To Have But Not To Hold: 

the Bernals of early San Francisco and their lost corner of the City.

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     More than a few historians have suggested that the history of the State of California has been a series of "Gold Rushes."

    The state's economy has been enriched by a succession of opportunities, some larger and longer-lived and some smaller and brief, which have drawn new immigration to this blessed-by-nature land. Most of these historians have written that the first of the many rushes began with the discovery of gold near Coloma, California in January of 1848. Following "gold rushes" include: tourism - born in the wake of the completion of the transcontinental railroad; mining speculation as seen in the Nevada Silver Rush; and the Klondike gold strikes, both of which left more wealth in California than its own 1849 version because the investors were Californians; export agriculture and world trade, an artifact of the trans-Pacific (and later trans-Panama) shipping industry; the World War II migration to California to work in defense industry, and several more. Contemporaneously this trend repeated in the recent "e-gold rush" which took place principally in the doomed dotcom boom. A more recent example is the home mortgage crash that leaves thousands of Californians financially "under water."

     One thread that connects the narrative of these "gold rushes" is that the people who participated in most of them sought, along with enhanced wealth, a personal transformation. Many diarists of the rush of 1849 wrote of the anonymity that made it possible for emigrants to live differently than they ever imagined, living without the traditional social constraints of their (often small) home towns. Some became "new men," even adopting new names. Talbot Green, for whom Green Street in San Francisco was named was, in fact, Paul Geddes, with a wife and family in California as well as the same "back in the States," and who was wanted for embezzlement.

     While "rags to riches" was certainly the most dramatic of California transformations (James Flood, an Irish immigrant saloon keeper, seized vast wealth as a speculator in the Nevada Silver Rush of the 1860s and become the cream of San Francisco society) some immigrants sought transformation at least as actively, and sometimes alternatively to conventional wealth. The artist commune of Carmel, founded by fin de siecle bohemians, the Beat Movement in San Francisco in the 1950s and the flight of thousands of youthful experimenteers to the Haight-Ashbury during 1967's Summer of Love were all movements of cultural transformation of self that found coalescence in California.

     This page suggests that at least one other, pre-gold rush, "rush," occurred in keeping with the theme of seekers drawn by a promise of both better lives (usually meaning wealth) and new lives (spiritual or cultural transformation). That earlier story can be seen in the five or so decades-long rise of a specifically "Californio" Hispanic culture that preceded the US-Mexican War of 1846-48, and its decline following war's end, the absorbtion of much of Mexico into the United States and the flash-fuel discovery of gold.

     That "rush" can be understood by reading the story that follows. It is the 160 year, six generation story of one line of the pioneer Bernal family, a family that eventually became related through marriage to many other Californio families. The first Bernals came to a California, then at the margins of the Spanish realm in the Americas, with just a few possessions - but whose descendants eventually owned a rancho that occupied more than fifteen percent of the lands that would emerge as a city called San Francisco.

      The story began in 18th century California as two world empires approached and confronted one another.

      In 1774 fur hunting Russians were stalking otters and seals along what is today's Sonoma coast, encroaching on Spain's claim to the Pacific edge of the North American continent. José del Galvez, Viceroy of New Spain, commanded that missions, pueblos and presidios be built in Alta California in order to solidify the Spanish claim and to demonstrate the will of King Carlos III to protect "his" lands in this, the farthest reaches of his royal empire.

     Juan Bautista de Anza, Lieutenant Colonel of Cavalry and Captain of the Royal Presidio of Tubac in the Province of Sonora (and, of course, his soldiers), had been the first of European descent to make the land journey into California - across the desert and mountains - in 1774. The next year year he was ordered to escort a colony over the same route. He enlisted three missionaries, three officers and twenty veteran soldiers (plus 30 muleteers and other "helpers") and also brought along a troop of civilian families, the male heads of whom he'd promised to train as soldiers upon arrival at the San Francisco Bay colony. 

     One of these was the family Bernal.

     Fray Font, Franciscan chaplain of the expedition, wrote in his diary that these soldier-recruits were from among the the poor in Sinaloa, Sonora, and who were, in fact, living in a condition described as "submerged in poverty." They left their gathering place in Horcasitas on September 29, 1775.

