LeBaron: The 168-year-hunt for slain Bear Flag rebels
It’s a puzzling local history question that crops up every 40 or 50 years: Where, exactly, in Santa Rosa are the graves of those two Bear Flag rebels killed 168 years ago?
This complicated tale without a proper ending is something of a horror story. It becomes news every generation or two as new clues - and, more important, new methodology - become available.
Currently, a pair of Rural Cemetery volunteers with plenty of experience at researching old graves and their occupants, have taken up the quest for the final resting place of Thomas Cowie and George Fowler, who were killed in a most grisly manner in the Santa Rosa Valley in June of 1846, three days after taking part in the Bear Flag Revolt at the Mexican pueblo of Sonoma.
With the support of the Sonoma County Historical Society, Bill Northcroft and Ray Owens are preparing to bring teams of forensic dogs, trained to locate old, long-buried bones, to find the graves - and, maybe, even arrange a reburial in the Franklin Avenue cemetery.
“I can’t for the life of me tell you what drew me to the search. I hate to say a little voice spoke to me, but when I came across the story, I got involved,” says Northcroft, who is an engineer with training in surveying. He enlisted Owens, a long-time volunteer with the Rural Cemetery Preservation Committee, and they began the research that led them to the area where they believe the bodies are buried.
Now they are ready to enlist the aid of the Institute for Canine Forensics, an organization in Woodside where dogs are trained to go a step beyond or a few feet deeper than the better-known cadaver dogs, to find long-buried skeletons.
The remains of Cowie and Fowler would qualify. The gist of their story:
In June of 1846, when a rag-tag band of 33 Americans, took over the pueblo of Sonoma and declared California an independent republic, the Mexican authority, in the person of Gen. Mariano Vallejo, acquiesced without struggle and, in fact, turned away rescue attempts by angry young Californio landholders, urging them to go back to their land and be patient.
Not all of them obeyed. Three days after Vallejo’s surrender, a band of defensores captured Cowie and Fowler, who were headed for the Sotoyome Rancho (present-day Healdsburg) to get gunpowder for the Bear Army. The pair were tortured and killed.
Legend has it that an Indian named Chanate pointed out their bodies to the Americans who came searching for them. According to narratives quoted in H.H. Bancroft’s earliest California history, they buried them on the spot and stones were piled on top the graves. Within a generation or two, the exact location of the graves was lost to posterity.
Searchers have come close. In 1885, the Sonoma Democrat (an ancestor of The Press Democrat) wrote of a Judge Cavanagh who was heading an “effort to find the remains … and have them decently buried.”
Presumably based on the early accounts, they were looking “in a little valley near the present County Farm…” The County Farm, in 1885 was across the road, just north and east of the County Hospital. And that’s about as close as they came.
Then, in 1925, The Native Sons of the Golden West went on a signage spree, so to speak. Delegations of lodge officials toured Sonoma County, and presumably, all of Northern California, placing wooden signs on historic sites.
With appropriate ceremony, they posted a sign in the area where they believed the bodies were buried. The site was selected from the many different versions of the Bear Flagger narratives, particularly one that spoke of a rock shaped like a sofa that was nearby. It was 15-year-old Milton Wiemeyer, whose family owned the land - once the Moore Ranch - who was told by his father to “Go show the Native Sons people where the grave site was.”
A decade later, with the wooden sign showing wear and houses being built on the land, Wiemeyer stowed the sign in a tool shed on the property and, when the land was actually subdivided in the 1970s, he gave it to the Codding Museum on Summerfield Road. When that closed, the sign went with other artifacts, to the Sonoma County Historical Society and, ultimately, to the Sonoma County Museum, where it resides safely in the collection.
Milton Wiemeyer, who has since died, knew exactly where the sign had been placed. He showed me in 1983 when I wrote about another burial spot, on Hidden Valley Drive, which was rumored to be where the Bear Flag pair was buried. But even as the Native Sons placed the sign in 1925, they agreed that it was an approximate location.
Now Milton’s son, Ken, has shown Northcroft and Owens the sign location. The too-big-to-travel “sofa rock” remains nearby. The rock piles on the graves have long since disappeared - maybe part of a stone retaining wall on the property. And the exact spot where bodies lie is still a mystery.
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