In the summer of 1851, George H. Keller pulled up to a small encampment near the headwaters of the Petaluma Creek Set on the former site of a Miwok trading village called Lekituit. The camp was little more than a few trading posts, a potato warehouse, and a handful of rustic redwood cabins occupied by meat hunters. Five miles to the east of the creek, the Petaluma Adobe, General Mariano Vallejo’s former hide and tallow factory, was being used as a hostel for disappointed gold miners streaming into the area in search of land.[1]
With the help of his son Garret and son-in-law A.T. Kyle, Keller quickly assembled a makeshift building along the creek to serve as a combination general store, dining house, and overnight lodge.[2] A 50-year old farmer from Missouri, Keller had come away from the gold fields empty handed but still plagued with gold fever. Within a few months, he was ready to stake a claim to what he surmised to be California’s next gold rush: land speculation. There was just one hitch—the land wasn’t for sale.
By 1851, squatting had become quite common in the American West. Thanks to the Preemption Act of 1841, a squatter had the right to purchase 160 acres in the public domain, assuming he had resided on the land for at least 14 months or made agricultural improvements to it for five years.[3] But in California, aspiring settlers discovered that the land most coveted for farming and ranching was privately held in Mexican land grants.[4] The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which brought an end to the Mexican-American War, protected Mexican ownership of the grants. At least it appeared to.[5]
California’s 813 Mexican land grants encompassed more than 10 million acres, or roughly 10% of the state, averaging 17,000 acres each.[6]
Originally established as an incentive to draw Mexican settlers to the Alta California frontier, the land grants found few takers, and were predominately doled to former Mexican soldiers and government officials. More than half of the grants were issued in the 1840s, as speculation of an imminent American takeover of the territory grew.[7]
The large ranchos were used primarily for raising cattle to supply Alta California’s thriving hide and tallow export business with Europe and New England. As cattle required as much as 30 acres a piece for grazing room, rancheros of 4,000 to 5,000 acres were relatively modest enterprises.[8]
Due to Alta California’s laissez-faire legal system, land grant deeds were often sketchy, incomplete, and in some cases, fraudulent. The land itself was haphazardly surveyed, if surveyed at all.[9] More than half of the grants were issued in the 1840s, as speculation of an imminent American territorial takeover grew.[10]
In 1850, after surveying the land grants, California’s secretary of state, Henry Halleck, issued a report classifying most of them “very doubtful, if not entirely fraudulent.” That served to support the thinking of many American settlers that, having won the battle with Mexico, the United States was entitled to ignore the terms of Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and instead treat the land grants as spoils of war, there for the taking.[11]
One of California’s first elected senators, William Gwin, was a strong settler advocate. He pushed through Congress the California Land Act in the spring of 1851, subjecting all Mexican land grant claims protected by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to legal review by an appointed Land Commission, placing the burden on the claimants to prove their ownership.
Ostensibly created to bring clarity to the legal morass, Gwin’s bill effectively putting the grants into play, opening the door to a host of American swindlers and land sharks. The ethos of the time, as David Starr Jordan noted, was simply: “whatever is not nailed down is mine, and whatever I can pry loose is not nailed down.”
Prospective settlers—an estimated 230,000 flooded into California by the early 1850s—were faced with one of two gambles: either purchase property from someone whose land grant claim might ultimately be nullified by the Land Commission, or else take a chance illegally squatting, in hopes the claim would be rejected and the land placed into the public domain, allowing them to make their own preemptive claim.[12]
Keller exercised a third option. Making a squatter’s illegal claim to 158 acres of a 13,316-acre Mexican land grant known as the Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio, he subdivided about 40 acres of the claim into a new town he called Petaluma, and began selling off lots to ready buyers.[13]
So began the Petaluma land scam, giving birth to one of California’s longest and most contested land grant disputes. Fueled by greed, exploitation, bribery, and fraud, it would play out over the next two decades in a series of dramatic twists and turns, leaving a persistent cloud hanging over the booming river town of Petaluma.
The Illegitimate Founding
Born in Kentucky in 1801, George Horine Keller tried his hand at various undertakings before settling down in 1835 on a farm in Weston, Missouri, along the Missouri River, and raising five children with his wife Nancy.
