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california history
volume 90
number 1
201 2
The Journal of the California Historical Society
A year built
in the Bay Area
2012, what a year!
The 75th anniversary
of the Golden Gate
Bridge. 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.
Photo credit: Chales Leung
Visit goldengatebridge75.org for
75th anniversary news and updates.
The Golden Gate Bridge is the setting of a spectacular fireworks display
during the 75th anniversary celebration on May 27, 2012.
wellsfargo.com
© 2012 Wells Fargo Bank, N.A.
All rights reserved. ECG-733888
The Golden Gate Bridge
and Wells Fargo —
built in the Bay Area
california history
volume 90
number 1
Executive Director
anthea hartig
2012
The Journal of the California Historical Society
contents
Editor
JANET FIREMAN
From the Editor: Changes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Managing Editor
Shelly Kale
Collections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Reviews Editor
JAMES J. RAWLS
Courtship and Conquest:
Alfred Sully’s Intimate Intrusion at Monterey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Design/Production
sandy bell
Editorial Consultants
LARRY E. BURGESS
ROBERT W. CHERNY
JAMES N. GREGORY
By Stephen G. 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 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
By Michael Gonzalez
JUDSON A. GRENIER
Joaquin Miller and the Social Circle at the Hights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
ROBERT V. HINE
By Phoebe Cutler
LANE R. HIRABAYASHI
LAWRENCE J. JELINEK
PAUL J. KARLSTROM
SALLY M. MILLER
GEORGE H. PHILLIPS
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
Reviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
Donors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
LEONARD PITT
Spotlight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
California History is printed in
Los Angeles by Delta Graphics.
on the front cover
Editorial offices and support for
California History are provided by
Loyola Marymount University,
Los Angeles.
(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).
www.encore-editions.com

from the editor
changes
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:
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Attn: Janet Fireman
Loyola Marymount University
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Los Angeles, CA 90045-2659
ADMINISTRATIVE HEADQUARTERS/
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Periodicals Postage Paid at Los Angeles,
California, and at additional mailing offices.
POSTMASTER
Send address changes to:
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THE CALIFORNIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY is a
statewide membership-based organization designated 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 jfireman@lmu.edu. Books for
review should be sent to James Rawls, Reviews
Editor, California Historical Society, 678 Mission
Street, San Francisco, CA 94105-4014.
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, presidios, and towns, and for Californios of Spanish and Mexican descent when
Americans conquered Alta California, achieved statehood, and built a burgeoning state, time did anything but stand still.
Change, of course, is what history is about, and in this issue, three essays encapsulate much of the chronology and many effects of sweeping social, political, economic, 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 relationships between conquered peoples and their conquerors, relating U.S. Army
Lieutenant Sully’s intimate social interactions with Californios, Native Americans, 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 mid1880s—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 passage 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 electronic issue, vol. 90, no. 2, will be published in April 2013 as the last appearance
of California History, terminating its ninety-year existence.
Janet Fireman
California Historical Society
www.californiahistoricalsociety.org
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collections
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
Among the examples of early Californiana in the Geil J. Norris collection is this pairing: a photograph of
Manuel Castro, prefect of Monterey,
in his later years and in military regalia, 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 tensions between the United States and
Mexico culminating in the Mexican
War (1846–48).
The grouping represents a collection
rich in correspondence, broadsides,
baptismal certificates, land records,
and ephemera documenting the political, military, economic, and social life
of Norris’ prominent Mexican ancestors. Other noteworthy examples from
the collection—the majority of which
are in Spanish—are an 1844 broadside 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.
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.

Courtship and Conquest: Alfred Sully’s
Intimate Intrusion at Monterey
By Stephen G. Hyslop
A
lfred Sully was not born to conquer, but
as a young man seeking distinction
in an era of relentless American expansion, 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, however, 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 destruction 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 intentions, 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 reconciling its people to conquest. Such was the task that
awaited American occupation forces when he
landed in Monterey, California, in April 1849 as
quartermaster.

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The society Sully encountered there had a tradition of accommodating newcomers through
hospitality, courtesy, and courtship. Ever since
Spanish colonial rule ended and barriers to foreign trade and settlement were lowered, Mexican
residents of Spanish ancestry, known as Californios, 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 economic benefits in the form of partnerships with
merchants and captains who arrived by sea and
traded, mingled, and intermarried with Californios. Far less obliging to them were the mountain 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 adaptable Yankee traders of old than the confrontational overlanders who had ignited the Bear Flag
Revolt a month earlier and ushered in the conquest. 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
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 primarily 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 borderlands, which he documented in hundreds
of revealing letters, sketches, and paintings. During his years as an officer in
California (1849–53), he witnessed the
Gold Rush and massive influx of AngloAmericans.
Yale Collection of Western Americana,
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
rebellion against imperial rule into an imposing
empire in its own right. Thomas Jefferson, in a
letter to his presidential successor James Madison 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, including 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 Californios were to become American citizens unless
they chose to remain Mexican citizens. In either
case, their property was to be respected and protected. 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’ property rights, which were not, in fact, protected
under American law. When Alfred Sully arrived
in California, that convulsive American takeover—to which the Mexican War was merely a
prelude—was just beginning. Uncertain of their

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

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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 American captains and traders by entering this hospitable society through marriage. But his union
would end tragically, and he bore some responsibility for setting that tragedy in motion. Although
he had more in common with the appreciative
maritime visitors who courted Californios in earlier times than with the defiant overlanders who
spurned them, he came into California as a conqueror, 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 Robinson and the English trader William Hartnell,
both of whom had become Catholics and Mexican citizens before entering her family. Annexation by the United States, she concluded, was a
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.
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 residents 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

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 sombrero 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
Señora de la Guerra’s ambivalence toward the
occupiers was aptly summarized by an American acquaintance, the merchant William Heath
Davis, who married into this society. Prior to the
Mexican War, Davis wrote, the women of California “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 countenance 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—
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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 kindness 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
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 eventually 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 companion than Manuela, who struck him initially as
too young and impulsive for an officer approaching 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 children).” There was, in fact, nothing improper in
Angustias de la Guerra (1815–1890) sat for this portrait sometime 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 marriage, Manuela Jimeno (1833–1851), who died ten months after
wedding Alfred Sully without parental consent.
California Historical Society, CHS2012.1014.tif
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 company 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.

