The Bear Flag

✍ Scribed by Holland, Cecelia

• Book ID: 109474735
• Year: 1990
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 542 KB
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

Cat Reilly, like Scarlett O’Hara, is a heroine of the lost cause. Widowed on the terrible trek west to California in the early 1840s, she is forced to take whatever work — and to find whatever friends — she can among the new settlers around Sutter’s Fort in northern California and among the Californio dons who still govern California as a province of Mexico. Passionate in her opinions, dedicated to a kind of democracy respected by neither Mexicans nor imperialists, Cat suspects the motives of the new “explorers” of California — John C. Fremont and Kit Carson — while she makes common cause with those who went west as she did, to find a new and innocent America. Especially disturbing to her, and especially attractive, is a fellow maverick, the Russian “Count” Sergei Sohrakoff. As every California schoolchild knows, the Bear Flag, proclaiming California an independent republic, was hoisted in Sonoma on June 14, 1846. Cat Reilly and her friends are there at the victory; but the real war is only just beginning. Though the dons play all their cards, the Yankees have money, manpower, and cunning. Cat and Sohrakoff find themselves in the middle of the struggle from Sonoma to Monterey, from Hawk Mountain to Los Angeles. When the fighting was done, the harum-scarum victory of the United States left scars that have remained with us to this day: California, despite its dreams of independence, will be American forever.