A Californio Patriarch
The descendant of a Spanish family that had lived — and prospered — in Mexico since the Spanish Conquest, Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo served in Mexican California as a military officer. In the 1830s and 1840s, he received land grants totaling 270,000 acres in the Sonoma Valley north of San Francisco. Vallejo, the father of seventeen children (eleven of whom survived childhood), presents himself in this photograph as a proud patriarch, surrounded by two daughters and three granddaughters. Although he favored the American conquest of 1846, Vallejo was imprisoned for a short period and subsequently suffered severe financial setbacks, losing most of his vast landholdings to squatters and rival claimants. University of California at Berkeley, Bancroft Library.