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
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 Manuela’s paternal uncles Antonio and José Joaquín
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Jimeno, who served as priests to small communities 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 converting to Catholicism. Fearing that he would never
gain parental consent and would lose the popular 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 were promptly married by the local priest,
who was later removed from his post for performing 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 symbolized 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 pronounced beautiful. Manuela has it.”10
Angustias was slower than her husband to forgive 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 physician (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 misinterpreted these terrible events. The “fatal orange”
was just one possible cause of the sudden intestinal 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 punishment 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 representative of the expanding American empire, or
his in-laws, as heirs to the old Spanish imperial

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.
order, were being punished for their sins. 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. 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 servant, whose death added to the burden of guilt he
bore as a master and conqueror and shared with
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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 Spanish 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 sanctuary 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 foreigners with close ties to this society and contrasted sharply with the skeptical assessments
of American visitors who remained aloof from
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 completed 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
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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 irrigation. 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
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 American 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 providential—raised doubts about such competing
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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 insightful 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 violently 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
to such evils as placing Indians under demoralizing 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 married—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 corresponded 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,
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.”
Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

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.
Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
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 relationship 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”),
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who later wed Philip Deloria (Tipi Sapa), an Episcopal 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 Yankton Sioux pictured in a group portrait painted
near Fort Pierre by Sully—a capable artist if not
an accomplished one like his father—as Pehandutawin, the woman who bore Sully’s child.
Langdon Sully did not mention Alfred’s relationship 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 occupied 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 during 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 settlers 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 volunteering 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 occupied country.
Sully’s courtship of Manuela was, in one sense,
an act of accommodation like that of previous 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 Americans 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 blessing. Like earlier Spanish colonizers who subjected Native Californians to spiritual conquest,
he demonstrated that intrusions made with
seemingly good intentions could have tragic consequences and that no conquest, however well
meaning, was truly innocent or innocuous.
Stephen G. 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.

“With the God of Battle# I Can
De#troy All Such Villain#”
War, Religion, and the Impact of Islam
on Spanish and Mexican California, 1769–1846
By Michael Gonzalez
L
ike Othello, “the valiant Moor” who wel
comed 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 California 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
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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 experienced 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.
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
Beginning in the ninth century, and perhaps
earlier, Muslim mystics and pilgrims met in fortresses—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 exertions 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 California. 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 Muslims had occupied Spain centuries earlier, many
would still profess ignorance of jihad and its

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 himself 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 historical context is needed. In the first years of Islam,
when Muhammad and his companions battled
for their survival, they proclaimed jihad to convince 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 periods 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 centuries later in California, a place thousands of miles
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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 fundamental 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 descriptions 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 misunderstanding. The point is not that Muslims or Christians 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. Professing 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 prosecution of war conformed to their beliefs. Over time,
as the Spanish-speaking inhabitants of California 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 practice, 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 counterpart, 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 function, a ribat was a fortified place that offered protection 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 protection 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 brotherhoods to pray and who, as the following pages
will make clear, often preferred more vigorous
displays of faith.15 Even so, when some Sufis supplied 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 believers 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 commitment. 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 fasting 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.
continued on p. 24

Islamic Influences on California
Mission Architecture
Muslim architectural techniques influenced the Spaniards and Mexicans who settled California. Roofless inner
courtyards and fortress-like walls are two elements that
found expression in the Franciscan missions.
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.
California Historical Society/USC Special Collections
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
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The model for Mission San Gabriel Arcángel (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 practice 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 practice 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 Muslims 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 perfection 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
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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 cessation 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 companions.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 religion. 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 Persia and elsewhere composed siyars, histories of
Muhammad’s military campaigns, to remind the
faithful they had a duty to fight infidels and apostates. Three in particular, the siyars of Abu Ishaq
al-Fazari, Abu al-Awzai, and Abdullah ibn alMubarak, which, together, earned the title KitabFadl 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). Sometime 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 Muslims. 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 Christian attack. Feeling besieged or, if so inclined,
eager to prove his piety by going to battle, he
could overlook the Quranic injunctions commanding 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 participate in a sacred exercise. While any pilgrimage 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 similarities 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 conducted himself as a pilgrim on a sacred journey, 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 mysticism and warfare. To be fair, the teaching, what
Muslims call a hadith, had more innocent applications. 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 consequence, 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 pilgrim 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 religious 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 followers so they could clear their minds and commune 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 encumbrances 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
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believes he performs God’s bidding. He likened
himself to the Mahdi, a messianic figure popular 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 alliances 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 Muslims across a desolate frontier that held untold
dangers. The boundaries marking Christian
territory, even if fixed by castles and other defensive 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 enemies’ 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-
theless, it is baffling that the borrowing of ribat,
and of course jihad, escaped comment. In matters removed from war, various witnesses, some
from beyond Spain, enumerated the ways Christians absorbed or admired Islamic habits.
Upon hearing about Córdoba’s wealth and
beauty, Hroswitha of Gandersheim, a tenthcentury 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 philosophers. . . . At the mention of Christian books they
disdainfully protest that such works are unworthy
of notice.” Adelard of Bath, an English philosopher from the eleventh century, admitted that he
cited Arabic authors to make his writings more
acceptable. According to the art historian D. Fairchild Ruggles, by the fourteenth century Christian 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, Archbishop of Toledo and confessor to Queen Isabella, 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 philosophy, it is likely Christians also embraced
the practice of sacred violence. As did Muslims
who performed ribat to make war, some Spanish 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 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.
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 northwestern 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

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, discourages, 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 implying that He renounces violence or any other
display of force to implement His teachings. He
tells skeptics to “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’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 particular impact. Many clergymen and philosophers
believed that violence, regardless of the cause,
brought limited benefit. The historian Jay Rubenstein 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 soldiers and noncombatants was, at most, a morally
neutral act, a regrettable event brought on by circumstances 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 special 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
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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 transmission 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 methodology 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 technology 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 prevailing 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 acknowledge its debt to the other. The members of the
recipient culture, then, who have the ability to
document their impressions, would not mention 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.”
Below: Following the fall of Constantinople 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 mission 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 theologians 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 Jerusalem 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 purpose of violence, even if employed to defend the
place of Christ’s ministry, Christians knew that
Islam, and not their own faith, would provide
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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 connections 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 Muslim 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 punishment [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 consecrated; that the rewards he receives in the afterlife 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
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 AlZamanin’s principles now conformed to Christian 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 confessed 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 Christians 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 suitable 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. Whoever has been obliged to fast every Friday for a
year shall have this penance remitted if he undertakes 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 pilgrimage 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 forgiveness by going to battle. The pilgrimage to
Jerusalem, meanwhile, while no doubt an important 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 military 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 existence would last as long as they “served God in
battle.” In addition, and again reflecting Muslim
example, the allowance to see violence as worship could accommodate priests and monks

