Chief Solano was a Suisan Indian who lived during the early 19th century. His story serves as an important example of the romanticized legends behind the mission era. For over 100 years, the legend of Chief Solano was spread through out the region, although many of the facts in the story are not plausible. Lieutenant Mariano Vallejo, who was given command of the northern frontier of California by the Mexican government in the early 19th century, spread the tale of an Indian that negotiated peace with neighboring tribes or led his troops into battle against other Indians. Later research suggests that this tale is false because the Suisan were not a warring people, as Vallejo suggests, and his timeline does not fit with a known raid on a Suisan village that wiped out a large portion of their population. Vallejo claims to have met Solano in 1834 with an army of 40,000 warriors, but the Suisan were not known warriors and most of their population had been destroyed in the area around Mission Dolores in an 1810 raid. Solano was most likely raised in the mission because the surviving villagers either fled to the interior of California or were taken to the mission. If Solano had been raised in the missions, he would have had trouble learning his traditional language and communicating with tribal leaders outside of the mission. The various explanations debunking the myth suggest that the tale of Chief Solano and his actual life are different stories, which teaches us that the myths about the mission era need to be checked against the limited evidence left behind for us to interpret.