarke,<br />
1914), 268–69.<br />
21<br />
Elbert Hubbard, So Here Then Is a Little<br />
Journey to the Home of Joaquin Miller (East<br />
Aurora, NY: The Roycrofters, 1<strong>90</strong>3), 5.<br />
Hubbard founded the William Morrisinspired<br />
Roycroft community in Aurora,<br />
New York. Hubbard, who died in the sinking<br />
of the Lusitania, wrote multiple books.<br />
The title of his short story “A Message to<br />
Garcia” became a catch phrase for a heroic<br />
undertaking. For Mills, see Nelson Daniel<br />
Wilhelm, “B. Fay Mills: Revivalist, Social<br />
Reformer and Advocate of Free Religion”<br />
(PhD diss., Syracuse University, 1964).<br />
22<br />
“Misc.,” Daily Alta, July 17, 1887.<br />
23<br />
Charles J. Woodbury, Talks with Ralph<br />
Waldo Emerson (New York: Baker and Taylor,<br />
18<strong>90</strong>). U.S. Census Bureau, 1880 and<br />
1<strong>90</strong>0 Census of Population. “Lectures on<br />
Emerson,” Oakland Tribune, Aug. 23, 1<strong>90</strong>4;<br />
“Golden Wedding,” Oakland Tribune, Feb.<br />
17, 1919.<br />
24<br />
“Joaquin Miller’s Open Letters,” # 31,<br />
Pacific States Illustrated Weekly, Dec. 15,<br />
1888, box 8, Joaquin Miller Collection.<br />
25<br />
“Death Laid a Harsh Finger,” Modesto Evening<br />
News, Oct. 10, 1923. Irish died, age 80,<br />
from a fall while trying to enter a Berkeley<br />
streetcar.<br />
26<br />
As close as they were, Ina Coolbrith<br />
would not have confided this lifelong secret<br />
to Miller. See Josephine DeWitt Rhodehamel<br />
and Raymund Francis Wood, Ina Coolbrith,<br />
Librarian and Laureate of <strong>California</strong> (Provo,<br />
UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1973),<br />
20–21, 371–72.<br />
27<br />
Cincinnatus H. Miller, Joaquin, et al (Portland,<br />
OR: S. J. McCormick, 1869 [reissued<br />
in London, 1872]). Wagner, Joaquin Miller<br />
and His Other Self, 228. Joaquin Murrieta,<br />
a gold rush figure of uncertain origins,<br />
was sometimes called the “Mexican Robin<br />
Hood.” Wagner, following the demise of the<br />
Golden Era, became Miller’s business agent.<br />
His biography deals more with the Oakland<br />
years than the others and, although predictably<br />
partial, is considerably more reliable<br />
than Marberry’s Splendid Poseur.<br />
28<br />
The exact number of years, as the spelling<br />
of Cally’s name, varies in different accounts,<br />
but Charlotte Perkins Gilman notes her<br />
presence at Coolbrith’s twenty years on in<br />
67
notes<br />
1892. Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins<br />
Gilman (New York: D. Appleton-Century<br />
Company, 1935), 142. Calla-Shasta wrote<br />
heart-rending letters, bemoaning the loss<br />
of her Sierra homeland and bewailing her<br />
father’s neglect. See Margaret Guilford-<br />
Kardell, “Calla Shasta—Joaquin Miller’s<br />
First Daughter,” <strong>California</strong>ns 9, no. 4 (Jan./<br />
Feb., 1992): 40–44.<br />
29<br />
For London and Coolbrith, see George<br />
Rathmell, Realms of Gold: The Colorful Writers<br />
of San Francisco, 1850–1950 (Berkeley,<br />
CA: Creative Arts Book Co., 1998), 123; for<br />
James and Coolbrith, see Peter Wild, Wayne<br />
Chatterton, James H. Maguire, George Wharton<br />
James (Boise, ID: Boise State University,<br />
19<strong>90</strong>), 16.<br />
30<br />
At this time she was known as Charlotte<br />
Perkins Stetson, having recently been<br />
estranged from the artist Walter Stetson,<br />
whom she left behind in Pasadena.<br />
31<br />
Denise D. Knight, ed., The Diaries of Charlotte<br />
Perkins Gilman, vol. 2 (Charlottesville:<br />
University Press of Virginia, 1994), 505.<br />
32<br />
Ibid., 554.<br />
33<br />
Anonymous (but in the style of Joaquin<br />
Miller), “Poet Got His Bath,” San Francisco<br />
Call, Sept. 1, 1895.<br />
34<br />
George Wharton James, “The Human<br />
Side of Joaquin Miller” Overland Monthly 75,<br />
no. 2 (Feb. 1920), 126; Yone Noguchi, “With<br />
the Poet of Light and Joy,” National Magazine<br />
21, no. 4 (Jan. 1<strong>90</strong>5), 420.<br />
35<br />
Beatrice B. Beebe, ed., “Joaquin Miller<br />
and His Family,” The Frontier 12, no. 5 (May<br />
1932), 344. Charles Warren Stoddard, “Joaquin<br />
Miller at The Heights [sic],” National<br />
Magazine 26, no. 1 (Apr. 1<strong>90</strong>6), 21.<br />
36<br />
Yoné Noguchi, The Story of Yoné Noguchi<br />
(London: Chatto & Windus, 1914), 69;<br />
Charles H. Scofield, “The Poet of the Sierras:<br />
His Mountain Home Above Oakland,”<br />
Stockton Evening Mail, Mar. 29, 1893; Elsie<br />
Whitaker Martinez, San Francisco Bay Area<br />
Writers and Artists, with an introduction by<br />
Franklin D. Walker, Regional Oral History<br />
Office, Bancroft Library, University of <strong>California</strong><br />
at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA (hereafter<br />
cited as BANC), 161.<br />
37<br />
Wagner, Joaquin Miller and His Other Self,<br />
124.<br />
38<br />
Martinez, San Francisco Bay Area Writers<br />
and Artists, 161.<br />
39 Scofield, “The Poet of the Sierras.”<br />
68 <strong>California</strong> History • volume <strong>90</strong> number 1 2012<br />
40<br />
Martinez, San Francisco Bay Area Writers<br />
and Artists, 161.<br />
41<br />
Yonejiro Noguchi to Blanche Partington,<br />
Aug. 17, 1<strong>90</strong>0, Partington Family Papers:<br />
Additions, 1865–1979, MSS 81/143, BANC.<br />
Jack London was informally affianced to<br />
Phyllis Partington. A singer, she performed<br />
with the Metropolitan Opera in New York.<br />
42<br />
George Sterling, “Joaquin Miller,” The<br />
American Mercury 7, no. 2 (Feb. 1926), 222;<br />
Marberry, Splendid Poseur, 202.<br />
43<br />
Austin Lewis, “George Sterling at Play,”<br />
The Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine<br />
85, no. 11 (Nov. 1927), 344.<br />
44<br />
Marberry, Splendid Poseur, 202, 252–53;<br />
Sterling, “Joaquin Miller,” 221. Marberry<br />
includes a scene in which a surprised<br />
George Sterling observes John Partington<br />
and Ambrose Bierce slaving over the construction<br />
of Moses’ pyramid. True to form,<br />
the very readable Marberry has been a little<br />
loose with the facts. Sterling saw “young<br />
Bierce,” Ambrose’s nephew, not the caustic<br />
journalist, who felt some fondness for his<br />
old acquaintance despite being well aware<br />
of his shortcomings. In his well-read Examiner<br />
column, the elder Bierce had famously<br />
