Page:History of California, Volume 3 (Bancroft).djvu/726

708 The decision was, I think, entirely in accordance with fact, law, and equity; though many abler men still hold the contrary opinion. Among the many champions of the respective sides in the controversy may be appropriately named Edmund Randolph and William Carey Jones against the pueblo title, and in favor of it Henry W. Halleck and John W. Dwinelle, the latter's Colonial History of San Francisco being the most extensive and satisfactory treatise on the subject. As is their wont, the lawyers succeeded in making of a comparatively simple matter a very complicated one; but their efforts were valuable contributions to local history.

The settlement of Yerba Buena, nucleus of the modern city, had its humble beginning in this decade, and contained in 1840 more than half-a-dozen structures. As we have seen, the name Yerba Buena had been transferred from the anchorage west to that south of Loma Alta, or Telegraph Hill, where several vessels had anchored before 1830, where a French trader had landed to build a boat, and where the construction of a guard-house had been ordered in 1827, there being no evidence that it was ever built. At any rate in 1831-4 all was in a state of nature but for the presence of a party of foreign boat-builders for a time in 1831 or 1832. Vessels were still