Insecure by Design: Property Rights of the Spanish Enlightenment in
California, 1769 to 1810.
by Marie Christine Duggan, Keene State College, mduggan@keene.edu,
April 16, 2015. Draft: not for quotation.
Research Question
The Alta California colony was founded by the Bourbons in 1769, two years after the
expulsion of the Jesuits, and with a conscious goal of implementing reform. In contrast to
twenty-first century faith that secure property rights promote society’s well-being, Spain’s
Bourbon thinkers held that property rights must be insecure to achieve the common good.
Modern readers may be familiar with the argument that eminent domain is a necessary power
of government in a private property rights regime, but the Bourbon faith in insecure property
went further than the justification for eminent domain. Where property rights are private and
land can be sold or mortgaged or willed, the state’s authority to assert eminent domain is used
to remove property from one private individual if it blocks the prosperity of a majority of the
community (Lamoreaux 2011). By contrast, the Spanish state granted usufruct right to land
temporarily and with conditions, in order to keep the loyalty of the grantee to state authority
assured. In other words, for the Bourbons, prosperity was not defined as high private
productivity, but rather by profound private loyalty to the state.
1
First, the logic of the argument for insecure property will be presented by outlining the
Bourbon experiment at Sierra Morena (1767) and also by analyzing Juan Sempere y
Guarinos’1803 text. This leads to a hypothesis about the purpose of property insecurity in
Spanish California. A new dataset is then utilized to reconstruct the land-size of selected
missions in California over time. Two recent developments in the field of anthropology are
maps of pre-contact indigenous villages (Milliken 1995, Carrico 1997), and a database which
provides the date Indians from each village were baptized into missions.1 This author’s
particular contribution is to use the baptismal dates and the maps as a method of
reconstructing mission boundaries over time. The maps are then used as a backdrop for
exploring the disputes over insecure land-rights between the four sectors of Alta California:
privileged military officials, rank-and-file veterans, mission Indian congregations, and the
unconverted. Part IV concludes by reconsidering the Bourbon methods and intent.
Review of the Literature
Hernando de Soto is a well-known proponent of secure property rights as the solution
to slow productivity growth in Latin America (2000, 2002). He pointed out that migrants of
the 1970 to 1990 period seeking a better life in urban centers did not lack for work ethic. He
1
The Huntington Library, Early California Population Project Database, 2006. The database was built
from mission registers through painstaking work by Randall Milliken, John Johnson and Steve Hackel.
2
noted the long hours that Andinos on the outskirts of Lima put into constructing their own
adobe homes, and then installing pipes for water and sewage, and finally hooking each home to
electricity. De Soto attributed the low net worth of these industrious people to the insecurity of
their titles to this property. He contrasted the near impossibility of obtaining title in Lima with
the situation of US homeowners who can use the title as the means of obtaining a mortgage
loan with which they might found a business. He concluded that if each Andino head of
household in a shantytown home could obtain a title, he or she could also obtain the capital to
expand and regularize his or her informal business. The mystery of capital was then secure
title in property; should such title be provided, capitalism would flourish in shantytowns across
Latin America. If secure property rights could raise standard of living of so many by so much,
then why would anyone stand in their way?
The institutional rules which two influential Bourbon Reformers set up at Sierra
Morena in 1767 reveal a strong predilection for providing access to land, but with insecure
titles. The fundamental problem that Pedro de Campomanes and Pablo de Olavide sought to
resolve was joint “ownership” of the harvest by tiller and nobility. They wanted to incentivize a
work ethic on the part of the tiller, and promote interest in the science of agricultural
efficiency on the part of the nobility. Their method of aligning the interests of both was to
permit nobility to charge rents, but the rents should be fixed for extremely long periods of time
3
(emphyteusis). Such emphyteusis would impede landlords from raising rent in times of high
grain prices, and permit the renting farmer to benefit instead (Perdices 1993, 126-27). The
logic of incentivizing the tiller comes through, interesting the nobility in the science of
agriculture was to be accomplished in other ways, such as the salon for elites which Olavide
held in his home when he served as intendant of Seville.
In addition to incentivizing the work ethic of the tiller, Campomanes and Olavide also
wanted to stem the rise of income inequality. No-one should be without land, as Campomanes
puts it in the following quotation, content subjects should be rooted: Pedro de Campomanes
(economic advisor to Carlos III) wrote in 1765, “in the partition of an inheritance among a
group of heirs, one attempts to distribute real estate equally to each one for his greater
permanence, and so that they can live rooted [arraigados] in their homes” (Campomanes
1765:2). Long-term access to land which would produce a reasonable harvest was meant to
mitigate one end of the scale of inequality. To restrict the upper income side, the reformers put
strict limits on how much land a tiller could retain. Campomanes and Olavide assigned each
colonist a permanent and hereditary lease for a 50 fanega plot2 (Perdices 1993, 199-200; Herr
1989, 38); the property would remain that of the state, while the tillers would have secure
2
This is a plot on which 50 fanegas of grain can be sown. The exact size of the plot might vary, since land of
different fertility could accommodate different quantities of seed. There are 1.25 bushels in a Fanega.