In the spring of 1850, he loaded up a wagon and set out for the Gold Rush with his eldest son, 19-year-old Garret Valentine Keller (mistaken in some early Petaluma histories as the city’s founder under the name “Garrett W. Keller”), and his son-in-law, 19-year old Andrew Thomas Kyle. The three men joined a wagon train of other prospectors departing for California from nearby St. Joseph, Missouri.[14]
After a fruitless year in the mines, the Keller party made its way to Sonoma County, most likely on the recommendation of Lilburn Boggs, Missouri’s former governor. Boggs had emigrated to the area with his family in 1846, after losing his home and mercantile business during an economic recession. Initially taken in by General Vallejo at the Petaluma Adobe just before it was plundered during the Bear Flag Revolt, Boggs soon settled in the town of Sonoma, where he opened a dry goods store and became alcalde, or judicial and administrative officer for the territory of Northern California extending to the Oregon border.[15]
Boggs’ reports of Sonoma County’s rich farmlands and mild climate circulated among Missourians back home as well in the gold fields. Of the 560 settlers counted in the 1850 Sonoma County census, 108 were from Missouri.[16]
Keller’s connection to Boggs may have come through Reverend Lorenzo Waugh, his Methodist minister back in Weston, who was well acquainted with the ex-governor. (Waugh himself emigrated to Petaluma in the fall of 1852).[17]
In January 1852, Keller hired a surveyor named J.A. Brewster to plat the town on 40 acres of his claim, extending west from the Petaluma Creek to Liberty and Kent streets, north to West and Bridge streets (today’s Lakeville Street), and south to A Street. After naming the streets—including Keller and Kentucky streets, the latter for his birth state—Keller began selling off property lots at this store for $10 apiece (roughly $300 in today’s currency).[18]
Despite the fact he had no legal claim to the land, many of Keller’s deed sales were recorded by the county. It may have had something to do with the fact that Bogg’s son William was the county’s first recorder of deeds.[19]
In February, Keller’s store also became the new town’s post office, with a mail carrier passing through town on horseback once a week, and Keller’s 19-year old son Garret appointed the town’s first federal postmaster.[20] A political appointment, it was most likely facilitated by ex-Governor Boggs, who had been appointed Sonoma’s first postmaster in 1849, and elected to the California State Assembly in the fall of 1851.[21]
In July, the newly established Kent & Smith dry goods store on Main Street (across from today’s Putnam Plaza) hosted an Independence Day celebration that drew 150 settlers from the surrounding area. By the end of the year, the town hosted roughly 50 houses, two hotels, the dry goods store, a livery, and a blacksmith.
Flat-bottom schooners loaded with potatoes, meat, and grains, plied up and down the Petaluma creek, and The Red Jacket, a paddle-wheel steamer, ferried passengers and cargo as far as Haystack Landing, a relatively deep-water dock a mile and a half south of the downtown.[22]
By the spring of 1853, Keller and his son-in-law Kyle had returned to Missouri with the proceeds of their development. The next year, they were part of a company of developers who founded Leavenworth, the first town to be established in the new Kansas Territory, employing an illegal land grab similar to the one Keller used in Petaluma, only this time on a land owned by Native Americans.[23]
Petaluma’s Land Grant Quagmire
One reason for Keller’s departure from Petaluma may have been commencement of the Land Commission’s reviews in the summer of 1852. By then, at least 42% of California’s 813 land grants had fallen into the hands of either American speculators or settlers who married into Mexican families, where the grants served as dowries.[24]
The new town of Petaluma sat at the northern tip of the 13,316-acre Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio, which primarily resided in Marin County. The rancho’s ownership was cloudy. Originally, it was awarded in 1838 to Antonio Ortega, a former priest and Mexican soldier who served as General Vallejo’s major-domo in secularizing the Sonoma mission. Vallejo allegedly made the grant to Ortega—by all accounts a sexual predator and generally reprehensible character—as a consolation prize after firing him.[25]
Vallejo’s nephew, Alta California governor Juan Alvarado, signed Ortega’s land patent in 1840, although it was later charged his signature was postdated to when the grant was filed with the Land Commission in 1852. The sticky point was that Ortega never actually lived on the ranch.[26]
Under Mexican law, a grantee was required to build a primary residence on the rancho within a year, and make use it for grazing or cultivation. It was not to be subdivided nor rented out, nor was the owner to move out of Alta California.[27]
The same year the 58-year old Ortega received the grant, he entered into an apparent arranged marriage with Francisca Miranda, the 18-year old daughter of Vallejo’s livestock foreman at the Petaluma Adobe, Juan Miranda. Ortega left occupation of the ranch to Miranda, who, along with his son Teodoro, built a family house there, cultivating 20 acres of corn and vegetables, and raising a couple thousand head of cattle. Ortega remained for the most part in Sonoma, where he operated a liquor store off the town square.[28]
In 1843, things got messy when Ortega left his pregnant wife, who was having an affair with another man, to join a money-making cattle drive to Oregon led by Sonoma’s alcalde, or mayor. During his absence, Juan Miranda petitioned the new governor of Alta California, Manuel Micheltorena, for ownership of the land grant, claiming his father-in-law had abandoned the property and the territory.[29]
Papers were drawn up transferring the title to Miranda, but before Micheltorena could sign them, he was overthrown in a political revolution. Juan Miranda died soon afterward.[30] His claim however, would live on.
