The haste and recklessness, to use no harsher term, with which this grant was made, cannot but suggest grave doubts of the bon a fides of the transaction. It nowhere appears that Roland had any claim on the bounty of the Mexican nation, or ability, or intention to occupy so large a tract of country; any yet Pico, near the time when power passed from his hands, in the midst of civil commotion, disregarding the customary and established modes of making concession of the public domain to meritorious persons; without an informe; without a map; without any inquiry whatever; grants to him eleven leagues of land (the maximum quantity grantable to a single person) in a remote wilderness, occupied by hostile Indians, and of which so little was known that the best description that could be given of it was, that it was situated on the banks of the San Joaquin and Stanislaus rivers.
That the plain requirements of the Mexican colonization laws were violated in these proceedings, is very apparent from the frequent decisions of this court in this class of cases; but it is unnecessary to examine the effect of this departure on this title, if it were genuine, because in our opinion it has no validity. And it is not the first time, in the history of California land cases in this court, that grants made at or near the time of the one in controversy purports to be made by Governor Pico, and countersigned by his secretary, Moreno, have been held not to be genuine.
The struggle in this case, as in others of like character, is to make up by parol proof for a deficiency of record evidence. Pico and Moreno have been examined in support of the title, but their testimony is singularly unsatisfactory. Pico has no recollection of making the grant, nor, indeed, of Roland's application, but is able to identify his signatures. Although he knew Roland-that he had married a Mexican woman, the number of his children, and the state of his property-yet he cannot recollect that he donated to him an immense tract in a remote part of the country, and broke through all the forms of law in order to do it quickly.
A transaction of this magnitude, where the favored party was known, is not apt to be forgotten, and to say the least on the subject, this want of memory on Pico's part, is in itself a circumstance of great suspicion that the grant was never made. Moreno's memory, if somewhat better than Pico's, is not enough so to clear away the difficulties from this title.
It is a little singular, if Pico's signatures to the papers produced by the claimant are authentic, that they should differ so materially from his signatures to public documents of that date. In Luco v. The United States, the same differences existed, and the court adopted the conclusion that they were not genuine. If these inequalities in Pico's signatures create distrust as to their genuineness, the different phraseology in describing the land in the borrador, from that used in the titulo, increases the distrust in the authenticity of this title.
In the borrador the land is described 'as eleven leagues, situated on the banks of the rivers Stanislaus and San Joaquin,' corresponding with the description given in the petition, while the titulo, issued on the same day as the borrador, directs 'that the measurement of the eleven leagues shall be on the banks of the Stanislaus, of the width of one league, commencing where the two rivers run.' On the theory that the borrador and titulo were actually signed on the same day, how did it come to pass that the designation of the tract is so much more particular in the one than in the other? It will be borne in mind that Pico and Moreno have no definite recollection concerning this grant, and yet in this most important point the title-paper issued to the claimant differs essentially from the one which forms part of the expediente. Why think of the necessity of this change of description, when both documents were made on the same day, and form part of the same transaction? The change of description cannot be explained on the hypothesis that both papers were prepared and executed on the same day; but it is easily under stood, if the titulo was prepared at a subsequent date, when the parties interested could see that a more definite description was wanting, than that which the borrador furnished.
But there are much graver difficulties affecting this title than those which we have noticed.