San Diego County CA Archives History - Books .....Early Days 1888
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Book Title: The City And County Of San Diego

CHAPTER I.
THE EARLY DAYS.

   THE BAY of San Diego was discovered in 1542, by Cabrillo, and named in 1602
by Vizcaino, who made a survey of it at the time.From the survey of Vizcaino
over a century and a half rolled over its unbroken face until the ships of Padre
Junipero Serra anchored within it. It was several years before the Indians were
fully subdued, but they finally succumbed to the peaceful arts of the
missionaries. 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 of these settlers
obtained grants of large tracts of land from the Mexican Government, which have
since been the cause of much litigation, envy, and quarreling. 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 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. Instead of abusing the owner of a grant as a monopolist
and a robber, the man who felt bad because he did not own a slice of it, should
have remembered that he or his father or grandfather might have had it just as
easily. But they preferred the luxuries of civilization to a rude life in a
foreign country, both wild and remote, and which, as everyone then believed,
would never be anything but a wild cattle range. The man who endured years of
privation for its sake, could scarcely be blamed for wanting something for it.
In some respects these large holdings have been an injury to California. But it
is equally certain that the results have not been one-sided. Such improvements
as have been made at Coronado Beach, Escondido, and many other places in
Southern California, would have waited fifty years, had the land been half
covered with ordinary farms. Riverside, Pasadena, and nearly all that is of much
value in Los Angeles and San Bernardino Counties, owes its value to the fact
that the control of the water, highways, and improvements of all kinds were in
one hand.

   Nevertheless 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. The
owners of the large ranchos, who knew better than this, still believed the land
fit only for stock range; and as they practically owned all the outside range,
they naturally looked with jealousy upon the incoming of any farmers either to
overstock the ranges or to make cultivated fields, upon which the cattle would
trespass and cause trouble. Hence, it was for the interest of all these large
owners to keep up the cry that the land was of no use for anything but stock,
even had they not really believed it.

   Under these influences the county remained virtually an open stock range,
covered with many thousands of cattle and horses, for about twenty years after
the admission of California to the Union. A very few persons had come in and
attempted farming, some on large and some on small scales, but made a poor
headway against low prices, wild cattle and their own ignorance of the land's
peculiarities. Much quarreling and bad feeling between the new settlers and the
old necessarily resulted. On the one hand the ranchero claimed that his lines
embraced all available Government land in his vicinity, and ate out the crops of
the granger with his cattle. In this he was aided by the sheep-man, who had for
some time been a power in the land and who wanted all the public grazing for
himself. On the other hand, too many a "granger" ignored all lines, declared all
grants frauds, denounced his Government for recognizing vested rights, squatted
in force upon what was unquestionably within the grant lines, and shot the
ranchero's cattle not only in his grain fields, but in the hills. The cattle
shot in the fields were left where they lay, but the beef upon which some of the
new settlers kept fat came from the hills.

   The "granger" increased so fast under the impetus given by the founding of
New San Diego, the fact—first proved by J. S. Harbison, of Sacramento, who
brought the first bees into California and into this county—that enormous
quantities of fine honey could be raised here, and the fine climate, that he
soon became a power in the land. The squatter, or "esquatero," as he was
contemptously called by the sheep and cattle-men, finally walked off with the
country, as he eventually will with the great cattle ranges of the great western
basins. About 1870 he worked through the Legislature a law which broke up the
old free range system which had been in use in all the new States of the West in
their early days. Under this system damages for trespass by cattle could be had
only upon proof that the land was protected by a fence of a certain size. The
new law, or "no-fence law," as it was called, made the common law of England, by
which every man must keep his cattle on his own land, the law of this county.

   This law soon reduced the raising of cattle and horses to a minimum, because
it was too expensive at that time to fence the large ranchos, and because the
free range upon which cattle had heretofore run was practically destroyed. The
sheep interest did not suffer, but improved in consequence of the law. Being
under the care of a herder day and night, sheep could not trespass, and the
amount of free range on public land was increased by the withdrawal of the
cattle and horses. From this time sheep-raising, bee-keeping, and general
farming became the leading industries, though on a few of the large ranchos,
such as Santa Margarita and Santa Rosa, the cattle were retained. The ranchos
remained, however, closed to settlement, as the owners did not care to admit a
few small farmers, and there was then no probability of getting settlers enough
to make subdivision profitable. El Cajon, San Dieguito, and La Nacion were for
many years the only ranchos open to settlement, and the farmer had to seek such
spots as lay around the grants or in the small valleys in the surrounding hills.
Some very valuable tracts, such as Poway, Fallbrook, and San Pasqual, never were
included in grants and were speedily taken up. Hundreds of other small tracts
were scattered over the land in pieces of from one hundred to a thousand acres
or more, and of these the smaller ones were gradually settled, until it became
nearly impossible to find forty acres of good, arable Government land west of
the desert divide San Jacinto was opened to general settlement in 1882,
Escondido in 1886, Ex-Mission in 1885, Santa Maria in 1886, San Marcos in 1887,
Temecula in 1883. But many of the large grants still remain closed, though it
will be but a short time before all of them are upon the market in small tracts.


Additional Comments:
From:

THE
CITY AND COUNTY
OF
SAN DIEGO.
ILLUSTRATED,
AND CONTAINING
BI0GRAPHICAL SKETCHES
OF
PROMINENT MEN AND PIONEERS.

SAN DIEGO, CAL.
LEBERTHON & TAYLOR
1888


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