Colin Woodard (33 page)

The war indeed proved to be a slaughter. U.S. forces drove across Mexico conquering Alta California, New Mexico, and much of the rest of El Norte. By the early fall of 1847, they occupied Mexico City and Veracruz. For policy makers the question was not how to win the war but rather how much of Mexico they should appropriate. Again, the debate broke largely along national lines. Yankees generally opposed any territorial annexations, fearing they would add more slave states and make the country too large for them to ever hope to assimilate it all into the New England Way. Midlanders took a pacifistic stance. Appalachians enthusiastically backed military conquest and the imperial project, arguing for the total annihilation of Mexico. Tidewater and New Netherland were ambivalent.
¹³

In the end, the United States seized only the sparsely populated northern half of Mexico, an area that included the modern states of Arizona, New Mexico, California, Nevada, and Utah. Curiously, further annexations were rejected because of the opposition of Deep Southern leaders, who feared being unable to assimilate the more densely populated, racially mixed central and southern states of Mexico. “More than half of the Mexicans are Indians, and the other is composed chiefly of mixed tribes,” warned Senator John Calhoun. “I protest against such a union as that! Ours, sir, is the Government of a white race.”
¹⁴

The war, which ended in 1848, and the subsequent Gadsden Purchase split ownership of El Norte between two countries. Sparsely populated southern California and southern Arizona joined more heavily settled New Mexico and south Texas as occupied territories within the United States.
Norteños
in all of these places would be subjected to discrimination, disenfranchisement, and a massive cultural challenge from their new overlords yet would survive a century of occupation to challenge their subjugation in the late twentieth century. El Norte's southern section—the states of Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, Coahuila, Chihuahua, Sonora, and Baja California—would remain in Mexico but would continue to be subject to, and often embrace, the influences of their American neighbors; these northern states remained at odds with central Mexico, serving as the core of support in the Mexican Revolution and the electoral overthrow of the corrupt Revolutionary Institutional Party in the early 1990s.
¹⁵

But large parts of the annexed Mexican territory had never really been colonized and, culturally speaking, had never truly been a part of El Norte: northern California, Nevada, Utah, and most of Colorado and Arizona. These enormous regions were about to become the birthplace of two new ethnocultural nations, built with staggering speed on lands seized from their native inhabitants. Amazingly the Left Coast and Far West would evolve in complete opposition to each other, and to the occupied Spanish-speaking nation to their south.

CHAPTER 20

W
hy is it that the coastal zone in northern California, Oregon, and Washington seems to have so much more in common with New England than it does with other parts of those states? From voting behavior to culture wars to foreign policy, why has the Left Coast found itself allied with Yankeedom—and at odds with its neighbors to the south and west—since its foundation?

The primary reason is that the majority of the Left Coast's early colonists were Yankees who arrived by sea in the hopes of founding a second New England on the shores of the Pacific. And while they didn't fully succeed in this mission—the Left Coast has always had fundamental temperamental differences from its eastern ally—they left a stamp of utopian idealism that put this young nation on a collision course with its neighbors in deferential El Norte and the libertarian Far West.

 

In the early nineteenth century the Pacific coast of North America was still largely under Native American control. Spain theoretically claimed all of what is now California, but for practical purposes,
norteño
influence began petering out to the north at Monterey, and ceased altogether at San Francisco. Britain and the United States had yet to resolve who controlled the Pacific Northwest, agreeing only that it would eventually be divided between them. On their maps there was just an enormous mass of land called the Oregon Territory, which encompassed what is now British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. Prior to this, the struggle in the region pitted New France against Yankeedom. The New French dominated the local staff of the Hudson's Bay Company, the British fur trading conglomerate that was, in effect, the government of much of what is now western and northern Canada. On the ground, the New French manned most of the company's fortified fur trading posts in the area, and when they retired, some settled down with their Native American wives in the familiar métis pattern. Until the 1830s their primary rivals were shipborne fur traders from New England, who made no attempt to set up permanent outposts.
¹
For the next century or more, the Chinook Indians called all British people “King George Men” and referred to Americans simply as “Bostons.”
²