declared that Miller was a liar . . . albeit a<br />
harmless, good-natured one. (Equally memorably,<br />
Joaquin responded, “I am not a liar.<br />
I simply exaggerate the truth.”). Ambrose<br />
Bierce, “Prattle,” San Francisco Examiner,<br />
Jan. 30, 1898.<br />
45<br />
Miller uses the term “hillside Bohemia”<br />
in The Complete Poetical Works of Joaquin<br />
Miller (San Francisco: Whitaker and Ray,<br />
1897), 318. Joaquin Miller, The Building of<br />
the City Beautiful (Cambridge and Chicago:<br />
Stone and Kimball, 1894 [privately printed<br />
1893]), 77, 72.<br />
46<br />
“A Selection of Letters from the Markham<br />
Archives,” The Markham Review (Staten<br />
Island, NY: Hormann Library, Wagner College,<br />
May 1969); Louis Filler, The Unknown<br />
Edwin Markham: His Mystery and Its<br />
Significance (Yellow Springs, OH: Antioch<br />
Press, 1966), 68, 70–71, 76.<br />
47<br />
“A Study of Japanese,” San Francisco Call,<br />
Aug. 25, 1895; Miller, The Building of the City<br />
Beautiful, <strong>90</strong>.<br />
48<br />
Hubbard, So Here Then Is a Little Journey,<br />
14. “Joaquin Miller,” in Elbert Hubbard and<br />
Bert Hubbard, Selected Writings of Elbert<br />
Hubbard (New York: Wm. H. Wise & Co.,<br />
1922), 16.<br />
49<br />
Martinez, San Francisco Bay Area Writers<br />
and Artists, 180.<br />
50<br />
Hubbard, So Here Then Is a Little Journey,<br />
14; Stoddard, “Joaquin Miller at The Heights<br />
[sic],” 26.<br />
51<br />
“Deserted is His Own Good Hall,” San<br />
Francisco Call, Mar. 3, 1895. Carolyn Wells,<br />
“The Latest Thing in Poets,” Critic 29 (Nov.<br />
1896), 302.<br />
52<br />
Noguchi, The Story of Yone Noguchi,<br />
76–77.<br />
53<br />
Oakland, Alameda, and Berkeley City Directory:<br />
1889–<strong>90</strong> (San Francisco: F. M. Husted<br />
Publisher, Jan. 18<strong>90</strong>), 586.<br />
54<br />
Robert Boyle, Gertrude’s great-nephew,<br />
has determined that Takeshi Kanno’s passport<br />
was issued in Kyoto in October 1892;<br />
e-mail message to the author, Dec. 15, 2011.<br />
55<br />
Takeshi Kanno, Creation-dawn: (a vision<br />
drama); evening talks and meditations (Fruitvale,<br />
CA: Kanno, 1913). Noguchi included<br />
a couple of sample lines from one of his<br />
poems in a letter to Coolbrith: “The opiate<br />
vapors, in foamless waves, rock about this<br />
dreaming shore of April-Earth,” Noguchi<br />
to Coolbrith, Mar. 19, 1897, Ina Coolbrith<br />
Papers, Additions, BANC).<br />
56<br />
Nina Egert organized the exhibit in conjunction<br />
with her book, Noguchi’s <strong>California</strong>:<br />
Public Visions of a 19th Century Dharma Bum<br />
(Canyon, CA: Nina Egert and the Vinapa<br />
Foundation, 2010); http://vinapafoundation.<br />
org/VinapaFoundation/Noguchis_<br />
<strong>California</strong>.html.<br />
57<br />
Alfred James Waterhouse Photographic<br />
Album, 2008.086, BANC; Block Book of<br />
Oakland, vol. 17 (Oakland, CA: Thomas<br />
Bros., 1924); Abigail Leland Miller Papers,<br />
MSS C-H 146, BANC. J. P. Irish praises<br />
Abbie for her success in recouping Waterhouse’s<br />
delinquent mortgage payment.<br />
58<br />
Stoddard, “Joaquin Miller at The Heights<br />
[sic],” 28; Sterling, “Joaquin Miller,” 224.<br />
59<br />
Adelaide Hanscom and Blanche Cumming,<br />
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam (New<br />
York: Dodge Publishing, 1<strong>90</strong>5).<br />
60<br />
William D. Armes, professor of American<br />
Literature at UC Berkeley, was a friend<br />
of John Muir, cofounder with Muir of the<br />
Sierra Club, and editor of Joseph LeConte’s<br />
autobiography, Joseph LeConte and William<br />
Dallam Armes, The Autobiography of Joseph<br />
LeConte (New York: D. Appleton and Company,<br />
1<strong>90</strong>3).
61<br />
Henry Meade Bland to Ina Cook Peterson<br />
(niece of Coolbrith), Mar. 30, 1928, Ina D.<br />
Coolbrith Collection of Letters and Papers,<br />
BANC.<br />
62<br />
“Beautiful Ceremony Performed on the<br />
Hights Before Hundreds of Bard’s Admirers,”<br />
San Francisco Call, May 26, 1913.<br />
63<br />
Florence Hardiman Miller to Joaquin<br />
Miller, Aug. 5, 1896, Joaquin Miller Collection,<br />
HM 15691, Huntington Library.<br />
“Reception to a Rising Authoress,” San<br />
Francisco Call, Aug. 12, 1896. Mrs. Miller<br />
(no relation) also invited Coolbrith, Edwin<br />
Markham, Millicent Shinn, and Adeline<br />
Knapp. Of the five, the only ones to show up<br />
were Miller and Adeline Knapp, a journalist,<br />
antisuffragette, student of economics, and,<br />
briefly, an object of infatuation on the part<br />
of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.<br />
64<br />
Stuart P. Sherman, The Poetical Works of<br />
Joaquin Miller (New York & London: G. P.<br />
Putnam’s Sons, 1923), 3. “Estimate of Poetry<br />
of <strong>California</strong>ns by Critic Stirs Literati: Witter<br />
Bynner Says Joaquin Miller’s Work not Permanent<br />
and Gives Vent of Other Iconoclastic<br />
Criticism,” Oakland Post-Enquirer, Nov.<br />
11, 1922. For the most perceptive modern<br />
critique of Miller’s verse, see Frost, Joaquin<br />
Miller.<br />
65<br />
Harry Hayden, “Heights [sic] Neglected<br />
by City of Oakland,” San Francisco Chronicle,<br />
July 15, 1923.<br />
66<br />
“Joaquin Miller’s Open Letters,” #31.<br />
67<br />
Wagner, Joaquin Miller and His Other Self,<br />
132.<br />
sideBar, the irrepressiBle John p.<br />
irish . . . colonel, p. 47<br />
Caption sources: John P. Irish, “Some<br />
Memories of Joaquin Miller,” Out West<br />
7, no. 2 (Feb. 1914), 84–85. Text: Joseph<br />
Eugene Baker, ed., Past and Present of Alam-<br />
eda County, <strong>California</strong> (Chicago: S. J. Clarke,<br />
1914), 401, 409–11; Descriptive summary,<br />
John Powell Irish Papers, 1882–1923, Stanford<br />
University, http://www.oac.cdlib.org/<br />
findaid/ark:/13030/tf9k4007br/entire_text/;<br />
Pauline Jacobson, “Col. John P. Irish, Tory:<br />
Allied at Birth Is Well-Fed. He has Been<br />
an ‘Anti’ All his Life,” The Bulletin, Sept. 9,<br />
1911; “Col. Irish in Japan,” Oakland Tribune,<br />
Dec. 10, 1922; “Col. Irish Killed by Car in<br />
<strong>California</strong>,” Iowa City Press Citizen, Oct. 8,<br />
1923.<br />
1<br />
J. P. Irish to Charles W. Irish, Aug. 10,<br />
1885, Charles Wood Irish Papers, MS C362,<br />
box 2, University of Iowa, Iowa City.<br />
2<br />
Excerpt, Ambrose Bierce, “Black Beetles<br />
