california histo ry

california historyThe Journal of the California Historical Societyvolume 90 number 1 2012

The Golden Gate Bridge is the setting of a spectacular fireworks display during the 75th anniversary celebration on May 27, 2012.

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© 2012 Wells Fargo Bank, N.A. All rights reserved. ECG-733888

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A year built in the Bay Area

The Golden Gate Bridge and Wells Fargo — built in the Bay Area

2012, what a year! The 75th anniversary of the Golden GateBridge. Twelve months of food, fun, fireworks, and the Bay Area

coming together to celebrate the golden icon that brings us together every day.

The Golden Gate Bridge and Wells Fargo have been American icons throughout their histories. We’ve been honored to share the celebrations of the Golden Gate Bridge 75th anniversary with you throughout the year, and hope you have enjoyed them all.

Visit goldengatebridge75.org for 75th anniversary news and updates.

From the Editor: Changes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Collections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Courtship and Conquest: Alfred Sully’s Intimate Intrusion at Monterey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 ByStephenG.Hyslop

“With the God of Battles I Can Destroy All Such Villains”: War, Religion, and the Impact of Islam on Spanish

and Mexican California, 1769–1846 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 ByMichaelGonzalez

Joaquin Miller and the Social Circle at the Hights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 ByPhoebeCutler

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62

Reviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70

Donors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75

Spotlight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80

on the front cover(Detail) The artist and U.S. Army officer Alfred Sully (1821–1879) held posts in Monterey and Benicia, California, during the years immediately following the American conquest of California. As Stephen Hyslop observes, Sully described people and scenes of Californio society in his letters and artwork. This untitled painting, created circa 1850, is an idealized view of the life to which he aspired at the time (see pages 4–17).

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c o n t e n t s

california historyThe Journal of the California Historical Societyvolume 90 number 1 2012

California History is printed in Los Angeles by Delta Graphics.

Editorial offices and support for California History are provided by Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles.

ExecutiveDirectoranthea hartig

EditorJanet FireMan

ManagingEditorShelly Kale

ReviewsEditorJaMeS J. raWlS

Design/ProductionSandy bell

EditorialConsultants

LARRY E . BURGESS

ROBERT W . CHERNY

JAMES N . GREGORY

JUDSON A . GRENIER

ROBERT V . HINE

LANE R . HIRABAYASHI

LAWRENCE J . JELINEK

PAUL J . KARLSTROM

SALLY M . MILLER

GEORGE H . PHILLIPS

LEONARD PITT

2

changes

David Bowie wrote and recorded the song “Changes” in 1971. Perhaps he meant the mysterious lyrics to reflect his chameleon-like persona or technological changes in the music industry. Whatever the inspiration, countless listeners have found tender value in Bowie’s admonition to “Turn and face the strange changes . . . but I can’t trace time.”

Neither could Californians trace or control the changes time brought over the centuries. For Native Americans when Spaniards established missions, pre-sidios, and towns, and for Californios of Spanish and Mexican descent when Americans conquered Alta California, achieved statehood, and built a burgeon-ing state, time did anything but stand still.

Change, of course, is what history is about, and in this issue, three essays encap-sulate much of the chronology and many effects of sweeping social, political, eco-nomic, cultural, and personal changes that people—and time—brought about.

In his essay, “‘With the God of Battles I Can Destroy All Such Villains’: War, Religion, and the Impact of Islam on Spanish and Mexican California, 1769–1846,” Michael Gonzalez asks how much, and in what form, the Muslim idea of sacred violence influenced the Franciscan priests and Spanish-speaking settlers who lived in California.

In “Courtship and Conquest: Alfred Sully’s Intimate Intrusion at Monterey,” Stephen G. Hyslop brings perspective to the complexities of personal relation-ships between conquered peoples and their conquerors, relating U.S. Army Lieutenant Sully’s intimate social interactions with Californios, Native Ameri-cans, and Southerners during his long military career.

Phoebe Cutler, in “Joaquin Miller and the Social Circle at the Hights,” provides a colorful sketch of the controversial and magnetic “Poet of the Sierras.” Once a gold miner, Indian fighter, Pony Express rider, backwoods judge, and journalist, Miller envisioned his Oakland Hills outpost “the Hights”—built in the mid-1880s—as an artists’ retreat. His vision became reality as California’s literati, artists, and political figures flocked to him and his eccentric ranch at the turn of the last century.

As if to demonstrate the incontrovertible permanence of change with the pas-sage of time, this issue—vol. 90, no. 1—is the last print edition of the journal, as decided by the Board of Trustees of the California Historical Society. An elec-tronic issue, vol. 90, no. 2, will be published in April 2013 as the last appearance of California History, terminating its ninety-year existence.

JanetFireman

f r o m t h e e d i t o r

Cali fornia History • volume 90 number 1 2012

CALIFORNIA HISTORY, December 2012 Published quarterly © 2012 by California Historical Society

LC 75-640289/ISSN 0162-2897

$40.00 of each membership is designated for California Historical Society membership services, including the subscription to California History.

KNOWN OFFICE OF PUBLICATION:California Historical SocietyAttn: Janet FiremanLoyola Marymount UniversityOne LMU DriveLos Angeles, CA 90045-2659

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THE CALIFORNIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY is a statewide membership-based organization des-ignated by the Legislature as the state historical society. The California Historical Society inspires and empowers Californians to make the past a meaningful part of their contemporary lives.

A quarterly journal published by CHS since 1922, California History features articles by leading scholars and writers focusing on the heritage of California and the West from pre-Columbian to modern times. Illustrated articles, pictorial essays, and book reviews examine the ongoing dialogue between the past and the present. CHS assumes no responsibility for statements or opinions of the authors . MANUSCRIPTS for publication and editorial correspondence should be sent to Janet Fireman, Editor, California History, History Department, Loyola Marymount University, One LMU Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90045-8415, or [email protected]. BOOKS FOR REVIEW should be sent to James Rawls, Reviews Editor, California Historical Society, 678 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA 94105-4014 .

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c o l l e c t i o n s

3

Among the examples of early Cali-forniana in the Geil J. Norris collec-tion is this pairing: a photograph of Manuel Castro, prefect of Monterey, in his later years and in military rega-lia, and an English translation of his March 5, 1846 letter to Captain John C. Frémont ordering him to remove his forces from Monterey. The letter was written at a time of escalating ten-sions between the United States and Mexico culminating in the Mexican War (1846–48).

Norris was a descendant of the Cota, Pico, Castro, and Sanchez families, whose members—notably Pío Pico, Manuel Castro, Juan B. Castro, and Rafael Sanchez—were leading figures in the affairs of Mexican California.

Photograph of Manuel Castro (undated) and English translation of his letter to John C. Frémont (March 5, 1846), Geil J. Norris family papers, Vault MS 156 [ f.10].001.tif

Mexican Californiana

The grouping represents a collection rich in correspondence, broadsides, baptismal certificates, land records, and ephemera documenting the politi-cal, military, economic, and social life of Norris’ prominent Mexican ances-tors. Other noteworthy examples from the collection—the majority of which are in Spanish—are an 1844 broad-side announcing Thomas O. Larkin’s appointment as U.S. consul; letters by Larkin, Agustín Zamorano, and Pío Pico; and documents pertaining to the Mexican War.


lfred Sully was not born to conquer, but as a young man seeking distinction in an era of relentless American expan-sion, he found that path laid out for him. The son of painter Thomas Sully of Philadelphia, one of the nation’s leading portraitists, he entered West Point in 1837 at the age of sixteen, hoping to put his creative talents to constructive use as a draftsman and engineer. A decade later, how-ever, during the Mexican War, he took part as an infantry commander in the shattering American assault on Veracruz, which fell to forces led by General Winfield Scott in March 1847 after being blasted by artillery fire. “Such a place of destruc-tion I never again wish to witness,” Lieutenant Sully wrote. He was sorry to say that women and children were among the victims, but faulted the populace for not fleeing the city in advance: “General Scott gave them warnings of his inten-tions, but, Mexican-like, they depended too much on the strength of the place.”1 That was mild criticism compared with the aspersions cast on Mexicans by some Americans who invaded their homeland and wrought destruction without regret. Sully seemed better suited for the role of reconstructing a defeated country and reconcil-ing its people to conquest. Such was the task that awaited American occupation forces when he landed in Monterey, California, in April 1849 as quartermaster.

The society Sully encountered there had a tra-dition of accommodating newcomers through hospitality, courtesy, and courtship. Ever since Spanish colonial rule ended and barriers to for-eign trade and settlement were lowered, Mexican residents of Spanish ancestry, known as Califor-nios, had compensated for their small numbers and inadequate defenses by incorporating as friends and kin Americans and other foreigners who might otherwise have remained alien and potentially hostile. That policy also brought eco-nomic benefits in the form of partnerships with merchants and captains who arrived by sea and traded, mingled, and intermarried with Califor-nios. Far less obliging to them were the moun-tain men and land-hungry pioneers who entered California overland from the United States and actively opposed Mexican authorities as war loomed in early 1846.2

After American forces occupied their territory in July 1846, Californios had reason to fear that their new rulers might behave less like the adapt-able Yankee traders of old than the confronta-tional overlanders who had ignited the Bear Flag Revolt a month earlier and ushered in the con-quest. Those two groups represented contrasting aspects of the American character and American expansion, which was inherently contradictory, for it transformed a republic that was born in

ByStephenG.Hyslop

Courtship and Conquest: Alfred Sully’s Intimate Intrusion at Monterey

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55

rebellion against imperial rule into an imposing empire in its own right. Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to his presidential successor James Madi-son in 1809, tried to resolve that contradiction in writing by referring to the dynamic young nation he helped foster and expand as an “empire for liberty.”3 But did that mean liberty and justice for all those incorporated within the emerging American empire in decades to come, includ-ing Indians and people of Spanish heritage? Or was the true purpose of westward expansion to subdue and dispossess those of other races or nationalities and clear the way for settlement by Anglo-Americans, for whom liberty was reserved?

Under the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican War, all Califor-nios were to become American citizens unless they chose to remain Mexican citizens. In either case, their property was to be respected and pro-tected. But that guarantee was threatened by a vast influx of Anglo-Americans, many of whom came to California seeking gold but remained as settlers, often infringing on Californios’ prop-erty rights, which were not, in fact, protected under American law. When Alfred Sully arrived in California, that convulsive American take-over—to which the Mexican War was merely a prelude—was just beginning. Uncertain of their

Alfred Sully (1821–1879) was a brigadier general in the United States Army when he made this self-portrait around 1864, a decade or so after leaving California for duties elsewhere. Known primar-ily for his rigorous campaigns against defiant Indian tribes during and after the Civil War, he was also a keen observer and chronicler of war and peace in the American West and the Mexican border-lands, which he documented in hundreds of revealing letters, sketches, and paint-ings. During his years as an officer in California (1849–53), he witnessed the Gold Rush and massive influx of Anglo-Americans.

Yale Collection of Western Americana,

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library


A portrait of Alfred Sully as a young lieutenant during the Mexican War (1846–48) was featured in this 1914 article in the New York Times, along with drawings he made during that conflict and an excerpt from a letter he wrote describing the American assault on Veracruz in 1847. Identified here as the son of the renowned painter Thomas Sully, Alfred became newsworthy in his own right at a time when public attention was focused on “the present trouble in Mexico”—the article’s reference to the Mexican Revolution, which erupted in 1910 and led to American military intervention in that country.

The New York Times, May 3, 1914

77

fate, wealthy Californios fell back on the custom of accommodating respectable Americans and trying to win them over. For their part, Sully and other officers welcomed those overtures and found interacting with their Hispanic hosts enjoyable and instructive.

Sully would follow the example of earlier Ameri-can captains and traders by entering this hospi-table society through marriage. But his union would end tragically, and he bore some responsi-bility for setting that tragedy in motion. Although he had more in common with the appreciative maritime visitors who courted Californios in ear-lier times than with the defiant overlanders who spurned them, he came into California as a con-queror, and his marriage amounted to a personal conquest, which he achieved by imposing on those over whom he had authority. This ill-fated marriage was the first of three such relationships Sully entered into during his military career, all of them with women from groups subsumed forcefully within the expansive nation he served. Professionally and personally, he wrestled with the contradictions inherent in Jefferson’s goal of an empire for liberty—a problematic objective that could not be pursued without taking liberties in the process.

hoSting the oCCupierS

Soon after landing in Monterey, Sully made the acquaintance of Angustias de la Guerra, whose Spanish-born father, José de la Guerra y Noriega, had commanded the presidio at Santa Barbara and whose husband, Manuel Jimeno Casarín, had served as an official in Monterey before American forces occupied the town in 1846. She had long and close ties to Anglos. Among her in-laws were the American merchant Alfred Rob-inson and the English trader William Hartnell, both of whom had become Catholics and Mexi-can citizens before entering her family. Annexa-tion by the United States, she concluded, was a

better fate for California than continuing “on the road to utter ruin” under a poor and politically unstable Mexico. American forces took Monterey unopposed, and she and other prominent resi-dents saw no reason to spurn polite American officers such as Lieutenant Edward Ord, brother of Dr. James Ord, an army physician whom she married following the death of Jimeno. In her wartime diary, she referred to Edward Ord fondly as “Don Eduardo,” observing that “he looks like one of us. He is very charming and dances divinely.” But her friendship with him and other American officers did not ease her fears that this new regime might bring wrenching changes to her country. “Putting the laughter and dancing aside,” she wrote, “we are all ill at ease because we do not know how we, the owners of all this, will end up! May God be with us!”4

Professionally and personally, he wrestled with the contradictions inherent in Jefferson’s goal of an empire for liberty—a problematic objective that could not be pursued without taking liberties in the process.

Señora de la Guerra’s ambivalence toward the occupiers was aptly summarized by an Ameri-can acquaintance, the merchant William Heath Davis, who married into this society. Prior to the Mexican War, Davis wrote, the women of Califor-nia “were wholly loyal to their own government and hated the idea of any change; although they respected the Americans, treated them with great cordiality and politeness, and entertained them hospitably at their homes, they would not coun-tenance the suggestion that the United States or any foreign power should assume control of the country.” Angustias de la Guerra—who followed Spanish tradition by retaining her maiden name but was referred to by Davis as Mrs. Jimeno—

shared those sentiments and was initially hostile to invading Americans. “In a patriotic outburst,” Davis related, she “exclaimed one day that she would delight to have the ears of the officers of the United States squadron for a necklace, such was her hatred of the new rulers of her country.” But whenever an American officer was taken sick, he added, “Mrs. Jimeno was the first to visit the patient and bestow on him the known kind-ness so characteristic of the native California ladies.”5

Angustias’s policy of dealing charitably with Americans in the hope that they would respond in kind continued after the war, affording Sully and other officers a gracious hostess to look after


In his illustrated recollection of his adventures in California, William Redmond Ryan offered this view of Monterey in February 1848 and observed: “The portly Californian, under his ample-brimmed som-brero and gay serapa, the dark-skinned and half-clad Indian, and the Yankee, in his close European costume, intermingled or chatting apart in groups of threes and fours, imparted an irresistible charm of novelty to the scene.” Alfred Sully was disappointed when he arrived the following year and found Monterey’s prominent “Spanish” residents frosty at first encounter. “They are generally to strangers somewhat cold in their manners,” he wrote. “But once acquainted all restraint is thrown off.”

Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

them. In a letter written to his family not long after he reached Monterey, Sully described her as “a tall majestic looking woman, about 30 or 35, remarkably handsome . . . very agreeable, very good natured & very smart. In fact she is a well read woman & would grace any circle of society.” With her husband away temporarily and there “being no male in the house,” he added, “Me Madre (that is the name she calls herself though she is rather young & handsome to have so old a boy as me) requested me to make her house my home.” This might have been considered improper if she lived alone, but the house was brimming with servants and family members, including her eldest daughter, Manuela, who was fifteen and of marriageable age. Manuela was “remarkably pretty & gay,” he wrote, and “like all Spanish girls, monstrous fond of a flirtation. I fear she finds this rather a hard job with me, for my bad Spanish always sets her a laughing.”6

Sully was captivated by Manuela and eventu-ally proposed marriage. But until he made his intentions clear he remained quite close to her mother, who served officially as godmother to many youngsters in California and continued in that capacity informally by taking Sully under her wing. She was only six years older than he was, and he at first found her a more congenial com-panion than Manuela, who struck him initially as too young and impulsive for an officer approach-ing thirty. In letters home, he mentioned the mother more often than the daughter and used language that caused family members to worry that he was straying into an affair. “Could I come across another Doña Angustias de la Guerra,” he wrote in August 1849, “I don’t think I would long be an old bachelor. She has given me a piece of gold from which I wish you to have made a ring.” To ease his family’s concerns, he later explained that he wanted the ring “to adorn my person & at the same time show my respect for the lady (who is by-the-by a married lady with 7 chil-dren).” There was, in fact, nothing improper in

his relationship with Angustias, but he was less than truthful when he claimed that he had “not yet seen anybody in this country good enough for me.”7 Indeed, when later deprived of the com-pany of Angustias and Manuela he found that they had been almost too kind and too good for him and left a void in his life that he found hard to fill.

Angustias de la Guerra (1815–1890) sat for this portrait some-time after her marriage to Dr. James Ord in 1856. The daughter of José de la Guerra y Noriega (1779–1858), one of Mexican California’s leading figures, she told of her experiences in a diary she kept during the Mexican War and in a lengthy dictation to Thomas Savage, who interviewed her in 1878 while conducting research for Hubert Howe Bancroft’s multivolume History of California. Perhaps because the subject remained painful to her, she made little mention of her beloved daughter by her first mar-riage, Manuela Jimeno (1833–1851), who died ten months after wedding Alfred Sully without parental consent.

California Historical Society, CHS2012.1014.tif

0

When Angustias befriended Sully, her marriage was strained. (She and Jimeno were at odds over financial and family matters and would separate before he died in 1853.) She found solace in the attention this courtly young American paid her, but she allowed Manuela to enjoy his company as well. On one occasion when Manuela asked to attend a dance with friends, Angustias suggested that Sully serve as her chaperon. “If my son Don Alfredo will take my daughter to the ball,” she declared, “she can go.”8 Angustias trusted in Sully and must have been shocked when he asked for Manuela’s hand in marriage a short time later, but she and her husband did not rule out the match. Their chief concern was that Sully was not a Catholic, and they told him that they would have to consult relatives, including Manu-ela’s paternal uncles Antonio and José Joaquín

Jimeno, who served as priests to small communi-ties of Christian Indians still living at California’s decaying missions.

Unlike Robinson, Hartnell, and other foreign settlers who adopted the customs and creed of their hosts, Sully had no intention of convert-ing to Catholicism. Fearing that he would never gain parental consent and would lose the popu-lar Manuela to another suitor, he took strong measures that he admitted were “not altogether according to Hoyle,” or in keeping with the rules that gentlemen were supposed to observe. He arranged for the wife of a fellow officer, Captain Elias Kane, to invite Manuela to their home, where she arrived in the company of an admirer, a “young gentleman” of Monterey who was favored by Angustias. While another officer distracted that unfortunate suitor, Mrs. Kane escorted Manuela into the kitchen, where she and


Sully drew this sketch of the Royal Presidio Chapel at Monterey in 1849, around the time that Monterey became a diocese and the chapel became the cathedral of San Carlos Borromeo. Founded in 1770 at a site shared by the Monterey presidio and Mission San Carlos Borromeo, the chapel remained part of the presidio after the mission was relocated to the Carmel River in 1771. Rebuilt in 1794–95, it is the oldest continuously functioning church in California.

The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley

Sully were promptly married by the local priest, who was later removed from his post for perform-ing this ceremony without parental consent. Sully appeared unaware that his actions might have compromised the priest and insulted the young admirer who had unwittingly escorted Manuela to her wedding, but he could not ignore the offense he caused her parents. “The old folks are as mad as well can be,” he wrote. “I went to see them & was invited never to show my face again.”9

a “JudgMent FroM god”

Manuela’s parents had reason to feel cheated, but for Angustias the betrayal was deeply personal, coming as it did from someone she had treated as a member of her family. The betrayal was sym-bolized by the gold ring that Sully had intended to wear in her honor. In June 1850, a month after his furtive wedding, he wrote home to thank his family for sending it: “The steamer of yesterday brought me two letters & the ring, which is pro-nounced beautiful. Manuela has it.”10

Angustias was slower than her husband to for-give Sully, but she reconciled with him when she learned that Manuela was pregnant. By imposing on this proud family and violating the code by which they lived, however, Sully had set the stage for tragedy. In late March 1851, less than two weeks after giving birth, Manuela fell violently ill and died after eating what Sully called a “fatal orange” sent to her as a present. It was rumored afterward that the gift came from a disappointed suitor, who had poisoned the fruit. Sully had urged her not to eat the orange, fearing that it might be bad for her, but her mother thought it would do her no harm and consulted the physi-cian (her future husband, James Ord), who gave his consent. “Thus by the ignorance of a doctor I have been robbed of a treasure that can never be replaced,” Sully lamented. His black servant, Sam, who was devoted to Manuela, became so distraught after her death that he killed himself,

believing “that in the world to come we would all be united once more together.” The final blow for Sully came a short time later, when Angustias, who had recently given birth, took Manuela’s infant to bed with her to nurse the boy and fell asleep with him in her arms. “When she woke up he was dead,” Sully wrote. “She had strangled it in her sleep. The doctor persuaded her it died of a convulsion, but to me alone he told the true story.”11

In his shock and grief, Sully may have misinter-preted these terrible events. The “fatal orange” was just one possible cause of the sudden intes-tinal torments Manuela suffered before she died (she may have contracted cholera). And Sully’s assertion that Angustias “strangled” the infant in her sleep hinted perhaps at an unconscious motive on her part—lingering hostility toward him—that existed only in his imagination. But whether those deaths and Sam’s demise were the result of “ignorance & violence,” as he put it, or random misfortunes beyond anyone’s control, Sully had reason to feel that dreadful punish-ment had been visited on him and his in-laws. “It appears like a judgment from God for some crime that I or her family have committed,” he wrote.12

aFter the Fall

Sully was surely aware that the act he believed set this tragedy in motion—eating a forbidden fruit—was like the original sin that brought God’s judgment on Adam and Eve. The fact that his new family’s devastating fall from grace occurred in California, a bountiful land likened to Eden, made that biblical precedent hard to ignore. But there were other reasons, rooted not in myth but in history, for Sully to feel that he, as a repre-sentative of the expanding American empire, or his in-laws, as heirs to the old Spanish imperial

order, were being punished for their sins. His personal conquest of Manuela—achieved by defy-ing the values and customs of people over whom he had power as an occupier—was not unlike the exploits of wealthy Californios and their colonial predecessors, who claimed Indians as mistresses or menial laborers. Sully compared their way of life to that of a “rich Southern planter, only in place of Negroes they have Indians for servants.”13 Although not a slaveholder, Sully had a black ser-vant, whose death added to the burden of guilt he bore as a master and conqueror and shared with

those of Spanish heritage who once dominated this country.

The bitterness and resentment that overcame Sully when the seemingly safe harbor he had found in California was shattered gradually receded, allowing him to resume cordial relations with his in-laws. He and Angustias grew even closer than they had been before, linked now by a sense of loss that was too great for either to bear alone.

Before leaving for Benicia—a transfer he sought in order to distance himself from Monterey and its painful associations—he visited Santa Barbara with Angustias to pay his respects to her father. Sully characterized that venerable figure as a “queer old specimen of an old Span-ish gentleman, very polite, very dignified & very hospitable, but very bigoted & very tyrannical but not unkind.” As indicated by that ambivalent assessment, Sully found saving graces in the old colonial regime of cross and crown that his late wife’s grandfather represented. Wishing to see the church where Manuela had been confirmed, he visited the hilltop mission overlooking the town and admired “the altar at which she had as a child so often knelt, & at the foot of the altar the tomb of her grandmother, who was more than a mother to her.” Saddened, he left the sanc-tuary and walked behind the mission, where an aqueduct built by Indians under the supervision of padres now lay in ruins. “It is wonderful what those old Spanish priests were able to accomplish with the means at hand,” he wrote. “How they civilized the Indians & taught them every branch of useful knowledge & then with the workmen of their own creation erected works that would do credit to any part of the world.”14

Sully’s appreciative view of the mission system echoed that of Alfred Robinson and other for-eigners with close ties to this society and con-trasted sharply with the skeptical assessments of American visitors who remained aloof from

2 Cali fornia History • volume 90 number 1 2012

His personal conquest of Manuela—achieved by defying the values and customs of people over whom he had power as an occupier—was not unlike the exploits of wealthy Californios and their colonial predecessors, who claimed Indians as mistresses or menial laborers.

3

Alexander F. Harmer’s nineteenth-century drawings of the California missions are acknowledged for their realistic rendering and detail. Among them are these drawings of the construction of the first permanent Santa Barbara mission buildings at the Chumash Indian village of Tay-nay-án (“El Pedregoso,” or “Rocky Mound”) and of worshippers leaving the mission church circa 1860. The mission’s construction began in 1787 with buildings of thatch roofs and log walls and the church was com-pleted in stone in 1820. Sully visited the church in 1851 and described it as a “noble old building” that would “put to blush many churches in Philadelphia.”

California Historical Society/USC Special Collections

Hispanic California and saw little to admire in the spiritual conquest of the padres, dismissed by some critics as slave drivers.15 Were the missions good or evil? This question, which remains with us today, was hotly argued long before the Ameri-can takeover of California. That event, in turn, contributed to a larger historical debate about the virtue of conquest in general, whether intended to assimilate Indians and save their souls or to further democracy and extend what Jefferson called an empire for liberty across the continent. The fact that American expansionists saw it as their manifest destiny to seize California from the descendants of Spanish colonists—who had regarded their own conquest as pious and provi-dential—raised doubts about such competing

claims. Skeptics wondered why God would favor one imperial venture over another, or bless either party with success when neither had motives as pure as they professed. What Josiah Royce said of his own assertive countrymen in the insight-ful history of California he composed in the late 1800s could be said as well of earlier Spanish colonizers: “The American wants to persuade not only the world but himself that he is doing God service in a peaceable spirit, even when he vio-lently takes what he has determined to get.”16

For Alfred Sully, praising the missionaries was a way of paying tribute to Manuela and the world that nurtured her. He did not stop to consider that the good done by the padres might be linked


In the summer of 1847, the surveyor and draftsman William Rich Hutton illustrated this section of the Santa Barbara mission’s water works. Along with agriculture, the Franciscans taught the Chumash irri-gation. They constructed a dam in Pedregoso Creek, high above the mission, and diverted water to the mission via aqueducts. Some of the water system’s ruins are visible today.

Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California

to such evils as placing Indians under demoral-izing restraint and punishing them bodily if they defied those strictures. Nor did he dwell on the moral complexities of his own position as a conqueror. Good might have come from the offense he caused by abducting Manuela had she and their child survived and his ties to her family lengthened and deepened, making him a bridge between the old regime here and the new. But the tragic consequences of that elopement prevented him from remaining long in Monterey as a guest of Angustias de la Guerra—who kept Manuela’s room just as it was before she mar-ried—and sent him into exile. He ended up on the Great Plains, that vast field of toil and strife east of Eden, where he served long and hard as a tenacious Indian fighter.

intruSion and aCCoMModation

Sully spent almost his entire career in the West. His one notable tour of duty in the East occurred in 1862, when he campaigned as a colonel in the Union Army during General George McClellan’s unsuccessful bid to seize the Confederate capital, Richmond. By then he had met the woman who would become his second wife, Sophia Webster, a resident of Richmond with whom he corre-sponded during the war. According to Langdon Sully, Alfred Sully’s grandson and biographer, “Sophia was a Southern sympathizer. When Alfred sent a note to her through the lines that he could ‘see the lights of Richmond,’ she sent a reply that he might see the lights but that he would never reach them.”17 Before wedding her,

5

In 1863–65, Sully commanded two far-ranging expeditions against hostile Sioux in the Dakota Territory. This photograph of an encampment Sully established during his campaigns suggests its isolation and primitive conditions. Of Sully’s leadership, Colonel M. T. Thomas of the Minnesota brigade wrote: “His perceptions were remarkably clear, and he appeared to know intuitively just where the Indians were and what they would do. These instinctive qualifications . . . rendered him fully competent for the duty to which he had been assigned, and, added to these, a genial temperament made him an agreeable commander.”


6

he returned in 1863 to the northern Plains and led troops against rebellious Sioux and their tribal allies.

Sully’s marriage in 1866 to Sophia, with whom he had two children, was preceded by a relation-ship he entered into before the Civil War with a young Yankton Sioux woman he met while at Fort Pierre in what is now South Dakota. In 1858, she gave birth to a daughter named Mary Sully (also known as Akicitawin, or “Soldier Woman”),

who later wed Philip Deloria (Tipi Sapa), an Epis-copal missionary to his fellow Yanktons and other Sioux. Among their descendants were several notable Native American authors, including their daughter Ella Deloria and their grandson Vine Deloria, Jr., who wrote about the family’s ties to Alfred Sully in his book Singing for a Spirit: A

Portrait of the Dakota Sioux. He identified a Yank-ton Sioux pictured in a group portrait painted near Fort Pierre by Sully—a capable artist if not


In 1854, Sully began frontier service on the northern Plains, building or repairing forts in the Dakotas, Minnesota, and Nebraska. The proximity of Indian encampments to the forts inspired his paintings of Sioux Indians, including this representation of Sioux Indian Maidens. While serving at Fort Pierre in what is now South Dakota, he fathered a daughter, named Mary Sully, by a Sioux woman.


an accomplished one like his father—as Pehan-dutawin, the woman who bore Sully’s child. Langdon Sully did not mention Alfred’s relation-ship with her in his biography, but reproduced that painting and hinted at its significance by noting: “Alfred’s second wife, Sophia, was aware of the relationships between soldiers and Indians of the Sioux tribes on the frontier. She refused to let her husband hang the picture of the Indian girls in her house.”18

All three women with whom Sully had children belonged to groups whose homelands were occu-pied by American troops and claimed—or, in the case of the Confederate Virginians, reclaimed—by the nation he represented. Sully’s role as an officer and occupier was complex and involved both conquest and conciliation. One might say that he was inclined to sleep with the enemy, but none of the societies to which he was linked as a husband or father was intrinsically hostile to his own. All had traditions of accommodating outsiders or newcomers through hospitality and exchanges of gifts, goods, and intimacies.

Sully, in return, welcomed such give-and-take and was more tolerant and appreciative of rival cultures than many American expansionists of his day. Yet, he could not enter as freely into those cultures as did civilians like those obliging Yankee merchants who settled in California dur-ing the Mexican era, for whom accommodating foreigners was their stock in trade. The official role he played in Monterey after annexation did not allow for full immersion in the society he joined briefly by wedding Manuela. His position was more like that of some earlier American set-tlers who defied categorization as either docile assimilationists or hostile intruders.

Benjamin D. Wilson, for example, who arrived overland from New Mexico in 1841 and settled as a rancher near present-day Riverside with his wife, Ramona Yorba, whom he wed in 1844, was known respectfully as Don Benito to his many

Hispanic relatives and compañeros. Yet, his close ties to Californios did not stop him from volun-teering to fight those who opposed the American occupation in 1846.19

U.S. officers serving in California during the Mexican War could not easily avoid being cast in the role of hostile intruders. But those who remained or came here after the fighting ended, as Sully did, found themselves in an ambiguous position as warriors by profession whose task was to help restore order and stability to an occu-pied country.

Sully’s courtship of Manuela was, in one sense, an act of accommodation like that of previ-ous American visitors who entered this society through marriage. But it was also an intimate intrusion and personal conquest by an occupying officer, not unlike the advances made by Ameri-cans in uniform in later times as they extended their nation’s reach across the Pacific to the Philippines and beyond and acquired women in occupied countries as wives or mistresses. Intent on annexing his beloved Manuela, or winning her on his own terms, Sully took liberties with his hosts, for whom incorporation in America’s “empire for liberty” was, at best, a mixed bless-ing. Like earlier Spanish colonizers who sub-jected Native Californians to spiritual conquest, he demonstrated that intrusions made with seemingly good intentions could have tragic con-sequences and that no conquest, however well meaning, was truly innocent or innocuous.

StephenG.Hyslop is an independent scholar who has written extensively on American history and the Spanish American frontier. He is the author of Contest for California:

From Spanish Colonization to the American Conquest and Bound for Santa Fe: The Road to New Mexico and the American

Conquest, 1806–1848 and coauthor of several books published by the National Geographic Society. He also served as editor of a twenty-three-volume series on American Indians for Time-Life Books.

7

8

ike Othello, “the valiant Moor” who welcomed the “flinty and steel couch of war,” we, too, gird for battle and ask how much, and in what form, the Muslim idea of sacred violence influenced the Franciscan priests and Spanish-speaking settlers who lived in Califor-nia between 1769 and 1846.1 For our purposes, violence means the killing and suffering loosed during wartime. As for dignifying what would be a horrific and murderous undertaking, Islam, more than Christianity, seemed better disposed to include war amongst the holy deeds that defined the sacred.

Such was the case in California. Because the priests and settlers often treated war’s fury as an act of worship—so much so that they exceeded Christian practice—the search for precedent requires us to look beyond the example of knights and princes who fought in the Crusades. Only Muslims, who once used the dictates of their faith to make battle sacred, would transmit the lessons the residents of California, and even Crusaders, chose to follow.2

Jihad, one such dictate, instructed the faithful that any task they performed, no matter how violent, could glorify God, while another, ribat, admittedly a term describing many different activities, spoke of the unity believers experi-enced when they collected as one. Each dictate complemented the other. But of the two, jihad was the more prominent. Regardless of how believers interpreted ribat, jihad helped reconcile the differences by suggesting there were various ways to exalt the spirit.

Meaning “effort” or “striving,” jihad emphasized the struggle to resist temptation, or the duty to fight infidels and apostates.3 The obligations need not be separate. To earn God’s favor, the believer had to meet and defeat any challenger, whether it was a sinful heart or an enemy brandishing a weapon. With piety and violence thus aligned, the two pursuits found full expression between 711 and 1492, when Muslims occupied part, or nearly all, of Spain.


De#troy All Such Villain#”“With the God of Battle# I Can

War,Religion,andtheImpactofIslam

onSpanishandMexicanCalifornia,1769–1846

ByMichaelGonzalez

L

Beginning in the ninth century, and perhaps earlier, Muslim mystics and pilgrims met in for-tresses—one of the meanings of ribat—to study holy texts. On occasion, they did not collect in a redoubt to perform their duties. But regardless of how and where they gathered, they followed a religious leader. Although they did not come from the ranks of a professional army, they nonetheless trained for war between sessions of prayer and reflection. When Christians or other Muslims attacked or threatened to attack, mystics and pilgrims followed their leader into battle, convinced that their spiritual and martial exer-tions secured their place in paradise. “There are

two times when the gates of heaven are opened,” declared the Muwatta, one of the works they studied. “It is during the azhan”—the call to prayer—and “in a rank of people fighting in the way of Allah.”4

The legacy of jihad earned scant notice in Cali-fornia. No priest or settler mentioned the term in any document, much less admitted its influence. It is also unlikely that anyone possessed a Qur’an or a Quranic commentary that explained the word’s meaning. Even if the Spaniards and Mexicans who settled California knew that Mus-lims had occupied Spain centuries earlier, many would still profess ignorance of jihad and its

Franciscan priests and soldiers saw the settlement of Spanish California as a spiritual and military exercise. Leon Trousett’s 1876 painting of Father Junípero Serra celebrating Mass at Monterey in 1770 suggests their partnership, one that may have its origins in the Islamic practice of sacred violence.

California Historical Society Collections at the Autry National Center; Bridgeman Art Library, CAH 331445

workings. Nonetheless, when battling enemies, the priests and settlers followed patterns first conceived by Muslims. They performed acts of sacrifice, spoke of their obligation to smite foes for God, and sometimes considered war a sacred enterprise. During the campaign to fight the pirate Hippolyte Bouchard in 1818, a settler asked heaven to bless his efforts: “Under the protection of the God of battles I believe I can destroy all such villains as may have the rashness to set foot upon this soil.”5 A priest, meanwhile, mortified the flesh to seek divine support against Bouchard. According to a witness, the cleric prayed, abstained from food, and whipped him-self so God would grant his compatriots victory.6 At the same time, and up through the 1830s, some priests accompanied military expeditions into California’s interior to capture or punish defiant Indians. If hostilities seemed certain, they said Mass for the soldiers and militia and then marched into battle beside the troops.

Any claim about jihad’s influence in California may sound far-fetched or confused. To some, jihad urges the believer to improve his character and nothing more. Others admit that Muslims did invoke jihad to make war, but some histori-cal context is needed. In the first years of Islam, when Muhammad and his companions battled for their survival, they proclaimed jihad to con-vince believers that God was on their side.7 It is also worth wondering if war in Muslim Spain was as prevalent as we suppose. There is no argument that Christians and Muslims fought one another, but just as notable, and perhaps for longer peri-ods of time, the two sides, along with a sizable Jewish population, lived together in peace.8

There is also some question about the nature of war and its practitioners. Even if Muslims in Spain saw war as a religious obligation, it seems unlikely that such a practice would surface centu-ries later in California, a place thousands of miles

away. Moreover, Franciscan priests had little in common with Muslims who saw war as an act of devotion. The Muslim mystics and pilgrims who supposedly went to battle abounded in great number, whereas the Franciscans, at least in California, were few, and those who joined campaigns fewer still.9 The intrepid priests who accompanied troops into the field do not prove that all Franciscans saw war as a holy endeavor. (The sharp-eyed reader could add that Islam has no ordained clergy or sacraments, at least in the Christian, especially Catholic, sense.) As for the settlers in California, the most fundamen-tal understanding of human nature shows that individuals do not need divine approval to fight. If religion did impel believers to take up arms, Christianity, not Islam, provided enough cause. The Book of Revelation, by itself, with its descrip-tions of bloodshed and beasts on the loose, could fire the imagination of any Christian warrior.

Nonetheless, these doubts, while valid, and which will be addressed in due time, reflect a misunder-standing. The point is not that Muslims or Chris-tians relished bloodshed. What matters more is how and under what circumstances Muslims and their Spanish-speaking counterparts considered war a sacred effort. But caution is in order. Pro-fessing similar attitudes, whether about war or anything else, does not mean one side mirrored the other. Although Muslims were the first to consecrate violence, Christians in Spain, when following suit, did not blindly imitate Islamic habits. Instead, they ensured that the prosecu-tion of war conformed to their beliefs. Over time, as the Spanish-speaking inhabitants of Califor-nia would confirm, Christians had introduced so many changes that the Muslim imprint had largely disappeared. What remained, though, despite the overlay of Christian ritual and prac-tice, was the Muslim conviction that war was a sacred calling. Thus, regardless of their faith, the men-at-arms knew when, and against whom, they could make piety assume lethal proportions.


the Setting

If jihad’s purpose seems clear, ribat, its counter-part, is less so. One authority laments that ribat may be impossible to define.10 The meaning of ribat varied from place to place in the Islamic world. Even when focusing on a single locale like Spain, the term’s definition continues to baffle because it acquired different meanings over time. As some scholars claim, ribat described a fortress that emerged in northern or central Spain where Muslims and Christians confronted one another. A ribat could even be a citadel in the central part of a city or a watchtower where soldiers observed an enemy’s movements.11 But whatever its func-tion, a ribat was a fortified place that offered pro-tection or allowed men to train for battle. To date, investigators have uncovered the ruins of a ribat near the city of Alicante in southeastern Spain.12 Although the site is far from the interior parts of Spain, where ribats supposedly flourished, other scholars have looked at Muslim writings from the early Middle Ages to find mention of believers assembling in fortresses.13

Some historians prefer different meanings. Because ribat comes from the Arabic root r-b-t, which means to tie together, as one would tether a herd of livestock, the term could describe a caravansary, a structure that invited traders and travelers to secure their horses or camels before resting. In this sense, there is nothing to imply that ribats were fortresses. They offered protec-tion along a trade route, but they did not exist to make war, much less provide a setting for prayer and study.14 If the meaning is broadened to describe a place where warriors on horseback could rest their mounts, ribat may still refer to trade because its occupants defended caravans making their way through hostile territory. By the thirteenth century, especially in Muslim Spain, the meaning of ribat had evolved to describe a monastery for Sufis, mystics who formed broth-erhoods to pray and who, as the following pages will make clear, often preferred more vigorous

displays of faith.15 Even so, when some Sufis sup-plied lodging for a caravan or footsore traveler, their monastery earned the name ribat.

To reach consensus on the word’s definition, it may be best to move beyond descriptions of a structure with different uses and give ribat a more literal reading. The term could refer to believers bound together by their devotion. Accordingly, when this collection of believ-ers made war or collected as one to repel an approaching enemy, the building where they gathered would resemble a fortress to observers. But in other instances, and depending on the region where they dwelled, the believers would prefer to pray rather than fight. Thus, regardless of their intent, when believers were tied to one another to perform various duties, they fulfilled the most elemental meaning of ribat.16

The spiritual and military dimensions of ribat proved quite popular in Muslim Spain. The historian Manuela Marín explains that by the ninth century, men periodically left cities and towns to gather in places along the coast or in frontier outposts near Christian territory. In most instances, they set the terms of their com-mitment. They could “make ribat” or “perform ribat”—the expressions they used to describe their devotion—for a number of days or months. When they finished their obligation, they were free to leave. Participants could also perform ribat for any number of reasons. A few used the time away from home to contemplate their flaws and weaknesses. Others went on ribat during Ramadan, the month Muslims set aside for fast-ing and prayer.17 But a great many more believed that fighting could express their faith. We do not speak of the professional soldier, though he, as well, appreciated the mystical properties of violence. Of greater interest is the believer who volunteered his time to make war.

2

continued on p. 24


Muslim architectural techniques influenced the Span-iards and Mexicans who settled California. Roofless inner courtyards and fortress-like walls are two elements that found expression in the Franciscan missions.

Islamic Influences on California Mission Architecture

The Mexican art historian Miguel Toussaint has noted that the mission’s patio “is without a doubt not a Christian plaza” and “more akin . . . to the patio of a mosque.” Its rectangular courtyard recalls the immense patio and surrounding arched galleries and columns of Tunisia’s Great Mosque of Kairouan, built at the start of the seventh century.

Creative Commons

An 1884 reconstruction of Mission San Juan Capistrano (founded 1775) depicts the arched, open-air corridors of the court, or patio, adapted from Spanish-style dwellings. Many of the missions’ chambers, work spaces, and living quarters opened up onto the patio, a place of refuge in case of attacks by neighboring Indians or revolts by mission neophytes.


23

The model for Mission San Gabriel Arcán-gel (founded 1771) (left) may have been La Mezquita, the Great Mosque in Córdoba, Spain (above), which has been converted into a Catholic cathedral. Likely designed by the Córdoba-born Franciscan priest Father Antonio Cruzado, the mission’s capped buttresses, tall and narrow windows, arched shell decorations, and fortress-like appearance display a strong Moorish architecture influence.

Mission: California Historical Society,

CHS2012.1012.tif; West Wall, La Mezquita:

Courtesy of Ali Eminov


The historian Elena Lourie notes that Muslims may have used the practice of ribat to conquer Spain in the eighth century.18 The Almoravides, a fundamentalist group from northern Africa that came to Spain in 1086, considered ribat an important act of worship. They used the prac-tice of ribat to train young men in a monastic setting where they prayed and participated in military drills.19 As for the Almohades, another fundamentalist group from Africa that arrived in Spain in 1147, it is not clear how they regarded ribat. But it is unlikely they would let the prac-tice lapse.20 Some scholars contend that ribat lost its military character by the twelfth century and emphasized prayer and study. Nevertheless, the more militant expressions of ribat endured for some time. As late as 1354, Ibn Hudhayi, a scholar from Almería in southern Spain, described ribats as fortresses that defended Mus-lims from Christian advances.21

If Muslims in Spain associated ribat with war, they could consult sacred texts to confirm the connection.22 It is not enough to cite Quranic passages that speak about the believer’s duty to do battle.23 The attitudes that emerge in the Qur’an are more telling. The religious scholar Richard Martin explains that in the first centuries after Muhammad’s death many Muslims believed that it was their duty to supersede the flawed tenets of Christianity and Judaism and convert humanity to Islam. Once the world accepted the one true faith, Muslims would restore the perfec-tion that God had created at the beginning of time. To set individuals “on the path of God,” it was incumbent on believers to “command the good and forbid evil.”24

When Islam was slow to spread, at least by the reckoning of some Muslims, the world could assume a stark, violent cast. The faithful, along with unbelievers who acknowledged Muslim authority, dwelled within Dar al-Islam, the House

of Islam. Beyond emerged Dar al-Harb, the House of War, the regions where infidels resisted Islam’s advance. With humanity divided, and abiding in uneasy accord, Muslims could use violence to subsume the House of War within the House of Islam. Until the conversion of all, or at minimum until the infidels honored Islam’s primacy, peace would never prevail. Any cessa-tion of hostilities would be but a truce, according to Martin, and once conditions proved favorable, the faithful would press the attack to make Islam supreme.25

If war was to be, the believer could learn how his efforts on the battlefield would bring divine reward. Many Muslims in Spain followed the Malikite school of jurisprudence, one of four schools of thought recognized by the Sunnis, the largest branch of Islam. The Malikites took their name from Malik ibn Anas, a Muslim scholar from the eighth century who compiled the Muwatta, a collection of teachings attributed to the prophet Muhammad and his compan-ions.26 Malik emphasized the simple, unadorned piety of the first Muslims—Muwatta means “the simplified”—in which the faithful remembered their obligation to make Islam a universal reli-gion. By the ninth century, the Malikites had established themselves in Spain as the jurists and scholars whose interpretation of Islamic law influenced the course of daily life. With the Muwatta in hand, some Malikites declared that should a believer kill or be killed, the shedding of blood amounted to a sacrifice whose significance increased his status and the blessings he would accrue in the afterlife. Verse 21.15.34 instructs the warrior that “the bold one fights for the sake of combat, not for the spoils. Being slain is but one way of meeting death, and the martyr is the one who gives of himself, expectant of reward from Allah.”27

The consecration of war deepened over time. By the mid-ninth century, scholars in ancient Per-sia and elsewhere composed siyars, histories of

25

Muhammad’s military campaigns, to remind the faithful they had a duty to fight infidels and apos-tates. Three in particular, the siyars of Abu Ishaq al-Fazari, Abu al-Awzai, and Abdullah ibn al-Mubarak, which, together, earned the title Kitab-

Fadl al-Jihad (Book on the Merit of Jihad), held great appeal in Muslim Spain. Ibn abi Zamanin, a tenth-century resident of Córdoba, contributed to the corpus of militant works by composing Qidwat al-Ghazi (The Fighter’s Exemplar). Some-time in the twelfth century, Abu Muhammad ibn Arabi, a scholar and mystic from Murcia, elaborated on the Malikite theme of purity and simplicity in Al Futuhat al Mekkiya (Meccan

Illuminations). At least a hundred years later, Muhammad al-Qurtubi, another Malakite jurist from Córdoba, composed Al-tadhkira fi awhal

al-mawtawaumar al-akhira (Remembrance of the

Affairs of the Dead and Matters of the Hereafter). Al-Qurtubi argued that Islam’s promise to renew humanity depended on the piety of Spanish Mus-lims. Once they emulated the Prophet and his companions, they would assume their destiny to extend Dar al Islam.28

Thus, the man making ribat in Spain had ample reason to think war was an appropriate form of worship. He dwelled on the margins of the Islamic world where he faced the threat of Chris-tian attack. Feeling besieged or, if so inclined, eager to prove his piety by going to battle, he could overlook the Quranic injunctions com-manding that only a caliph, the recognized leader of the Islamic community, had the authority to declare war. He could follow his own conscience to go on the attack or, more likely, heed a mystic who reminded the faithful how a warrior could find glory.29

If battle loomed, the warrior could approach his calling as would a pilgrim who left home to par-ticipate in a sacred exercise. While any pilgrim-age in the Muslim or Christian world involves a trip to a holy place, the greater and perhaps more important element of the journey often requires

the believer to hunger and fast to repent for his sins. If no different from a pilgrim who makes penance, the murabit—the man making ribat—would also see the violent deed, or the potential of its unleashing, as a spiritual act. He reclined in a sacred moment where the pious deed, even if belligerent, promised redemption. Verse 21.1 of the Muwatta, for instance, discussed the simi-larities when saying that the man on jihad was like “someone who fasts and prays constantly.” Other works expanded the theme. Al-Mubarak, whose siyar was part of the Book on the Merit of

Jihad, argued that the murabit who “volunteered” for battle resembled the pilgrim who fasted and made the haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca.30 In The

Fighter’s Exemplar, al-Zamanin, the tenth-century scholar from Córdoba, explained how the pilgrim performing ribat during times of war could atone for his sins. When making ribat, even if briefly, he erased some of his sins and lessened the chance of punishment in the afterlife. Indeed, the longer his commitment, the more likely he cleansed his soul.31

By the eleventh century, the murabit, if he con-ducted himself as a pilgrim on a sacred jour-ney, acquired the confidence that his salvation, and that of those around him, lay in war. The historian Maribel Fierro writes that a teaching attributed to Muhammad—“Islam began as a stranger and shall return to being a stranger as it began”—convinced believers in Spain that they could elide the boundary between mysti-cism and warfare. To be fair, the teaching, what Muslims call a hadith, had more innocent appli-cations. According to some Muslim scholars in the Middle Ages, Muhammad prophesied that Islam would become corrupt when the faithful neglected to honor God. To see that believers remembered their obligations, the scholars, and any person who wished to share their sacrifice, set a pious example by retreating from society to pray and perform acts of charity.32


But for other Muslim scholars, the search for solitude justified the use of violence to purge corruption.33 While cleansing their own spirits, the scholars and their followers believed they could restore the integrity of Islam by attacking infidels or unrepentant Muslims. As a conse-quence, little distinguished the pilgrim from the murabit who used force. The temporal, human exigencies that regulated behavior lapsed, and any deed the believer performed, no matter how violent, became holy and blessed. Once the pil-grim and the murabit completed their task, the narrow, mortal principles that defined existence re-emerged, and the mystical state that graced the believer came to an end.

The prospect of equating war with piety attracted many adherents. In 1120, for instance, Abu Ali al-Sadafi, a distinguished religious scholar and jurist, joined an army of thousands to fight Christians in northern Spain.34 He perished in the effort. Two decades later, Abu Ahmad ibn al-Husayn ibn al-Qasi from Silves, a Portuguese city in the south that sits close to the Spanish border, formed a “fighting brotherhood,” a Sufi order dedicated to making war. A mystic and reli-gious scholar, al-Qasi believed that ignorance and selfishness blinded humans to the truth that they were one with God. To address the moral blight, al-Qasi called on the more extreme dictates of ribat. He prescribed religious exercises to his fol-lowers so they could clear their minds and com-mune with divinity. Once they had purged their souls, or at least claimed to, they stood ready to battle sin in other quarters.

By punishing Muslims they deemed corrupt, as well as recalcitrant Christians, al-Qasi and his followers would sweep away the encum-brances that distracted the mind and spirit. What remained after the purging of falsehood, al-Qasi said, would be “no God, but God.” Al-Qasi no doubt possessed the serenity of any person who

believes he performs God’s bidding. He likened himself to the Mahdi, a messianic figure popu-lar with Muslim mystics, and raised an army to attack Almoravid governors who lacked sufficient faith and rigor. In time, al-Qasi fell victim to the devotion he inspired. When he tried to make alli-ances with Christians in 1151, his followers killed him.35

The thought of Muslims on ribat, some with weapons at the ready, encompassed the reach and depth of the Christians’ world. The Spanish philologist Américo Castro says ribat formed the root of some Iberian words that commemorated or conveyed the experience of suffering an attack. Some Spanish and Portuguese towns carry the name Rábida or Rápita. The Spanish term rebato means “sudden attack.” Arrebatar is to “snatch away,” while arrobda speaks of an “advance guard.”36 The historian Thomas Glick adds that war against Muslims convinced Christians they suffered a perilous existence. Confined to the northern reaches of Spain, especially in the years prior to the tenth century, they viewed the Mus-lims across a desolate frontier that held untold dangers. The boundaries marking Christian territory, even if fixed by castles and other defen-sive sites, could easily be penetrated by Muslim attackers ensconced in a fortress.37 In sum, the murabit who saw war as a form of worship embodied nearly every aspect of the Christians’ existence. The men on ribat threatened violence, but in the same instant they granted Christians, and their heirs in the New World, the means to challenge and defeat any foe.

tranSMiSSion

When Christians in Spain employed their ene-mies’ tactics and religious beliefs, they neglected to describe the process of incorporation. They left no written accounts discussing how they adopted the Muslim approach to sacred violence. None-

27

theless, it is baffling that the borrowing of ribat, and of course jihad, escaped comment. In mat-ters removed from war, various witnesses, some from beyond Spain, enumerated the ways Chris-tians absorbed or admired Islamic habits.

