Page:The War with Mexico, Vol 1.djvu/350

Rh is almost ready to separate from the mother-country, concluded Sir George Simpson, governor-in-chief of the Hudson Bay Company, who was there a year later. As a rule the people are disaffected, it was directly reported in June, 1844. The principal men have decided, wrote Forbes, the British vice consul, in September, 1844, that progress under Mexican rule is impossible, and they will not have it. The Californians are unanimously determined to be rid of the Mexican military government, declared the British consul at Tepic, under whom Forbes acted, a few months later; and of course all Mexican rule was military. A separation is probably inevitable, concluded Lord Aberdeen, head of the British Foreign Office, at the end:of the year. California "must change owners," said a letter from that coast in July, 1845. "The people hardly care what flag is exchanged for their own," stated a competent American observer two months later, while a Californian was predicting that the Stars and Stripes would certainly go up there.

"The situation of Upper California will cause its separation from Mexico before many years," predicted Wilkes's book in 1845. The people of southern California are agreed to cut loose from Mexico, wrote a British admiral. "Mexican rule had become intolerable, concluded Walpole, a British officer in 1846. It had long been "only a shadow," said a young American, afterwards famous as General William T. Sherman; but it was a shadow that blighted. Another Mexican expedition would not be tolerated, said Larkin; and in fact a commissioner from California so notified the government. To get on at all with the people, a Mexican had to become Californian in head and in heart, and even then he was less welcome than an Englishman or an American.

Nor were such opinions merely expressed — they were made known to Mexico. Many warnings, both official and private, went from California, and the province maintained commissioners at the capital, who presented information regarding the wholly unsatisfactory conditions existing there. That part of the country has been "forgotten for more than twenty years," wrote one of these commissioners to the war department in 1844; and the following year he said that it had been "injured by every one of our administrations." Alarms were