I have two tickets for sale to the Jefferson Starship this October 27 at the Royal Theatre in Victoria B. C. Canada.
They usually sell for $81.50 Can. a piece, including taxes and service charges.
I am willing to sell these two tickets, MFL RowF Seats 9 and 10, for $150.00 total, cash only, on personal delivery.
Please phone 250 382 97 67 if seriously interested in hearing this historic San Francisco band and saving $13.00.
‘Goyo de la Rosa’
250 382 97 67
Victoria
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Tagged: Blue Sky Productions, JEFFERSON STARSHIP, Only in Victoria, Royal Theatre
At Olompali all our gear is set up on a flat stage on the grass in front of the big house and anybody can play at any time.
Big Brother and the Charlatans and the Grateful Dead and the Quicksilver Messenger Service are all hanging out and playing together.
Totally disorganized because everybody is so high, wandering off and tripping.
Phil Lesh and Bill Kreutzmann are riding horseback up into the hills, Bobby Weir’s hooking up with the peyote ceremony that’s going on in the back of the property (which is huge, it backs onto state land).
People get lost for days.
Whoever is around plays.
David Freiberg gets up and plays with Garcia, Janis Joplin sashays up and sings with Pigpen.
LIVING WITH THE DEAD
Twenty Years on the Bus
With Garcia and the Grateful Dead
Rock Scully and David Dalton
Page 56
LA ROSA – CCC TRANSCULTURAL PACIFICAN HISTORY 1966 – 2009
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Tagged: BIG BROTHER AND THE HOLDING COMPANY, CHARLATANS: DAN HICKS' FIRST BAND, DAVID DALTON: ROCK MUSIC HISTORIAN, DAVID FREIBERG: QUICKSILVER MUSICIAN, JANIS JOPLIN, JEFFERSON STARSHIP, JERRY GARCIA, LIVING WITH THE DEAD, OLOMPALI MARIN COUNTY CALIFORNIA, PIGPEN: RON McKERNAN: DECEASED GRATEFUL DEAD ORGANIST, QUICKSILVER MESSENGER SERVICE, ROCK SCULLY: GRATEFUL DEAD MANAGER
When the Grateful Dead began, San Francisco was still in that transitional period from Beat to Hip.
We aspired to the bohemian, outlaw code of the Beats.
They smoked grass, ate magic mushrooms, grew beards, and wore Levi’s and plaid flannel shirts.
They were into jazz, Zen, and existentialism.
So what if they talked to themselves or took speed and drank Hearty Mountain Burgundy!
We don’t care, they are on the beam.
But it is not exactly a mutual admiration society.
The Beats from North Beach look askance at us hippies.
We are on a different wavelength.
This has to do with musical tempo and electronics and the changing of an era.
Of course, there is one other little factor: the mind-bending drugs.
***
Jerry was born in San Francisco, as was Pigpen.
Phil Lesh was born in Berkeley.
Bob Weir in Palo Alto.
We were Bay Area kids proud of the city’s long line of hairy poets and eccentrics.
Garcia had come up through the coffeehouse scene in Palo Alto, a bohemian enclave if ever there was one.
His beard is a coffeehouse beard.
Bushy, nihilistic, Beat.
Occasionally he ventured off to North Beach.
That’s where we all hung sooner or later, because that’s where the music was .
If you were going to hear jazz, or blues, or folk music, that’s where you went.
That’s where we heard Jorma Kaukonen play guitar.
LIVING WITH THE DEAD
Rock Scully and David Dalton
Page 22
LA ROSA – CCC TRANSCULTURAL PACIFICAN HISTORY 1965 – 2009
For information about the upcoming Jefferson Starship concert at the Royal Theatre on October 27 in Victoria, British Columbia, please refer to the comments section below for a link to a number of relevant websites.