As a result of this very long-distance fur trade, New Englanders had better intelligence and greater knowledge of the Pacific coast than anyone else in the United States. Not surprisingly, their intellectual and religious leaders soon added this new “wilderness” to the list of places in need of Yankee salvation. In the 1830s Lyman Beecher was calling on his followers to save the West from the cruel machinations of the Pope and his obedient Catholic immigrant followers. “The rapid influx of foreign emigrants, unacquainted with our institutions, unaccustomed to self-government, inaccessible to education . . . and easily embodied and wielded by sinister design,” he wrote, threatened “the safety of our republic.” The solution, Beecher argued, was to educate and assimilate the newcomers “under the full action of our schools and republican institutions.” Beecher, who was then training missionaries in Cincinnati, had German and Irish Catholic immigrants in the Great Lakes and upper Mississippi Valley foremost in his mind. But for those familiar with the Pacific, Beecher's warnings were equally applicable to Catholic New French traders on the Columbia River or, soon thereafter, the
norteños
of California. That Franciscan missionaries were already schooling Indian children in San Jose only increased the urgency of the mission.
³

This new Yankee “errand in the wilderness” got underway in fits and starts in the late 1820s. A delusional New Hampshire schoolmaster, Hall Jackson Kelley, tirelessly promoted an ambitious colonization scheme for the Pacific Northwest, a region he'd never seen. His elaborate plans for a civic and religious republic never got off the ground, but his marketing effort—he plastered posters across New England, published books, and petitioned Congress for aid—did inspire others. Jason Lee, a northern Methodist preacher from Vermont, traveled overland across the continent to found a mission near what is now Salem, Oregon, in 1834. Working first with Native Americans, Lee recruited teachers and settlers from New England and eventually added an institute that would become the first college in the western United States (now Willamette University). A Presbyterian missionary named Samuel Parker of Massachusetts spent much of 1835 and 1836 preaching and selecting future mission sites in the Oregon Territory; his book,
The Far West
, drew more Yankees to the territory, most of them clustering near Reverend Lee's Willamette Valley mission in what is now Oregon State. In May 1843 Yankee settlers in the territory held a meeting at which they set up their own provisional government, drafted laws prohibiting slavery, and elected officers; three-quarters of those elected were from New England. The document would later form the basis for Oregon's state constitution.
⁴

While the Yankees dominated the political and intellectual scene, they were not to form a majority of the population. Within a few months of the creation of the provisional government, a wagon train arrived bearing over 700 new settlers, doubling the Willamette Valley's non-Indian population. The vast majority of the newcomers were farmers from the Appalachian Midwest. As one historian put it, the Borderlanders “carried to Oregon an allegiance to . . . local sovereignty, grass-roots organization, an independent producer ethic and the ‘doctrine of the negative [i.e., weak] state.' ” The Borderlanders tended to settle on farms in the countryside, leaving the towns and government to the Yankees. This settlement pattern continued throughout the 1840s and 1850s, leaving New England–born Yankees outnumbered fifteen to one but still in control of most civic institutions.
⁵

In Oregon, which split from what became British Columbia in 1846 and from Washington in 1853, the Yankees dominated the scene to a remarkable degree. Salem and Portland were founded by New Englanders, the latter named by a native of Portland, Maine, after winning a coin toss with a Bostonian. The state's first and most influential newspaper, the
Oregon Statesman
, was founded, owned, and operated by Yankees, as was its rival,
The Oregonian
, which promoted a Beecher-like fear of Catholic immigrants. Yankees ran most of the public schools, colleges, and seminaries and dominated debate at the Constitutional Convention of 1857, which produced a document championing communities of independent family farmers and the very Yankee notion that individual interests must be subsumed for the common good. Six of the first eight state governors and six of the first eight U.S senators were Yankees from New England, New York, or the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania.
⁶

