California was so remote from the headquarters of the general government, that these things were done with impunity, for it would have been difficult to send a force into the State that could subdue it, with its scattered population, and if laws obnoxious to them were enacted, and they violated them, or expelled an official who proposed their enforcement, it was quietly overlooked. Managing their own affairs in this way, a spirit of independence and bold daring had been cultivated, especially since the time when our story of California life commenced in Carson's first visit to that State, nor had the intercourse with Americans hitherto lessened these feelings, for the California Mexicans admired the Americans, as they called them, and cultivated good fellowship with them generally; so that we see when the Bear Flag and Independence of the State became the order under Fremont and his party, many of its leading citizens came at once into the arrangement, or were parties in it at the first. Had the conquest and government of the country been conducted wholly by Fremont, it would have exhibited very little expenditure of life, for conciliation and the cultivation of kindly feeling was the policy he pursued; indeed, with Carson as prime counselor, whose wife at home in Taos owned kindred with this people as one of the same race, how could it have been otherwise! though as Americans and citizens of the United States, in whose employ they acted, first allegiance was ever cheerfully accorded to their country, by Carson equally with Fremont, as the history of California most fully proves. The United States forces at San Diego were not in condition to again take the field, until a number of weeks had elapsed, when a command of six hundred had been organized for the purpose of again capturing Los Angelos, where the Mexican forces were concentrated; and General Kearney and Commodore Stockton were united in conducting it, and in two days arrived within fifteen miles of the town, near where the Mexican army, to the number of seven hundred, had established themselves strongly upon a hill beside their camp, and between whom and the Americans flowed a stream of water. General Kearney ordered two pieces of artillery planted where they would rake the position of the Mexicans, which soon forced them to break up their camp, when Gen. Kearney and Commodore Stockton immediately marched into the town, but only to find it destitute of any military control, as the Mexican army had gone northward to meet Col. Fremont, who had left Monterey with a force of four hundred Americans, to come to Los Angelos.