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Tagged: BEAT-HIPPIE HISTORY, City Lights Books, DAVID DALTON: ROCK MUSIC HISTORIAN, GRATEFUL DEAD, JEFFERSON AIRPLANE, JEFFERSON STARSHIP, JERRY GARCIA, JORMA KAUKONEN, LIVING WITH THE DEAD, NORTH BEACH NEIGHBOURHOOD SAN FRANCISCO, PHIL LESH: GRATEFUL DEAD BASS PLAYER, ROCK SCULLY: GRATEFUL DEAD MANAGER
Not until the Jefferson Airplane go on do we venture out of the bus.
There is all this kinetic energy zinging about, and when Marty Balin gets into a fight with this Angel named (I’m not kidding) Animal, we fear the worst.
Animal is wearing a grisly cowl made out of wolf fur.
It is road kill, essentially, that he has shaped to go over his head, complete with snout, teeth and whiskers.
All that’s missing from his outfit are horns.
Animal proceeds to smack Marty Balin in the face and has to be pulled off the stage kicking and screaming, still trying to smash Marty in face with his boot.
It is a truly terrifying moment.
Jerry holds up both hands in an involuntary gesture of keeping back some unseen host of demons.
He is petrified.
Speechless, and shaking like a leaf.
He turns every shade of pale and whispers: “Oh, maa-aan, no way are we doing this.
“There is absolutely no way.
“The inmates have definitely taken over the asylum.
“Rock, go sort it out, man.
“Talk to the Angels or something.”
Oh, sure, Jerry.
If somebody would only just talk to the Angels, this misunderstanding could get itself worked out!
Now, it’s true I am dumb enough to go retrieve my suitcase after being busted, but I’ve got a little more sense than to interfere in foreign wars.
It’s not that Jerry fears for his life; he has a lot of friends in the Hell’s Angels.
What is truly disturbing him are the bad vibes, and let me tell you, they are truly ugly.
Of course, being high as a kite makes things that much worse.
The momentum is frightening, too.
“This show is like some kind of runaway train, and we best get the f— out of here before it runs into us,” Jerry moans, making a dash for the bus.
And everybody else is running around and wailing and wringing their hands.
Phil Lesh, who is even more jittery than Garcia, is peeking out through the saggy curtains giving us a running commentary of the savage sideshow outside.
“Jesus Christ, there’s this three-hundred-pound naked guy, and — of God! — the Angels are beating him to a f—ing pulp.”
“Phil, stop, please!”
Pigpen is huddld in the back of the bus too numb to react.
But night must fall.
Healy pokes his head in the bus: “The Airplane are coming off-stage, what do you guys want to do?”
We had planned to go on just before the Stones, but things seem to be falling apart too quickly (including the band).
It’s essential, if more chaos is be avoided, that the Stones play as soon as possible.
A lot more bands have shown up than we anticipated, the show is goinG on too long, and if we go on now the Stones will go on way too late.
It is starting to get dark, and there are no lights and no lit roads to find our way out of the godforsaken place.
At least 350,000 people trapped in this demonic gulley!
Garcia tell me to get everybody together; he wants it to be a group decision.
Well, turns out that Marty Balin’s getting hit has made the band members fairly crazy; nobody wants to go out there and play, lights or no lights!
LIVING WITH THE DEAD:
Twenty Years on the bus with
Garcia and the Grateful Dead
This Darkness Got to Give
Pages 182 – 183
LA ROSA – CCC TRANSCULTURAL PACIFICAN HISTORY 1965 – 2009
NOTA BENE: The Jefferson Airplane band spawned the Jefferson Starship, which is coming to the Royal Theatre in Victoria on October 27, 2009.
Please refer to the CCC BLOGROLL on the right for further ticket details.
- ‘Goyo de la Rosa,’ Editor
LA ROSA
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Tagged: ALTAMONT SPEEDWAY, HELL'S ANGELS, JEFFERSON AIRPLANE, JEFFERSON STARSHIP, JERRY GARCIA, MARTY BALIN, PHIL LESH: GRATEFUL DEAD BASS PLAYER, ROCK SCULLY: GRATEFUL DEAD MANAGER, ROLLING STONES
Thanksgiving 1967 feels like a last hurrah.
