Sonoma Plaza and the Bear Flag Revolt

Stand in the square of Sonoma Plaza and you are standing at the birthplace of a country that lasted less than a month. On the morning of June fourteenth, eighteen forty six, roughly thirty armed American settlers rode into this Mexican pueblo and seized its lightly defended garrison without firing a single shot. They surrounded the home of General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, the most powerful man in northern California, and demanded his surrender.

Vallejo, who quietly favored the United States taking over California, surprised them. He invited the ringleaders inside and offered them wine and brandy while the terms were discussed. The men outside, growing impatient, needed a symbol.

So they took down the Mexican flag from the plaza and ran up a hasty banner of their own. On a strip of unbleached cotton they painted a single red star, a grizzly bear facing it, a red stripe along the bottom, and the words California Republic. The painting was so rough that observers reportedly joked the bear looked more like a pig.

That homemade flag gave the uprising its name, the Bear Flag Revolt, and the new nation its identity, the California Republic. The republic was tiny and short lived. It had no navy, no real government, and almost no citizens beyond the men who had declared it.

It lasted just twenty five days. On July ninth, eighteen forty six, United States Navy Lieutenant Joseph Revere arrived and raised the American flag over the Sonoma Barracks, folding the little republic into the larger war between the United States and Mexico. The bear was never forgotten.

Decades later, in nineteen eleven, its descendant became the official flag of the state of California, grizzly and star and all, even though the real California grizzly had by then been hunted to extinction. Today a bronze monument on a corner of the plaza marks the spot where the flag first flew. The square around you, once a Mexican military parade ground laid out by Vallejo himself, is now the largest town plaza in California and the green heart of the Sonoma Valley wine country.