In 1847, Ortega returned from Oregon and reclaimed the rancho. The next year, at the end of the Mexican-American War, he made a gift of it to a Jesuit priest named Father Abraham Brouillet who was looking for contributions to start a school in Santa Clara. In exchange, Brouillet agreed to educate Ortega’s children. Among those to witness the grant transfer was Juan Miranda’s son Teodoro, who had taken over running the rancho after his father’s death.[31]
Brouillet sold the rancho in 1852 for $5,000 ($158,000 in today’s currency) to an American speculator named Charles White. Shortly after filing his claim with the Land Commission on February 7, 1853, White died. Later that year, his widow, Ellen White, sold the claim to James F. Stuart, a San Francisco merchant, at a loss for $3,000 ($95,000 in today’s currency).[32]
Stuart was well aware of Keller’s new town of Petaluma on the rancho. It was, in fact, part of what attracted him to the claim. He was surprised however to find that a competing claim had been filed with the Land Commission on February 7, 1852, a year before White’s filing. That claim—originally the Miranda claim—had been purchased at public auction on September 20, 1850, by a 22-year old American speculator named Thomas B. Valentine.
As it turned out, Juan Miranda’s Teodoro and other heirs had put the claim up for auction after asking the Marin County probate court to liquidate Miranda’s assets in 1850. Valentine bid $9,550 ($300,000 in today’s currency), which many believe was a private rather than a public auction, as it was never advertised. That belief was supported by the fact that Valentine sold off portions of the rancho to his attorney, the court administrator, and the probate judge who approved the sale. [33]
Valentine came to California in 1849 with a group of New York gold-seekers who called themselves the California Company. Led in part by John Woodhouse Audubon, a naturalist and artist like his famous father, the company’s 96 members set off overland from New Orleans in quasi-military uniforms, funded with an $27,000 investment ($850,000 in today’s currency) from a wealthy benefactor. After a tortuous journey through the southwest, during which many members either turned back or died of cholera, 35 remaining members, including Valentine, reached California. By all accounts, they struck out in the gold fields.[34]
Which is when Valentine turned to land speculation, purchasing the Miranda claim.
By the time Stuart sought him out about his competing claim in 1853, Valentine was working for a commercial printer in San Francisco.[35] The next year, he replaced one of the partners in the firm, which, as Francis, Valentine & Co., would go on to reign as one of the city’s top printing shops for the remainder of the 1800s.[36]
After comparing notes, Stuart and Valentine became aware of the weaknesses of their respective claims. The Miranda claim lacked a governor’s signature and the Ortega claim a proof of residency. Concerned their rival claims might cancel each other out, the two men cut a deal. Valentine agreed to withdraw his claim in exchange for a percentage of the subdivision sales Stuart made from the land grant—50% for property in the upper half of the land grant where the town of Petaluma sat, and 33% for sales in the lower half extending into Marin County.[37]
In June 1855, four months after Valentine withdrew his competing claim, the Land Commission confirmed the legitimacy of Stuart’s claim.[38] Stuart quickly opened an real estate office in Petaluma, placing ads in the Sonoma County Journal newspaper to inform residents they had a legal obligation to purchase their property deeds from him, regardless of whatever bogus deeds they held from Keller or any other seller.[39]
More than 200 residents paid Stuart an average $350 ($10,000 in today’s currency) to purchase a deed, generating a total of $70,000 ($2 million in today’s currency), half of which Stuart split with Valentine.[40](The side of town east of the Petaluma Creek was not included in Stuart’s demand, as it was part of the undisputed 66,000-acre Rancho Petaluma land grant held by General Mariano Vallejo, who in 1853 sold 267 acres that came to comprise East Petaluma to the settler Tom Hopper).[41]
Valentine, however, soured on their division of spoils. When Stuart’s claim went before the U.S District Court on appeal— almost all of the decisions of the Land Commission were appealed as a matter of course—Valentine invoked an obscure clause in the Land Act that allowed him to refile his original Miranda claim, along with new depositions stating that Ortega had never resided on the property and had abandoned ownership when he moved to Oregon Territory. He also provided depositions claiming the governor’s signature of Ortega’s claim was postdated back to 1840 (the original filing of the claim was missing from the government archives).[42]
In August 1857, the Ninth District Court upheld the Land Commission’s ruling of Stuart’s claim, after which Valentine filed an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.[43]
Meanwhile, Petaluma, having grown to a population of 1,300, moved ahead in 1858 to officially incorporate as a city, accepting Stuart’s assurances that his legal ownership of the land grant would withstand Valentine’s court appeal.[44] It would prove to be wishful thinking.