The Airplane come, and the Charlatans, and Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley and Neal Cassady, our genius loci, presiding over all.
We open all the big sliding doors that separate the different rooms — the front room from the dining room, the dining room from the back room, which is Pigpen’s room.
We finally get to see Pig’s room.
He has to clean up his room and make his bed and do all the things that he hates to do, because we are incorporating his room into the festivities.
We put together every table in the house, take doors off the hinges to make tables, and then cover the whole thing with motley tablecloths.
We have tables winding through from the front of the house to the back, all on different levels.
It goes up and down with the height of the different tables.
People are sitting on easy chairs or towering over the tables on stools.
Everybody brings something to this wonderful Thanksgiving dinner, their favorite thing or the best thing that they make.
The dinner is elegant: pies and soup, rice and all kinds of exotic side dishes, from American Indian recipes and Zen macrobiotic to traditional American turkey and stuffing and sweet potatoes and gravy.
Everybody eats themselves silly except for Neal Cassady.
Aside from sixteen diet pills, he doesn’t eat a thing.
For him those Desoxyn are the best brown meat, white meat, stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes and pies and gravy and cranberry sauce imaginable.
Le tout rock ‘n’ roll of San Francisco comes.
It’s probably the first time a lot of us have a celebration like this that isn’t with our families.
It’s one of those moments where we realize that we’re making our own kind of family here.
Cassady never sits down.
He’s up on the table, doing a little dance from corner to corner, rapping out his own Dada digest of the news.
A futurist collage of an article on Vietnam and then on to movie reviews or some book review and then back to how the folks at the White House are planning to celebrate Thanksgiving.
This is our dinner music.
Jerry loves it because you can talk over it or under it, relate to it or ignore it.
Jerry and Phil, who are both well read, listen to it like instantaneous poetry and toss lines back to him and feed the frenzy.
Cutup conversations pieced together out of the dross and everyday surrealism of American culture, a Mahabharata of gossip, mental mumbling, song lyrics, weather reports, and menus.
You can see why Kerouac and Kesey loved him so much.
The guy was a brilliant writer who never stopped long enough to write it down.
But under the camaraderie and high spirits runs a strain of melancholy.
We know something we believed in with all our hearts has ended.
The Haight is going all to hell and shortly the Dead family is going to be splitting up.
We’re never all going to live together again.
We are being cast out of Eden.
Time to roll another joint.
LIVING WITH THE DEAD:
Twenty years on the bus
with Garcia and the Grateful Dead
Rock Scully and David Dalton
Pages 133 – 134
LA ROSA TRANSCULTURAL PACIFICAN HISTORY 1967 – 2009
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Tagged: ALTON KELLEY: SAN FRANCISCO POSTER ARTIST (KELLEY-MOUSE STUDIO), CHARLATANS: DAN HICKS' FIRST BAND, DAVID DALTON: ROCK MUSIC HISTORIAN, JEFFERSON AIRPLANE, JERRY GARCIA, NEAL CASSADY, PHIL LESH: GRATEFUL DEAD BASS PLAYER, ROCK SCULLY: GRATEFUL DEAD MANAGER, STANLEY MOUSE: SAN FRANCISCO POSTER ARTIST
Rock Scully, the Grateful Dead’s manager from 1965 to 1985, tells his version of the fabled story of the Monterey Pop Festival to David Dalton, author of numerous rock music history books, including Piece of My Heart: Travels with Janis.
In this excerpt from the 1996 book Living with the Dead, Scully recalls a quasi-mythical free jam with Jimi Hendix, David Crosby, and various members of the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and the Who.
- Goyo de la Rosa, Editor
LA ROSA
The festival rolls for June 15-16-17.
I get to the fairgrounds early to help take care of all the stuff the promoters forgot about.
We know from the Be-in that people will be coming in from all the communities up and down the coast: Big Sur, Shasta, the communes in Oregon.
Two days before the festival opens, the buses begin arriving filled with people who want to know where they can pitch their tents and tepees.
We realize that we’ll have to look after them because the L. A. contingent certainly isn’t going to.
The kind of people who come to see the Grateful Dead will most likely want to camp out.
We get the Monterey Peninsula College to provide free camping on the football field and open up the showers and turn on hot water and all that good stuff.
We make arrangements with the people who run the floral show to use their pavilion to accomodate the overflow people who have nowhere to stay and no tents either.
All of which is right next door to the fairgrounds.
Just walk under the highway and you are there.
When you walk through the fairgrounds at twilight with the tepees painted with Sioux symbols, people playing guitars, and children and dogs running around the tents, it’s worth all the hassles in the world.
We’ve infiltrated the enemy camp, turned it into our own event.
A Digger underground action.
The promoters are busy catering to Brian Jones and the Monkees and all the people who aren’t even playing.
We have have our peyote-ceremony tents set up just as you walk in the gate.
The Laws are there, they started the New Buffalo commune in New Mexico.
Also Steve Gaskin, who started a commune down in Tennessee and wrote a great book, and whose self-styled messianism is satirized in “St. Stephen.”
There are bonfires going, and smoke coming out of tepees.
Meanwhile, backstage the sharks are busy scheming and maneuvering.
All those L. A. record company types.
Man, are they scary.
Bill Graham is a Boy Scout compared to them.
Holy cow, here comes Albert Grossman – the Band’s manager, Dylan’s manager.
Grossman’s trying to snag Janis and is doing it in the most ruthless, shabby way.
Dangling Bob Dylan, whom Janis worships, right in front of her eyes.
Very soon we dream up a new piece of folly.
It starts, like so many great ideas, with a simple desideratum.
Jerry says, “A jam or something might be nice.
“Yeah, a jam might be real nice. . . .”
Stop the presses!
The great Barcia has spoken (I think).
“Well,” say I, “what about the floral pavilion?
“Or even the football field?
“It’s full of all those people who couldn’t get into the shows.”
Garcia is up for it, so is Pig.
The plot hatches at the Jokers Club (where the musicians hang out behind the main stage).
And as soon as it’s been conjured up, Hendrix says, “Hey, now that sounds like serious fun!”
Pigpen, Jimi Hendrix, Jerry Garcia, Pete Townsend, David Crosby.
They’re all into it.
And as soon as the other musicians hear about it they’re going yes, yes – count us in too.
At one end of the floral pavilion we set up the PA system on a little platform that is already there.
The quippies skank the electricity and get juice into the hall, and we borrow some amplifiers off the stage and move them in.
All this is done furtively, as people are going to sleep, so nobody will twig.
The lights are off, so the whole setting-up process is done with flashlights.
We get everything ready and then Jorma Kaukonen, Jack Casady, Garcia, and Jimi Hendrix (all of them high on acid) come tripping out onstage.
With the first chord the lights go on and the projectors start flashing their amoeba-like images.
People wake up to bubbles moving across the ceiling (one of the light companies installs a liquid light projector) and here’s the Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and Jimi Hendrix cranking through “Walkin the Dog.”
The Dead are like grease.
Here take another tab, and everybody knows “Good Morning Little School Girl,” right?
LA ROSA TRANSCULTURAL PACIFICAN HISTORY 1965 – 2009
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Tagged: DAVID CROSBY, DAVID DALTON: ROCK MUSIC HISTORIAN, GRACE SLICK, GRATEFUL DEAD, JACK CASADY, JANIS JOPLIN, JEFFERSON AIRPLANE, JEFFERSON STARSHIP, JERRY GARCIA, JIMI HENDRIX, JORMA KAUKONEN, MARTY BALIN, MONTEREY POP FESTIVAL, PAUL KANTNER, PETE TOWNSEND, ROCK SCULLY: GRATEFUL DEAD MANAGER
Poor old Haight-Ashbury.
