Oh, California. Oh, Federalism.

This laboratory of Democracy stuff tires me sometimes.
Just when I was settled into a comfortable level of familiarity with preemption laws, agricultural lands acts, common law principles of adverse possession, I start looking at specific legal cases and discover that none of those apply. Instead I find local exceptions like the California Possessory Act of 1852.
See, when the US of A "bought" California from Mexico as part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo we promised to honor the system of land grants and the rights of former Mexican citizens to their property. This wouldn't have been a problem if things had gone as expected and settlers from the east had trickled into the territory at the usual rate. Problem was, there was a gold rush within a year of the transfer and the new residents didn't care much for the property rights of anyone.
Later in this project I will be working on sections describing the 1850-2 Sacramento Squatter War. For now I will just say that the newly-minted state government was persuaded to pass legislation that reads a lot like a draft of the federal homesteading act passed ten years later. The key principle of the act is simple; it gives precedence of claim to the person physically in possession of land. Like the federal Homestead Act of 1862 the design was to discourage speculators and to boost settlement.This from a decision in 1871:

By the time we get to Mrs. Hamilton and the culmination of her six years of legal wrangles with the Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad in 1912, the act had been repealed but the principle remained as a legal avenue to challenge the leasehold of the LA&SL over Terminal Island.Her lawyers argued before the State Supreme Court that her occupation and use of the land in question was a prior claim in keeping with the precedents and legal environment of California. The court honored the logic of that argument, but refused her claim because her occupation did not meet the agricultural standards of the act. In other words, because she was renting out houses and not farming or ranching she failed to meet the same conditions of the 1852 law as the LA&SL.
Reading the decision it quickly becomes obvious why the court agreed to hear the case. They bundled all of Mrs Hamilton's legal troubles into a single hearing and disposed of her preemption claim in a single paragraph of a nine page decision. What they really wanted to settle was the constitutional issue of possession and leasing of tidal lands. Hamilton's attorneys argued that the land was federal property and therefore open to preemption, but the court decided that the state constitution (Article V, section 3) gave the state, and therefore the municipalities of the state, ownership and leasing rights.
Boring, huh? I promise to work on the presentation.
Granted, California is a special case but I expect a lot more of this going forward.

Mrs Louise Hamilton.

Look at what I found...

Bless Google Books.

Discovery.

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In the process of a random search of a Chicago Sanitation report from January 2, 1895 I found the following:

The context is the purchase of a right of way for the expansion of the Illinois Sanitary Drainage and Ship Canal. By the late 1880's about 1% of Chicago's population was a victim of the city's success (read: typhoid, cholera, etc). The remarkable combination of effluent from the Union Stockyards and the less exotic (but equally nasty) civilian contributions to the sluggish Chicago River  made downtown a smelly place. In addition, the north-flowing Chicago River emptied into Lake Michigan a little too close to the city's drinking water uptake for comfort. The genius solution was to modernize the fifty-year old Illinois Ship Canal by dredging and adding locks that deepened the channel and reversed the flow of the river. This met with some objections from proposed downstream communities as far away as St Louis that didn't want to share Chicago's sewage. Anyone familiar with Chicago will not be surprised that they were ignored and the plan was rammed through the state government over all objections and construction was hurried to complete the canal just ahead of injunctions intended to stop its opening.
But back to Charles Jindrich. The old canal was still active in the 1890s, if at a fraction of the tonnage handled in the pre-railroad days, and land along its banks was valuable. It struck me today that because squatters appeared along every navigable waterway in the late 19th century, records of the expansion of the Chicago River Memorial Poop and Sloop Canal (I made that name up. It's a joke) was a natural place to find official mentions of squatters.
So imagine my interest when Charles Jindrich pops up as a squatter on the canal in the area near where Interstate 55 crosses Western Avenue (Northeast quarter of Section 36, Township 39N, Range 13E). My probable relative profited pretty well too as a result of his property crimes. In 1892 the median family income in Chicago was about $475, so ol' Chuck got the modern equivalent of a $20,000 bribe to not contest Chicago's condemnation of a property he didn't own.
Nice.

Things that need to be found.

I am still in the materials phase of writing. Why is it so hard to find simple things, things that should be readily available?
Several things that I would really love to discover are maps of San Pedro Harbor, circa 1890, 1905, and 1910. There is a birdseye of the harbor dated 1905 in many places but it is really a 1893 effort and it doesn't show Terminal Island. I did find an 1893 sketch map of the harbor which will do in a pinch for the earliest period. Favorite would be Sanborn Atlases.
Short of detailed maps what I could really use are locations for the Los Angeles and Salt Lake RR terminal and wharf, and the Carse Machine Works and Shipbuilding Company.
Then there is case law. There are lawsuits brought by John Webb claiming all of Terminal Island, Mrs. Louise M. Hamilton's series of lawsuits claiming possession of 26 acres in East San Pedro, another suit to use Valentine Script to purchase the land, then another staking a claim under the agricultural lands act. San Pedro sued and was counter-sued by Long Beach endlessly between 1905-1909.
The minutes of the Long Beach and San Pedro city council would be very useful.