4
usufruct rights. The usufruct rights were secure in that a poor harvest or a low price would not
force the colonist to lose the land, and it seems likely that getting into arrears on the rent would
have been tolerated as well. However, failure to cultivate would lead the state to evict the
colonist (a penalty for poor work ethic). The colonist could not subdivide or mortgage his land,
but he could sell it to another outsider that was acceptable to the community (he could not sell
his plot to a neighbor, because that would double the neighbor’s plot to 100 Fanegas, which
was unacceptable).
Finally, the colonists were meant to cultivate grains, and not to raise cattle in large
herds. The Sierra Morena project was implemented in Andalusia, where large landowners
with large herds of cattle dominated the landscape. The reformers wanted to reduce income
and wealth inequality, and so were promoting small-holders. Each colonist had a few head of
cattle, whose manure they were meant to incorporate into the fields where wheat and legumes
would be planted. While adoption of innovations suggested by the leadership was promoted,
the colonists themselves were not to further their educations; the point was to create a society
of small-holders who were content with their lot.
The experiment indicates to us that reduced income inequality was a goal, that superexploitation via high rents was condemned, that the nobility were meant to interest themselves
5
in scientific advance, that land was meant generally to be inherited, rather than purchased.
The ultimate owner of the land was the state, and for this reason the state would receive the
“small fee.” So long as people continued to till the land, they would hold onto it, even if they did
not pay the small fee. Selling the land would be difficult, because only outsiders of which the
community approved could buy it. Failure to till would lead to exile from the community.
We will see below that these property rights were largely identical to what was implemented in
Bourbon California.
While Sierra Morena indicates by example that the Bourbons favored usufruct rights
with conditions, the logic of the argument in favor of insecure property rights has to be
inferred. Fortunately, the argument was put forward more directly by Juan Sempere y
Guarinos in Spain in 1803. The policy problem was--in Sempere’s view--a nobility whose
secure title to property had removed incentive to serve the King. Sempere called for a return to
the property-rights systems in Spain’s past: the 7th century Visigoths, the 8th century medieval
Kings, and even to aspects of Almoravid rule of the 14th century. The use of examples from the
glorious past was the typical method of justifying innovation in 18th century Spain.
Under the early Visigoths, land held in common with fields rotated annually among
members of the community (1803, 5). Rotation prevented men from becoming overly attached
6
to land, thereby freeing them for service in war. Sempere also noted that rotations prevented
“greed for money from which could arouse…factions” (ibid), and in doing so presages a
distrust of desire for money in itself, which was characteristic also of Bourbon contemporaries
such as Pedro de Campomanes. Sempere contrasts the hard-working subjects of Visigothic
King Recesvinto (649-672) with his contemporary nobility to the latter’s detriment:
“In those days, there was no such thing as a purely consuming class, nor of a nobility
with the privilege to do nothing, nor of enjoying fat rents without any corresponding
obligations. Every nobleman was a soldier, and had to sally forth against the enemy in
person…Even the bishops and other clergy…were not exempt from this most essential
obligation of the nobility [i.e., to risk their lives in battle] (1803, 9).”3
Apparently, late 18th century Spain was rife with noblemen whose secure title to ‘fat rents’
undermined motivation to serve the King in war.
Sempere also lauds the system of reward-for-service implemented in the first half of
Spain’s Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula from the Umayyad Caliphate (722 to 1492).
Initially, the Reconquista involved a wise use of financial incentives to leverage desire for honor
on the battlefield. For example, Soldiers were compensated for their wounds, so that they
would not fear falling into poverty as a result of fighting (1803, 17). The King was entitled to
one-fifth of the winnings, unless a wealthy man had contributed money and knights, in which
case the King was to receive only half of his fifth, giving the contributor the other half. If the
3
This and subsequent translations are by the author.
7
King had personally fought in the battle, his fifth was taken from the winnings before his men
received their compensation for wounds. There were also prizes for exceedingly courageous
and risky acts, such as saving the King’s life, or taking down the enemy flag. Sempere
concludes that with these financial incentives for bravery in battle, “our monarchy could not
help but be abundant in good soldiers and excellent officials” (1803, 19).
The nobility risked their own funds on the King’s battles: “The Spaniards of the Middle
Ages made war, not for a state salary, or to cede [to the state] their conquests, but rather by
common consent, and at their own cost. As a consequence they had a right to distribute
amongst themselves the winnings, according to the effort and costs that each one contributed
(1803, 16).” Sempere’s analysis of the property in the early Reconquista culminates in his
ringing manifesto for the King’s right to use property to stimulate service: “Although honor is
the prime mover of all true noble and loyal vassals, universal history teaches us that it generally
influences human action in a lukewarm manner when it is not accompanied by self-interest
(19).”
In the early Reconquista, “Most of the wealth of the crown consisted in lands and
inheritances from conquests…These lands were given in usufruct or feudo to the lords and
noblemen in return for military service, and once the possessors died, [the lands] returned to
8
the crown, unless for some particular concession, the usufruct might be continued by their
families” (1803, 31).
Sempere contrasts lifetime usufruct rights to conquered land with two
other possibilities: salaried military service, and the right for the soldier to bequeath the land.