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 accurate 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 culture, Spanish explorers brought Islamic art and architecture to
Mexico and California.
General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library,
Yale University
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 continued 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 punishment in the afterlife, the council decreed that
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 command by our apostolic authority to wear crosses
again and to complete their journey. . . . Otherwise, from that moment we cut them off from
entry into church and forbid divine services in all
their lands.”57

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 fashion, as the council’s proviso explained, the warrior 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 hypothesized, Christians assimilated, and then transformed, their rivals’ ideas. Employing Muslim
precedents, whose shape and contours now sat
obscured, Christians presented their efforts to liberate Spain as a santa empresa (holy undertaking)
or una santa romería (holy pilgrimage).58 War, like
a pilgrimage, retained a finite quality. Once Christians 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 intriguing. 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.
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Denouement
We have come full circle. The ties between Muslim 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 descendants 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 enemies. 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 liking, 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 Spanishspeaking 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 century 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 portions of the province of Castilla and assumed
the role of soldiers.61 Centuries later, in 1568,
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 commanders, declaring that they “wished to die for Jesus
Christ.”62 He denied their request.
In the Americas, some clergy found more opportunities to take up the sword. The buildings missionaries 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 proselytized 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 Francisco 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, ordinarily 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
The buildings missionaries
constructed, or at least
asked others to construct
on their behalf, embodied
the principle that force and
faith were compatible.
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 gospel 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 “glistening” swords were more effective than “the voice
of five missionaries.”67 A century later, a commentator 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

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 themselves with God and deliver Mexico from the
Spaniards who had fallen sway to the anti-Catholic 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
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
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 expedition, 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 village . . . [and] . . . took it entire. The prisoners in
all included 15 San José Christians, 18 heathen
men, and 51 heathen women.”72
In 1817, Father Narciso Durán, as rector at Mission 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 fugitives to return to the mission.74 Meanwhile,
Father Xavier de la Concepción Uría demonstrated 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 witness recalled he jumped out of bed and “shot and
killed” two Indians with his shotgun.75
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 Mission 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
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The exploits of bellicose priests and their contemporaries 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 overcome 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 consecrated war. But when the residents of Mexican
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 Franciscan 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 Mohammedans, 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-
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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 bequeathing 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 imperfection 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 describing 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 present 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 penitential qualities of a military effort.80
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 during 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 captured 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, Amador “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 generations. Muslims in Spain conveyed certain practices 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
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.
paradise. But if war is an act of faith, there come
beguiling questions. Did the residents of California, 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 invoking God to justify violence, or remembers that in
2003 an American president said that war would
usher in a “New Age” and fulfill biblical prophecies, 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 muster ranks and fight.
Michael Gonzalez 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.

Joaquin Miller
and the social Circle
at the Hights
By Phoebe Cutler
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!’”
t
his verse from the poem “Columbus,”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, following 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 California and on the plains of Idaho and Montana,
then feted in two European capitals, this backwoods 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 earlier adventurous life—Indian skirmishes, bear
encounters, and frozen Pony Express rides—was
compensated for by a whirl of activity of a different 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 continuing, prodigious, and varied output, the novice
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 brownhaired Lowell, the shaggy Whitman—is more noticeable on the street than Joaquin Miller.”
California Historical Society/USC Special Collections
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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-thelast-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, causing no end of trouble).5 His third spouse, Abbie
Leland Miller, was back in New York, where,
along with Newport or Saratoga Springs, she preferred 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,
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combined with some early writing, had laid down
tracks for an eventual return. In the 1870s and
1880s, his prodigious output during his residency in Europe and on the East Coast had distinguished 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 Sierras (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 Washington, 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 candidate 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 Stoddard, 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 neophyte journalist Elodie Hogan, this membership
paid immediate dividends. A few of Miller’s club
mates contributed their talents to the construction 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
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-cumbedroom. The two wings on either side were the
“deaneries,” in one of which Miller regularly performed 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 windows 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 gregarious coterie contributed the scarlet cross that
arose from the gable and the silver Moslem crescent 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, fellow miner and longtime rival Bret Harte. Five
years later, he joined in a comparable celebration, 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 biographer (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
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Given the logistics of transport, entertaining one
hundred guests at home would have been marginally more demanding than attending the San
Francisco gatherings. The Bohemian schedule
of performances at 9 p.m., with dinner following 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 Hopkins (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 students 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 horsedrawn 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
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
In 1910, Frank C. Havens of Realty Syndicate purchased from his partner, Francis “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 purchased 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

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-nineteenthcentury Oakland could boast its share of fraternities. 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 addition 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 Gripenburg 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 frequently 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 missionary 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
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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 congregation.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 freefloating Reverend Benjamin Fay Mills, and, even
more importantly, two of the church’s staunchest 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 promoted literature as well as music during these
years (1886–98) in the burgeoning town.19 True
to the liberal outlook of his chosen denomination, 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 complete complement of writers from the area. On
another occasion, Miller sat by bemused while an
embarrassed Unitarian from across the bay parodied his versifying.20
Relocated to southern California by 1904, Rev.
Mills was less a literary figure and more a spirited reformer with a socialist agenda. Miller,
whose writing inveighed against the evils of
unfettered capitalism (ignoring his own inveterate land speculations), enjoyed an easy rapport
with Mills. Elbert Hubbard recalled the Hights
proprietor waylaying him and the minister during a visit. Miller had appeared from the trees
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
The Irrepressible John P. Irish . . . Colonel
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 Oakland, he became editor and chief owner
of the Oakland Times and the last managing editor of San Francisco’s venerable Daily Alta.1 Within that same period,
he served on a committee to oversee
the Southern Pacific, led another committee to overhaul the city’s sewer system, and was elected head of the West
Oakland Improvement Association.
Simultaneously, he shared responsibility 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, Prohibition, and the ceding of Yosemite
to the federal government. He campaigned nationwide against silver and
for the gold standard. Ambrose Bierce,
not a fan of Irish, nevertheless recognized, in a backhanded way, his omnipresence:
“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
From 1894 to 1910, Irish held the sinecure (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 campaigned ardently against Asian discrimination 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.

