USA > California > Land in California, the story of mission land, ranches, squatters, mining claims, railroad grants, land scrip, homesteads > Part 5
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... We find ourselves suddenly threatened by hordes of Yankee emigrants, who have already begun to flock into our country, and whose progress we cannot arrest. Already have the wagons of that perfidious people scaled the almost in- accessible summits of the Sierra Nevada, crossed the entire continent, and penetrated the fruitful valley of the Sacra- mento. What that astonishing people will next undertake, I cannot say; but in whatever enterprise they embark they will be sure to prove successful. Already are these adventurous land-voyagers spreading themselves far and wide over a country which seems suited to their tastes. They are culti- vating farms, establishing vineyards, erecting mills, sawing up lumber, building workshops, and doing a thousand other
[59]
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Land in California
things which seem natural to them, but which Californians neglect or despise . . :
The perfidious Yankees came. They had been coming- in small parties or as individuals-ever since the Jedediah Smith party of trappers made the first American overland expedition to California in 1826. Some of these men be- came citizens of Mexico and landowners. At the time of the American conquest in 1846, toward which Cali- fornians were partly apathetic and, to an extent, sympa- thetic, the white-occupied part of California-a very small part, by the way-was a land of pueblos and ranchos. The population in that year has been estimated to be 10,000, exclusive of Indians.
Established pueblos in 1846 were few in number: Sonoma (founded under Mexican law in 1835 upon the secularization of Mission San Francisco Solano), San Francisco (Yerba Buena), Monterey, San José, Santa Bar- bara, Los Angeles, and San Diego. Four of these origi- nated in presidios. The pueblo title to all seven was later to be upheld by the United States. Branciforte, breathing its last and presently to be succeeded by Santa Cruz, was to make no claim before the United States Land Commis- sion. Benicia and Sacramento were yet unborn. Towns- men in existing pueblos held lots granted them by pueblo authorities under Mexican law.
New Helvetia, John Sutter's privately owned fortress overlooking the Sacramento and American rivers had
1 Pío Pico, as quoted by Joseph Warren Revere in A Tour of Duty in California (New York, C. S. Francis and Company, 1849). Revere adds that the speech may have been delivered by José Antonio Carrillo, whom he refers to as reflecting Pico's views. See Theodore H. Hittell's History of California, II, 397, and Bancroft's History of California, V, 138-266, which indicate that Pico went no farther north than Santa Barbara to indulge in declarations against Americans.
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Gifts of Land
some of the physical aspects of a pueblo, with Sutter him- self a combination of feudal lord and alcalde.
There were also a few villages of white families, or of both white and ex-neophyte families, that had sprung up out of the decay of secularized missions, such as San Juan de Castro at Mission San Juan Bautista, San Juan de Argüello at Mission San Juan Capistrano, together with San Luis Obispo and Carmelo. Some of the inhabitants held parcels of land distributed by commissioners ap- pointed under Governor Figueroa's provisional rules for the secularization of the missions. There were a few purely Indian pueblos in the southern part of the state, too, such as Las Flores, San Dieguito, and San Pascual. None of these villages, white or Indian, were to present claims before the Land Commission, and whatever rights they had were swallowed up in rancho or other titles.
Most of California, however, was outside of pueblo areas at the time the Americans fulfilled Pío Pico's dire prophecy. And most of the good grazing land along the coast and the coastal rivers, along with a part of the San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys, was privately owned rancho land-land that had largely been the gift of the government to individual Mexican citizens. There were in Alta California in 1846 more than 500 ranchos, all but a handful of which had their origin in Mexican grants. Of the few that were of the Spanish period, ending in 1822, most had been confirmed to their original or later owners by new grants from Mexican authorities. The greater number of the ranchos of California had been carved out of former mission-controlled lands following the begin- ning, in 1834, of actual secularization of the missions.
The most northerly of the ranchos, and lying almost entirely in Shasta County, was that of San Buenaventura
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Figure 3. Diseño of Cañada de los Nogales, Los Angeles County.
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Gifts of Land
along the Sacramento River, which was granted in 1844 to naturalized citizen Pierson B. Reading. Reading, a native of New Jersey, had come to California the year before with the Chiles-Walker party, entering into John Sutter's service as clerk and chief of trappers. His thick-walled adobe home still stands on the west bank of the Sacra- mento River near Cottonwood Creek. The cities of Red- ding (named after B. B. Redding, railroad land agent, and not ranchero P. B. Reading) and Anderson are today within the San Buenaventura's boundaries.