Upon hearing about Córdoba’s wealth and beauty, Hroswitha of Gandersheim, a tenth-century German nun, described the Muslim city as “the ornament of the world.” About the same time, the Christian thinker Álvaro of Córdoba lamented: “My fellow Christians delight in the poems and romances of the Arabs; they study the work of Muslim theologians and philoso-phers. . . . At the mention of Christian books they disdainfully protest that such works are unworthy of notice.” Adelard of Bath, an English philoso-pher from the eleventh century, admitted that he cited Arabic authors to make his writings more acceptable. According to the art historian D. Fair-child Ruggles, by the fourteenth century Chris-tian kings of Spain ordered craftsmen to employ Islamic ornamentation in churches and other buildings to project a sophisticated air. After the re-conquest of Spain, Muslim culture continued to impress. Cardinal Ximénez de Cisneros, Arch-bishop of Toledo and confessor to Queen Isa-bella, begrudged the Muslims some praise. “We lack their works,” he admitted, but “they lack our faith.”38

When seeking to imitate, or at least respect, Islamic achievements in architecture and phi-losophy, it is likely Christians also embraced the practice of sacred violence. As did Muslims who performed ribat to make war, some Span-ish monks and laymen exhibited similar fervor. In the eleventh and twelfth century, they formed military societies like the Knights of Calatrava or Santiago.39 Like Muslim warriors who claimed that “a thousand angels” would aid them during battle, the military societies summoned their own celestial defender and believed that Santiago, or Saint James, would fight on their behalf.40

The saint did not disappoint. According to one source, he aided Christians in thirty-eight battles against Muslims.41 When Muslims claimed that a pilgrimage to Mecca was one of the pillars of their faith, Christians responded in kind. Knights and commoners alike worshipped at the shrine to Santiago in Compostela, a holy site in north-western Spain that still receives pilgrims from all over the Christian world.42 Thus, on the strength of circumstantial evidence, it appears that the Christian approach to war, as well as other sacred activities, followed Muslim examples.

Of course, one could say Christians did not need any instruction in the arts of war. The Knights Templar, for instance, who emerged in the Holy Land in 1118 to defend Christian pilgrims from Muslim attacks, may have influenced the rise of military societies in Spain.43 But enough doubts exist to question the possibility. The military societies often emerged in places where Muslims had performed ribat for centuries, suggesting the

The men on ribat

threatened violence, but

in the same instant they

granted Christians, and

their heirs in the New

World, the means to

challenge and defeat

any foe.


conveyance of ideas from one group to another. Christian teachings also profess some reluctance about the morality of violence. Jesus, in whose name the Christian warrior made war, discour-ages, if not forbids, attacks against others. He tells His disciples to “turn the other cheek” and “love your enemies.” Jesus also shows no interest in creating a new political order, thereby imply-ing that He renounces violence or any other display of force to implement His teachings. He tells skeptics to “render unto Caesar what is Cae-sar’s and to God what is God’s.” When answering Pilate’s questions if he is a king, Jesus responds, “My kingdom is not of this world.”44

Jesus’ condemnation of violence had particu-lar impact. Many clergymen and philosophers believed that violence, regardless of the cause, brought limited benefit. The historian Jay Ruben-stein explains that prior to the First Crusade in 1095, the Church promoted the doctrine of just war in which only principalities, at the behest of their leaders, could fight one another as a last resort. When war did occur, the killing of sol-diers and noncombatants was, at most, a morally neutral act, a regrettable event brought on by cir-cumstances that no one could control or foresee. The warrior who killed, as he was obligated to do when in service to his leader, received no spe-cial virtue or promise of reaching heaven.45 For some clerics, the fact that the warrior killed at all, although tolerated in light of war’s exigencies, proved so reprehensible that it required redress. As late as 1066, for instance, Norman bishops commanded that any knight who killed during the Battle of Hastings had to make penance for a year.46

In Spain, the Christians’ reliance on sacred violence, with priests as convinced as laypeople that they fought on behalf of God, reveals that Muslims supplied the justifications that were lacking in Christian belief. When Christians

went to fight, the duration of their commitment, and the words they pronounced to sanctify their efforts, were but Muslim habits recast in new ways. Even if the written evidence for the trans-mission of habits from one group to another is absent, anthropological theory may document the exchange.

Elena Lourie says that the concept of “stimulus diffusion,” or “idea diffusion,” a methodol-ogy first proposed by the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, can describe the connections between Muslims and Christians that witnesses failed to record.47 Throughout history, Kroeber says, there are many examples of different, even hostile societies, residing side by side, who in time will adopt one another’s practices. In most instances, what makes the transaction more likely is that the donor culture possesses a superior technol-ogy or concept, while the recipient culture is bereft of any comparable advancement that will simplify life. But, to complicate matters, even if the recipient culture acknowledges its rival’s sophistication and is desirous of taking on better habits or routines, it will not necessarily emulate everything it admires. Instead, it will take the new approaches and alter them according to pre-vailing beliefs. In essence, the recipient culture adopts what it pleases and discards the rest.

On this note, Kroeber explained why the exchange of ideas could escape comment. The recipient culture, if disposed to see the donor culture as an enemy, would not want to acknowl-edge its debt to the other. The members of the recipient culture, then, who have the ability to document their impressions, would not men-tion the exchange for fear of confessing that they owed their achievements to a rival. Kroeber concludes, with Lourie in agreement, that if the transmission of ideas features a recipient culture loath to admit how it adopted a new way of life, the “diffusion could take place below the surface of the historical record.”

2

Below: Following the fall of Constan-tinople in 1453, the Italian Franciscan St. John Capistran amassed an army to defend against the Turks. Armed with a crucifix and carrying a banner on which were inscribed the initials of the holy name, I.H.S., he led a crusade of 40,000 Christians into Hungary in a decisive victory.

California Historical Society,

CHS2012.1016.tif

Left: St. John Capistran’s crusader legacy found a home in California in 1775, when he was designated patron saint of Mission San Juan Capistrano. Here, in the central niche of the altar of the Serra Chapel, he presides, holding his crusader banner. The 400-year-old gold altar is not original to the mis-sion chapel, but was brought over from Spain during a 1920s restoration.

© Jim Shoemaker,

www.jimshoemakerphotography.com

When confronting Muslims inspired by jihad and ribat, Christians, to counter the menace, did not find the support they needed in their own traditions. They took the principles that caused consternation, and perhaps no small amount of admiration, and called them their own without acknowledging Muslim contributions.48 As a consequence, Christians in Spain and other parts of Europe borrowed and altered, especially as the years progressed, Muslim deeds and beliefs that best suited their purposes.

In the first instance, when waging war against Muslims, Christians invoked their enemies’ doctrines that honored the warrior who died in battle.49 True enough, when priests and theolo-gians praised the warrior’s sacrifice, they often spoke of knights or professional soldiers. But as did Muslims, though arguably to a lesser degree, Christians also professed that the humble believer of no means or military training could receive blessings in battle. In any event, after the knights of the First Crusade had seized Jerusa-lem and tried to secure their prize from Muslim attack, priests and chroniclers celebrated their heroes with praises that echoed the descriptions of jihad. When writing to Hughes de Payens, a French noble who established the Knights Templar, St. Bernard declared around 1128: “To be sure, precious in the eyes of the Lord is the death of his holy ones, whether they die in battle or bed, but death in battle is more precious as it is more glorious. . . . How secure, I say, is life when death is anticipated without fear; or rather when it is desired with feeling and embraced with reverence.”50

The Christians, coming from a recipient culture, would not describe how they adapted Muslim ideas. But because the church doubted the pur-pose of violence, even if employed to defend the place of Christ’s ministry, Christians knew that Islam, and not their own faith, would provide

the reasons to honor warriors who risked their lives in the Holy Land. Thus, Bernard’s remarks, when matched with Muslim writings about the value of a warrior’s sacrifice, pose unspoken con-nections between Christianity and Islam.

Even more, the example of ribat, its significance amplified and justified by jihad, reverberated throughout Christendom. But, when following Muslim ways, Christians revealed the conceit, and perhaps the insecurity, of a recipient culture whose members believed that they, and no one else, produced the ideas they implemented. The pretense, though, cannot stand up to scrutiny. In almost every sense, the behaviors Christians admired, and changed, corresponded to the Mus-lim idea of how a believer acquired blessings when he reported to a fortress or retreated into seclusion to follow a spiritual leader.

Various texts describe Christians performing what is, in essence, their version of ribat with words and phrasing that refer to the Muslim practice of linking piety and violence. In The

Fighter’s Exemplar, al-Zamanin, when explaining how the man making ribat could speed his way to paradise, raises points Christian authors repeated in their own way: “For he who performs ribat for ten days, God will pardon him for one quarter of the time he must spend in hell; for he who does twenty days, he will be pardoned for half; for he who does thirty days, three quarters of his pun-ishment [will be pardoned]; for he who performs ribat for 40 days, God will free him from hell.” Each idea presented by al-Zamanin—that the believer made what was essentially a pilgrimage; that regardless if he makes war or prays, each deed equates with the other and thus is conse-crated; that the rewards he receives in the after-life correspond to the number of days he spends on ribat—provided Christians with material for their own designs.51

At the Council of Clermont in 1095, for instance, Pope Urban II urged the assembly to approve


3

what would be the First Crusade and liberate the Holy Land. Although much of what Urban said is now lost, his remarks apparently conveyed the following declaration: “Whoever might set forth for Jerusalem to liberate the church of God, can substitute that journey for all penance.”52 Al-Zamanin’s principles now conformed to Chris-tian sensibilities. Previously, only the pilgrim traveling to Jerusalem could atone for his sins. But, in Urban’s formulation, the indulgence—that is, the idea that the pilgrim could repent of his sins—now extended to the knight or any other person who enlisted to fight Muslims.

Urban treaded carefully on this point. Violence alone would not help knights or anyone else gain admission to heaven. As long as they focused their energies on freeing Jerusalem and had con-fessed their sins, their actions, no matter how deadly, could count as penance. When judgment day came, God would weigh the sincerity of their repentance, a moral condition that presumably involved the dispatch of enemies, and dispense His mercy accordingly. Although Urban did not say the Christian could kill to reach heaven, a privilege supposedly possessed by the murabit, he nonetheless suggests the comparison. By the eleventh century, many Christians had contended with Islamic expansion for hundreds of years and knew firsthand how some Muslims making ribat

considered war an act of faith. Thus, even when Christians did not mention it outright, or refer to a scholar like al-Zamanin who celebrated its virtues, they nonetheless paid tribute to ribat, and the devotions it encouraged.53

In Spain, where contact with Muslims was more frequent and had endured for a longer time, ribat assumed an intimacy that impelled Chris-tians to take on more of its attributes.54 In 1122, the founders of the confraternity of Belchite, one of the first military societies established in Spain, echoed al-Zamanin’s provisions. In their

regulations the founders stated: “Any Christian, whether cleric or layman, who should wish to become a member of this confraternity . . . and at the castle of Belchite, or any other castle suit-able for this enterprise, should undertake to fight in the defense of the Christian people and in the service of Christ for the rest of his life will, after having made confession, be absolved of all his sins as if he were entering upon the life of a monk or hermit. Whoever should wish to serve God there for one year will receive remission for his sins as if he had marched to Jerusalem. Who-ever has been obliged to fast every Friday for a year shall have this penance remitted if he under-takes to serve God there for one month. . . . If anyone should wish to make a pilgrimage and for a number of days would have spent on pilgrim-age serves God there in battle. His reward from the Divine Benefactor will be doubled.”55

The founders of Belchite took and embellished ideas afforded them through their contact with Muslims. War and violence, when directed against Muslims, remain, and arguably assumed more prominence as, penitential exercises. The man who confessed wrongdoing could seek for-giveness by going to battle. The pilgrimage to Jerusalem, meanwhile, while no doubt an impor-tant duty, now became one of several exercises that the Christian warrior could perform. The more time he committed to the confraternity, and thus the greater his penance, the more likely he could expiate his sins in equal measure. But, in every instance, and in synchrony with the mili-tary obligations of ribat, the confraternity’s rule instructed members that they, as well, resided in a sacred moment that once had graced pilgrims on a journey to Jerusalem. This consecrated exis-tence would last as long as they “served God in battle.” In addition, and again reflecting Muslim example, the allowance to see violence as wor-ship could accommodate priests and monks

33

the Christian warrior now had two places to seek penance: “To those who set out for Jerusalem and offer effective help towards the defense of the Christian people and overcoming the tyranny of the infidels, we grant remission of their sins, and we place their houses and families under the protection of blessed Peter and the Roman church. . . . Those who have put crosses on their clothes, with a view to journeying to Jerusalem or to Spain, and have later taken them off, we com-mand by our apostolic authority to wear crosses again and to complete their journey. . . . Other-wise, from that moment we cut them off from entry into church and forbid divine services in all their lands.”57

who wished to join the fight. Admittedly, there is some debate if the confraternity of Belchite and other military societies truly regarded knights and clerics as the same. To resolve the question would take us too far afield.56 But, what matters more is that priests and monks, like Muslims who made ribat, could consider battle part of their vocation.

A year later, in 1123, the First Lateran Council convened by Pope Callistus II in Rome contin-ued the consecration of war. War as pilgrimage could now encompass the liberation of Spain as well as Jerusalem. Like a pilgrim who saw his journey as a sacred duty to lessen his punish-ment in the afterlife, the council decreed that

Opposite: The panoramic views that illustrate Bernhard von Breydenbach’s fifteenth-century account of his pilgrimage to the Holy Land (1483–84) are among the first detailed and accu-rate printed illustrations of major cities along the pilgrimage route, including Jerusalem, a section of which is illustrated in this detail. In consideration of his somewhat reckless youth, the wealthy Breydenbach, dean of Mainz Cathedral, had resolved to undertake this pilgrimage in the hopes of obtaining salvation.

Panoramic View of Jerusalem, from Hugh Wm. Davies, Bernhard

von Breydenbach and His Journey to the Holy Land, 1483–4:

A Bibliography (London: J. & J. Leighton, 1911)

Left: Breydenbach’s account described various eastern peoples he met en route, including these illustrations of Saracens and the Arabic alphabet, believed to be the first printed specimen of that language. His report included the birth, life, and death of Muhammad; the Quranic laws; and the “Manners and Errors of the Saracens.” Influenced by Arab and Muslim cul-ture, Spanish explorers brought Islamic art and architecture to Mexico and California.

General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library,

Yale University


Again, the equation of the Christian warrior and pilgrim reflected, and owed a debt to, the man on ribat. The Muslim scholar, mystic, or any other person with spiritual ambitions acquired the authority to fight for God. Once the ribat ended and his obligation was done, the special moment he occupied, no matter how holy the cause, ceased to grant spiritual advantages. In like fash-ion, as the council’s proviso explained, the war-rior who tried to liberate his brethren in Spain or Jerusalem, and thus must wear markings to validate his mission, could slay his enemies, and presumably repent for his sins, only while he honored his commitment. Once the warrior finished his task or abandoned his calling to attack another target, the quest, like a pilgrimage that had run its course, was complete.

By the fifteenth century, Christians had taken ribat and made it their own. As Kroeber hypoth-esized, Christians assimilated, and then trans-formed, their rivals’ ideas. Employing Muslim precedents, whose shape and contours now sat obscured, Christians presented their efforts to lib-erate Spain as a santa empresa (holy undertaking) or una santa romería (holy pilgrimage).58 War, like a pilgrimage, retained a finite quality. Once Chris-tians had completed their task, whether it was the attempt to liberate Spain or Jerusalem, they had fulfilled their obligation. There is no need to stretch the point and wonder if we see a Christian variation of the House of War superseded by the House of Islam, though the thought is intrigu-ing. It is enough to say that Christians valued the process that combined war and pilgrimages. Each venture involved a journey whereby the participants proved their devotion by asking for forgiveness and performing certain duties, which included, if need be, the chance to go to battle.

denoueMent

We have come full circle. The ties between Mus-lim Spain and provincial California, especially concerning the making of war, confirm the endurance of certain habits.59 Spanish Christians who followed Muslim ways, and their descen-dants elsewhere who perpetuated these patterns, bear out Kroeber’s ideas about culture. The sum of habits and routines that regulate and organize human existence, culture is far from an inert, stolid mass of behaviors that individuals cannot control. Rather, as Kroeber noted, culture may be best described as a collection of practices that individuals can choose, refine, or reject when circumstances merit. The selection of traits that constitute culture may involve ways to defeat ene-mies. Even when choosing habits from rivals, the members of any culture do so with the intent of ensuring their survival and prosperity. The habits that promise success, although they may emanate from a rival, strengthen and grow more rooted over time when they bring benefit. Accordingly, because the Muslim approach to war seemed superior, Christians of Spain picked through the practices of both jihad and ribat. They selected what they needed, altered the choices to their lik-ing, and employed them when necessary.

At its most basic, the Muslim legacy of mystics and scholars going to war set the example that Christians followed throughout the Spanish-speaking world. In many instances, and in cases that seemed removed from the establishment of military societies that accepted clergy, priests and monks in Spain served alongside, or replaced, knights and soldiers. As early as the tenth cen-tury in the Kingdom of León in northern Spain, monks and military men who had become “Arabicized” secured responsible positions in the church hierarchy and civil government.60 By the twelfth century, Cistercian monks occupied an abandoned castle in the southernmost por-tions of the province of Castilla and assumed the role of soldiers.61 Centuries later, in 1568,

35

after the re-conquest of Spain, Franciscan priests from the Monastery of Saint Francis assembled with weapons at the ready to fight Muslims who rebelled against the Crown. (It is not clear if the priests went to battle.) During the same episode, four Franciscans and an equal number of Jesuits, doubting the bravery of Spanish soldiers, offered their services to one of the military command-ers, declaring that they “wished to die for Jesus Christ.”62 He denied their request.

In the Americas, some clergy found more oppor-tunities to take up the sword. The buildings mis-sionaries constructed, or at least asked others to construct on their behalf, embodied the principle that force and faith were compatible. As the art historian George Kubler explains, when the Franciscans and other missionary orders pros-elytized Mexico’s Indians, they employed “the extremely unusual habit of fortifying the church.” The priests built churches surrounded by “a vast courtyard” with “crenellated walls.” The Arabist T. B. Irving adds that many Mexican churches during the colonial era resembled the “open-air congregational type of mosque which was built by Muslims for army worship.”63

Apart from churches, some seminaries in Mexico that trained priests to establish missions recalled the shape and function of the ribat as fortress. Admittedly, any resemblance may be accidental. But however inadvertent, the seminary’s purpose, and the descriptions it prompted from observers, brings to mind the Muslim effort to prepare the mind and body for any challenge. Father Fran-cisco Palóu, Junípero Serra’s biographer, hinted at the parallels when he repeated a colleague’s description of how priests and novices in the eighteenth century prepared for their calling. “What praise and appreciation,” he recounted, “may reach the merit of these men who, ordinar-ily observing within the cloister walls of their college [seminary] an austere religious life, busy continually with their divine services, find their recreation in going out . . . to sanctify with their missions all of North America.”64

Through the years, other clergy consecrated war in their own manner. Francisco López de Gómara, a secular priest who became Cortés’s chaplain and biographer, noted that war helped spread the Gospel. He claimed that Cortés told his men on the march to the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán that “it is foreign to our Spanish nation” to refuse the challenge of war and forsake the chance “to exalt and increase Our Catholic Faith.”65 Juan Ginés Sepúlveda, a Dominican priest, argued that the “Spaniards were especially noted for warfare and government, and hence best [suited] for the mission of bringing the gos-pel and civility to the conquered peoples of the Americas.”66

In the late eighteenth century, Father Romualdo Cartagena, rector of the College of Santa Cruz in Querétaro, claimed that “soldiers” with “glisten-ing” swords were more effective than “the voice of five missionaries.”67 A century later, a com-mentator praised Father Isidoro Felix de Espinosa for writing about the conversion of Mexico’s Indians with a soldier’s resolve: “He was the Julius Caesar of New Spain [Mexico], for like that ancient Roman, he fought by day . . . and wrote by night.”68

The buildings missionaries

constructed, or at least

asked others to construct

on their behalf, embodied

the principle that force and

faith were compatible.


any good fortune.” Returning home, Martínez and his companions visited a village they had called upon during the first part of their journey. But the village had moved, and Martínez, who “was . . . astonished at their fickleness,” ordered his men to look for the settlement. When they found the village, the Indians attacked. Martínez is not clear about the succeeding chain of events, but he adds that the “next day the village was burned and everything in it destroyed because the people in it had taken up arms against those [the priest and his men] who had treated them well. . . . This village [deserved] severe punishment.”73

In 1817, Father Narciso Durán, as rector at Mis-sion San José, asked Governor Pablo de Solá for permission to pursue fugitive neophytes. Durán explained that his “breviary” and santo cristo (image of Jesus Christ) would serve, in Hubert Bancroft’s paraphrase, as “weapons.” In case these sacred instruments failed, Durán requested a cañóncito (little cannon) to convince the fugi-tives to return to the mission.74 Meanwhile, Father Xavier de la Concepción Uría demon-strated that he could acquit himself well in battle. During the Chumash rebellion in 1824, Uría, then rector at Mission Santa Inés, awoke from a nap as insurgents approached his quarters. A wit-ness recalled he jumped out of bed and “shot and killed” two Indians with his shotgun.75

The exploits of bellicose priests and their con-temporaries abided by patterns that long had presented war as a sacred endeavor. Given the practices bequeathed them by medieval Spain, the priests and settlers of California drew upon ideas that enabled them to define and over-come an enemy’s defiance. When contesting Indians and the pirate Hippolyte Bouchard, individuals who imperiled the very nature of their existence—Bouchard supposedly professed the atheism of the French Revolution and thus threatened the sanctity of religion—they conse-crated war. But when the residents of Mexican

Some priests wanted to experience, rather than write about, the chance to fight on God’s behalf. When Father Miguel Hidalgo led Mexico’s fight for independence in 1810, he unfurled banners upon which his followers had emblazoned an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Rallying his troops, he proclaimed that all should align them-selves with God and deliver Mexico from the Spaniards who had fallen sway to the anti-Cath-olic ideas of the French Revolution.69 José María Morelos, another rebel priest, proved quite adept at guerrilla warfare, and in 1813 he approved the Constitution of Chilpancingo that recognized Catholicism as the supreme faith of Mexico.70

Priests in California seemed no less vigorous.71 In 1810, Father José Viader twice accompanied expeditions from Mission San José to capture Indian converts who had escaped. Viader draws no distinction between himself and the soldiers. In all instances, he indicates “we” to show he participated in every activity. On one expedi-tion, Viader, “in the company of Lieutenant Gabriel Moraga, 23 other soldiers, and about 50 armed Christian Indians,” describes an attack on an Indian village to apprehend runaway neophytes. “We placed our people in position to attack a dance [being carried on] by heathen Indians and fugitive Christians,” he noted in his report. At dawn, the next day, “we assaulted a vil-lage . . . [and] . . . took it entire. The prisoners in all included 15 San José Christians, 18 heathen men, and 51 heathen women.”72

In a few cases, priests commanded troops in the field, or at least seemed quite comfortable about conducting themselves as soldiers. In 1816, Father Juan Luís Martínez, rector of Mis-sion San Luis Obispo, led an expedition into the southern part of California’s Central Valley. It is not clear how many men joined him, but whatever the number, they obeyed the priest’s orders to round up fugitive converts and pagan Indians so that they could learn of the “True God, without [whom] no one can live well or enjoy

3737

Spain established presidios in San Diego, Monterey (above), San Francisco, and Santa Barbara to hold California against foreign rivals and control the native populations. A number of presidio soldiers were assigned to the missions to protect the missionaries and civilians, discipline the neophytes, and bring back runaways.

The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley;

drawing by Jose Cardero

In 1824, the Chumash Indians rebelled against Francis-can missionaries at Santa Barbara (right), Santa Ynez, and La Purísima Concepción. Soldiers from the Santa Barbara and Monterey presidios were sent to quell the revolt, including about 100 soldiers from Monterey who fought the natives at Mission Purísima Concepción with infantry, cavalry, and artillery after the Chumash’s nearly month-long occupation. As did their Spanish predecessors centuries before, troops in the field could compare their efforts in battle to a pilgrimage to atone for their sins.

California Historical Society; drawing by Alexander

Harmer, CHS2012.1017.tif


California fought each other or the Americans in 1846, war lacked the sense of annihilation that inflamed the spirit.

Only battles against infidels required the services of pious warriors. When Father Palóu spoke about the establishment of Mission San Diego in 1769, he declared that “exactly as through the power of that sacred emblem the Spaniards had gained a great victory over the barbarous Moham-medans, in the year 1212, they [i.e., the priests] might also win a victory by raising the standard of the Holy Cross, and putting to flight all the army of hell, [and] bring under the subjection to the gentle yoke of our Holy Faith all the savage tribes . . . who inhabited . . . California.” Later, when Indian converts rebelled at Mission San Diego in 1775, Palóu praised a “blacksmith [who surpassed all other Spaniards in the fight] for without a doubt the Holy Communion which he had just received filled him with extraordinary courage and though he had no leather jacket to protect him he went out among the houses and shacks crying out, ‘Long live the Faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, and let these dogs of enemies die the death.’”76 When Bouchard raided settlements along the coast, Father Mariano Payeras, rector of Mission La Purísima Concepción, used terms that echoed the Muslims’ willingness to fight and die for their faith, writing: “Long live God, long live [our Catholic] religion, long live the king, long live the fatherland [in whose] precious defense we will conquer or die.”77

The settlers used similar terms. Luis Arguello, when describing an expedition to recover fugitive neophytes, reported to the governor that he had confronted “heathen overwhelmed with error” whom God “has placed under the conquering banner of the most Catholic and pious monarch.” In the interest of “propagating our holy religion,” Arguello announced, “I am ready to sacrifice my comfort and my life and all the power of my mind.”78 When troops marched from Los Ange-

les to pursue the Indians who participated in the Chumash rebellion, they serenaded each member of the expedition with such lyrics as “Sergeant Carlos, who for the Trinity, dressed for war.”79

But above all, the shadow of ribat lingered. It bears repeating that the legacies of ribat dwelled beyond memory. Nonetheless, the strategies and ideas of ribat provided lessons that Christians in Spain did not find in their own doctrines. After borrowing and then changing certain elements to reduce any reference to Islam, Christians reimagined ribat as a religious exercise that could include the warrior’s labors in battle. In California, the image of the warrior and pilgrim conflated into one personage, thereby bequeath-ing to believers a repertoire of behaviors that could sanctify the most violent deeds. When enemies lurked, who, for the most part would be Indians, the priests and settlers also found the opportunity to abolish the sin and imperfec-tion that engulfed their hearts. Like Spanish Christians centuries before, California’s warriors believed that for the duration of their quest, the slaying of enemies would serve as penance or professions of worship.

