Frémont's California Battalion of Mounted Riflemen Frémont: "Our cavalcade made a strange and grotesque appearance; and it was impossible to avoid reflecting upon our position and composition...guided by a civilized Indian, attended by two wild ones from the Sierra, a Chinook from the Columbia, and our mixture of American, French, German--all armed--four or five languages heard at once--above a hundred horses and mules, half wild--American, Spanish, and Indian dresses and equipments intermingled--such was our composition. Our march was a sort of procession. Scouts ahead and on the flanks; a front and rear division; the pack-animals, baggage, and horned cattle in the centre; and the whole stretching a quarter of a mile along our dreary path. In this form we journeyed, looking more as if we belonged to Asia than to the United States of America." The Bear Flag was raised at Sonoma on June 15, 1846. On June 23, 1846, Frémont arrived at the garrison , with a force of about ninety men. James W. Marshall, who would discover gold at Sutter's mill in 1848, described the party. "These were Americans, French, English, Swiss, Poles, Russians, Chileans, Germans, Greeks, Austrians, Pawnees [Delawares] native Indians [Walla Walla], etc...Some wore the relics of their homespun garments, some relied on the antelope and bear for their wardrobe, some lightly dressed in buckskin leggins and a coat of war-paint and their weapons were equally various...Well, if they [the Mexicans] can whip this crowd they can beat all the world, for [General] Castro will whip all nations, languages and tongues!"
"During our stay in Monterey Captain Frémont and his party arrived. They naturally excited curiosity. Here were true trappers, the class that produced the heroes of Fennimore Cooper's best works. These men had passed years in the wilds, living upon their own resources; they were a curious set. On November 28th, swelled to over 400 men, the California Battalion of Mounted Riflemen commenced a 400 mile march from San Juan Bautista to Los Angles. The battalion was organized into eight companies:
Years later, in his Memoirs (1887), Frémont recorded the following thoughts regarding the position in which he had found himself placed in June of 1846 at Montery:
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On
July 19th, his party swelled to about 160 from newly arrived
settlers, he entered Monterey. The party was described by an
officer of Her Majesty's Ship Collingwood, that had entered
Monterey Bay hours after Commodore Sloat had hoisted the
American Flag:
who
were his bodyguard, and have been with him through all
his wanderings; They had charge of two baggage horses.
The rest, many of them blacker than the Indians, rode two
and two, the rifle held by one hand across the pommel of
the saddle.
The
cross of St. George [England] hung idly
down from the peak of the great ship
[HMS] Collingwood, the breeze
occasionally spreading out against the sky the
small red patch which represented centuries of
glory. There lay the pieces on the great
chessboard before me with which the game for an
empire had been played…I was but a pawn,
and like a pawn I had been pushed forward to the
front at the opening of the game...My path of
life led out from among the grand and lovely
features of nature, and its pure and wholesome
air, into the poisoned atmosphere and jarring
circumstances of conflict among men, made subtle
and malignant by clashing
interests.
