LAW. 423 



California, implies and covenants that the grantor has not pre- 

 viously conveyed his title or any part of it to any other per- 

 son, or encumbered it in any way ; in other words, he cove- 

 nants that the title is as good as when he got it. The grant 

 title is equivalent to the " bargain and sale " title, which was 

 in general use before 1873. Warranty conveyances have 

 never been extensively used in California. 



351. Tenure of Land. Most of the land in California 

 is owned by the Federal Government, which acquired it from 

 Mexico by treaty. This Federal land lies in the mineral re- 

 gions, and in all the unsettled districts of the State. Most of 

 it has been surveyed, and with the exception of land in the 

 mineral districts, is offered to homestead settlers, in lots of 

 forty acres, or tracts of any size of which forty is a multiple, 

 not exceeding 160 acres. 



Most of the land held in private ownership in the State, is 

 under grants made by Mexico previous to 1846. Of these 

 grants there are eight hundred and thirteen, covering a total 

 of 9,828,181 acres. Of these claims, about one hundred and 

 fifty, covering about 3,000,000 acres, have been finally rejected, 

 and some are as yet undecided. The grants were for large 

 tracts called ranchos, intended to be used chiefly or ex- 

 clusively for pasturage, and the average size was about 12,- 

 000 acres, or three square leagues. The grants were made, 

 not by the acre or by the mile, but by the square league, con- 

 taining 4,438 acres and a fraction, or, to be precise, 4,438.683 

 acres. Every ranch had its name, for it was a kind of princi- 

 pality ; and these names have in many cases been transferred to 

 towns and townships under the American dominion. 



The common tenure of land in California is fee-simple. 

 Such conditional tenures as are common in Europe are very 

 rare here, and many of them are prohibited by our laws. We 

 have few life estates, nor is any lease or limited conveyance of 

 land good for a longer period than ten years, unless it be a 

 town lot, and then the limit is twenty years. All conveyances 



