With the advent of secularization, California’s pastoral economy and society revolved around cattle-raising, which made the province dependent on transpacific exports and imports. The 20 or so ranchos that had existed during the Spanish period ballooned up to roughly 800, comprising about 10 million acres, in the Mexican era. They were nearly all located along the coast so that their products, hides and tallow, could be loaded aboard
Oceangoing vessels. Just as sea otter pelts had rendered California a Pacific Eldorado in the Spanish era, hides and tallow largely performed that function in the Mexican period. From the 1820s onward, the province’s international Pacific Basin connections strengthened and multiplied dramatically. Meanwhile, a ranchero oligarchy, led by wealthy patriarchs, ran the province.
California’s hide production and trade were driven mainly by the needs of New England shoe - and boot-makers. Locally, hide leather was used to fashion bridle reins, riatas or lassos, chair bottoms, and floor mats. Some of the tallow was used as cooking oil. Most of the substance, however, was enclosed in large rawhide bags (botas) weighing as much as 1,000 pounds, that were shipped to Peru. There the tallow was processed into candles and soap, which were sold to silver miners. Though the quantity of California hides and tallow traded in Mexican California is unknown, historian Douglas Monroy puts the figure at nearly 1.25 million hides and 60 million pounds of tallow in the years 1826 to 1848.
The cattle needed to satisfy these international market demands were raised on California ranchos that were run in ways traceable to medieval Spain. Land grants, bestowed in the name of the Crown and revocable, conveyed the right to use rather than own the land. Consequently, since the missions did not own these properties, thorny legal questions arose during the Mexican and later periods as to whether the neophytes actually possessed the plots distributed to them that they sold or bartered away to rancheros. The tracts varied in size between 10,000 and 20,000 acres. A few families, though, like the Yorbas and Castros, managed to acquire grants of several hundred thousand acres. California’s climate and natural grass provided abundant fodder on these enormous spreads. An open-range policy allowed cattle to roam and forage across indistinct tract boundaries. Because this resulted in herds mixing, annual roundups or rodeos were held so that rancheros could find and brand their stock. Besides the work involved, these were festive occasions highlighted by feats of horsemanship.
A mix of workers was involved in the hide-and-tallow industry. Indians, both exneophytes and gentiles, and poorer Mexicans performed rancho labor. They herded, slaughtered, and skinned cattle, and salted hides to preserve them for shipping. Additionally, they rendered tallow from the carcasses. The hides, stacked compactly, were transported to waiting ships by American and kanaka (Hawaiian) sailors.
The province’s commerce was closely connected to Hawai’i, which served as the international commercial crossroads of the Pacific, meaning that due to its fairly central location ships plying that ocean stopped there more than anywhere else to make repairs, load and unload cargoes, and rest crewmen. Horses, cattle, and ranching were introduced to those Polynesian islands from California. For example, in 1827 French Captain Auguste Duhaut-Cilly bought a deckload of horses at Fort Ross that he sold at a profit in Honolulu, where he took on a cargo of sandalwood before proceeding to Canton, China. In 1830 Hawaiian King Kamehameha III imported vaqueros from California to herd cattle and teach ranching skills.
The hide-and-tallow trade operated largely on a barter basis. Scarce money and ample hides in Mexican California helped ensure that the skins would be treated as currency,
Informally called “California bank notes.” Foreign ships served as floating department stores, bringing needed manufactures to California. Britons Hugh McCulloch and William E. P. Hartnell took up residence in California in 1822, purchasing hides, horns, furs, and wines for the English firm of John Begg and Company, which secured a three-year monopoly on the province’s surplus hides and tallow.
Later that same year New England merchants entered and soon dominated the trade. The first of these, William Gale, represented the Boston shipping firm of Bryant and Sturgis. As supercargo (the officer conducting business) on the vessel Sachem, Gale enjoyed some success in transacting business with padres willing to evade the contract with John Begg and Company. When that agreement expired the English lost out to American traders. Richard Henry Dana, Jr., a Harvard student in the early 1830s, took a leave of absence due to illness and joined the crew of the Bryant and Sturgis-owned Pilgrim, one of many clipper supply ships sailing from New England to California and other West Coast destinations. Dana wrote about his seafaring and onshore hide-loading days along California’s coast in his classic account, Two Years Before the Mast (1840). Nearly a third of all foreign vessels departing California ports in this period, like the Pilgrim, carried cargoes of hides and tallow. From California, the majority of these vessels voyaged to the Pacific Northwest Coast, Alaska, and/or Hawai’i to acquire or sell trade goods before returning to their home ports along the United States Atlantic seaboard or in Europe. Already by the 1830s, however, Yankee and English hide traders were resettling in California port towns in order to participate more fully in the growing Pacific commerce.
Alfred Robinson of Massachusetts furnishes an example of a seafaring Yankee hide trader who took up residence in Santa Barbara. There he married into the prominent de la Guerra family, whose patriarch, Jose de la Guerra, amassed great wealth as a merchant and middleman in transpacific trading with Mexico, Peru, and the Philippines. Robinson’s book, Life in California (1846), provides a description of the Mexican province during the hide-and-tallow era. The oceangoing commerce, in which Robinson and other Americans engaged, paved the way for the later U. S. takeover of California. American ambitions for the province were expressed succinctly by Dana in his popular narrative: “In the hands of an enterprising people what a country this might be!”
