Although San José is one of the newest of cities, it is one of the oldest of communities in the State of California. It has a history both rich and varied. From the Spanish Conquistadors to the Mission padres to the mountain men voyageurs’ to the 49’ers, San José has been a glowing hope for the future. And so it remains. Here in this beautiful valley one group of travellers after another have found a tremendous opportunity to fulfill their dreams. It has provided a vision of a better life to those who arrived as overland emigrants in covered wagons or in tempest-tossed boats from lands at the other side of the Pacific Rim. It has always stood for things simple and profound: freedom and hope.

Those things that occurred in our past are more valuable to the present than any other commodity This has been a rapid and at times dizzying journey from the Llano de los robles to the Valley of Heart’s Delight to Silicon Valley, but it has been a journey filled with certain constants. The pueblo of San José is quite visible in the agricultural hub of early Twentieth century San José , just as that entrepreneurial place is present in the rising metropolitan high technology center of our own time. Whether it was cattle on the mission pasture or cherries and prunes in a crate or information onto a chip, San José has always been innovating, and improving. We remain so today. As we reap the benefits of a preeminent City of the future, we must never forget the lessons and values of our past. For generations San José has been the destination of choice and a wonderful home for my family and hundreds of thousands of others. In these pages we will relive the founding and emergence of our City as recounted by one who knows it better than any other. Enjoy the trip.

Though he loved uniforms adorned with plume and braid, the Californio was not a warrior in the widely understood sense of the term. Save for such internal squabbles as the Victoriano, Gutierrez, and Micheltorena affairs, he confined most of his fighting to occasional Indian skirmishes and fiery orations. His closest brushes with international war prior to American occupation seem to have been keeping a wary eye on the Russians at Fort Ross and shouting curses at Bouchard’s pirates in the Pacific.

In short, he was a fairly peaceable fellow. Thou-sands of miles of land and sea isolated him from the Napoleonic campaigns in Europe and early American pushes against Tecumseh and Black Hawk.

Even the raising of the American flag at Monterey in 1846 did not completely arouse him. The more astute among his leaders had long foreseen this event. Only those less resigned to invasion put up noteworthy resistance—mostly elsewhere in the department.

The only military hostilities taking place in what is now Santa Clara County occurred on the plain west of Santa Clara on January 2, 1847. This clash,variously known as the Battle of Santa Clara and later, the “Battle of the Mustard Stalks,” has been referred to as the “last” and the “only” battle of the Mexican War in northern California. The troops on both sides were largely volunteer except for a small naval force from Yerba Buena in command of Captain Ward Marston of the United States Marine Corps. The main scene of action appears to have been the great triangle of territory now bounded by State Highway 82, the Lawrence Expressway, and the Southern Pacific Railroad, with Santa Clara at the easternmost point.

There was nothing reminiscent of Yorktown or Waterloo, however, about any feature of the engagement. Realistic writers have never described it as a great campaign. One considered it marching, countermarching, and general confusion. Former Rocky Mountains trapper Grove Cook felt that both sides fought all day to keep from getting within two miles of each other.

It was not until after California’s admission to statehood that national economics and politics began to determine what moderns call a collision course—and an internal one at that. Santa Clara County was about evenly divided between staunch Northerners and adamant Southerners. The Southerners, however, were by no means unified, Many of them had no intention of letting disagreement with Northern policies push them into dismemberment of the nation.

Except for Democratic George O’Doherty’s violently anti-adminstration San José Tribune, the local press was pro-Union, but with the bombardment of Fort Sumter, which opened the Civil War, rationality lost out. Southerners became suspect not because they committed crimes against the United States, but because they were Southerners.

All over the state, sectionalism disrupted church-es, lodges, and other organizations presumably de-voted to peace and the brotherhood of man. In San José, as elsewhere, members of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, had no easy time of it. Such terms as “Copperheads” and “Black Republicans” were used to the point of losing their meaning. Even the kindly James Jerome Owen’s editorials in the Mercury were not above using the opprobrious term “Secesh.”

Within a short time, practically every community in Santa Clara County boasted one or more military companies. Yet few contemporary San Joséans got closer than Texas to anything resembling Bull Run, Chickamauga, Shiloh, Donelson, Gettysburg or Richmond.

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