in Amber,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/<br />
John_P._Irish.<br />
69
eviews<br />
Edited by James J. Rawls<br />
so far from home:<br />
russians in early<br />
california<br />
Edited by Glenn J. Farris (Berkeley,<br />
CA: Heyday, 2012, 352 pp., $21.95<br />
paper)<br />
REVIEWED BY WALTER C . UHLER, FORMER<br />
PRESIDENT OF THE RUSSIAN-AMERICAN INTER-<br />
NATIONAL STUDIES ASSOCIATION<br />
Fort Ross was constructed some<br />
eighty miles north of San Francisco in<br />
1812 by ninety-five Russians and forty<br />
Aleuts. Located on a shelf overlooking<br />
Bodega Bay, its mission was to serve as<br />
a trading post for the Russian American<br />
Company (RAC) in support of sea<br />
otter hunting off the coast of <strong>California</strong><br />
and the supply of agricultural produce<br />
sorely needed by RAC employees in<br />
Alaska. To commemorate the 200th<br />
anniversary of the founding of Fort<br />
Ross, historical archaeologist Glenn<br />
J. Farris has assembled a fascinating<br />
collection of documents—some of<br />
them “translations of recent finds from<br />
Russian archives”—that shed light not<br />
only on the life and impact of Russians<br />
in <strong>California</strong>, but also on their<br />
interaction with Spaniards, Mexicans,<br />
Native Americans, and various foreign<br />
visitors.<br />
Anxiety about Russian commercial<br />
activity in the North Pacific prompted<br />
the Spanish claimants to Alta <strong>California</strong><br />
in 1768–69 to shift from explora-<br />
70 <strong>California</strong> History • volume <strong>90</strong> number 1 2012<br />
tion of the territory to actual settlement.<br />
But, notwithstanding this early<br />
anxiety, the first Russian didn’t appear<br />
until 1803.<br />
By 1808, however, the RAC was looking<br />
for a settlement in the territory<br />
north of the northernmost Spanish<br />
settlements, which it called New<br />
Albion. The documents suggest that<br />
Timofei Tarakanov offered the Bodega<br />
Miwoks “three blankets, three pairs<br />
of breeches, two axes, three hoes and<br />
some beads” in exchange for access to<br />
or ownership of territory that included<br />
the future site of Fort Ross, probably<br />
in 1811. Unlike the Spanish, the Russians<br />
demonstrated their willingness<br />
to acknowledge that the Indians had<br />
rights to the land.<br />
The documents also suggest that the<br />
Russians and Aleuts treated the local<br />
Bodega Miwok and Kashaya Pomo<br />
Indians more humanely than did the<br />
Spaniards. Intermarriage was common,<br />
and Creoles eventually constituted<br />
the largest part of the colony’s<br />
population. For reasons still unknown,<br />
but which spark the imagination, the<br />
Indians called the Russians and Aleuts<br />
the “Undersea People.”<br />
As a commercial enterprise, Fort Ross<br />
proved to be a bust. “By the early 1820s<br />
the Russians were reporting a steep<br />
decline in the number of sea otter furs<br />
taken each year.” Plan B, growing and<br />
supplying food to Alaskan colonies,<br />
never blossomed. Thus, by 1838, operational<br />
costs had risen to 72,000 rubles<br />
annually while revenues plunged to<br />
8,000 rubles. Consequently, in 1841<br />
the RAC found it expedient to sell Fort<br />
Ross and the surrounding fields to<br />
John Sutter for 30,000 piasters.<br />
But, as these documents make clear,<br />
the Russian experience in and impact<br />
on <strong>California</strong> was far richer than such<br />
profit-and-loss calculations would suggest.<br />
They address the size and use of<br />
<strong>California</strong> redwoods, describe Spanish<br />
missions and Native American culture,<br />
enumerate the finds of Russian<br />
botanists, suggest a leading role by a<br />
Russian in the 1824 Chumash revolt,<br />
and detail the methods by which the<br />
use of script and mandatory purchases<br />
from the company store kept RAC<br />
employees perpetually in debt. They<br />
amply demonstrate why it is important<br />
to commemorate Fort Ross’s 200th<br />
anniversary.
hoBoes, Bindlestiffs,<br />
fruit tramps, and the<br />
harVesting of<br />
the West<br />
By Mark Wyman (New York: Hill<br />
and Wang, 2010, 368 pp., $28.00<br />
cloth, $16.00 paper, $9.99 eBook)<br />
hoBos to street<br />
people: artists’<br />
responses to<br />
homelessness from<br />
the neW deal to the<br />
present<br />
By Art Hazelwood (San Francisco:<br />
Freedom Voices, 2011, 84 pp., $25.95<br />
paper)<br />
REVIEWED BY CHRISTOPHER HERRING, PHD<br />
CANDIDATE OF SOCIOLOGY, UNIVERSITY<br />
OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, AND ASSOCIATE<br />
RESEARCHER FOR THE NATIONAL COALITION<br />
FOR THE HOMELESS<br />
In their latest books, Mark<br />
Wyman and Art Hazelwood offer lucid<br />
portrayals of the most marginalized<br />
characters in the history of the American<br />
West and, in the wake of the Great<br />
Recession, provide valuable historical<br />
perspectives of the contemporary<br />
migrant worker and the homeless<br />
American.<br />
The men, women, and children variously<br />
called bindlestiffs, fruit tramps,<br />
bums, and hoboes were vital to the<br />
creation of the West and its economy,<br />
yet their history has been largely<br />
untold. In his book Hoboes, Bindlestiffs,<br />
Fruit Tramps, and the Harvesting of the<br />
West, veteran historian Mark Wyman<br />
provides this much-needed story of<br />
western development. The book’s narrative<br />
follows the symbiotic evolution<br />
of rails, crops, and labor. With refrigerated<br />
freight and massive irrigation<br />
projects across the West, family fields<br />
of a few hundred acres were converted<br />
to “bonanza” farms composed<br />
of thousands, small farmers became<br />
small capitalists, and local hires were<br />
replaced by traveling flocks of seasonal<br />
labor. In the spirit of historian Howard<br />
Zinn, Wyman offers an alternative history<br />
of the West’s development from<br />
below, tracing the migrations and<br />
struggles of the floating proletariat<br />
that harvested America’s breadbasket,<br />
orchards, and forests from the Civil<br />
War to the 1920s.<br />
Although Hoboes is singularly emblazoned<br />
on the book’s spine, the work<br />
focuses equally on migrating families<br />
A bindlestiff walks from the mines to the lumber camps to the<br />
farms in Napa Valley in 1938.<br />