The Settler Wars
As the Ortega-Miranda land grant battle unfolded, waves of settlers continued to pour into California. By 1860, Sonoma County’s non-native population, which stood at 560 in 1850, had grown to 12,000, consisting largely of farmers, with more than 200,000 acres under cultivation.[45] The primary driver of that growth was California’s wheat boom.
After the Crimean War cut off Russian wheat exports in the 1850s, Australia and New Zealand turned to California for wheat supplies, setting off a minor boom. The boom went into overdrive during the Civil War, which disrupted Midwest wheat exports to Europe. By the mid-1860s, 80 percent of the wheat grown in Sonoma County was being shipped around the Horn to Europe’s central grain market in Liverpool, England, making Petaluma not only a thriving river town, but also an international shipping port.[46]
Between 1852 and 1856, the Land Commission confirmed 514 of the 813 claims filed. The problem was, most of their decisions were appealed in federal district court, and then, in about 100 cases, the U.S. Supreme Court. Although 75% of the commission’s decisions were upheld on appeal, claimants had to wait on average 17 years to receive their final patents.[47]
This bureaucratic quagmire worked to the detriment of many Mexican claimants who were land rich but relatively cash poor. In addition to being thrust into a costly, protracted maze of hearings and appeals, they also faced California’s predatory property taxes, which served as an incentive to monetize the land through either intensive cultivation or subdivision sales.
As a result, many original claimants were forced to sell or mortgage their property to their Yankee lawyers—a swarm of whom descended upon California following passage of the Land Act—or American land sharks, at prices well below the land’s true value.[48]
With so many land grants tied up in appeals, the wheat boom led to clashes between claimants and settlers, turning in some cases into small-scale warfare, especially when claimants resorted to trying to eject large holdings of “squatters.” In 1857, frustrated settlers formed a statewide Settlers’ League to lobby elected official for their rights as homesteaders. Some members formed secret societies devoted to defying government authority and terrorizing land grant claimants.[49]
In 1853, Antonio Piña, owner of the 13,000-acre Rancho Tzabaco, the largest in the Russian River Valley, was shot to death by squatters, after he drove a herd of horses over a wheat field they had planted on his land. With the rancho in debt, his siblings signed it over after a five-year holding period to their American lawyer, John Frisbie, a real estate speculator and the son-in-law of General Vallejo.[50] The claim was confirmed by the Land Commission just before Frisbie took possession in 1858, and a mandatory survey ordered.
The fact that Mexican land grants lacked clearly specified boundaries, provided owners with the ability to influence government surveyors in drawing their property lines so as to exclude barren and mountain waste and include desirable valley acreage. In the case of the Rancho Tzabaco, that included acreage improved by settlers that was allegedly adjacent to the original land grant. Settlers responded by mobbing the surveyors and destroying their field notes. Mass meetings followed, with angry denunciations of “pestilential land thieves” and appeals for a new survey.[51]
In the spring of 1859, the Land Commission disclosed they had uncovered at least 200 fraudulent land grant claims, or a quarter of the claims filed. A Sonoma County chapter of the Settlers’ League, led by Petaluma minister Reverend Lorenzo Waugh (Keller’s former minister from Missouri), pledged to not purchase property held in any of the county’s 24 land grants until they had ferreted out the crooked land sharks and determined which claims were legally “settled and reliable.”[52]
That led within a few months to the “Bodega War.”
The claimant of the Bodega Rancho land grant, an ambitious, young San Francisco swindler named Tyler Curtis, requested that the county sheriff, L. Green, evict 48 squatters on his rancho. To assist the sheriff, Curtis sent along 40 armed “hirelings” from San Francisco. They were met in Bodega by 80 armed members of the Settlers’ League. After some mediation by Sheriff Green, Curtis agreed to stand down. The Settlers’ League escorted him and his hirelings back to Petaluma, where a local crowd gathered to send them off on the ferry to San Francisco with a cannon salute.[53]
Tensions between squatters and land grant claimants further intensified during the Civil War, as Sonoma County split into two factions, with Union loyalists centered around Petaluma and Copperheads on the Santa Rosa plain.
