Though no general Federal laws were extended by Congress over the later acquisitions from Mexico for more than two years after the end of the war, the paramount title to the public lands had vested in the Federal Government by virtue of the provisions of the treaty of peace; the public land itself had become part of the public domain of the United States.  The army of occupation, however, offered no opposition to the invading army of prospectors.  The miners were, in 1849, twenty years ahead of the railroad and the electric telegraph.  The telephone had not yet been invented.  In the parlance of the times, the prospectors “had the drop” on the army.  In Colonel Mason’s unique report of the situation that confronted him, discretion waited upon valor.  “The entire gold district,” he wrote to the Government at Washington, “with few exceptions of grants made some years ago by the Mexican authorities, is on land belonging to the United States.  It was a matter of serious reflection with me how I could secure to the Government certain rents or fees for the privilege of procuring this gold; but upon considering the large extent of the country, the character of the people engaged, and the small scattered force at my command, I am resolved not to interfere, but permit all to work freely.”  It is not recorded whether the resolute colonel was conscious of the humor of his resolution.  This early suggestion of conservation was, under the circumstances, manifestly academic.

The Supreme Court of the United States, in commenting on the singular situation in which Colonel Mason found himself, clearly and forcefully states his predicament.  “His position,” says that Court, “was unlike anything that had preceded it in the history of our country . . . .  It was not without its difficulties, both as regards the principle upon which he should act, and the actual state of affairs in California.  He knew that the Mexican inhabitants of it had been remitted by the treaty of peace to those municipal laws and usages which prevailed among them before the territory had been ceded to the United States, but that a state of things and population had grown up during the war, and after the treaty of peace, which made some other authority necessary to maintain the rights of the ceded inhabitants and of immigrants, from misrule and violence.  He may not have comprehended fully the principle applicable to what he might rightly do in such a case, but he felt rightly and acted accordingly.  He determined, in the absence of all instruction, to maintain the existing government.  The territory had been ceded as a conquest, and was to be preserved and governed as such until the sovereignty to which it had passed had legislated for it.  That sovereignty was the United States, under the Constitution, by which power had been given to Congress to dispose of and make all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory or other property belonging to the United States, with the power also to admit new states into