The Only President of California

Near Red Bluff, a quiet adobe on the Sacramento River marks the ranch of the only man who ever served as president of the California Republic. On June fourteenth, eighteen forty-six, a band of American settlers seized the Mexican pueblo of Sonoma, captured the commandante Mariano Vallejo, and raised a flag stitched with a grizzly bear. William B.

Ide, a carpenter and farmer from Illinois, wrote the proclamation declaring California an independent republic and became its sole head of state. The republic lasted exactly twenty-five days before American naval forces arrived and folded it into the United States during the Mexican-American War. Ide retired to this Sacramento River farm, where he died in eighteen fifty-two.

The adobe park preserves the era he briefly governed.