Autograph Letter, signed. 3 pp., with original envelope (postmarked San Francisco).

To his sister, Catharine Sever, c/o William B. Sever, Plymouth, Massachusetts. “…I had sold out all my interest in the store… two months ago…everything was at an extreme low price and I had made up my mind to sell out at once…I still have one thousand dollars in goods which I am turning into cash as fast as possible as I am speculating in lumber…Two weeks ago, a fellow by the name of Fish with several others came up from San Francisco purporting to be United States Surveyors but the settlers seized their instruments and they had to leave, they came up again however and were driven off in a hurry…Their object is to get some sort of a survey so that a writ of ejectment can be sustained but it will be well for them if they come with their commissions and stick to their instructions from the Surveyor General the next time or they will have a hard road to travel, for people do not like to be trifled with where their all is at stake…” Descendant of an old New England family, John Sever was one of 23 stalwart Yankees who had formed the “Boston Marine Mining Co.”, purchased a small schooner and, with little maritime experience, miraculously managed to sail around the Horn to San Francisco, arriving on the very last day of 1849. Whether or not he ever tried his hands as a miner, this 1854 letter found him a merchant in Solano County, north of the then-state capital of Benicia, where newly-arrived Gold Rush squatters had settled on fertile farm land to which older pioneers laid claim, based on the original Mexican land grants. The on-going “squatter wars” were less violent in Suisun than in Sacramento, to the north, but still bitter enough, with squatters organizing to protect their property with loaded rifles while the land grand owners prosecuted their claims by endless litigation before federal courts and commissioners - and civil engineers, hired by the US Surveyor General to map the land, claimed neutrality.