In June 1862, a newly appointed sheriff, Joseph M. Bowles of Petaluma, was dispatched to Healdsburg to serve eviction notices to five farms of squatters on Henry Fitch’s Rancho Sotoyome land grant. Prior to the sheriff’s arrival, a “settlers army” of 80 armed men gathered in Healdsburg’s town square to the cheers of a crowd of onlookers, before riding off to successfully block the sheriff’s efforts.
In mid-July, Bowles returned to Healdsburg with a posse comitatus of 250 lightly armed men. He was met by 50 armed members of the Settlers’ League, with an estimated 200 armed men hiding in the nearby woods. After it became clear the eviction would not proceed without bloodshed, the sheriff and his men withdrew, leaving the Settlers’ League to throw a barbecue for the large crowd of supporters who had gathered to watch the showdown.[54]
In September, Bowles went back upon orders from the governor, this time accompanied by two Union militias from Petaluma, the Petaluma Guard, formed in 1854, and a newly formed unit of Irish immigrants, the Emmet Rifles.[55] They were confronted by a band of armed men with blackened faces, who, upon seeing the militia units, “skedaddled” away, allowing Bowles to peacefully evict the squatters.[56]
Act of Congress
It was against this contentious backdrop that Valentine’s appeal of his land grant claim made it way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In 1860, the court remanded the case back to the District Court, which ruled again in favor of Stuart. Not to be deterred, Valentine appealed once again to Supreme Court, which, in April 1864, ruled both the Ortega and Miranda claims invalid, releasing the land into the public domain.[57]
Under the Preemption Act of 1841, that meant Petaluma residents were granted first right of refusal in purchasing their property from the government at a nominal fee of $1.25 per acre ($21 in today’s currency).[58] For early settlers, it would be the third payment they had to make for their property, having first paid Keller and then Stuart.
Stuart, who by that time had used his experience in the case to become a prominent land rights attorney and real estate agent, specializing in disputed land grants, supported the court’s decision.[59] Valentine did not. Well before the ruling, he had begun hedging his bets by lobbying Congress for the right to prove his claim in court.
In 1863, before the Supreme Court’s ruling, he persuaded California’s outgoing U.S. senator, Milton Latham, a pro-Southern Democrat, to introduce a bill in Congress reopening review of his claim.
Members of California’s state legislature took a vote to protest Latham’s bill, but were defeated. Although technically a Union state, California was politically split between Unionist and secessionists. The secessionists—heavily concentrated in Southern California—embraced Latham’s bill as a political means of instilling chaos in the state, as it would signal ripping up other land titles throughout the agricultural regions of California, creating anarchy and confusion.
Latham’s bill died in committee, but Valentine wasted no time increasing his lobbying of Congress once the Supreme Court’s ruling came down.[60] His persistence left Petaluma with an underlying sense of uncertainty.
“If the Congress revives the claim,” wrote the Sonoma County Journal, “it will be the worst blight that ever cursed Petaluma. It will be like rust upon a field of wheat, destroying every source of life and vitality. It will reduce the value of property by rendering it unsaleable.”[61]
In March 1865, California’s first elected Republican senator, John Conness, shepherded through Congress the General Townsite Bill, which provided for the government surveying and plotting Petaluma, after which land patents could be easily obtained by citizens for their property.[62]A group of local residents raised $3,000 ($50,000 in today’s currency) to have the government survey the rancho.[63]
A year later, after Conness announced Valentine’s latest request to Congress had been rejected, Petaluma celebrated by adorning the town with banners and the firing off a cannon while the Petaluma Brass band played.
