Administrator's Sale! Pursuant to an Order of the Probate Court of Santa Clara County...150 Head of Beef Cattle.... Vente del Administrador! En Virtud de una Order de la Corte de Provanza del Condado de Santa Clara...150 Reses Gordas... [caption title]

San Jose: Tribune Job Printing Office, 1854. Very good.. Broadside, 16 x 11 inches. Old folds, minor toning and foxing, two contemporary manuscript date corrections. An unrecorded early California bilingual broadside announcing the sale of 150 heads of cattle from a Mexican, then Mexican-American ranch in Santa Clara County, California in 1854. The cattle are being sold "at the house of Francisco Alviso, on the Rancho belonging to the estate of Jose Delores Pacheco, deceased, situated in the County of Alameda." The broadside then gives the date and time of the auction, per the instructions of the Public Administrator of Santa Clara County, John Yontz. The text is then repeated in Spanish translation at the bottom of the broadside. In both cases, the date of the sale is overwritten with a strip of white tape and a new manuscript date applied on top of said tape. The broadside was produced at the relatively-short-lived San Jose Tribune's Job Printing Office in the year the paper began (it would run until the early-1860s).

The broadside is emblematic of real estate matters in mid-19th-century California, when lands that once belonged to Mexican citizens became United States property. Jose Delores Pacheco was the alcalde of Mexico's Pueblo de San Jose and was given the land referred to here, Rancho Santa Rita by Mexican Governor Juan Alvarado in 1839. Following the U.S. victory in the Mexican-American War, and pursuant to the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Pacheco's grant was honored; upon Pacheco's death, Rancho Santa Rita was sold to Augustin Alviso by Pacheco's heirs, and was eventually broken up, ending up in the hands of several American landholders. The house mentioned in the present broadside, built by Francisco Alviso earlier in 1854 still stands today in the Alviso Adobe Community Park in Pleasanton. We were unable to locate any other copies of this interesting bilingual broadside; in general, early California bilingual printing is very scarce. (Inventory #: 5375)