And so they marched. In 1806, when describ-ing an expedition to pursue fugitive neophytes, Father Pedro Muñoz wrote in his diary that on the first day the men set out, they “were informed in a formal address of the purpose toward which God was guiding them in the pres-ent expedition and the merit they would acquire, if following the Voice of God as transmitted through their chief, they fulfilled their duty.” Twenty years later, Sergeant José Dolores Pico said of another expedition that the men “recited the rosary” at least twice during their hunt for fugitive neophytes. The rosary, whose prayers include multiple recitations of the “Hail Mary” where believers ask the “Mother of God to pray for us sinners,” testified once more to the peni-tential qualities of a military effort.80

3

At times, an expedition was the consummate exercise whereby soldiers and militia repented of their sins and, at least for the moment, restored their place in the Christian community. In 1828, Sergeant Sebastian Rodríguez reported that dur-ing the hunt for fugitive converts, the soldiers twice heard Mass.81 The most sacred ceremony of the Catholic faith requires believers to confess their sins. According to the Latin Rite, which would be the liturgy followed by the residents of California, the congregation prays, “I have sinned exceedingly in thought, word, and deed, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.” After the priest asks that “the Almighty and Merciful Lord grant us pardon . . . and [the] remission of our sins,” any person who wishes could receive Communion, and once more sit at the Lord’s table.82 Even Indians taken prisoner during these expeditions received the chance to repent. In 1837, José María Amador of San Jose led “soldiers and civilians” into the Central Valley to recover stolen horses. Of the two hundred Indians cap-tured by the party, one hundred were fugitive neophytes, with the remainder being gentiles, or “heathen.” Amador told the Christian Indians to “pray the creed.” In other words, they could renounce sin by professing their faith. He then ordered their execution with “two arrows in the front and two in the back.” To make sure that the pagan Indians did not die in a state of sin, Ama-dor “baptized” them and commanded his men to shoot the prisoners “in the back.”83

In the end, the way the priests and settlers used violence testifies to connections that span genera-tions. Muslims in Spain conveyed certain prac-tices to their Christian rivals, who then passed them to the settlers and colonists of the New World. Although rendered into Christian form, the Muslim ideas of jihad and ribat nonetheless possessed some of their original shape and intent. In some instances, war became a pilgrimage in which the warrior performed penance, and thus obtained the opportunity to fight his way into

paradise. But if war is an act of faith, there come beguiling questions. Did the residents of Califor-nia, like their predecessors in Spain, use religion to justify war? Or did they really think war was a form of religious expression? The answer to these questions depends on the reader’s approach to faith. But even so, the association of war with a pilgrimage addresses contemporary concerns. When one reads about Muslim militants invok-ing God to justify violence, or remembers that in 2003 an American president said that war would usher in a “New Age” and fulfill biblical prophe-cies, the priests and settlers of California sound quite modern.84 They are not, then, a remote populace lost to us through time and distance; rather, in their use of war they behaved as we do, sometimes repelled, sometimes emboldened, but all the while fascinated by the clarion call to mus-ter ranks and fight.

MichaelGonzalez is an associate professor of history at the University of San Diego. He teaches California history, Chicano history, Cold War history, and Middle Eastern history and terrorism. He also is the director for the history master’s program.

Like Spanish Christians

centuries before, California’s

warriors believed that for

the duration of their quest,

the slaying of enemies

would serve as penance or

professions of worship.


thisversefromthepoem “Colum-bus,”1 a few schools, a park, and an annual poetry series in Washington,

D.C., are the visible remnants of the man who, at the turn of the last century, was arguably the most famous poet in America. Currently, Joaquin Miller is experiencing a mini-revival. A comprehensive Web site spans 166 years of his writing and ongoing bibliographical references. Two symposiums have been held, in Ashland in 2004 and in Redding in 2005. In 2013, follow-ing the launch of a three-year exhibition at the Mt. Shasta Sisson Museum, a third gathering will celebrate the centenary of the Poet of the Sierras’ death.2

Born in Indiana, raised in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, tested in the mountains of northern Cali-fornia and on the plains of Idaho and Montana, then feted in two European capitals, this back-woods scribe, at the age of nearly fifty, settled down in the hills behind Oakland.3 There, what his final, almost three decades lacked in an ear-lier adventurous life—Indian skirmishes, bear encounters, and frozen Pony Express rides—was compensated for by a whirl of activity of a dif-ferent kind. Newly self-styled as a “fruit grower and poet,”4 Miller transformed seventy stony acres into a virtual forest and garden spectacle. With his pre-established reputation and continu-ing, prodigious, and varied output, the novice

Joaquin Miller and the social Circle

at the Hights

ByPhoebeCutler

Behind him lay the gray Azores,

Behind the Gates of Hercules;

Before him not the ghost of shores,

Before him only shoreless seas.

The good mate said: “Now must we pray,

For lo! the very stars are gone.

Brave Adm’r’l, speak; what shall I say?”

“Why, say: ‘Sail on! Sail on! and on!’”

Opposite: Joaquin Miller (ca. 1839–1913), celebrated western writer and public personality, found fame and influence across continents. In addition to his poems—a number of them written in his last decades, when this portrait was made—the self-promoting Poet of the Sierras wrote essays, fiction, plays, and autobiography. In 1879, the architect Arthur Gilman affirmed: “Almost every one of our leading American poets is of handsome or striking appearance. But none of them—the kindly-eyed Longfellow, the aged and Socratic Bryant, the brown-haired Lowell, the shaggy Whitman—is more noticeable on the street than Joaquin Miller.”



rancher’s domain became an attraction for both the anonymous tourist and the aspiring artist. Witty, for the most part, gregarious, egoistic but also strongly idealistic, Joaquin Miller and his Hights—the name he gave his acreage—were major players in Oakland’s lively, turn-of-the-last-century cultural scene.

SoCial CliMbing

When, in the spring of 1887, Miller purchased his piece of the Contra Costa hills, he was an acclaimed poet with multiple books and four plays to his name. At the age of ten, Cincinnatus Hiner Miller, as he was named, moved with his family from Libertyville, Indiana, to Oregon. Thirty years later and an aspiring writer, this child of the Wabash River and the Conestoga wagon became the sensation of the drawing rooms of London. Sporting long hair and a Wild West outfit of sombrero, scarlet shirt, scarf, and sash, the onetime gold miner, Indian fighter, Pony Express rider, newspaper publisher, and judge captivated the haute monde of Britain. A dozen years before William Cody’s Buffalo Bill show packaged the mythos, this self-called Byron of the Rockies introduced an old-world audience to the romance and adventure of the western frontier.

Having acquired his Oakland holding, Miller built a tiny log hut as temporary shelter. At this phase of his life, he would amass an amorphous total of three wives and seven, mostly absent, children (two, however, soon showed up, caus-ing no end of trouble).5 His third spouse, Abbie Leland Miller, was back in New York, where, along with Newport or Saratoga Springs, she pre-ferred to remain.6 Several factors eased Miller’s plan to settle permanently in northern California. Having lived in the Shasta/Siskiyou areas on and off between 1853 and 1859, he knew the wilds of that part of California. Subsequent visits to San Francisco in 1863, 1870, and again in 1871–72,

combined with some early writing, had laid down tracks for an eventual return. In the 1870s and 1880s, his prodigious output during his resi-dency in Europe and on the East Coast had dis-tinguished this frontiersman as one of the West’s most prolific writers. Along with his adventurous life, in the sixteen years (1870–86) preceding his return, he had produced six books of poetry, four novels, two works of romanticized nonfiction, and ten plays, only two of which were actively produced. Of those two, The Danites in the Sierras was both a Broadway and a London success (it was performed in London by the first American troupe to travel abroad). Two collections of verse, Pacific Poems (London, 1871) and Songs of the Sier-

ras (London and Boston, 1871), had even earned the Oregonian a California title, namely, Poet of the Sierras.7 All of this acclaim had the beneficial effect of securing Miller a job in advance of his arrival. Harr Wagner, the new editor of a revived Golden Era magazine, had offered the Washing-ton, D.C.–based Miller the position of associate editor. This allowed him to pick up way ahead of where he left off.

Miller’s cumulative achievements, combined with his bonhomie, made him a natural candi-date for one of San Francisco’s leading social fraternities, the Bohemian Club. Founded in 1872 by a group of journalists, this society had expanded early on to include artists and their patrons. By 1888, Miller had joined Mark Twain, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Warren Stod-dard, and Ina Coolbrith as an honorary member. (His continuation in that status may be explained by both his early fame and his persistent state of penury.) According to an account by the neo-phyte journalist Elodie Hogan, this membership paid immediate dividends. A few of Miller’s club mates contributed their talents to the construc-tion of the Abbey, the chapel-like cottage that the writer built for himself while living in the log hut at the Hights. One, possibly Martinez native and man-about-the-arts Bruce Porter, fashioned

43

At the Hights, Miller built four cabins: one for receiving guests, one for his brother, one for his mother, and one for sleeping and writing, which he called the Abbey (above), after his absent wife, Abbie Leland Miller, and Westminster Abbey, final resting place for many of Miller’s heroes. The central room, or “chapel,” was Miller’s office-cum-bedroom. The two wings on either side were the “deaneries,” in one of which Miller regularly per-formed an Indian rain chant.

California Historical Society, de Young Collection,

CHS2010.301.tif

Miller transformed what had been rugged land into a forested slope with extensive rock walls, stone terracing, small ponds, numerous fountains, and a network of quixotic monuments, as detailed in this sketch by his daughter Juanita Miller (1880–1970). After his death, Juanita—described in a newspaper account as “beautiful and very unconventional”—sold souvenirs from one of the cabins and converted another into a sanctuary stocked with relics of her father.

Courtesy of Phoebe Cutler

the multicolored glass set in the two peaked win-dows adjoining the front door. Similarly, fellow Bohemian and sculptor Arthur Putnam could well have carved the rising sun, described as “an Aztec nimbus,” that sat above the door, while Putnam or another craftsman from the gregari-ous coterie contributed the scarlet cross that arose from the gable and the silver Moslem cres-cent on the door.8

The Bohemian Club provided Miller with a base in the city for drinking and socializing and, until the 1906 earthquake and fire demolished its building and the majority of its contents, a place to archive some of his papers. He participated in the “jinkses” that related to his own experience, such as the 1903 theatrical and musical evening honoring a companion of his London days, fel-low miner and longtime rival Bret Harte. Five years later, he joined in a comparable celebra-tion, the “Days of ’49,” with fellow performers “Sunset Norris” (Frank Norris of Octopus fame), “Sundown Field” (Charles K. Field, editor of Sunset magazine and Bohemian Club president from 1913 to 1914), and Arthur (repackaged as “Coyote”) Putnam.9

So much did the Poet of the Sierras enjoy his Bohemian experience that not long after its launch in 1904, he joined the Sequoia Club, society figure Ednah Robinson’s revival of a short-lived earlier group, a female response to the Bohemian Club.10 Uniquely for its time, the reorganized Sequoia Club integrated genders. Headed by Charles S. Aiken, editor of Sunset (and shortly to be Robinson’s husband), the Sequoia Club signaled its revival with a dinner at the St. Francis Hotel honoring the author Gertrude Atherton. Other receptions followed, along with concerts and art exhibits. Harr Wagner, who became Miller’s close associate and first biogra-pher (and the Sequoia Club’s third president), commented that the poet was inspired to host a barbecue at his ranch for a hundred of his fellow Sequoians.11

Given the logistics of transport, entertaining one hundred guests at home would have been mar-ginally more demanding than attending the San Francisco gatherings. The Bohemian schedule of performances at 9 p.m., with dinner follow-ing at 11, would have been a challenge for any member who wished to be home the same night, especially if that home happened to be in the hills behind the decorous suburb of Fruitvale and ten miles from the center of Oakland. With the last San Francisco–Oakland ferry leaving around midnight and connecting streetcars on the other side running only every hour, Miller could not have lingered long over dinner. In a few lines of a surviving note, he reassured a concerned friend that he did his “stint at the Bret Harte jinks, then caught the boat and walked up the hill to the Hights and slept in my own bear skins, as I told you I would.”12

As with almost everything connected with Miller, the facts, as related by both him and observers, are contradictory. However, almost all accounts concur in describing the hike up the “tawny hill” as a strenuous one. Commencing at the little settlement of Dimond at the intersection of Hop-kins (now MacArthur) and Fruitvale Avenues, the purported length of the trip varied markedly depending on the age and fitness of the traveler. What was two miles for a couple of college stu-dents in 1892 was five for the author, publisher, and arts-and-crafts manufacturer Elbert Hubbard a decade later. At least by the time the two Baptist students attempted the trip, the electric Highland Park and Fruitvale line had replaced the horse-drawn Brooklyn and Fruit Vale (as the name of the suburb was originally spelled) streetcar and now extended from Fruitvale center to Dimond. But even under ideal circumstances—a private carriage driven all the way from City Hall at 14th and Broadway—the trip to the Hights was a two-hour trek.13 Usually Miller made good use of a horse and buckboard when commuting up and down his hill. Returning from San Francisco after the Bret Harte musicale, he made the best


45

In 1910, Frank C. Havens of Realty Syn-dicate purchased from his partner, Fran-cis “Borax” Smith, the East Bay’s mass transit company. Included in the sale was this streetcar, featured in a 1911 postcard describing East 14th Street in Fruitvale as “the road of a thousand wonders.” Havens was now in charge of 13,000 acres—including the land surrounding the Hights—in the Berkeley-Oakland hills. For his part, Miller had joined the land rush as early as 1887, when he pur-chased several Oakland lots. By 1909, he was focusing his resources on that siren the eucalyptus, ordering and planting that year thousands of trees.

California Historical Society,

CHS2012.1011.tif

By 1900, the crossroads settlement of Dimond, where Miller picked up his mail and his less robust guests, hosted four unruly watering holes. From Saratoga Springs, New York, in February 1903, the poet wrote his brother regarding his nephew’s wanderings: “I do not allow him to hang around Dimond: It is low, low: I never knew a boy about there that did not go to the bad.”

Oakland History Room, Oakland Public Library


of it, closing the aforementioned note with the description: “The little baby moon had gone to bed, but all the heaven was a pin cushion of gold-headed stars and I was neither lonely or leg weary: all this to show what the steps (?) and stairs (?) out door air will do for a fellows [sic] legs and lungs.”14

Although it lacked exact complements to the Bohemian and Sequoia Clubs, late-nineteenth- century Oakland could boast its share of frater-nities. It was a town, in the words of its mayor, where “Science, art, and letters thrive[d]” along with “morality and general education.”15 In addi-tion to upscale areas with “handsome and costly houses,” the Alameda County seat hosted sixteen educational establishments. The Vermonter Miss Mary Snell, principal of the Snell Seminary, filled in as a patron of the city’s budding art scene. When the reformer Baroness Alexandra Gripen-burg of Finland sought, in 1887, to meet the East Bay’s famous new resident, they rendezvoused at the seminary.16 In this way and in others, Miller improvised his social life on the Contra Costa side of the bay.

Spiritual heightS

Above almost all else, the church was a unifying force in the middle-aged bard’s new northern California life. Although Miller claimed loyalty to no single religion, his father’s Quakerism and the fundamental Christian practice in the Willamette Valley of his youth strongly shaped his outlook and his writing. (The Bible, he fre-quently asserted, was the only reference book he needed.) Halfway up the hill on the trail that led to his private cemetery, he erected the Bishop’s Gate, honoring William Taylor, Methodist bishop, powerful gold rush preacher, and heroic mission-ary to Africa. What would have further attracted Miller, Taylor enjoyed a reputation as one of the first, if not the first, importer of eucalyptus to California.17

Simultaneously with Miller settling at his ranch was the establishment of the Unitarian Church’s first East Bay branch. Known as a sect with advanced views and led by a succession of dynamic ministers, the First Unitarian Church of Oakland attracted a distinguished congrega-tion.18 Although Miller habitually spent his Sundays propped up at work in the big brass bed that doubled as his office, he formed strong ties to the church’s Reverend Charles W. Wendte, his successor William Day Simonds, the free-floating Reverend Benjamin Fay Mills, and, even more importantly, two of the church’s staunch-est parishioners, Charles J. Woodbury and John P. Irish.

Son of a German immigrant and a gifted leader who grew up in Boston and San Francisco, Wendte established twelve new Unitarian churches in a six-year period during his stay in Oakland. To a large degree self-educated, he pro-moted literature as well as music during these years (1886–98) in the burgeoning town.19 True to the liberal outlook of his chosen denomina-tion, he offered the pulpit of the newly built First Unitarian Church to both the radical feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Indian mystic Swami Vivekananda, founder of the Vedanta Society. Under his aegis, a fundraiser for a memorial to a deceased poet drew almost a com-plete complement of writers from the area. On another occasion, Miller sat by bemused while an embarrassed Unitarian from across the bay paro-died his versifying.20

Relocated to southern California by 1904, Rev. Mills was less a literary figure and more a spir-ited reformer with a socialist agenda. Miller, whose writing inveighed against the evils of unfettered capitalism (ignoring his own inveter-ate land speculations), enjoyed an easy rapport with Mills. Elbert Hubbard recalled the Hights proprietor waylaying him and the minister dur-ing a visit. Miller had appeared from the trees

47

From 1894 to 1910, Irish held the sine-cure (which earned him the title of Colonel) of Naval Officer of Customs, Port of San Francisco. He never gave up farming, eventually operating a thousand acres near Bakersfield. In the penultimate year of his life, he made a triumphant visit to Japan, where he was received as a hero, since he had cam-paigned ardently against Asian discrimi-nation laws. He was greeted by Yone Noguchi, a member of the Japanese parliament, who, as a stowaway at age thirteen, wandered into West Oakland and the Irish home. The family took him in and educated him. According to the lore, this future parliamentarian was the first Japanese the Iowa native had ever seen.

John P. Irish was a dervish. Prior to arriving in California in 1882 at the age of thirty-nine, he had trained as a lawyer, served two terms in the Iowa legislature, run for governor, and been publisher of the Iowa State Press. Within six or seven years of arriving in Oak-land, he became editor and chief owner of the Oakland Times and the last man-aging editor of San Francisco’s venera-ble Daily Alta.1 Within that same period, he served on a committee to oversee the Southern Pacific, led another com-mittee to overhaul the city’s sewer sys-tem, and was elected head of the West Oakland Improvement Association. Simultaneously, he shared responsibil-ity for the Home for the Adult Blind and the Women’s Sheltering and Protective Home. In sum, for the next forty years, he was ubiquitous as a civic leader, writer, and speaker.

Large, with an oversized head, and (later) flowing white hair—and always without a tie—this public figure poured himself into conservative causes. He opposed women’s right to vote, Pro-hibition, and the ceding of Yosemite to the federal government. He cam-paigned nationwide against silver and for the gold standard. Ambrose Bierce, not a fan of Irish, nevertheless recog-nized, in a backhanded way, his omni-presence:

“Ah, no, this is not Hell,” I cried;“The preachers ne’er so greatly lied.

“This is Earth’s spirit glorified!

“Good souls do not in Hades dwell,“And, look, there’s John P. Irish!”

“Well,The Voice said, “that’s what makes it Hell.”2

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The Irrepressible John P . Irish . . . Colonel

Miller’s friendship with the journalist John P. Irish (1843–1923) dated to the first year of his return to San Francisco. In the February 1914 issue of Out West magazine, Irish described Miller’s influence: “There occurred at his mountain home certain things which in literary interest have probably not been equaled in the history of any genius. . . . The arms of his hospitality were opened to the maimed and spent and the stranger, who, in the atmosphere that was around him discovered talents that they had not suspected.”

Charles Wood Irish Papers, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa


intoning, “The collection will now be taken.” He then welcomed the entrepreneurial Hub-bard, declaring, “Ben said you were coming, but preachers are such damn liars.”21

Given the centrality of religion to the social and literary life of early Alameda County, it is apt that Miller’s first documented social outing was sponsored by Charles and Lucia Woodbury in the summer of 1887. The Woodburys invited the poet, the Irishes, and the Wendtes to meet the simpatico Reverend John K. McLean and his wife of the Congregational Church.22 Charles’s ties with the Unitarian sect came naturally. Born in Massachusetts, but raised partially in Michigan, he returned to his native state to attend Williams College, where he became a disciple of the emi-nent thinker and onetime Unitarian minister, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Their acquaintance lasted on and off for five years. At the time of his Oak-land entertainment, Woodbury, head of a growing family and president of a varnish company, was writing a book about his life-changing relation-ship with Emerson twenty years earlier. For the remainder of his life, besides playing the violin and penning the occasional religious poem and book review, this devout Unitarian gave lectures on the Concord philosopher and his circle.23

It was to this learned patriarch’s warm and wel-coming household that Miller repaired—“wet, dripping, draggled, muddy hands and face, torn clothes, and worn-out body and mind from my long walk and contact with wire fences”—en route to speak at the First Presbyterian Church. Along with his fire and “sundry cups of hot tea,” Miller, in kind with the audiences who gathered for his friend’s talks, would have valued Wood-bury’s New England associations. During one of his several trips to Boston, he wrote Abbie and their daughter, Juanita, that he had visited Longfellow’s grave and was going to the “classic ground” of Concord and Lexington.24

The three compatriots—Woodbury, Irish, and Miller—arrived in California about the same time. Although all were individuals of some significance, Woodbury was, for the most part, a private figure. Miller, a prolific writer with a national reputation to maintain, required a degree of isolation to do his work. In contrast, Irish, the poet’s most intimate ally, was 95 percent in the public eye. Now forgotten but at the time judged one of California’s “most picturesque public figures,” he deserves separate treatment.25

literary liaiSonS

Keeping very quiet, for understandable reasons, about her religious preferences (she was the daughter of the younger brother of Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism26), Ina Coolbrith was judged by Harr Wagner as Miller’s closest liter-ary friend. Without a doubt, she was his longest-running female friend. This much-esteemed figure in the California pantheon of writers was a beautiful young woman of twenty-nine when the Indiana-born poet first met her in 1870 dur-ing the second of his early visits to San Francisco. Miller had come to her attention the previous year with the receipt at the Overland Monthly offices of the slim book of verse Joaquin, et al. A divorcée and transplant from Los Angeles, Coolbrith, herself a contributor to the journal, urged editor Bret Harte to review the curious submission from the backwoods Oregon judge. When, following the review’s appearance, Miller himself arrived at the journal’s offices, Coolbrith kindly took charge of the newcomer. Almost twenty years later, still single and guardian to her orphaned niece and nephew, she lived in a mod-est house on Webster Street, not far from her job as Oakland’s—and the state’s—first public librarian.

Miller owed this attractive colleague more than one debt. He was en route to greater arenas of glory when he spent a day with Coolbrith gather-ing olive branches in Marin County to make a

4

Ina Coolbrith (1841–1928), one of the Bay Area’s most prominent literary figures, met Miller when she was about twenty-nine, when this studio portrait was made. Coolbrith and Miller were bound by their shared Conestoga wagon past, Midwest origins, long acquaintance, involvement with literature, and unconventional single states. That closeness did not preclude Coolbrith from complaining that Miller did not credit her for his changed name and had reneged on his promise to provide her housing on his hill.

Oakland Public Library, photograph by Louis Thors


wreath for Byron’s grave. At this juncture, she convinced the aspiring poet to change his name from Cincinnatus to Joaquin, in honor of the fabled Mexican bandit and Miller’s poem in the just-reviewed, eponymous book.27 When two years later, Miller—now returned from Britain—was notified that the half-Wintun daughter he had fathered thirteen or fourteen years earlier and had left behind in Shasta County needed to be rescued from a bad situation, he arranged for the teenager to reside with Coolbrith. Cal-lie lived with her mentor—part of the time as a quasi-domestic—for an extended period. The two formed a strong bond.28

Until she moved back to San Francisco in 1899, Coolbrith was one of the anchors of the East Bay’s literary life. Well known is the help she gave to a disadvantaged and youthful Jack Lon-don. Less known is her support of more estab-lished writers, in particular George Wharton James. This restless young Brit, a minister by training, arrived with his family in 1887 (coin-cidentally the same year Miller put down stakes in the hills just to the south) for an almost two-year stay in Oakland. At the beginning of a remarkable writing career that spanned mental well-being, the Grand Canyon, the Southwest Indians, and southern California, James was offered a small loan by Coolbrith, who also wrote the introduction to one of his first literary efforts, a manual on physiology for youth. Extending her graciousness even further, she took her new friend to the Hights, the first of James’s many visits over the next two and a half decades.29

Coolbrith introduced two other literary figures to the frontier poet: the New York poet and painter Edmund Russell and the Rhode Island–raised, utopian reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Russell spent six months in San Francisco and Oakland in the early 1890s, during which time he was inspired to compile an anthology of con-temporary California poetry. During her longer Oakland stay, from 1891 to 1894, Gilman pub-

lished her still-admired, semiautobiographical short story, The Yellow Wallpaper. The grandniece of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Harriet’s brother, the fiery (and scandal-tainted) Reverend Henry Beecher, Gilman’s impecunious state required her to take charge of a boardinghouse directly across from Coolbrith’s household.30 Here, this remarkable woman composed poetry, fiction, and nonfiction for at least five different journals and newspapers; lectured; and engaged in social protest (sanitation, temperance, kindergartens, unemployment). For some of this time, she tended a dying mother (Swedenborgian minister Joseph Worcester visited and advised her to get help). And, for almost all of it, she looked after a young daughter.31 Gilman may have been singu-lar in her productivity, but she stood out as being one of the few women who was utterly resistant to the bard’s spell.

A stalwart daughter of Presbyterian New Eng-land, Gilman confided her disgust with Miller to her diary, calling him a “dirty person.” The high-minded Gilman also expressed her contempt in her description of the scene that George Wharton James, a less-exacting Methodist, was delighted to capture for the ages four years later: both visi-tors had discovered the writer in his standard working position, in bed, but, in Charlotte’s case, with a cigar, whose ashes he carelessly dropped on the floor.32

hillSide boheMia

Gilman—her scorn not withstanding—and James were welcome guests at the Hights. Torrents of curiosity seekers were not. The bard railed against the “lion-hunters” who would “purloin his manuscripts, steal his books, peer through his windows, and even carry off his coats, gloves and handkerchiefs.” The incident inciting this outburst was the appearance of four female “pil-grims to the shrine of poesy,” who steadfastly refused to acknowledge Miller’s attempt to take his “rapidly cooling” bath.33

5

When directed toward his friends, Miller’s hos-pitality was warm and welcoming. He appeared to entertain effortlessly. Among his long list of prior occupations was that of cook for a camp of gold miners. Even his estranged Native American daughter conceded that her father was a good chef. The importance Miller assigned to food and meals was indicated in James’s description of his first visit with Coolbrith to the Hights. James “solemnized his heart” when the poet at last revealed the “holy of holies,” pulling back a pair of beautiful Persian shawls to expose his greasy stove and kitchen table. His protégée and live/work assistant Yone Noguchi cited his pronouncements, “Remember this is a sacred service” and “Eat slowly, think something higher and be content.”34

In pursuit of this contentment and in kind with its neighboring hardscrabble ranches, the Hights had its complement of cows and chickens. The resourceful and frequently cash-strapped poet foraged for greens and shot local game and fowl. He fussed over his three small purpose-built ponds that provided fish and frogs. “Every avail-able place” was “planted to corn and vegetables,” while the roadside, as writer and traveler Charles Warren Stoddard described the drive from Dimond, yielded watercress.35 Noguchi recalled Miller heading out to bag a quail for his mother’s breakfast but returning with a sparrow. One guest was disappointed that he was served not the promised pheasant, but “wild geese fresh from the wheat field.” He was lucky compared to the easterners for whom Jack London prepared rattlesnake under the guise of rabbit.36

George Sterling (1869–1926) recalled his first glimpse of Miller in the late 1880s at the Hights: “We stood and stared, and staring, made out the form of a man lying propped up on a bed in the nearest cabin. The presence wore a red skull-cap. Yellow hair foamed out on the pillow. It must be our god of the western lyre.” Years later, George Wharton James (1858–1923) made this photograph of the poet at work in his bed on Christmas Day, 1896, capturing some of the idio-syncrasies of his lifestyle: his small room with exposed rafters and unstained walls; clippings, photos, letters, and animal skins coating the walls; the ceiling hung with flags, whips, and arrows; and a stack of unanswered mail next to the bed. The one constant amidst the clutter was the all-important jug of whiskey under the bed.