By that time, roughly 2,500 people had purchased preemptive claims on the 13,316-acre Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio.[64] On March 1, 1867, Congress strengthened the city’s position by passing a bill ceding all government-owned land within Petaluma to the city.[65]
Still Valentine persisted. In coming years, two bills for reopening his claim passed in the House of Representatives, but died in the Senate. In 1871, a bill passed the Senate, but stalled in the House before they adjourned for the season.[66]
Finally, in 1872, Congress passed an act to have Valentine’s appeal reviewed by the Ninth District Court, with the option of appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. As a contingency, the bill stipulated that in the event the case was decided in Valentine’s favor, he would accept land scrip in lieu of the Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio, which he could apply to acquiring unclaimed public land elsewhere in the U.S. Thanks largely to vibrant growth of Petaluma, the property value of the 13,316-acre rancho at the time was estimated at $2 million ($44 million in today’s currency). [67]
To the surprise of many, the Ninth District Court ruled in Valentine’s favor, and in January 1874, their ruling was affirmed by the Supreme Court. Valentine was compensated with his land scrip, which he put to notorious use in 17 different states over the next 20 years, gaining fame for selling off portions of the scrip to land speculators around the country, who then laid claim to prominent pockets of properties still in the public domain.[68]
For the first time in the 22 years since George Keller founded the town, Petaluma was out from under the cloud of uncertainty.[69]As for Keller, after returning to Missouri, he helped to engineer an even larger illegal development scheme in co-founding Leavenworth, the first town in the new Kansas Territory, on land held by the Delaware Indians. He died in in Kansas in 1876, at the age of 75, never to return to Petaluma.[70]
Keller, Lansing, Kansas (photo public domain)
*****
Special thanks to Dana Keller Jones Schaffer for her assistance with research of George H. Keller.
This article inspired in part by Stacy Schiff’s observation of Samuel Adams in her biography of him, The Revolutionary (New York: Little Brown and Co., 2022), p.29:
“He spared us the eminently sensible, after the fact account, the kind that—bright with enameled anecdote—aligns beginnings with ends and causes with effects, lending a specious integrity and inevitability to the whole.”
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Robert Allan Thompson, Historical and Descriptive Sketch of Sonoma County, California (Philadelphia: L.H. Everts & Co., 1877), pp. 54-55; J.P. Munro-Fraser, History of Sonoma County (San Francisco: Alley, Bowen & Co., 1880), p. 131, pp. 259-262; Thos. Thompson, Historical Atlas Map of Sonoma County (Oakland, CA: Thos. Thompson & Co, 1877), p. 20.
[2] Munro-Fraser, pgs. 131, 259.
[3] The Preemption Act of 1841, 27th Congress, Ch. 16, 5 Stat. 453 (1841), accessed from www.minnesotalegalhistoryproject.org; Paul W. Gates, The California Land Act of 1851, California Historical Society, Vol. 50, No. 4 (Dec., 1971), pp. 395–430.
[4] David Hornbeck, “The Patenting of California’s Private Land Claims, 1851-1885,” Geographical Review, Vol. 69, No. 4 (October., 1979), p. 437.
[5] Hornbeck, p. 437.
[6] Hornbeck, pgs. 438, 443.
[7] Hornbeck, p. 438; Donald J. Pisani, “Squatter Law in California, 1850-1858,” Western Historical Quarterly, Autumn, 1994, Vol. 25, No. 3, pgs. 286, 290.
[8] Pisani, p. 286.
[9] Pisani, p. 286; Hornbeck, pgs. 435, 438.
[10] Hornbeck, p. 438; Pisani, pgs. 286, 290.
[11] Pisani, p. 289-290.
[12] Pisani, pp. 291-292.
[13] Adair Heig, History of Petaluma: A California River Town (Petaluma, CA: Scottwall Associates, 1982), pgs. 21, 29; “Centennial Resurrection,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, March 31, 1876; Robert Allan Thompson, p. 55.
[14] “Territorial Legislature of 1857-58: George Horine Keller,” Kansas Historical Society Collection, Vol. 10, 1907-1908, p. 211.
[15] William Boggs, “Lilburn Boggs,” F.A. Sampson, ed., Missouri Historical Review, Vol. IV (October 1909-July 1910), pp. 109; Donald Edwards, “Lilburn Boggs,” Portraits of Early Sonoma County Settlers (Sonoma County Genealogical Society, 2016), pp. 15-16.
[16] “Donald Edwards, pp. 15-18; “Gaye Lebaron’s Notebook,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, April 1, 1990.
[17] Lorenzo Waugh, Autobiography of Lorenzo Waugh (San Francisco: S.P. Taylor & Co., 1885), p. 135, 189; “A Long Life: Short Historical Sketch of Rev. Lorenzo Waugh,” Daily Commonwealth, August 27, 1884.
[18] “Historical: Petaluma’s Birth and Growth,” Petaluma Courier, October 19, 1892; Heig, p. 29.
[19] “Deeds of Sonoma County, 1847-1901,” film #008117705, LDS FamilySearch database. familysearch.org.
