After the fall of the armory of the San Francisco Blues, where Maloney and Terry had run for sanctuary, Colonel Joseph R. West surrendered the California Exchange with some seventy-five men and two hundred and fifty rifles and muskets. Calhoun Benham’s company of law and order forces at Montgomery and Pacific Streets, as well as those at Madam Pique’s Hall at Kearny and Post also gave up. Together these constituted the great majority of the law and order militia and their arms and ammunition in the city, and with their capture the opponents of the Committee of Vigilance suffered a sudden and complete collapse.
San Francisco Bay, Albert Bierstadt
On that same Saturday the vigilantes heard of a shipment of arms that had been sent by Governor Johnson from Sacramento to the prison at Point San Quentin aboard the schooner Mariposa so that they could be repaired and then transported to San Francisco. They consisted of eleven cases of muskets and three boxes of pistols and ammunition. But at once the vigilance committee sent a company of men after those weapons on the sloop Malvina. At Corte Madera Creek they caught up with the Mariposa and commandeered the arms, hidden in the hold under several layers of brick, and delivered them to the city by five o’clock that afternoon.
Point San Quentin
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