intoning, “The collection will now be taken.”
He then welcomed the entrepreneurial Hubbard, 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 eminent thinker and onetime Unitarian minister,
Ralph Waldo Emerson. Their acquaintance lasted
on and off for five years. At the time of his Oakland entertainment, Woodbury, head of a growing
family and president of a varnish company, was
writing a book about his life-changing relationship 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 welcoming 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 Woodbury’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
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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 literary friend. Without a doubt, she was his longestrunning 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 during 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 modest 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 gathering olive branches in Marin County to make a
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
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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. Callie 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 London. Less known is her support of more established writers, in particular George Wharton
James. This restless young Brit, a minister by
training, arrived with his family in 1887 (coincidentally 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 contemporary California poetry. During her longer
Oakland stay, from 1891 to 1894, Gilman pub-
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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 singular 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 England, Gilman confided her disgust with Miller to
her diary, calling him a “dirty person.” The highminded 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 visitors 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 “pilgrims to the shrine of poesy,” who steadfastly
refused to acknowledge Miller’s attempt to take
his “rapidly cooling” bath.33
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 skullcap. 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 idiosyncrasies 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
When directed toward his friends, Miller’s hospitality 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 available 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

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 variation 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 redwoods 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 combined 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 acquaintances 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
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Although Miller was inclined toward more intimate 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 conditions 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 resemblance 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 portrait. 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 gallery 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 wouldbe 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.
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 sexton’s daughter. Later, after a liberal ingestion of spirits, he went off, half-cocked, to lecture at the Monterey
County Teachers’ Institute.
The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
From their doings arise some of the more colorful anecdotes regarding life at the Hights. Sterling, 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 moonshine,” 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 tomahawk before.42
A busy Socialist (and onetime candidate for governor), 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 followed him from Long Island, recalled that in
a quarry near Miller’s they would discuss “the
affairs of the universe” and listen “to the rhapsodical 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

by 1893, the oregonbred 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.
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 Browning, 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 children. His “shelf of the mountain” was slowly
beginning to resemble the “hillside Bohemia” he
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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, grewsome [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 Oakland, 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 surrounded 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 beautiful 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
Monthly, marveled at the cultural attainments
of these young Asians, who “talked freely” of
“Emerson, Wordsworth, Longfellow, of Shakespeare” 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 description of the pedagogy would be Miller’s encapsulation 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 houseboys. 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 literary 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
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 marriage 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

Of Miller’s Japanese residents, wrote Charles Warren 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 ‘beautiful, 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
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Kanno lived at the Hights for over ten years, writing one poem and a “vision drama,” with very
limited exposure. In contrast, within a year of
moving to the Hights, Noguchi produced idiosyncratic 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 himself 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 material for an exhibition at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center.56
Ironically, of all the once-prominent literati who
gathered at Miller’s bastion, this penniless quasiservant is arguably the most feted. Noguchi was
the comet whose tail still shimmers: the first
Japanese to compose poems in English, a talented 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 stoking the numerous publications that made San
Francisco a West Coast literary center at the turn
of the last century. John P. Irish, George Sterling, Herbert Bashford, George Wharton James,
Henry Meade Bland, Harr Wagner, Charles Warren Stoddard, Bailey Millard, and more—Miller’s
boon companions—were the writers and editors
of Sunset, Overland Monthly, and Golden Era magazines and the city’s four principal newspapers.
Drawn to the Hights by its owner’s esprit, they
sunned themselves in his larger-than-life personality, drank his whiskey, and chawed his barbecue. 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.”
Not only writers gathered at the Hights. The fiery
Xavier Martinez, first painting teacher at the California 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 talented 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 dullness 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

notes
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
In late 1903 or early 1904, Miller was asked to pose for photographer Adelaide Marquand Hanscom’s (1875–1931) illustrated 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.”
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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
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 interpretation of the classic The Rubáiyát of Omar
Khayyám, George Wharton James recounts how
Miller, who had agreed to pose for several photogravures, 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 original circles reclaimed their own. Five days later,
the First Unitarian Church held a memorial service with eulogies by the minister, Professor William 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 acacias.”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 disappeared in the Mexican desert one year later;
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 disintegration, 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 “Columbus,” 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, inexplicable 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 without him. One local organizer seeking his presence 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 leading 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.

“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.
The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
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The 1920s witnessed the first signs of a reassessment of the poet’s merit. Despite his wife
and daughter’s best efforts to fan the altar
flame, a University of Illinois professor conducting 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 reputation.64 Concurrently, the Hights was falling into
a state of disrepair. A journalist visiting it in 1923
described the Abbey’s broken windows and wideswinging doors, Margaret Miller’s cottage on the
verge of collapse, the stone monuments vandalized, great trees felled, and the acacia thickets
“ruthlessly cut away.”65 Resisting this decline of
home and reputation, one or two of Miller’s bestknown 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 acknowledges, regarded his prose more highly than his
poetry. Indeed, journalism came easily to him.
In Oregon in the early 1860s, he ran two shortlived 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 deplorable condition of Oakland’s roads. In a characteristically exaggerated account of a real event,
he described his attempt to give a lecture in the
neighboring settlement of Walnut Creek. Confronting 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
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 carried 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 counseled them, “Take that road and sail on.” “He
smiled,” Hubbard recalled, “in a way that indicated that he had sprung the allusion before and
was pleased with it.”67
Phoebe Cutler 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,” Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 25, no. 3
(July–Sept. 2005).

