California Rich Read online

  From stories such as this one it is possible to conclude that the early Spanish land-grant families were foolish, gullible, or at best naïve. But this was hardly the case. The relatively small handful of men who had come up, by way of Mexico, with Portolá and had established families in Alta California—the Sepulvedas, the Figueroas, the Yorbas, the Picos—had been granted vast tracts of land and had been enormously successful as cattle rancheros. The great adobe hacienda of Don Bernardo Yorba, one of the sons of José Antonio Yorba, who had come with Portolá’s party, contained over a hundred rooms and was operated, as southern plantations were, as a ducal city-state, with its own carpenters, millwrights, cobblers, and ironmongers. The daughter of Thomas Yorba, who owned 60,000 acres of the Rancho Santa Ana, was an early nineteenth-century fashion plate. She owned outfits costing over a thousand dollars each, including more than 150 dresses “made of the finest satin and silk, each a distinct pattern, and low shoes with silver buckles, bright sashes, belts of brilliant colors, and a rebozo which was worn over the head and shoulders, with elaborate jewelry to match.” The Spaniards brought horses with them, animals the native Indians had never seen before, and the Indians at first assumed that the horses were human women in disguise and that the men on their backs were their children, since this was the way that Indian women carried their children. The Spaniards also demonstrated the superiority of their guns over the Indians’ bows and arrows by hanging a bearskin from the branch of a tree and showing how an arrow, fired at the bearskin, merely bounced off, while a bullet tore through it. The Indians were suitably impressed.

  On the great ranchos, cattle roamed freely without fences. Indeed, the history of California might have been quite different—and the entire state might still be owned by the descendants of roughly a dozen Spanish families—if it had not been for a series of not entirely unrelated events. The first, of course, was California’s independence from Mexico in 1846 and subsequent admission to the Union in 1850. Immediately the federal government began challenging the validity of the Spanish grants. According to the treaty with Mexico that was concluded in February 1848, the United States promised that the property rights of owners of California land would not be disturbed and that Spanish land-grant owners would be protected just as if they were citizens of the United States. But this stipulation covered only property that could be proved to have been acquired in California prior to July 7, 1846. Fortunately for the heirs of Bernardo Yorba—who had no less than twenty-three children—the Yorbas were able to prove that their large rancho had been granted in July 1834. But other Spanish families were less successful in defending the challenges from Washington, which, despite the treaty, clearly tended to view the Spanish families as Mexicans—as indeed they had become—and therefore as outsiders, aliens, enemies.

  Simultaneously, the great rush of gold-seekers and squatters that began pouring into California in 1849 and 1850 created a new and very serious problem for the Spanish landowners. According to a contemporary report, the newcomer did not hesitate to set up a small tent or rough cabin on any piece of land. In the mining regions the miner was free to stake a claim, but this was not true of fertile land in the agricultural valleys and with the land on which were started many of the early towns. Some of these lands were grants made to individuals by the Spanish or Mexican government and were, therefore, private property. These private grants often covered many square miles. The new immigrants to California refused to accept or believe that any single person could own so much land. By 1856 not even half of the land claims studied by the Federal Land Commission had been satisfactorily settled.

  Adding to the problem of who owned what was the fact that there were no fences and that the boundaries claimed in the various land grants were often very loosely and imprecisely designated. A typical parcel of land, for example, was described as bounded by “the old road,” extending to “the prickly pear patch,” and from there to “the steer’s skull” and “the tumbleweed,” or “the small stone.” Invariably, each of the descriptions of these parcels ended with the phrase “mas o menos”—“more or less”—and, needless to say, the tumbleweed over the years might have tumbled elsewhere, and the steer’s skull and the small stone might have been buried in the drifting sand. In trying to settle the many claims, the Land Commission occasionally ruled that a claimant owned quite a bit more land than he thought he did—particularly if he happened to be an Anglo, or gringo. But more often, particularly in the case of a Spanish Mexican, it determined that he owned much less.

  Finally, adding to all these vicissitudes, complications, prejudices, and bureaucratic red tape from the federal government, there occurred an event that virtually spelled the doom of all but the doughtiest of the great rancheros of California. In the end they would be destroyed by something they could not possibly fight in a court of law or otherwise: the weather. The Great Drought began in 1860, and it continued through 1861 and 1862. In 1863 and 1864 it was even worse. Streams diminished into trickles and then into troughs of dust. Even the most sophisticated irrigation systems were useless without a source. The cattle, which had made the rancheros rich, began to die. Soon the corpses of thousands of head of beef lay strewn across the thousands of acres of brown hillsides like so many moldering gunnysacks. The hot air reeked of decaying flesh. If skinned in time, hides could be sold for a small sum and the carcasses could be shipped to a glue works, but the physical process of dealing with so many dead animals was overwhelming.

  Quickly on the heels of the Great Drought came a band of avid moneylenders, as the once rich rancheros found themselves suddenly unable to pay their taxes. What the moneylenders offered, in return for cash, were mortgages, and in the space of a few short years huge amounts of land that had once belonged to the Spanish passed through foreclosures into the hands of gringo bankers in San Francisco. At least, the descendants of the Spanish land-grant families today tend to blame the gringo bankers for their massive losses of land.