Library of Congress; photograph by Dorothea Lange<br />
71
eviews<br />
of wives and small children, wageworking<br />
Indians, and high school students.<br />
In his chapter on the “Beeters,”<br />
Wyman explains how the early corporate<br />
domination of beets in Nebraska<br />
led to especially grueling labor conditions,<br />
where sugar entrepreneurs<br />
preferred families for their stability,<br />
less drunkenness, and, most crucially,<br />
more hands. The book depicts the<br />
use of convict labor, including several<br />
locked up on vagrancy charges, and<br />
the yearly migration to the Willamette<br />
of Native Americans, who picked hops<br />
for wages, moving between their traditional<br />
homes and capitalist society.<br />
The single itinerant hobo is but one of<br />
many characters in Wyman’s work.<br />
Ethnic diversity also plays large in<br />
Wyman’s history. The book illustrates<br />
the striking differences between organized<br />
Japanese work gangs, doubly<br />
discriminated Mexican laborers, and<br />
German-Russian migrant families<br />
seeking the American dream through<br />
acquiring their own property. It also<br />
brings to light the ethnic alliances<br />
forged through harvest labor, such as<br />
the pan-Indianism formed through<br />
tribal migrations and the successful<br />
organizing by the International Workers<br />
of the World of a seemingly impossible<br />
ethnic assortment. Although this<br />
is a scholarly text, Wyman connects<br />
meticulously curated statistics, archival<br />
news reports, and policy memos with<br />
the personal experiences of the workers,<br />
rendering sympathetic portraits<br />
72 <strong>California</strong> History • volume <strong>90</strong> number 1 2012<br />
of his subjects and lively passages that<br />
move the work forward with verve.<br />
Art Hazelwood’s Hoboes to Street<br />
People: Artists’ Responses to Homelessness<br />
from the New Deal to the Present picks<br />
up where Wyman leaves off, in the<br />
Great Depression, and presents powerful<br />
works of art aimed at social change.<br />
The beautiful publication is a product<br />
of the touring exhibition that first<br />
opened in San Francisco in 2009 and<br />
features nearly sixty works of visual art<br />
engaged with issues of homelessness.<br />
But this is no mere exhibition catalog.<br />
Hazelwood’s book traces the artworks<br />
through historical shifts in government<br />
policy, from the New Deal to Welfare<br />
Reform, and examines artists’ shifting<br />
relationship to their subjects and to the<br />
state, first as government WPA artists<br />
and photographers and later as activist<br />
artists relentlessly critical of the state.<br />
As Hazelwood himself is a member of<br />
the former camp, the book reads as a<br />
manifesto for artists to join together to<br />
inspire the public to act.<br />
The book features works by wellknown<br />
artists such as Dorothea Lange,<br />
Rockwell Kent, and Anton Refregier,<br />
but also resurrects older political artists<br />
who have largely been forgotten,<br />
including Leon Carlin and Giacomo<br />
Patri. Contemporary artists include a<br />
host of <strong>California</strong>ns, among them Jose<br />
Sances, Sandow Birk, and the formerly<br />
homeless Jane “in vain” Winkelman.<br />
The book brings together the works<br />
one usually finds on gallery walls and<br />
in an array of popular media aimed<br />
at the public conscience: screen-print<br />
posters, cover art of homeless broadsheets,<br />
and graphic novels.<br />
Although Wyman misses the opportunity<br />
to connect the history of the<br />
hoboes to migrants of today, dialogues<br />
between contemporary and past perceptions,<br />
portrayals, and policies of<br />
homelessness are at the center of<br />
Hazelwood’s survey. The book opens<br />
with two photographs: Dorothea<br />
Lange’s Mother and Two Children on<br />
the Road to Tule Lake, made in 1939,<br />
and David Bacon’s photograph of an<br />
indigenous woman and child, part of<br />
a group of farmworkers from Oaxaca,<br />
made nearly seven decades later. It<br />
is striking how little has changed<br />
when confronting the human pathos<br />
expressed in each portrait depicting<br />
mothers attempting to maintain their<br />
families amidst economic catastrophe.<br />
Yet, Hazelwood notes important distinctions:<br />
the globalizing forces that<br />
have reshaped agricultural economies<br />
since Lange’s era, the rollback of New<br />
Deal reforms, and the growing public<br />
perception that economic insecurity is<br />
considered a sign not of greed, but of<br />
a properly “flexible” workforce. In this<br />
new era of precarious labor and draconian<br />
anti-immigration policy, these two<br />
books offer historical perspectives that<br />
not only explain how we got here, but<br />
also provide the critical lenses necessary<br />
to imagine progressive futures.
neW england to gold<br />
rush california: the<br />
Journal of alfred<br />
and chastina W. rix<br />
1849–1854<br />
Edited with commentary by<br />
Lynn A. Bonfield (Norman:<br />
University of Oklahoma Press, 2011,<br />
356 pp., $45.00 cloth)<br />
REVIEWED BY GLORIA R . LOTHROP, EMERITUS<br />
PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, CALIFORNIA STATE<br />
UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE, AND COAUTHOR<br />
OF CAlIfOrnIA WOmEn: A HISTOry<br />
In 1849, a pair of Vermont schoolteachers<br />
made a matrimonial pledge,<br />
promising that each would contribute<br />
to a diary. The result is a unique commentary<br />
on mid-century America,<br />
a nation energized by its pursuit of<br />
manifest destiny, invigorated by an<br />
emerging industrial age, stimulated<br />
by a religious awakening, and, above<br />
all, enriched by the Croesus of <strong>California</strong><br />
gold.<br />
Throughout the exercise, the two<br />
remained independent thinkers<br />
focused on the issues of the day.<br />
Along with daily events, the couple<br />
noted heated political discussions<br />
about issues such as the Fugitive Slave<br />
Act, the Maine Temperance Initiative,<br />
and the emerging Free Soilers’<br />
agenda. Still, gold fever was their foremost<br />
subject, and it indelibly shaped<br />
the hopeful newlyweds’ future.<br />
The events of Alfred and Chastina<br />
Rix’s marriage and venture to El<br />
Dorado from their Peacham, Vermont,<br />