He opposed salaried soldiers on the grounds that military salaries tend to bankrupt the King
(1803, 30). He condemned wills because they were a means for the land to be distributed
away from the King’s vassals (the deceased’s relatives) and possibly to his enemies. In Sempere’s
ideal world, land grants remain at the King’s discretion: “The goods of the crown could not be
alienated as property. They could only be given in usufruct or fief for the lifetime of the giver,
unless his successor confirmed it” (1803, 17). That the king had the power to take away what
he had given is confirmed by a reference to Don Alfonso VII’s order in 1128 that lands given
out to men be returned to church and crown as a means of putting down rebellious barons
(20).
Yet the leverage of honor by means of financial incentives became distorted in the 11th
century, after Christian victories became few and hard-won. The Christian capital of Spain,
León, fell to Almanzor in 988. Once the city was back in Christian hands, it was difficult to
persuade the King’s vassals to return. In 1020 a special privilege (fuero) was granted to
holders of usufruct rights on royal lands in León to bequeath the usufruct to their children and
grandchildren. During the seven long years spent of the battle for Toledo (reconquered 1085),
9
the King offered a stream of income (sueldo) to his knights that could be bequeathed to their
heirs. For Sempere, these grants for longer than one generation indicate that the Crown was
dissipating its assets and beginning to lose the means to channel the ambition of future vassals
towards honorable ends (1803, 46).
Sempere writes, “Without great incentives, there is no patriotism, loyalty, valor, nor
exactitude in carrying out duties. To think about men working, they have to discomfort
themselves, to sacrifice their goods and their lives for the state, they are not going to do this
without well-founded expectations of great recompense. If you don’t understand that, you
don’t understand well the hearts of men” (1803, 47). One could easily misread this ringing
statement as endorsement for the generous intergenerational rewards that the medieval
Christian kings gave to their men in the battles for León and Toledo. But to do so would do a
disservice to Sempere. Instead, he meant these words to explain that the King must retain
ultimate ownership of land and streams of income, he must not dissipate them in overly
generous grants, because his successors would need those resources to distribute as rewards for
new services to ensure the loyalty of future generations.
Surprisingly, Sempere saw some virtue in the Almoravid property-rights structure: he
attributed Moorish scientific advances to the fact that Almoravid landlords collected only 10 to
10
20% of the harvest compared to the one-third customary in Christian The implication is that
low rent will stimulate science, though exactly how is unclear.
Like his contemporaries, Sempere viewed a church which served the King as virtuous,
contrasting it with a church servile to the Pope as an anti-royal interest. There were legitimate
reasons for the King to grant the church usufruct rights in property, but too much had been
granted in the past: “The Spaniards either because they were more pious and religious, or
because the lights of science and the useful arts arrived later to them, and because they had not
understood well the disadvantages of unlimited acquisitions…overtook all the rest of the
nations in enriching the churches and monasteries” (1803, 37).
Since church control of property will loom large in the discussion of the Bourbon
colony of California below, it is worth noting what types of service to the King Sempere deemed
worthy of reward. He notes that in 1572 according to the Council of Braga, “the kings and
lords founded and populated deserted districts which were their own land. They put as many
workers as necessary in order to work and cultivate the land…and built for them churches and
gave them a clergyman.” (35) Since populating deserted areas was an active part of Bourbon
reform, and since Sempere has already stated his approval for a nobility which financed useful
actions without draining the treasury, clergyman granted land to sustain them while they
11
service cultivators of deserted land would seem appropriate. He also states that in 1212 (when
the Reconquista was granted Crusade status by the Pope), land grants did not have the
pernicious affect which they would later attain. The reason was that land which passed to
church control was not tax exempt, and further that the bishops and clergy to whom it passed
were expected to do battle to defend the King like any other lord (1803, 30). Furthermore, at
this time, the church served the king by carrying out useful service such as teaching the youth,
sustaining families, and providing aid to the sick and the poor. (p. 39). We can conclude that if
the church facilitates the increase of cultivated land, pays taxes and if clergy will pick up the
sword to do battle upon the King’s command, then clerical land is at worst benign and possibly
beneficial.
From these words, we can glean a sense of the relationship of the church to land that
the Bourbon reformers would have held in high esteem. Clergy who populated deserted areas
with cultivators, clergy who paid the tax to the king, and clergy who taught the youth,
sustained families and provided aid to the sick and the poor received Sempere’s approval, so
long as these clerics were willing to pick up the sword to defend the king in battle.
These reasons for allocating property to church hands describe remarkably well exactly
what an 18th century missionary did in California under Spain: he baptized and ministered to
12
Indians and taught them to bring cultivation to uncultivated land. He took care of the sick and
the poor, sustained families, and taught the youth. In time of conflict, he was ready to pick up
the sword and fight for King. The one area where the Bourbon reformers might have found
fault is in the tax exempt status of the produce of California missions.
For the military, we see that Sempere expected the nobility to command the soldiers,
and viewed land grants to noblemen for a lifetime to be appropriate rewards for service. The
right to bequeath the land to the next generation was the King’s to give, not that of the holder
to take. There is a sense that support for the next generation would be forthcoming, so long as
the family did not take it for granted, but continued to serve the Crown. Finally, although
Sempere does tack on a concern for science and the arts and for cultivating desolate land, the
larger message is that land grants are to reward courage on the battlefield.