  Of course, in later generations the descendants of the gringo bankers would defend the actions of their forebears, saying that the Mexicans had lost their land at least partly through their own faults—their fondness for gambling, for betting on their own horses (which the Anglos didn’t do) in their rodeos and races, their participation in what was general corruption, and their habit of producing large, unwieldy families that had trouble controlling the land. The Mexicans, the Californians like to say, were their own undoing.

  Indeed, there were also cases in which rancheros were betrayed by members of their own aristocratic class, and even by members of their own families. One of the most notorious moneylending companies of the day was the nongringo firm of Pioche & Bayerque in San Francisco, which charged an interest rate of 5 percent per month, compounded monthly, and this quickly became the going rate. So desperate were the rancheros for ready cash that even a man with only a few hundred dollars to lend could find himself in a few months’ time the forecloser on a great tract of land.

  In southern California, Abel Stearns—a Yankee from Massachusetts and, when he arrived in 1829, one of the first American-born men in the region—had married a fourteen-year-old Spanish girl named Doña Arcadia Bandini of a proud ranchero family. Stearns became a naturalized Mexican citizen, adopted the ennobling “Don,” and during the drought became a moneylender to the rancheros, including his wife’s relatives. The land that Don Abel Stearns accumulated in the process became the basis of the Stearns Rancho Corporation, which has been a principal developer of the western side of Orange County down to the present time. Similarly, Don Juan (born John) Forster was an Englishman who came to California and married Ysidora Pico, a sister of Pio and Andrés Pico. Like Stearns, Forster became a naturalized Mexican citizen; in 1873 he sued his brother-in-law, Pio Pico, claiming that during the drought period he had loaned Pico money that Pico insisted he had never received. In the now Anglo-dominated courts of California it was again a case of English-speaking versus Spanish-speaking people, and Forster won his case.
It was appealed in the State Supreme Court by Pico, but once more Forster was declared the victor. His prize was the Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores, and title to some 133,440 acres in San Diego County.

  Whether Henry Miller ever indulged in this sort of unlovely activity has never been clear, but it is perhaps more than a coincidence that some of his largest landholdings were acquired during the early 1860s, the years of the Great Drought. And as more of Miller’s land became arable, he began stocking it with beef and sheep, and from the livestock the money really began to roll in. With California a part of the Union, it was now possible to obtain even more land through simple bribery and fraud. Some of Miller’s most valuable business associates promptly became the employees of the Land Commission’s office, the California government executive departments, and both houses of Congress in Washington. Of course Miller was no longer alone. The land-grabbers of California were all using Miller’s methods, and perjury, fraudulent surveys and entries, and collusion with local, state, and United States officials were all part of the technique.

  Miller’s methods were no different from those that had been commonplace in California for several years, nor were acts of chicanery confined to the Anglos. The Mexican government in California was overthrown by the American forces officially on July 7, 1846, but it had been apparent for some months prior to this that the Mexicans’ cause was lost. That his days as governor were numbered was quite clear to Pio Pico, and in May of that year Señor Pico began routinely handing out enormous grants of land in return for bribes, in anticipation of his imminent retirement from public life. Seeing what was going on, a number of other Mexican officials, as well as private citizens, embarked on a lively business of selling land grants over Governor Pico’s forged signature. Some of these forged and fraudulent land grants were crude and primitive, but others were clever, sophisticated, and almost convincing. When American capitalists such as Henry Miller moved into California and started buying up these grants, it fell to the courts to decide which were legitimate and which were not.

  Millions of acres of the richest agricultural, grazing, mining, and timber land were involved—not only in California, but in New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado as well. In some cases the Mexican land grants were for entire California towns and cities. And so it is perhaps not surprising that the local courts throughout California and the West tended to be sympathetic to the land-grabbers’ claims and to uphold them. Moreover, many western judges were in collusion with the claimants, while others were engaged in land-grabbing operations of their own. The sweet smell of money to be made in California was on all sides and was just too heady to resist.

  One Californian, for example, Henry Cambuston, claimed that eleven square leagues (about thirty-three square miles) of pasture-land on the Sacramento River had been granted to him by Governor Pico on May 23, 1846. The California courts decided in his favor. The government, however, pressed its case to the United States Supreme Court, charging that the alleged grant was fraudulent and forged. In 1857 the Supreme Court handed down a decision expressing doubts about the genuineness of the grant and reversing the decision of the California court. Another claimant, named Fuentes, carried his claim for eleven square leagues to the Supreme Court, where it was denounced by Attorney General Black as “fraudulent and spurious, a base and impudent forgery … It is in the handwriting of Manuel Castro, a part of whose business consisted in forging land grants.” The Fuentes grant, Black stated, was dated Monterey, June 12, 1843, but had actually been forged in Mexico City in 1850. The court agreed with Black and disallowed the claim. James R. Bolton turned up with a claim to ten thousand acres outside San Francisco—a claim worth, at a conservative estimate in 1851, more than $2,000,000. Bolton produced documents to show that Governor Pico had granted the land to one Santillan, a priest, in 1846. Bolton had bought it from Santillan in 1850 for $200,000. The Supreme Court rejected all Mr. Bolton’s evidence and dismissed the claim. Even Governor Pico’s brother, Andrés, was deemed in the eyes of the Supreme Court to be in fraudulent possession of a forged grant for his eleven square leagues of California (eleven square leagues was a popular size for a parcel) and had his claim thrown out.