home were penned in a blue-lined<br />
copybook that passed through generations,<br />
surviving both earthquake and<br />
fire before reaching the safety of the<br />
<strong>California</strong> <strong>Historical</strong> <strong>Society</strong>’s archives.<br />
Lynn Bonfield devoted more than three<br />
decades to research on the Rix journal.<br />
Exhaustive investigation is evident in<br />
the notes, appendix, and comprehensive<br />
bibliography containing several<br />
of Bonfield’s monographs and journal<br />
articles derived from her exhaustive<br />
examination of public records, newspapers,<br />
private archives, and family<br />
holdings.<br />
The editor has preserved the original<br />
document from editorial intrusion,<br />
reserving her clarifications and<br />
amplifications for the annotations.<br />
As a result, readers may arrive at their<br />
personal conclusions concerning the<br />
denouement to this family drama.<br />
Bonfield resists temptation to be the<br />
omniscient editor, never drawing a<br />
connection between Alfred’s tinkering<br />
with such inventions as his armored<br />
watercraft, the Dumbfudgeon, and his<br />
later contributions to San Francisco’s<br />
urban development.<br />
Bonfield’s thorough understanding of<br />
the diary is especially demonstrated by<br />
chapter introductions that prepare the<br />
reader for major events that often affect<br />
the spouses differently. For example,<br />
worn by the grinding demands of<br />
daily life—making candles and soap,<br />
harvesting, preserving, canning and<br />
brewing, churning, baking, cooking,<br />
spinning and knitting, sewing and<br />
maintaining the clothing, even ironing<br />
sixty-five shirts belonging to her family<br />
and her eight boarders—the usually<br />
benign Chastina observes ironically:<br />
“In the land of gold you must work or<br />
starve.”<br />
Alfred, in clueless counterpoint to<br />
Chastina’s domestic and childcare<br />
workload, rains eloquent praise upon<br />
“the cult of true womanhood,” protect-<br />
ing women within home and hearth.<br />
The inherent fallacy of the observation<br />
is keenly apparent to Chastina following<br />
Alfred’s departure for <strong>California</strong><br />
with a company of hopeful would-be<br />
miners. Once in the gold fields, he<br />
discovers that placer gold has played<br />
out, requiring more costly quartz<br />
mining techniques. Returning to San<br />
Francisco, employed as a teacher with<br />
a stable income, he plans for a family<br />
reunion and embarks on a respected<br />
law career, serves as justice of the<br />
peace, and finds future successes.<br />
As always, the Arthur H. Clark Company<br />
has produced a bookman’s book<br />
consistent with its respected reputation.<br />
It is not only well crafted, but also<br />
accessible. The index includes separate<br />
entries for the more than three dozen<br />
period photos. The appendix provides<br />
genealogies as well as information on<br />
Alfred’s party of Argonauts. Finally,<br />
the bibliography is comprehensive,<br />
including not only the canon of <strong>California</strong><br />
gold rush scholarship, but also<br />
recent studies in related fields.<br />
73
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Dr. Edith & Mr. George Piness, Mill Valley<br />
Mrs. Cristina Rose, Los Angeles<br />
Mr. Adolph Rosekrans, Redwood City<br />
Mr. H. Russell Smith, Pasadena<br />
Mr. & Mrs. Steven L. Swig, San Francisco<br />
Beverly Thomas, Studio City<br />
Mr. A.W.B. Vincent, Monte Carlo, MONACO<br />
Mr. Ralph Walter, Los Angeles<br />
Mr. & Mrs. Richard C. Wulliger,<br />
Pacific Palisades<br />
Mr. & Mrs. Lee Zeigler, San Francisco<br />
$500 to $999<br />
Mr. Michael & Mrs. Marianne Beeman,<br />
Woodland<br />
Ms. Melinda Bittan, Los Angeles<br />
Mr. Ernest A. Bryant, III, Santa Barbara<br />
Mr. Michael Carson & Dr. Ronald Steigerwalt,<br />
Palm Springs<br />
Mr. Robert & Ms. Rebecca Cherny,<br />
San Francisco<br />
Mr. Robert Coleman, Oakland<br />
Mr. & Mrs. John C. Colver, Belvedere-Tiburon<br />
Mrs. Suzanne Crowell, San Marino<br />
Mrs. Leonore Daschbach, Atherton<br />
Mr. & Mrs. Frederick K. Duhring, Los Altos<br />
Mr. Bill S. & Mrs. Cynthia Floyd, Jr.,<br />
Portola Valley<br />
Ms. Pam Garcia & Mr. Peter Griesmaier,<br />
Oakland<br />
Mr. Harry R. Gibson III, South Lake Tahoe<br />
Dr. Erica & Mr. Barry Goode, Richmond<br />
Mr. & Mrs. Richard W. Goss II, San Francisco<br />
Mr. & Mrs. Alfred E. Heller, San Rafael<br />
Mr. & Mrs. Robert E. Henderson,<br />
Hillsborough<br />
Ms. Ruth M. Hill, Daly City<br />
Mr. William L. Horton, Los Angeles<br />
Zachary & Elizabeth Hulsey, Burlingame<br />
Mrs. Katharine H. Johnson, Belvedere-Tiburon<br />
Mr. & Mrs. G. Scott Jones, Mill Valley<br />
Mr. Douglas C. Kent, Davis<br />
Mr. David B. King, Fremont<br />
Mrs. E. Lampen, San Francisco<br />
Ms. Judy Lee, Redwood City<br />
Mrs. Betsy Link, Los Angeles<br />
Mr. & Mrs. Leonis C. Malburg, Vernon<br />
Ms. Cathy Maupin, San Francisco<br />
Mrs. David Jamison McDaniel, San Francisco<br />
Mrs. Nan Tucker McEvoy, San Francisco<br />
Mr. Robert Folger Miller, Burlingame<br />
Mr. & Ms. George & Janet A. Miller,<br />
San Francisco<br />
Mr. Lawrence E. Moehrke, San Rafael<br />
Mr. Robert London Moore, Jr., Verdugo City<br />
Mrs. Albert J. Moorman, Atherton<br />
Susan Morris, Belvedere-Tiburon<br />
Mr. & Mrs. Peter J. O’Hara, Sonoma<br />
Dr. Ynez Viole O’Neill, Los Angeles<br />
Mr. Kevin M. Pursglove, San Francisco<br />
Mrs. Wanda Rees-Williams, South Pasadena<br />
Mr. Michael Rugen & Mrs. Jeannine Kay,<br />
San Francisco<br />
Mr. Paul Sack, San Francisco<br />
Farrel & Shirley Schell, Oakland<br />
Mrs. Teresa Siebert, Carmichael<br />
John & Andrea Van de Kamp, Pasadena<br />
Mr. Richard C. Warmer, San Francisco<br />
Mrs. Jeanne & Mr. Bill C. Watson, Orinda<br />
Mr. Paul L. Wattis, Jr., Paicines<br />
Mr. Steven R. Winkel, Berkeley<br />
Ms. Sheila Wishek, San Francisco<br />
Mr. Daniel Woodhead, III, San Francisco<br />
$250 to $499<br />
Mr. Matt Adams, San Francisco<br />
Dr. & Mrs. Michael J. Antonini, San Francisco<br />
Mr. Scott C. Atthowe, Oakland<br />
Mr. & Mrs. Peter Avenali, San Francisco<br />
Ms. Marie Bartee, San Francisco<br />
Mr. John William Beatty, Jr., Portola Valley<br />
Jan Berckefeldt, Lafayette<br />
Mr. Robert Bettencourt, Coyote<br />
Mr. Frederic W. Bost, San Rafael<br />
Ms. Barbara Bottarini, San Francisco<br />