     Among these recruits, Fray Font wrote, were Juan Francisco "Vernal" (born 1737 at Rancho del Tule, Sinaloa) and his wife, María Josefa Soto (born at Villa de Sinaloa) together with their seven children. 

     Among these children a was son, probably their eldest, named after his father Juan Francisco. Also in the expedition was another soldier-recruit, Ygnatio María Gutiérrez, his wife, Ana María Ossuna and three children - including a daughter - identified by Font as "María Petra." The two families would eventually be united through the marriage of these two children.

     As imagined by California historian John Caughey the cavalcade, numbering 240 plus "695 horses and mules and 355 cattle, equivalent to a ranch on the move ... and every night the camp looked like a good sized town." Together humans and animals walked across the deserts, over the mountain passes and, miraculously, all but one human survived the trek.

     The expedition reached San Gabriel in southern Alta California (today's Los Angeles County) on January 3, 1776 and, after a brief rest, they pressed northward to Monterey, the newly founded capital of Alta California. They arrived on March 10th and rested again until mid June while plans were laid for the colonization of lands near the mouth of San Francisco Bay. On June 17th, Lt. José Joaquin Moraga (whose family, too, would one day be linked to the Bernals when his son, Gabriel, would marry Ana Maria, the eldest Bernal daughter) led the colony on a 10 day march through the Pajaro and Santa Clara Valleys and up the peninsula of western San Francisco Bay, stopping to camp at the Arroyo de los Dolores, near a swampy lagoon on the northerly end of the peninsula. 

     Construction of a rough-hewn a chapel was begun in August, and on September 17th the site was dedicated in honor of St. Francis of Assisi, in whose honor the Bay had been named.

     It's highly likely that the majority of the colonists, including the Bernals and their future in-laws, would have been present for this dedication. Though the Bernal's new residence was at Juan Francisco's place of work, the Presidio, the mission was to remain a cultural anchor for the family throughout several generations.

     According to records of the times, most Presidio children were "born" at the Mission, though we might interpret that this means that they were baptized - "born" into the Catholic Church - and therefore were registered as members of the community there. It was also at the mission that couples were married, and the deceased were buried. When he died on October 28, 1802, Juan Francisco (the elder) was just the first of this line of Bernals to be buried at Mission Dolores. These rites of passage can be seen as the relatively rare communal gatherings for people living on the frontier, opportunities to mingle and celebrate (or mourn, as appropriate). In short, the Missions of California might be seen as the "warp" upon which the "weft" of early California Hispanic culture was woven.

     Juan Francisco Bernal (the younger), born at Villa de Sinaloa in 1763 and Maria Petronia (called "Petra" by Font) Gutiérrez (born also at Villa de Sinaloa) were married at Mission Dolores on May 17, 1782. Newlywed Juan Francisco Bernal, son and son-in-law of Anza "Soldier Recruits," himself became a soldier at the San Francisco Presidio. Juan Francisco and Maria Petronia (who appears to have been his second wife) had three sons and a daughter. One son, Apolinario, in the new family tradition, a soldier, was killed in 1813 by Indians in the San Ramon Valley. Their youngest child, José Cornelio Cipriano Bernal, born September 7, 1796, was also to become a soldier and married, at Mission Santa Clara, Maria Carmen Sibrian (also sometimes spelled Cibrian, born April 15, 1804 at Santa Clara) in June of 1819. This family too, because of his career, made their home at the Presidio of San Francisco.

     It must have been obvious to all Californios, and especially those of ambition like José Cornelio Bernal, that the key to success in Alta California lay in the acquisition of land. The Nation of Mexico, established in 1822, was, by 1830, deeply in debt. As the crisis widened the frontier provinces (Texas, New Mexico and Alta California) experienced increasing governmental neglect and fiscal abandonment. This condition presented an opportunity for "ordinary" families to climb another rung on the social ladder, for the Governor of Alta California for example), who had little hard cash to pay individuals for services rendered to the government, had an alternative economic power - the power to bestow land. Especially the land owned by (according to Spanish law) the Catholic Church, which was being recovered by the Mexican government and ceded to the Provinces in the 1830s.

