Barton S. Alexander - California Years

California Years

As was common for many senior officers at the end of the war, Alexander was honored with a brevet rank of brigadier general in the regular army, effective March 13, 1865. Following his closure of the offices of the defenses of Washington, D.C., he was briefly ordered to New England, where he supervised the renovation of various minor fortifications and river improvements in Maine. That posting came to an end on January 7, 1867, when he was ordered to the West Coast as the chief U.S. Army engineer in the region. He was promoted to lieutenant colonel on March 7, 1867.

As chief engineer to the Military Division of the Pacific, he was the top U.S. Army Corps of Engineers officer on the entire American Pacific Coast. Upon his arrival on the West Coast, he visited locations from Alaska to the Mexican border in order to analyze the work that would be needed. Between 1868 and 1870, he surveyed numerous California harbors and made engineering suggestions as required. One of these suggestions resulted in the construction of a 7,000-foot breakwater that made Long Beach harbor accessible to large amounts of shipping for the first time. In 1870, he suggested that landowners near Colusa, California, construct levees to contain the Sacramento River within a single channel. The plan would reclaim swampland and control the river's annual floods, making large-scale farming possible. The plan was eagerly seized upon by local residents.

In the spring of 1872, Col. Alexander and Maj. Gen. John M. Schofield, commander of the Military Division of the Pacific, sailed from San Francisco, California, to Honolulu in the then-independent Kingdom of Hawaii on a secret mission to evaluate Hawaii's ports in terms of defensive capabilities and commercial facilities. Fellow civil war veteran Alfred S. Hartwell was their host, who was on the kingdom's supreme court at the time. They recognized the great potential of Pearl Harbor as a "harbor of refuge in time of war," and on May 8, 1873, recommended that the War Department acquire the harbor. Their suggestion resulted in the signing of the reciprocity Treaty of 1875 between the United States and Hawaii. As part of the treaty, Hawaii ceded the area of Pearl Harbor to the United States in return for trade agreements benefiting Hawaiian sugar planters. The treaty was signed on September 8, 1876, helping pave the way for eventual American annexation of the Kingdom.