Library of Congress; photograph by G. Wharton James


Neither pheasant nor geese could have been all that plentiful, because by all accounts the most common meal for entertaining purposes was Miller’s “bandit luncheon,” a meat stew with onions and vegetables cooked in a large pot over an open fire for two to three hours. A varia-tion was the “Hungarian bandit luncheon,” a kebob of small steak, bacon, and a slice of onion on skewers.37 From the early 1890s, when the Hights began to welcome a steady stream of both transient and resident Japanese, the cuisine diversified to include tea and sushi. Goose or kebob, these meals took place among the red-woods in the canyon along Palo Seco Creek on the property’s northern border, or near the Abbey under what was variously described as an arbor, an arbor with roses, or “a bower of white roses.” In unseasonable weather, the repasts were moved a dozen yards east to Margaret Miller’s, Joaquin’s mother’s, winter cottage.38

The guest list of one such bandit lunch com-bined Berkeley artist William Keith and his wife; the author Cora Older, wife of local editor and reformer Fremont Older; the author Bailey Millard, at the time in between San Francisco and New York editing jobs; and resident artist and aristocrat the Hungarian count Geyza S. de Perhacs. All during his Oakland period, but especially in the early 1990s when he was a stringer, Miller drew heavily from his acquain-tances among the contributors and staff at the venerable San Francisco Morning Call (after 1895, the San Francisco Call). One dinner was prefaced by a pitcher of water containing one of Miller’s stocks of goldfish, described by guest and Call “auditor” Howard Hurlbut, a would-be poet and recent sojourner among the Crow Indians. Also in attendance were Ethel Brandon, a local leading lady, and her sister, a poetry contributor to the Call. To honor the departing New Yorker Edmund Russell, Upper Fruitvale’s most prominent host again called upon poets, in this instance Edwin Markham, David Lesser Lezinsky, and Coolbrith.39

Although Miller was inclined toward more inti-mate entertaining, near the end of his presence in Fruitvale Heights he also annually held what he called Whitaker Day, in honor of Herman “Jim” Whitaker, his wife, and their seven children.40

The son of English wool manufacturers, Whitaker had arrived in Oakland in 1895. He worked odd jobs while moving his family from one cheap immigrant neighborhood to another. Eventually, this close confrere of Miller’s was to enjoy success with his novel The Planter, an exposé of condi-tions on Mexican rubber plantations.

Superficially, Whitaker shared much in common with John Herbert Evelyn Partington, another intimate. Both men were British, Oakland-based, and the father of seven children. The resem-blance ended there, however, because Partington, a graphic artist, had a going business, a school for newspaper illustration. Also, in contrast with Whitaker’s earthier progeny, the Partington children were destined to become artists of one kind or another. Gertrude painted Miller’s por-trait. Blanche and Richard were familiar figures at the Hights. Blanche, the Call’s drama and cultural critic and a much-admired beauty, was a confidante of Ambrose Bierce and a source of romantic interest for Noguchi.41 Until the quake wreaked havoc with the city’s theaters and art schools, young Dick worked at the family’s San Francisco school. Afterward, he ran the art gal-lery that real estate developers Francis Marion “Borax” Smith and Frank Havens opened in the upscale suburb of Piedmont.

As Havens’s nephew and right-hand man, George Sterling would have been instrumental in securing the gallery position for Dick. A would-be poet, Sterling was the dashing, unannounced leader of a group of young men that included Dick, Ambrose Bierce’s younger son, Leigh, and the journalist Austin Lewis, who along with Bierce’s brother Albert and his son Carleton were regular imbibers of Miller’s store of 110 proof.

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From their doings arise some of the more color-ful anecdotes regarding life at the Hights. Ster-ling, a genuine fan of Miller’s poetry, recalled Miller’s insistence on demonstrating his skill with a tomahawk, an expertise he claimed had often saved his life during his Shasta days. Fueled with “an appreciable amount of moon-shine,” the bard flung the hatchet at a tree four times, each time missing his target. After the fifth attempt, he hit the tree with the butt end of the handle. Commenting on this incident, Miller biographer M. M. Marberry surmised that the poet, who was famously resistant to the effects of alcohol, most likely had never thrown a toma-hawk before.42

A busy Socialist (and onetime candidate for gov-ernor), Austin Lewis would not have been one of the more frequent denizens of the Hights, but even he recalls the group’s rollicking picnics. From an orchard in Piedmont, the picnickers would progress over the hills to Fruitvale. Lewis, one of Sterling’s three boyhood pals who fol-lowed him from Long Island, recalled that in a quarry near Miller’s they would discuss “the affairs of the universe” and listen “to the rhap-sodical lies of the old bard.”43

Visits to the Hights were not all whiskey and talk. Miller’s friends sometimes helped with the ranch work. One well-circulated photograph circa 1909 depicts Miller supervising Whitaker and two

Miller’s friendship with George Sterling and Charles Warren Stoddard (1843–1909) extended beyond the Hights to Carmel, where Sterling had cofounded an artist’s colony. In a letter to Ambrose Bierce, Sterling described the trio’s visit in October 1905 to Carmel Mission, where Miller flirted outrageously with the sex-ton’s daughter. Later, after a liberal ingestion of spirits, he went off, half-cocked, to lecture at the Monterey County Teachers’ Institute.



had been bruiting about since the early 1890s. One of the first to arrive was his disciple Edwin Markham. As early as 1888, a solitary Miller had written to Markham in Placerville in an effort to attract a sympathetic and muscular workmate to the barren hillside he termed a “doleful, grew-some [sic] place.”45 Four years later, after the electrification of the tram line, Markham, who for about three years had been living downtown near the Oakland elementary school where he was principal, moved within a half-mile of the Hights.46 There, in 1899, he produced “Man with the Hoe,” one of the most popular and lucrative poems of all times.

About the time Markham took the job in Oak-land, the first of Miller’s long line of Japanese youths began to appear. They were of two kinds, well-to-do students on their way home from Ivy League colleges and poorer young men who may have been working elsewhere in menial jobs. Both types raised the ire of the locals. (In his rambling semiautobiography, The Building of the

City Beautiful, Miller described a confrontation with a “committee for the protection of white labor,” whose threats forced some of the early live/work residents to leave.47) Elbert Hubbard, recalling his late 1902 visit, reported on the effect of these outlanders on the rough slopes above Dimond: “Soon a whole little village smiled upon us from a terraced outlook, that seemed sur-rounded and shut in by tall pines. The houses were about as large as dry goods cases—say eight by twelve. There were a dozen of them . . . of all sorts and color and shapes.”48

Musing on the same sight, Jim Whitaker’s daughter Elsa remembered visiting “the beauti-ful little Japanese paper houses up through the woods.” She described them as “well made” and mostly composed of paper.49 Hubbard was met by “an Oriental, all dressed in white,” who escorted him to his cottage. On his one and only stay at the Hights, Charles Warren Stoddard, a founder with Coolbrith and Harte of the Overland

writers, Luke Pease and James H. MacLafferty, pitching hay. The sturdier among Miller’s circle fitted rocks for his network of monuments: the pyramid to Moses, the tower to Robert Brown-ing, the turret to John C. Frémont, and, grandest of all, the funeral pyre intended for Miller’s own personal use.44

By 1893, the Oregon-bred poet had penned “Columbus” (“Sail on! Sail on! and on!”), the verses that would, on October 12 each year, make him the bane of at least two generations of chil-dren. His “shelf of the mountain” was slowly beginning to resemble the “hillside Bohemia” he

by 1893, the oregon-

bred poet had

penned “Columbus”

(“Sail on! Sail

on! and on!”). . . .

His “shelf of the

mountain” was

slowly beginning

to resemble the

“hillside bohemia”

he had been

bruiting about since

the early 1890s.

55

The following year brought Takeshi Kanno, the longest, most continuous Japanese inhabitant. A self-styled philosopher, Kanno was to become embroiled in two scandals: his interracial mar-riage to the sculptress Gertrude Boyle and her desertion of him for one of his much younger countrymen. This regrettable fate, including his eventual remarriage with Boyle, has not been sufficient to win lasting fame for the luckless Kanno.54

Monthly, marveled at the cultural attainments of these young Asians, who “talked freely” of “Emerson, Wordsworth, Longfellow, of Shake-speare” and also of Bunyan, “Victor Hugo, Walt Whitman, and even Bernard Shaw.” In addition, they were more versed in Russian literature than were their American equivalents.50

In contrast to the passing students, the Japanese live/work servants were indispensable to the Hights’s operation. Speaking to a reporter in the spring of 1895, Margaret Miller referred to the “two young Japanese” who had been “living with us here for a long time receiving instruction in English from Joaquin.” A more accurate descrip-tion of the pedagogy would be Miller’s encapsula-tion of his relationship with Yone Noguchi, who arrived in the spring of 1895 and stayed for five years: “This boy is the right sort; he does just as he pleases—lives in the cabin yonder. I never go into it. Sometimes he comes in here and we talk of men and books.”51

Although honored to be at the famed Hights, Noguchi and his peers were essentially house-boys. However, unlike their comrades elsewhere, they received no compensation (Noguchi stated that the only object he received from his host were two pairs of woolen socks to replace his tattered ones).52 A revealing photo (page 56)

of Miller with three Japanese youths and two horses (unusual among archival photos of casual scenes in that it bears a specific date, June 6, 1891) gives a sense of their status. In this image, the poet is every bit the proud ranch owner. One arm is tossed casually over his horse. Two of the Japanese hold the horses. A third looks out shyly from behind Miller. The front steps of the Abbey appear to the right and in the distance are a lordly view of Fruitvale’s eponymous orchards and a snatch of County Road #2509. The “fruit grower and poet,” as he had once again listed himself in the local directory, is showing off his steeds, his servants, and his domain.53

In 1893, student-laborer Yonejiro (Yone) Noguchi (1875–1947) took up residence at the Hights, where he began his English lit-erary career and embarked, in 1897, on a correspondence with Charles Warren Stoddard. This autographed portrait, made on July 4, 1897, was one of three he sent to Stoddard, each posed in western rather than Japanese dress, a preference acknowledged by Miller during Noguchi’s almost decades-long residence in the United States. Noguchi, Miller explained to the San Francisco Chronicle, “objects to that sort of interest, saying that he wants to write for America, and depend solely on the value of his work.”

Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California


Of Miller’s Japanese residents, wrote Charles War-ren Stoddard, “Never were gentler souls than these who have found a welcome and a shelter at The Heights.” Miller himself confessed enjoying their “exquisite refinement . . . their willingness and eagerness to add in some way to your comfort and pleasure; their delicacy and reserve,” attributes that “make them a model for every nation under the sun!” On their part, Miller observed, the “open little houses here and the meditative life among the flowers and birds remind them all the time of ‘beau-tiful, beautiful Japan.’”

California Historical Society, CHS2010.301.tif

The Japanese poet-philosopher Takeshi Kanno (1877–n.d.) married Gertrude Boyle (1876–1937), Miller’s portrait sculptor of choice, in 1907. In this 1914 photograph, the Kannos are performing Takeshi’s 1913 “vision drama,” Creation Dawn. Gertrude described Takeshi’s affinity to the Hights as “a spot in harmony with the meditative spirit so strong within him. . . . Here he has remained in the silence of dream, sunk deep in the ocean-thought of the universe; anon awakening to whisper his fancies, his sea-murmurings, to the soft breezes, to voice his soul-dreams to my ear.”

Library of Congress

57

Not only writers gathered at the Hights. The fiery Xavier Martinez, first painting teacher at the Cali-fornia Academy of Arts and Crafts in Oakland (later the California College of Arts and Crafts), came with and without his wife, Elsa Whitaker. Gertrude Boyle Kanno was one of the most tal-ented artists to take up residency. A refugee from the 1906 earthquake, she moved there when her studio (at the same Pine Street address as the Partington School) was destroyed. Boyle was the sculptor of choice for the eminences grises of the day, including Edwin Markham, John Muir, Joseph LeConte, and, of course, Miller.

Miller was the “center of our solar system,” Charles Stoddard reported, describing the dull-ness that followed his absence from the ranch. Ambrose Bierce, who may not have worked on the stone monuments but who was known to join family members on excursions into the hills, conceded that Miller was “as great-hearted

Kanno lived at the Hights for over ten years, writ-ing one poem and a “vision drama,” with very limited exposure. In contrast, within a year of moving to the Hights, Noguchi produced idiosyn-cratic poetry that created a small sensation. His efforts were collected into Seen and Unseen, or

A Monologue of a Homeless Snail (1897), the first and only book to emerge from Gelett Burgess and Porter Garnett’s Bohemian Press.55 By the time he returned to Japan in 1904, having left the Hights some four years earlier, Noguchi had published four books (and fathered the sculptor Isamu Noguchi). Repatriated, he established him-self as one of the reigning authorities on English literature. Today his accomplishments are the subject of an extensive Web site, the object of study in courses on Asian Americans, and mate-rial for an exhibition at the Oakland Asian Cul-tural Center.56

Ironically, of all the once-prominent literati who gathered at Miller’s bastion, this penniless quasi-servant is arguably the most feted. Noguchi was the comet whose tail still shimmers: the first Japanese to compose poems in English, a tal-ented crafter of words, and a pioneer in bringing Western literature to Asian shores. The lesser lights who were drawn to the Oregonian’s “steeps and heaps of stones” for the most part could just watch. They, however, did their service stok-ing the numerous publications that made San Francisco a West Coast literary center at the turn of the last century. John P. Irish, George Ster-ling, Herbert Bashford, George Wharton James, Henry Meade Bland, Harr Wagner, Charles War-ren Stoddard, Bailey Millard, and more—Miller’s boon companions—were the writers and editors of Sunset, Overland Monthly, and Golden Era mag-azines and the city’s four principal newspapers. Drawn to the Hights by its owner’s esprit, they sunned themselves in his larger-than-life person-ality, drank his whiskey, and chawed his barbe-cue. Some—Bland, Wagner, and the newspaper editor and poet Alfred James Waterhouse—even lived there for different periods.57

Miller was the

“center of our

solar system,”

charles stoddard

reported. . . .

ambrose bierce

conceded that

miller was “as

great-hearted a

man as ever lived.”

n o t e s


The poet Charles Keeler (1871–1937) also posed for Hanscom (right). Keeler, she recalled, “hazarded his life by sitting upon the edge of an upturned circular table pouring, or imagining he was pouring, bubbles from a huge, heavy brass bowl. It was the only available thing I could make to represent this big, round earth of ours.”

Courtesy of Michael Shreve; www.michaelshreve.com

The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

In late 1903 or early 1904, Miller was asked to pose for pho-tographer Adelaide Marquand Hanscom’s (1875–1931) illus-trated version of the classic selection of poems, the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (left).

In a 1906 interview, Hanscom described waiting for Miller’s reply: “We had about given up on hope, thinking he had ignored us entirely, when one day a tall, long bearded, long haired and long coated old man came into our studio and, without waiting to introduce himself, extended both his hands above our heads and said, ‘Bless you, my children, bless you.’ He then took each in turn by the hand, bowed low, and kissed the fingertips. It is a ceremony, we soon learned, that he seldom omits.”

5

London died two years after that. The same year as Miller’s demise, Sterling went on a binge and his wife initiated a divorce. By 1919, Whitaker was dead in New York. Despite this disintegra-tion, the Poet of the Sierras’ influence among the community lived on. In 1909, a group had formed the California Writers Club with Austin Lewis as president. Incorporating on February 28, 1913, the association adopted a ship as its logo and Sail On, from Miller’s poem “Colum-bus,” as its motto. In 1919, Oakland’s parks department acquired most of the Hights, which became Joaquin Miller Park, where for thirty years the California Writers Club held memorial activities, culminating in 1941 in the building of a 1,400-foot-long, Italian-style cascade using stone brought from the Sierra. Miller would have been pleased.

The death of the flamboyant author received national recognition. His reputation had been building since his, to many Americans, inex-plicable acclaim abroad in the 1870s. By 1893, the log cabin he had built and lived in for two years—near the White House—was on exhibit at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Distinguished in the eyes of his neighbors and others by his outlandish dress and self-prepared funeral pyre, Miller was viewed as an eccentric, but no Bay Area literary event was complete with-out him. One local organizer seeking his pres-ence at an industrial exposition addressed Miller as Oakland’s “bright, particular star” (the “star” agreed to lecture; his chosen topic: “The Size of the Dollar”).63

By early 1915, various women’s groups were lead-ing a campaign to preserve the Hights. In 1917, Abbie, encouraged in her negotiations by John P. Irish, settled on a price with the city of Oakland for the Hights while securing lifetime tenure for herself and a quarter acre for Juanita. Joaquin Miller Park was duly the largest of Oakland’s parks for years to come.

a man as ever lived.”58 At least one contemporary book other than Miller’s own output attests to the force of the poet’s personality. In his Sunset review of Adelaide Hanscom’s pictorial inter-pretation of the classic The Rubáiyát of Omar

Khayyám, George Wharton James recounts how Miller, who had agreed to pose for several pho-togravures, corralled Sterling, the poet Charles Keeler, and James himself to stand in for various characters. As a result of Miller’s intervention, we have an enduring record of George Sterling as a thoughtful, retreating soul, Charles Keeler as an angel shape with a cask of grapes, and James as a sultan.59

“bright, partiCular Star”

At the end—February 17, 1913—Miller’s two orig-inal circles reclaimed their own. Five days later, the First Unitarian Church held a memorial ser-vice with eulogies by the minister, Professor Wil-liam Dallam Armes of UC Berkeley, and John P. Irish.60 In May, the Bohemian Club orchestrated a scattering of Miller’s ashes at the Hights. The Call estimated that five hundred people tromped up the hill to the site of the poet’s funeral pyre. Coolbrith “chanted her lines in a full voice that reached out in the neighboring pines and aca-cias.”61 Irish lit the flames, above which the old gold miner’s ashes were flung. At that point, a sixty-voice chorus from the club burst forth with the bard’s own three-verse farewell to himself titled “Goodby.” The first verse read:

Yon mellow sun melts in the sea,

A somber ship sweeps silently

Past Alcatraz toward Orient skies,

A mist is rising to the eyes,

Good by, Joaquin; good by, Joaquin; good

night, good night.62

It was more than a goodbye to Miller. It was also a goodbye to the locale’s literary and social scene: Stoddard had died four years before; Bierce dis-appeared in the Mexican desert one year later;


“Some day I shall sit down and not get up any more,” Miller wrote John P. Irish in a “directory letter” in 1889. “I want to leave my ashes on my ‘Hights,’ among the trees I have planted, and I want you to see to it that my body is burned on my tomb here; and quietly, secretly if necessary. Let no one meddle. It should be of far less concern to the world than the planting of one of my thousands of trees.” On May 23, 1913, three months after Miller’s publicly celebrated funeral, members of San Francisco’s Bohemian and Press Clubs gathered to burn the urn containing the poet’s ashes, scattering them about his beloved Hights.


6

asked if he could swim: “Yes.” “Then swim to Contra Costa,” he was advised. “Splendid good swimming all the way. Take the water at the San Francisco wharf, swim the bay of San Francisco, then the San Pablo Bay, then Suisun Bay, then up the Sacramento river, then up Walnut Creek to the schoolhouse, where the committee will be out on the porch with banners and bands to receive you.”66

Miller’s blend of candor and the vernacular enjoyed wide appeal. Besides the New York–based Independent, two other journals, the Chicago

Times and the San Francisco Call, regularly car-ried his byline. With the wide proliferation of Miller’s poetry and his prose, the hospitality of his barbecues, and the eccentricity of his ranchero life and appearance, it is not surprising that the Hights and its environs became, by the 1890s, a habitation for area artists and a destination for visiting celebrities and local curiosity seekers. When Elbert Hubbard and Benjamin Fay Mills descended from the tram that terminated in the little settlement of Dimond, the conductor coun-seled them, “Take that road and sail on.” “He smiled,” Hubbard recalled, “in a way that indi-cated that he had sprung the allusion before and was pleased with it.”67

PhoebeCutler is an independent scholar. Recipient of the Heritage/Preservation Award (National Endowment for the Arts, 2001) and the Rome Prize (American Academy in Rome, 1988–89), she is the author of The Public Landscape of

the New Deal (Yale University Press, 1986), “Joaquin Miller’s Trees, Pts. 1 & 2,” Eden: The Journal of the California Garden

& Landscape Society 13, nos. 2 and 3 (2010), “Sutro Baths: Caracalla at Lands End,” Eden: The Journal of the California

Garden & Landscape Society 12, no. 1 (2009), and “The Rise of the American Municipal Rose Garden, 1927–1937,” Stud-

ies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 25, no. 3 (July–Sept. 2005).

The 1920s witnessed the first signs of a reas-sessment of the poet’s merit. Despite his wife and daughter’s best efforts to fan the altar flame, a University of Illinois professor conduct-ing research during the summer of 1921 for a compendium of Joaquin’s poems could find no copies of any of Miller’s books in a dozen Bay Area bookshops. This neglect presaged an opening fusillade on the frontier bard’s reputa-tion.64 Concurrently, the Hights was falling into a state of disrepair. A journalist visiting it in 1923 described the Abbey’s broken windows and wide-swinging doors, Margaret Miller’s cottage on the verge of collapse, the stone monuments vandal-ized, great trees felled, and the acacia thickets “ruthlessly cut away.”65 Resisting this decline of home and reputation, one or two of Miller’s best-known verses would habitually appear, at least until the 1950s, in American poetry anthologies.

While a handful of poems lived on, the prolific writer’s journalism more or less died with him. Yet Miller, more than one biographer acknowl-edges, regarded his prose more highly than his poetry. Indeed, journalism came easily to him. In Oregon in the early 1860s, he ran two short-lived newspapers. Throughout his career, he was writing constantly about his travels, initially in personal diaries and, later, on assignment for newspapers. His outspoken prose—both frank and moralistic—was spiked with humor and country argot. With the same brio with which he confronted swindlers and marauding indigenous people in the Sierra, he lambasted crooked land speculators and irresponsible politicians.

One of his early pet complaints was the deplor-able condition of Oakland’s roads. In a charac-teristically exaggerated account of a real event, he described his attempt to give a lecture in the neighboring settlement of Walnut Creek. Con-fronting the men who had invited him to speak with the lack of passable roads and his inability to walk due to prior war injuries, Miller was

62

n o t e s


courtship and conquest: alfred sully’s intimate intrusion at monterey, By stephen g. hyslop, pp 4–17

This article is adapted from my book Contest for California: From Spanish Colonization to the American Conquest (Arthur H. Clark and the University of Oklahoma Press, 2012), vol. II in the series Before Gold: California under Spain and Mexico, edited by Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz.

Caption sources: William Redmond Ryan, Personal Adventures in Upper and Lower California, vol. 1 (London: William Shoberl, Publisher, 1852), 72–73; Langdon Sully, No Tears for the General: The Life of Alfred Sully, 1821–1879 (Palo Alto, CA: American West Publishing Company, 1974), 42, 75; http://www.sancarloscathedral.org/history; www.mchsmuseum.com/san carlos; Walker A. Tompkins, Santa Barbara Past and Present (Santa Barbara, CA: Tecolote Books, 1975); completion date of 1820 per http://www.sbthp.org/soldados/SBMission and other sources; “Campaign of General Alfred Sully Against the Hostile Sioux in 1864, as Transcribed in 1883 from the Diary of Judge Nicholas Hilger,” in Contributions to the Historical Society of Montana, vol. 2 (Helena, MT: State Publishing Company, 1896), 322.1 Langdon Sully, No Tears for the General: The Life of Alfred Sully, 1821–1879 (Palo Alto, CA: American West Publishing Company, 1974), 23–24. 2 Doyce B. Nunis, Jr., “Alta California’s Tro-jan Horse: Foreign Immigration,” in Con-tested Eden: California before the Gold Rush, ed. Ramón A. Gutiérrez and Richard J. Orsi (Berkeley: University of California Press, in association with the California Historical Society, 1998), 299–330.3 Jefferson to Madison, Apr. 27, 1809, in Joseph J. Ellis, et al., Thomas Jefferson: Genius of Liberty (New York: Viking Studio, in association with the Library of Congress, 2000), 118, 133.4 Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senke-wicz, trans. and eds., Testimonios: Early Cali-fornia through the Eyes of Women, 1815–1848 (Berkeley: Heyday Books, in association with The Bancroft Library, 2006), 265, 277–78; Louise Pubols, The Father of All: The de la Guerra Family, Power, and Patriarchy

in Mexican California (Berkeley and San Marino: University of California Press and the Huntington Library, 2009), 262–69.5 William Heath Davis, Seventy-Five Years in California, ed. Harold A. Small (San Fran-cisco: John Howell, 1967 [1889]), 37, 66–67; Susanna Bryant Dakin, The Lives of William Hartnell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1949), 280–81.6 Letter of June 14, 1849, Alfred Sully Papers, Western Americana Collection, Bei-necke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (hereafter cited as Alfred Sully Papers); Sully, No Tears for the General, 41–42; Beebe and Senkewicz, Testimonios, 193–97.7 Letters of Aug. 19, 1849, and Dec. 29, 1849, Alfred Sully Papers.8 Letter of May 1, 1850, Alfred Sully Papers; Sully, No Tears for the General, 57, 85, 239–40 n. 5.9 Letters of May 28, 1850, and Aug, 28, 1850, Alfred Sully Papers; Sully, No Tears for the General, 61–63, 237 n. 3.10 Letter of June 23, 1850, Alfred Sully Papers.11 Letter of Apr. 30, 1851, Alfred Sully Papers; Sully, No Tears for the General, 69–71.12 Letter of Apr. 30, 1851, Alfred Sully Papers.13 Letter of June 14, 1849, Alfred Sully Papers; Sully, No Tears for the General, 42.14 Letter of June 1851, Alfred Sully Papers; Sully, No Tears for the General, 72–75.15 Alfred Robinson acknowledged that mission Indians were subjected to severe discipline but regarded plans to emanci-pate them and secularize the missions, undertaken by José María Echeandía and later governors of Mexican California, as misguided assaults on what conscientious padres with whom he did business had accomplished at their religious communi-ties. “These flourishing institutions, as they had been, were in danger of immediate sub-version and ruin,” Robinson wrote in Life in California before the Conquest (San Francisco: Thomas C. Russell, 1925 [1846]), 129. For a contrasting assessment of the mission sys-tem by an American who traded with Cali-fornios but did not enter into their society, see William Dane Phelps, Alta California, 1840–1842: The Journal and Observations

of William Dane Phelps, Master of the Ship “Alert,” ed. Briton Cooper Busch (Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark, 1983), 197–98. 16 Josiah Royce, California: A Study of Ameri-can Character (Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 2002 [1886]), 119.17 Sully, No Tears for the General, 150–51.18 Sully, No Tears for the General, 119–25, 243 n. 13; Vine Deloria, Jr., Singing for a Spirit: A Portrait of the Dakota Sioux (Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light Publishers, 2000), 59–60. For more on the history of the Deloria family, see Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 109–35. Alfred Sully’s connection to the Deloria family is mentioned in biographical articles on Ella Deloria by Raymond J. DeMallie in Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green, eds., Notable American Women: The Modern Period (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard Uni-versity Press, 1980), 183–85; and by Charles Vollan in David J. Wishart, ed., Encyclopedia of the Great Plains (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 59–60. 19 Benjamin D. Wilson, “Benjamin David Wilson’s Observations of Early Days in California and New Mexico,” Annual Pub-lications of the Historical Society of Southern California (1934), 74–150; Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of California (San Fran-cisco: History Company, 1886), 5: 777.

