Hooker’s Claim

According to the few secondary sources available regarding Sonoma Valley history it is generally acknowledged that General Fightin’ Joe Hooker was the first owner of a large tract of land that includes the present day Bedrock Vineyard. The story, etched together using the erasable and revision-friendly pencil that is historical study, is that following the Mexican-American War’s conclusion Hooker came west. The war’s finale in 1848 was followed closely by the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in 1849. It seems likely that Hooker, along with many other officers who were not gentleman, came west.

Like so many others though, Hooker’s hopes of a quick fortune was not to be, and instead he apparently settled on farming as a vocation. At this point, most of the money to be made were in those industries tangential to mining as the exponential increase in the population expanded dramatically the demand for, well, food, liquor, and women. In the valleys of Napa and Sonoma, on the relatively fertile soils of the valley bottom within a day’s boat ride of San Francisco, much food was grown.

All of this though has been understandably quite speculative. Not only was moving around a lot common, there are few hard records that can link a person to a spot. This was made doubly hard by the earthquake of 1906 when many records of property transactions (a great tool for erecting the skeleton of a good historiography) were lost to fire and general pestilential-like destruction.

So, it was with some wonder and amazement that I stumbled across the original map used in the district court case by which Hooker claimed the large tract of land, now known as the Banana Belt, of Sonoma Valley. According to the information coming with the map at Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley the map is from 184?. Not an exact date to be sure. Part of me wonders if an exact date can be put on it at all given the fickle, constantly changing, nature of the judicial system in the years leading up to California’s statehood. The map is in Spanish however, which probably means it predates the establishment of codified California courts– though given the de facto bilingual nature of a culture dominated by Spanish and then Mexican influence even this is a hard justification to make.

What is clear though is that the map is beautiful and renders a relatively accurate outline of Sonoma Valley’s riparian paths. Based on these paths we can see where the present day Wilson, Hooker, and Sonoma Creeks come together in a pattern which corresponds to that on this map drawn close to 160 years ago. The first map shown is the larger-tract. In the second I have zoomed to the section of the map which indicates where Bedrock Vineyards is currently located.

Enjoy!