stretched from Trabuco Canyon to the San Diego Freeway, and from El Toro Road up to the El Toro Marine Base nearly 11,000 acres."4 Another California pioneer was Don Juan Bandini (1800 1859), a Peruvian whose father had been a Spanish sea captain. Bandini, who came to Los Angeles in 1822 as an administrator for the Mexican government, issued a number of land grants to himself and became a wealthy rancher who helped transform the Southern California desert into something like a land baron's fief. Feeling ignored by the Mexican government and confined to the provincial backwater of California, Bandini backed American forces in the Mexican War of the 1830s, "believing he could find greater opportunities in a territory under U.S. administration." This strategy backfired when the U.S. redistributed land grants via the Land Act of 1851, and Bandini, like Pico, died a bankrupt.5 The residue of Mexican and Spa
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