Research Hypothesis
From this literature, I expected that insecure property rights channeled everyone in
Spanish California to serve and flatter those with political authority in hopes that the official
might use their influence to provide insecure land to particular families or bands for the
foreseeable future. The insecurity of the grant fostered a dependence of the populace on the
good will of the authorities. Land was not typically purchased or sold for cash, but rather
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granted and used with hereditary privileges conditional upon maintaining a good relationship
with authority. The native people complied with baptism and deferred to and served the
missionaries as a means to maintain usufruct rights over ancestral lands. The rank and file
military men deferred to and served their commanders as the means to obtain usufruct rights
over land. Commanders deferred to and served the viceroy in hope of either obtaining rights to
the exceptional large land grant, or having the power to grant such to their most loyal men. By
channeling what Smith called “the desire to better one’s condition” into service to a superior
socio-political structure established by the Bourbon Crown, the system succeeded in its own
goal of keeping subjects loyal and (for the most part) peaceful.
Data
For the four military presidios and nineteen missions between San Diego and San Francisco
between 1769 and 1810, there were four different types of insecure land tenure. First, Indians
brought the territory of their original village with them at baptism, so that the land under
mission cultivation expanded with baptism. Secondly, at retirement military men obtained
small plots similar to those envisioned for Sierra Morena; the difference was that the men
received half-pay to supplement their small-plot income. The pueblos were located at San Jose
and Los Angeles, the most fertile locations among the six missions founded first in the 1770s.
Thirdly, military men could till land among unconverted Indians, if they had the ambition and
14
diplomatic skill to do so. Fourthly, in 1786, the top military official in California, Pedro Fages
was authorized to make grants of private land to soldiers on the condition that the grant not
exceed 3 leagues, and did not injure the missions. It was theoretically possible for these types of
land tenure to co-exist, but one can see already that the tillers would require the support of the
state to maintain their control over land in the face of competing claims.
Lands of Indian Congregations
Rather than losing land at baptisms, Indians who entered a Christian congregation
changed their relationship to the land, using it for agriculture rather than hunting and
gathering.4 One source of support of this contention is a letter written in 18275 in which friars
cited Law 9, Title 3, Book 6 of the Laws of the Indies: “The land that they formerly held is not to
be taken from those Indians reduced6...[The land] will be preserved just as they had it before, so
that they may cultivate it and attempt improvements.” Law 9, Title 12, Book 4 “No [land] can
be given to Spaniards if it damages the Indians, and if given and having caused harm, it must
be returned.” When soldiers settled among the unconverted, it was often the case that missions
4
Clarification: native Californians never gave up hunting and gathering completely; certainly up to 1810, native
Christians subsisted from both sources harvested from the congregation’s land.
5
Frs. Zalvidea and Barona, Dec. 22, 1827 to Governor
José María de Echeandía, Santa Barbara
Mission Archive Library.
6
“Reduced” means baptized and congregated in mission villages based on agriculture.
15
expanded later, in which case the argument was then made that since the soldier-settler’s use
was contrary to the well-being of the Indian congregation, it must be returned. This happened,
for example, at Rancho Camulos near Mission San Fernando. San Fernando was not founded
until 1797, so a soldier had utilized Camulos in the intervening years as “land among the
unconverted.” However, he was pushed to return the land to the mission. Though he did,
animosity remained and festered for decades.
16
San Francisco and the Ohlone
Figure 1. Mission Landholdings Around the San Francisco Bay by 1815
17
The entire discussion of Bourbon land rights in California can take on more concrete
dimensions due to recent advances by anthropologists who have reconstituted pre-contact
native populations in geographic space. Figure 1 above provides a view of expansion of the
three Bay Area missions between 1769 and 1815. The diagonal hatch represents the land of
the communities which entered mission life the earliest, by 1785. One can see that at that date,
there was plenty of territory outside of control of mission congregations. By 1795, additional
communities had entered mission life (filled-in black dots). By 1805, nearly all the land visible
to the naked eye when viewing the San Francisco Bay Area on a clear day would have been
under the tillage of Christian Indians.
Pueblo Lands
José de Galvez had been sent from the King’s inner circle of advisors to New Spain in
1764 to implement Bourbon reform. When the Viceroy proved less than supportive of higher
taxes, a new Viceroy Carlos Francisco De Croix was sent to rubber stamp Galvez’ actions. By
1767 Galvez and De Croix had carried out the Jesuit expulsion, which included the
impoverished Jesuit missionaries in Baja. Galvez went to Baja and attempted to replace them
with soldier-settlers who were to be rewarded by a system of usufruct land rights instead of
providing pay. The terms ring of Sierra Morena: the 50 fanega small plot, the small fee to the
18
government for its use, the restrictions on what could and could not be produced, the ban on
accumulating more than one plot. Indian missions were to become tax-paying pueblos that
would supply free labor and food to the military (Priestley 1916). The governor of Baja
resigned rather than implement them, and settlers did not volunteer. Franciscan missionaries
were Galvez’ fall-back option for replacing the Jesuits, but even the Franciscans insisted that
the military compensate Indians at missions for labor and produce, resisted relocating Indians
from ancestral territory, and by 1773, had attained the political authority to ban soldiers from
service at missions should they mishandle Indians.