The most southerly rancho was the Otay, in San Diego County, close to the border. It was the property of Mag- dalena Estudillo, the daughter of José María Estudillo, Spanish captain of the San Diego company and founder of the Estudillo family in California. This rancho had been the site of an Indian ranchería, Otay Indians being among those who helped to destroy the first mission of San Diego in 1775.
The rancho map of California in the year 1846, when Mexican rule ended, shows rancheros owning much of the best land around the San Francisco Bay region, in what became the counties of Marin, Sonoma, Napa, Solano, Contra Costa, Alameda, and San Mateo. Coastal ranchos immediately north of San Francisco were limited to Marin and Sonoma counties. The entire coastal area from San Francisco to San Diego, however, was principally rancho land. In addition, and of more recent origin, was the thin line of ranchos following the Sacramento River up from John Sutter's Fort (established in 1839) and down along the Upper San Joaquin, or along tributary streams of these rivers. These "central valley" ranchos were held largely by men of Anglo-Saxon or other European origin who had been coming into California during the 'forties,
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Land in California
who had become naturalized to qualify for landowner- ship, and who disregarded the Indian menace that had held back native Spanish Californians from making use of this land. Among them, in addition to Reading, were such men as William B. Ide, William G. Chard, Albert G. Toomes, Robert H. Thomas, Peter Lassen, William Dickey, Edward A. Farwell, James Williams, William Knight, Thomas M. Hardy, William A. Leidesdorff, and John Bidwell. Elsewhere rancheros were predominantly Spanish Californian: descendants of first soldiers and first settlers, men of the Portolá and Anza expeditions and of later parties of colonists. A few Yankee or European sea- farers, trappers, merchants, and traders had been trickling into California for many years and they also had settled down to ranchero roles. These call to mind George Yount, J. B. Chiles, William Pope, E. T. Bale, and John York, who settled in Napa County, Abel Stearns, John Temple, John Rowland, William Workman, Hugo Reid, Henry Dalton, Isaac Williams, Benjamin D. Wilson, David W. Alexander, and Francis Mellus, who found a prosperous or pleasant way of life in Los Angeles County, and shipmasters John Wilson, William G. Dana, Alpheus B. Thompson, and Thomas M. Robbins, who turned readily from seafaring to ranching. Christianized Indians, too, held a number of the ranchos, north and south, for under the law they were citizens and entitled to landowning privileges.
The greater part of northern California, together with vast mountain and desert areas throughout the whole state-making up overwhelmingly the bulk of the state's land area-remained Indian or unoccupied territory, un- claimed by white individuals. Almost none of what was to become, with the Gold Rush, the Mother Lode country
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Gifts of Land
of the lower western Sierra, was rancho land. An out- standing exception was the ten-square-league Rancho Las Mariposas, in what is now Mariposa County, granted in 1844 to Juan Bautista Alvarado and to become famous through John Charles Frémont's later ownership. The first claim to be filed with the Land Commission was Fré- mont's to Las Mariposas, over which there was much liti- gation.
The islands off the California shore should not be over- looked on the 1846 rancho map, for three of them in the Santa Barbara and San Pedro channels were ranchos. These were the islands of Santa Rosa, granted in 1843 to José Antonio and Carlos Carrillo; Santa Cruz, granted in 1839 to Andrés Castillero; and Santa Catalina, granted in 1846 to Tomás M. Robbins.
Although private ownership of most of the ranchos - dates from the period following secularization of the mis- sions (i.e., the 1830's and the 1840's), there was no inter- ruption in the earlier granting of land concessions when Spanish rule gave way to Mexican in 1822. Mexican authorities, like the Spanish, continued to give vague cattle-grazing permits and, when the land laws were really clarified in 1828, to make actual grants of full title.
The first step toward clarification came on August 18, 1824, when the Mexican Congress established rules for the colonization of national lands to stimulate land set- tlement and to satisfy the demands of Mexican promoters of colony movements.2 They promised security to for- eigners who wished to establish themselves in Mexican territory, but prohibited colonization of territory within twenty leagues of the boundaries of a foreign nation or
2 Halleck's Report in House Ex. Doc. No. 17, App. 4; John W. Dwinelle's The Colonial History of San Francisco, Addenda XII.