“With the god of Battles i can destroy all such Villains”: War, religion, and the impact of islam on spanish and mexican california, 1769–1846, By michael gonzalez, pp 18–39

Caption sources: Edna Kimbro, Julia G. Costello, Tevvy Ball, The California Missions: History, Art, and Preservation (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2009); Hugh Wm. Davies, Bernhard von Breydenbach and His Journey to the Holy Land, 1483–4: A Bibli-ography (London: J. & J. Leighton, 1911); Fr. Zephyrin Engelhardt, Santa Barbara Mission (San Francisco: James H. Barry Company, 1923), 125, California Historical Society 979.402 MSa51e.

1 William Shakespeare, Othello, in The Yale Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. Wilbur Cross and Tucker Brooke (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1993), I.i.52 and I.iii.247.

63

The lines describe Othello’s mission to confront a Turkish fleet bearing down on Cyprus.2 Some commentators may insist that Mus-lims still see jihad as a religious obligation. There is no need to enter the controversy. Commentary in the text and in the notes will provide sufficient explanation about the function of jihad in history.3 Jihad invites contentious discussion. For a sampling of the debate, see Malise Ruth-ven, A Fury for God: The Islamist Attack on America (London: Granta Books, 2002); Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (New York: Random House, 2004), esp. 29–32; Bernard Lewis also edited the entry for “Djihad” in The Encyclopedia of Islam, New Edition, 13 vols. (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1991), 2:538–40; Laurent Murawiec, The Mind of Jihad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Dan Diner and Steven Ren-dall, Lost in the Sacred: Why the Muslim World Stood Still (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Karen Armstrong, Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2009); and John Calvert, Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism (New York: Columbia Uni-versity Press, 2010).4 Verse 3.1.7, Al-Muwatta, http://bewley.vir-tualave.net/muwcont.html, also see, the ver-sion of the Muwatta at http://www.sultan.org/books/Muatta.pdf. All references to the Muwatta come from these versions.5 Hubert Howe Bancroft, The History of Cali-fornia, 7 vols. (San Francisco: The History Company, 1883), 2:223. The speaker is Pablo de la Guerra, resident of Santa Barbara.6 Ibid., 2:236.7 For a sophisticated and passionate defense of Islam as a contemplative faith whose approach to war is misunderstood, see Ziaddun Sardar, Reading the Qur’an: The Contemporary Relevance of the Sacred Text of Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). For a more personal approach to the subject, see Ed Husain, The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I Saw Inside, and Why I Left (New York: Penguin Books, 2007).8 We are speaking about the idea of con-vivencia, the hypothesis that the different religions and cultures of Spain learned to accept and work with one another. The argument is controversial. I give a sampling

of the literature. For a classic description, see Américo Castro, The Structure of Span-ish History, tr. Edmund King (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954). Other scholars support the idea: Jerrilyn D. Dodds, Architecture and Ideology in Early Medieval Spain (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), 58; Jerrilyn Dodds, María Rosa Menocal, and Abigail Krasner, The Arts of Intimacy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 117–20; and Dominique Urvoy, “The ‘Ulama of Al-Andalus,” ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, 2 vols., The Legacy of Muslim Spain (New York: E. J. Brill, 1994), 2:850. Some scholars express their doubts or at least say the subject is prone to overstatement: L. P. Harvey, Islamic Spain: 1250–1500 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Henry Kamen, The Disinherited: Exile and the Making of Spanish Culture (New York: HarperCollins Publish-ers, 2007); and Dario Fernández-Morera, “The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise,” The Intercollegiate Review (Fall 2006): 23–31. Finally, I would be remiss if I did not mention Robert I. Burns and his views on convivencia. Burns writes that the question deserves subtle treatment and must allow for exceptions and outright deviations. As one example of his work, see Muslims, Chris-tians, and Jews in the Crusader Kingdom of Valencia: Societies in Symbiosis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).9 Some may say we even misunderstand Franciscan devotion. To put the matter bluntly, they did not want to kill so much as they wanted to be killed and earn the martyr’s crown. For further discussion on Franciscan spirituality in the New World, see John Leddy Phelan, The Millennial King-dom of the Franciscans in the New World, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970). Also see Jacques Lafaye, Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness, tr. Benjamin Keen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).10 Jacqueline Chabbi, “Ribat,” in The Ency-clopedia of Islam, New Edition, 8:493–506. To complicate matters, a ribat could also take the name zawiyya. See Mustafa ‘Abdu-Salam al-Mahmah, “The Ribats in Morocco and their influence in the spread of knowl-edge and tasawwuf” [the Islamic practice of spiritual development] from al-Imra’a al-Maghribiyya wa’t-Tasawwuf (The Moroc-can Woman and Tasawwuf in the Eleventh Century), http://bewley.virtualave.net/ribat.html. One could also argue that ribat could

compare with a hisn, a Muslim castle. For more on this subject, see Thomas F. Glick, From Muslim Fortress to Christian Castle: Social and Cultural Change in Medieval Spain (Manchester, England: Manchester Univer-sity Press, 1995).11 Manuela Marín, “La práctica del ribat en al-Andalus,” El ribat califal: Excavaciones y estudios (1984–1992), ed. Rafael Azuar Ruiz (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2004), 191–201, esp. 191–92.12 For further discussion, see the collection of essays in El ribat califal: Excavaciones y estudios. Also consult Robert Hillenbrand, Islamic Architecture: Form, Function, and Meaning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), esp. 331–38; Peter Harrison, Castles of God: Fortified Religious Buildings of the World (Woodbridge, England: Boydell Press, 2004), 225–26; andMustafa ‘Abdu-Salam al-Mahmah, “The Ribats in Morocco.”13 For further discussion see, Carmen Mar-tínez Salvador, “Sobre la entitad de la rábita andalusí omeya, una cuestión de termi-nología: Ribat, Rábita y Zawiya,” in El ribat califal: Excavaciones y studios, 173–89, esp. 176–86.14 For criticism about the ribat as fortress, see Chabbi, “Ribat,” 493–506; and Jorg Feuchter, “The Islamic Ribat: A Model for the Christian Military Orders? Sacred Violence, Secularized Concepts of Religion and the Invention of a Cultural Transfer,” Religion and Its Other: Secular and Sacral Concepts and Practices and Interaction, eds. Heike Bock, Jorg Feuchter, Michi Knecht (Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag, 2008), 115–41. 15 For other views of the Sufi brotherhoods in the Islamic world, see Eric Wolf, “Society and Symbols in Latin Europe and in the Islamic Near East: Some Comparisons,” Anthropological Quarterly 42, no. 3 (July 1969): 287–301; Richard J. A. McGregor, “A Sufi Legacy in Tunis: Prayer and the Shad-hiliyya,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 29, no. 2 (May 1997): 255–77; and Gerald Elmore, “New Evidence on the Con-version of Ibn Al-Arabi to Sufism” Arabica 45, no. 1 (1998): 50–72.16 Michael Bonner, Jihad in Islamic History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 2, 136; Elena Lourie, “The Confra-ternity of Belchite, Ribat, and the Temple,” Viator 13 (1982): 156–79, esp. 165.

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17 Marín, “La práctica del ribat en al-Anda-lus,” esp. 196–97.18 Lourie, “The Confraternity,” 167–68.19 Dodds, Menocal, and Balbale, The Arts of Intimacy, 130. For more examples of Almoravid fervor, see Alejandro García-Sanjuán, “Jews and Christians in Almoravid Seville as Portrayed by the Islamic Jurist Ibn ‘Abdun,” Medieval Encounters 14 (2008): 78–98, esp. 82. On another note, the word Almoravid may come from the Arabic al-Murabitun, meaning “those bound together” or “those who perform ribat.”20 Fernández-Morera, “The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise,” 24. One scholar sug-gests that the Almohades practiced some form of ribat; see Gerald Elmore, “New Evidence on the Early Life of Ibn al-‘Arabi,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 117, no. 2 (Apr.–June 1997): 347–49.21 José Enrique López de Coca Castañer, “Institutions on the Castilian-Granadan Frontier,” in Medieval Frontier Societies, eds. Robert Bartlett and Angus Mackay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 127, and “Ibn Hud-hayl al-Andalusi, 1354–1362,” Schola Forum, Martial Arts, History and Warfare for Adults, http://www.fioredeiliberi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=18439.22 Richard Martin, “The Religious Founda-tions of War, Peace, and Statecraft in Islam,” in Just War and Jihad, Historical and Theoret-ical Perspectives on War and Peace in Western and Islamic Traditions, eds. John Kelsay and James Turner Johnson (New York: Green-wood Press, 1991), 96–97.23 By no means do we wish to promote the idea that Islam is a faith dedicated to war. Other commentators, though, have no trou-ble making the claim. See Pamela Geller, Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance (Washington, DC: WNDBooks, 2011), and Robert Spencer, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) (Washington, DC: Regnery Press, 2005). Mr. Spencer also maintains the web-site Jihad Watch. In any event, one does not have to read far to find verses like 4:95, in which God says that He will honor “those who fight, above those who stay at home,” or 9:5, also known as “the sword verse,” where the faithful learn that “when the sacred months are over, slay the idolaters wherever you find them.” Also see Helen Adolf, “Christendom and Islam in the Mid-

dle Ages: New Light on ‘Grail Stone’ and ‘Hidden Host,’” Speculum 32, no. 1 (January 1957): 103–15, esp. 107–8.24 All ideas about using war to “command the good and forbid evil” come from Martin, “The Religious Foundations of War, Peace, and Statecraft in Islam,” 96–97, 106–7. One version of the phrase can be found in Qur’an, 3:104.25 Martin, “The Religious Foundations of War, Peace, and Statecraft in Islam,” esp. 102–11.26 Malik produced the Muwatta sometime in the eighth century. See Maribel Fierro, “Mawali and Muwalladun in al-Andalus” in Patronate and Patronage in Early and Classi-cal Islam, eds. Monique Bernards and John Nawas (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, Academic Publishers, 2005), 202–4 and Fernández-Morera, “The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise,” 28. On another note, some com-mentators say Sunnis have more than four schools of thought. We let others decide the debate. For more views of Malik, see Mu’li Yusuf ‘Izz al-Din, Islamic Law from Histori-cal Foundations to Contemporary Practice (Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2004); Fierro, “Mawali and Muwal-ladun in al-Andalus,” esp. 202–4.27 Admittedly, warriors did not receive license to indulge in unrestrained carnage. Their violence occurred within a holy, lim-ited moment where they alone risked death and destruction. The weak, or any other person or thing incapable of giving offense, should suffer no harm. In the Muwatta, verse 21:3.11 says that men at war must not “kill women and children, or an aged, infirm person.” Furthermore, the warriors learn that they cannot “cut down fruit-bearing trees” and “destroy an inhabited place.” Even the distribution of treasure and livestock seized from the enemy followed a certain protocol. Verse 21:6 counseled that only “free men who have been present at battle” could receive a share of booty. Still, the Muwatta praised the warrior’s efforts. In Verse 21.1, the Muwatta proclaims that “someone who does jihad” follows the way of God. Muhammad adds: “Allah laughs at two men. One of them kills the other, but each of them will enter the garden; one fights in the way of Allah and is killed, then Allah turns [in forgiveness] to the killer so he fights [in the way of Allah] and also becomes a martyr.” Verse 21.14.27 features Muhammad saying, “I would like to fight in the way of Allah and be killed, then brought

to life again so I could be killed, and then brought to life again so I could be killed again.” 28 Some siyars seemed spurious, a question that need not concern us at this time. For a more thorough discussion, see Muhammad Munir, “Islamic International Law (Siyar): An Introduction,” Research Papers, Human Rights Prevention Centre (HRCPC) 7, no. 1–2 (2007): 923–40, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm; Bonner, Jihad in Islamic History, 111; Jean-Pierre Filiu, Apocalypse in Islam, tr. M. B. DeBevoise (Berkeley: Univer-sity of California Press, 2011), 32, 36–37.29 Michael Bonner, “Some observations concerning the early development of Jihad on the Arab-Byzantine Frontier,” Studia Isl-amica no. 75 (1992): 5–31, esp. 7.30 Ibid., 23–26.31 Marín, “La práctica del ribat en al-Anda-lus,” 197. 32 For more comment on this subject of holy men going to fight, see,Bonner, “Some observations,” 7; Maribel Fierro, “Spiritual Alienation and Political Activism: The guraba in al-andalus during the Sixth/Twelfth Century,” Arabica 47, no. 2 (2000): 230–60, esp. 233–34, 236.33 Fierro, “Spiritual Alienation,” 247.34 Bonner, Jihad in Islamic History, 112.35 Fierro, “Spiritual Alienation,” 257. 36 Castro, The Structure of Spanish History, 204. The Diccionario de la Lengua Española, 2 vols. (Madrid: Real Academia Española, 1992) provides the etymology for each of the above words and illustrates their Arabic origins.37 Thomas Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages (Princeton: Princ-eton University Press, 1979), 50–55.38 Mariam Rosser-Owen, Islamic Arts from Spain (London: V&A Publishing, 2010), 21; Maria Rosa Menocal, The Orna-ment of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2002); Álvaro of Córdoba quoted in William Dalrymple, “Inside the Madrasas,” The New York Review of Books, 52 (Dec. 1, 2005), http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18514; Alejandro García-Sanjuán, “Jews and Christians in Almoravid Seville as Portrayed by the Islamic Jurist Ibn ‘Abdun,” Medieval Encounters 14 (2008): 78–98, esp.

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91; D. Fairchild Ruggles, “Representation and Identity in Medieval Spain: Beatus Manuscripts and the Mud jar Churches of Teruel,” in Languages of Power in Islamic Spain, ed. Ross Brann, (Bethesda, Mary-land: CDL Press, 1997), 99–12, esp.103. Ruggles even speculates that the Christian kings used Islamic ornamentation to cre-ate a Spanish “identity” and reject French influence. Cisneros quoted in R. Brooks Jeffrey, “From Azulejos to Zaguanes: The Islamic Legacy in the Built Environment of Hispano-America,” Journal of the Southwest 45 (Spring-Summer 2003): 289–327. The exact quotation reads, “They lack our faith, but we lack their works.”39 Elena Lourie, “A Society Organized for War: Medieval Spain,” Past and Present 35 (Dec. 1966): 54–76, esp. 67–8.40 Qur’an, 8:941 Adolf, “Christendom and Islam in the Middle Ages,” esp. 107–9. Also see Javier Domínguez García, “Santiago Mataindios: La continuación de un discurso medieval en la Nueve España,” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, 54, no. 1 (2006): 33–56 (41).42 Luce López-Baralt, Islam in Spanish Lit-erature: From the Middle Ages to the Present (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill 1992), 25. 43 Elena Lourie discusses, and dismisses, the possibility that the Knights Templar inspired the rise of Spain’s military societ-ies. See “The Confraternity,” 159–70.44 Matthew 5–7; Mark 12:17; John 18:36.45 Jay Rubenstein, Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 24.46 Lourie, “The Confraternity,” 164n.23.47 Alfred L. Kroeber, “Stimulus Diffusion,” American Anthropologist 42, no. 1 (Jan.–Mar., 1940): 1–20, esp. 1–2, 20. Also consult Lou-rie, “The Confraternity,” 163–64; Thomas Glick and Oriol Pi-Sunyer, “Acculturation as an Explanatory Concept in Spanish History,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 11, no. 2 (1969): 136–54, esp. 151–52; Glick, “Muhtasib and Mustasaf: A Case Study of Institutional Diffusion,” Viator 2 (1971): 59–81; and Dodds, Menocal, and Babale, The Arts of Intimacy, esp.130–31. All refer-ences to Kroeber will draw on these other works that use his ideas to discuss the spread of Muslim ideas to Christians.

48 For one more view on the matter, see Andrew Wheatcroft, Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam (New York: Random House, 2003), chapter 3, eBook, http://books.google.com/books?id=p2QM1fKXOggC&printsec=frontcover& source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false.49 Qur’an 4:74: “Let those who fight in the way of Allah who sell the life of this world for the other. Whoever fights in the way of Allah, and he is slain, or is victorious, on him We shall bestow a vast reward.” Muwatta, Verse 21.15.34 emphasizes the rewards awaiting the warrior who sacrifices himself during wartime: “Being slain is but one way of meeting death, and the martyr is the one who gives himself, expectant of reward from Allah.” 50 St. Bernard, “”De Laudibus Novae Mili-tiae” or “In Praise of the New Knighthood,” http://webpages.charter.net/sn9/notebooks/bernard.html. 51 Zamanin, supposedly citing a hadith (teaching of Muhammad), in Marín, “La práctica del ribat en al-Andalus,” esp. 197; Rubenstein, Armies of Heaven, 24.52 Rubenstein, Armies of Heaven, 24.53 Ibid., 23–25. For more on the example of ribat, see Lourie, “The Confraternity,” 167–68, 174.54 See Roberto Marín Guzmán, “Jihad vs. Cruzada en al-Andalus: La Reconquista española como ideología a partir del siglo XI y sus proyecciones en la colonización de América, Revista de Historia de América no. 131 (Jul.–Dec., 2002): 9–65.55 Lourie, “The Confraternity,” 167.56 Ibid., 165–66, 169.57 Canon 10, The First Lateran Council, http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Councils/ecumo9/htm.58 Cited in Angus MacKay, “Religion, Cul-ture and Ideology on the Late Medieval Castilian-Granadan Frontier,” Medieval Fron-tier Societies, ed. Robert Bartlett and Angus MacKay (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1989), 229.59 Some scholars say the struggle against the Muslims had nothing to do with the conquest of the Americas. See Charles Gibson, “Reconquista and Conquista,” in Homage to Irving A. Leonard: Essays on His-panic Art, History and Literature, ed. Raquel

Chang-Rodríguez and Donald A. Yates (East Lansing: Michigan State University, 1977), 19–28.60 Miguel Asín Palacios, Islam and the Divine Comedy, tr. and ed. Harold Sutherland (Lon-don: Frank Cass and Co., Ltd., 1968 [1926]), 243n.1. 61 Lourie, “A Society Organized for War,” 67.62 Castro, The Structure of Spanish History, 205. 63 George Kubler, “Mexican Urbanism in the Sixteenth Century,” The Art Bulletin 24, no. 2 (June 1942): 160–71, esp. 166–68; T. B. Irving, “Arab Craftsmanship in Spain and America,” The Arab World 15 (Sept. 1969): 18–26, esp. 25. Also consult Manuel Tous-saint, Arte Mudéjar en America (Mexico, D. F: Editorial Porrua, 1946), 26. 64 The quotation comes from a letter cited by Palóu. Father Francisco García Figueroa and Father Manuel Camino to Father Fran-cisco Palóu, March 12, 1787, in Francisco Palóu, Historical Account of the Life and Apos-tolic Labors of the Venerable Father Junípero Serra, ed. George Wharton James, trans. C. Scott Williams (Pasadena: George Wharton James, 1913), xxix–xxxi.65 Francisco López de Gómara, The Life of the Conqueror by His Secretary, ed. and trans., Lesley Byrd Simpson (Berkeley: Uni-versity of California Press, 1964), 113–14.66 Cited in D. A. Brading, Prophecy and Myth in Mexican History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 11.67 Cited in Herbert Bolton, “The Mission as a Frontier Institution in the Spanish-American Colonies,” The American Histori-cal Review 23, no. 1 (Oct. 1917): 42–61.68 Fray Isidro Felix de Espinosa, Crónica de los colegios de propaganda fide de la Nueva España (México, 1746), ed. Lino G. Canedo, O.F.M. (Washington, DC: American Acad-emy of Franciscan History, 1964), frontis-piece. The quotation is attributed to José Mariano Beristain de Souza, Biblioteca His-pano-Americano Septentrional (México, 1816).69 Hugh Hamill, The Hidalgo Revolt (Gaines-ville: University of Florida Press, 1966), 122–23.70 D.A. Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1991), 578–81.


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71 For other interpretations about the way priests and settlers conducted themselves in California, see James Sandos, Converting California, Indians and Franciscans in the Missions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); Steven W. Hackel, Children of Coyote, Missionaries of St. Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769–1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Louise Pubols, The Father of All: The de la Guerra Family, Power and Patriarchy in Mexican California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Car-los Salomon, Pio Pico: The Last Governor of Mexican California (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010); and Quincy Newell, Constructing Lives at Mission San Francisco: Native Californians and Hispanic Colonists, 1776–1821 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2011).72 “Report of Father José Viader, From 19 to 27 October, 1810,” in Sherburne Cook, Colo-nial Expeditions to the Interior of California, Central Valley, 1800–1820 (Berkeley: Univer-sity of California Press, 1960), 259. 73 Father Martínez to Prefect Sarría, in Cook, Colonial Expeditions, 271; ibid., 272.74 Bancroft, The History of California, 2:328–29n14. 75 Antonio María Osio, “Historia de la Cali-fornia” copia facilitada por John J. Doyle, Esq., 1878, 61–65, Calisphere, http://con-tent.cdlib.org/ark:/. 76 Palóu is referring to the pivotal battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, in which Chris-tians soundly defeated Muslims and all but made the reconquest inevitable. Francisco Palóu, Historical Account of the Life and Apos-tolic Labors of the Venerable Father Junípero Serra, 79, 81.77 Bancroft, The History of California, 2:489n16. 78 Luis Arguello “Report to Governor Pablo de Sola, May 26, 1817,” in Cook, Colonial Expeditions, 276.79 José del Carmen Lugo, “Vida de un ran-chero,” ms. 1877, 6–7. Calisphere, http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/.80 “Diary of Pedro Munoz,” in Cook, Colonial Expeditions, 248; “Report of José Dolores Pico of the Expedition to the San Joaquin and Kings Rivers,” in Cook, Colonial Expedi-tions, 182–83.81 Sergeant Sebastián Rodriguez, “Diary,” in Cook, Colonial Expeditions, 184–85.

82 “Medieval Sourcebook: Mass of the Roman Rite Latin/English,” http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/latinmass2.asp.83 José María Amador,“Memorias sobre la historia de California,” ms. 1877, 36-40, Calisphere, http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/.84 In 2003, when trying to convince Presi-dent Jacques Chirac of France to participate in the attack on Iraq, President George W. Bush said, “This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.” See Clive Hamilton, “Bush’s Shock-ing Biblical Prophecy Emerges: God Wants to ‘Erase’ Mid-East Enemies ‘Before a New Age Begins,’” AlterNet, http://www.alternet.org/news/140221/bush’s_shocking_biblical_prophecy_emerges.

Joaquin miller and the social circle at the hights, By phoeBe cutler, pp 40–61

Caption sources: “Joaquin Miller,” in Arthur Gilman, Poet’s Homes: Pen and Pencil Sketches of American Poets and Their Homes (Boston: D. Lothrop and Company, 1879), 73; “In the Public Eye,” Munsey’s Magazine 13, no. 1 (Apr. 1895), 181; The Pittsburg Press, Aug. 28, 1921, 73; Juanita Miller, About the Heights with Juanita Miller, 2nd ed. (Oak-land, CA: Bray & Mulgrew, 1919); quoted in Beatrice B. Beebe, ed., “Letters of Joaquin Miller,” Frontier 12 (Jan. 1932), 121; George Sterling, “Joaquin Miller,” The American Mercury 7, no. 26 (Feb. 1926), 220; Roger K. Larson, ed., Dear Master: Letters of George Sterling to Ambrose Bierce, 1900–1912 (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 2002); “Monterey County Teachers’ Meeting,” San Francisco Call, Oct. 25, 1905; San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 22, 1896, in Amy Sueyoshi, “Miss Morning Glory: Orientalism and Misogyny in the Queer Writings of Yone Noguchi,” Amerasia Journal 37, no. 2 (2011), 23; Charles Warren Stoddard, “Joaquin Miller at the Heights,” National Magazine 24, no. 1 (Apr. 1906), 26; Joaquin Miller, “A Study of Japanese,” San Francisco Call, Aug. 25, 1895; Takeshi Kanno, Creation-dawn (A Vision Drama): Evening Talks and Meditations (Fruitvale, CA: Takeshi Kanno, 1913), 7–8; Adelaide Hanscom, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, trans. Edward Fitzgerald (Dodge Publishing Co., 1905), George Wharton James, review of Adelaide Hanscom’s The Rubaiyát of Omar Kháyyám, Sunset Maga-

zine (Mar. 1906); http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelaide_Hanscom_Leeson, “How Joaquin Miller Posed for Pictures in Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat,” Seattle Post Intelli-gencer, Sept. 20, 1906, Canadian Bookseller and Library Journal 18, no. 1 (Mar. 1905), 32; John P. Irish, “Some Memories of Joaquin Miller,” Out West 7, no. 2 (Feb. 1914): 84-86.

