Squatter-settler conflicts caused turmoil in Vallejo
Vallejo had its share of battles over land ownership in the early 1860s. My Feb. 2 column focused on one dispute that ended in a vigilante murder of Portuguese immigrant Manuel Vera. His family’s problems didn’t end there — a decade-long property fight involving his half-brother, Elias Viera, ended with Viera barricading himself in his house for two days and threatening to kill officers who were trying to evict him.
Vera, whose accused killers were never convicted, and Viera were caught up in a wave of violence in California during an early-statehood period of uncertainty over land ownership that resulted in squatters building shacks on property that had been part of sprawling Spanish and Mexican land grants. In the early 1860s there were nearly 200 squatters on Gen. Mariano Vallejo’s 84,000acre Rancho Suscol grant that he got from the Mexican government. The squatters ignored demands to leave, emboldened by a March 24, 1862, ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that rejected Vallejo’s Suscol grant.
On Sept. 1, 1861, Viera agreed to buy 126 acres on the east edge of town from John Frisbie, Gen. Vallejo’s son-inlaw, who was selling off much of the Rancho Suscol land. But following the 1862 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Frisbie — claiming Viera stopped making his mortgage payments — assigned the mortgage to F.D. Atherton.
Atherton forced a sheriff’s sale of the farm, but despite the sale, Viera refused to
leave. Even though he had started out as a legal land buyer, in Atherton’s mind Viera had become an illegal squatter — in the same category as squatters accused of killing his halfbrother in 1863.
Atherton managed to get a deed to the land in mid-1865, and Viera signed an agreement for a 3-year lease of the property the following October. A week later, Atherton sold the land back to Frisbie who — ever the wheeler-dealer — in turn sold it to the Vallejo Land Association. Viera wasn’t sitting by idly — at the same time that he was working out the lease details he was applying to the federal government for a patent to the same land. Viera utilized the same patent process that Frisbie had managed to get approved in 1863 by Congress, as a method for original and new landowners to confirm their property rights and freeze out squatters.
Viera’s patent was granted in early 1867, prompting the Land Association to file a lawsuit against him. The litigation dragged on for years, first at the lower court level and then moving to the state Supreme Court. Finally, in a Jan. 1, 1874, decision, the Supreme Court ruled against Viera, holding that despite his federal patent, the property — which included his home — was owned by the Land Association. Eleven months later, Viera was still in the house and the association was trying to sell the property back to Frisbie. To finalize the sale, Viera had to be out of the home. However, when a deputy tried on Nov. 6 to serve him an order to leave, Viera barricaded himself and his family inside his house and vowed that he would shoot anyone who tried to evict him. The deputy “was confronted by the muzzles of a half dozen firearms coupled with a liberal sprinkling of knives” and a warning that a forced entry by officers would result in the premises being “flooded with gore and obstructed with corpses,” the Vallejo Chronicle reported.
The next day, Sheriff E.D. Perkins came to the house and tried to negotiate with Viera, who was holed up in the house with his wife, a brother and five daughters. But Viera wouldn’t budge. He insisted that the house was his and wasn’t included with the land that the association was selling to Frisbie — and “he would rather die than give it up,” the newspaper stated.
Perkins wanted to avoid bloodshed, so he and four deputies laid in wait all night outside the house, planning to grab Viera whenever he might step outside. At about 6 a.m. on Sunday, Nov. 8, Viera opened a back door and walked out. He didn’t see the hidden officers at first, and when he did “he made a rush back to the door, crying to his wife inside, ‘Thieves! Robbers! Shoot!’ and like other exclamations appropriate to the circumstances,” according to the Chronicle. He and Perkins reached the door at the same time, and the sheriff collared him. “Being conquered by strategy, as he was, he was ready to give up with a good grace,” the newspaper added. His wife also became cooperative, and even cooked breakfast for everyone. The Vieras moved their belongings out of the house later in the day.
Despite all the hardships that Viera faced in Vallejo, he opted to stay here. But he decided against any more farming and by 1880 was working as a shipwright. He died on Christmas Eve, 1886, at age 49. His one-paragraph newspaper obituary made no mention of his earlier troubles, stating only that he died after a long illness and his funeral at St. Vincent’s Church was “largely attended.”
— Vallejo and other Solano County communities are treasure troves of earlyday California history.
The “Solano Chronicles” columns, running every other Sunday in the Times-Herald and on my Facebook page, highlight various aspects of that history. Source references are available upon request. If you have local stories or photos to share, email me at genoans@ hotmail.com. You also can send any material care of the Times-Herald, 420 Virginia St.; or the Vallejo Naval and Historical Museum, 734 Marin St., Vallejo.