Mr. DeWitt F. Bowman, Mill Valley<br />
Ms. Carmelita Brooker, Escondido<br />
Mr. Mark Brown, Walnut Creek<br />
Mr. & Mrs. Curtis & Robin Caton, Berkeley<br />
Mr. Gordon Chamberlain, Redwood City<br />
Mrs. Park Chamberlain, Redwood City<br />
Mr. Michael Charlson, Oakland<br />
Mr. & Mrs. Herman Christensen, Jr., Atherton<br />
Drs. James & Linda Clever, Mill Valley<br />
Mr. John Coil, Santa Ana<br />
Renate & Robert Coombs, Oakland<br />
Mr. Jeff Craemer, San Rafael<br />
Ms. Karen D’Amato, San Carlos<br />
Mr. & Mrs. William Davidow, Woodside<br />
Mr. Lloyd De Llamas, Covina<br />
T. R. Delebo, M.D., Sausalito<br />
Mr. & Mrs. R. Dick, Healdsburg<br />
Mr. & Mrs. William G. Doolittle,<br />
Carmel By The Sea<br />
Mr. David Drake, Union City<br />
Mr. Robert M. Ebiner, West Covina<br />
Jacqueline & Christian Erdman, San Francisco<br />
Mr. David Ernst, San Francisco<br />
Mr. & Mrs. John Fisher, San Francisco<br />
Mr. & Mrs. James C. Flood, San Francisco<br />
Helene & Randall Frakes, San Francisco<br />
Mr. Perry Franklin Fry, San Francisco<br />
Mr. & Mrs. Milo Gates, Redwood City<br />
Mr. Karl E. Geier, Lafayette<br />
Mr. & Mrs. John Stevens Gilmore, Sacramento<br />
Dr. & Mrs. George J. Gleghorn,<br />
Rancho Palos Verdes<br />
Mr. Fred F. Gregory, Palos Verdes Peninsula<br />
Mrs. Richard M. Griffith, Jr.,<br />
Belvedere-Tiburon<br />
Mr. Allen Grossman, San Francisco<br />
Ms. Jeannie Gunn, Burbank<br />
Mr. Noble Hamilton, Jr., Greenbrae<br />
Carl & Jeanne Hartig, Alta Loma<br />
Mr. & Mrs. Scott M. Haskins, San Francisco<br />
Susan Brandt Hawley, Esq., Glen Ellen<br />
Mr. Warren Heckrotte, Oakland<br />
Ms. Stella Hexter, Oakland<br />
Mr. James Hofer, Redlands<br />
Mr. & Mrs. David & Carolyn Hoffman,<br />
Fremont<br />
Mr. Stephen H. Howell, San Francisco<br />
Mr. Clifford Hudson, Oklahoma City, OK<br />
Mr. Robert C. Hughes, El Cerrito<br />
Mr. Richard Hyde, Belvedere-Tiburon<br />
Mrs. Lon F. Israel, Walnut Creek<br />
75
donors<br />
Ms. Carol G. Johnson, Redwood City<br />
Mrs. Sylvia G. Johnson, Los Altos<br />
Mr. Charles B. Johnson & Dr. Ann Johnson,<br />
Hillsborough<br />
James & Paula Karman, Chico<br />
Mr. George Kennedy, Santa Cruz<br />
Mr. Wayne T. Kennedy, San Carlos<br />
Susan Keyte, San Francisco<br />
Mr. & Mrs. George S. Krusi, Oakland<br />
Mr. & Mrs. Gary F. Kurutz, Sacramento<br />
Judith Laird, Foster City<br />
Mr. & Mrs. William C. Landrath, Carmel<br />
Mr. & Mrs. Jude P. Laspa, San Francisco<br />
Mrs. Robert Livermore, Danville<br />
Ms. Janice Loomer, Castro Valley<br />
Mr. Weyman I. Lundquist, San Francisco<br />
Mr. Edward C. Lynch, Vancouver, WA<br />
Stephen & Alice Martin, San Mateo<br />
Mr. & Mrs. Thomas H. May, Oakville<br />
Wm. C. Corbett, Jr. & Kathleen McCaffrey,<br />
Fairfax<br />
Mr. Ray McDevitt, Mill Valley<br />
Mrs. Amy Meyer, San Francisco<br />
Mr. & Mrs. Burnett Miller, Sacramento<br />
Guy Molinari, Upper Saddle River, NJ<br />
Mr. & Mrs. Joe W. Morganti, Berkeley<br />
Ms. Elaine Myers, San Francisco<br />
Ms. Joanne Nissen, Soledad<br />
Mrs. Katherine Norman, Orinda<br />
Mr. Stanley Norsworthy, Fresno<br />
Mr. Thomas E. Nuckols, South Pasadena<br />
Ms. Harriett L. Orchard, Carmichael<br />
Mr. O. Leland Osborne, Belmont<br />
Ms. Diane Ososke, San Francisco<br />
Mr. & Mrs. Richard C. Otter,<br />
Belvedere-Tiburon<br />
Ms. Mary J. Parrish, San Francisco<br />
Mr. Warren Perry, San Francisco<br />
James Brice & Carole Peterson, Pleasanton<br />
Dr. & Mrs. John O. Pohlmann, Seal Beach<br />
Mr. Herbert C. Puffer, Folsom<br />
Mr. James Reynolds, Berkeley<br />
Mr. Terence Riddle, San Francisco<br />
Mr. Daniel W. Roberts, San Francisco<br />
Mr. Daimar Robinson, Salt Lake City, UT<br />
Mr. Robert E. Ronus, Los Angeles<br />
Jeanne Rose, San Francisco<br />
Mrs. James H. Ross, San Mateo<br />
Mr. Allen Rudolph, Menlo Park<br />
Ms. Susan Sesnon Salt, Borrego Spring<br />
Mr. Bernard Schulte, Jr., Orinda<br />
Mr. Jacob Gould Schurman, IV, San Francisco<br />
Rev. Thomas L. Seagrave, San Mateo<br />
Mr. Robert J. Sehr, Jr., Alamo<br />
Mr. Robert J. Sieling, San Carlos<br />
Mr. Keith Skinner, Berkeley<br />
Ms. Harriet Sollod, San Francisco<br />
Mr. Martin & Mrs. Sherril A. Spellman,<br />
Fremont<br />
Mr. Sanford D. Stadtfeld, Sausalito<br />
Mr. & Mrs. Isaac & Madeline Stein, Atherton<br />
Mr. & Mrs. Moreland L. Stevens, Newcastle<br />
Mr. Robert Stoldal, Las Vegas, NV<br />
Mr. Daniel F. Sullivan, San Francisco<br />
Mr. & Mrs. Anson Blake Thacher, Ojai<br />
Mr. Max Thelen, Jr., San Rafael<br />
Mr. Richard L. Tower, San Francisco<br />
Mr. Thomas Tragardh, San Francisco<br />
Ms. Catherine G. Tripp, San Rafael<br />
Ms. Anne M Turner, San Francisco<br />
Jane Twomey, San Francisco<br />
Mr. Christopher VerPlanck, San Francisco<br />
Mr. Don Villarejo, Davis<br />
Mr. Paul A. Violich, San Francisco<br />
Mr. Peter Wald, San Francisco<br />
Josh Weinstein & Lisa Simmons,<br />
Santa Monica<br />
Kathleen Weitz, San Francisco<br />
Ms. Willy Werby, Burlingame<br />
Walter & Ann Weybright, San Francisco<br />
Mr. Warren R. White, San Francisco<br />
Mr. Thomas J. White, Oakland<br />
Mr. Ed White & Mrs. Patti White, Los Altos<br />
Ms. Nancy C. Woodward, Carmichael<br />
Mr. Robert A. Young, Los Angeles<br />
Ms. Deborah Zepnick, Calabasas<br />
76 <strong>California</strong> History • volume <strong>90</strong> number 1 2012<br />
CoRPoRAtE, FoUNDAtIoN<br />
& GoVERNMENt SUPPoRt<br />
$50,000 to $199,000<br />
San Francisco Foundation, San Francisco<br />
The S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation,<br />
San Francisco<br />
$10,000 to $49,999<br />
Bland Family Foundation, Saint Louis, MO<br />
Grants for the Arts, San Francisco<br />
Sherwin-Williams, Richardson, TX<br />
The Barkley Fund, Menlo Park<br />
The Bernard Osher Foundation, San Francisco<br />
Union Bank of <strong>California</strong> Foundation,<br />
Los Angeles<br />
UnitedHealthcare, Cypress<br />
Wells Fargo, San Francisco<br />
$1,000 to $9,999<br />
Cal Humanities, San Francisco<br />
Comcast, Livermore<br />
Derry Casey Construction, Inc., San Francisco<br />
Dodge & Cox, San Francisco<br />
Hearst Corporation, San Francisco<br />
John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ<br />
Louise M. Davies Foundation, San Francisco<br />
Marvell Technology Group, Santa Clara<br />
J. Rodney Eason Pfund Family Foundation,<br />
Carmichael<br />
Ronald & Ann Williams Charitable<br />
Foundation, Los Altos<br />
Safeway Inc., Pleasanton<br />
