Chapter 22: Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, General Mariano Vallejo

The Squatters and the Don

Casa Grande, Sonoma, California, 1861

Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Don Mariano Vallejo, Senator William Gwin

As the threat of war loomed, Captain Henry Burton was assigned to Fort Monroe in Virginia. Maria Amparo would accompany her husband to his post.

The Burtons were to depart from San Francisco, and generous as always, the Vallejos threw a farewell party at Casa Grande. Don Vallejo’s Sonoma-produced wine flowed and the young people danced quadrilles. But Maria Amparo was only impatient with the revelry. The other guests, even her Enrique, assumed her distraction had to do with last-minute preparations for their immense move East. 

But when Maria Amparo slipped away from the house, she had a very specific mission.

She urgently needed to speak with the Don. And this time it was Vallejo who was absent from his own party.

After her initial meeting with Don Vallejo, Maria Amaparo visited la Casa Grande often, and not just for the library. The unlikely friendship between her and Don Mariano sustained her through those rocky first years in Alta California. 

She had grown up unchallenged and unfulfilled, surrounded by the pious, the unambitious, the simply lazy.

Henry Burton, her Enrique, was her first savior. He had rescued her from the village life, and theirs was a union of expansive minds as well as eager bodies. But Henry was away more than he was home. And they were forever separated by race.

Her bond with Vallejo was different. Maria Amparo held a secret contempt for most of her own countrymen, who did so little with so much. She herself had the ambition of a hundred of her male compatriots. But Vallejo… from his role as the most powerful Mexican general in Alta California, to state senator, then mayor of Sonoma—as well as philanthropist who had donated both land and money to build Northern California’s first government buildings—the Don was proof of what their race was capable of, and she reveled in their friendship.

When Enrique Burton was reassigned to the military outpost of San Diego, Maria Amparo corresponded with Vallejo, again finding intellectual stimulation in his friendship while she struggled to adapt to life in the tiny, dusty town that locals called “Sand and Ague.”

She harbored no illusions that the General was a saint. It was whispered that in 1838, after thirty-five of his cattle were stolen, Vallejo executed thirty-five of his indigenous workers in retaliation. When smallpox raged through Sonoma County, Vallejo had inoculated his family and close allies, but not his workers. Almost the entire two thousand of them had died, and the resulting spread of smallpox almost eradicated the Coast Miwok and Pomo populations of Sonoma County.

She knew in her heart that even the worst stories she’d heard about him were at least partly true. But Don Mariano Vallejo was paisano. He was californio. Good and bad, he was a part of her alma, her soul. And she needed his help.

She found Don Mariano silently walking up and down the front piazza, his hands listlessly clasped behind and his head slightly bent forward in deep thought. He had pushed away to one side the many arm-chairs and wicker rockers with which the piazza was furnished, to give himself a long space to walk. That his meditations were far from agreeable could easily be seen by the compressed lips, slight frown, and sad gaze of his mild and beautiful blue eyes. Sounds of laughter, music and dancing came from the parlor; the guests, both old and young, enjoying themselves heartily. Don Mariano, though already in his fiftieth year, was as fond of dancing as his sons and daughters, and not to see him go in and join the quadrille was so singular that Maria Amparo felt a stab of worry. He was so absorbed in his thoughts that he did not at first hear her voice calling him.

So she caught up him, putting her arm under his, bending her head forward and turning it up to look into his eyes.

“What is the matter?” she asked, stopping short, thus making the Don come to a sudden halt. He smiled faintly in amusement at her effort to rouse him.

She persisted. “I am sure something has happened. Tell me.”

He sighed, and the sound was an icy wind in her heart. “We are waiting to have my title settled. Waiting in killing suspense. Killing literally, for the settlers (I don't mean to make puns), are killing my cattle by the hundred head, and I cannot stop them.”

She knew he was speaking of the title to his ranch, currently being disputed in court. “But there are laws to protect property in California,” Maria Amparo began. He had himself ensured it. It was what she was there to consult him about.

“Some sort of laws, which in my case seem more intended to help the law-breakers than to protect the law-abiding,” Don Mariano replied, in agitation.“By those laws any man can come to my land, for instance, plant ten acres of grain, without any fence, and then catch my cattle which, seeing the green grass without a fence, will go to eat it. Then he puts them in a ‘corral’ and makes me pay damages and so much per head for keeping them, and costs of legal proceedings and many other trumped up expenses, until for such little fields of grain I may be obliged to pay thousands of dollars. Or the settler shoots the cattle at any time without the least hesitation, only taking care that no one sees him in the act of firing upon the cattle. He might stand behind a bush or tree and fire, but then he is not seen. No one can swear that they saw him actually kill the cattle, and no jury can convict him, for although the dead animals may be there, lying on the ground shot, still no one saw the settler kill them. And so it is all the time. I must pay damages and expenses of litigation, or my cattle get killed almost every day.”

Maria Amparo listened in silence and growing dismay. The conversation was not going at all as she had wished. It was precisely on the matter of land grants and squatters that she desperately needed Don Mariano’s help.

While Enrique was commander of the San Diego military post, he had purchased Rancho Jamul, nearly 9000 acres of land, initially a grant given to Governor Pío Pico in 1831 by Governor Victoria.

