The Bear Flag Libation?

Surely, it’s kismet.  The first book I crack open (The Bear Flag Rising by Dale L. Walker) to officially begin research for my California history podcast project and it has an introduction about Richard Henry Dana sailing up and down the coast in the 1830s.  If I believed in omens, this was a good one.  I went over to my book shelf and found the thin copy of Dana’s memoir, Two Years Before the Mast that I last read about twenty-five years ago.  Inside the front cover is the large blue stamp, “PROPERTY OF R.H. DANA SCHOOL” to discourage sticky fingered 4th graders such as myself.  Apparently, I knew it would come in handy.

Statue in Dana Point Harbor

Growing up in a town bearing Dana’s name -Dana Point- and attending an elementary and high school also bearing his name actually has the opposite effect that you might think.  The blue-blooded Harvard dropout turned rugged sailor is not some towering figure in the lives of Dana Point residents (though there is a large statue of a manly and shirtless Dana in the harbor [coincidentally, it stands near the same spot I was arrested, also shirtless, for swimming with friends in the harbor when I was sixteen]). He was just some guy everybody in town knows as once throwing hides off the soaring cliffs to his trader ship below.  We all know the ship was called the Pilgrim because a replica of it is now docked in the harbor.  In the 4th grade every kid in south Orange County reads Two Years Before the Mast and spends the night aboard the replica Pilgrim, but who really remembers any of that into adulthood.  The only memory that I have of that overnight field trip was the fake captain telling us we were only allowed to use two squares of toilet paper (because that’s all Richard Henry Dana was allowed to use?  Beats me.  Historical reenactors tell children strange things hoping it will make the history come alive and it only makes them fear taking a number two for next ten hours).
My point is this: I had not thought about Dana, as a human being or as a historical figure, in decades.  Even with a life-long love of history, which became major in college in history, which became a focus on California history, which has become the hope of a career in local Public History?  My grand plan for a grad school project is a podcast that will make people aware of the living pieces of local history that is all around them and it took a book that I bought for the story of John C. Fremont to remind me Richard Henry Dana might actually have some interesting things to say.
So, Mr. Dana?  What words of wisdom do you have based on your impression of California under Mexican rule?   

“In the hands of an enterprising people, what a country this might be!”  

How true, sir.  How true… and kind of racist.

This blog is part of Digital History course I am taking at Cal-State East Bay as I learn to use the tools of web design to better bring history to the public in the 21st century.  I’ll be covering some of the bits of California history I find interesting as a research and plan for the eventual podcast project, but this blog will not be part of it.  What is the podcast project I keep mentioning?  I’m glad you asked.
Last Fall I worked on a blog for a California History class with Dr. Ivey (same professor as this Digital History class) where I explored the history behind some of the Bay Area’s oldest bars and saloons.  When I chose the topic it simply seemed like fun idea; a way for me to practice my research skill, an excuse to drive out to some of the parts of the Bay I never get to see and maybe drink a few beers along the way.  It wasn’t until about half way through did I realize that telling the history of a bar is really telling the history of a community, town or subculture.  And in that I was telling the story of California itself.
In writing about Smiley’s Schooner Saloon in Bolinas, I was telling the story of Americans carving a logging and shipbuilding town out of a Mexican ranchero.  In writing about The Warehouse Café in Port Costa, I was telling the story of a quintessential Wild West town that was briefly a major shipping hub during the wheat boom of the 1880s and then suffered a long and definitively odd decline.  In writing about Vesuvio in San Francisco, I was telling the story of the Beats and the birth of San Francisco’s famous bohemian reputation.
By the end of the course I yearned to continue the project, or rather start anew with the thesis from the beginning that I would be providing the history of California by way of the state’s oldest watering-holes.  I’m an avid listening of podcasts, especially a good history podcast (of which there are few [some of my favorites are The History of Rome, Hardcore History, Memory Palace and The History of the World in 100 Objects]) and I can think of no better way to bring history to interested, but busy, people these days.  The bars will serve as a hook to draw people in to places they know, have been to, or may want to go to.  This will be in no small part a travel guide to the Golden State.  More importantly, the bars are perfect anchors for episodes on a particular person, place, event or era, rather than trying to tackle the vast sea of information that is California history.  I’m thinking, part Huell Howser’s California Gold, part Dave Attell’s Insomniac.  
And by the end of this course, the podcast should come with a pretty kickass website.  Right now I’m toying with the name The Bear Flag Libation.  Maybe with the logo will be the bear on the flag walking toward a beer pint or glass of whisky.  Please let me know what you think.  The name, the logo, the entire concept… will it work?

If you'd like to check out the Bay Area historical bar blog I did it's at BoozingByTheBay.blogspot.com