In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

c h a p t e r t h r e e Farms without Titles The eagerness to keep pumping money into these establishments was all the more astounding given that title to the land itself was in question. No one truly owned the land. In the midst of all their hard work and mounting debts, farmers on Ranchos Rio de los Putos, Los Putos, and Laguna de Santos Callé found themselves in the position of having to defend their property rights. Under the provisions of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the California Land Act passed by Congress in 1851, claimants (whether Hispanic or non-Hispanic) were required to have their titles confirmed by a three-member California Land Commission. The stakes were all or nothing. Claims made under Mexican rule would either be confirmed to individuals or rejected and become part of the public domain. Both the claimant and the United States could appeal the Land Commission’s decision to the appropriate federal district court and then to the U.S. Supreme Court. The mass of litigation that ensued—the Land Commission heard over 800 cases between 1852 and 1856, and the average length of time for a claimant to secure a patent was seventeen years—has become part of the lore of early California history .1 John Wolfskill had a relatively easy time of it. Unlike most Hispanic claimants, Wolfskill had a rudimentary knowledge of both Mexican and U.S. law and was able to present a convincing, if not ironclad, case. He had kept all the written documentation from the Mexican government including the original hand-sketched diseño of his grant, paid a federal surveyor to draw up a more exact version, secured the testimony of several prominent Californians (including John Bidwell, whose reputation for honesty was unsurpassed in these hearings), and had actually occupied his claim all along. It also helped that his lawyer, Henry Hancock (who was also the federal surveyor), understood that the earlier the case could be presented to the Land Commission, the better its chance of confirmation. With precedent a key factor, Hancock reasoned that fraudulent cases could later disad- vantage authentic ones. Wolfskill’s claim was filed on May 15, 1852, and while it took seventeen months for Hancock to collect the various documents and depositions , the Land Commission itself took less than a month to confirm the claim, on November 7, 1854. U.S. attorneys appealed the case but only as a matter of procedure . Their appeal was dismissed on March 14, 1857, and Wolfskill received his patent from President James Buchanan shortly thereafter.2 Juan Manuel Vaca and Juan Felipe Peña’s experience with the Land Commission , in contrast to Wolfskill’s, was anything but routine. To present their claim, they hired the prestigious law firm of Jones, Tomkins, and Strode (headed by William Carey Jones), who proceeded much the same way that Hancock had for Wolfskill. Nevertheless, on November 15, 1853, the Land Commission rejected Los Putos. The fact that Peña, for inexplicable reasons, used the name Armijo (his stepfather’s name) in the grant documents raised considerable suspicion. Even more importantly, the claimants’ lawyers did not have the grant properly surveyed , presumably because of its “floating” nature. Unlike most grants, which specified an amount of land in terms of given boundaries, Los Putos purported to give the grantees ten square leagues of land within an area five or six times that size. “The Commissioners,” the opinion stated, “have no power to supply so vital a defect in the Claimants’ testimony.” But the lawyers did have the power to conduct a survey. They could have simply made up the boundaries to Vaca’s and Peña’s liking—just as they had a year earlier with John C. Frémont’s famous Mariposa claim, a grant whose floating nature was even more pronounced than that of Los Putos but which was nonetheless confirmed by both the Land Commission and the U.S. Supreme Court. With regard to Los Putos, however, Jones, Tomkins, and Strode—perhaps overcon fident, perhaps less committed to Hispanic clients—presented the case badly. Though the California Land Act of 1851 in essence demanded it, few of these grants could be measured with any sort of precision. Even those that did not float, such as Rio de Los Putos, provided only vague approximations of their actual boundaries. It was left to the lawyers to impose...

Share