notes
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 Trojan Horse: Foreign Immigration,” in Contested 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. Senkewicz, trans. and eds., Testimonios: Early California 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
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vol ume 90
in Mexican California (Berkeley and San
Marino: University of California Press and
the Huntington Library, 2009), 262–69.
of William Dane Phelps, Master of the Ship
“Alert,” ed. Briton Cooper Busch (Glendale,
Calif.: Arthur H. Clark, 1983), 197–98.
5
16
William Heath Davis, Seventy-Five Years in
California, ed. Harold A. Small (San Francisco: John Howell, 1967 [1889]), 37, 66–67;
Susanna Bryant Dakin, The Lives of William
Hartnell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1949), 280–81.
Josiah Royce, California: A Study of American Character (Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books,
2002 [1886]), 119.
17
Sully, No Tears for the General, 150–51.
18
9
Letters of May 28, 1850, and Aug, 28,
1850, Alfred Sully Papers; Sully, No Tears for
the General, 61–63, 237 n. 3.
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 University 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.
10
19
6
Letter of June 14, 1849, Alfred Sully
Papers, Western Americana Collection, Beinecke 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.
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 emancipate 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 communities. “These flourishing institutions, as they
had been, were in danger of immediate subversion 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 system by an American who traded with Californios but did not enter into their society,
see William Dane Phelps, Alta California,
1840–1842: The Journal and Observations
num ber 1
2012
Benjamin D. Wilson, “Benjamin David
Wilson’s Observations of Early Days in
California and New Mexico,” Annual Publications of the Historical Society of Southern
California (1934), 74–150; Hubert Howe
Bancroft, History of California (San Francisco: 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 Bibliography (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.
The lines describe Othello’s mission to
confront a Turkish fleet bearing down on
Cyprus.
2
Some commentators may insist that Muslims 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 Ruthven, 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 Rendall, 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 University Press, 2010).
4
Verse 3.1.7, Al-Muwatta, http://bewley.virtualave.net/muwcont.html, also see, the version 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 California, 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 convivencia, 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 Spanish 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 AlAndalus,” 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 Publishers, 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, Christians, 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 Kingdom 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 Encyclopedia of Islam, New Edition, 8:493–506.
To complicate matters, a ribat could also
take the name zawiyya. See Mustafa ‘AbduSalam al-Mahmah, “The Ribats in Morocco
and their influence in the spread of knowledge and tasawwuf” [the Islamic practice
of spiritual development] from al-Imra’a
al-Maghribiyya wa’t-Tasawwuf (The Moroccan 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 University 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 ‘AbduSalam al-Mahmah, “The Ribats in Morocco.”
13
For further discussion see, Carmen Martínez Salvador, “Sobre la entitad de la rábita
andalusí omeya, una cuestión de terminología: 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 Shadhiliyya,” International Journal of Middle East
Studies 29, no. 2 (May 1997): 255–77; and
Gerald Elmore, “New Evidence on the Conversion 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 Confraternity of Belchite, Ribat, and the Temple,”
Viator 13 (1982): 156–79, esp. 165.

notes
17
Marín, “La práctica del ribat en al-Andalus,” 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 GarcíaSanjuán, “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 alMurabitun, meaning “those bound together”
or “those who perform ribat.”
20
Fernández-Morera, “The Myth of the
Andalusian Paradise,” 24. One scholar suggests 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 Hudhayl 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 Foundations of War, Peace, and Statecraft in Islam,”
in Just War and Jihad, Historical and Theoretical Perspectives on War and Peace in Western
and Islamic Traditions, eds. John Kelsay and
James Turner Johnson (New York: Greenwood 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 trouble 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 website 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-
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dle Ages: New Light on ‘Grail Stone’ and
‘Hidden Host,’” Speculum 32, no. 1 (January
1957): 103–15, esp. 107–8.
to life again so I could be killed, and then
brought to life again so I could be killed
again.”
24
28
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 Classical Islam, eds. Monique Bernards and John
Nawas (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, Academic
Publishers, 2005), 202–4 and FernándezMorera, “The Myth of the Andalusian
Paradise,” 28. On another note, some commentators 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 Historical Foundations to Contemporary Practice
(Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University
Press, 2004); Fierro, “Mawali and Muwalladun in al-Andalus,” esp. 202–4.
27
Admittedly, warriors did not receive
license to indulge in unrestrained carnage.
Their violence occurred within a holy, limited 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 fruitbearing 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
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2012
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: University of California Press, 2011), 32, 36–37.
29
Michael Bonner, “Some observations
concerning the early development of Jihad
on the Arab-Byzantine Frontier,” Studia Islamica no. 75 (1992): 5–31, esp. 7.
30
Ibid., 23–26.
31
Marín, “La práctica del ribat en al-Andalus,” 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: Princeton University Press, 1979), 50–55.
38
Mariam Rosser-Owen, Islamic Arts
from Spain (London: V&A Publishing,
2010), 21; Maria Rosa Menocal, The Ornament 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.
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, Maryland: CDL Press, 1997), 99–12, esp.103.
Ruggles even speculates that the Christian
kings used Islamic ornamentation to create 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.”
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=p
2QM1fKXOggC&printsec=frontcover&
source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onep
age&q&f=false.
49
Elena Lourie, “A Society Organized for
War: Medieval Spain,” Past and Present 35
(Dec. 1966): 54–76, esp. 67–8.
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.”
40
50
39
Qur’an, 8:9
41
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 Literature: 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 societies. 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 Lourie, “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 references to Kroeber will draw on these other
works that use his ideas to discuss the
spread of Muslim ideas to Christians.
St. Bernard, “”De Laudibus Novae Militiae” 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, Culture and Ideology on the Late Medieval
Castilian-Granadan Frontier,” Medieval Frontier 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 Hispanic 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 (London: 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 Toussaint, 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 Francisco Palóu, March 12, 1787, in Francisco
Palóu, Historical Account of the Life and Apostolic 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: University 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 SpanishAmerican Colonies,” The American Historical 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 Academy of Franciscan History, 1964), frontispiece. The quotation is attributed to José
Mariano Beristain de Souza, Biblioteca Hispano-Americano Septentrional (México, 1816).
69
Hugh Hamill, The Hidalgo Revolt (Gainesville: 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 University Press, 1991), 578–81.