See...not so much.

A new book about squatters in Red Hook

Today I heard from Roger Kvarsvik, an email friend in Bergen, Norway. His book describing the 20th century shantytowns built and inhabited by Norwegian sailors in Red Hook, Brooklyn has been published. Problem is...det er kun tilgjengelig i norske.

http://www.spartacus.no/index.php?ID=Bok&counter=546

Free State of Farquier County

Here is the opening of the chapter. I add it for Michelle, who grew up nearby.

There is a legend in Farquier County, Virginia, that John Marshall was the father of the durable squatter colony centered on the town named for him. The story goes that when America's preeminent Chief Justice jump-started his political career in the early days of the republic by exchanging votes for usufruct rights on a vacant 200 acre parcel he owned in the foothills of the Blue Ridge (Washington Times 1904). This offer attracted landless men who would be otherwise ineligible to vote and with their help Marshall sat two terms as the state representative from Farquier County. When Marshall left for higher office he kindly allowed the original tenants to remain unmolested, and was either unconcerned or unaware that his property continued to act as a magnet for landless Virginians long after he had moved beyond the need for their votes. By the time Justice Marshall died in 1835 the tenants had enjoyed five decades of rent free access to his property and had successfully avoided paying taxes by pointing out that they had not improved the land. Shortly before his death Marshall sued to re-establish his right to issue leases and collect rents from his erstwhile tenants, winning against their claims that they became the rightful owners upon the expiration of the original leases issued by Lord Fairfax in the 1760s (Marshall v. Foley et. al.).

But winning the right to collect rents is not the same as having the money in hand. Neither was the state of Virginia able to convince the residents of the area that taxes were a necessary obligation. At some point in the mid-nineteenth century the area was dubbed the Free State and acquired a reputation as a region of outlaws and shiftless layabouts that was at first a point of perverse pride, but in time became an embarrassment. By the early twentieth century the area was well cultivated and above average in tax observance and the real distinctiveness of the Free State quietly passed. Yet memories of the Free State persist in Farquier County, if muddled with regional stories of bootleggers and gambling that have replaced squatting as the reason for the name in most people's minds.

It is wrong to assume that Marshall's political motives behind his accidental begetting of the Farquier County Free State were uniquely cynical. Instead of a unique instance, the political history of squatter colonies is replete with examples of politicians actively cultivating the votes and allegiance of the squatter bloc. The most lasting and influential example of pandering to the squatter vote is the Federal Preemption act of 1841 that in effect opened all public lands to alienation through squatting. That act also set the precedent for the later mining and homestead acts, both of which use actual possession and improvement of the property as a precondition for granting the title. As an instrument for disposing of vast tracts of potential farmland with minimal supervision and at a profit, preemption is reasonably efficient. As a tool for urban development problems emerge.

Overview

This is what happens when you need to organize your thoughts. Bits of things are wrong with it, pieces are missing, pathways are not complete. On the whole though I think it lays out what I am going for with this project.
So what is squatting? The easiest answer to this complicated question is that it is taking possession of real property to which you do not have legally recognized rights.
There are a few iconic squattertypes in the US of A:
The easiest stuff to run down and document is the Shanty Irish connections. This is why there are so many lines running in and out of that corner in the diagram above. The Shanty Irish are iconic in part because they were a high profile immigrant population in 19th century New York City and for decades were a mainstay of Tammany Hall.

Either circumstance would have made them Enemies of Progress and a Detriment to the City, but the combination made them an evil to be stamped out by right thinking land developers. Which they were at great profit to the developers, but which did nothing to rid the city of squalor, poverty, or the Irish.

Another icon is the sturdy pioneer. They went forth seeking freedom from civilization, bravely opening the country at great risk to themselves, and moving on when things got too civ-lized.

A subset of the sturdy pioneers were claim jumpers. They aren't terribly interesting because they seem to be mostly an invention of Louis L'Amore and Max Brand. Oddly their web presence is almost entirely links to a chain of family restaurants. What kind of message does this send to the children?

In more recent decades there is the alt-culture movement that occupies vacant urban properties as an applied philosophic statement.

These iconic squatters avoid the stigma of homelessness, although they can have a lot in common and get confused in public opinion. By publication proportions I get the impression that the population of present day squatters is about 47% graphic novelist. I like that.

Less noted is the society squatter, which is something I want to highlight. There are other squattertypes that still need to be brought forward, although from what I am finding there is no specific "type" that is more prone to squatting that others. Some of the biggest trespassers in Brooklyn were major businesses, and in the chapter I am working on right now an entire community was given leases on land they had squatted for decades as a reward in an annexation struggle.
Old squatters don't fade away, they go mainstream.

One thing that I still need to think through is where I stand on The Mystery of Capital.