The Bear Flag Republic: Twenty-Two Days

Stand in this plaza long enough and you can almost reconstruct the morning of June fourteenth, eighteen forty-six. A group of roughly thirty Anglo settlers, land speculators, and soldiers of fortune rode into Sonoma before dawn, woke General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, and informed him that California was under new management. They arrested him in his own parlor. He offered them wine while negotiations proceeded. They accepted.

The flag they raised over this square had been sewn the previous night from a white petticoat and a piece of brown homespun. Someone painted a grizzly bear on it, which another observer later noted looked more like a pig. A red stripe ran the length of the bottom. A single star. Beneath it the words: California Republic.

The California Republic lasted about twenty-five days.

General Vallejo was, at the time of his arrest, the largest private landowner in California, with roughly one hundred seventy-five thousand acres across Sonoma and Napa counties. He was also, and this is the detail the Bear Flag mythology tends to suppress, a committed advocate for American annexation. He had spent years arguing that California's future lay with the United States rather than Mexico. He cooperated willingly with the rebels. He offered them use of his supplies and horses. They imprisoned him anyway.

John C. Fremont, the U.S. Army explorer who claimed credit for the revolt in dispatches and memoirs afterward, was not present on this plaza when the flag went up. He arrived days later and retroactively positioned himself as its architect. The men who actually broke down Vallejo's door that morning were, most of them, obscure figures whom history never bothered to sort out.

The republic dissolved on July ninth, eighteen forty-six, when riders arrived with news that the Mexican-American War had already begun weeks earlier, the U.S. Navy had taken Monterey, and California was, legally speaking, already American. The Bear Flaggers had staged a revolution for a country that had already been captured without them.

The plaza they seized is still the civic center of Sonoma. The bear on the California state flag is a descendant of theirs: crude, symbolic, stitched together overnight by men who were making history at a speed slightly faster than the facts.