Yankee Mischief

By the 1820s Boston's great mercantile companies had sent ships around the Cape Horn on a regular basis.  To evade Mexican tariffs, and secure trade monopolies, these Boston firms first placed their agents in California to deal with missionaries and ranchers.  From their headquarters in the tiny town of Los Angeles or the capital of Monterey, these "Bostons" as they were known, began to settle along the coast, developing relations with the Mexican community leaders in towns of not more than 3300 (in Los Angeles for example).

One of these Bostons was Abel Stearns (left photo) who arrived in 1829 via Mexico where he had obtained Mexican citizenship.  His dour, homely face earned him the nickname "Horseface" but that didn't keep him from becoming a wealthy hide merchant in LA, nor from marrying the 14 year old daughter of a powerful area family.  In 1846 Abel was working with the US Consul in Monterey, Thomas Larkin, who had been secretly instructed to foster a movement for California expansion by President Polk.

Larkin was a another New England born merchant who made a fortune in California as the owner of a Monterey flour mill.  As a sideline, he wrote florid descriptions of California's beauty and wealth for eastern newspapers.  Most Americans living in California in the 1830s and 1840s made it their job to write back east in hopes of setting off a migration west to join them.  Americans were slowly working their way into the communities of California territory with thoughts of it belonging to the United States...Mexico had other ideas.

Next time...Ceaseless Propaganda
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Today in Pioneer History:  On November 21, 1877, Thomas Edison stumbled on one of his great inventions–the phonograph–while working on a way to record telephone communication at his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey.