The Squatter and the Don

San Francisco 1885 is the true first and the only nineteenth-century edition — the earliest Californio novel written and published in English, and the first fictional narrative in English from the perspective of the conquered Mexican population of California. No UK edition and no Spanish-language predecessor, so no precedence question arises. The census's "privately printed" characterisation is BORNE OUT by the title page, which names no publisher; scholarship records that the work was copyrighted by "C. Loyal" and then associated with the San Francisco house of Samuel Carson & Co. in the same year, which is why catalogues assign the Carson imprint in brackets. Both descriptions are defensible; the title page is the authority. The pseudonym "C. Loyal" stands for "Ciudadano Leal" (Loyal Citizen), a conventional nineteenth-century Mexican letter-closing.