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On Aug 1, 1834, two ships left the west coast Mexican port of San Blas, carrying 239 colonists bound for the young nation’s far-flung province of California. As recounted in the last Portals, the Hijar-Padres expedition (named after its two leaders) had been dispatched by Mexico’s co-president, Valentin Gomez Farias, for two reasons. The colonists were to create a settlement on California’s northern frontier that would prevent the Russians from expanding from their outpost at Fort Ross. And they were to take over and begin distributing the vast lands formerly controlled by the missions, which the previous year had been ordered secularized.
These coveted lands had been held in trust for the native people, but their disposition was now unclear. As Alan Hutchinson notes in his authoritative account of the expedition, “Frontier Settlement in California: The Hijar-Padres Colony and Its Origins,” the debate over what to do with the mission lands hinged on two different views about the nature of the Native Americans. The liberal Farias administration, inspired by Enlightenment ideas of equality, were critical of the paternalistic way the mission fathers had dealt with the natives. They believed that with a different approach, the native people were capable of becoming productive Mexican citizens and working the lands. The Mexicans who were already in California, who had begun calling themselves Californios, argued that long experience had shown that the natives were incapable of becoming farmers and that handing over the lands to them would be disastrous, both for the native people and for the province’s economy. But they were also driven by self-interest: they wanted the lands themselves. They were supported by the province’s governor, Jose Figueroa. The potential for conflict between the colonists and Figueroa and the Californios was obvious.
If all had gone according to Farias’s plan, this conflict would have been avoided. Farias had given orders that the expedition’s co-leader, Jose Maria de Hijar, was to replace Figueroa as governor. But while the expedition was underway, Farias was deposed by his conservative co-president, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, and his order countermanded. As a result, Figueroa did not consider himself bound to follow Hijar’s instructions. And crucially, the vagueness of those instructions led Figueroa and the Californios to suspect the colonists of wanting to seize all the land for themselves.
Figueroa first met with Hijar in the provincial capital, Monterey, on October 14, 1834. Figueroa greeted him amicably and informed him that Santa Anna had ordered him to remain as governor. The meeting proceeded relatively harmoniously until Hijar asked Figueroa to hand over the property of the missions, and showed him his instructions. The surprised Figueroa replied that he would comply, but said that in his view it was an injustice to take the land away from the Native Americans, which they regarded as their property. Left unsaid was the fact the Figueroa and the Californios believed they had as much right to the land as the Native Americans, and that they suspected the colonists of using their professed concern for the native people to pull off a colossal land grab. For his part, Hijar suspected Figueroa and the Californios of doing exactly the same thing. On this uneasy note, the meeting broke up.
The last question: What was “Fort Gunnybags”?
Answer: The headquarters of the Second Committee of Vigilance, located on Sacramento Street near Front Street. Formed in 1856, it was the largest vigilante movement in American history.
This week’s question: After benches were installed in Golden Gate Park around 1880, what supposed crisis erupted?
Things rapidly went downhill from there. The two men exchanged lengthy letters, in which they expressed increasing suspicion of each other. Hijar angrily moved out of Figueroa’s house. In a long “Manifesto” defending his actions that he subsequently published (and which was the first book printed in California), Figueroa accused Hijar of trying to bribe him. Figueroa also received warnings, which appear to have been false, that some of the colonists were plotting against him.
Angry and aggrieved, Hijar nonetheless considered himself duty bound to continue with his mission. He proceeded with his original plan to establish a settlement on the northern frontier, near the last of the missions, Mission San Francisco de Solano in Sonoma, to check Russian expansion. Many of the colonists had already arrived on the northern frontier and begun working on the settlement, which was to be called “Santa Anna and Farias.” (The exact location of this settlement is unknown, but it was close to Mark West Road, a few miles north of Santa Rosa.)
In late February, 1835, Hijar and some other colonists arrived at San Francisco, where they had another tense meeting with Governor Figueroa at Mission Dolores. Figueroa told Hijar that his friends were plotting against him, named the supposed leaders of the plot and urged him to put an end to it, promising that if he did, he would keep the whole affair quiet. Hijar ignored these warnings, treating Figueroa with the “same coldness and indifference with which he is accustomed to deal with important affairs,” as the governor wrote in his “Manifesto.” After the meeting ended, the two men exchanged letters. Hijar asked Figueroa to tell him whether or not he would fund the colony, as stipulated in Hijar’s instructions. Figueroa replied that he would not be able to fund it fully, and offered to let the colonists disband and settle wherever they liked. When Hijar rejected this offer, Figueroa ordered the colony dispersed.
Hijar headed north to oversee the disbanding of the colony, probably embarking for the Sonoma estuary from the little cove on the Bay called Yerba Buena, possibly in a launch piloted by a Native American named Celso. But any plans for an orderly shutdown of the colony were dashed when one of the comic-opera-like “revolutions” that recurred in Mexican California took place in Los Angeles. Figueroa was convinced that Hijar, Padres and some of the colonists were behind the uprising. He ordered the colonists’ arms confiscated, and Hijar and Padres were put aboard a ship under arrest and sent back to Mexico.
The Hijar-Padres colony, Mexico’s most ambitious attempt to colonize its California province, had fizzled out almost before it began. But it did have some beneficial effects. The colonists, who scattered across California, were better educated and of a higher class than previous Mexican immigrants, and many became important figures in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Monterey. Such eminent men as Jose Abrego, Antonio Franco Coronel, Jose Maria Covarrubias, Francisco Guerrero, Jesus de Noe, Victor Prudon and Florencio Serrano all came up with the Hijar-Padres party. And many of the 22 teachers in the expedition helped educate a generation of Californios. As Antonio Coronel told the historian Hubert Bancroft, “Many sons of the country who are today men of importance…owe to (the teachers of the colony) the little education and knowledge they possess.”
With the colony dispersed, Figueroa and the military commander at Sonoma, Mariano Vallejo, needed to find new settlers to guard against the Russians. Not surprisingly, after the way the Hijar-Padres party had been treated, few Mexicans were interested, so Figueroa and Vallejo allowed a number of Anglo-Americans, including James Black, Edward M. McIntosh, James Dawson, and Mark West, to settle in the area. Ironically, at the same time these Anglo-Americans were settling on the northern frontier, the Russian threat that was the reason they were allowed to settle was fading away, and it disappeared altogether when the Russian government sold Fort Ross to John Sutter in 1841. Even more ironically, a much greater threat to Mexico’s feebly defended province ended up being posed by the Americans, who began to pour into California in increasing numbers. By allowing Anglo-Americans to settle around Sonoma, Figueroa increased this threat. That is, perhaps, the most significant, if inglorious, legacy of the doomed Hijar-Padres party.
Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling book “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco.” His most recent book is “Spirits of San Francisco: Voyages Through the Unknown City.” All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. To read earlier Portals of the Past, go to sfchronicle.com/portals.
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