Manuel, Pedro, Nasário and Victoria Dominguez owned in the neighborhood of forty-eight thousand acres of the choicest land in the South. More than a century ago, Juan José Dominguez received from the King of Spain ten or eleven leagues of land, known as the Rancho de San Pedro; and this was given by Governor de Sola, after Juan José's death in 1822, to his brother, Don Cristóbal Dominguez, a Spanish officer. Don Cristóbal married a Mexican commissioner's daughter, and one of their ten children was Manuel, who, educated by wide reading and fortunate in a genial temperament and high standard of honor, became an esteemed and popular officer under the Mexican _régime_, displaying no little chivalry in the battle of Dominguez fought on his own property. On the death of his father, Don Manuel took charge of the Rancho de San Pedro (buying out his sister Victoria's interest of twelve thousand acres, at fifty cents an acre) until in 1855 it was partitioned between himself, his brother, Don Pedro and two nephews, José António Aguirre and Jacinto Rocha. One daughter, Victoria, married George Carson in 1857. At his death, in 1882, Dominguez bequeathed to his heirs twenty odd thousand acres, including Rattlesnake Island in San Pedro Bay. James A. Watson, an early-comer, married a second daughter; John F. Francis married a third, and Dr. del Amo married a fourth. Henry Dalton, who came here sometime before 1845, having been a merchant in Peru, owned the Azusa Ranch of over four thousand acres, the patent to which was finally issued in 1876, and also part of the San Francisquito Ranch of eight thousand acres, allowed him somewhat later. Besides these, he had an interest, with Ygnácio Palomares and Ricardo Vejar, in the San José _rancho_ of nearly twenty-seven thousand acres. As early as the twenty-first of May, 1851, Dalton, with keen foresight, seems to have published a plan for the subdivision of nine or ten thousand acres into lots to suit limited ranchers; but it was some time before Duarte and other places, now on the above-mentioned estates, arose from his dream. On a part of his property, Azusa, a town of the Boom period, was founded some twenty-two miles from Los Angeles, and seven or eight hundred feet up the Azusa slope; and now other towns also flourish near these attractive foothills. One of Dalton's daughters was given in marriage to Louis, a son of William Wolfskill. Dalton's brother, George, I have already mentioned as having likewise settled here.