[20] Sacramento Daily Union: “Post Offices in California,” November 15, 1852; “Lillian Boggs,” Portraits of Early Sonoma County Settlers (Sonoma County Genealogical Society, 2016), pp. 19; A Register of Officers and Agents, Civil, Military, and Naval in the Service of the United States, 1853, United States, Department of State; “Historical: Petaluma’s Birth and Growth,” Petaluma Courier, October 19, 1892.
[21] Claire Prechtel-Kluskaens, “The Nineteenth-century Postmaster and his Duties,” NGS Magazine, National Genealogical Society, January, 2007; William Boggs, “Lillian Boggs,” F.A. Sampson, ed., Missouri Historical Review, Vol. IV (October 1909-July 1910), pp. 109; “First Postmasters,” Petaluma Argus, April 6, 1926; Heig, p. 30.
[22] Thos. Thompson, Historical Atlas map of Sonoma County (Oakland, CA: Thos. Thompson & Co, 1877), p. 20; “Historical: Petaluma’s Birth and Growth,” Petaluma Courier, October 19, 1892; Robert Allan Thompson, pp. 54-55; Munro-Fraser, pgs. 131, 259-262.
[23] Henry Miles Moore, “Sketches of the Early Settlement of the City and County of Leavenworth,” Western Life (Leavenworth, KS), August 3, 1900.
[24] Paul Gates, “The California Land Act of 1851,” California Historical Quarterly, December 1971, Vol. 50, No. 4. Pgs. 402, 408, 410; Hornbeck, pgs. 440, 442.
[25] Heig, p. 15; George Tays, “Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo and Sonoma: A Biography and History,” California Historical Society Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Sep., 1937), pp. 237, 240, 241; Transcript of the legal appeal in the District Court for the Northern District of California of “White vs. The United States,” December Term, 1863, https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/US/68/68.US.660.html.
[26] White vs. The United States, 1863 transcript; U.S. Supreme Court; United States v. White, 64 U.S. 23 How. 249 (1859).
[27] Pisani, p. 291; “White vs. The United States” transcript, pgs. 1, 9.
[28] White vs. The United States, 1863 transcript.
[29] White vs. The United States, 1863 transcript.
[30] White vs. The United States, 1863 transcript.
[31] White vs. The United States, 1863 transcript.
[32] California Supreme Court, Reports of Cases Determined in the Supreme Court of the State of California, Volume 16, 1861, pp. 473-504. Google/com.books.
[33] “Report in the Matter of Juan Miranda,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, February 2, 1865; Robert Lee, “Valentine Scrip: The Saga of Land Locations in Southern Dakota Territory Originating from a Mexican Land Grant,” South Dakota History Journal, Vol 2, No. 3, 1972, pp. 263-264; Judge James A. Short, order by probate court. Marin County, Calif., 19 Aug. 1850. 24 Jan. 1851, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
[34] Jeanne Skinner Van Nostrand and J. H. Bachman, “Audubon’s Ill-Fated Western Journey: Recalled by the Diary of J. H. Bachman,” California Historical Society Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 4 (Dec., 1942), pp. 289-310; John W. Audubon, Audubon’s Western Journal, 1849-1850 (Cleveland, OH: A H. Clark Company, 1906), p. 195.
[35] “San Francisco City Directory 1852-53, 1852: Monson, Haswell & Co., Printers, 159 Montgomery St.
[36] “Lesson of a Busy Life: T.B. Valentine, the Pioneer Printer, Passes to His Rest,” San Francisco Call, October 28, 1896; Henry R. Wanger, “Commercial Printers of San Francisco from 1851 to 1880,” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, Vol. 33 (1939), pp. 73-74; “The Francis-Valentine Company, San Francisco,” The Inland Printer, Volume XVIII, October 1896 to March, 1897. p. 679.
[37] Munro-Fraser, History of Sonoma County, pp. 154, 256-58; “After the Rogues,” Sonoma County Journal, January 30, 1863; “Supreme Court Decisions, Sacramento Daily Union, April 4, 1860.
[38] Robert Lee, p. 266.
[39] Ad for Office Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio, Sonoma County Journal, October 27, 1855.
[40] “The Miranda Resolutions,” Sonoma County Journal, February 27, 1863.
[41] “Ancient Land History,” Petaluma Courier, November 30, 1912.
[42] “After the Rogues,” Sonoma County Journal, January 30, 1863; White vs. The United States, 1863 transcript.
[43] “After the Rogues,” Sonoma County Journal, January 30, 1863; Robert Lee, p. 266.
