• calendar_month July 3, 2024
• folder California News

Let's learn a bit of California flag history they didn't teach us in grade school. This is the time of the year that stars-and-stripes, and flags waving can be seen throughout the Golden State and the rest of the nation. The California flag typically takes a place of honor beside it.

How much do you know about the origins of the state flag? The grizzly bear 🐻 perched on a patch of green, along with the red star was a tribute to the Lone Star from the flag of Texas, and the words "California Republic" below. 

This is a story rooted in a cunning land grab by white insurgents who hastily drew an image of a bear and hoisted their flag over what had been Mexican territory, proclaiming it to be the California Republic. Some of those men abused and enslaved Indigenous people in their quest for wealth and power. 

In June 1846, a small group of American settlers who moved into Mexican-controlled land in what is now northern California launched a sneak attack on the town of Sonoma, capturing a Mexican general. This came as the Mexican government was moving to evict many of the settlers from land they claimed with no legal rights to hold. So these settlers banded together to oust Mexican authorities and claim California as their own, and they wanted a flag to make it official.

What became known as the bear flag, was designed by William Todd, whose family owned slaves in Kentucky. Todd was the nephew of Mary Todd, wife of Abraham Lincoln. The scheme to conquer Sonoma was short-lived because the U.S. government had declared war on Mexico a month earlier, but the news had not reached the rebels. U.S. troops, along with the Navy arrived weeks later to occupy and claim California as American territory and the newly formed "California Republic" was dead. The only lasting legacy of the Bear Flag Revolt was the flag. It was often said that these guys were all illegal immigrants. 

So how did the banner raised by insurgents with a legacy of racist violence become our state flag? Thanks largely to a fraternal organization called the Native Sons of the Golden West (NSGW), founded in 1875 to preserve California's history of the Gold Rush and early statehood.

Learn more about the history of California's flag: How much do you know about California's flag?