     Only 10% of all land grants in California pre-date 1833, and these only to prominent families. After that date it appears that entrepreneurial, and more ordinary citizens, who provided service to the Nation of Mexico would, when this service had reached a critical financial mass (and the political winds were blowing in the proper direction) submit a request for a land grant. Among these were a vast number of Bernal descendants. 

     Upon this land, Californio's could literally "raise money" in the form of trade goods, most usually cowhides and beef or mutton tallow. Robert Ryal Miller writes in his biography of the Bernal's fellow "Yerba Buenan," (the trading village of Yerba Buena would not be named San Francisco until the American occupation) who was a British sailor turned Mexican merchant and trader named William Richardson,

      "The era of hide and tallow trade... coincided almost exactly with the period when the Mexican flag flew over Alta California (1822-1846). It was also the heyday of the ranchos. During these pastoral years Yankee and British sailing ships, loaded with merchandise, arrived on the California coast where they traded their cargo for cowhides and tallow (beef or mutton fat), and occasionally for salted beef, wheat, furs and other produce...  Profits for the sea borne merchants came from a customary markup of 200-300% on New England or European finished goods. At each of these landings local townspeople and ranchers went aboard the 'floating departments stores' to pick out items they wished to buy, or rather, to barter, since money was very scarce."

     Cowhides were known as the "bank notes" of Alta California's economy, and these "green" skins (uncured due to the lack of industrial tanneries in California) the means of wealth formation would have been in the pasturage on which to sustain these cattle and sheep herds.

     An additional advantage was that in much of coastal Northern California, and especially in the Bay Area, this pasturage was supplied abundantly by nature without planting or need of irrigation or other agrarian intervention. Fiscal success in the economy in Alta California was to be had not through personal hard work, but through the acquisition of parcels of pastureland and Indian labor to tend the herds, times remembered in the late 19th/early 20th century through the "lens of romance" as the "peaceful and happy days of the noble Dons," even by some who'd been eyewitness to the times but whose memory was softened by nostalgia.

     In fact, many of the recent land-owning "Dons" were formerly landless Californio soldiers who, by industry and effort, earned grants through labor or services rendered to a bankrupt government and while they, themselves were at least partially of Indian descent, were exploiting (formerly Mission) Indian labor on their new found Ranchos.

     José Cornelio Bernal I, the records show, was regidor (a member of the ayuntimiento, or town council) of San José starting in 1828. He seems to have been rewarded for this community service with a small homestead grant at Mission Dolores (as secularization of the Missions began) in 1834. This small grant was along today's 17th and 18th Street, and may have included today's site of San Francisco's Mission High School.

     Within just a few more years and in reward, it seems clear, for services rendered at the Mission, in San José, in the town of Yerba Buena and elsewhere, Bernal was given two further adjoining grants, first Rincon de las Salinas (an "inside corner of a salty marsh," including the basin of Islais Creek and today's Excelsior, Crocker-Amazon, Outer Mission, Bay View/Hunter's Point and a "slice" of Daly City, granted in 1839) and El Potrero Viejo (the "old pasture" - apparently part of the original, but by then secularized, Mission Dolores property including Precita Creek and today's Bernal Heights, Holly Park Circle and St. Mary's Park neighborhoods, granted in 1840). This two parcel grant encompassed roughly the southeastern fifteen percent of present day San Francisco. At this time José Cornelio seems to have been civilly active in the events of the trading village of Yerba Buena, as his signature appears on a number of early town documents which are collected in UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library.

      Unfortunately, José Cornelio Bernal I did not live long enough to realize the true value of his grant. He died in 1842, at the age of 46, and was buried, near his parents and grandparents, at Mission Dolores.

     It's certain that the family would have pastured stock on his land grants, the animals most likely herded by Indians who had been released from the Missions by the recent secularization. These Native Americans may even have been members of the same families who'd tended these lands in Mission times and whose ancestors had hunted game along these same creeks for uncounted generations. But these pastoral years of partnership with a relatively benign and cooperative nature and supported by Indian labor were shortly to end.

