The Van Ness ordinance was seen as something that was desperately needed at that chaotic time, and a great success — in fact, James Van Ness was elected mayor on the strength of its popularity. Holladay didn’t write it, just shepherded the thing through the state legislature.

And though he certainly was in the position to help other men with unethical land litigation against the city, there’s just no record that he did so. Many city records were lost in the great fire of ‘06, though, so we may never know.

As to his association with various wealthy men of the city whom I’ve characterized as “barons”, they seem to have come into his orbit after the Holladay Hill case was settled. In other words, this would have been after the Western Addition lands were settled, providing no opportunity for any “Deadwood”-like land grabs.

One of his famous cases actually involved prosecuting some of San Francisco’s richest men — the infamous Comstock Lode “Bonanza Kings“, Flood, O’Brien, Fair, and Mackey. (The Flood mansion is the only “Robber Baron”-era castle to have survived the ‘06 fire — it’s still up on Nob Hill.) Holladay represented stockholders who claimed that the “Kings” had bilked them by misrepresented bullion production… and he won.

I’m afraid that I still have to draw the conclusion that I came to in the podcast. Though his squatting of Holladay Hill looks quite shady, he seems to have thought of himself and been thought of as an honourable, respectable man. Odd as it sounds, I think he was convinced that he was in the right!

Still, I have to admit that your interpretation is a much more exciting one! And if any evidence comes to light, I’d love to hear it.

Questions…

In addition to directly benefiting from his own laws, which of Holladay’s CLIENTS also benefited? You mentioned all these barons coming over — it seems like they weren’t coming over for cultural enrichment, but rather to get legal counsel on how to use the same tactics (“I bought this land when it was still Mexico”). It was a Deadwood-like situation after all.

Did any of Holladay’s clients go through similar legal proceedings? Perhaps many were settled without a peep (because they didn’t claim land in a park) and we’ll never know just how much land was had for nothing by those who could afford to pay or pay-off Holladay.

Who sponsored that legislation? Who paid for Holladay’s various candidacies? It just seems like as much as you dug up, perhaps you only scratched the surface. Perhaps ironically, Holladay was the only one who got his hands caught in the cookie jar while his clients took, as Monty Python put it, “Huge tracks of land!”