Page 23 - ramona-text

RAMONA \-->

land within a radius of forty miles,—forty miles westward,
down the valley to the sea; forty miles eastward, into the
San Fernando Mountains; and good forty miles more or less
along the coast. The boundaries were not very strictly de-
fined; there was no occasion, in those happy days, to reckon
land by inches. It might be asked, perhaps, just how General
Moreno owned all this land, and the question might not be
easy to answer. It was not and could not be answered to the
satisfaction of the United States Land Commission, which,
after the surrender of California, undertook to sift and adjust
Mexican land titles; and that was the way it had come about
that the Senora Moreno now called herself a poor woman.
Tract after tract, her lands had been taken away from her;
it looked for a time as if nothing would be left. Every one
of the claims based on deeds of gift from Governor Pio Pico,
her husband's most intimate friend, was disallowed. They all
went by the board in one batch, and took away from the
Senora in a day the greater part of her best pasture-lands.
They were lands which had belonged to the Bonaventura
Mission, and lay along the coast at the mouth of the valley
down which the little stream which ran past her house went
to the sea; and it had been a great pride and delight to the
Senora, when she was young, to ride that forty miles by her
husband's side, all the way on their own lands, straight from
their house to their own strip of shore. No wonder she be-
lieved the Americans thieves, and spoke of them always as
hounds. The people of the United States have never in the
least realized that the taking possession of California was
not only a conquering of Mexico, but a conquering of Cali-
fornia as well; that the real bitterness of the surrender was
not so much to the empire which gave up the country, as to
the country itself which was given up. Provinces passed back
and forth in that way, helpless in the hands of great pow-
ers, have all the ignominy and humiliation of defeat,
with none of the dignities or compensations of the transac-
tion.
Mexico saved much by her treaty, spite of having to ac-
knowledge herself beaten; but California lost all. Words
cannot tell the sting of such a transfer. It is a marvel that a