[44] Thos. Thompson, p.20.
[45] “Population of Sonoma County,” Sonoma Democrat, September 27, 1860; “1860 Census: Agriculture of the United States,” United States Census Bureau, p. 10. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1860/agriculture/1860b-05.pdf
[46] “Varieties: The Sonoma Bulletin Says,” Placer Herald, June 8, 1853; Donald Pisani, From the Family Farm to Agribusiness (Berkeley: UC Press, 1984), p. 5-10;
James Gerber, “The Gold Rush Origins of California’s Wheat Economy,” December 2010,
America Latina en la Historia Economica 17(34):37-66; James Gerber, “Gold Rushes and the Trans-pacific Wheat Trade, California and Australia, 1848-57,” Pacific and Pacific Rim Economic History Since the 16th Century, edited by Dennis O. Flynn, A.J. H. Lathan, and Lionell Frost (NJ: Routledge, 1999)
[47] “Gaye LeBaron,” column, Santa Rosa Press Democrat, June 7, 1981; Hornbeck, pp. 439-440; Pisani, p. 287.
[48] Paul W. Gates, “California’s Embattled Settlers,” p. 124; Hornbeck, p. 440.
[49] “Settlers’ League,” Sonoma County Journal, May 15, 1857; Colonel L. A. Norton, “The Squatter Wars,” Life and Adventures of Colonel Norton (Big Byte Books, 2014),pp. 258-275; Paul W. Gates, Land and Law in California: Essays on Land Policies (Iowa State University Press, 1991), pp. 307-308.
[50] “Shooting in Sonoma,” Los Angeles Star, May 7, 1853.
[51] “The Healdsburg Outage,” Alta California, May 10, 1858; Gates, pp. 119-120.
[52] Daily Commonwealth: “A Long Life: Short Historical Sketch of Rev. Lorenzo Waugh,” August 27, 1884.
[53] “Gaye LeBaron,” column, Santa Rosa Press Democrat, June 7, 1981.
[54] Sonoma County Journal: “The Healdsburg War,” June 25, 1862; “Letter from the Seat of War,” “The Settler War Again,” “Healdsburg War,” July 16, 1862; “The Healdsburg Ware, Sonoma County Journal, July 18, 1862.
[55] “History of the Petaluma City Guard (Petaluma Union Mounted Rifles), California Militia/National Guard of California 1864-1868.” militarymuseum.org; “California Militia and National Guard Unit Histories: Emmet Rifles, Petaluma Guard,” February 8, 2016. militarymuseum.org.
[56] “Settler Troubles,” Sonoma County Journal, September 24, 1862; “Settlers’ Troubles Happily Terminated,” Petaluma Argus, October 1, 1862; Munro-Fraser, pp. 83-85; Historic California Militia and National Guard Units Emmet Guard: Adjutant General Report 1862, Page 20, http://www.militarymuseum.org/EmmetRifles.html
[57] Robert Lee, p. 266; Transcript of the legal appeal in the District Court for the Northern District of California of “White vs. The United States,” December Term, 1863. https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/US/68/68.US.660
[58] “Citizens Lookout,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, December 7, 1865;
The Preemption Act of 1841, 27th Congress, Ch. 16, 5 Stat. 453 (1841) Text of the law, accessed from www.minnesotalegalhistoryproject.org
[59] “His Last Call: Death of Attorney James F. Stuart,” San Francisco Call, November 19, 1893.
[60] “The First Fight of the Lobby,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, February 25, 1863.
[61] “The Miranda Claim,” Sonoma County Journal, December 31, 1862.
[62] “Legislation for California,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, February 16, 1865; “The Miranda Case Defeated,” Argus, April 3, 1865.
[63] “Settler’s Meeting, Petaluma Weekly Argus, June 23, 1864; Citizen’s Lookout,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, December 7, 1865.
[64] “Cause for Rejoicing,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, May 17, 1866; “Opposed to Miranda,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, April 26, 1866.
[65] Thirty-Ninth Congress Records, Session 2, 1867, page 418. www.loc.gov/law.
[66] Robert Lee, pp. 266-267.
[67] U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Congressional Globe, 42nd Congress, 2nd Session, 1872, pp. 1186-1187.
[68] W.W. Robinson, Land in California: The Story of Mission Lands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1948), pp. 178-179.
[69] “Our Homes Secure,” Petaluma Argus, January 9, 1874.
[70] William Connelley, editor, A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans, Volume 14 (Chicago: Lewis, 1918), pp. 1209-1210