     Following the Mexican War, which ceded California to the United States, and the following turbulent California Gold Rush, city, state and federal government did much to sincerely defend the rights and property of the former Mexican citizens of California. .Article VIII and Article IX of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had provided for Mexican citizens the option to become US citizens and retain "free enjoyment of their liberty and property."  But at statehood there was no mechanism for deeding land grants carried over from the Mexican period. A land commission was therefore created in 1851 by a Federal Land Law. Grantees had two years in which to submit claims and also had the ability to appeal to both the US District Court and the Supreme Court in the case of denial. Eventually the commission confirmed 604 claims and denied only 190. At the Courts level, of the 600 commission rulings of appeals (filed by either grantee or by government) 587 grants were confirmed. The work of the commission and especially the courts seems to have been generally fair and evenhanded, though the appeal process sometimes dragged on for years.

     In 1852 attorneys for Jose Cornelio Bernal's widow, Carmen Cibrian de Bernal and their son, José de Jesus Bernal II (born 1829, according to the 1842 Mexican census) filed a claim with the Federal Land Commission on the Bernal holdings in San Francisco. Records of the US District Court of Judge Ogden Hoffman summarize the case, which confirmed the Bernal claim and dismissed the final government appeal:

Granted October 10th, 1839, by Manual Jimeno to JC de B(ernal); claim filed Feb. 9th, 1852, confirmed by the Commission December 18th, 1852, by the District Court August 20th, 1855 and appeal dismissed December 8th, 1856; containing 4,446.40 acres. Patented December 31st, 1857.

     The confirmed Bernal grant was roughly three times the size of the modern Presidio, today a portion of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and more than four times the size of San Francisco's present day Golden Gate Park. There is evidence that attempts were made by the Bernals to develop these valuable holdings, though none too successfully.

     In 1857 a brochure was issued in New York by real estate firm Latimer Bros. and Seymour. A "J. Hutchison" seems to have obtained license - if not ownership - to develop more than 2,000 acres, almost half the grant, and used a pamphlet (a copy of which is in the collection of the San Francisco Public Library's San Francisco History Center) to solicit speculators and investors. The brochure, a wonder of boosterist enthusiasm and clever dissembling, brags,

The advantages which this property possesses over all other in the vicinity of San Francisco are:
1st. Its title, which is established.
2d. Its situation.
3d. Its harbor. [Though undeveloped.]
4th. Its abundant supply of pure, fresh water. [What is "abundant," and does this flow remain throught the year?]
5th. Its protection from ocean winds. [Anyone who lives in the Excelsior will laugh at this claim."]
6th. Its deep, rich, permanent [sic, as opposed, one assumes, to sandy] soil.
In these particulars, so essential to the growth, peace, health, and prosperity of a large town, the Bernal Rancho is universally admitted to stand in enviable contrast to the conflicting claim - and other serious disadvantages attendant upon a residence within the present over-taxed limits of San Francisco.

     Where are the interests of the Bernals in this scheme? While their surname appears on the brochure, they seem to have little or no active participation. In fact, shortly thereafter, it seems clear that their resources were stretched thin. By 1864, according to the City Directory, they were no longer living on the Rancho property (their farmhouse had been on the County Road - Mission Street, or possibly on its extension, San Jose Avenue - just south of Precita Creek, near today's Cesar Chavez Street. An apartment complex completed within a few dozen yards of the site of the Bernal home in 2002 - on Cesar Chavez at Mission St.- is named "Bernal Gateway.")

     Carmen Cebrian Bernal is credited with donation to the Catholic Church of the site of the original St. Mary's College (now San Francisco's St. Mary's Park neighborhood), a gift that can be seen as both philanthropic as well as entrepreneurial. A college would certainly be an anchor for a community, drawing supporting businesses and creating local demand for real estate on which to build both housing and commercial enterprises.

     Langley's San Francisco Directory for 1864-65 shows the Bernals - mother and son - moved back to their original farm property near Mission Dolores, plus one more listing that gives a clue to their financial plight. The entries:

Bernal, Carmel [sic] (widow) dwl. Ss 17th bet. Dolores & Church
Bernal Homested Assoc., office 25 Montgomery Block
Bernal, José, farmer, dwl. 17th bet. Dolores & Church

     The "Bernal Homestead Assoc." address is identical to the address of the law offices of Halleck, Peachy and Billings who represented many Californio claimants, including the Bernal family, in their land grant cases. As such, the "homestead association" - a common 19th century name for a real estate tract - can be seen as either a passive and defensive device to protect the family's holdings or, more likely, an enterprise of the law firm, possibly intended to develop land traded by their client, the Bernal family, in exchange for legal services.