The Chrysopolae Foundation, San Francisco<br />
The Consulate General of Switzerland in<br />
San Francisco, San Francisco<br />
The Stanley S. Langendorf Foundation,<br />
San Francisco<br />
$250 to $999<br />
Brick Row Book Shop, San Francisco<br />
Chevron Texaco Matching Gift Program,<br />
Princeton, NJ<br />
Cypress Lawn Memorial Park, Daly City<br />
ht Lehmann Consulting, Sausalito<br />
Leona & Donald Davis Fund, Greenbrae<br />
Limoneira Company, Santa Paula<br />
Moore Dry Dock Foundation, San Francisco<br />
Stanley Stairs, Esq., New York, NY<br />
IN KIND DoNAtIoNS<br />
Dennis Agatep Photography, Oakland<br />
Kirk Amyx, San Francisco<br />
Amyx Photography, San Francisco<br />
Anchor Brewing Company, San Francisco<br />
Anchor Distilling Company, San Francisco<br />
Apertifs Bar Management, Santa Rosa<br />
Barbary Coast Conservancy of the American<br />
Cocktail, San Francisco<br />
BAYCAT, San Francisco<br />
Belfor Property Restoration, Hayward<br />
David Burkhart, San Bruno<br />
John Burton, Santa Rosa<br />
<strong>California</strong> Bountiful Foundation, Sacramento<br />
Cavallo Point, Sausalito<br />
CBW Group, Inc., San Francisco<br />
Chandon, Yountville<br />
Drakes Bay Oyster Company, Inverness<br />
H. Joseph Ehrmann, San Francisco<br />
Evvy Eisen, Point Reyes Station<br />
Elixir Cocktail Catering, San Francisco<br />
Elixir Saloon, San Francisco<br />
Daniel Godinez, Half Moon Bay<br />
Hafner Vineyard, Alexander Valley<br />
HPA Strategies, Herglotz Public Affairs,<br />
San Francisco<br />
Hearst Ranch Winery, San Simeon<br />
House of Shields, San Francisco<br />
Kappa, Daly City<br />
Katzgraphics, San Francisco<br />
La Boulange Café & Bakery, San Francisco<br />
Lagunitas Brewing Company, Petaluma<br />
Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles<br />
Luxardo, San Francisco<br />
Kevin & Nancy Lunny, Inverness<br />
Eric Passetti, San Francisco<br />
Richard Ramos, San Mateo<br />
Safeway, San Francisco<br />
San Francisco Girls Chorus<br />
Sherman Clay, San Francisco<br />
Square One Organic Spirits, San Francisco<br />
St. Regis, San Francisco<br />
The Candy Store, San Francisco<br />
The Judson Studios, Los Angeles<br />
Trader Joe’s, San Francisco<br />
United States Bartenders Guild<br />
Waking State Design, Los Angeles<br />
Whitehead & Porter LLP, San Francisco<br />
Working Girls Café, San Francisco
CALIFoRNIA LEGACY<br />
CIRCLE<br />
legacy gifts received<br />
North Baker, Tiburon<br />
Elise Eilers Elliot, Marin County<br />
Muriel T. French, San Francisco<br />
J. Lowell Groves, San Francisco<br />
Louis H. Heilbron, San Francisco<br />
Arthur Mejia, San Francisco<br />
Ms. Mary K. Ryan, San Francisco<br />
DoNoRS to thE<br />
CoLLECtIoN<br />
Benton County <strong>Historical</strong> <strong>Society</strong> and<br />
Museum, Philomath, OR<br />
Kenneth G. Berry<br />
Dave Burkhart<br />
<strong>California</strong> Art Club<br />
<strong>California</strong> Genealogical <strong>Society</strong> & Library<br />
The Call Family<br />
Cornell University Library<br />
Paul DiMarco<br />
Evvy Eisen<br />
Charles Fracchia<br />
Carol Eber<br />
Mrs. Vera Freeberg<br />
Brenda Frink<br />
Elizabeth Kay Gibson<br />
Golden Gate National Recreation Area<br />
Fred Hamber<br />
Barbara Harren Estate / Stearns History<br />
Museum, Belgrade, MN<br />
Alfred C. Harrison, Jr., The North Point<br />
Gallery<br />
Lynne Horiuchi<br />
Jewish Family and Children’s Services of<br />
San Francisco<br />
Jedediah Smith <strong>Society</strong><br />
Ron Johnson<br />
Johnson County Museum, Shawnee, Kansas<br />
Alastair Johnston, Poltroon Press<br />
Tim Kelly Consulting, LLC<br />
Mark & Rita Knudsen for Moxon Chappel<br />
Woody LaBounty, Western Neighborhoods<br />
Project<br />
Christine Laennec<br />
Philip Woods Markwart & Elisabeth<br />
Markwart Teel<br />
Elizabeth McKee<br />
William Byron McClintock<br />
Michael McCone<br />
Doug McWilliams<br />
Kenneth Murrah / Orange County Regional<br />
History Center, Winter Park, FL<br />
Make plans to attend the<br />
Organization of American Historians<br />
2013 Annual Meeting<br />
Andrew T. Nadell, M.D.<br />
Carol Potter Peckham<br />
Patrick Rafferty & Peter Shott<br />
Dr. Francis Rigney<br />
Susan H. Riley<br />
Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food<br />
Science, University of <strong>California</strong>, Davis<br />
Karen Jacobsen Scarsdale, on behalf of<br />
Violet & James W. B. Thomas and<br />
Frederic Lee Jacobsen & Thelma Harris<br />
Jacobsen Thomas<br />
The Shaw <strong>Historical</strong> Library,<br />
Klamath Falls, OR<br />
Nancy K. Smith<br />
Tim Stanley<br />
Mary Jane Stanton<br />
D. Steele<br />
William & Shirley Swasey<br />
Deanna Tomei<br />
Paul Tutwiler<br />
Gail Unzelman<br />
Aline Spivock Usim<br />
Alison Weir<br />
San Francisco Cable Car Museum<br />
U. S. Department of the Interior, NPS,<br />
Branch of History, Architecture and<br />
Landscapes, Yosemite National Park<br />
Judy Yung<br />
San Francisco<br />
The Organization of American Historians will hold its 2013 Annual Meeting<br />
April 11 –14 at the Hilton San Francisco Union Square. Join American history<br />
enthusiasts from around the world for four days filled with sessions, tours,<br />
and special events.<br />
This year’s meeting will include more than 150 sessions on cutting-edge<br />
American history scholarship, teaching resources, and best practices. The<br />
program includes sessions on <strong>California</strong> history, tours of area attractions<br />
including the New Deal Mural Project at Coit Tower and Rincon Center,<br />
and the recently restored and renovated historic Angel Island Immigration<br />
Station in San Francisco Bay.<br />
Also, don’t miss the OAH Exhibit Hall that includes the newest publications<br />
from the field’s most respected authors and publishers.<br />
Register today to attend the 2013 OAH Annual Meeting in San Francisco<br />
and save! Early registration ends March 31. More information online at<br />
http://annualmeeting.oah.org<br />
Organization of American Historians � 112 n bryan ave � bloomington in 47408 � 812.855.7311 � www.oah.org<br />
77
on the back cover<br />
The celebrated western writer Joaquin Miller (circa 1839–1913) was at the center of<br />
the Bay Area’s art and literary circles at the turn of the last century, principally at the<br />
Hights, his self-constructed East Bay hillside bohemia (see pages 40–61).<br />
