Volume 90, Number 1 - California Historical Society

an accomplished one like his father—as Pehandutawin,
the woman who bore Sully’s child.
Langdon Sully did not mention Alfred’s relationship
with her in his biography, but reproduced
that painting and hinted at its significance by
noting: “Alfred’s second wife, Sophia, was aware
of the relationships between soldiers and Indians
of the Sioux tribes on the frontier. She refused to
let her husband hang the picture of the Indian
girls in her house.” 18
All three women with whom Sully had children
belonged to groups whose homelands were occupied
by American troops and claimed—or, in the
case of the Confederate Virginians, reclaimed—
by the nation he represented. Sully’s role as an
officer and occupier was complex and involved
both conquest and conciliation. One might say
that he was inclined to sleep with the enemy, but
none of the societies to which he was linked as
a husband or father was intrinsically hostile to
his own. All had traditions of accommodating
outsiders or newcomers through hospitality and
exchanges of gifts, goods, and intimacies.
Sully, in return, welcomed such give-and-take
and was more tolerant and appreciative of rival
cultures than many American expansionists of
his day. Yet, he could not enter as freely into
those cultures as did civilians like those obliging
Yankee merchants who settled in California during
the Mexican era, for whom accommodating
foreigners was their stock in trade. The official
role he played in Monterey after annexation did
not allow for full immersion in the society he
joined briefly by wedding Manuela. His position
was more like that of some earlier American settlers
who defied categorization as either docile
assimilationists or hostile intruders.
Benjamin D. Wilson, for example, who arrived
overland from New Mexico in 1841 and settled
as a rancher near present-day Riverside with his
wife, Ramona Yorba, whom he wed in 1844, was
known respectfully as Don Benito to his many
Hispanic relatives and compañeros. Yet, his close
ties to Californios did not stop him from volunteering
to fight those who opposed the American
occupation in 1846. 19
U.S. officers serving in California during the
Mexican War could not easily avoid being cast
in the role of hostile intruders. But those who
remained or came here after the fighting ended,
as Sully did, found themselves in an ambiguous
position as warriors by profession whose task
was to help restore order and stability to an occupied
country.
Sully’s courtship of Manuela was, in one sense,
an act of accommodation like that of previous
American visitors who entered this society
through marriage. But it was also an intimate
intrusion and personal conquest by an occupying
officer, not unlike the advances made by Americans
in uniform in later times as they extended
their nation’s reach across the Pacific to the
Philippines and beyond and acquired women in
occupied countries as wives or mistresses. Intent
on annexing his beloved Manuela, or winning
her on his own terms, Sully took liberties with
his hosts, for whom incorporation in America’s
“empire for liberty” was, at best, a mixed blessing.
Like earlier Spanish colonizers who subjected
Native Californians to spiritual conquest,
he demonstrated that intrusions made with
seemingly good intentions could have tragic consequences
and that no conquest, however well
meaning, was truly innocent or innocuous.
Stephen G. Hyslop is an independent scholar who has
written extensively on American history and the Spanish
American frontier. He is the author of Contest for California:
From Spanish Colonization to the American Conquest and
Bound for Santa Fe: The Road to New Mexico and the American
Conquest, 1806–1848 and coauthor of several books published
by the National Geographic Society. He also served as editor
of a twenty-three-volume series on American Indians for
Time-Life Books.
17