The California state flag commemorates an event that
occurred in the little town of Sonoma on Sunday morning, June 14,
1846.
A band of some thirty rough-hewn American settlers
seized Colonel Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo and informed him that he
was a prisoner
of war. The Americans proudly proclaimed that theirs was a war
for the independence of California. In front of Vallejo's casa grande,
the rebels hoisted a flag emblazoned with a crude drawing of a
bear,
a lone star, and the words "CALIFORNIA REPUBLIC."
The
original bear flag was made by William Todd, nephew of an up-and-coming
Illinois attorney named Abraham Lincoln. Todd used a three-by-five
piece of white cotton cloth. Along the bottom he sewed several
strips of red flannel taken from either a man's shirt of a woman's
petticoat.
He then painted a five-pointed red star in the upper left-hand
corner and drew a picture of a California grizzly bear. But William
Todd
clearly was no artist. His grizzly looked more like a pig than
a bear.
Shortly after the arrival of United States naval forces
along the California coast, the Stars and Stripes replaced the Bear
Flag over Sonoma. The life of the "California Republic" thus
ended on July 9, less than a month after it had begun. The main result
of the Bear Flag Revolt--an event that would later be fantastically
romanticized--was an unnecessary embitterment of feelings between
Anglo-Americans and the Spanish-speaking Californios.
