In 1846 Governor Pico asked permission of his government to lease the remaining land of the Mission San Gabriel “to prevent the total ruin of the Mission.” No lessee could be found to take the land under this act and on June 18th, 1846, Pio Pico made the final grant of all the remaining Mission lands to Julian Workman and Hugo Reid. The United States government, however, refused to confirm this last minute disposal of the Mission land and declared the property public land of the United States, first setting aside to Bishop Alemany 190 acres surrounding the Mission buildings. The public land was quickly taken up by many settlers, who were eager to acquire homesteads in a country almost exclusively made up of giant ranchos. Subsequently B. D. Wilson and J. De Barth Shorb acquired much of this land and platted the present prosperous and beautiful city of Alhambra. San Gabriel and Monterey Park also have been built on land originally within the Mission boundaries. The 190 acres set aside for the Mission Church was the largest parcel of land received by any one Mission out of the land it had formerly held. At the height of the Mission glory in all a million and a half acres were under the control of the Padres. When California became the property of the United States twenty missions other than San Gabriel held from four to seventy-six acres each—a total for all the chain of less than 800 acres. Eight hundred acres out of the original million and a half. [Illustration: _Mission San Gabriel Arcangel_] Rancho San Jose de Buenos Ayres Rancho San Jose de Buenos Ayres was not in South America, as its name might indicate, but was an important rancho of Southern California. The rancho was granted by Manuel Micheltorena, Governor of the Californias, February 24, 1843, to Maximo Alanis and comprised 4,438 acres. Don Alanis died shortly after he received the grant and his heirs conveyed the rancho to Dr. Wilson W. Jones and Wm. T. B. Sanford, the former, one of Los Angeles’ first doctors and the latter, an early Los Angeles postmaster. But the doctor knew little about ranching and in 1852 he was glad to sell his half interest in the rancho to Don Benito Wilson for $662.75, or at the rate of 35 cents an acre. Don Benito’s interests were extensive and widely separated. Jointly with Dr. Griffin he operated Rancho San Pascual northeast of the Pueblo of Los Angeles. Jointly with Phineas Banning he founded and developed the city of Wilmington at the port of San Pedro, and west of the pueblo, halfway to the ocean, with Sanford, the Postmaster, he raised cattle on Rancho San Jose de Buenos Ayres. Between supervising trips to his ranchos and to the harbor he found time to maintain a home in the Pueblo of Los Angeles—so large that after he moved it was used for an orphan asylum—buy much city property, ship wine to San Francisco and foster the development of the orange.