Background
Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo was born on July 7, 1807, in Monterey, California. He was the son of Ignacio Vallejo and Maria Antonia Lugo.
(Excerpt from Documentos Para La Historia De California, 1...)
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Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo was born on July 7, 1807, in Monterey, California. He was the son of Ignacio Vallejo and Maria Antonia Lugo.
At fifteen, Vallejo was attached as cadet to the Monterey garrison.
By 1827, Mariano Guadalupe was an ensign in the company at the Presidio. On the occasion of the formidable Estanislao Indian rebellion of 1829, when the neophytes of the San Jose mission rose against the missionaries, young Vallejo was sent against the Indians with a hundred men and a number of Indian auxiliaries. He defeated and scattered the rebels, but his victory was marred by his failing to prevent the murder of some of the prisoners by his Indian allies. Elected a deputy to the territorial congress in 1830, he supported the rebellion of the Californians against their Mexican governor, Manuel Victoria, in 1832.
The new governor, the able and humane Jose Figueroa, a close friend of Vallejo's, had Vallejo removed as deputy but made him commander of an expedition to reconnoiter the northern frontier, where the activities of the Russians at Fort Ross were causing uneasiness among the Californians.
Vallejo found the Russians to be peacefully engaged in the fur trade and no menace to California, but his report on the danger from the warlike Indians of that region and the encroachment of American immigrants decided Governor Figueroa to establish a military post there. The commandant of the new garrison at Sonoma was Vallejo, and his organization of the frontier defenses and his control of the Indians were, perhaps, his most valuable contributions to the state.
The secularization of the mission properties carried on by Figueroa led naturally to the appointment of Vallejo as administrator of the Solano mission, a duty which he performed efficiently and humanely, befriending the Indians and settling them on the mission lands, although in so doing he ran afoul of the belligerent Father Mercado of Solano. With the death of Figueroa in 1835 Vallejo was again forced into politics, this time against the bombastic centralist governor Mariano Chico and his lieutenant Gutiérrez.
He supported his nephew, Juan Bautista Alvarado, in the rebellion that led to the proclamation of the "free state" of California in 1836, and in 1838, under Alvarado's governorship, was named commander of the state forces. A petty quarrel over military etiquette estranged the two, and Vallejo retired to his post at Sonoma, where, with an imposing force of Indian allies and his own troops, he made himself a semi-independent chieftain, a cacique on the Spanish-American pattern, and the most powerful figure in the north. Alvarado's appointment of William Hartnell as administrator of the missions widened the gap between the two.
When Hartnell invaded the Sonoma country in the discharge of his duties, he was promptly arrested and deported by Vallejo, and thereafter Vallejo was left to himself until the end of the Mexican regime in 1846. Vallejo had protected and encouraged the immigration of American families into his territory, being, as he said, powerless to prevent it.
The presence of the Fremont expedition of 1846 encouraged an enemy of the Vallejos, one Merritt, and a number of idle Americans at Fort Sutter to undertake their headless and planless "Bear Flag Republic. " Their single exploit was the capture and imprisonment of Vallejo and his brother Salvador, and the theft of their cattle. The two brothers were kept prisoners for two months by the unaccountable Fremont.
A powerful agent in securing the submission of California to the United States, Vallejo was elected to the constitutional convention of 1849, and to the first state Senate of California, where he staged a long fight to have the state capital fixed at Vallejo in his own territory. Thereafter he devoted his energies largely to clearing the titles of his princely holdings, some of which he retained.
In his later years, he was no longer the great cacique of the Mexican days, but he kept up his magnificent hospitality at the great house at Sonoma to the end of his life. He died in Sonoma in comparative poverty, a well-loved and respected country gentleman. His unpublished "Historia de California" is a somewhat colored, but charming and valuable account of early California.
(Excerpt from Documentos Para La Historia De California, 1...)
Quotations:
"Now, therefore, I, the said Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, in consideration of the premises, do hereby release the State of California, from any and all claims for relief or damages against said State, founded upon or growing out of anything connected with the location or removal of the Seat of Government at or from the city of Vallejo. "
"I compare that old relic with myself. .. ruins and dilapidation. What a difference between then and now. Then, youth, strength and riches; now age, weakness and poverty. "
On March 6, 1832, Vallejo married Maria Francisca Felipa Benicia Carrillo of San Diego, by whom in the course of time he had between thirteen and seventeen children.