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.

This is where the dogs come in.

But first, you need to know more about what happened to these two young men. And how their deaths turned what was to be a peaceful takeover into battle and bloodshed.

Sonoma’s Bear Flag Revolt established a California Republic that lasted just 23 days before it was absorbed by the United States’ declaration of war on Mexico. The Americans from what is now Solano; Napa and Sonoma counties had “conquered” General Mariano Vallejo without firing a shot. Vallejo (who had few if any soldiers at his would-be garrison on Sonoma’s plaza) had, in fact, invited the leaders into his parlor and offered them drinks from his private stock of aguardiente while he prepared to be taken prisoner and ridden off to Sutter’s Fort.

California historians don’t make much of the short conflict we call the Bear War. It has been called, in various volumes, a “comic opera revolt,” “a heroic myth,” “unspeakably ridiculous” and “a half-droll, half-drunken event.”

But at least one 20th century historian got it very wrong when he skipped over some salient information in his writing of “the ambiguous events of June 1846 in which Vallejo’s brandy seems to have caused the most significant casualties…”

Cowie and Fowler, killed most horribly in Santa Rosa, just days after Vallejo’s peaceable surrender were significant casualties, as were the deaths that followed the discovery of their bodies.

There are many versions of the Cowie and Fowler story (the most complete, for those who would read more, can be found in Alan Rosenus’s 1995 biography of Vallejo). For the sake of space and simplicity, I will stick with the version I heard from the late SRJC history instructor Harvey Hansen, which appears in an early chapter of “Santa Rosa, a 19th Century Town.”

Told to ride in the foothills, away from the main trail and to be on the lookout for roving bands of defensores, the two followed orders for the first 10 miles but then took the easier path along the creek. About two miles from the Carrillo Adobe they were captured.

Various Mexican leaders are mentioned, including Juan Padilla, the young grantee of the Roblar de la Miseria Rancho (Penngrove area); Bernardino Garcia, the renegade who would become a notorious bandido known as “Four-Fingered (some say Three-Fingered) Jack”, and even Jose Ramon Carrillo, the son of Dona Maria, the señora who owned the adobe and the Rancho Cabeza de Santa Rosa.

They were held overnight at the adobe where Dona Maria, fearing retribution, ordered them off her land. They were taken to a “”little valley” just outside the Rancho Cabeza boundaries where the Pomo named Chanate watched what happened next.

By all accounts, it was a grisly scene. The men were brutalized, body parts cut away, jawbones pulled out with reatas. Finally, mercifully, they were shot and left lying beneath a tree as the men rode away.

The defensores continued their search for Americans and captured several. Riding south with the Bear Army in pursuit, they stopped at Rancho Olompali (near present day Novato) and a battle followed that resulted in one death, several injuries and the rescue of the captive Bear Flagger William Todd.

In San Rafael, the quasi-military band commanded by John C. Fremont found an elderly well-respected Sonoman named Jose Berryessa and 20-year-old twins named DeHaro crossing San Pablo Bay from the east in a small boat. Fremont’s scout, Kit Carson, intended to take them prisoner but Fremont said he had no room for prisoners and all three were summarily shot. Some say it was Fremont’s retribution to the Cowie and Fowler murders, which he had learned of at his arrival - after the fact, in Sonoma.

So, fast-forward to the present. The search goes on. There is no need to say where, exactly, in whose backyard, they will search.

There is no firm date set for the first of the dog exercises, but it will be soon, Northcroft and Owens believe. If they are found? Well, what’s the next step? Finding family members would be another challenge, as would permission to exhume and rebury.

As I said at the outset, there is no end to this tale.