Being exploited like crazy by the media and the bus companies!
Everybody jumped on it like a big piece of free cheesecake.
But of all the shifty schemes and scaly exploitations of the hour, the Monterey Pop Festival is the most nefarious.
We know from the outset it’s going to be a rip-off, but it’s galling to get ripped off by guys who are making millions of dollars doing “California Dreamin’.”
We’re the ones doing the dreaming, they’re the ones making the bread!
We already knew from friends in the Airplane and others that the principals of the festival, Lou Adler and Papa John Phillips of the Mamas and Papas, have something up their sleeves.
Nobody knows quite what, but we know from experience that somebody somewhere will be making money from all this free music and free love. . . .
It starts with John and Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and Papas coming to see us, representing themselves as fellow musicians who have also taken acid or maybe taken acid.
But whatever they’ve taken, they aren’t anywhere near as crazy as we are.
Or as naive.
Phillips is a musician whose group we respect, but why, we wonder, is he talking like that?
The hip malapropisms, the music-biz cliches, the fake sincerity.
We are soon to discover that once you get beyond the fur hat and the beads he is just like a goddamn L. A. slicko.
We all get the same vibe from him: he’s here to exploit the San Francisco hippie/love phenomenon by building a festival around us and Janis and Country Joe and Big Brother and Quicksilver and the Airplane.
The meeting is over on Fulton at the Airplane’s palace.
In spite of our misgivings we are led on because we aren’t big yet, we don’t have a hit record and the Mamas and the Papas are huge.
We never even hope to achieve the kind of success that the Mamas and the Papas have on AM radio.
Phillips has no idea what we’re about, and he doesn’t much want to find out.
For one thing, we’re asking too many embarrassing questions.
“Hey, brother,” he’s saying, “What are you guys so paranoid about?
“You’ve got us all wrong.
“You’re gonna dig this trip if you give it half a chance.
“You’re really going to flip when you hear who we’re bringing in: Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, and the Who, for starters.
“And we’re working on getting the Stones.
“Isn’t that right, Andrew?”
They’ve brought the Stones’ manager with them, the infamous Andrew Loog Oldham.
Sir F—ing Andrew himself!
We’re impressed, all right.
“Out the door and around the back, man, innit?” Oldham remarks dryly and proceeds to embark on an extravagant automotive metaphor.
“It’s a bit like a car, a festival.
“D’y'know what I mean?
“Well, unless or even if your engine is frozen up like a Swanson’s TV dinner, if you got the right ingredients it will still roll over.
“See what I mean, love?
“Only problem with a gig like this, that’s got its own momentum, is will it overheat?
“Y’know?”
As beguiling as it is being shined on by John and Michelle Phillips, cajoled by superpromoter Lou Adler, and, uh, talked to by the redoubtable Andrew Loog Oldham, Danny and I have to blow them off, which we do by saying we’ll think about it.
Time for Andrew and Lou Adler to drive back up the coast.
They drove down together and Andrew is still going on about it.
“Lovely drive,” offers Sir Andrew.
“Although the f—in’ waves were a bit overdone, didn’t you think?”
So just to make their trip back even more scenic . . . . we dose ‘em.
At this point nobody in Berkeley or the Haight wants anything to do with the Monterey Pop Festival.
Big Brother, Steve Miller, Country Joe and the Fish, Quicksilver.
They all turn them down flat.
The Airplane are down in L. A. finishing up their second album and therefore [are] more susceptible to the importunings of Adler & Co.
More righteous people get involved.
Paul Simon commits and tries to get us to do the same.
He comes out to San Francisco.
