The Squatter and the Don

Content Warning: This section of the guide references racist policy, rhetoric, and violence (including allusions to chattel enslavement), sexist attitudes, animal death, gun violence, and possible death by suicide.

Married couple William and Mary Darrell talk into the night on the eve of Mr. Darrell’s departure from their home in Alameda (in Northern California) for Southern California, where he hopes to locate a homestead. Darrell wryly laments that, 24 years prior, he believed he could become rich off the Northern California lands granted by the US Government. Instead, he remains poor and is called a “squatter.” Mrs. Darrell suggests that they should not lament, and she reframes them as “settlers.”

They discuss the difference between a “settler” (who pays the government-set price for land) and a “squatter” (who sets up on land belonging to someone else). Mrs. Darrell cautions her husband to carefully determine the provenance of any land he chooses in Southern California, warning him not to accept a “Mexican grant” as opposed to a US-backed land grant.

Darrell thinks back to meeting his wife, whom he convinced to give up teaching and marry him. Mary was initially concerned that Darrell had a temper and that the difference in their religion would make their marriage impossible: She is Roman Catholic, and he is Protestant.