Sherman’s Recollections of California, 1846-1848, 1855-1857, from his Memoirs

Before he became the Union's most feared general, William Tecumseh Sherman was a young lieutenant navigating the edge of American empire. This fragment of his memoirs captures his California years during the Mexican-American War and its immediate aftermath, when the territory was still reverberating from conquest. Sherman sailed 198 days around Cape Horn with fellow lieutenants Henry Halleck and Edward Ord, arriving in Yerba Buena just days before it became San Francisco. He marched with military governor Richard Barnes Mason through infant towns and gold fields, witnessing the transformation of Mexican California into American territory. The prose has a rookie's eagerness, full of vivid observations about the landscape, the people, and the strange bureaucratic work of occupying a conquered land. Historians and Civil War enthusiasts will find fascinating the seeds of Sherman's later ruthlessness in these quieter, formative years. Anyone curious about California before the gold rush, or about the making of one of America's most controversial military figures, will find this an unexpectedly compelling time capsule.