North of the Columbia River, the Washington Territory was much more sparsely populated, the territorial dispute with Britain having discouraged potential settlers, who had no assurances that their land titles would be respected if the area changed sovereignty. Still, the cultural pattern was similar. Attracted by the lumber resources of Puget Sound and the Olympic Peninsula, Yankees from the forests of eastern Maine, northern Vermont, and the Great Lakes arrived in considerable numbers in the 1840s and 1850s. The East Machias, Maine, lumber firm of Pope & Talbot founded the towns of Port Gamble and Port Ludlow and transported both sawmills and workers from the eastern Maine coast in an organized migration that continued for seventy years. (“It seemed everybody there came from East Machias or his father did,” one Port Gamble veteran recalled a half century later. “We always had baked beans and Johnny bread at Gamble and plenty of codfish.”) When Puget Sound became desperate for women in the 1860s—white men outnumbered white women by a nine-to-one ratio—local leaders recruited 100 single New England women and shipped them to Seattle; to be a descendant of one of these settlers still has
Mayflower
-like cachet there. Mainer Alden Blethen arrived to found the region's principal newspaper, the
Seattle Times
, and Massachusetts' Isaac Stevens was Washington's first territorial governor and U.S. representative. But, as in Oregon, the region was not to have a Yankee majority, as large numbers of Scandinavian, Irish, and Japanese immigrants settled there after the Civil War. Coastal British Columbia developed even later, populated in large part by immigrants from Seattle, Oregon, and northern California who brought their Congregational and Presbyterian churches with them.
⁷

 

The Yankee mission in California was complicated by the fact that parts of the region had already been colonized. El Norte's culture was well rooted south of Monterey, and Yankee traders and travelers who decided to move to southern California prior to the U.S. annexation generally assimilated to
Californio
ways. Arriving by sea, the Yankees congregated in Santa Barbara and Monterey, learned Spanish, converted to Catholicism, took Mexican citizenship and spouses, adopted Spanish versions of their names, and respected and participated in local politics. Some were very successful. Abel Stearns, a shipboard agent from Massachusetts, settled in Los Angeles in 1829, married well, ran a lucrative trading company, and died a spectacularly wealthy cattle rancher. Thomas Larkin, a carpenter and failed businessman from Charlestown, Massachusetts, hoped the province's people would secede from Mexico and join the United States on its own terms; the home he built in Monterey blended New England proportions and roofing with Spanish full-length balconies and adobe construction, yielding the popular hybrid now called the Monterey Style. By the time of the American conquest in 1846, such Mexicanized Yankees comprised around a tenth of California's non-Indian population of 4,000.
⁸

But El Norte's cultural influence vanished when one moved away from the coast or north of Monterey. In the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento regions,
norteños
were few and far between, and the immigrants were of a very different sort. At the time of conquest, a tenth of California's population lived on the Bay or along a branch of the Sacramento River that soon became known as the
Rio Americano
, or American River. As in the Oregon Territory, these settlers were a mix of Yankees (who typically arrived by sea and congregated in the towns) and Appalachian people (who arrived overland, fanning out to farms, ranches, and mills). Whatever their differences, the two groups did share a resentment of southern California, Mexican rule, and
norteño
culture. They generally refused to take up Mexican citizenship, occupied land without permission, and openly agitated for American annexation.
⁹

If California's north-south split was already apparent by 1845, the 1848 discovery of gold in the American River Valley helped divide the Left Coast from the until-then unpopulated interior. This division—presaging that which would soon divide the older, coastal Pacific Northwest from the arid lands over the Cascades—was largely due to the Yankee presence around San Francisco Bay and adjacent sections of the Pacific seaboard. Even more than their counterparts in Oregon, these Yankees were compelled by a particular mission: they had to save California from the barbarians.