1 Miller composed his popular poem “Columbus” in 1892, marking the 400th anniversary of the discovery of America; Joaquin Miller, Songs of the Soul (San Fran-cisco: The Whitaker & Ray Company, 1896), 154–55.2 http://www.joaquinmiller.com/1872intro.html. The symposium is scheduled for October, the exhibition for the spring; [email protected], www.mtshastamuseum.com. 3 The poet’s birth date has been much debated. Miller authority Margaret Guilford-Kardell has settled upon 1839; e-mail message to the author, May 12, 2010. The much misstated date is only one of many fallacies that have flourished in the con-fused wake of the celebrity author’s elabora-tions and modifications. Four full-length biographies—Harr Wagner, Joaquin Miller and His Other Self (San Francisco: Wagner Publishing Company, 1929); Martin Severin Peterson, Joaquin Miller: Literary Frontiers-man (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1937); M. M. Marberry, Splendid Poseur: Joaquin Miller—American Poet (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1953); and O. W. Frost, Joaquin Miller (New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1967)—all contain factual errors. The section on Miller in Ray Longtin’s bibliography, Three Writers of the Far West: A Reference Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980), helps to clarify sources and dates. Margaret Guilford-Kardell and Scott McKeown’s A Joaquin Miller Chronological Bibliography and Study Guide. (http://www.joaquinmiller.com/index.html) is even more comprehensive. Guildford-Kardell’s Joaquin Miller Newsletter 1, no. 9 (Jan. 2001) through 3, no. 8 (Aug. 2008) further corrected the record.4 Oakland, Alameda, and Berkeley City Direc-tory (San Francisco: McKenney Directory Co., Oct. 1888), 538. 5 Miller’s children by the first two of his three producing alliances vie with each other for tragic endings. Of the two girls, according to Harr Wagner, Calla-Shasta

67

died of alcoholism at an early age; Maud was a failed, much-married actress. What ultimately happened to George and Harry is not recorded, but both boys—Harry more than George—served time in jail for larceny. Wagner, Joaquin Miller and His Other Self, 239. 6 Abbie’s preference for East Coast water-ing holes did not prevent her from enlarg-ing her absent husband’s property by the purchase of 221/2 contiguous acres in 1891. Information regarding this speculative pur-chase did not find its way into the variant of the Miller legend promoted by his and Abbie’s only child, Juanita. Consequently, with the exception of William W. Winn, “Bohemian Club Memorial,” California His-torical Society Quarterly 32, no. 3 (Sept. 1953), 237, Miller biographies have uniformly cred-ited him with buying the entire 72.5 acres. 7 The first documented use of “Poet of the Sierras” appeared while Miller was still in London in the “Personal and Literary” fea-ture of Missouri’s St. Joseph Herald on Feb. 2, 1872. That paper, in turn, was quoting the Portland [Oregon] Herald.8 Elodie Hogan, “An Hour with Joaquin Miller,” The Californian, Mar. 1894, Joaquin Miller Collection, H1938.1, Special Collec-tions, Honnold/Mudd Library, Claremont University Consortium (hereafter cited as Joaquin Miller Collection). Two years after he wrote this article, Hogan (1816–1914) married the English writer Hilaire Belloc and moved to the United Kingdom. Bruce Porter is best known as the publisher of the literary journal The Lark and as the land-scape designer (1915–17) of William Bourn’s Filoli in Woodside, California. 9 The Annals of the Bohemian Club: com-prising text and pictures furnished by its own members (San Francisco: The Club, 1898).10 “Society Chat,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 1, 1904.11 Wagner, Joaquin Miller and His Other Self, 125. 12 “Oaklanders Pay an Extra Fare,” San Francisco Call, Nov. 27, 1903. Joaquin Miller, postscript fragment, n.d. (ca. Oct. 25, 1903), Joaquin Miller Collection. Fruitvale did not merge with Oakland until 1909.13 The Students’ Pen, Nov. 1892, 11, a publica-tion of The Rockefeller Rhetorical Society of California College, a short-lived Baptist college in neighboring Highland Park, heav-

ily funded by John D. Rockefeller. Mayor John L. Davie describes the carriage ride in John L. Davie, His Honor the Buckaroo: Auto-biography of John L. Davie, ed. and revised by Jack W. Herzberg (Oakland, CA: Jack Herz-berg, 1988 [1931]), 192–93.14 “Oaklanders Pay an Extra Fare,” San Fran-cisco Call.15 William R. Davis, “Nature and Human Nature as They Appear in Oakland and Environs,” Oakland Tribune, Jan. 1, 1888.16 Ernest J. Moyne, “Joaquin Miller and Bar-oness Alexandra Gripenburg,” The Markham Review 4 (Feb. 1974), 69. 17 A modern Taylor Memorial United Meth-odist Church, in the same location on 12th St. in Oakland as the 1920s original, honors this heroic clergyman. Taylor wrote the highly popular Seven Years’ Street Preaching in San Francisco, California; Embracing Inci-dents, Triumphant Death Scenes, Etc. (New York: Carlton & Porter, 1856), http://www.taylorchurch.org/churchhistory/.18 Besides Woodbury and Irish, the con-gregation included philanthropist Jane K. Sather, business leaders Phineas Marston and P. N. Remillard, of brick-manufacturing fame, and San Francisco Bulletin editor W. C. Bartlett. Charles W. Wendte, “Unitari-anism,” Oakland Tribune, Jan. 1, 1888.19 Unitarian Church of Berkeley, http://www.uucb.org/index.php/worship/sermon-archives-and-podcasts/610-uu-mosaic-mak-ers-what-we-make-together.html; “Notable American Unitarians 1740–1900,” http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/uu_addenda/Charles-William-Wendte.php. In 1885, Wendte co-authored, with Julia Ward Howe, Louisa M. Alcott, and others, a book of Christmas carols. The Rev. William Day Simonds wrote five books, most notably a biography of the Rev. Thomas Starr King (Starr King in California [San Francisco: Paul Elder and Company Publishers, 1917]). Per-haps even more remarkable was Simonds’ status as a pioneer commuter: by 1910 he was living with his family in Marin while preaching at the First Unitarian Church across the bay; U.S. Census Bureau, 1910 Census of Population.20 In attendance for the charity event were Miller, Rev. John K. McLean, Ina Coolbrith, John Vance Cheney, Edwin Markham, David Lesser Lezinsky, Alexander G. Hawes, Ella Sterling Cummins, and Edmund Russell. The deceased poet was the English-born adventurer Richard Realf. Joseph Eugene

Baker, ed., Past and Present of Alameda County, California (Chicago: S. J. Clarke, 1914), 268–69.21 Elbert Hubbard, So Here Then Is a Little Journey to the Home of Joaquin Miller (East Aurora, NY: The Roycrofters, 1903), 5. Hubbard founded the William Morris-inspired Roycroft community in Aurora, New York. Hubbard, who died in the sink-ing of the Lusitania, wrote multiple books. The title of his short story “A Message to Garcia” became a catch phrase for a heroic undertaking. For Mills, see Nelson Daniel Wilhelm, “B. Fay Mills: Revivalist, Social Reformer and Advocate of Free Religion” (PhD diss., Syracuse University, 1964). 22 “Misc.,” Daily Alta, July 17, 1887.23 Charles J. Woodbury, Talks with Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Baker and Tay-lor, 1890). U.S. Census Bureau, 1880 and 1900 Census of Population. “Lectures on Emerson,” Oakland Tribune, Aug. 23, 1904; “Golden Wedding,” Oakland Tribune, Feb. 17, 1919.24 “Joaquin Miller’s Open Letters,” # 31, Pacific States Illustrated Weekly, Dec. 15, 1888, box 8, Joaquin Miller Collection.25 “Death Laid a Harsh Finger,” Modesto Eve-ning News, Oct. 10, 1923. Irish died, age 80, from a fall while trying to enter a Berkeley streetcar.26 As close as they were, Ina Coolbrith would not have confided this lifelong secret to Miller. See Josephine DeWitt Rhodehamel and Raymund Francis Wood, Ina Coolbrith, Librarian and Laureate of California (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1973), 20–21, 371–72.27 Cincinnatus H. Miller, Joaquin, et al (Port-land, OR: S. J. McCormick, 1869 [reissued in London, 1872]). Wagner, Joaquin Miller and His Other Self, 228. Joaquin Murrieta, a gold rush figure of uncertain origins, was sometimes called the “Mexican Robin Hood.” Wagner, following the demise of the Golden Era, became Miller’s business agent. His biography deals more with the Oakland years than the others and, although predict-ably partial, is considerably more reliable than Marberry’s Splendid Poseur. 28 The exact number of years, as the spelling of Cally’s name, varies in different accounts, but Charlotte Perkins Gilman notes her presence at Coolbrith’s twenty years on in


1892. Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1935), 142. Calla-Shasta wrote heart-rending letters, bemoaning the loss of her Sierra homeland and bewailing her father’s neglect. See Margaret Guilford-Kardell, “Calla Shasta—Joaquin Miller’s First Daughter,” Californians 9, no. 4 (Jan./Feb., 1992): 40–44.29 For London and Coolbrith, see George Rathmell, Realms of Gold: The Colorful Writ-ers of San Francisco, 1850–1950 (Berkeley, CA: Creative Arts Book Co., 1998), 123; for James and Coolbrith, see Peter Wild, Wayne Chatterton, James H. Maguire, George Whar-ton James (Boise, ID: Boise State University, 1990), 16.30 At this time she was known as Char-lotte Perkins Stetson, having recently been estranged from the artist Walter Stetson, whom she left behind in Pasadena. 31 Denise D. Knight, ed., The Diaries of Char-lotte Perkins Gilman, vol. 2 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 505.32 Ibid., 554.33 Anonymous (but in the style of Joaquin Miller), “Poet Got His Bath,” San Francisco Call, Sept. 1, 1895.34 George Wharton James, “The Human Side of Joaquin Miller” Overland Monthly 75, no. 2 (Feb. 1920), 126; Yone Noguchi, “With the Poet of Light and Joy,” National Maga-zine 21, no. 4 (Jan. 1905), 420. 35 Beatrice B. Beebe, ed., “Joaquin Miller and His Family,” The Frontier 12, no. 5 (May 1932), 344. Charles Warren Stoddard, “Joa-quin Miller at The Heights [sic],” National Magazine 26, no. 1 (Apr. 1906), 21. 36 Yoné Noguchi, The Story of Yoné Nogu-chi (London: Chatto & Windus, 1914), 69; Charles H. Scofield, “The Poet of the Sier-ras: His Mountain Home Above Oakland,” Stockton Evening Mail, Mar. 29, 1893; Elsie Whitaker Martinez, San Francisco Bay Area Writers and Artists, with an introduction by Franklin D. Walker, Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of Cali-fornia at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA (hereafter cited as BANC), 161.37 Wagner, Joaquin Miller and His Other Self, 124.38 Martinez, San Francisco Bay Area Writers and Artists, 161.

39 Scofield, “The Poet of the Sierras.”40 Martinez, San Francisco Bay Area Writers and Artists, 161.41 Yonejiro Noguchi to Blanche Partington, Aug. 17, 1900, Partington Family Papers: Additions, 1865–1979, MSS 81/143, BANC. Jack London was informally affianced to Phyllis Partington. A singer, she performed with the Metropolitan Opera in New York.42 George Sterling, “Joaquin Miller,” The American Mercury 7, no. 2 (Feb. 1926), 222; Marberry, Splendid Poseur, 202. 43 Austin Lewis, “George Sterling at Play,” The Overland Monthly and Out West Maga-zine 85, no. 11 (Nov. 1927), 344.44 Marberry, Splendid Poseur, 202, 252–53; Sterling, “Joaquin Miller,” 221. Marberry includes a scene in which a surprised George Sterling observes John Partington and Ambrose Bierce slaving over the con-struction of Moses’ pyramid. True to form, the very readable Marberry has been a little loose with the facts. Sterling saw “young Bierce,” Ambrose’s nephew, not the caustic journalist, who felt some fondness for his old acquaintance despite being well aware of his shortcomings. In his well-read Exam-iner column, the elder Bierce had famously declared that Miller was a liar . . . albeit a harmless, good-natured one. (Equally mem-orably, Joaquin responded, “I am not a liar. I simply exaggerate the truth.”). Ambrose Bierce, “Prattle,” San Francisco Examiner, Jan. 30, 1898. 45 Miller uses the term “hillside Bohemia” in The Complete Poetical Works of Joaquin Miller (San Francisco: Whitaker and Ray, 1897), 318. Joaquin Miller, The Building of the City Beautiful (Cambridge and Chicago: Stone and Kimball, 1894 [privately printed 1893]), 77, 72.46 “A Selection of Letters from the Markham Archives,” The Markham Review (Staten Island, NY: Hormann Library, Wagner Col-lege, May 1969); Louis Filler, The Unknown Edwin Markham: His Mystery and Its Significance (Yellow Springs, OH: Antioch Press, 1966), 68, 70–71, 76.47 “A Study of Japanese,” San Francisco Call, Aug. 25, 1895; Miller, The Building of the City Beautiful, 90. 48 Hubbard, So Here Then Is a Little Journey, 14. “Joaquin Miller,” in Elbert Hubbard and Bert Hubbard, Selected Writings of Elbert Hubbard (New York: Wm. H. Wise & Co., 1922), 16.

49 Martinez, San Francisco Bay Area Writers and Artists, 180. 50 Hubbard, So Here Then Is a Little Journey, 14; Stoddard, “Joaquin Miller at The Heights [sic],” 26.51 “Deserted is His Own Good Hall,” San Francisco Call, Mar. 3, 1895. Carolyn Wells, “The Latest Thing in Poets,” Critic 29 (Nov. 1896), 302.52 Noguchi, The Story of Yone Noguchi, 76–77. 53 Oakland, Alameda, and Berkeley City Direc-tory: 1889–90 (San Francisco: F. M. Husted Publisher, Jan. 1890), 586. 54 Robert Boyle, Gertrude’s great-nephew, has determined that Takeshi Kanno’s pass-port was issued in Kyoto in October 1892; e-mail message to the author, Dec. 15, 2011. 55 Takeshi Kanno, Creation-dawn: (a vision drama); evening talks and meditations (Fruit-vale, CA: Kanno, 1913). Noguchi included a couple of sample lines from one of his poems in a letter to Coolbrith: “The opiate vapors, in foamless waves, rock about this dreaming shore of April-Earth,” Noguchi to Coolbrith, Mar. 19, 1897, Ina Coolbrith Papers, Additions, BANC).56 Nina Egert organized the exhibit in con-junction with her book, Noguchi’s California: Public Visions of a 19th Century Dharma Bum (Canyon, CA: Nina Egert and the Vinapa Foundation, 2010); http://vinapafoundation.org/VinapaFoundation/Noguchis_ California.html.57 Alfred James Waterhouse Photographic Album, 2008.086, BANC; Block Book of Oakland, vol. 17 (Oakland, CA: Thomas Bros., 1924); Abigail Leland Miller Papers, MSS C-H 146, BANC. J. P. Irish praises Abbie for her success in recouping Water-house’s delinquent mortgage payment.58 Stoddard, “Joaquin Miller at The Heights [sic],” 28; Sterling, “Joaquin Miller,” 224.59 Adelaide Hanscom and Blanche Cum-ming, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam (New York: Dodge Publishing, 1905).60 William D. Armes, professor of Ameri-can Literature at UC Berkeley, was a friend of John Muir, cofounder with Muir of the Sierra Club, and editor of Joseph LeConte’s autobiography, Joseph LeConte and William Dallam Armes, The Autobiography of Joseph LeConte (New York: D. Appleton and Com-pany, 1903).

n o t e s

6

61 Henry Meade Bland to Ina Cook Peterson (niece of Coolbrith), Mar. 30, 1928, Ina D. Coolbrith Collection of Letters and Papers, BANC.62 “Beautiful Ceremony Performed on the Hights Before Hundreds of Bard’s Admir-ers,” San Francisco Call, May 26, 1913.63 Florence Hardiman Miller to Joaquin Miller, Aug. 5, 1896, Joaquin Miller Col-lection, HM 15691, Huntington Library. “Reception to a Rising Authoress,” San Francisco Call, Aug. 12, 1896. Mrs. Miller (no relation) also invited Coolbrith, Edwin Markham, Millicent Shinn, and Adeline Knapp. Of the five, the only ones to show up were Miller and Adeline Knapp, a journalist, antisuffragette, student of economics, and, briefly, an object of infatuation on the part of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.64 Stuart P. Sherman, The Poetical Works of Joaquin Miller (New York & London: G. P.

Putnam’s Sons, 1923), 3. “Estimate of Poetry of Californians by Critic Stirs Literati: Witter Bynner Says Joaquin Miller’s Work not Per-manent and Gives Vent of Other Iconoclas-tic Criticism,” Oakland Post-Enquirer, Nov. 11, 1922. For the most perceptive modern critique of Miller’s verse, see Frost, Joaquin Miller.65 Harry Hayden, “Heights [sic] Neglected by City of Oakland,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 15, 1923.66 “Joaquin Miller’s Open Letters,” #31.67 Wagner, Joaquin Miller and His Other Self, 132.

sideBar, the irrepressiBle John p. irish . . . colonel, p. 47

Caption sources: John P. Irish, “Some Memories of Joaquin Miller,” Out West 7, no. 2 (Feb. 1914), 84–85. Text: Joseph Eugene Baker, ed., Past and Present of Alam-

eda County, California (Chicago: S. J. Clarke, 1914), 401, 409–11; Descriptive summary, John Powell Irish Papers, 1882–1923, Stan-ford University, http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf9k4007br/entire_text/; Pauline Jacobson, “Col. John P. Irish, Tory: Allied at Birth Is Well-Fed. He has Been an ‘Anti’ All his Life,” The Bulletin, Sept. 9, 1911; “Col. Irish in Japan,” Oakland Tribune, Dec. 10, 1922; “Col. Irish Killed by Car in California,” Iowa City Press Citizen, Oct. 8, 1923.

1 J. P. Irish to Charles W. Irish, Aug. 10, 1885, Charles Wood Irish Papers, MS C362, box 2, University of Iowa, Iowa City.2 Excerpt, Ambrose Bierce, “Black Beetles in Amber,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_P._Irish.


Edited by James J. Rawls

so far from home: russians in early california

Edited by Glenn J. Farris (Berkeley, CA: Heyday, 2012, 352 pp., $21.95 paper)

REVIEWED BY WALTER C . UHLER, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE RUSSIAN-AMERICAN INTER-NATIONAL STUDIES ASSOCIATION

FortRosswasconstructed some

eighty miles north of San Francisco in

1812 by ninety-five Russians and forty

Aleuts. Located on a shelf overlooking

Bodega Bay, its mission was to serve as

a trading post for the Russian Ameri-

can Company (RAC) in support of sea

otter hunting off the coast of California

and the supply of agricultural produce

sorely needed by RAC employees in

Alaska. To commemorate the 200th

anniversary of the founding of Fort

Ross, historical archaeologist Glenn

J. Farris has assembled a fascinating

collection of documents—some of

them “translations of recent finds from

Russian archives”—that shed light not

only on the life and impact of Rus-

sians in California, but also on their

interaction with Spaniards, Mexicans,

Native Americans, and various foreign

visitors.

Anxiety about Russian commercial

activity in the North Pacific prompted

the Spanish claimants to Alta Califor-

nia in 1768–69 to shift from explora-

tion of the territory to actual settle-

ment. But, notwithstanding this early

anxiety, the first Russian didn’t appear

until 1803.

By 1808, however, the RAC was look-

ing for a settlement in the territory

north of the northernmost Span-

ish settlements, which it called New

Albion. The documents suggest that

Timofei Tarakanov offered the Bodega

Miwoks “three blankets, three pairs

of breeches, two axes, three hoes and

some beads” in exchange for access to

or ownership of territory that included

the future site of Fort Ross, probably

in 1811. Unlike the Spanish, the Rus-

sians demonstrated their willingness

to acknowledge that the Indians had

rights to the land.

The documents also suggest that the

Russians and Aleuts treated the local

Bodega Miwok and Kashaya Pomo

Indians more humanely than did the

Spaniards. Intermarriage was com-

mon, and Creoles eventually consti-

tuted the largest part of the colony’s

population. For reasons still unknown,

but which spark the imagination, the

Indians called the Russians and Aleuts

the “Undersea People.”

As a commercial enterprise, Fort Ross

proved to be a bust. “By the early 1820s

the Russians were reporting a steep

decline in the number of sea otter furs

taken each year.” Plan B, growing and

supplying food to Alaskan colonies,

never blossomed. Thus, by 1838, opera-

tional costs had risen to 72,000 rubles

annually while revenues plunged to

8,000 rubles. Consequently, in 1841

the RAC found it expedient to sell Fort

Ross and the surrounding fields to

John Sutter for 30,000 piasters.

But, as these documents make clear,

the Russian experience in and impact

on California was far richer than such

profit-and-loss calculations would sug-

gest. They address the size and use of

California redwoods, describe Spanish

missions and Native American cul-

ture, enumerate the finds of Russian

botanists, suggest a leading role by a

Russian in the 1824 Chumash revolt,

and detail the methods by which the

use of script and mandatory purchases

from the company store kept RAC

employees perpetually in debt. They

amply demonstrate why it is important

to commemorate Fort Ross’s 200th

anniversary.

r e v i e w s

7

hoBoes, Bindlestiffs, fruit tramps, and the harVesting of the West

By Mark Wyman (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010, 368 pp., $28.00 cloth, $16.00 paper, $9.99 eBook)

hoBos to street people: artists’ responses to homelessness from the neW deal to the present

By Art Hazelwood (San Francisco: Freedom Voices, 2011, 84 pp., $25.95 paper)

REVIEWED BY CHRISTOPHER HERRING, PHD CANDIDATE OF SOCIOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, AND ASSOCIATE RESEARCHER FOR THE NATIONAL COALITION FOR THE HOMELESS

Intheirlatestbooks, Mark

Wyman and Art Hazelwood offer lucid

portrayals of the most marginalized

characters in the history of the Ameri-

can West and, in the wake of the Great

Recession, provide valuable histori-

cal perspectives of the contemporary

migrant worker and the homeless

American.

The men, women, and children vari-

ously called bindlestiffs, fruit tramps,

bums, and hoboes were vital to the

creation of the West and its economy,

yet their history has been largely

untold. In his book Hoboes, Bindlestiffs,

Fruit Tramps, and the Harvesting of the

West, veteran historian Mark Wyman

provides this much-needed story of

western development. The book’s nar-

rative follows the symbiotic evolution

of rails, crops, and labor. With refrig-

erated freight and massive irrigation

projects across the West, family fields

of a few hundred acres were con-

verted to “bonanza” farms composed

of thousands, small farmers became

small capitalists, and local hires were

replaced by traveling flocks of seasonal

labor. In the spirit of historian Howard

Zinn, Wyman offers an alternative his-

tory of the West’s development from

below, tracing the migrations and

struggles of the floating proletariat

that harvested America’s breadbasket,

orchards, and forests from the Civil

War to the 1920s.

Although Hoboes is singularly embla-

zoned on the book’s spine, the work

focuses equally on migrating families

A bindlestiff walks from the mines to the lumber camps to the farms in Napa Valley in 1938.

Library of Congress; photograph by Dorothea Lange


r e v i e w s

of wives and small children, wage-

working Indians, and high school stu-

dents. In his chapter on the “Beeters,”

Wyman explains how the early corpo-

rate domination of beets in Nebraska

led to especially grueling labor con-

ditions, where sugar entrepreneurs

preferred families for their stability,

less drunkenness, and, most crucially,

more hands. The book depicts the

use of convict labor, including several

locked up on vagrancy charges, and

the yearly migration to the Willamette

of Native Americans, who picked hops

for wages, moving between their tra-

ditional homes and capitalist society.

The single itinerant hobo is but one of

many characters in Wyman’s work.

Ethnic diversity also plays large in

Wyman’s history. The book illustrates

the striking differences between orga-

nized Japanese work gangs, doubly

discriminated Mexican laborers, and

German-Russian migrant families

seeking the American dream through

acquiring their own property. It also

brings to light the ethnic alliances

forged through harvest labor, such as

the pan-Indianism formed through

tribal migrations and the successful

organizing by the International Work-

ers of the World of a seemingly impos-

sible ethnic assortment. Although this

is a scholarly text, Wyman connects

meticulously curated statistics, archival

news reports, and policy memos with

the personal experiences of the work-

ers, rendering sympathetic portraits

of his subjects and lively passages that

move the work forward with verve.

Art Hazelwood’s Hoboes to Street

People: Artists’ Responses to Homelessness

from the New Deal to the Present picks

up where Wyman leaves off, in the

Great Depression, and presents power-

ful works of art aimed at social change.

The beautiful publication is a product

of the touring exhibition that first

opened in San Francisco in 2009 and

features nearly sixty works of visual art

engaged with issues of homelessness.

But this is no mere exhibition catalog.

Hazelwood’s book traces the artworks

through historical shifts in government

policy, from the New Deal to Welfare

Reform, and examines artists’ shifting

relationship to their subjects and to the

state, first as government WPA artists

and photographers and later as activist

artists relentlessly critical of the state.

As Hazelwood himself is a member of

the former camp, the book reads as a

manifesto for artists to join together to

inspire the public to act.

The book features works by well-

known artists such as Dorothea Lange,

Rockwell Kent, and Anton Refregier,

but also resurrects older political art-

ists who have largely been forgotten,

including Leon Carlin and Giacomo

Patri. Contemporary artists include a

host of Californians, among them Jose

Sances, Sandow Birk, and the formerly

homeless Jane “in vain” Winkelman.

The book brings together the works

one usually finds on gallery walls and

in an array of popular media aimed

at the public conscience: screen-print

posters, cover art of homeless broad-

sheets, and graphic novels.

Although Wyman misses the oppor-

tunity to connect the history of the

hoboes to migrants of today, dialogues

between contemporary and past per-

ceptions, portrayals, and policies of

homelessness are at the center of

Hazelwood’s survey. The book opens

with two photographs: Dorothea

Lange’s Mother and Two Children on

the Road to Tule Lake, made in 1939,

and David Bacon’s photograph of an

indigenous woman and child, part of

a group of farmworkers from Oaxaca,

made nearly seven decades later. It

is striking how little has changed

when confronting the human pathos

expressed in each portrait depicting

mothers attempting to maintain their

families amidst economic catastrophe.

Yet, Hazelwood notes important dis-

tinctions: the globalizing forces that

have reshaped agricultural economies

since Lange’s era, the rollback of New

Deal reforms, and the growing public

perception that economic insecurity is

considered a sign not of greed, but of

a properly “flexible” workforce. In this

new era of precarious labor and draco-

nian anti-immigration policy, these two

books offer historical perspectives that

not only explain how we got here, but

also provide the critical lenses neces-

sary to imagine progressive futures.

73

“the cult of true womanhood,” protect-

ing women within home and hearth.

The inherent fallacy of the observation

is keenly apparent to Chastina follow-

ing Alfred’s departure for California

with a company of hopeful would-be

miners. Once in the gold fields, he

discovers that placer gold has played

out, requiring more costly quartz

mining techniques. Returning to San

Francisco, employed as a teacher with

a stable income, he plans for a family

reunion and embarks on a respected

law career, serves as justice of the

peace, and finds future successes.

As always, the Arthur H. Clark Com-

pany has produced a bookman’s book

consistent with its respected reputa-

tion. It is not only well crafted, but also

accessible. The index includes separate

entries for the more than three dozen

period photos. The appendix provides

genealogies as well as information on

Alfred’s party of Argonauts. Finally,

the bibliography is comprehensive,

including not only the canon of Cali-

fornia gold rush scholarship, but also

recent studies in related fields.

Lynn Bonfield devoted more than three

decades to research on the Rix journal.

Exhaustive investigation is evident in

the notes, appendix, and comprehen-

sive bibliography containing several

of Bonfield’s monographs and journal

articles derived from her exhaustive

examination of public records, news-

papers, private archives, and family

holdings.

The editor has preserved the origi-

nal document from editorial intru-

sion, reserving her clarifications and

amplifications for the annotations.

