The Squatter Riot of '50 in Sacramento [pp. 225-246]

2The Squatter Riot of'50 in Sacramento.
published literature than the above I cannot
name as bearing directly on the riot of'50,
although the whole legal history of the Sutter case, as it was summed up in the United
States Supreme Court Decisions of i858
and I864, has an indirect bearing on the
matter; while the problems concerned have
of course affected all the rest that has been
written or said about any of the land titles
that are based on Sutter's Alvarado grant.
In forming my judgment of the perspective
in which all this matter is to be viewed, I
must further acknowledge how much I owe
to the free use granted to me in the summer
of I884, by Mr. H. H. Bancroft, of his great
collections of pioneer records. As it happens, I did not find time during several
weeks of study that I enjoyed at Mr. Bancroft's library to consult his records of this
particular affair, and so cannot confess any
debt to him for the material here collected
from the Sacramento newspaper files. But
while I was reading in his original sources
for other purposes,! collected numerous
suggestions, and got glimpses of facts that
have enabied me to see the present topic in
a much clearer light, when I later came to
consider it. I hope to have a chance to
show my direct indebtedness to the Bancroft library more fully in another connection hereafter; but for the present, so much
may suffice as acknowledgment of the indirect help that I owe to Mr. Bancroft's courtesy, in my study of the present question.
I.
AND now to begin the story with the moral,
let us try to understand at once why this episode should seem of so much historical significance. That a few lives should be lost
in a squabble about land, is indeed a small
thing in the history of a State that has seen
so many land quarrels as California. The
Squatter Riot of'50 was but a preliminary
skirmish, if one will judge it by the number
of killed and wounded, while the history of
settler difficulties in the whole State, during
the thirty-five years since, seems, by comparison of numbers, a long battle, with killed
and wounded who would need to be counted, not by fives,' but by hundreds.
Not, however, for the number of lives lost,
but for the importance of just that crisis at that
moment, must we consider the Squatter Riot
noteworthy. Just as the death of James
King of William happened to seem of more
importance to the California community than
the deaths of ninety and nine just miners
and other private persons, who were waylaid
or shot in quarrels; just as that death had
many times the historical significance that it
would have had if King had been slain under the most atrocious circumstances a few
months earlier;-even so the Squatter Riot in
Sacramento is significant, not because bloodshed was unknown elsewhere in California
land quarrels, but because nowhere else did
any single land quarrel come so near to involving an organized effort to get rid, once
for all, of the Spanish titles as evidences of
property in land. Elsewhere and later, men
followed legal methods, or else stood nearly
alone in their fight. Men regarded some
one title as fraudulent, and opposed it; or
frankly avowed their private hatred of all
Mexican land titles, but were comparatively
isolated in their methods of legal or illegal
resistance to the enforcement of the vested
rights; or they were led into lengthy and
often murderous quarrels by almost hopelessly involved problems of title, such as so
long worried all men alike in San Francisco.
Elsewhere than in Sacramento, men thus
tried, in dealing with numerous questions of
detail, to resist the enforcement of individual
claims under Mexican titles; but in Sacramento, in 1850, the popular opposition was
deeper, and its chances of a sweeping success were for a moment far greater.
In form, to be sure, even the Sacramento
squatters, like so many successors, pretended
to be doubtful of the legal validity of Sutter's
Alvarado grant, and to believe that, if it were
valid, the grant still did not cover Sacramento. But this pretense was here a very thin
veil for an undertaking that was in its spirit
and methods distinctly revolutionary. The
squatters of that time and place were well
led, and they meant to do, and contempo
[Sept.
226