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Land in California
within ten leagues of the seacoast unless previously ap- proved by the supreme general executive power. They encouraged the entry of foreigners, but in the distribu- tion of lands Mexican citizens were to be given prefer- ence. Prior promises made to "military persons," regarding lands, were to be carried out in the states. Dis- posal of vacant lands to military or court officers was permitted "the supreme authority." The area of land a person could own was limited to eleven square leagues (one of irrigable, four of farming, and six of pasture land). New colonists were prohibited from transferring posses- sion "in mortmain"-that is, to the Church or other eccle- siastical corporations. Absentee ownership was forbidden.
To give effect to this Congressional act of 1824, specific rules and regulations for colonization of territories of the republic were enacted by the Mexican government on November 21, 1828.8 Governors were given authority to grant vacant lands to "contractors (empresarios), families or private persons, whether Mexicans or foreigners, who may ask for them for the purpose of cultivating and in- habiting them." They outlined the steps to be taken by persons wanting lands, beginning with the petition to the governor and what it should contain and describing the land asked for by means of a map. Grants made to families and private persons were not to be held definitely valid without previous consent of the Territorial Deputa- tion or of the supreme government, and grants to empresarios for colonization purposes called for final ap- proval of the supreme government. The rules required the governor to issue a document, signed by him, "to serve as a title to the person interested," and the keeping of a record of petitions and grants, with the maps of the
8 Halleck's Report, loc. cit., App. 5; Dwinelle, op. cit., Addenda XIV.
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Gifts of Land
lands granted. Failure to cultivate or occupy the land granted, within a "proportionate time," would void the grant. The colonist was expected to prove cultivation or occupancy before the municipal authority in order that his right of ownership might be made secure and that he might dispose of his land freely.
Under these colonization laws of 1824 and 1828 and under governmental decrees in 1845 and 1846, author- izing the disposition of mission properties, more than 500 land grants were made. They were made between 1833 and 1846, that is, between the passage of the seculariza- tion act and American occupation.4
Few grants complied one hundred per cent with the letter of the law. Laxity in following details, such as the provision calling for a map describing the land sought, was prevalent. Little attention apparently was paid to the requirement regarding the type of land that should com- pose the eleven square leagues. Written approvals of the Territorial Assembly or of the supreme government often were not obtained. Although the United States Supreme Court held that restrictions against colonization of sea- coast land were applicable only to foreign colonies, some confusion had existed during the Mexican period and
" Regarding the disposition of hitherto undisposed mission estates, the Departmental Assembly on May 28, 1845, authorized the renting of some of the missions and the converting of others into pueblos. Governor Pío Pico on October 28, 1845, issued regulations for the sale and renting of certain missions. The Assembly on April 3, 1846, authorized the sale of the missions. On October 31, 1846-too late to be recognized as a valid act by the United States-the Assembly attempted to annul the sales of missions made by Governor Pico. In addition, the Mexican Minister of War and Marine had given the General Commander of the Californias on March 10, 1846, authority to take necessary steps for the defense of the nation-authority which Pico was to cite as legalizing the mission sales made by him. The United States Land Commission later upheld Pico's sales of the mission lands of San Diego, San Buenaventura, San Fernando, Soledad, and San Juan Bautista, but turned down his sales of San Gabriel and San Luis Rey.
1
SONOMA
YERBA BUENA (SAN FRANCISCO)
SAN JOSE
MONTEREY
SANTA BARBARA-
LOS ANGELES
SAN DIEGO
CALIFORNIA IN 1846
The black areas show the land included within the private land grants that were later con- firmed by the United States. Pueblo and mission holdings were a part of the privately owned areas, but ranchos made up the bulk of them. In preparing this map the General Land Office's 1944 map of the state was used in determining land-grant boundaries.