The Burtons had repaired the rancho’s adobe house to live there, raising cattle and horses as well as their two young children, Fanny and Henry. Under the California marriage and property law that Vallejo himself had pushed for, Jamul was considered a joint asset, and Maria Amparo took no end of pride in her ownership of the rancho, not merely as valuable property but as a part of her history.

But the validity of Enrique’s purchase of Jamul rested on the legal recognition of Pico’s land grant. The Land Act of 1851 had set up a Land Commission to determine the validity of Mexican grant titles, and the Commission had been rejecting Spanish land titles at an alarming rate. When Pío Pico tried to have his title to Jamul confirmed by the board, his claim was rejected, forcing the Burtons to begin looking into an appeal of the decision. Now a number of squatters had swept in and settled on the rancho, claiming it was government land and free for hem to settle.

With Henry’s assignment to Fort Monroe, Maria Amparo’s mother Isabel, her brother Federico and Henry’s half-brother Edward Williston would remain at Rancho Jamul. But the Burtons themselves would be a whole continent away from their disputed land, leaving the squatters to wreak havoc…

Maria Amparo forced herself to breathe through her panic. “Haven't you—the cattle owners—banded together to have some law enacted that will protect your property? It seems to me that could be done—”

Don  Mariano gave a dismal shake of his head. “I am told that at this session of the legislature a law more strict yet will be passed, which will be ostensibly ‘to protect agriculture,’ but in reality to destroy cattle and ruin the native Californians.” For a moment his eyes flashed with the old spirit. “The agriculture of this State does not require legislative protection. Such pretext is absurd.”

“I thought that the rights of the Spanish people were protected by our treaty with Mexico,” Maria Amparo said faintly.

 “By the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo the American nation pledged its honor to respect our land titles just the same as Mexico would have done. The treaty said that our rights would be the same as those enjoyed by all other American citizens. But the discovery of gold brought to California the riff-raff of the world, and with it a horde of land-sharks. Our people are being uprooted from their own lands or impoverished. And I think but few Americans know or believe to what extent we have been wronged by Congressional action.”

“By Senator Gwin, you mean,” Maria Amparo said, the name bitter in her mouth. Senator William Gwin, the grand enabler of the squatters.

She had first known of Gwin through Don Vallejo, who successfully opposed the senator during California’s original Constitutional Convention. It had been Vallejo who quietly rallied the californio forces to side with el Senator Broderick against Gwin, to ensure that California remain a free state and not a slave state as Gwin had hoped.

Whether it was retaliation against the californios or greed or both. Gwin had been doing his nefarious work ever since, creating the United States Land Commission, whose sole purpose was to review Mexican land grants. The Commission operated on the cynical assumption that all claims to grants were invalid until the californio owner could prove the authenticity of his claim.  

And that was not even the beginning of Gwin’s infamy.

During her time in San Diego Maria Amparo had soon become aware of Gwin’s sinister plans for Southern California. The San Diego Herald, the newspaper openly acknowledged as Gwin’s mouthpiece, first drew Maria Amparo’s ire with its frequent comments attacking her race:

“We never met with a more lethargic, indolent, lazy set of white men, than the people of Lower California, from their comandante and alcaldes down to their poor, miserable, deluded and denuded, but simple and kind, hearted Rancheros.”

But reading more closely, she realized Gwin was working in tandem with Ames, the Herald’s editor, to agitate for division of the state into Upper and Lower California, and for the annexation of the new Southern half of California as a slave state. He had similar plans to bring the Sandwich Islands into the Union as a slave territory, as well as plans for the construction of a Southern transcontinental railway terminating at San Diego and serving the slave powers.

These ambitions were clear to anyone who was paying attention. Maria Amparo could not believe that the rest of white California was naïve enough to grant the viper such political power.

“Gwin is not in any way Californian,” she burst out. “He is Southern. He owns a Mississippi plantation full of slaves. How can he be allowed to make laws for California?”

Don Mariano shook his head. “I fear that the conquered have always but a weak voice, which nobody hears.”

Maria Amparo stood silent, devastated. She had known that Vallejo’s fortunes were receding. His gift of land for a state capital had come to naught. For several years the actual location of the capital had bounced back and forth between Benicia and Sacramento, but by 1855 Sacramento had won out. It was a blow to the General’s legacy. And his legal entanglements must be hideously expensive.

Even so, she had thought of all the men in California, Vallejo was most equipped to deal with Gwin. He had always been the fighter, the sly negotiator. He had never let los yanquis best him. She was alarmed to find him so diminished, so devoid of hope.

She took his arm again, this time to grip it, shake it. “They have taken nothing from you. You have your whole life. They cannot take your legacy. You must write your history,” she urged him.

She won a small smile from him, and she pressed on. “We were born to do something more than simply live. We were born for something more, for the rest of our countrymen.”

Now she saw a flare in his eyes, the beginning of fire. “My history of California…”

“Your history is our history.”

“Si,” he said softly. “Claro.”

She left him on the piazza and walked his gardens in a daze. She had come to him expecting him to rally, to fight—to help her fight. Instead she had rallied him.

She hoped she had.

And now she was resolved. She would keep Rancho Jamul. Even if she had to appeal to the American president—whoever that turned out to be—himself.

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Notes:

Much of the above scene between Maria Amparo and Don Vallejo is written in her own words, from her second novel: The Squatter & The Don.