Miller’s participation in the creation of Adelaide Hanscom’s 1<strong>90</strong>5 illustrated Rubáiyát<br />
of Omar Khayyám is acknowledged in the book’s Arts and Crafts–inspired title page.<br />
Along with his fellow literati and friends George Sterling and George Wharton James,<br />
Miller posed for the pictorial photographer’s lavishly constructed scenes, which<br />
featured figures in ancient costume enacting parts of Khayyám’s verse.<br />
Unfortunately, Hanscom’s negatives for the book, one of the first to illustrate a literary<br />
work with fine art photographs, were destroyed in San Francisco’s 1<strong>90</strong>6 earthquake<br />
and fire.<br />
Courtesy of Michael Shreve; www.michaelshreve.com<br />
oFFiCerS<br />
ROBERT CHATTEL, Sherman Oaks, President<br />
R. THOMAS DECKER, San Francisco, Executive Vice President<br />
STEPHEN LeSIEUR, San Francisco, Vice President<br />
THOMAS R. OWENS, San Francisco, Vice President<br />
CRISTINA ROSE, Los Angeles, Vice President<br />
LARRY GOTLIEB, Sherman Oaks, Secretary<br />
JOHN BROWN, Riverside, Treasurer<br />
board oF truSteeS<br />
MELINDA BITTAN, Los Angeles<br />
ALBERT CAMARILLO, Palo Alto<br />
IAN CAMPBELL, Los Angeles<br />
JON CHRISTENSEN, Los Angeles<br />
TONY GONZALEZ, Sacramento<br />
FRED HAMBER, San Francisco<br />
ROBERT HIATT, Mill Valley<br />
GARY KURUTZ, Sacramento<br />
SUE MOLINARI, San Francisco<br />
BEVERLY THOMAS, Los Angeles<br />
HAROLD TUCK, San Diego<br />
RALPH WALTER, Los Angeles<br />
BLANCA ZARAZúA, Salinas<br />
CaliFornia hiStoriCal<br />
Foundation board<br />
DEWITT F. BOWMAN, Mill Valley, President<br />
BILL McCREERY, Hillsborough<br />
EDITH L. PINESS, Mill Valley<br />
DAVID BARRY WHITEHEAD, San Francisco<br />
preSidentS eMeriti<br />
JAN BERCKEFELDT, Lafayette<br />
MARIBELLE LEAVITT, San Francisco<br />
ROBERT A . McNEELY, San Diego<br />
CARLOTTA MELLON, Carmel Highlands<br />
EDITH L . PINESS, Mill Valley<br />
STEPHEN L . TABER, San Francisco<br />
JOHN K . VAN DE KAMP, Los Angeles<br />
exeCutive direCtor eMerituS<br />
MICHAEL McCONE, San Francisco<br />
SpeCial adviSor<br />
HUELL HOWSER, Los Angeles<br />
FelloWS<br />
WILLIAM N. DAVIS JR., Sacramento<br />
RICHARD H. DILLON, Mill Valley<br />
CHARLES A. FRACCHIA, San Francisco<br />
ROBERT V. HINE, Irvine<br />
GLORIA RICCI LOTHROP, Pasadena<br />
JAMES R. MILLS, Coronado<br />
JAMES JABUS RAWLS, Sonoma<br />
ANDREW ROLLE, San Marino<br />
EARL F. SCHMIDT JR., Palo Alto<br />
KEVIN STARR, San Francisco<br />
FRANCIS J. WEBER, Mission Hills<br />
CHARLES WOLLENBERG, Berkeley<br />
79
80<br />
spotlight<br />
Photographer<br />
Unidentified<br />
Location<br />
Hollywood, Los Angeles<br />
The aftermath of World War I dramatically<br />
altered the landscape of Los Angeles,<br />
and nowhere more visibly than in<br />
the canyons of Hollywood, where developers<br />
sought to imprint their vision on<br />
the fast-growing metropolis.<br />
To help publicize a planned 500-acre<br />
subdivision, in 1923 the real estate<br />
syndicate headed by Los Angeles Times<br />
publisher Harry Chandler erected a<br />
large $21,000 sign composed of thirteen<br />
50-foot letters spaced eight inches<br />
Untitled [Photographs of Hollywoodland, Calif.,<br />
and Los Angeles County coastline]<br />
ca. 1924–29<br />
<strong>California</strong> <strong>Historical</strong> <strong>Society</strong><br />
pc 002.001.tif<br />
<strong>California</strong> History • volume <strong>90</strong> number 1 2012<br />
apart and illuminated by four thousand<br />
20-watt light bulbs. The sign and the<br />
giant white dot below it, 35 feet in<br />
diameter, beckoned the eye as though<br />
punctuating the land’s intended use.<br />
What was once the perfect advertisement<br />
is today the city’s signature land-<br />
mark, minus the last four letters, which<br />
were removed as part of a 1949 restoration<br />
organized by the Hollywood<br />
Chamber of Commerce. Appropriately,<br />
the Hollywood sign still harkens above<br />
the hills; Sherwin-Williams, following<br />
donations by Dutch Boy Paints in 1995<br />
and Bay Cal Painting in 2005, has partnered<br />
with the Hollywood Sign Trust<br />
to prepare the sign in honor of its <strong>90</strong>th<br />
birthday celebration in February 2013.<br />
You don’t have to be in Los Angeles<br />
to join the party; live webcam views<br />
of the sign are available, together with<br />
history, lesson plans, and coverage of<br />
the sign in popular culture, at http://<br />
www.hollywoodsign.org/.
I See Beauty in This Life:<br />
A Photographer Looks at 100 Years of Rural <strong>California</strong><br />
Les Bruhn, Bodega Bay, with “Queen,” won 2nd place, 26th annual Fox Western<br />
International Sheep Dog Trials at <strong>California</strong> Ram Sale, Sacramento, 1964.<br />
Photographer unknown, silver gelatin print, 3 x 3 inches. <strong>California</strong> <strong>Historical</strong><br />
<strong>Society</strong>, <strong>California</strong> Wool Growers Association photographs (PC 014), PC 014.002.tif.<br />
October 28, 2012 through March 24, 2013<br />
Galleries of the <strong>California</strong> <strong>Historical</strong> <strong>Society</strong><br />
678 Mission Street<br />
San Francisco, <strong>California</strong> 94105<br />
Lisa M. Hamilton, Ashley, Riata Ranch Cowboy Girl, Tulare County, 2011,<br />
chromogenic print, 24 x 24 inches. Courtesy of the artist.<br />
Over the past two years, writer and photographer<br />
Lisa M. Hamilton has been telling the stories of<br />
rural communities in her multimedia work Real<br />
Rural. For this exhibition she has delved into the<br />
collections of the <strong>California</strong> <strong>Historical</strong> <strong>Society</strong> to<br />
connect these present-day stories with the past.<br />
Featuring close to two hundred photographs, I See<br />
Beauty in This Life is a combination of large-scale<br />
color prints by Hamilton and her selections from<br />
<strong>California</strong> <strong>Historical</strong> <strong>Society</strong>’s vast photography<br />
collections—material dating from the 1880s<br />
through the mid-twentieth century.<br />
This exhibition is part of Curating <strong>California</strong>, a new<br />
program through which remarkable <strong>California</strong>ns<br />
explore our rich collections with the goal of inspiring<br />
a project or exhibition.<br />
Your State<br />
Your History<br />
Your <strong>Historical</strong> <strong>Society</strong>