Early Land Grabs

For over a thousand years, the San Francisco Bay Area was home to many triblets of natives we know as the Ohlone. However, the Spanish expanded into this part of California in the late 1700s and brought missions to convert the Indigenous peoples to Christianity and force them to use "modern methods" of agriculture and living. This particular land was granted to Luis Peralta for his military service in 1820, and though he never lived on the ranch, he moved his children here to manage the land. A few decades later, with "manifest destiny" the driving ambition for the young United States to occupy the entirety of the continent, and gold being discovered in California in 1849, the white English speakers soon drove out the Spanish. Several interlopers occupied the Peralta's land, squatting for years and keeping the Peraltas tied up in the newly imposed U.S. court system. These men, Edson Adams, Horace Carpentier, and Andrew Moon, went on to found the City of Oakland, and eventually paid some amount of money to the Peraltas to acquire the land.