As a result, readers may arrive at their

personal conclusions concerning the

denouement to this family drama.

Bonfield resists temptation to be the

omniscient editor, never drawing a

connection between Alfred’s tinkering

with such inventions as his armored

watercraft, the Dumbfudgeon, and his

later contributions to San Francisco’s

urban development.

Bonfield’s thorough understanding of

the diary is especially demonstrated by

chapter introductions that prepare the

reader for major events that often affect

the spouses differently. For example,

worn by the grinding demands of

daily life—making candles and soap,

harvesting, preserving, canning and

brewing, churning, baking, cooking,

spinning and knitting, sewing and

maintaining the clothing, even ironing

sixty-five shirts belonging to her family

and her eight boarders—the usually

benign Chastina observes ironically:

“In the land of gold you must work or

starve.”

Alfred, in clueless counterpoint to

Chastina’s domestic and childcare

workload, rains eloquent praise upon

neW england to gold rush california: the Journal of alfred and chastina W. rix 1849–1854

Edited with commentary by Lynn A. Bonfield (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011, 356 pp., $45.00 cloth)

REVIEWED BY GLORIA R . LOTHROP, EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE, AND COAUTHOR OF CAlIfOrnIA WOmEn: A HISTOry

In1849,apairof Vermont school-

teachers made a matrimonial pledge,

promising that each would contribute

to a diary. The result is a unique com-

mentary on mid-century America,

a nation energized by its pursuit of

manifest destiny, invigorated by an

emerging industrial age, stimulated

by a religious awakening, and, above

all, enriched by the Croesus of Califor-

nia gold.

Throughout the exercise, the two

remained independent thinkers

focused on the issues of the day.

Along with daily events, the couple

noted heated political discussions

about issues such as the Fugitive Slave

Act, the Maine Temperance Initia-

tive, and the emerging Free Soilers’

agenda. Still, gold fever was their fore-

most subject, and it indelibly shaped

the hopeful newlyweds’ future.

The events of Alfred and Chastina

Rix’s marriage and venture to El

Dorado from their Peacham, Vermont,

home were penned in a blue-lined

copybook that passed through genera-

tions, surviving both earthquake and

fire before reaching the safety of the

California Historical Society’s archives.

Your StateYour History

Your Historical Society

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We invite you to make your legacy California’s legacyPlanned gifts—through a bequest, charitable trust, or other estate

giving vehicle—will ensure that your passion for California history

will continue to be expressed long into the future by becoming a

member of the California Legacy Circle.

California Historical Society supporters become members of the

California Legacy Circle when they communicate to CHS that

they have included CHS in their estate plans. Once we receive this

information, your name will be listed prominently as a member

of the California Legacy Circle in our membership publication,

California History.

For more information please contact 415.357.1848 x215 or

email [email protected]

Picking Prunes, Santa Clara Valley, California. Silver gelatin printCalifornia Historical Society, FN-22169/CHS2009.044.tif

75

INDIVIDUALS

$10,000 and aboveMr. Jon Christensen, Los AngelesMr. Stephen LeSieur, San FranciscoMrs. Jeanne S. Overstreet, Bennington, VT

$5,000 to $9,999Mr. Robert Jay Chattel, AIA, Sherman OaksDr. Maribelle & Dr. Stephen Leavitt,

San FranciscoMr. John L. & Mrs. Susan L. Molinari,

San Francisco

$1,000 to $4,999Mr. Ted Balestreri, MontereyMrs. May Blaisdell, OaklandBill & Claire Bogaard, PasadenaMr. John E. Brown, RiversideHonorable Willie Brown, San FranciscoMrs. John Edward Cahill, San RafaelDr. Albert M. Camarillo, StanfordMs. Alice Carey, Pope ValleyMr. Ralph Collins, Los AngelesMr. Robert David, A.I.A., San FranciscoMr. & Mrs. R. Thomas Decker, San FranciscoMr. & Mrs. Reid W. Dennis, WoodsideMr. & Mrs. Ray Dolby, San FranciscoMr. Bill & Mrs. Ilse L. Gaede, San FranciscoMrs. Gloria Gordon Getty, San FranciscoMr. Fredric Hamber, San FranciscoErica Hartig Dubreuil, UplandMrs. Charlene Harvey, San FranciscoMr. Robert & Mrs. Kaye Hiatt, Mill ValleyMr. Sean A. Johnston, San FranciscoMs. Deb Kinney, San FranciscoMr. Hollis G. Lenderking, La HondaMr. Ray & Mrs. Lynn Lent, San RafaelLinda Lee Lester, GilroyMr. Bruce M. & Mrs. Cynthia Lubarsky,

San FranciscoMr. William S. McCreery, HillsboroughMr. Holbrook T. Mitchell, NapaMr. Mark A. Moore, BurlingameMr. Richard Moscarello, Westlake VillageMr. Peter Johnson Musto, San FranciscoMr. Thomas R. Owens, San FranciscoConstance Peabody, San FranciscoDr. Edith & Mr. George Piness, Mill ValleyMrs. Cristina Rose, Los AngelesMr. Adolph Rosekrans, Redwood CityMr. H. Russell Smith, PasadenaMr. & Mrs. Steven L. Swig, San FranciscoBeverly Thomas, Studio CityMr. A.W.B. Vincent, Monte Carlo, MONACOMr. Ralph Walter, Los AngelesMr. & Mrs. Richard C. Wulliger,

Pacific PalisadesMr. & Mrs. Lee Zeigler, San Francisco

$500 to $999Mr. Michael & Mrs. Marianne Beeman,

WoodlandMs. Melinda Bittan, Los AngelesMr. Ernest A. Bryant, III, Santa BarbaraMr. Michael Carson & Dr. Ronald Steigerwalt,

Palm SpringsMr. Robert & Ms. Rebecca Cherny,

San FranciscoMr. Robert Coleman, OaklandMr. & Mrs. John C. Colver, Belvedere-TiburonMrs. Suzanne Crowell, San MarinoMrs. Leonore Daschbach, AthertonMr. & Mrs. Frederick K. Duhring, Los AltosMr. Bill S. & Mrs. Cynthia Floyd, Jr.,

Portola ValleyMs. Pam Garcia & Mr. Peter Griesmaier,

OaklandMr. Harry R. Gibson III, South Lake TahoeDr. Erica & Mr. Barry Goode, RichmondMr. & Mrs. Richard W. Goss II, San FranciscoMr. & Mrs. Alfred E. Heller, San RafaelMr. & Mrs. Robert E. Henderson,

HillsboroughMs. Ruth M. Hill, Daly CityMr. William L. Horton, Los AngelesZachary & Elizabeth Hulsey, BurlingameMrs. Katharine H. Johnson, Belvedere-TiburonMr. & Mrs. G. Scott Jones, Mill ValleyMr. Douglas C. Kent, DavisMr. David B. King, FremontMrs. E. Lampen, San FranciscoMs. Judy Lee, Redwood CityMrs. Betsy Link, Los AngelesMr. & Mrs. Leonis C. Malburg, VernonMs. Cathy Maupin, San FranciscoMrs. David Jamison McDaniel, San FranciscoMrs. Nan Tucker McEvoy, San FranciscoMr. Robert Folger Miller, BurlingameMr. & Ms. George & Janet A. Miller,

San FranciscoMr. Lawrence E. Moehrke, San RafaelMr. Robert London Moore, Jr., Verdugo CityMrs. Albert J. Moorman, AthertonSusan Morris, Belvedere-TiburonMr. & Mrs. Peter J. O’Hara, SonomaDr. Ynez Viole O’Neill, Los AngelesMr. Kevin M. Pursglove, San FranciscoMrs. Wanda Rees-Williams, South PasadenaMr. Michael Rugen & Mrs. Jeannine Kay,

San FranciscoMr. Paul Sack, San FranciscoFarrel & Shirley Schell, OaklandMrs. Teresa Siebert, CarmichaelJohn & Andrea Van de Kamp, PasadenaMr. Richard C. Warmer, San FranciscoMrs. Jeanne & Mr. Bill C. Watson, OrindaMr. Paul L. Wattis, Jr., PaicinesMr. Steven R. Winkel, BerkeleyMs. Sheila Wishek, San FranciscoMr. Daniel Woodhead, III, San Francisco

$250 to $499Mr. Matt Adams, San FranciscoDr. & Mrs. Michael J. Antonini, San FranciscoMr. Scott C. Atthowe, OaklandMr. & Mrs. Peter Avenali, San FranciscoMs. Marie Bartee, San FranciscoMr. John William Beatty, Jr., Portola ValleyJan Berckefeldt, LafayetteMr. Robert Bettencourt, CoyoteMr. Frederic W. Bost, San RafaelMs. Barbara Bottarini, San FranciscoMr. DeWitt F. Bowman, Mill ValleyMs. Carmelita Brooker, EscondidoMr. Mark Brown, Walnut CreekMr. & Mrs. Curtis & Robin Caton, BerkeleyMr. Gordon Chamberlain, Redwood CityMrs. Park Chamberlain, Redwood CityMr. Michael Charlson, OaklandMr. & Mrs. Herman Christensen, Jr., AthertonDrs. James & Linda Clever, Mill ValleyMr. John Coil, Santa AnaRenate & Robert Coombs, OaklandMr. Jeff Craemer, San RafaelMs. Karen D’Amato, San CarlosMr. & Mrs. William Davidow, WoodsideMr. Lloyd De Llamas, CovinaT. R. Delebo, M.D., SausalitoMr. & Mrs. R. Dick, HealdsburgMr. & Mrs. William G. Doolittle,

Carmel By The SeaMr. David Drake, Union CityMr. Robert M. Ebiner, West CovinaJacqueline & Christian Erdman, San FranciscoMr. David Ernst, San FranciscoMr. & Mrs. John Fisher, San FranciscoMr. & Mrs. James C. Flood, San FranciscoHelene & Randall Frakes, San FranciscoMr. Perry Franklin Fry, San FranciscoMr. & Mrs. Milo Gates, Redwood CityMr. Karl E. Geier, LafayetteMr. & Mrs. John Stevens Gilmore, SacramentoDr. & Mrs. George J. Gleghorn,

Rancho Palos VerdesMr. Fred F. Gregory, Palos Verdes PeninsulaMrs. Richard M. Griffith, Jr.,

Belvedere-TiburonMr. Allen Grossman, San FranciscoMs. Jeannie Gunn, BurbankMr. Noble Hamilton, Jr., GreenbraeCarl & Jeanne Hartig, Alta LomaMr. & Mrs. Scott M. Haskins, San FranciscoSusan Brandt Hawley, Esq., Glen EllenMr. Warren Heckrotte, OaklandMs. Stella Hexter, OaklandMr. James Hofer, RedlandsMr. & Mrs. David & Carolyn Hoffman,

FremontMr. Stephen H. Howell, San FranciscoMr. Clifford Hudson, Oklahoma City, OKMr. Robert C. Hughes, El CerritoMr. Richard Hyde, Belvedere-TiburonMrs. Lon F. Israel, Walnut Creek

d o n o r s


$250 to $999Brick Row Book Shop, San FranciscoChevron Texaco Matching Gift Program,

Princeton, NJCypress Lawn Memorial Park, Daly Cityht Lehmann Consulting, SausalitoLeona & Donald Davis Fund, GreenbraeLimoneira Company, Santa PaulaMoore Dry Dock Foundation, San FranciscoStanley Stairs, Esq., New York, NY

IN KIND DoNAtIoNS

Dennis Agatep Photography, OaklandKirk Amyx, San FranciscoAmyx Photography, San FranciscoAnchor Brewing Company, San FranciscoAnchor Distilling Company, San FranciscoApertifs Bar Management, Santa RosaBarbary Coast Conservancy of the American

Cocktail, San FranciscoBAYCAT, San FranciscoBelfor Property Restoration, HaywardDavid Burkhart, San BrunoJohn Burton, Santa RosaCalifornia Bountiful Foundation, SacramentoCavallo Point, SausalitoCBW Group, Inc., San FranciscoChandon, YountvilleDrakes Bay Oyster Company, InvernessH. Joseph Ehrmann, San FranciscoEvvy Eisen, Point Reyes StationElixir Cocktail Catering, San FranciscoElixir Saloon, San FranciscoDaniel Godinez, Half Moon BayHafner Vineyard, Alexander ValleyHPA Strategies, Herglotz Public Affairs,

San FranciscoHearst Ranch Winery, San SimeonHouse of Shields, San FranciscoKappa, Daly CityKatzgraphics, San FranciscoLa Boulange Café & Bakery, San FranciscoLagunitas Brewing Company, PetalumaLoyola Marymount University, Los AngelesLuxardo, San FranciscoKevin & Nancy Lunny, InvernessEric Passetti, San FranciscoRichard Ramos, San MateoSafeway, San FranciscoSan Francisco Girls ChorusSherman Clay, San FranciscoSquare One Organic Spirits, San FranciscoSt. Regis, San FranciscoThe Candy Store, San FranciscoThe Judson Studios, Los AngelesTrader Joe’s, San FranciscoUnited States Bartenders GuildWaking State Design, Los AngelesWhitehead & Porter LLP, San FranciscoWorking Girls Café, San Francisco

Mr. Daniel F. Sullivan, San FranciscoMr. & Mrs. Anson Blake Thacher, OjaiMr. Max Thelen, Jr., San RafaelMr. Richard L. Tower, San FranciscoMr. Thomas Tragardh, San FranciscoMs. Catherine G. Tripp, San RafaelMs. Anne M Turner, San FranciscoJane Twomey, San FranciscoMr. Christopher VerPlanck, San FranciscoMr. Don Villarejo, DavisMr. Paul A. Violich, San FranciscoMr. Peter Wald, San FranciscoJosh Weinstein & Lisa Simmons,

Santa MonicaKathleen Weitz, San FranciscoMs. Willy Werby, BurlingameWalter & Ann Weybright, San FranciscoMr. Warren R. White, San FranciscoMr. Thomas J. White, OaklandMr. Ed White & Mrs. Patti White, Los AltosMs. Nancy C. Woodward, CarmichaelMr. Robert A. Young, Los AngelesMs. Deborah Zepnick, Calabasas

CoRPoRAtE, FoUNDAtIoN & GoVERNMENt SUPPoRt

$50,000 to $199,000San Francisco Foundation, San FranciscoThe S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation,

San Francisco

$10,000 to $49,999Bland Family Foundation, Saint Louis, MOGrants for the Arts, San FranciscoSherwin-Williams, Richardson, TXThe Barkley Fund, Menlo ParkThe Bernard Osher Foundation, San FranciscoUnion Bank of California Foundation,

Los AngelesUnitedHealthcare, CypressWells Fargo, San Francisco

$1,000 to $9,999Cal Humanities, San FranciscoComcast, LivermoreDerry Casey Construction, Inc., San FranciscoDodge & Cox, San FranciscoHearst Corporation, San FranciscoJohn Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJLouise M. Davies Foundation, San FranciscoMarvell Technology Group, Santa ClaraJ. Rodney Eason Pfund Family Foundation,

CarmichaelRonald & Ann Williams Charitable

Foundation, Los AltosSafeway Inc., PleasantonThe Chrysopolae Foundation, San FranciscoThe Consulate General of Switzerland in

San Francisco, San FranciscoThe Stanley S. Langendorf Foundation,

San Francisco

Ms. Carol G. Johnson, Redwood CityMrs. Sylvia G. Johnson, Los AltosMr. Charles B. Johnson & Dr. Ann Johnson,

HillsboroughJames & Paula Karman, ChicoMr. George Kennedy, Santa CruzMr. Wayne T. Kennedy, San CarlosSusan Keyte, San FranciscoMr. & Mrs. George S. Krusi, OaklandMr. & Mrs. Gary F. Kurutz, SacramentoJudith Laird, Foster CityMr. & Mrs. William C. Landrath, CarmelMr. & Mrs. Jude P. Laspa, San FranciscoMrs. Robert Livermore, DanvilleMs. Janice Loomer, Castro ValleyMr. Weyman I. Lundquist, San FranciscoMr. Edward C. Lynch, Vancouver, WAStephen & Alice Martin, San MateoMr. & Mrs. Thomas H. May, OakvilleWm. C. Corbett, Jr. & Kathleen McCaffrey,

FairfaxMr. Ray McDevitt, Mill ValleyMrs. Amy Meyer, San FranciscoMr. & Mrs. Burnett Miller, SacramentoGuy Molinari, Upper Saddle River, NJMr. & Mrs. Joe W. Morganti, BerkeleyMs. Elaine Myers, San FranciscoMs. Joanne Nissen, SoledadMrs. Katherine Norman, OrindaMr. Stanley Norsworthy, FresnoMr. Thomas E. Nuckols, South PasadenaMs. Harriett L. Orchard, CarmichaelMr. O. Leland Osborne, BelmontMs. Diane Ososke, San FranciscoMr. & Mrs. Richard C. Otter,

Belvedere-TiburonMs. Mary J. Parrish, San FranciscoMr. Warren Perry, San FranciscoJames Brice & Carole Peterson, PleasantonDr. & Mrs. John O. Pohlmann, Seal BeachMr. Herbert C. Puffer, FolsomMr. James Reynolds, BerkeleyMr. Terence Riddle, San FranciscoMr. Daniel W. Roberts, San FranciscoMr. Daimar Robinson, Salt Lake City, UTMr. Robert E. Ronus, Los AngelesJeanne Rose, San FranciscoMrs. James H. Ross, San MateoMr. Allen Rudolph, Menlo ParkMs. Susan Sesnon Salt, Borrego SpringMr. Bernard Schulte, Jr., OrindaMr. Jacob Gould Schurman, IV, San FranciscoRev. Thomas L. Seagrave, San MateoMr. Robert J. Sehr, Jr., AlamoMr. Robert J. Sieling, San CarlosMr. Keith Skinner, BerkeleyMs. Harriet Sollod, San FranciscoMr. Martin & Mrs. Sherril A. Spellman,

FremontMr. Sanford D. Stadtfeld, SausalitoMr. & Mrs. Isaac & Madeline Stein, AthertonMr. & Mrs. Moreland L. Stevens, NewcastleMr. Robert Stoldal, Las Vegas, NV

d o n o r s

77

Andrew T. Nadell, M.D.Carol Potter PeckhamPatrick Rafferty & Peter ShottDr. Francis RigneySusan H. RileyRobert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food

Science, University of California, DavisKaren Jacobsen Scarsdale, on behalf of

Violet & James W. B. Thomas and Frederic Lee Jacobsen & Thelma Harris Jacobsen Thomas

The Shaw Historical Library, Klamath Falls, OR

Nancy K. SmithTim StanleyMary Jane StantonD. SteeleWilliam & Shirley SwaseyDeanna TomeiPaul TutwilerGail UnzelmanAline Spivock UsimAlison WeirSan Francisco Cable Car MuseumU. S. Department of the Interior, NPS,

Branch of History, Architecture and Landscapes, Yosemite National Park

Judy Yung

Mrs. Vera FreebergBrenda FrinkElizabeth Kay GibsonGolden Gate National Recreation AreaFred HamberBarbara Harren Estate / Stearns History

Museum, Belgrade, MNAlfred C. Harrison, Jr., The North Point

GalleryLynne HoriuchiJewish Family and Children’s Services of

San FranciscoJedediah Smith SocietyRon JohnsonJohnson County Museum, Shawnee, KansasAlastair Johnston, Poltroon PressTim Kelly Consulting, LLCMark & Rita Knudsen for Moxon ChappelWoody LaBounty, Western Neighborhoods

ProjectChristine LaennecPhilip Woods Markwart & Elisabeth

Markwart TeelElizabeth McKee William Byron McClintockMichael McConeDoug McWilliamsKenneth Murrah / Orange County Regional

History Center, Winter Park, FL

CALIFoRNIA LEGACY CIRCLE

legacy gifts receivedNorth Baker, TiburonElise Eilers Elliot, Marin CountyMuriel T. French, San Francisco J. Lowell Groves, San FranciscoLouis H. Heilbron, San FranciscoArthur Mejia, San Francisco Ms. Mary K. Ryan, San Francisco

DoNoRS to thE CoLLECtIoN

Benton County Historical Society and Museum, Philomath, OR

Kenneth G. BerryDave BurkhartCalifornia Art ClubCalifornia Genealogical Society & LibraryThe Call FamilyCornell University LibraryPaul DiMarcoEvvy EisenCharles FracchiaCarol Eber

San Francisco

Organization of American Historians 112 n bryan ave bloomington in 47408 812.855.7311 www.oah.org

The Organization of American Historians will hold its 2013 Annual Meeting April 11 –14 at the Hilton San Francisco Union Square. Join American history enthusiasts from around the world for four days filled with sessions, tours, and special events.

This year’s meeting will include more than 150 sessions on cutting-edge American history scholarship, teaching resources, and best practices. The program includes sessions on California history, tours of area attractions including the New Deal Mural Project at Coit Tower and Rincon Center, and the recently restored and renovated historic Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay.

Also, don’t miss the OAH Exhibit Hall that includes the newest publications from the field’s most respected authors and publishers.

Register today to attend the 2013 OAH Annual Meeting in San Francisco and save! Early registration ends March 31. More information online at http://annualmeeting.oah.org

Make plans to attend the Organization of American Historians

2013 Annual Meeting

7

o F F i C e r S

ROBERT CHATTEL, Sherman Oaks, PresidentR. THOMAS DECKER, San Francisco, Executive Vice PresidentSTEPHEN LeSIEUR, San Francisco, Vice PresidentTHOMAS R. OWENS, San Francisco, Vice PresidentCRISTINA ROSE, Los Angeles, Vice PresidentLARRY GOTLIEB, Sherman Oaks, SecretaryJOHN BROWN, Riverside, Treasurer

b o a r d o F t r u S t e e S

MELINDA BITTAN, Los AngelesALBERT CAMARILLO, Palo AltoIAN CAMPBELL, Los AngelesJON CHRISTENSEN, Los AngelesTONY GONZALEZ, SacramentoFRED HAMBER, San FranciscoROBERT HIATT, Mill ValleyGARY KURUTZ, Sacramento SUE MOLINARI, San FranciscoBEVERLY THOMAS, Los AngelesHAROLD TUCK, San DiegoRALPH WALTER, Los AngelesBLANCA ZARAZúA, Salinas

C a l i F o r n i a h i S t o r i C a l F o u n d a t i o n b o a r d

DEWITT F. BOWMAN, Mill Valley, PresidentBILL McCREERY, Hillsborough EDITH L. PINESS, Mill ValleyDAVID BARRY WHITEHEAD, San Francisco

p r e S i d e n t S e M e r i t i

JAN BERCKEFELDT, Lafayette MARIBELLE LEAVITT, San Francisco ROBERT A . McNEELY, San Diego CARLOTTA MELLON, Carmel Highlands EDITH L . PINESS, Mill Valley STEPHEN L . TABER, San Francisco JOHN K . VAN DE KAMP, Los Angeles

e x e C u t i v e d i r e C t o r e M e r i t u SMICHAEL McCONE, San Francisco

S p e C i a l a d v i S o rHUELL HOWSER, Los Angeles

F e l l o W S

WILLIAM N. DAVIS JR., SacramentoRICHARD H. DILLON, Mill ValleyCHARLES A. FRACCHIA, San FranciscoROBERT V. HINE, IrvineGLORIA RICCI LOTHROP, PasadenaJAMES R. MILLS, CoronadoJAMES JABUS RAWLS, SonomaANDREW ROLLE, San MarinoEARL F. SCHMIDT JR., Palo AltoKEVIN STARR, San FranciscoFRANCIS J. WEBER, Mission Hills CHARLES WOLLENBERG, Berkeley

on the back coverThe celebrated western writer Joaquin Miller (circa 1839–1913) was at the center of the Bay Area’s art and literary circles at the turn of the last century, principally at the Hights, his self-constructed East Bay hillside bohemia (see pages 40–61).

Miller’s participation in the creation of Adelaide Hanscom’s 1905 illustrated Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám is acknowledged in the book’s Arts and Crafts–inspired title page. Along with his fellow literati and friends George Sterling and George Wharton James, Miller posed for the pictorial photographer’s lavishly constructed scenes, which featured figures in ancient costume enacting parts of Khayyám’s verse.

Unfortunately, Hanscom’s negatives for the book, one of the first to illustrate a literary work with fine art photographs, were destroyed in San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake and fire.

Courtesy of Michael Shreve; www.michaelshreve.com

80

s p o t l i g h t

Untitled [Photographs of Hollywoodland, Calif.,

and Los Angeles County coastline]

ca. 1924–29

CaliforniaHistoricalSociety

pc002.001.tif

The aftermath of World War I dramati-cally altered the landscape of Los Ange-les, and nowhere more visibly than in the canyons of Hollywood, where devel-opers sought to imprint their vision on the fast-growing metropolis.

To help publicize a planned 500-acre subdivision, in 1923 the real estate syndicate headed by Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler erected a large $21,000 sign composed of thir-teen 50-foot letters spaced eight inches

apart and illuminated by four thousand 20-watt light bulbs. The sign and the giant white dot below it, 35 feet in diameter, beckoned the eye as though punctuating the land’s intended use.

What was once the perfect advertise-ment is today the city’s signature land- mark, minus the last four letters, which were removed as part of a 1949 res-toration organized by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce. Appropriately, the Hollywood sign still harkens above

the hills; Sherwin-Williams, following donations by Dutch Boy Paints in 1995 and Bay Cal Painting in 2005, has part-nered with the Hollywood Sign Trust to prepare the sign in honor of its 90th

birthday celebration in February 2013.

You don’t have to be in Los Angeles to join the party; live webcam views of the sign are available, together with history, lesson plans, and coverage of the sign in popular culture, at http://www.hollywoodsign.org/.


Photographer

Unidentified

Location

Hollywood, Los Angeles

Lisa M. Hamilton, Ashley, Riata Ranch Cowboy Girl, Tulare County, 2011, chromogenic print, 24 x 24 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

Your StateYour HistoryYour Historical Society

678 Mission StreetSan Francisco, California 94105

I See Beauty in This Life: A Photographer Looks at 100 Years of Rural California

Over the past two years, writer and photographer

Lisa M. Hamilton has been telling the stories of

rural communities in her multimedia work Real

Rural. For this exhibition she has delved into the

collections of the California Historical Society to

connect these present-day stories with the past.

Featuring close to two hundred photographs, I See

Beauty in This Life is a combination of large-scale

color prints by Hamilton and her selections from

California Historical Society’s vast photography

collections—material dating from the 1880s

through the mid-twentieth century.

This exhibition is part of Curating California, a new

program through which remarkable Californians

explore our rich collections with the goal of inspiring

a project or exhibition.

October 28, 2012 through March 24, 2013Galleries of the California Historical Society

Les Bruhn, Bodega Bay, with “Queen,” won 2nd place, 26th annual Fox WesternInternational Sheep Dog Trials at California Ram Sale, Sacramento, 1964.Photographer unknown, silver gelatin print, 3 x 3 inches. California Historical Society, California Wool Growers Association photographs (PC 014), PC 014.002.tif.

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