General Vallejo and the Advent of the Americans

Winner, Best Biography of the Year, Western Writers of America Spur Award

General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo was one of California’s most distinguished citizens in the mid-nineteenth century. A frontier cosmopolitan and visionary, Vallejo owned vast ranchos in northern California and wielded enormous political power throughout the province. While serving as military governor during Mexican rule, he established an open immigration policy that encouraged and facilitated the American entrada to northern California.

This richly textured biography explores the contradictions and passions of a leader who in his own time was described as “a man fifty years in advance of his countrymen in intelligence and enterprise.”  Social historian Bernard DeVoto  summed him up as California’s  “most considerable citizen,”  and others noticed his  “20/20 vision of the future,” for the General predicted a time when  California would become a multicultural democracy capable of unleashing the state’s untapped human potential.