INTRODUCTION: THE RANCHOS OF CALIFORNIA

The original work from which this book is taken, Burgess McK. Shumway's Ranchos of California: Patented Private Land Grants Listed by County, was one of a series of noteworthy research projects produced by the Federal Writers Project of the Works Project Administration. The WPA was a Depression-era attempt by the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt to provide paying jobs for the nation's unemployed workers, including out-of-work artists, writers, and other creative individuals. The FWP took these unemployed authors, and set them to producing state and city travel guides, county records inventories, census indexes, local and regional histories, and a great many other projects of interest to the historian, researcher, and genealogist. Regretably, many of the projected series were never finished, having been terminated by the onset of World War II. Also unfortunately, more than half of the books which did appear were published in mimeographed form only, in editions of no more than 250 copies, with poor typography (often typed copy), inferior paper, and cheap bindings. Few copies survive today, and most of these are brittle, faded, and difficult to read.

    Shumway's project, originally produced in 1940-41, anticipated Robert G. Cowan's Ranchos of California: A List of Spanish Concessions, 1775-1822, and Mexican Grants, 1822-1846 (Historical Society of Southern California, 1977), a thoroughly excellent work in its own right. But Cowan's work was organized differently, by rancho name, and provided less detail than Shumway's pioneering effort, which is available today in just a handful of large research collections. Thus, when a well-known California book dealer, Allan Adrian, suggested that a new edition of Shumway's guide might be appropriate, Borgo Press obtained a copy of the original, had it reset and re-edited, and retitled it California Ranchos to avoid confusion with Cowan's book. The volume was also checked for typographical and other errors, and newly indexed. Robert G. Cowan graciously consented to provide a new preface, "California's Land Grants."

    Shumway's basic format, which organized the grants by the present-day county boundaries into which they would now fall, and then alphabetically by the name of the rancho, has been maintained in this new version. Ranchos straddling two contemporary counties are listed in both. Grants beginning with initial Spanish-language articles ("El," for example) have been alphabetized under those articles (following the practice in Shumway's original publication), since many of these names later became well-established locales in modern-day California.

    The original Spanish and Mexican land grants were issued under a loose metes-and-bounds system that emphasized contemporaneous physical landmarks to establish the boundaries of each grant; these were often sufficiently ill-defined to cause disputes at a later date, even prior to statehood. Consequently, a number of the ranchos were regranted a second time, sometimes to the same person(s) as before. When California was admitted to the union in 1850, it was erected as a public-domain state.

    Boundaries under the public-domain system are determined from a theoretical grid based around north-south meridians and east-west base lines. Three principal meridians were established in California between the years 1851-53: the Humboldt Meridian (HBM), located in northern California; the Mount Diablo Meridian (MDM), located in central California; and the San Bernardino Meridian (SBM), located in southern California. Intersecting these meridians at right angles are several base lines. Extending outward from these measures are six-mile-square townships, each having thirty-six one-mile-square sections. The numbers listed at the end of each entry in this book describe the township(s) into which the rancho now falls, the letter "T" indicating the distance from the base line, the letter "R" indicating the distance from the meridian. Thus, "T1S, R11-12E, MDM" indicates that the rancho is located in Township 1 South, Range 11-12 East of the Mount Diablo Meridian.

    Following the establishment of state government in California, a Board of Land Commissioners was empowered (beginning in 1852) to adjudicate Spanish and Mexican claims, and to reissue properly surveyed patents using the public-domain system now in effect. Some claims were rejected, others were not adjudicated until the 1880s, and still others wound up in the courts. Many of the original grants had long since been sold, split into smaller sections through inheritance or sale, or been subject to fraudulent claims. Most of the original records of the Board were destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake and fire in 1906. This book only lists those claims that were ultimately recognized as genuine, with new patents actually being issued.

    My thanks to Allan Adrian, for locating a copy of the original book, to the University of California, Los Angeles, to Robert G. Cowan, for providing a new preface, and to Mary A. Burgess, for describing the meridian system so succinctly, and for producing the indexes herein.

Michael Burgess
San Bernardino, California
July 19, 1988