notes
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); Carlos 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, Colonial Expeditions to the Interior of California,
Central Valley, 1800–1820 (Berkeley: University 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 California” copia facilitada por John J. Doyle,
Esq., 1878, 61–65, Calisphere, http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/.
76
Palóu is referring to the pivotal battle of
Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, in which Christians soundly defeated Muslims and all but
made the reconquest inevitable. Francisco
Palóu, Historical Account of the Life and Apostolic 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 ranchero,” 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 Expeditions, 182–83.
81
Sergeant Sebastián Rodriguez, “Diary,” in
Cook, Colonial Expeditions, 184–85.
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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 President 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 Shocking 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. (Oakland, 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-
num ber 1
2012
zine (Mar. 1906); http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Adelaide_Hanscom_Leeson, “How
Joaquin Miller Posed for Pictures in Omar
Khayyam’s Rubaiyat,” Seattle Post Intelligencer, 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 Francisco: 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;
museum@mtshastamuseum.com, www.
mtshastamuseum.com.
3
The poet’s birth date has been much
debated. Miller authority Margaret GuilfordKardell 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 confused wake of the celebrity author’s elaborations 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 Frontiersman (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 Directory (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
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 watering holes did not prevent her from enlarging her absent husband’s property by the
purchase of 22 1/2 contiguous acres in 1891.
Information regarding this speculative purchase 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 Historical Society Quarterly 32, no. 3 (Sept. 1953),
237, Miller biographies have uniformly credited 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” feature 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 Collections, 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 landscape designer (1915–17) of William Bourn’s
Filoli in Woodside, California.
9
The Annals of the Bohemian Club: comprising 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 publication 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: Autobiography of John L. Davie, ed. and revised by
Jack W. Herzberg (Oakland, CA: Jack Herzberg, 1988 [1931]), 192–93.
14
“Oaklanders Pay an Extra Fare,” San Francisco 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 Baroness Alexandra Gripenburg,” The Markham
Review 4 (Feb. 1974), 69.
17
A modern Taylor Memorial United Methodist 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 Incidents, Triumphant Death Scenes, Etc. (New
York: Carlton & Porter, 1856), http://www.
taylorchurch.org/churchhistory/.
18
Besides Woodbury and Irish, the congregation 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, “Unitarianism,” Oakland Tribune, Jan. 1, 1888.
19
Unitarian Church of Berkeley, http://
www.uucb.org/index.php/worship/sermonarchives-and-podcasts/610-uu-mosaic-makers-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]). Perhaps 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 Morrisinspired Roycroft community in Aurora,
New York. Hubbard, who died in the sinking 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 Taylor, 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 Evening 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 (Portland, 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 predictably 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

notes
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 GuilfordKardell, “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 Writers 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 Wharton James (Boise, ID: Boise State University,
1990), 16.
30
At this time she was known as Charlotte 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 Charlotte 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 Magazine 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, “Joaquin Miller at The Heights [sic],” National
Magazine 26, no. 1 (Apr. 1906), 21.
36
Yoné Noguchi, The Story of Yoné Noguchi (London: Chatto & Windus, 1914), 69;
Charles H. Scofield, “The Poet of the Sierras: 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 California 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.
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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 Magazine 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 construction 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 Examiner column, the elder Bierce had famously
declared that Miller was a liar . . . albeit a
harmless, good-natured one. (Equally memorably, 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 College, 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.
num ber 1
2012
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 Directory: 1889–90 (San Francisco: F. M. Husted
Publisher, Jan. 1890), 586.
54
Robert Boyle, Gertrude’s great-nephew,
has determined that Takeshi Kanno’s passport 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 (Fruitvale, 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 conjunction 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 Waterhouse’s delinquent mortgage payment.
58
Stoddard, “Joaquin Miller at The Heights
[sic],” 28; Sterling, “Joaquin Miller,” 224.
59
Adelaide Hanscom and Blanche Cumming, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam (New
York: Dodge Publishing, 1905).
60
William D. Armes, professor of American 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 Company, 1903).
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 Admirers,” San Francisco Call, May 26, 1913.
63
Florence Hardiman Miller to Joaquin
Miller, Aug. 5, 1896, Joaquin Miller Collection, 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 Permanent and Gives Vent of Other Iconoclastic 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
eda County, California (Chicago: S. J. Clarke,
1914), 401, 409–11; Descriptive summary,
John Powell Irish Papers, 1882–1923, Stanford 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.
“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-
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.

reviews
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 International Studies Association
Fort Ross was constructed 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 American 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 Russians 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 California in 1768–69 to shift from explora-

Ca l i fo rn i a Hi s tor y
•
vol ume 90
tion of the territory to actual settlement. But, notwithstanding this early
anxiety, the first Russian didn’t appear
until 1803.
By 1808, however, the RAC was looking for a settlement in the territory
north of the northernmost Spanish 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 Russians 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 common, and Creoles eventually constituted 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, operational costs had risen to 72,000 rubles
annually while revenues plunged to
num ber 1
2012
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 suggest. They address the size and use of
California redwoods, describe Spanish
missions and Native American culture, 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.
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)
of rails, crops, and labor. With refrigerated freight and massive irrigation
projects across the West, family fields
of a few hundred acres were converted 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 history 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 emblazoned on the book’s spine, the work
focuses equally on migrating families
Reviewed by Christopher Herring, PhD
candidate of sociology, University
of California, Berkeley, and associate
researcher for the National Coalition
for the Homeless
In their latest books, Mark
Wyman and Art Hazelwood offer lucid
portrayals of the most marginalized
characters in the history of the American West and, in the wake of the Great
Recession, provide valuable historical perspectives of the contemporary
migrant worker and the homeless
American.
The men, women, and children variously 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 narrative follows the symbiotic evolution
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

reviews
of wives and small children, wageworking Indians, and high school students. In his chapter on the “Beeters,”
Wyman explains how the early corporate domination of beets in Nebraska
led to especially grueling labor conditions, 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 traditional 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 organized 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 Workers of the World of a seemingly impossible 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 workers, rendering sympathetic portraits

