History of California

by Helen Elliott Bandini

The man whom the government sent out to investigate the subject, W. C. Jones, was an able Spanish scholar, skilled in Mexican and Spanish law, and his carefully prepared report declared that the greater part of the rancheros had perfect title to their lands, and all that was necessary for the United States to do was to have them resurveyed.

In Congress, Senator Benton and Senator Fremont in most points supported this report as the only just plan. Against the bill that was finally passed Senator Benton protested vigorously, saying that it amounted to confiscation of the land instead of the protection promised by the American government, through Larkin and Sloat.

This law made it necessary for every Californian, no matter how long he had lived on his land, to prove his title to it, and that, too, while the United States attorney resisted his claim inch by inch, as if he were a criminal.

Thus the Spanish American, who was seldom a man of business after the standard of the Eastern states, was forced into the distressing necessity of fighting for what was his own, in courts, the law and language of which he did not understand. Meantime his property was rendered hard to sell, while taxation fell heaviest upon him because he was a large land owner. Often, too, he would have to pay his lawyer in notes, promising to give money when he could get it, and in the end the lawyer often got most of the land which the United States government had left to the unhappy Californian.

The way in which unprincipled men got the better of the rancheros would fill a volume. Guadalupe Vallejo, in the Century Magazine (Vol. 41), tells how a leading American squatter came to her father and said:—

“There is a large piece of your land where the cattle run loose, and your vaqueros are all gone to the mines. I will fence the field at my own expense if you will give me half of it.” Vallejo agreed, but when the American had inclosed it, he entered it on the record books as government land and kept it all.

This article also describes the losses of the ranchmen from cattle stealing. It tells how Americans, who were afterward prosperous citizens, were guilty of selling Spanish beef which they knew had been stolen.

The life of the Spanish-speaking people at the mines was made miserable. The American miners seemed to feel that the Californian had no right to be there. Of course there were some of the lower class, many of whom were part Indian, who would lie, steal, or, if they had an opportunity, murder; but often those who were persecuted were not of this type. A woman of refinement, who under the title of “Shirley” wrote her experiences at the mines, says:—

“The people of the Spanish race on Indian Bar, many of whom are highly educated gentlemen, are disposed to bear an ill opinion of our whole nation on account of the rough men here. They think that it is a great characteristic of Columbia’s children to be prejudiced, selfish, avaricious, and unjust.”

Because in a quarrel a Mexican killed a drunken miner, the men of the Bar determined to drive away all Californians. They captured several, not the guilty one, banished some, and two they sentenced to be flogged. Shirley from her cabin heard what was going on. She tells how one of them, a gentlemanly young Spaniard, begged in vain to be killed rather than be disgraced by whipping. When, finally, he was released, he swore eternal vengeance against the American race.