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before that ruling. Actually much of the seacoast was occupied by individuals under Spanish concessions years before the 1824 legislation, and Mexican governors con- tinued into the year 1846 to grant such lands to its own citizens. In 1840 the Assembly had consulted the supreme government on coastal grants already made but no dis- approval was expressed by the latter." The United States Land Commission, functioning in the 1850's, and the courts to which appeals were taken displayed a liberal and fair attitude toward claimants and ordinarily con- firmed the titles of persons who could prove possession and actual occupancy by themselves or predecessors in the Mexican period-regardless of whether or not the provisions of Mexican laws were followed religiously in obtaining Mexican grants. Patents were issued claimants by the United States (following confirmation by the Board of Land Commissioners, approval of the District or the Supreme Court, and approved government surveys) as final and perfect evidences of title. On the other hand, the commissioners or the courts were quick to throw out antedated or last-minute grants made in anticipation of American annexation, together with those made after July 7, 1846-the date Commodore John D. Sloat took possession of Monterey and the date arbitrarily assigned as the end of Mexican rule-as well as alleged grants, like the fantastic ones of José Y. Limantour, that were ob- viously fraudulent or forged.
A spot check of the rancho map of California in 1846 would show a few ranchos of less than 20 acres in size, such as the little rancho of Francisco Sales in the San Gabriel Valley of Los Angeles County, and others gigantic in area like the Ex-Mission de San Fernando, in the same county,
" Bancroft, History of California, VI, 531.
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Figure 4. Diseño of Rancho Cañada de los Alisos, Orange County.
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Gifts of Land
comprising more than 115,000 acres. It would disclose one man, the influential and wealthy José de la Guerra y Noriega of Santa Barbara claiming four ranchos-Simi, San Julian, El Conejo, and Las Posas-whose acreage to- taled 215,857.88 acres. Even this vast land holding, how- ever, is less than some twentieth-century holdings of California land. It would show substantial ownerships by members of such well-known Spanish Californian fam- ilies as Avila, Alanis, Alvarado, Bernal, Carrillo, Castro, Domínguez, Estudillo, de la Guerra, Higuera, Ibarra, López, Lugo, Machado, Noriega, Ortega, Pacheco, Palo- mares, Peralta, Pico, Reyes, Ruiz, Sánchez, Sepúlveda, del Valle, Vallejo, Verdugo, and Yorba. It would show the Fort Ross (Russian) settlement included within the coastal four-square-league Rancho Muniz owned by Manuel Torres. It would show a scattering, north and south, of ranchos that had been granted by Mexican governors to Indians, for example, the Suisun in Sonoma County whose first owner was Christianized Francisco Solano, "chief of the tribes of the frontiers of Sonoma"; and the 126.26-acre rancho Huerta de Cuati in Los Angeles County, the property of Victoria Reid, Indian wife of the Scotsman Hugo Reid. The map would show Cayetano Juarez' Rancho Yokaya, in Mendocino County, the boundary of which on the north, east, and west, as de- scribed in early deeds, was "the country inhabited by the unchristianized Indians." It would reveal Captain John Wilson, who left the sea for the successful life of a Cali- fornia ranchero, as owner of 32,430-acre Rancho Cañada de los Osos Pecho y Islay, in San Luis Obispo County, and the possessor of a two-story adobe home in the "valley of the bears." It would show the Irish physician and Santa Barbara citizen Nicholas A. Den as owner of the coast
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Land in California
rancho Los Dos Pueblos. The map would display Spanish names for most of the ranchos, yet it would also carry a substantial number bearing Indian labels: Cahuenga, Capay, Caslamayomi, Caymus, Cholami, Collayomi, Cosumnes, Cotate, Cucamonga, Cuyama, and Cujamaca, to name but a few.
Such was the California of ranchos that greeted Wil- liam Carey Jones in 1849, when, representing the "per- fidious people" of the United States and the United States Congress, he came to classify all grants and claims derived from Spanish and Mexican authorities.
CHAPTER VII
Chain of Title
A CHAIN OF TITLE is the sequence of ownership of a par- ticular piece of land as shown by the public records of property transfers. These records are full of human in- terest, especially when they have to do with rancho lands that have had generations of owners from the pastoral age of California to the metropolitan present.
An example is Rancho San Pascual, the site of present- day Pasadena. Let us trace the chain of its ownership or title through the Spanish, Mexican, and American pe- riods down to the present day. Not only will the changing laws of governments be reflected, but people long dead will come to life and testify how a Spanish Californian acquired a rancho, how he held, lost, or sold his title, how he and his successors lived, what most concerned them, how they got along with their neighbors, what interest rate they paid on their mortgages, the names of their chil- dren, what they provided for in their wills, what hap-
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Land in California
pened year by year to the land and its many owners, and what wars, droughts, booms, and busts did for or to them.