  By 1869, thirty-six private California land claims had been rejected by the Supreme Court. Some had been almost successful, such as that of José Limantour, who was very nearly able to steal—with the help of state officials—over a half million acres of California land with a forged grant from Governor Pico. And at the same time, nearly an equal number of claims—thirty-three in all—were confirmed by the court. Most of these were probably just as fraudulent as the ones rejected, but during these years Washington was thronged with lobbyists for the land-grabbers. A number of important congressmen also had financial interests in the success of the false claims. And it was widely rumored—though never proved—that at least one Supreme Court justice who had been appointed during the Civil War, a jurist whose vote often decided the fate of the claims, had more than a passing interest—either financial, political, or friendly—in the success or failure of certain land grants. Still, though it was quite clear that the Americans involved in the great California land grab were just as unscrupulous as the Mexicans, the popular attitude was to place all blame for malfeasance and skulduggery on the Mexicans. In 1869, for example, in an investigation into the California land scandals, the House Committee on Claims referred piously and scathingly to “a bagful of affidavits of drunken and venal Mexicans who can be hired for five dollars apiece to swear to anything.”

  The Mexican land-grant scheme of acquiring California land—since it often involved lengthy court battles—frequently turned out to be both complicated and costly. Other methods, in the meantime, were almost childishly simple. There was the “swampland” ruse, for example. If land could be declared swampland, it was deemed officially worthless and could be bought for next to nothing. All one had to do was to get one’s surveyor to pronounce the land a swamp—which, for a price, most surveyors were willing to do even if the land was not a swamp. Or one could get one’s surveyor to appraise the land during the spring melt, when it was indeed a swamp. The swampland laws were wonderfully loose and flexible. In the 1870s it was possible to file a “claim” for real or alleged swampland. A claim cost nothing and could remain inactive for an indefinite number of years. All one had to do was wait until a buyer came along who wanted to buy the land in good faith, and then one could sell one’s “rights”—rights to land for which one had never paid a cent and never intended to pay a cent.

  In 1873 the Swamp Land Investigating Committee of the California Assembly was formed to look into the activities of the land-grabbers, which had been going on for years. Among its findings, the committee sonorously announced, was a “mighty mass of evidence … that through the connivance of parties, surveyors were appointed who segregated lands as ‘swamp,’ which were not so in fact. The corruption existing in the land department of the General Government has aided this system of fraud.” A quick stop, the committee implied, would be put to this shameful business. But as often happens with the findings of investigative committees, it was too late for the findings to do much good. By then more than 17,000,000 acres of the lush Sacramento Valley were owned by about a hundred men. In the San Joaquin Valley, which was harder to irrigate, the average landholder had 100,000 acres. Henry Miller and his partner, Charles Lux, another ex-butcher, by then owned 14,539,000 acres of the richest land in California and southern Oregon. The Miller-Lux empire embraced more than 22,500 square miles, a territory three times as large as the state of New Jersey and twice the size of Belgium. On this land more than two million head of cattle grazed.

  Miller and Lux were America’s first cattle kings, and Henry Miller liked to boast that he could ride from Mexico to the Oregon border on horseback and never need to sleep on land that was not his own. He had also been responsible for pushing through the California Assembly its Law of Riparian Rights, which provided that anyone owning land along a river could use
that river’s water to whatever extent he wished. This gave Miller virtually complete control of all the water in the San Joaquin Valley—a considerable resource.

  A joke of the era had it that “whatever land in California Henry Miller doesn’t own the Southern Pacific Railroad does.” This was of course an exaggeration, but not a flagrant one. Miller had 14,500,000 acres, and the Southern Pacific had 16,387,000—clearly somewhat more land than would be required for laying down tracks and building switchyards. Of California’s 101,563,523 acres, Miller and the railroad owned close to 31,000,000, leaving a little over 70,000,000 acres for other people. The railroad had acquired its land much the way Henry Miller had, but in the case of the railroad, its greed for land had begun to have an unexpected, and unpleasant, side effect: it was discouraging further immigration to California, and the small farmer who wanted to farm a hundred acres or so was being driven out. The railroads had been willing to sell land—at exorbitant prices, of course—to small farmers, and to those with insufficient capital the railroads cheerfully offered mortgages. When small farmers could not make their mortgage payments the railroads just as cheerfully foreclosed. But a railroad, unlike a Henry Miller, had to count on an expanding population to make it pay—an increase in people, produce, livestock, and other goods to transport. The railroads had counted on cities growing out of the California wilderness. But now, with so much land in the hands of so few people, where would the cities go? The huge landholdings had made much of California seem a very empty place. The small landholder in California found himself surrounded by boundless acres of a rich man’s land, friendless, neighborless.