Jerry and I give him a tour of the Haight and Golden Gate Park, up to hippie hill, over to the Airplane mansion and Big Brother’s house.
We take him for a walk all the way down Haight Street from one end to the other and not a soul recognizes him.
We tell him what bothers us about the setup, the cast of rogues running the thing, etc.
All of which he grants, but then adds:
“Guys, we don’t have to get so hung up on the legalities; let the lawyers take care of that stuff.
“That’s not what’s going to be remembered about this festival — who got the Japanese rights.
“Without the Dead and the other San Francisco bands, Monterey will just be another Dick Clark production.
And besides, I only got involved because they told me you guys were doing it.”
In the next few weeks other heroes of ours start getting involved with the festival.
Derek Taylor, who’d been the Beatles publicist, becomes the press agent.
The Airplane sign on, and then some bands from San Francisco start committing.
The Byrds get involved.
We hear the Who and Hendrix are definitely coming, and how could we miss out on that?
And now Otis!
Gotta-gotta-gotta-gotta!
The damn thing is a steamroller.
LIVING WITH THE DEAD
Rock Scully and David Dalton
Pages 99 – 101
LA ROSA TRANSCULTURAL PACIFICAN HISTORY
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We’ve only been back at 710 a few days when I get a call from the Airplane.
Jorma wants to know if Jerry can, you know, come down and help them out for a few days.
“Maybe Jerry could tweak this mix a bit, Rock, I dunno, there’s something. . . something . . .”
“Something in the middle part, maybe?” I say, as deadpan as I can manage.
We hop on a flight to L. A. and head straight to the studio where the Airplane are still working on “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love.”
Garcia takes his little Princeton amplifier in there and tinkers with the guitar parts and essentially arranges those two songs, which eventually become Top Forty hits.
His contribution is so crucial that the Airplane want to list him as producer on those two tracks.
But Rick Jarrand won’t permit it.
Which is how the Airplane end up listing Jerry Garcia as “spiritual advisor” on the back of Surrealistic Pillow.
Anyway, the lurch that really makes those songs is Jerry’s.
He actually lays down the rhythm guitar parts, then Jorma and Paul come in later and overdub them.
I don’t know if they just mixed Jerry way back or erased him altogether.
Some future sonic archaeologist will no doubt come along and unearth the Garcia ur-track and make it the cornerstone for some theory of ancient rock.
Living with the Dead, Rock Scully with David Dalton, Little Brown and Company, 1996, pages 86 – 87
LA ROSA TRANSCULTURAL PACIFICAN HISTORY 1966 – 2009
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Tagged: DAVID DALTON, JEFFERSON AIRPLANE, JERRY GARCIA, JORMA KAUKONEN, ROCK SCULLY: GRATEFUL DEAD MANAGER, SAN FRANCISCO PSYCHEDELIC ROCK BANDS, SURREALISTIC PILLOW
He indicates that he will let his cousin in on the ground floor, saying: “If ever anything should be done and any agency accrew . . . . . I shall not forget my old friend.” Meanwhile, a suggestion:
‘Could you demand in my name, or your own, a large extent of good land near San Francisco on the banks of the river? If you can so as to secure the property . . . . . I will either take the whole, or half with you, and I will send out Colonists from England, good men and true, who will not play the Game of Texas. There is money to be made in this way. If you do not act, say nothing about it.’
Once again the golden gleam of a fortune to be made without too much effort! As usual, Hartnell needed money for his growing family. His interpreter job for Commodore Jones was done, and there remained only the poorly paying position as customs official. Shipping was at a standstill, while foreign statesmen were deciding California’s fate.
Perhaps the prospect of literary fame lured him more strongly than material gain. Or his purpose may have been more admirable still – to make an anonymous contribution to world knowledge. We never shall know more than that he answered every one of Wyllie’s questions in considerable detail. That he wrote with style, with informed eloquence, is apparent from the mutilated manuscript which remains among his papers. Originally, it must have been a contemporary account of life in California to rank with his famous brother-in-law’s interest and verity. Dr. Wyllie said of it: “The answeres to my queries are full and able, just such as I could have expected from the talent that I always attributed to you.