The story of Rancho San Pascual is only one of the stories of the five hundred and more ranchos that flour- ished on the river and pasture lands of California in the year 1846, when Mexican rule gave way to American. It is a story revealed in petitions, grants, deeds, mortgages, patents, court actions, in laws of nations, and in proceed- ings of federal, state, county, and municipal bodies, sup- plemented by the direct testimony of individuals found in public and private writings, records, and histories.
Before white people came to San Pascual there were, of course, Indians. They lived on the banks of a brook on the east side of Raymond Hill, at Los Robles Canyon in Oak Knoll, at the mouth of Millard Canyon, along the Arroyo Seco, especially at Garfias Springs, and no doubt in other places. Of their customs or laws regarding owner- ship of land we have no information, but something of their way of life, their villages or rancherías of stick-built huts, their rich language and involved beliefs, together with their reactions to Spanish invaders-beings with a "nasty white color and having ugly blue eyes"-is to be found in ranchero Hugo Reid's frank and illuminating essays that appeared in the Los Angeles Star during the year 1852. Reid, a Scotsman, had married an intelligent Indian woman, Victoria, who had been born in a ranchería and brought up as a neophyte of San Gabriel Mission. Part of the Indian phase, too, of San Pascual's story is told in the reports of those who have found Indian remains in the Pasadena area, referred to in local histories or accounts.
With the Spanish occupation of California the absolute title to the San Pascual area, as well as all other parts of
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Chain of Title
the state, was vested, under the Laws of the Indies, in the King of Spain. The laws formulated in Spain by the Council of the Indies, through which the will of the King was carried out in America, regulated the affairs of the New World. When finally compiled, under the title of Recopilación de Leyes de los Reynos de las Indias, they were published in 1681 at Madrid, in a four-volume edi- tion, by order of Charles II. Under the King the Indians were recognized as the theoretical owners of the territory they needed, but-to indulge in an understatement-the civilizing process to which they were subjected greatly reduced their land needs.
San Pascual land, with its Indian inhabitants, came under the jurisdiction of San Gabriel Mission, the first location of which, in 1771, was on the banks of the San Gabriel River near its passage through the southern hills of the valley. A few years later it was removed to its pres- ent place at the Indian village of Sibag-na. Near by lay the live oak forests, the good soil, and the streams of the Pasadena, the South Pasadena, and the San Marino areas over which, with other land, the mission was given juris- diction.
The mission phase of San Pascual is part of the whole story of California, for the threefold plan of Spanish colo- nization provided for presidios, missions, and pueblos. We find the story of San Gabriel Mission and its mission- aries interwoven in all the general histories of California, in the specific accounts of this mission, in the diaries of explorers, travelers, and trappers who visited San Gabriel, in interesting sidelights to be found in the archives of its nearest pueblo, Los Angeles, and in the transcripts of the United States Land Commission and district court pro- ceedings involving the nearest ranchos: San Pascual, Santa
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Land in California
Anita, San Rafael, and San Francisquito. Secularization ended this phase, with secular administrator Colonel Nicolás Gutiérrez being placed in charge at San Gabriel in the year 1834. The laws and regulations which trans- formed this and other California missions into parish churches and made rich lands available to private owner- ship are to be found, among other places, in the much- quoted official reports of Henry W. Halleck and William Carey Jones, made in 1849 and 1850. During this mission period El Rincón de San Pascual-which was the full name given to the land bounded by the mission itself, the mountains, and the Arroyo Seco-served the interests of San Gabriel as a sheep and cattle ranch.
Even before secularization was a fact at least one far- seeing individual looked hopefully on San Pascual. He was sixty-three-year-old Spanish ex-artilleryman Juan Mariné (or Mariner), who had come to California in 1795 and had retired from the army in 1821 with the rank of lieutenant. He was a resident at Mission San Gabriel, and apparently a close friend of Father José Bernardo Sánchez, the popular and successful head of the mission. He was, perhaps, the same person as "Don J. M. M., an old Span- iard who had large commercial relations with the mis- sion," referred to in Hugo Reid's essays on the Indians. These essays give an excellent picture of two men, Ma- riné and Sánchez, who loved good eating, hearty living, and practical joking.
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