How Did the Mexican-American War in California Actually End? A Table, Cahuenga, and Historical Uncertainty

It's a perfectly ordinary table, big enough for two to sit across from each other. The grain of the wood shows through the worn finish in places. The panels of the top are uneven, but not so much to make the table unusable.

It's a piece of homely furniture that could have been found in any kitchen anywhere in Los Angeles until the middle of the 20th century. A table like it might be in anyone's garage today, after losing its one drawer, and now a place to set a clothes hamper or store garden tools

Except this ordinary table isn't in a garage. It's in the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. It stands, elevated and lighted in a tall glass box, as a witness to history (although both the witness and the history, in this case, are somewhat ambiguous).

The Cahuenga Treaty table on display at the Becoming Los Angeles exhibition. Photograph courtesy of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

The exhibition Becoming Los Angeles regards the table as so significant that it's one of the touchdown points visually linked to other key objects in the exhibition by the swooping overhead ribbon that symbolizes the flow of time.

If we imagine time that way, as a flow that condenses in a place to make history, then a single hour in the 1.5-million-hours of this table gave it significance. Time is supposed to have touched down on its well-used top on the morning of Jan. 13, 1847, as the table sat on the porch of an adobe house in a pasture called Campo de Cahuenga (or Cauenga). The Campo de Cahuenga is Universal City today.

The Mexican American War of 1846-1848, the museum says, ended in California on this tabletop on that January morning. Given the realities of rural life in Southern California in the 1840s, the table would probably have been the best available in a house that, according to many accounts, belonged to Tom s F liz, a rancher, on the day the war ended.

The Becoming Los Angeles exhibition. Photograph courtesy of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

The table was positioned - ceremoniously? anxiously? without much thought? - on the long porch in front of the house in anticipation of a meeting between the commanders of the approaching American forces and the embattled Californians. (In a hand-colored postcard from 50 years after, a shingled roof shades the porch of a building that the Los Angeles Public Library identifies as this house. The building is the sort of adobe rectangle from which so many Southern California tract houses were derived, thanks to Cliff May.)

The United States and Mexico (of which California was a fractious part) had been at war since the previous May. Los Angeles, the sometime capital of the Mexican state, had been taken by the Americans and then lost the previous year. Several battles, small but some of them bloody, had since been fought.

Jan. 13, 1847, was a Wednesday. The day was rainy. The houses of colonial California, with few windows, were notoriously dark. The porch would have been the best location for any business that required, for example, writing out a formal document.

The table on the porch on that Wednesday morning is in the foreground of the events that required enough light. In Hugo Ballin's 1931 mural (still mounted in the lobby of the Guarantee Trust Building at 5th and Hill streets), General Andr s Pico, commanding the Mexican forces in California, is shown seated at the table. Behind him are members of his staff. Leaning over Pico, who is shown in typical Californio costume, is U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel John C. Fr mont. Fr mont is in full uniform.

The mural depicting the surrender of General Andr s Pico to Lieutenant-Colonel John C. Fr mont was painted by Hugo Ballin in 1931 and mounted in the lobby of the Guarantee Trust Building at 5th and Hill Streets. Photograph courtesy of the federal Works Progress Administration Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.

Fr mont wasn't the most senior American officer bringing the war to Southern California in 1847. (General Stephen Watts Kearney and Commodore Robert Stockton jointly commanded.) But Fr mont was the most impetuous. In Ballin's mural, Fr mont is pointing out something on the sheet of paper on the table. Insistently? Helpfully? Arrogantly? The paper Pico is about to sign is the surrender of the Californian forces.

Portrait of John C. Fr mont, who received Pico's surrender. He was briefly the states governor and later (and briefly) its first U.S. senator. Photograph courtesy of the Security Pacific National Bank Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.

The Mexican American War in California was fought, on the American side, by a mixed force of soldiers, sailors, marines, and volunteers from among American immigrants. They had confronted a local militia of Angele o and Sandieguino horsemen in three engagements in Southern California since the beginning of December 1846: the Battle of San Pasqual (Dec. 6-7), the Battle of Rio San Gabriel (Jan. 8), and the Battle of La Mesa (Jan. 9). San Pasqual was dominated by the Californians. (Stockton described San Pasqual as Kearny's defeat. ) Rio San Gabriel and La Mesa were skirmishes that the Americans dominated, although the Californians had shown that they would fight.

Photograph of Andr s Pico, taken when he had become a California state legislator, who concluded the Treaty of Cahuenga with Fr mont among other accomplishments. Photograph courtesy of the Security Pacific National Bank Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.

But they couldn't win. On Jan. 10, as the Californians sought an end to the conflict, American troops re-entered Los Angeles without resistance.

Even before he sat down with Fr mont three days later, Pico was prepared, on behalf of the government of California, to end hostilities and permit California to be handed over to the invading

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