     Either way, the southern reaches of the city developed slowly and the enterprise proved not have been an immediately profitable one and Carmen Cibrian Bernal died in 1876 without having again lived away from the neighborhood adjoining the Mission.

The small (about one block) parcel that constituted the Bernal "farm" in the 1860s abutted Dolores Creek, and therefore was valuable for its access to flowing water. This block is now mostly occupied by San Francisco's Mission High School. The creek still runs under Eighteenth Street, emptying into the Bay at the Islais Creek outlet east of I-280 and just south of Cesar Chavez Street. The water is carried away under the streets by San Francisco's little known, but essential, "Clean Water Sewer System" which also disposes of rainwater.

José de Jesus Bernal (who died in 1870), had married Geronima Rufino. They had four daughters and three sons. Their first son, born in 1857, was named in honor of José de Jesus' own father. This second son ,José Cornelio Bernal, eventually married Julia Valencia, quite likely also a descendent of a de Anza soldier recruit and - if so - Valencia Street, which traverses the Mission District of San Francisco, is named in honor of her family.

José Cornelio, born an American citizen and a fifth generation Californian, died in 1926; and his obituary, published in The San Francisco Examiner on November 8th, reads in part,

LAST OWNER
OF DE BERNAL
GRANT DIES

Land Given His Grandfather in 1839 Covered One-Fourth of Present Area of San Francisco

With the funeral this morning of Jose Cornelio Bernal, who died Friday in Oakland at the age of sixty-nine, will pass from the life of San Francisco the last of the holders of the great de Bernal grant of land...
Funeral Mass will be celebrated at the Mission where the Bernals worshipped for three (sic) generations and internment will take place at Holy Cross Cemetery...
The vast domain was gradually whittled down as mortgages upon which the family had borrowed were foreclosed. A large tract from Butchertown to the San Bruno Road was sold by the sheriff in 1859 for $1,500 to satisfy a $4,298 mortgage held by General William T. Sherman. Other portions followed in similar manner until in 1917 when the last bit of the real estate was lost through foreclosure.
Bernal's final illness was aggravated by the recent death of his wife, Mrs. Julia H. Bernal. He is survived by two sons, Cornelius and Alfred Bernal, both of 530 Funston Ave.

     Why theirs sisters were not noted in this obituary is not known.

     The Funston address, across the city from the Mission, appears to have been the final family home. The San Francisco telephone directory for 1924 lists "Bernal, Julia" living at this address. Is the phone listed in her name in order to "dodge" creditors? The evidence for this speculation is still to be discovered.

     Alfred, one of the sons listed in the obituary, disappears from the record shortly thereafter, though Polk's Crocker-Langley San Francisco Directory for 1934 lists, living again in the Mission District just two and a half blocks from the site of the old family farm:

Bernal, Cornelius J., chauffeur, r 1836 15th St.

     In just six generations this particular lineage of the Bernal family escaped "submersion in poverty" in Sinaloa, served in the armies of New Spain and then Mexico, was awarded a modest set of land grants, was absorbed into a foreign culture, and saw its real and potential wealth finally, in the words of the obituary, "whittled down." The fact remains, however, that the Bernal family had transformed itself - in this particular case, in just two generations - from Sonoran peasants to land-owning Alta Californios.

     In their ascent, these Bernals were fortunate. The seven children of Juan Francisco and Maria Soto Bernal - who had walked and rode across the deserts and mountains with de Anza - all survived to adulthood to leave their names on many places in California. The father, Juan Francisco, became a soldier, most possibly achieving the first professional career in the remembered history the family. His son, Juan, was successful, too, in a military career. His grandson, José Cornelio, seems to have been an efficient and capable administrator who married well (Carmen de Cebrian was related to Anglo-Mexican, William Hartnell - Judge Hoffman notes this in his land grant appeal decision - and therefore related to the powerful Santa Barbara Spanish "peninsular" clan of de la Guerra), and though he died relatively young, he left income-producing property to his widow and son.

