It was just a little cannon – a brass four-pounder with a forty-inch barrel, three-and-a-half-inch bore, taking an eight-ounce charge of powder. It was on solid wheels and could be lifted by two cast handles on the sides of the barrel. It was fired in the bloody Battle of San Pasqual (east of present Escondido, California) by the Americans against the Californios in 1846. But it came from a world away.

The gun was cast in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1804, and had blasted away at Napoleon’s forces during the siege of Moscow. It was then carted across Siberia and shipped to Sitka, Alaska, and on to Russian-occupied Fort Ross, California, on the Sonoma County coast, 12 miles north of the mouth of the Russian River.

When the Fort Ross property was sold by the Russians in 1841 to John Sutter of Sacramento, the cannon came with it. Sutter loaded the gun onto one of his ships and carried it to his fort on the Sacramento River, where it was placed to guard the entrance. The cannon was sometimes fired to signal an emergency to men on the ranges or in the fields.

When Sutter joined Governor Manuel Micheltorena to put down a rebellion, the gun trailed along with him from Sacramento through the valleys and hills to Los Angeles. In the Battle of Caheunga in 1845 it was fired twice, and was said to be responsible for the only fatalities of that skirmish: two of the rebels’ mules.

When Sutter returned to Sacramento he left the cannon in Los Angeles. It sat in the garden of Inocencia Reyes, becoming overgrown with roses and covered with dust thrown up by horses in the street. In the winter, pigeons roosted in the barrel. But soon Captain Archibald Gillespie pulled it away to San Diego and on to Ballena to assist General Stephen W. Kearny in the Battle of San Pasqual.

The Battle of San Pasqual, not counting Indian massacres, was the bloodiest campaign fought in California. It occurred on December 6, 1846, in the San Pasqual Valley, during the American occupation period. General Kearny, leading a detachment of regulars, including Lieutenant Edward F. Beale (famous for his camel project) and scout Kit Carson, had marched across the desert in what is now Imperial and San Diego counties. Tired and thirsty, they stopped at Warner’s Ranch, an important depot on the Old Emigrant Trail (part of the Southern Overland Trail, a standard route used much in the 1840s and 1850s from the East into California). From there they continued on toward San Diego.

Kearny and his men encountered General Andrés Pico and his formidable group of horsemen -- enlisted primarily from the ranchos – in the narrow San Pasqual Valley. Kearny’s forces suffered heavy losses. The next day, Kearny regrouped his men on a hilltop, from where, under cover of darkness, Lieutenant Beale, his Indian servant, and Kit Carson stole away to San Diego to find reinforcements.

Barefoot, and traveling only at night, the trio picked their way through prickly pear-clad countryside which was patrolled by mounted Californios. It took them three nights to cover the 35 miles to San Diego, where they conveyed the urgent message from Kearny to Commodore Robert F. Stockton. When reinforcements arrived, including Captain Gillespie with the Sutter Gun in tow, they found that Kearny’s men, pinned down on the hilltop, had resorted to eating their mules in order to survive.

On December 11, the reinforcements, with some firings from the Sutter Gun, scattered General Pico’s horsemen and freed Kearny’s army from its hilltop holdout. That evening, the remainder of Kearny’s men, nearly starved and many wounded, straggled into Rancho Los Peñasquitos for a sumptuous bounty of food and drink. The group arrived in OldTown, San Diego, on December 12.

Twenty-one Americans died in the conflict, with almost as many seriously wounded, including Gillespie and Kearny.

Mule Hill, the site where Kearny and his men were trapped, is in present-day San Diego County. East of Highway 395, it’s four miles south of Escondido. There is an historical marker on a side road where there is a vantage point of Mule Hill, ¾ of a mile to the northeast. It’s recognizable as a low, boulder-strewn hill, with white rocks near the summit.

On February 22, 1924, the Daughters of the American Revolution placed a bronze tablet on the battle site itself, which is about seven miles east of Escondido on Highway 78. The following year, on December 20, the State of California set up their own monument, commemorating the men who died in the combat. The scene of the battle eventually became the San Pasqual Battlefield State Historical Monument, after the land was bequeathed by Colonel Edward Fletcher and others of San Diego.

In 1920, the Daughters of the American Revolution placed a granite boulder inset with a bronze plaque in OldTown, San Diego, to mark the arrival of the remainder of Kearny’s men and the end of the Kearny Trail. It was erected in the plaza, across from the old Estudillo and Bandini houses.

After the Battle of San Pasqual, the gun was taken back to San Diego, and then returned with the Mormon Battalion to Sutter’s Fort. Here the Mormons worked for Sutter until gold was discovered. Many of them became instantly wealthy. When they prepared to go home to their families, Sutter gave them the cannon as a going-away present.

The Mormons pulled the gun across Nevada to Salt Lake and later into southern Utah. When they started to build their temple, they tamped large boulders into the marshy ground by raising the cannon on a hoist and dropping it onto them. The beaten gun was left among the boulders as part of the foundation.

Probably few of those passing Inocencia Reyes’ garden or those who built the temple knew that the little cannon had belched Russian fire against Napoleon and traveled halfway across the world and over half of California.

(Note: Newer information than the original source material for this article has since come to light, claiming that the Sutter Gun was not buried in the foundation of the Mormon temple, but went on to yet more adventures.)

Eric Bryan is a freelance writer.

This article originally appeared in Muzzle Blasts.

Copyright © Eric Bryan