By 1781, de Croix’s nephew Teodoro was Commander of the Provincias Internas (Texas
to California), and he reinitiated the Bourbon aim of removing the church as protector of
Indian land-rights, and expanding the military by means of land-grants to a settler militia
rather than increased payroll (Bancroft, I:336). The attempt to remove the church as a buffer
between Indian land-and-labor and the military was rebuffed by 1786 (Duggan 2004), and
few new settlers materialized, but two pueblos did come into being. Settlers were to receive a
solar (house lot), and a plot for cultivation (perhaps 50 fanegas); to be provided with livestock
on credit, to receive a salary less than half that of a soldier and only for five years, to use
common lands for pasture. Land could not be sold, nor mortgaged. In order to retain the land,
evidence of cultivation must be presented (a house built, irrigation dug, livestock maintained,
19
implements repaired). Accumulation of wealth was discouraged by a ban on owning more
than 50 animals of one kind. In addition, all were to contribute to tilling common fields whose
harvest would pay for pueblo expenses. In return for the land tenure, the settlers must be
prepared to fight by supplying themselves with a musket and horse.
These inducements were not adequate to induce many settlers to come to California,
and of those who tried, one party was killed at Yuma in 1782. However, for people who were
already there (soldiers ready to retire, or their offspring), and for people who had a member or
two of the family on military payroll, the terms were agreeable. As Figure 1 illustrated, by
1805 there was very little land available outside of mission jurisdiction to which a retiring
soldier could aspire. Furthermore, interacting with the unconverted was not an easy task. Two
pueblos succeeded at San Jose and Los Angeles. The pueblos were not to exceed four leagues in
size (about 10.5 miles).
Pueblo San José was founded as a proto-type in 1778 on the banks of the Guadelupe
River, less than a league south of Mission Santa Clara, which at that time was one of the most
fertile missions established. It is hard to avoid concluding that the military was aiming to get a
claim onto the most fertile land prior to the expanding mission swallowing up the area as
protected for baptized Indians. Even at that early a moment, it must have been clear that the
20
Indians baptized into Mission Santa Clara would come from up and down the banks of the Rio
Guadelupe. Over time, Mission Santa Clara proved less successful, with the most successful
fields in the SF bay region being at Mission San José, further from the Pueblo.
Land grants to military
In 1786, Teodoro de Croix was Commander of Provincias Internas with known
sympathies for Bourbon reform. He approved a request from Pedro Fages, Governor of
California, to give several extremely large land grants to a select few of his men. Such grants
do seem in line with Sempere’s argument that land grants should reward service in battle.
However, far from the nobility that Sempere had in mind, the land grants went to rank and file
soldiers who tended to be of mulatto or mestizo origin. Hence such grants facilitated the
upward mobility of which Campomanes and Olavide would have disapproved. In theory, the
size of the grants was not to exceed 3 leagues, and they were not to interfere with the lands of
mission Indians. In practice, one grant alone to Manual Niego totaled 68 leagues, and it was
quite close to Mission San Gabriel in the fertile Los Angeles River basin.
Before turning to that case, let us conclude with the San Francisco Bay Area. As noted
earlier, the Huchiun of the East Bay opposite San Francisco rejected mission life, leading to
armed conflict between 1795 and 1797 which resulted in the founding of Mission San José in
the East Bay, but well-skirting the heart of Huchiun territory (see Figure 1; Milliken 1995). The
21
Huchiun location across the SF bay gave that people some leverage because the Spanish had no
boats, while the Huchiun did have tule rafts and the knowledge of the bay currents sufficient to
use them to cross the bay. Over time, Mission San José built an outpost at El Cerrito in Huchiun
territory, called San Pablo, which was used for pasture. If grants of land were the King’s to take
away as penalty for disloyalty, perhaps it is no accident that the first private rancho founded
around the SF Bay was Rancho San Antonio in 1820. The rancho ran from El Cerrito to San
Leandro (modern Oakland). In effect, the authorities had taken Huchiun rights to their land
away in 1820, though they would not have been evicted. The Spanish grants assumed people
came with the land, and would be the labor force. How precisely Sergeant Luis Peralta’s sons
got the Huchiun to labor on his rancho is not known (De Veer 1914, pp. 34-36).
Turning back to the Los Angeles Basin, Mission San Gabriel was founded in the first few
years of Spanish rule in California along the San Gabriel River in the Los Angeles basin and,
like Mission Santa Clara, produced high agricultural yields with the labor of the Christian
Tongva. Father Lasuén could write by 1796, “[The Tongva congregation of San Gabriel] should
look to the produce of the arable land which is to be given to them as their own, with building
22
lots, improvements, and livestock.”7 However, this was wishful thinking because two
competing claims to the lands near the mission had emerged in the 1780s.
First, Pueblo of Los Angeles was starting to collect veterans and their families in the next
watershed north from the mission, along the Los Angeles River. This would naturally have
made the mission inclined to expand to the south (behind them to the East was the steep San
Gabriel mountain range). Then in 1784, Commander Fages and De Croix granted Manual
Nieto, a mulatto-mestizo soldier who had served for many years and perhaps accomplished
acts of particular bravery, 68 leagues of land. Rancho Los Nietos was intended to run from the
Santa Ana River to the Los Angeles River, from Mission San Gabriel to the sea—i.e., it would
cover most of modern Los Angeles County and a good bit of Orange County as well.
