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Show 588 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT privilege of exchanging 450,000 acres of nearly worthless land for timberlands in Oregon, some 200,000 acres of which were later acquired by Weyerhaeuser Companies.70 Similarly the San Francisco Mountain Forest Reserve created by President Roosevelt just before Hermann's warning was delivered proved a boon. Two other proposals for reserves subsequently came to the government from local interests motivated by questionable considerations. The more important one, and the one over which much lobbying was conducted, related to a private land grant made in the very closing days of Mexican control of California when Governor Pio Pico was trying to push fast the alienation of public lands before the completion of American conquest. Los Prietos y Najalaye-gua in the Santa Inez Mountains back of Santa Barbara, conveyed by Pico on September 24, 1845, and May 26, 1846, was so ill-defined, so questionable as to extent, location, title, and value that it was not presented to the Land Commission for confirmation and patent between 1851 and 1855. As late as 1864 it was conveyed for 1100 and in 1865 for $1,000 to Thomas A. Scott, of railroad and oil company fame. What suddenly brought the claim to attention was the excitement over oil and mercury, both of which, it was thought, might be found on the tract. Since the time had long since passed in which the claim could be presented for confirmation and presumably all rights, vague as they were, had lapsed, the only way to revive it was by an act of Congress. In presenting the claim to Congress it was made to appear that the original owner still held it, and that his wife who died the previous year at 109 had planted a grapevine, now the largest in the world and producing six tons of grapes. Levi Parsons, who presented the claim for Tom Scott and others, had been 70 John Ise, United States Forest Policy, pp. 183-85; id., Our National Park Policy, pp. 119-22. involved in a dubious effort to have confirmed to parties he represented the whole waterfront of San Francisco and was not altogether well thought of in California because of "his wonderfully avaricious traits," said a local historian. However, Congress was sufficiently impressed to confirm the grant, presumably for 4 leagues or 17,826 acres.71 Then followed an effort by the new owners to enlarge the boundaries to 11 or 47 leagues and to twist the boundaries around in such a way as to include an area adjacent to Santa Barbara on two sides. A new survey seemed to uphold this absurd claim despite Mexican law that grants in excess of 11 leagues were illegal and without right. As a local writer said: "If the Mexicans had learned to dread American law as being a Pandora's box of evils, the Americans had learned to dread Mexican grants as a Trojan horse, which . . . had all manner of evils in its belly which were likely ... to devour the substance of the country." After much turmoil, many indignation meetings in Santa Barbara, the repudiation by the original grantee, who was only 70, of the story of the grapevine and his virtual accusation that Parsons was mendacious, and the knowledge that neither oil nor mercury was to be found in the tract, interest in it subsided and in 1875, 11 leagues of 48,275 acres were patented, with boundaries confining the claim to an area between two ridges well back of Santa Barbara.72 In 1898 and 1899 Los Prietos y Najalaye-gua came back into the limelight when President McKinley proclaimed the Santa Inez Forest Reserve and the Pine Mountain and Zaca Lake Forest Reserve in the mountains back of Santa Barbara. Separating the two forests was the long narrow Los 71 Thompson and West, History of Santa Barbara County, California (Oakland, Calif., 1883), p. 199. 72 Thompson and West, History of Santa Barbara County, pp. 199-209. |