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Show 116 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT after the settlers were informed through writs of ejectment and summonses that they were trespassing, they could see no justification in allowing wholly undeveloped tracts of 4,000 to 48,000 acres to be claimed by people who did not use the lands. The settlers wanted homes and though they soon learned that their improvements might be on Mexican claims it was easy for them to conclude that the claims were spurious and, indeed, many of them were. Here is the background of the agrarian warfare which raged throughout the Bay Counties in the fifties and sixties. The California Land Act of 1851 borrowed from past experience in establishing a land commission to investigate titles and confirm or reject them, subject to later action by the Commissioner of the General Land Office and to appeals by the United States or disappointed claimants to the Federal Circuit Court of California and the Supreme Court. With one exception, poorly paid lame duck politicians, who were ignorant of both the Spanish language in which all the documents were written and Mexican law, were appointed to the commission and the Federal officials who were required to defend the government's title were overburdened and poorly paid. The advantage therefore lay with the private claimants who had the best legal talent in California, and when necessary in Washington, at their service. In the rush for confirmation, claims were upheld by the courts which were later, though too late, shown to be based on fraudulent documents and forged signatures. Such fairly obvious errors and the clear bias of some judges against the squatters who were intruding into the large and undeveloped claims and challenging the claimants titles, brought the judges into politics and caused them to be bitterly criticized by squatters' groups. That claims to as much as 133,000 acres of undeveloped land should be confirmed and thus denied to the thousands of land seekers seemed contrary to American democratic ideas, and was long resented and resisted in California. With the principal exception of the lands of the Southern Pacific Railroad, the large properties in the state today, over which there is great controversy as to whether the excess lands provision of the reclamation laws should be applied, were originally Mexican land claims. Among them are the holdings of the Kern County Land Company (389,972 acres), the Tejon Land Company (272,744 acres), the Irvine ranch (110,000 acres, now slightly reduced), the Standard Oil Company (79,844 acres), and the San Emidio ranch (15,600 acres).9" The term squatters, applied to all settlers who anticipated the government land sale and after 1853 to those who anticipated the government surveyor, had no unfavorable connotation as it was used throughout the Mississippi Valley. Squatting on surveyed land was legalized by the prospective Preemption Act of 1841 and the privilege was extended to unsurveyed land and coupled with free land in the Homestead Act of 1862. State after state, and finally the Federal government, went further, conceding that settlers who had moved upon the unoccupied land of nonresidents and began their improvements, and who were later sued in an action of ejectment by the owner, could demand compensation for the fair value of the improvements they had made, provided they had a color of title. Squatter influence was sufficient to get such a law adopted in California in 1856 but it was struck down by the state supreme court which used as a basis for its decision the long since discredited United States Supreme Court case of Green v. Biddle of 1824. This occupancy law marked the high tide of the squatter's political strength in California. The influence of the press, the brilliant coterie of San Francisco lawyers retained by the claimants, and of the writings 90 Of the 31 other large holdings in the Central Valley of California containing 404,079 acres which are shown in the Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Irrigation of the Committee, on Interior and Insular Affairs, United States Senate, 1958, p. 181, a number were the result of the confirmation of Mexican grants. |