No anthropologist has yet mapped out the native villages of the Tongva. Yet given what
we know from the rate of expansion of Mission San Francisco, we can assume that by 1784
when Manuel Nieto was granted his ranch, only a small circle of Tongva territory had been
brought into cultivation by Tongva Christians. Thus, the sixty-eight leagues granted to Manuel
Nieto in 1784 may not at that moment have overlapped with fields cultivated by the Tongva,
but it would have prevented the mission from expanding area under cultivation to include the
territory of the newly converted. By 1796, the inevitable clash had emerged.
7
Writings of Lasuen, op cit (the 1796 letter).
23
By 1795, Tongva Christians at San Gabriel had increased to 1300, and attempts to
expand the irrigation structure and plowed fields of the mission ran right into Nieto’s own
fields. In 1795, the harvest was inadequate and half the Tongva returned to gathering acorns
and harvesting pine nuts from the oak and pine trees in the San Gabriel mountains. The other
half of the congregation kept agriculture going while subsisting on half rations. Nieto’s claim
to the flatlands was preventing the Tongva from making the switch to an agricultural way of
life, quite possibly the main attraction of the missions for the Tongva people.8 Father Sanchez
lead the community for decades, and he wrote, “When we met with Nieto about how he plowed
right next to where we sowed last year, preventing us from expanding the planting, he said he
would go further down (that is, right near there, because further down from where he had
sown, there is not good land), and I told him no, that was where WE were going to sow;
because the Mission needs all that land, that’s what I told him.9” Nieto apparently told the
Tongva congregation that if they wanted water they could build two aguajitos to the North of
the mission in the slice of land between the mission and the San Gabriel mountains, to which
the missionary replied, “but for this a lot of work is necessary, and the water has to pass
“Last year, they had to sow one hundred and seventy-nine fanegas of the first, twelve of the
second, and the same amount of the others. Despite that, it did not suffice to support the Indians, and they
had to send half of them away to the mountains, and to place the rest on half rations.” Writings of Fermin
Francisco de Lasuen, there is a memorandum from Lasuen to be added to Gov. Boricas documents on the
Nieto ranch. Date: May 9, 1796, p. 377-378 in V. I.
9
California Mission Document 256, Father Sanchez to Fahter President Lasuén about Nieto, 17
Marzo 1796, SBMAL.
8
24
through a sandy spot which could suck it all up.”10 Father Sanchez suggested that Nieto stick
to Los Coyotes, an area to the South of San Gabriel about one third the way between the sea and
Mission San Gabriel (see Coyote Creek in Figure 2)..
Figure 2. San Gabriel Watershed (Mission SG is close to Glendora, on the opposite side of the river)
Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/San_Gabriel_River_Map.jpg
10
CMD 257 March 20, 1796 Sanchez to Lasuen, SBMAL.
25
Indians and Mexican soldiers like Nieto both preferred corn to the Spanish wheat, but
corn required steady water to grow reliably. Nieto and his men argued that they had built the
dam at La Puente, while the Tongva argued that they had done the real work of digging the
irrigation ditch to provide the steady water that the corn fields required.11 A subtext of the
discussions is that Indians who had not accepted baptism were using La Puente as a location
from which to cull horses and sheep from mission herds—about a third of the Tongva
congregation’s 10,000 sheep were grazing there. Nieto bargained with unconverted Indians
from a village called Guapa to work for him, a bargain which allowed them to resist relocating
to the Tongva village at San Gabriel. Fifteen horses and one sheep disappeared, and the word
among the Tongva was that men from Guapa who used to hunt deer were hunting sheep and
horses instead. In 1796, Nieto won out with his claim to La Puente. However, the Tongva
congregation and their missionaries succeeded in pushing Nieto back to the southern side of
the San Gabriel River. This left Mission San Gabriel with half of one watershed, compared to
two entire watersheds for Mission San Diego. Eventually, the mission did expand inland to till
the mountain canyon of San Bernardino.
11
Nieto put some grass there, while the Indians built it, wrote Fr. Sanchez to Lasuén, March 20, 1796,
SBMAL.
26
If we turn now to San Diego, data exists for a more detailed exploration of the way in
which the land of the Kumeyaay congregation expanded with baptisms. Three starting points
emerge: first, Kumeyaay bands rotated on an East/West axis, so that each band could utilize
resources from coast to inland mountains (of up to 6,000 feet), and into the desert beyond.
Rivers also flowed from East to West, so Kumeyaay bands along a single rivershed were socially
connected. The second starting point is that the Spanish way of agriculture placed a premium
on land that could be irrigated continuously. El Cajón, Paguay and Santa Ysabel were the only
plots of land in Southern San Diego county which had sufficient irrigation for growing crops,
hence had the most value in this subsistence economy (see Figure 3 and assume San Bernardino
is Paguay (Poway)). In general, sheep and cattle-raising were more productive than grain
crops in San Diego, but scarcity of water could cut into herds. Pamo had a permanent watering
hole for livestock, and Jamacha along the Sweetwater river was also prime pasture.12 Thirdly,
water was more scarce in San Diego county than any other location in Alta California—in
terms of climate, San Diego was naturally affiliated more with Baja than with Alta California.
12
Dec. 18, 1827 Fr. Martín and Fr. Oliva of Mission San Diego to Governor,
Santa Barbara Mission Archive Library (hereafter SBMAL).
27
Figure 3. Grain Fields and Pastures in Jurisdiction of Mission San Diego
Source: Glenn Farris 1997. Note: his article covered a later period, but the fertile pieces in the
jurisdiction of San Diego Mission were the same as the land delineated on this map.
