  Conclusion of General Vallejo's message to the Governor of Alta California, which was printed on a press that had been shipped from Boston via Hawaii. Conclusion of General Vallejo's message to the Governor of Alta California, which was printed on a press that had been shipped from Boston via Hawaii. As early as 1830 AgustÍn V. Zamorano, executive secretary of the Mexican territory of Alta California, was using limited printing equipment to produce official letterheads. Zamorano later became proprietor of California's first regular printing press, which was shipped from Boston (via Hawaii) and set up at Monterey about July 1834. While he controlled this press—that is, until the uprising in November 1836—Zamorano appears to have employed two printers, whose names are unknown. Under the revolutionary government the same press continued in operation at Monterey and at Sonoma, and the earliest California printing in the Library of Congress is the first known Sonoma issue: Ecspocision [sic] que hace el comdanante [sic] general interino de la Alta California al gobernador de la misma. It is a small pamphlet having 21 pages of text, preceded by a leaf bearing a woodcut of an eagle. The text is dated from Sonoma, August 17, 1837, and signed by Mariano G. Vallejo, beneath whose printed name is a manuscript flourish. Don Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo (1807-90) held the highest military office of Alta California at the time of writing, his headquarters His plan was to prohibit all coasting trade by foreign vessels, and to transfer the custom-house from Monterey to San Francisco. In defence of the first, he adduced the well known practice on the part of traders of presenting themselves at Monterey with a few cheap articles for inspection, afterward taking on board from secure hiding-places the valuable part of the cargo, to be sold at other ports. Thus the revenue was grossly defrauded, leaving the government without funds. By the change proposed not only would smuggling cease and the revenues be augmented, but Californians would be encouraged to become owners of coasting vessels or to build up a system of inland communication by mule-trains.... The transfer of the custom-house was advocated on the ground of San Francisco's natural advantages, the number and wealth of the establishments tributary to the bay, and the importance of building up the northern frontier as a matter of foreign policy. General Vallejo was his own printer. In a manuscript "Historia de California" he says of his pamphlet, "I wrote the attached statement of which I sent the original to the governor of the State and which I printed immediately in the small printing office that I had in Sonoma and of which I was the only employee; I had the printed copies distributed throughout all parts of California and furthermore I gave some copies to the captains of merchant ships that were going to ports in the United States of America." The Library of Congress copy shows that the general left something to be desired as a printer, some pages being so poorly inked as to be scarcely legible. This copy—one of but four known to bibliographers—was previously in the possession of A. B. Thompson of San Francisco, and the Library purchased it from him in February 1904 for $15. |
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