In the early 1840s, the English-owned Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) extended its North American fur empire by establishing a trading post in Yerba Buena (San Francisco). Until 1846, when it left California, HBC exchanged its wares for hides and tallow, which it sold elsewhere.
Because so little was manufactured in California, Pacific traders supplied virtually all such goods in exchange for hides and tallow. Typical import cargoes included: dry goods, liquors, cigars, raisins, sugar, spices, silks, hardware, cutlery, guns, powder, caps, combs, toothbrushes, shoes, furniture, an occasional piano, even Chinese fireworks. Censored books, that is, those that Catholic clerics saw as too liberal, were smuggled into California, mainly by New England merchant shippers. For example, in 1831 Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo exchanged 400 cowhides and 10 kegs of tallow for an unknown quantity of smuggled books, which he shared with two friends. All three were excommunicated by a Church official, though later they were reinstated and allowed to keep the books. Apart from
Figure 3.2 A replica of the brig Pilgrim at sea, off the coast of California. Courtesy of the Ocean Institute, Dana Point, CA.
Smuggled goods, Mexican customs officials collected port duties ranging from 5,000 to 15,000 pesos at Monterey. Between 20 and 30 vessels regularly traded at California ports, San Diego being the busiest of those from which hides were shipped. The fact that annual revenues from port duties seldom exceeded $75,000 suggests that illicit foreign commerce with California thrived, especially in the offshore islands, such as Catalina. Despite such evasions, duties from Pacific trade constituted the sole financial means for paying the costs of governing Mexican California, underscoring the dependency of the province on transoceanic commerce. Yet the duties worked no hardship on Yankee traders. Even after payment of legitimate fees and sometimes bribes, Dana claimed that American profits from these voyages often reached 300 percent.
Though less consequential than California’s maritime commerce, overland trade also contributed to the province’s economy. Beginning in the late 1820s a caravan trade developed along the Old Spanish Trail that ran from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to Los Angeles. Westward-bound pack trains brought silver, blankets, and other items. Eastward-bound return cargoes included such Californian and Asian products as hides, tallow, and Chinese silks. American and New Mexican horse thieves augmented this trade by seizing mounts
From ranchos located between San Jose and Los Angeles and transporting them out of California to other Mexican frontier provinces.
Like Yankee and non-Anglo-Pacific traders, rancheros also amassed wealth in Mexican California. Such wealth kept these Californio land barons and their families atop a threetiered social pyramid. American and other foreign immigrants occupied the larger middle tier of society. Many of them intermarried with gente de razon, with whom they identified, and, as indicated, prospered as merchants and landowners. This group included Abel Stearns, Alfred Robinson, Thomas O. Larkin, John Marsh, William Wolfskill, John Temple, and John Sutter. Numerous cholos (Mexican workers) and Indians constituted the base of the social pyramid. Often landless, exploited, unruly, and sometimes violent, they performed the province’s manual labor.
Though rancheros had the most property, they lacked an attribute common among the aristocracies in the American states along the Atlantic seaboard: education. Because mission-associated schooling did not go beyond memorization of religious catechisms, there were, in effect, no educational institutions in either Spanish or Mexican California. Consequently, the level of literacy in the province, even among the upper class, was low. There were no post offices, newspapers, magazines, libraries, museums, theaters, or art galleries. Many of the wealthiest rancheros could not sign their own names; instead, they drew a sign of the cross on documents requiring a signature. Some scholars estimate that probably no more than 100 Californians were literate in 1845. Evidently, more important to Californians than learning was the enjoyment they experienced at fiestas, rodeos, bull and grizzly-bear fights, cockfights, and other gatherings where social classes mingled and celebrated the occasion of the moment.
Family life among the Californios was governed largely by patriarchy. Ranchero fathers at times locked up their daughters to safeguard their virginity. Family patriarchs arranged marriages, afterward often controlling the lives of their wedded children. Wives could expect to give birth to numerous children. Among the wealthy de la Guerras, Ortegas, and Vallejos some parents had 13 to 19 children. A double standard favoring males prevailed regarding punishment for sexual offenses. A man, unlike a woman, would not forfeit his honor by engaging in promiscuity. In Mexican California a woman who gave birth out of wedlock thereby reduced her chances of success in the marriage market. Californio Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, for example, sired several children by women below his social rank. Two of these women were sisters. When asked by a padre in 1827 what his intentions were, Vallejo responded he “could marry neither” of them. Punishments for fornication and adultery were more severe for women than men.
Some women found their own ways to resist patriarchal control over their lives. Apoli-naria Lorenzano, who taught in a girls orphanage, rejected marriage though an offer had been made to her. “I refused his offer. . . because I was not particularly inclined toward that state [of matrimony] even though I knew the merits of that sacred institution.” Other women, both single and married, challenged male control by engaging in illicit sex.
Despite patriarchy and its controls, women could and did own land, that is, those who were members of the socially elite gente de razon, and enjoyed some legal safeguards while girls’ gender roles were flexible. Women owned roughly 60 ranchos, comprising 335,000 acres. For example, Juana Briones de Miranda held a land grant of 4,439 acres near
San Jose. Also, under Mexican law wives retained ownership of any property belonging to them at marriage and received community property rights after they wed. Moreover, laws protected wives from abusive husbands. Girls as well as boys of all social classes were taught horsemanship and grew into what some foreign observers described as the best riders in the world.
While Californians adjusted to secularization and enjoyed what pleasures a pastoral economy and lifestyle had to offer, Americans in greater numbers - beginning with fur trappers - entered the province. Mexico’s hold on California would weaken further.
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