But once again William Hartnell was fated to have his brains picked without profiting by it. The promised pamphlet never appeared in print, and portions were abstracted, without credit, from the original of Hartnell’s long letter to his doctor-cousin, dated April 20, 1844. Other writers and historians reaped from Hartnell’s sowing, as did other traders, educators, diplomats in other periods of his life. The quality of his reflections is shown in the few pages left intact by vandal scissors:
‘My dear Cousin, as all I advance is to the best of my knowledge true, and nothing secret, you are perfectly at liberty to make what use you may see fit of my name, and it would be highly gratifying to me to hear that what information I am able to give you, may be of any use to you. I will now proceed to answer your questions.’
Of foreign influences in the country which might at one time have operated strongly for or against Wyllie’s colonization plan he mentions the French not at all.
‘The Hudson’s Bay Company have a house and an agent established at San Francisco for the purpose of collecting hides and tallow in exchange for English goods and this is the only commerce which at present exists between the Columbia river and this place. There is now no longer any commerce carried on between the Russian settlements and California. The Russian American Company have disposed of everything possessed in their settlement at Ross to Captain Sutter, a Swiss Gent. established on the South bank of the Sacramento and he, I believe, is to pay in whatever produce (particularly wheat) he may raise at his establishment of “New Helvetia.”
‘Several parties of Americans have come from the United States to California by way of the Rocky Mountains. It has hitherto taken them about six months to perform the journey but I expect that very shortly it may be effected in at least half the time, when the roads become better known. It has been proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that it is possible to travel from the U. S. to settlements in California with wagons.
No mines of any description are at present worked in California, but there is no doubt that coal, asphalts, and the precious metals do exist and the latter in abundance. A “placer de oro” has lately been found in the neighbourhood of “the Pueblo” [Los Angeles] and there are . . . . .a quantity of paisanos employed washing for the gold, which is of very good quality and, although generally found in very small pieces, lumps of the weight of half an ounce have been picked out.’
Answering Wyllie’s question as to the state of missionary establishments in California, Hartnell says:
‘The missions are almost all entirely gone to ruin and can never be brought back to their former state; and there is no doubt but the temporal welfare of a great portion of the inhabitants has been much improved by their ruin, for formerly almost all the land of the country belonged to the Missions and the white inhabitants were not able to obtain any and now the former are barely left with what is sufficient for the cattle they at present possess, and the latter have obtained grants of farms, many of which are not well stocked and in general are improving rapidly.’
As a sobering note on these temporal gains, the educator adds:
‘We are much in want of spiritual assistance in California, and likewise of good establishments for the education of youth [Hartnell is at this time obliging Governor Micheltorena by teaching school in Monterey] and I for my part should be very glad indeed to see 20 or 30 Jesuits introduced into the country.’
The common interest of Micheltorena and Hartnell in education has led them into a friendly relationship. It is therefor easy for Hartnell to get the Governor’s ear, and he feels that Micheltorena can be counted on to keep Wyllie’s proposition confidential. Continuing his report:
‘With respect to the latter part of your letter I have spoken to the Governor; no instructions whatever have been received in California touching the exchange of deferred bonds for land. But His Excellency has assured me that he will do all that he possibly can for you with respect to granting a tract of land for colonization. His faculties do not allow him to give more than 11 square leagues to one person, but I can ask for one tract for you and another for myself, and I am almost certain that I shall succeed in obtaining the privilege to hold onto them a reasonably sufficient time to enable settlers to come out from England (say two years from the time they are granted without being obliged to stock them or cultivate them within one twelve-month, as all others who have hitherto obtained grants of land in California have been obliged to do. The Governor told me plainly that he wished very much that settlers would come out from Europe so that all the vacant lands should not be given to Americans, and he even hinted that he should like to take a share in the speculation himself. He has always professed himself particularly favourable to the English. You will have the goodness to let me know as soon as possible what your ideas are respecting the formation of a settlement, what extent of land you would wish to obtain and what number of settlers you could count upon sending out, etc., etc., etc.’
