Russian cannon finds a home in Pacifica

“It’s by far the best paper about the cannon,” he said.

According to Regnery, a worker at the ranch at the intersection of Page Mill Road and Skyline Boulevard discovered the cannon that was concealed by a layer of leaf mold under a large oak. “When a portion of the ranch was sold in 1936, the neglected cannon was considered worth the effort necessary to move it from the field to the barnyard of the home ranch,” she wrote. Regnery started her research in 1959, prompted by someone who was at the ranch when the weapon was found in 1933. The artillery piece was presented to the San Mateo County Historical Association Museum in 1964 by its last owner, Roger Page.

To the surprise of many, the lettering on the cannon was not Spanish or English, which had been expected given the fact that the only Northern California battle of the United States-Mexico war was fought in Santa Clara County. Embossed on the upper side of the barrel is the Imperial Russian Crest.

“The double-headed eagle with its crown has been worn down to a pattern of smooth lumps,” the history continued.

There was speculation the cannon once guarded Fort Ross, the Russian coastal outpost in Marin County, but Regnery doubted this, noting that the Russians returned all of their Fort Ross cannons to Alaska after abandoning their California colony in 1840. She concluded that most likely the cannon came from a Russian ship in Monterey, confiscated by Americans who planned to use it against Francisco Sanchez and his band of Californios, the locals who could trace their heritage to the coming of the Spanish. Sanchez, whose Pacifica home is visited by thousands every year, was an experienced soldier and his troops were skilled horsemen, albeit their weapons were mainly lances.

Regnery ends her research paper by saying that whatever theory one embraces about the cannon’s origin, “it remains a mystery how such a unique artillery piece came to be hidden beneath leaf mold in the mountains on the San Francisco Peninsula.”

One theory Regnery dismissed early on was the idea that the gun was abandoned by Sanchez at the time of the Santa Clara “battle.” The quote marks around battle are hers and they are important because some histories of the clash make it seem a comic opera event, even referring to the clash in a mustard field near Mission Santa Clara as a mere “skirmish.” One marker is flip, summing up the event with “dead none, wounded none.” Was the fight that bloodless? Did early accounts rely too much on the report in the California Star newspaper of Feb. 6, 1847, that only a horse was killed? The Star boasted that its coverage was “the most correct accounting of the movements of our troops and the enemy.” The account is a long one and it obviously came from the American side. At the bottom, however, and seemingly in haste, are words that may have been overlooked by later historians: “Since the above was put in type, we have learned persons from Santa Clara ascertained that four Californios were killed and five badly wounded.”

The Rear View Mirror by history columnist Jim Clifford appears in the Daily Journal every other Monday. Objects in The Mirror are closer than they appear.