The Utah war was inglorious. Far from its base, and operating in a desert against plainsmen of remarkable skill, the army was helpless. At will, the Mormon cavalry cut out and burned the supply trains, confining their attacks to property rather than to armed forces. When the army reached Fort Bridger, it found Brigham still defiant, his people bitter against conquest, and the fort burned. With difficulty could the army of invasion have lived through the winter without aid. In the spring of 1858 a truce was patched up, and the Mormons, being invulnerable, were forgiven. The army marched down the trail again.
The Mormon hegira planted the first of the island settlements in the heart of the desert. The very isolation of Utah gave it prominence. What religious enthusiasm lacked in aiding organization, shrewd leadership and resulting prosperity supplied. The first impulse moving population across the plains had been chiefly conquest, with Oregon as the result. Religion was the next, producing Utah. The lust for gold followed close upon the second, calling into life California, and then in a later decade sprinkling little camps over all the mountain West. The Mormons would have fared much worse had their leader not located his stake of Zion near the point where the trail to the Southwest deviated from the Oregon road, and where the forty-niners might pay tribute to his commercial skill as they passed through his oasis on their way to California.
[CHAPTER VII]
CALIFORNIA AND THE FORTY-NINERS
On his second exploring trip, John C. Frémont had worked his way south over the Nevada desert until at last he crossed the mountains and found himself in the valley of the Sacramento. Here in 1844 a small group of Americans had already been established for several years. Mexican California was scantily inhabited and was so far from the inefficient central government that the province had almost fallen away of its own weight. John A. Sutter, a Swiss of American proclivities, was the magnate of the Sacramento region, whence he dispensed a liberal hospitality to the Pathfinder's party.
In 1845, Frémont started on his third trip, this time entering California by a southern route and finding himself at Sutter's early in 1846. In some respects his detachment of engineers had the appearance of a filibustering party from the start. When it crossed the Rockies, it began to trespass upon the territory belonging to Mexico, with whom the United States was yet at peace. Whether the explorer was actually instructed to detach California from Mexico, or whether he only imagined that such action would be approved at home, is likely never to be explained. Naval officers on the Pacific were already under orders in the event of war to seize California at once; and Polk was from the start ambitious to round out the American territory on the Southwest. The Americans in the Sacramento were at variance with their Mexican neighbors, who resented the steady influx of foreign blood. Between 1842 and 1846 their numbers had rapidly increased. And in June, 1846, certain of them, professing to believe that they were to be attacked, seized the Mexican village of Sonoma and broke out the colors of what they called their Bear Flag Republic. Frémont, near at hand, countenanced and supported their act, if he did not suggest it.
The news of actual war reached the Pacific shortly after the American population in California had begun its little revolution. Frémont was in his glory for a time as the responsible head of American power in the province. Naval commanders under their own orders coöperated along the coast so effectively that Kearny, with his army of the West, learned that the conquest was substantially complete, soon after he left Santa Fé, and was able to send most of his own force back. California fell into American hands almost without a struggle, leaving the invaders in possession early in 1847. In January of that year the little village of Yerba Buena was rebaptized San Francisco, while the American occupants began the sale of lots along the water front and the construction of a great seaport.
The relations of Oregon and California to the occupation of the West were much the same in 1847. Both had been coveted by the United States. Both had now been acquired in fact. Oregon had come first because it was most easily reached by the great trail, and because it had no considerable body of foreign inhabitants to resist invasion. It was, under the old agreement for joint occupation, a free field for colonization. But California had been the territory of Mexico and was occupied by a strange population. In the early forties there were from 4000 to 6000 Mexicans and Spaniards in the province, living the easy agricultural life of the Spanish colonist. The missions and the Indians had decayed during the past generation. The population was light hearted and generous. It quarrelled loudly, but had the Latin-American knack for bloodless revolutions. It was partly Americanized by long association with those trappers who had visited it since the twenties, and the settlers who had begun in the late thirties. But as an occupied foreign territory it had not invited American colonization as Oregon had done. Hence the Oregon movement had been going on three or four years before any considerable bodies of emigrants broke away from the trail, near Salt Lake, and sought out homes in California. If war had not come, American immigration into California would have progressed after 1846 quite as rapidly as the Mexican authorities would have allowed. As it was, the actual conquest removed the barrier, so that California migration in 1846 and 1847 rivalled that to Oregon under the ordinary stimulus of the westward movement. The settlement of the Mormons at Salt Lake developed a much-needed outfitting post at the head of the most perilous section of the California trail. Both Mormons and Californians profited by its traffic.
With respect to California, the treaty which closed the Mexican War merely recognized an accomplished fact. By right of conquest California had changed hands. None can doubt that Mexico here paid the penalty under that organic law of politics which forbids a nation to sit still when others are moving. In no conceivable way could the occupation of California have been prevented, and if the war over Texas had not come in 1846, a war over California must shortly have occurred. By the treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo Mexico relinquished the territory which she had never been able to develop, and made way for the erection of the new America on the Pacific.