Insecure by Design: Property Rights of the Spanish Enlightenment in California, 1769 to 1810. by Marie Christine Duggan, Keene State College, [email protected], 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 1
Transcript
Insecure by Design: Property Rights of the Spanish Enlightenment in California, 1769 to 1810.
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 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 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.
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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 (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
3
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 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 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.
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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 super-exploitation via high rents was condemned, that the nobility
were meant to interest themselves 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.
5
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 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
3 This and subsequent translations are by the author.
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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 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
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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 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).
8
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), 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
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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 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
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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
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.
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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 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
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will of the authorities. Land was not typically purchased or sold for cash, but
rather 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
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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
expanded later, in which case the argument was then made that since the 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.14
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.
15
San Francisco and the Ohlone
Figure 1. Mission Landholdings Around the San Francisco Bay by 1815
16
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 government for its use, the
restrictions on what could and could not be produced, the ban on
17
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, implements repaired). Accumulation of
wealth was discouraged by a ban on owning more than 50 animals of one
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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 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.
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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
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
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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 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
7 Writings of Lasuen, op cit (the 1796 letter).
21
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.
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
22
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 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)..
8 “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.
10 CMD 257 March 20, 1796 Sanchez to Lasuen, SBMAL.
23
Figure 2. San Gabriel Watershed (Mission SG is close to Glendora, on the opposite side of the river)
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 24
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.
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.
11 Nieto put some grass there, while the Indians built it, wrote Fr. Sanchez to Lasuén, March 20, 1796, SBMAL.
25
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).
26
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
27
encroachment by foreign ships. There was no 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 Viceroy in Mexico City to clarify mission
28
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 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.
29
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 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
30
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 in-kind 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 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
31
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 no-one’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 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
32
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.
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
33
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, 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
13 See Duggan 2016 for an explanation of the increasing conflict between 1810 and 1825.
34
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 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.
35
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