"Great American Desert." Except an act to provide for the deliveries and
taking of mails at certain points on the coast, and a resolution
authorizing the furnishing of arms and ammunition to certain immigrants,
no Federal act was passed with reference to California in any relation;
in no act of Congress was California even mentioned after its
annexation, until the act of March 3, 1849, extending the revenue laws
of the United States "over the territory and waters of Upper California,
and to create certain collection districts therein." This act of March
3, 1849, not only did not extend the general laws of the United States
over California, but did not even create a local tribunal for its
enforcement, providing that the District Court of Louisiana and the
Supreme Court of Oregon should be courts of original jurisdiction to
take cognizance of all violations of its provisions. Not even the act of
September 9, 1850, admitting California into the Union, extended the
general laws of the United States over the State by express provision.
Not until the act of September 26, 1850, establishing a District Court
in the State, was it enacted by Congress "that all the laws of the
United States which are not locally inapplicable shall have the same
force and effect within the said State of California as elsewhere in the
United States[4]."

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