As tangible evidence of his interest in this colonization scheme, Governor Micheltorena made an immediate and outright grant of fertile land to William Hartnell, eleven leagues on the Cosumnes River to be known as Rancho el Cosumnes.
How brilliant the prospect gleamed for the British cousins to form an “empire” rivaling Sutter’s New Helvetia! Unfortunately, on November 14, 1844, only eleven days after granting el Cosumnes to Hartnell, the friendly Governor Micheltorena was deposed from office. He had no serious faults, save laziness, but the Californians became angered by the depredations of his undisciplined, felon army. Pio Pico was elevated to the highest office in the land.
Now forty-three years of age, Don Pio was heavy and coarse in appearance. Perhaps this derived from self-indulgence, perhaps even from elephantiasis or gland trouble. Suffice it to say that in appearance and action Don Pio symbolized a type of person repugnant to Don Guillermo Hartnell. And Governor Pico nursed a grudge against the former visitador for displacing him as administrador of San Luis Rey Mission, although Don Pio also favored an English protectorate.
Had Hartnell been a friend of the new Governor, as of the old, he could have secured all the land he wanted, as had Hugo Reid and William Workman, who were deeded the mission lands at San Gabriel; Juan Forster and James McKinley, who bought San Juan Capistrano for $710. Pico granted nothing to Hartnell, and shattered the Englishman’s illusion of empire building. At best, it could have lasted only a little while. From the formal installation of Don Pico as governor to the first firing of guns in the war between Mexico and the United States was a matter of months. The Americans did not honor Don Pio’s last-minute legacies of land.
Following the revolt against Micheltorena, Hartnell lost the various government positions through which he had supported his family in the early forties, as customs official, tax collector, court clerk, and teacher in Monterey. Collectively, they had supplied him with cash for family needs beyond the produce of Alisal and Cosumnes, and there were a few months of incessant worry, in late 1844 and early 1845, from which Don Guillermo was rescued by his brother-in-law, returning from Europe. Through Don Pablo’s influence with Pio Pico, Hartnell was offered a new government job which he had no choice but to accept. He was asked to organize a treasury department for the fast-growing pueblo of San Francisco, similar to his Monterey plan which had proved efficient through the years. It meant separation from his family, but surcease from financial worry.
Shortly before his departure, on December 13, 1844, Don Guillermo received a letter from Captain Sutter at New Helvetia aksing – nay, commanding – him to do various commissions in the capital for the king of the northern empire. Sutter wrote in German, ending with a veiled threat: ”I would be very grateful to you especially as the political horizon looks very cloudy and you cannot think of peace any more . . . . . I am here in a martial state, every day we are drilling. I have a strong garrison, and several thousand Indians ready to fight for their fuhrer at any moment.”
Sutter’s courier had orders to return with an immediate answer from Hartnell. Unintimidated and with dignity, Don Guillermo answered the fuhrer: “It will always give me great pleasure to serve you to the utmost of my power but I only received your letter yesterday, and your courier tells me that he must leave today, so that it is impossible in so short a time to form any idea of what may be done for you, but I shall not lose sight of your interests.” He did not trouble to write in German, save a salutation at the end.
Important events crowded each other in California from February 1845, when Pio formally succeeded Micheltorena as governor, to May 1846, when President Polk proclaimed that “by the act of the Republic of Mexico a state of war exists between that government and the United States.”
During htis inexorable march of time, Robert Wyllie continued his effort to transform California into a British colony by peaceful penetration. In rueful mood, Cousin William would read his letters.
[Pages 263 267 of Dakin's book]
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