     Finally, José Cornelio's land grant was posthumously confirmed with relative alacrity, and most justly, by the United States Government.

     In other things, in their family descent, they were the victims of a sea change in California history. A great fortune was, in fact, created by a scheme to bring fresh water into the city of San Francisco. The individuals who gained this fortune were the developers of an aqueduct bringing water from from Lobos Creek in the northwest reaches of the city, rather than from Islais Creek to the south. How those investors grasped this fortune was simply a matter of which cartel could raise ready capital to complete construction first. That the southern end of the city of San Francisco developed far later than the city's expansion to the west had more to do with the development of transportation (the Mission St. streetcars, for example, ended at 26th Street until almost the turn of the 20th entury) and the development of Golden Gate Park (beginning in the 1870s) with its cable car, streetcar and even railroad lines connecting the park and lands end with downtown drew the residential city across the sand dunes and toward the Pacific.

     That José de Jesus Bernal listed himself in the City Directory as a "farmer" in 1864 might be more than simply descriptive of his then-current occupation. He may thus have been expressing a nostalgic desire to return to a simpler life-role and identity. Was he, by moving back to the neighborhood of the Mission, symbolically registering disgust, if not despair, at the high-blown boosterism of the real estate pamphlets and real estate speculators? Or was he merely seeking financial stability and a place to raise his expanding family? Probably both.

     Even more powerful Mexican citizens with experience in economics outside of California, including the wealthier former-Englishman Richardson and the imperial-minded Swiss, Johann Sutter, failed in the end to prosper by their their land grants. And, in truth, land speculation in 19th century California - which may be seen as one of the minor-theme gold rushes - was a slippery slope at best. Sam Brannan lost most of his fortune due to his own mismanagement.

     Meanwhile, most Californios were looked down upon by many Anglo newcomers as "foreigners" even though native born. From the rare peninsular Spaniards to the intermarried, mixed race Spanish/Indian/African stock, Anglos tended to marginalize them all as non-participants in California, which symbolized to many a fulfillment of Manifest Destiny and the solidification of the United States as a nation of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Additionally, in the years during and immediately following the Gold Rush, the anti-foreigner prejudices against hispanics and Catholics - among others - by the "Know Nothing" political party were common and accepted. At least one early governor of California was elected on a Native American Party ("Know Nothing") ticket.

     In addition to this established exclusionism, the histories of most ordinary Californios suggest that many of the land-owning families of Alta California - and certainly the Bernals of San Francisco - who'd lived in baroque Hispanic isolation under a provincial pre-modern economy of barter were culturally underequipped to deal with a suddenly Enlightenment-era "modern" world and its economy of mortgages, interest rates, payment deadlines and cash-on-the-barrelhead.

     In resistance to this strange new world the last Mexican (who were also the first American) Bernals seemed to have adapted with a certain simple grace by retreating to the abiding Hispanic cultural symbol of La Misión de San Francisco de Asis, which their family helped to found. The Mission was a connection to the memory of a way of life in a land that their ancestors had pioneered, a slower paced land-and-cowhide-based economic "rush" for advancement and transformation in California.

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For the genealogy of the earliest Bernal families I'm indebted to Historian Jim Delgado whose hand-drawn chart is now in the collection of the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley.

The children of José de Jesus and Geronima Rufino Bernal were (according to Delgado's chart) named Francisco, Lucinda, José Cornelio, Julia (McKinnon), Alodia (McDonald), Antonio and Estele.)

In the Appendix to John S. Hittell's 1878 history of San Francisco - the first three chapters of which cover the pre-American period - Hittell wrote, "Among those to whom I am indebted are Mrs. Carmen Bernal, a native of San Jose, who came as a bride only fifteen years old in 1819, to live at the Mission, and Mr. Charles Brown, who came to San Francisco in 1829. These are the oldest residents of San Francisco."

If you are a descendant of the Bernals, or one of the other land grant families of California, I'd like to talk to you about your family's oral history - the stories passed down to you from your parents and/or grandparents. Go to the welcome page and send me e-mail on how I can contact you.

Thanks!

Copyright ©1997-2008, Greg Pabst. All rights reserved.

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