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The Bob Cesca Podcast: The Prison Bus

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Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus10/02/2019 3:19:51 am PDT

If you’ve got $72M laying around, have I got a deal for you:

The Largest Land Sale in California

You get almost as much a sense of the ecological value of the N3 Ranch property, 50,000 East Bay acres listed for sale for $72 million in early July, from looking at a map as you do from the spectacular drone footage the owners released with the listing.

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The ranch has been owned by the same family since Sharsmith surveyed it, and has been both a working cattle ranch and private hunting ground, with 14 hunting cabins for hunters to pursue tule elk and black-tailed deer.

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Before the Vickers-Naftzger family arrived, N3 fell on the eastern edge of Chochenyo-speaking Ohlone territory. When the Mexican government secularized the California missions in the 1830s, hundreds or perhaps thousands of Ohlone returned to the greater Livermore and Pleasanton area, and established a large community in Pleasanton as well as smaller communities around Arroyo del Mocho — parts of which are now on the N3 property — and in parts of what are now the East Bay Regional Park District and SFPUC watershed land. A partial Census in 1900 shows 20 Ohlone living in Murray Township, the site in Alameda County of the future N3 ranch.

Between 1851-1852 the remaining Bay Area Ohlone signed treaties with government representatives that granted them access to 8.5 million acres of land in central California to cede 64 million acres to the United States. But the Senate never ratified any of the treaties — and in the late 1920s, just before the Naftzger family turned to Northern California in search of new ranchland, the Bay Area Ohlone, until then recognized as a sovereign tribe called the Verona Band of Alameda County by the U.S. government, were stripped of their tribal status. Without formal organizational power, the communities in Pleasanton and Livermore drifted apart as individual families sought work elsewhere in the Bay Area. Many joined the Army to fight in World War I and II. The 500 enrolled members of the Muwekma Ohlone today have no tribal land and as of 2019 have had their petition to regain federal recognition rejected by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

“On this ranch, there are probably a multitude of ancestral heritage sites that of course the tribe will never have access to,” says San Jose State emeritus anthropology lecturer Alan Leventhal, who has worked with the Muwekma Ohlone for nearly 40 years. “That’s the politics of erasure which the tribe has faced since 1927. If you don’t mention their contributions or their history or their heritage, they’re not considered stakeholders.”

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Here’s the sales video, complete with hokey country voice over:

N3 Cattle Company | Livermore, CA