Initially, agriculture failed at San Diego because the Spanish did not control either El
Cajon or Paguay or Santa Ysabel. The first “mission” was at the Presidio directly on the port,
which the Presidio was built to protect from encroachment by foreign ships. There was no
28
potable water at the Presidio, and no possibility of agriculture. Mission San Diego was founded
as a separate agricultural settlement in 1774 six miles away from the port on the San Diego
River. The river must not have run year-round, because even there, the missionaries and
Kumeyaay were attempting to install a pump for irrigating the fields, a task at which they were
initially unsuccessful. In November 1775, an uprising by the Kumeyaay led to the death of the
missionary and two craftsmen working for the military; many Kumeyaay also died. Carlos
Chisli was the kwaipai of the Kumeyaay village where Mission San Diego had been located, and
he led the uprising. The proximate cause was his flogging by the Spanish for stealing fish from
an unconverted Kumeyaay. The crime itself suggests that the failure of Spanish agriculture was
leading to anger, disaffection, and tensions between the converted and unconverted Kumayaay
as well as between the Spanish contingent and the Kumeyaay. The numbers show that the
crops were incapable of sustaining the numbers baptized; indeed in some years, there were no
crops at all.
It quickly became apparent to the Spanish that the plum location was El Cajon, inland
on the San Diego River. However, a gang rape by military men at that location had poisoned
relations between the mission and the people before 1773. This gang-rape may have been an
attempt by the military to assert control over the prime productive land and its people before
the missionaries acted, though that is speculation. Missionary leadership personally visited the
29
Viceroy in Mexico City to clarify mission jurisdiction, but the Kumeyaay uprising in 1775
made that a moot point: it became unsafe for any Spaniard to go into El Cajón (Burrus 1967).
The most skilled missionary was brought in, Fermín Francisco de Lasuén. He negotiated
peace with the people at the next watershed up from San Diego, along the San Dieguito River.
There were possibly long-standing tensions between the Kumeyaay of the San Diego River and
those of San Dieguito (Carrico 1997). It was then a very painstaking process to rebuild a
relationship with the Kumeyaay that would lead to productive agriculture. Only twenty-one
years after the uprising--in 1796--did large numbers of Indians from Meti and San Jorge
(Kumeyaay villages in El Cajon) switch allegiance to the Spanish way of life, and only then did
the mission become self-sustaining and a way of life that might have held any attraction. See
map illustrating expansion of mission congregation land (spots highlighted with choice water
spots highlighted [note: note yet included]). Ironically, after the initial years of extreme conflict,
the Christian Kumeyaay of San Diego retained rights to the most useful land in the region
longer than either the Ohlone in the San Francisco Bay or the Tongva in San Gabriel, up to
1833.
A geographical location that highlights the insecurity of landrights even during the
Spanish period is Mission San Gabriel, in what is now Los Angeles. Unfortunately, no
30
anthropologist has yet mapped out the locations of native villages near Mission San Gabriel, so
it is not possible to make a diagram showing the expansion of the territory of the congregation
over time. However, armed with the visuals from San Diego and San Francisco, we can
imagine that in 1786, the amount of land controlled by the mission’s people was fairly small
and close to the mission. San Gabriel had better water than San Diego and harvests flourished
quickly; this may be why it was the object of military desire.
Land in southern San Diego was relatively undisputed despite the violence of 1775. The
Kumeyaay congregation tilled the plum resources of El Cajon, Paguay and Santa Ysabel. A
market was established at the edge of mission territory from which Christian Kumeyaay could
exchange the produce of mission agriculture for the traditional foods they prized with the
unconverted, or with the Mojave or Yuma. Soldiers who retired probably relocated to the
Pueblo of Los Angeles, where they would have been granted a solar. Alternatively, they might
have settled next to the lands on the Sweetwater River (Jamacha and Jamul in Figure 3) where
the Presidio pastured its horses, or they might have obtained employment at the mission and
settled near the San Diego river.
After Mission San Diego was abolished in 1833, however, the insecurity of Kumeyaay
property rights emerged. The Kumeyaay probably thought that by serving the missionary, who
31
served the King, their lands would be protected. However, the Spanish King was replaced by
Mexican republic by 1825, and religious men lost authority in the new republican era. El
Cajon, Paguay and Pamo passed to non-Indian hands, with the Kumeyaay villages located
inside the rancho of some ex-military man. Eventually, when Americans took over the
ranchos, they were not accustomed to having people come with the land, and lobbied
successfully to have the Kumeyaay relocated to reservations on land useless for tilling. Many of
the modern reservations in San Diego county are in fact just outside the boundaries of the
fertile land. The American ranchers did lobby to have these reservations located next to their
ranches (they were opposed to the President’s idea to relocate the Kumeyaay to Oklahoma!),
because they wanted a labor force. By the 1930s, the Kumeyaay “volunteered” to work for inkind payments, rather than money wages. The Kumeyaay reverted to hunting and gathering as
a way to supplement this income and survive. Multiple tiny reservations remain inside San
Diego county. The “useless” land has been brought to profitability by the 1988 law permitting
casinos on Indian reservations.
