Sea to Shining Sea 123In addition to New Mexico, US citizen residents laid groundwork
for the annexation of Mexico in Te xas and California as well. The
Spanish Cortes (parliament) had enacted a law in 1'8 13 that autho
rized provincial authorities to make private property land grants,
and this practice of granting land to individuals, including foreign
ers, was continued under the independent Mexican government
until 1828. In 1823 , Mexico's despotic ruler Agustin de Iturbide
enacted a colonization law authorizing the national government to
enter into a contract granting land to an empresario, or promoter,
who was required to recruit a minimum of two hundred families to
settle the grant. Only applied in the province of Texas, many such
grants were sought by and granted to slave-owning Anglo-American
entrepreneurs, despite slavery being illegal in Mexico, making pos
sible their dominance in the province and leading to Mexico's loss of
Texas in 1836. 11
Senator Benton, his son-in-law Captain John C. Fremont, and
Kit Carson also helped pave the way for the invasion of Northern
California. In the early 1840s, Benton and his daughter, Jessie-Fre
mont's wife-built a booster press to entice settlers to the Oregon
Territory as well as to settle in the Mexican province of California.
At the same time, Fremont and his guide Carson mounted five ex
peditions to gather information, laying the groundwork for military
conquest. The third expedition illegally entered the Sacramento Va l
ley region from the north in early 1846, just before the United States
declared war against Mexico. Fremont encouraged Anglo settlers in
the Central Va lley to side with the United States, promising military
protection if war broke out. Once a US warship was positioned for
war, Fremont was appointed lieutenant colonel of the California
Battalion, as if it had all been planned in advance. 12
Exploration and intelligence gathered by Pike, followed by infil
tration and settlement of northern Mexican provinces preceded by
US entrepreneurs, finally culminated in military invasion and war. US
forces fought their way from Mexico's main commercial port of
Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico to the capital, Mexico City, nearly
three hundred miles away. The US Army occupied the capital until
the Mexican government agreed to cede,its northern territories, cod
ified in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Texas had become a