Ca l i fo rn i a Hi s tor y
•
vol ume 90
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 powerful 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 wellknown artists such as Dorothea Lange,
Rockwell Kent, and Anton Refregier,
but also resurrects older political artists 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 broadsheets, and graphic novels.
num ber 1
2012
Although Wyman misses the opportunity to connect the history of the
hoboes to migrants of today, dialogues
between contemporary and past perceptions, 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 distinctions: 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 draconian anti-immigration policy, these two
books offer historical perspectives that
not only explain how we got here, but
also provide the critical lenses necessary to imagine progressive futures.
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
In 1849, a pair of Vermont schoolteachers made a matrimonial pledge,
promising that each would contribute
to a diary. The result is a unique commentary 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 California 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 Initiative, and the emerging Free Soilers’
agenda. Still, gold fever was their foremost 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 generations, surviving both earthquake and
fire before reaching the safety of the
California Historical Society’s archives.
Lynn Bonfield devoted more than three
decades to research on the Rix journal.
Exhaustive investigation is evident in
the notes, appendix, and comprehensive bibliography containing several
of Bonfield’s monographs and journal
articles derived from her exhaustive
examination of public records, newspapers, private archives, and family
holdings.
The editor has preserved the original document from editorial intrusion, 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
“the cult of true womanhood,” protecting women within home and hearth.
The inherent fallacy of the observation
is keenly apparent to Chastina following 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 Company has produced a bookman’s book
consistent with its respected reputation. 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 California gold rush scholarship, but also
recent studies in related fields.

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Mr. Herbert C. Puffer, Folsom
Mr. James Reynolds, Berkeley
Mr. Terence Riddle, San Francisco
Mr. Daniel W. Roberts, San Francisco
Mr. Daimar Robinson, Salt Lake City, UT
Mr. Robert E. Ronus, Los Angeles
Jeanne Rose, San Francisco
Mrs. James H. Ross, San Mateo
Mr. Allen Rudolph, Menlo Park
Ms. Susan Sesnon Salt, Borrego Spring
Mr. Bernard Schulte, Jr., Orinda
Mr. Jacob Gould Schurman, IV, San Francisco
Rev. Thomas L. Seagrave, San Mateo
Mr. Robert J. Sehr, Jr., Alamo
Mr. Robert J. Sieling, San Carlos
Mr. Keith Skinner, Berkeley
Ms. Harriet Sollod, San Francisco
Mr. Martin & Mrs. Sherril A. Spellman,
Fremont
Mr. Sanford D. Stadtfeld, Sausalito
Mr. & Mrs. Isaac & Madeline Stein, Atherton
Mr. & Mrs. Moreland L. Stevens, Newcastle
Mr. Robert Stoldal, Las Vegas, NV

Ca l i fo rn i a Hi s tor y
•
vol ume 90
Mr. Daniel F. Sullivan, San Francisco
Mr. & Mrs. Anson Blake Thacher, Ojai
Mr. Max Thelen, Jr., San Rafael
Mr. Richard L. Tower, San Francisco
Mr. Thomas Tragardh, San Francisco
Ms. Catherine G. Tripp, San Rafael
Ms. Anne M Turner, San Francisco
Jane Twomey, San Francisco
Mr. Christopher VerPlanck, San Francisco
Mr. Don Villarejo, Davis
Mr. Paul A. Violich, San Francisco
Mr. Peter Wald, San Francisco
Josh Weinstein & Lisa Simmons,
Santa Monica
Kathleen Weitz, San Francisco
Ms. Willy Werby, Burlingame
Walter & Ann Weybright, San Francisco
Mr. Warren R. White, San Francisco
Mr. Thomas J. White, Oakland
Mr. Ed White & Mrs. Patti White, Los Altos
Ms. Nancy C. Woodward, Carmichael
Mr. Robert A. Young, Los Angeles
Ms. Deborah Zepnick, Calabasas
CORPORATE, FOUNDATION
& GOVERNMENT SUPPORT
$50,000 to $199,000
San Francisco Foundation, San Francisco
The S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation,
San Francisco
$10,000 to $49,999
Bland Family Foundation, Saint Louis, MO
Grants for the Arts, San Francisco
Sherwin-Williams, Richardson, TX
The Barkley Fund, Menlo Park
The Bernard Osher Foundation, San Francisco
Union Bank of California Foundation,
Los Angeles
UnitedHealthcare, Cypress
Wells Fargo, San Francisco
$1,000 to $9,999
Cal Humanities, San Francisco
Comcast, Livermore
Derry Casey Construction, Inc., San Francisco
Dodge & Cox, San Francisco
Hearst Corporation, San Francisco
John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ
Louise M. Davies Foundation, San Francisco
Marvell Technology Group, Santa Clara
J. Rodney Eason Pfund Family Foundation,
Carmichael
Ronald & Ann Williams Charitable
Foundation, Los Altos
Safeway Inc., Pleasanton
The Chrysopolae Foundation, San Francisco
The Consulate General of Switzerland in
San Francisco, San Francisco
The Stanley S. Langendorf Foundation,
San Francisco
num ber 1
2012
$250 to $999
Brick Row Book Shop, San Francisco
Chevron Texaco Matching Gift Program,
Princeton, NJ
Cypress Lawn Memorial Park, Daly City
ht Lehmann Consulting, Sausalito
Leona & Donald Davis Fund, Greenbrae
Limoneira Company, Santa Paula
Moore Dry Dock Foundation, San Francisco
Stanley Stairs, Esq., New York, NY
In Kind Donations
Dennis Agatep Photography, Oakland
Kirk Amyx, San Francisco
Amyx Photography, San Francisco
Anchor Brewing Company, San Francisco
Anchor Distilling Company, San Francisco
Apertifs Bar Management, Santa Rosa
Barbary Coast Conservancy of the American
Cocktail, San Francisco
BAYCAT, San Francisco
Belfor Property Restoration, Hayward
David Burkhart, San Bruno
John Burton, Santa Rosa
California Bountiful Foundation, Sacramento
Cavallo Point, Sausalito
CBW Group, Inc., San Francisco
Chandon, Yountville
Drakes Bay Oyster Company, Inverness
H. Joseph Ehrmann, San Francisco
Evvy Eisen, Point Reyes Station
Elixir Cocktail Catering, San Francisco
Elixir Saloon, San Francisco
Daniel Godinez, Half Moon Bay
Hafner Vineyard, Alexander Valley
HPA Strategies, Herglotz Public Affairs,
San Francisco
Hearst Ranch Winery, San Simeon
House of Shields, San Francisco
Kappa, Daly City
Katzgraphics, San Francisco
La Boulange Café & Bakery, San Francisco
Lagunitas Brewing Company, Petaluma
Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles
Luxardo, San Francisco
Kevin & Nancy Lunny, Inverness
Eric Passetti, San Francisco
Richard Ramos, San Mateo
Safeway, San Francisco
San Francisco Girls Chorus
Sherman Clay, San Francisco
Square One Organic Spirits, San Francisco
St. Regis, San Francisco
The Candy Store, San Francisco
The Judson Studios, Los Angeles
Trader Joe’s, San Francisco
United States Bartenders Guild
Waking State Design, Los Angeles
Whitehead & Porter LLP, San Francisco
Working Girls Café, San Francisco
CALIFORNIA LEGACY
CIRCLE
Legacy Gifts Received
North Baker, Tiburon
Elise Eilers Elliot, Marin County
Muriel T. French, San Francisco
J. Lowell Groves, San Francisco
Louis H. Heilbron, San Francisco
Arthur Mejia, San Francisco
Ms. Mary K. Ryan, San Francisco
donors to the
collection
Benton County Historical Society and
Museum, Philomath, OR
Kenneth G. Berry
Dave Burkhart
California Art Club
California Genealogical Society & Library
The Call Family
Cornell University Library
Paul DiMarco
Evvy Eisen
Charles Fracchia
Carol Eber
Mrs. Vera Freeberg
Brenda Frink
Elizabeth Kay Gibson
Golden Gate National Recreation Area
Fred Hamber
Barbara Harren Estate / Stearns History
Museum, Belgrade, MN
Alfred C. Harrison, Jr., The North Point
Gallery
Lynne Horiuchi
Jewish Family and Children’s Services of
San Francisco
Jedediah Smith Society
Ron Johnson
Johnson County Museum, Shawnee, Kansas
Alastair Johnston, Poltroon Press
Tim Kelly Consulting, LLC
Mark & Rita Knudsen for Moxon Chappel
Woody LaBounty, Western Neighborhoods
Project
Christine Laennec
Philip Woods Markwart & Elisabeth
Markwart Teel
Elizabeth McKee
William Byron McClintock
Michael McCone
Doug McWilliams
Kenneth Murrah / Orange County Regional
History Center, Winter Park, FL
Make plans to attend the
Organization of American Historians
2013 Annual Meeting
Andrew T. Nadell, M.D.
Carol Potter Peckham
Patrick Rafferty & Peter Shott
Dr. Francis Rigney
Susan H. Riley
Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food
Science, University of California, Davis
Karen 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. Smith
Tim Stanley
Mary Jane Stanton
D. Steele
William & Shirley Swasey
Deanna Tomei
Paul Tutwiler
Gail Unzelman
Aline Spivock Usim
Alison Weir
San Francisco Cable Car Museum
U. S. Department of the Interior, NPS,
Branch of History, Architecture and
Landscapes, Yosemite National Park
Judy Yung
San Francisco
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
Organization of American Historians  112 n bryan ave  bloomington in 47408  812.855.7311  www.oah.org

