Josiah Belden

Josiah Belden (May 4, 1815 – April 23, 1892) was an American pioneer and politician.

Born in Connecticut, Belden was orphaned by the time he was 14. He later moved to St. Louis, Missouri and became a successful businessman. In 1841 he joined the Bartleson-Bidwell Party, the first organized emigrant party to use the California Trail to reach the Mexican province of Alta California. The party was detained at Mission San Jose by General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo for illegally entering Mexico without valid passports; Vallejo violated his orders to force all American immigrants to leave California, allowing the group to remain after becoming Mexican citizens.

He came in 1842 to Monterey, where Thomas O Larkin put him in a mercantile store at Santa Cruz and made him his agent. Belden was living in Branciforte (now Santa Cruz), when the USS United States, under the command of Commodore Thomas ap Catesby Jones, captured the nearby Presidio of Monterey on October 20, 1842. Jones appointed Belden alcalde, a political position that combines the functions of a mayor, a judge, and a sheriff. On October 21, Jones discovered that the U.S. and Mexico were not at war, and returned the Presidio back to the Mexican forces; Belden's short term as alcalde also ended.

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