The Anonymous Bard

By the time U.S. president James Polk’s dreams of plantation hegemony invaded Mexican territory in 1846, Alta California had already garnered a reputation as an opportunist’s paradise—a remote outpost where a frontier soldier could find himself rewarded with a 50,000-acre rancho brimming with cattle and crops.

In June of that year, 33 undocumented U.S. immigrants continued in that spirit as they sought to overthrow the Mexican government that ruled Alta California. They seized a garrison in present-day Sonoma County, stitched together a flag with a bear on it, and declared themselves founders of the California Republic. A few weeks later, the bear flag came down and the Stars and Stripes went up. General John C. Frémont, Polk’s appointed instigator, secretly encouraged the insurgents to stage their revolt and welcomed them into his California Battalion.

That summer, the region’s first-ever newspaper was launched. Consisting of a single sheet made from tobacco rolling paper with English on helped citizens and immigrants make sense of a civic and political life in disarray. The paper even captured the existential moment in verse, describing the situation in two flowery poems. (In the 19th century, poems were an integral part of the newspaper trade.) The first poem, “On Leaving the United States for California,” which is about fate drawing the writer from the United States to a new destiny, was published on October 3; a companion poem, “On Leaving California for the United States,” about returning home, came one week later.