O F F I C ER S
ROBERT CHATTEL, Sherman Oaks, President
R. Thomas Decker, San Francisco, Executive Vice President
STEPHEN LeSieur, San Francisco, Vice President
thomas r. owens, San Francisco, Vice President
cristina rose, Los Angeles, Vice President
Larry Gotlieb, Sherman Oaks, Secretary
John Brown, Riverside, Treasurer
BOARD O F TRU S TEEs
melinda bittan, Los Angeles
albert camarillo, Palo Alto
IAN CAMPBELL, Los Angeles
JON CHRISTENSEN, Los Angeles
TONY GONZALEZ, Sacramento
Fred Hamber, San Francisco
Robert Hiatt, Mill Valley
Gary Kurutz, Sacramento
Sue Molinari, San Francisco
BEVERLY THOMAS, Los Angeles
harold Tuck, San Diego
RALPH WALTER, Los Angeles
BLANCA ZARAZúA, Salinas
C ALI F ORNIA HI S TORI C AL
F OUNDATION BOARD
DEWITT F. BOWMAN, Mill Valley, President
Bill McCreery, Hillsborough
EDITH L. PINESS, Mill Valley
DAVID BARRY WHITEHEAD, San Francisco
p r e s i d e n t s e M ERITI
on the back cover
The 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
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
executive director emeritus
MICHAEL McCONE, San Francisco
special advisor
HUELL HOWSER, Los Angeles
f e l l o ws
William N. Davis Jr., Sacramento
Richard H. Dillon, Mill Valley
Charles A. Fracchia, San Francisco
Robert V. Hine, Irvine
Gloria Ricci Lothrop, Pasadena
James R. Mills, Coronado
James Jabus Rawls, Sonoma
Andrew Rolle, San Marino
Earl F. Schmidt Jr., Palo Alto
Kevin Starr, San Francisco
Francis J. Weber, Mission Hills
Charles Wollenberg, Berkeley

spotlight
Photographer
Untitled [Photographs of Hollywoodland, Calif.,
Unidentified
and Los Angeles County coastline]
ca. 1924–29
Location
Hollywood, Los Angeles
The aftermath of World War I dramatically altered the landscape of Los Angeles, and nowhere more visibly than in
the canyons of Hollywood, where developers 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 thirteen 50-foot letters spaced eight inches

Ca l i fo rn i a Hi s tor y
•
vol ume 90
California Historical Society pc 002.001.tif
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 advertisement is today the city’s signature landmark, minus the last four letters, which
were removed as part of a 1949 restoration organized by the Hollywood
Chamber of Commerce. Appropriately,
the Hollywood sign still harkens above
num ber 1
2012
the hills; Sherwin-Williams, following
donations by Dutch Boy Paints in 1995
and Bay Cal Painting in 2005, has partnered 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/.
I See Beauty in This Life:
A Photographer Looks at 100 Years of Rural California
Les Bruhn, Bodega Bay, with “Queen,” won 2nd place, 26th annual Fox Western
International 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.
October 28, 2012 through March 24, 2013
Galleries of the California Historical Society
Lisa M. Hamilton, Ashley, Riata Ranch Cowboy Girl, Tulare County, 2011,
chromogenic print, 24 x 24 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
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.
678 Mission Street
San Francisco, California 94105
Your State
Your History
Your Historical Society