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Nicasio Historical Background |
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Page 4 of 6 The Rancho Nicasio Land Grant
The Rancho Nicasio land grant was the largest in all Marin. The original, officially documented grant was signed by His Excellency Governor Manuel Micheltorena on August 1, 1844. It was later confirmed by Governor Pio Pico on August 30, 1845. Ten square leagues were granted to Spanish nobleman Pablo De la Guerra for public service, and six square leagues to sea captain Juan Bautista Roger Cooper (another Anglo turned Mexican Catholic to qualify as land grantee) in payment of $4,000 owed him from the California treasury. Full measurement of 16 leagues would equal 70,854+ acres, however, it was later confirmed by survey as a grant of 56,621 acres. (History of Marin, 1880, p. 283)
The name Nicasio is believed to come from a local etcha-tamal Indian shepherd named after St. Nicasius (Nicasio in Spanish) by the mission padres in baptism. The 1844 land grant diseno shows that the name Nicasio was already well established as it marks by name Arroyo de Nicasio, Casa De los Indios Nicasio, and Roblado (oak grove) de Nicasio.
At about the same time this Rancho Nicasio grant was solicited, decreed, and documented, it appears that General Mariano Vallejo and his nephew, Juan B. Alvarado, both ex-governors of California, hatched a plot to acquire this grant for themselves. To gain title, it was first necessary to secure a legal conveyance to the Nicasio Indians, which had never been done. Once Vallejo thought this was sufficiently achieved, it appears that he and Alvarado duped the Indian chiefs into signing away their ownership to Alvarado for $1000. The Indians then signed a receipt for the $1000, a sum they never received.
Governor Micheltorena’s secretary, Manuel Jimeno uncovered the plot. Since the Indians had never received payment from Alvarado, besides, since no official document signed by the governor granting the Indians title could be located, and moreover, since the grant to De la Guerra and Cooper had already been signed, Alvarado’s petition for Nicasio was not granted.
Pablo De la Guerra, a native Californio of aristocratic Castilian descent, was born at Santa Barbara where his father was made commandant of the presidio. Educated in England, Pablo was revered as an accomplished scholar. He served as Collector of the Port at Santa Barbara and for this public service he received the Nicasio grant.
Juan B. R. Cooper arrived in California in 1823, the ship’s master of the American schooner, Thaddeus. He gave up seafaring for stock raising, settled in Monterey in 1831, and married a sister of General Mariano Vallejo.
Neither of these men knew what Nicasio consisted of and so in 1847 they hired surveyor Jasper O’Farrell, Irish pioneer who laid out the city of San Francisco, to find out. His completed survey of 1849 divided the grant into five parcels. The fifth parcel of almost 9,500 acres went to O’Farrell in recompense for the survey. De la Guerra’s two parcels totaled well over 30,000 acres, Cooper’s two parcels, just over 16,000 acres.
On October 25, 1850, Cooper sold his Nicasio acreage to Benjamin Buckelew for $10,000. In fact in 1850 Benjamin Rush Buckelew bought three Marin ranchos in 11 days. He had come to San Francisco with his family on the Hoppe and Harlan wagon train in 1846. In San Francisco he founded a watch making and jewelry shop with tools he had brought with him from New York. He had owned and operated the San Francisco newspaper the Californian (1847-48), manufactured gold scales for use in the Mother Lode, and is said to have invented a machine for getting power out of the air. He bought John Reed’s Corte Madera Rancho on credit for $35,000 as well as the saw mill located there. With great expectations of founding a city to rival and surpass San Francisco, he set up a hotel and several houses (all of which had been shipped to S. F. in sections and abandoned there) at what is now Paradise Cove, calling it California City. Besides Cooper’s Nicasio holdings, Buckelew also purchased Cooper’s Punta de Quentin Rancho for $55,000. Due to illness, bad luck, and poor judgment, Buckelew became embroiled in a series of costly lawsuits resulting in the loss of all three ranchos. James Ross and John Cowell acquired both the Quentin and Nicasio properties.
The lion’s share of the original Rancho Nicasio grant (c. 30,000 acres) which belonged to De la Guerra was purchased by Lieutenant Henry Halleck in December of 1850 for $30,000. Lt. Halleck, a scholarly military engineer, had arrived in Monterey in January of 1847 on the store ship Lexington with Lt. William Tecumseh Sherman, Lt. Edward O. C. Ord, and Company F, 3rd Artillery. His mission was to survey the coastal fortifications. Halleck was soon appointed Secretary of State for the Territory of California by Military Governor Colonel Mason.
In 1849 he served as Monterey’s delegate to the California State Constitutional Convention and became a substantial author of our state constitution. Halleck was able to place a hefty down payment on the extensive tract of land in Nicasio when the delegates voted to allocate $6,000 per year to him as Secretary of State from funds intended to support the military government. Halleck decided to pay himself retroactively to April of 1847, a sum amounting to $14,136.98.
Halleck was also a lawyer who became an authority on the subject of land grants and land titles. His prestigious law firm Halleck, Peachey
& Billings was soon to represent over half of all the cases that came before the U. S. Land Commission tribunal.
Halleck liked to hunt and fish in Nicasio where he built a weekend cabin on the creek that bears his name. The cabin was crudely made of redwood logs and its roof was turf. After marrying Elizabeth, a granddaughter of Alexander Hamilton in New York in 1855, he rarely visited his country cabin. They lived in a Rincon Hill mansion on Second and Folsom streets in San Francisco. At this same time, he began selling off his Nicasio land with a 3,500-acre parcel to James Black for $5,000.
During the Civil War in which he served as General-in-Chief of the Union armies and then Lincoln’s chief-of-staff, Halleck sold the remainder of his land holdings in Nicasio. He later became Commander of the Military Division of the Pacific, returning to San Francisco, from where he still enjoyed visiting the countryside of Marin. According to the Marin Journal of 4/17/1869, “General Halleck is at present rusticating in San Rafael.”
These earliest foreign settlers and land owners of Marin, both the Californios and the Anglo adventures that followed, were courageous and bold individuals who risked the perils of lengthy voyages by land and sea to begin new lives in the wilderness that was then California. Once here they demonstrated great camaraderie and hospitality to each other and newcomers alike. They remained in frequent contact with each other over distances that seem enormous to us today especially given that their modes of transportation were limited to their feet, the horse, or sailing by sea.
The demise of the Coast Miwok civilization was due less to wicked villainy than to the clash of two disparate cultures that could not coexist, and yet it was due less to this disparate culture clash than to the secret weapon all foreigners brought, regardless of their motives: Deadly diseases for which the natives had no immunities.
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Last Updated ( Friday, 20 November 2009 )
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