Despite concerns of men like Sempere that the Crown would squander its
treasure on military salaries, the King did pay California soldiers a salary. However, not
without putting up a fight. Initially, Madrid’s representative in New Spain, Gálvez, suggested
that in lieu of salary, soldiers receive 50 fanega small plots on which they would be expected to
32
pay tithes and a small fee (can~on) to the state. This was not, however, adequate incentive to
stimulate bravery on the part of anyone.
If the 50 fanega small plot for a soldier, and a share of harvest on mission lands
for the Christian Indian, were the two primary ways in which Galvez envisioned that
California would channel its ambition toward the service of King, there were others who had a
different idea. Commander Fages seems to be going back to the practices of the Reconquista
when he granted huge land areas in perpetual usufruct to five of his men. While all military
grants undermined the ability of the religious to protect their Indian vassals, the largest grants
naturally undermined that system to a greater extent.
Conclusion
A subtext of evangelization which has gone unnoticed in the literature on California’s
Spanish period is that only the King’s vassals were to receive usufruct rights to property. In
converting to Catholicism, the Kumeyaay people of the area would become the King’s vassals.
By baptism, then, the Kumeyaay secured their rights to their land within the new colonial
system. Simultaneously, however, they were bringing their land into a system in which noone’s property was secure. One might say then that with baptism Kumeyaay land entered this
insecure system of Spanish property rights. Given the lack of permanent title, the Kumeyaay
33
desire for attachment to their territory was channeled into deference and service to the
missionary who, as representative of the King, had the authority to renew their usufruct rights.
Before exploring some concrete instances to support this argument, it is necessary to introduce
the military component of the conquest of California, and the method the King used to provide
it reward.
Ironically, the system of permitting the vanquished to retain their land in return for
loyalty to the new regime is something of which Sempere would have approved, from his
distant library in Madrid. Yet Bourbon reforms undermined this highly effective system of
loyalty because they viewed the church as a rival to the state. On the frontier, the church WAS
the state, and the loyal militias who did not require cash salaries to serve the king would prove
in 1818 to be Indians—a group of armed Chumash from Mission San Luis Obispo arrived with
their armed missionary to defend Monterey when it was attacked by a republican pirate.
Yet if the ill-defined nature of Indian land-rights at missions fostered dependence on
the missionary, the anti-clerical nature of Bourbon reforms undermined the Bourbon’s own
goals. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that a 68 league land grant next to a mission was
simply an invitation for anti-clerical Bourbons to supplant a missionary as the authority figure
that stood between Indians and Crown.
34
On the other hand, the insecure nature of land boundary between Pueblo and mission
might have had some useful purpose, similar to the eminent domain safety-valve for
community transformation. If the community itself changed to include more veterans and
their families, then it would be reasonable to expect some accommodation for them.
The date 1786 is important because this is when Pedro Fages granted his loyal soldier
Manual Nieto a land grant of sixty-eight leagues in size. While the Bourbons had intended any
rewards to go to the nobility (the point of Bourbon reform was to channel noble ambition
toward service to the king), in fact Manual Nieto and many of the future California grantees
were mulatto and mestizo people from Mexico who had served for a generation or two or three
in the California military (first Baja, then Alta California). Their ancestors may indeed have
initially gained their loyalty to the Spanish cause at a Jesuit mission in Sonora. The Kumeyaay
called these men quite brave (Burrus 1967), and in fact Manuel Nieto proved an intimidating
neighbor for the missionary and his congregation at San Gabriel. He made intelligent alliances
with the unconverted who then patrolled the land to keep the Christian Tongva from using it.
Output per person in California was notoriously low: hundreds of women often ground
wheat or corn by hand for serving their brethren in the communal dinner (see Duggan 2017).
Yet productivity per man was not the colony’s own rubric for measuring its success. Rather,
35
the colony aimed to control an extensive territory holding some 80,000 people without sharing
power with any for-profit enterprise, and with very little government expenditure. By that
measure, the allegiance of seventeen thousand native people (by 1810), hundreds of soldiers
and forty missionaries across a territory over 500 miles long and over 4,000 miles from Spain
was a success. Although the popular narrative in California is that Indians hated missionaries,
animosity was unusual between 1769 and 1810.13 Instead, personal allegiance marked day to
day relationships, which is precisely what Bourbon reformers had hoped for. A similar
personal allegiance reigned between military rank and file and their commanders, and
between missionaries and their father president and their father guardian in Mexico City. Both
commanders and missionaries attempted to live up to their paternalistic responsibilities by
providing land to their vassals—the troops and Christian Indians, respectively. However, the
rights to land were only as secure as the political influence of the institutions of military and
Franciscan order. This became a problem for Indians when the church lost influence in
republican Mexico in the 1820s, and it became a problem for rank and file soldier-settlers
when the American state replaced the Mexican state.
To all intents and purposes then, the non-Bourbon institution of religious mission
succeeded at the Bourbon intention of promoting the number of deferent vassals willing to
13
See Duggan 2016 for an explanation of the increasing conflict between 1810 and 1825.
36
serve authority. In fact, the Bourbon reforms as implemented in Alta California undermined
their own goals by breaking up the “keep your land in return for loyalty” approach with the
vanquished Indians, and by creating wealth inequality among their own. If Sempere were here
to comment, he might note that the medieval leaders of the Reconquista were also better at
rewarding their own men than at protecting the vanquished by means of the wise incentives
for surrender which they had promised.
37
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