At New Almaden we can see the steps in the proletarianization dance: the alienation of indigenous and peasant populations from the land, the formal establishment of white racial rule, scientific management continually optimizing for maximum profits, looming soldiers. It all adds up to a laboring class with no legal way to reproduce their lives except to sell themselves hour by hour to an employer, on the employer’s terms.ii Anglo-American settlers found themselves correspondingly enfranchised, whether squatting on land until the government recognized their claims or getting grants legitimately by joining a militia gang and murdering Indians on the state’s behalf. California’s agriculture was ranch-based, with amber waves of grain and large herds of cattle, so there was no significant yeoman tradition. Instead, California smallholders saw their titles as speculative investments that they could sell or rent to planters and other capitalists, less territory than an increasingly valuable entry in the expanding U.S. property register. After the Homestead Act, for example, mill owners encouraged their employees to register timber claims and then lease them to the company. That didn’t always work out so great for the small speculators, as I’ll explain in the following chapter, but they weren’t wrong about the land’s potential value. It soon came to outshine even the gold.