John Fremont and Mexican land grands in California

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ending the Mexican-American War was entered into by Mexico and the United States on Feb. 2, 1948, and ratified by both countries later that year. It contained a provision covering land ceded to the U.S. under the treaty, but owned by Mexicans. Ownership of such property, it said, "shall be inviolably respected."

In fulfillment of the directive that Mexican land titles be "inviolately respected," the Congress enacted the California Land Act of 1851, which provided for a board of three land commissioners, appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Claims by land holders (or their successors in interest) were to be brought before the commission for confirmation or rejection. Appeal was to be to the District Court for the Northern District of California, and thence to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 1855, the first such grant made it up to the Supreme Court. It produced an opinion written by Chief Justice Roger Taney two years before his Dred Scott fame, or infamy. This grant was for a large parcel of land called "Las Mariposas," located in the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada, prime gold mining country. Typical of grants made in the final years of Mexican rule, the land was among the most prized to be found in the Mexican state of Alta California. The original grantee was a Mexican official, Juan Alvarado, and his successor in interest was John C. Fremont.

Who was John C. Fremont? At this point in his extraordinary career he was not yet the first presidential nominee of the Republican Party. That would come a year later. He had been one of California's first U.S. senators. He had begun his career leading surveying expeditions in the American west, primarily the Rocky Mountain area.

In 1846, he had interrupted that effort to take a hand in the American conquest of Mexican California. He started too early, before hostilities between the U.S. and Mexico had officially begun. Fremont found himself and his men on top of Gavilan Peak in the Salinas Valley, surrounded by the Mexican troops of General Jose Castro. After three days he managed to extricate his men and head north to Oregon, for a while. Later he met up with the Sonoma Bear Flaggers just after they had captured and imprisoned the Mexican commander in the north of Alta, General Mariano Vallejo. Fremont co-opted the Bear Flaggers into his existing American unit.

Going south, he and his men, now called the California Battalion, took part in several of the military actions that were part of the Conquest. These took place principally in the southern part of the State. Fremont accepted the surrender of the Mexican forces in a document, signed on Jan. 13, 1847, called the Capitulation of Cahuenga Pass. Finally, he entangled himself in a nasty inter-service squabble, took the part of the Navy's commander over that of the Army's, Stephen Watts Kearney, and got himself court martialed and cashiered.

Soon thereafter, in 1847, he bought Las Mariposas. This was the land title he sought to have confirmed. The three commissioners decided for Fremont, but the district court did not, so the issue went up to the U.S. Supreme Court. By the time the action reached the high court, issues mainly centered on whether the conditions that the Mexican government had attached to the original grant to Alvarado had been performed, or could be excused of performance. These conditions included mapping the property and beginning to improve it.

In his opinion, Justice Taney began by noting that this was, in essence, a test case. Several other claims, resting on similar facts, were pending.

The Supreme Court noted that, for a portion of time since the grant, there had been a war on. This fact had encouraged, Justice Taney said, the local Indians in their attacks and depredations, making it impossible to perform the conditions. (N.B.: This does not fit in well with modern studies of settler-Indian relations in California during the years prior to and during the U.S. Civil War. See, e. g., Madley, Benjamin, "American Genocide," (2016). In the view expounded in this well-regarded book, the depredations were principally carried out by the American settlers.)

In moving to the issue of the conditions of the grant during the American period, which was Fremont's period of ownership, the chief justice concluded that the conditions need not have been performed, simply because the country was then American, and so was Fremont. "Every American citizen who was then in California had at least equal rights with the Mexicans and any law of the Mexican nation which had subjected them to disabilities ... were necessarily abrogated without appeal." To anticipate George Orwell's "Animal Farm" by about a century, some citizens, Americans, were more equal than others, the former Mexicans.

As Chief Justice Taney had foreseen, many other Mexican land grants then followed U.S. v. Fremont into court, most of them decided by Judge Ogden Hoffman, of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. In the main he confirmed the grants, often because of the "conditions in the country" cited in the Fremont case. This included the grant of an offshore island (U.S. v. Osio); one with a vague description of the property, and where the original grantee was an Indian, and in some circumstances, a non-citizen, (U.S. v. Sunol) and a claim brought by Pio Pico, the last Mexican governor of Alta California, where one of the issues was whether the Mexican government could execute such a grant "about thirteen days after the (American) capture of Monterey." (U.S. v. Pico).That date had been designated by the government of the state as the date of conquest. Judge Hoffman dug deeper. "It is to be considered, however, that Los Angeles, the capital of the Country [that is, the Mexican state of Alta California] was not taken until some months later." (Indeed, it was taken, at least symbolically, by Fremont himself in the Capitulation of Cahuenga pass.)

As for Fremont, he really never enjoyed his ownership of Las Mariposas. In a sense the property was just too rich, and too attractive. In the years between the publication of Chief Justice Taney's opinion and the outbreak of the Civil War, Fremont was plagued by large groups of squatters who occupied and worked mines on the property. These cost a great deal of money to remove. He frequently traveled to the East Coast and to Europe, seeking backing for his expensive undertaking.

Within a few years Fremont was involved in litigation against the Merced Mining Company, which asserted that he held only the surface rights (grazing, farming) to Las Mariposas and not the mineral rights. This action went back and forth in the courts until, in the early 1860s, Fremont and a partner won a victory which verged on the Pyrrhic.

By 1863, the Civil War was on. Past quarrels had faded and Fremont was a major general in the Union Army. He had no time any more for Las Mariposas. He sold it to a group that installed the later-famed landscape planner and author Frederick Law Olmsted as manager. Olmsted was skilled at many things, but not gold mining. In two years, the investment group was bankrupt, Olmsted had returned back east, and the assets that had once comprised the mighty Las Mariposas Grant were auctioned off at a sheriff's sale. 