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passed to the American Government. And so it went on, until the country, except the
mission and pueblo lands, had passed into private hands. A table showing these early
land grants is given at the end of this chapter.
Mr. Theodore S. Van Dyke has written very instructively about these land grants
in his city and County of San Diego. He says:
"Soon after the establishment of other missions in California, and the quieting
and gathering in of the greater part of the Indians around the missions, settlers from
Spain and Mexico began to come in, and later on a few from the United States, England,
and elsewhere. Nearly all these settlers obtained grants of large tracts of land from
the Mexican Government, which have since been the cause of much litigation, envy,
and quarrelling. These grants were simply Mexican homesteads, given to settle the
country just as the United States homesteads are given, for practically nothing.
"Instead of selling a man, as the United States then did, all the land he wanted
for $1.25 an acre, the Mexican Government gave it to him by the square league. The
grants were made large partly as an inducement to the settler to go into
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such a wild and remote country, but mainly because the raising of cattle for the hides
and tallow being the only industry, a large range was absolutely necessary for profit as
well as the support of the band of retainers necessary for profit and safety. . . .
The first effect of these large grants was to retard settlement. The County of San
Diego, in common with the rest of Southern California, was then believed to be a veritable
desert of sand, cactus, and horned toads, fit only for stock range at the rate of about
one hundred acres to each animal."
Dairying was practically unknown among the ranchos, and often there was no
effort even to keep the tables supplied with milk. Davis says that he has frequently
drank his coffee or tea without milk, on a ranch containing from 3600 to 8000 head of
cattle. Other methods were equally wasteful. The horns were not thought worth saving,
and the Americans who chose were allowed to gather and ship all they cared to, without
money and without price. These lax methods may be further illustrated by the fact that in
1840 the Mission of San José ordered the slaughter of two thousand bulls, which were
killed simply for their hides, none of the meat, and little of the tallow, being saved.
Next to the cattle industry, and the trade in hides and tallow, the fisheries made
the most important contribution to the early commerce of San Diego. And the fisheries
included the exciting chase for the sea otter, which was very valuable for its fur. The otters
were far more plentiful in the north, yet were frequent visitors to the San Diego
coast, especially to the kelp beds off Point Loma and La Jolla. The Indians were acquainted
with the use of their furs when the Spaniards came, and one of the early cares
of the missionaries was to train their converts to improved methods of catching them.
The Indians do not appear to have been remarkably energetic hunters, but enough
skins were brought in to form an important item of export and a subject of contention
between the commandants and the missionaries, both of whom thought themselves entitled
to a monopoly of the traffic. The heyday of the Spanish trade was about the time of
the Lelia Byrd affair, when virtually the whole population had skins to sell, openly or
covertly, and the commandant had a collection of about a thousand confiscated skins.
By the time the Americans began to settle at San Diego otters were not so common
in the bay, but along the coast of Lower California and its adjacent islands there