Free Lecture Illustrated by Over Eighty Beautiful California Views Projected on a Large Screen by a Powerful Lantern... [caption title]

[N.p., possibly Fresno, 1905. Very good.. Broadside, 13 x 5 inches. A few small nicks to edges, minor even toning, old horizontal folds. Lecture location stamp added in bottom margin, reading "Southport Monday Eve. Aug 28th K.P. Hall." An apparently unrecorded broadside advertising a magic lantern presentation aimed at promoting land in Fresno and King counties "for sale in ten acre tracts or larger at from $25 to $35 per acre, including perpetual water right. Yearly water rental 62 1/2 cents per acre -- the cheapest water in California. If you are thinking of moving you should not miss this lecture. If you are satisfied to stay where you are come anyhow and see the pictures and learn something about California." The Golden State was the site of not one but two Rancho Laguna de Tache land grants. One was granted by the Mexican governor Pio Pico in 1846 to Manuel Castro and included land along the north bank of Kings River for over twenty miles. The other Rancho Laguna de Tache was claimed to have been given to Joseph Yves Limantour by the Mexican governor Manuel Micheltorena in 1843. The latter grant, which was along the south bank of Kings River, was not honored by the Land Commission after the cession of California to the United States. The broadside then most likely relates to the sale of Castro's 48,000-plus acre Rancho Laguna de Tache tract north of the Kings River. Castro sold his land grant to Jeremiah Clark in 1866. Clark's wife, Charlotte had her husband declared mentally incompetent and eventually was allowed to sell the land to Charles A. Laton and Llewellyn A. Nares (the namesakes of the present-day towns of Laton and Lanare).

The location of the lecture was a Knights of Pythias Hall in Southport, though the exact location of Southport is unclear. From the text of the broadside, it is not out of the realm of possibility that the developers of the Laguna de Tache Grant tract were marketing their efforts outside California. We could locate no other copies of this informative broadside. However, a map at the California Historical Society of the Laguna de Tache Grant showing a portion subdivided into lots surveyed and platted by order of Nares and Saunders, managers, that was drawn in 1904 by H.L. Ward of Laton, California, helps place the present broadside in its proper context. The involvement of Nares in subdividing the Laguna de Tache tract in 1904 jibes with our proposed date for the broadside, as August 28 was a Monday in 1905.