Vallejo, Mariano Guadalupe (1807?–1890)

Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo (b. 4 July 1807?; d. 18 January 1890), military commander in California. Mariano Vallejo was born in Monterey, son of Ignacio Vallejo, an early settler from Jalisco, and María Antonia Lugo. After joining the Monterey military company at age fifteen, he rose to commandant of the San Francisco presidio by age twenty-four. As military commander and director of colonization of the northern frontier during the 1830s, Vallejo evaluated Russian intentions in California, established the Sonoma colony and organized the civilian government of San Francisco, and pacified Indian tribes. Vallejo was appointed jefe militar (military chief) of the revolutionary government of 1836, but soon disengaged himself from the rebel group. After central Mexican authority was reestablished, he was appointed military commander of California, whose prime concern was encroaching foreign influence.

Considered a friend of Americans, Vallejo was a force for moderation among leading Mexican citizens of California during the period leading up to the U.S. conquest. Vallejo's personal collection of eleven thousand documents of early California, a major source for Hubert Bancroft's History of California (1884–1890), now resides in the Bancroft Library of the University of California.

See alsoCalifornia .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Myrtle M. Mc Kittrick, Vallejo, Son of California (1944).

Ralph J. Roske, Everyman's Eden: A History of California (1968).

Additional Bibliography

Pérez, Vincent. Remembering the Hacienda: History and Memory in the Mexican American Southwest. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006.

Rosenus, Alan. General M.G. Vallejo and the Advent of the Americans: A Biography. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995.

                                       E. Jeffrey Stann