After The Gold Rush
L.A. and The American Dream
It was early January and a cold, northeasterly wind whipped off the waves of the Pacific Ocean onto the shore, up the dunes, through the hills and into the camp. For weeks by then, Commodore Robert Stockton and his men had been marching northward to recapture the last vestige of Mexican control in the territory of California to help win the Mexican American War. After victories to the north at Santa Cruz and Monterey and to the south in San Diego, only the outpost which a group of 44 settlers from Mexico founded in 1781 was left. They had called it “El Pueblo de la Reina de los Angeles.”
Stockton, by then, was in his early 50s. His grandfather had signed the Declaration of Independence. His father had served as the first U.S. Attorney for New Jersey and as U.S. Senator in the 4th Congress. Commodore Stockton himself would be elected to the Senate from New Jersey in 1850—and his son, John Potter Stockton, would be elected to the Senate in 1868. But the greatest accomplishment for the Stockton dynasty lay before Commodore Stockton in those early days of January 1847. As he and his men marched toward the city and the basin it occupied, Stockton stopped for the night a few miles to the east, in a town called Santa Ana. In his journal, he wrote of “a strange dust-laden windstorm” that arrived as his troops did. Not thinking too much of it, the troops marched westward, onto Los Angeles.
Within a few days, the United States and Mexico would sign the Treaty of Cahuenga, achieving a ceasefire in California. Still, the Mexican American War, which President James K. Polk had made the promise of his 1844 campaign, continued to the south for another year. It wouldn’t be until American soldiers scaled the rock cliffs surrounding Mexico City’s Chapultepec Castle in September 1847 when the Mexicans finally realized that the territories Polk had once offered to purchase had by then been taken by force, another casualty brought on by the bloody bayonet of Manifest Destiny.
After the fall of Mexico City, many Southern Democrats urged for the U.S. to annex all of Mexico. Polk had initially pushed his emissary in Mexico, Nicholas Trist, to obtain the territories of California and New Mexico from the Mexican government in exchange for ending the war. But by the time Mexico City had surrendered to the United States, Polk wanted all of Mexico too—and ordered Trist to agree to nothing less. The reason was slavery. Polk favored slavery’s expansion and was well aware of the fact that Mexico sat well below the latitude line of 36° 30', which the Missouri Compromise of 1820 had demarcated as the line between slave and free, South and North, in the United States.
Still, when Trist saw Polk’s instructions, he ignored them. He was on the precipice of an agreement that would forever alter the future of the United States. Instead, Trist would defy the president he served and sign the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildalgo, which awarded the United States with the territories we now know as California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, along with most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming. On top of that, Mexico also agreed to relinquish all claims to Texas, the American annexation of which had in effect started the war in 1845. By the end of Polk’s single term in 1849, he had overseen the acquisition of more territory than any other president in American history.
For expansionists, it was a triumph. However, not all were jubilant. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “The United States will conquer Mexico, but it will be as the man swallows the arsenic, which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us.” A young congressman from Pennsylvania named David Wilmot thought much the same. During the war, he had introduced the “Wilmot Proviso” to ensure that slavery could not be expanded into any of the new territories. The Senate, dominated by Southerners, rejected it. Its failure meant that with America’s expansion would come slavery’s expansion too—and that the greater debate on slavery, whether a nation can exist half slave and half free—would be delayed again. Those delays would result first in the Compromise of 1850, then the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, and then the Civil War.
But in California, admitted to the Union in 1850 as a free state, what was found wasn’t poison but gold. On January 24, 1848—just weeks before Trist signed the treaty—a carpenter named James W. Marshall found gold at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, northeast of San Francisco. In the ensuing decade, the state’s population grew by 300,000. Soon, however—in the years after the gold rush—Americans looked elsewhere for opportunity in California’s southland. In 1881, the Southern Pacific Railroad completed laying track to the city of Los Angeles, which at the time had a population of just over 11,000. The year prior, in 1880, the Los Angeles Evening Express coined that wind Commodore Stockton felt 33 years prior for the first time in print: “The Santa Anas pour their blasts of desert sand, making the house the only comfortable retreat.” A decade later, an oil tycoon named Edward Doheny hit in a field north of downtown L.A., creating a boom. By 1900, Los Angeles would be home to over 100,000 people. The next year, in December 1901, one journalist would describe a “Santa Ana wind” that knocked down every sign in town.
Still, homes went up and along with them, the hopes and dreams of millions. Here, at the edge of the continent, along the shores of the Pacific Ocean, the American Dream would reach its zenith.
In 1913, a film director named Cecille B. DeMille boarded a train for Arizona, where he hoped to shoot a western called The Squaw Man. But when he arrived, it didn’t look as he had hoped. Like Commodore Stockton, like the goldminers, he kept going west to California and ended up shooting the film in a small neighborhood known as Hollywood. DeMille, D.W. Griffith and more like them would build a film industry in Los Angeles that created the city’s main export for millions if not billions: dreams. In LA, those dreams would become reality for so many—and as they did, millions more came west, building their homes and their lives in those canyons and coastal plains.
By 1930, over 2.2 million people lived in Los Angeles County. The defense and aerospace boom of the 1940s and 1950s would grow the area even more—by 1960, over 6 million people lived in Los Angeles County. The 1960s would launch Los Angeles further into the American conscience as the national cultural id. And still, those same winds Commodore Stockton once felt would keep blowing every winter, in what Joan Didion called “the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows.” In 1956, the winds would fuel fires in Malibu, Bel Air in 1961, and Santa Barbara in 1964, and again in the San Gabriels in 1967. And in those dry, woody hills and along those windswept shores, inside homes and businesses, both majestic and ordinary, as Los Angeles grew, the American Dream would grow too, more vivid, more tortuous, and more real.
Sources:
Joan Didion. Slouching Towards Bethlehem. 1969. “The Santa Anas”.
https://www.murrieta.k12.ca.us/cms/lib5/CA01000508/Centricity/Domain/1538/The%20Santa%20Anas.pdf
James McPherson. Battle Cry of Freedom. 1988.
https://www.amazon.com/Battle-Cry-Freedom-Civil-War/dp/019516895X
Tim Vasquez. “Santa Ana Phenomenon.”
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.3200/WEWI.61.5.34-39?needAccess=true