The idea of Californian land as “virgin land” was a prominent theme used in boosters to captivate white American audiences and influence them to buy land in California. The Santa Clara valley boosters particularly targeted white American men by applying gender ideals to promote Californian land. This was done through descriptions gendering the land itself in boosters [1]:

“In his San Jose Chamber of Commerce brochure, pamphleteer and booster Leigh Irvine personified the Santa Clara Valley as a ‘sleeping maiden, fragrant with perfume and intoxicatingly beautiful, lying in a carven bed formed by the mountains of Santa Cruz, curtailed by fleecy clouds; her coverlet of eiderdown, tinted with rose, quilted with green, edged with yellow; her pillow the sun-kissed water of San Francisco Bay.’”[2]

The description of the Valley land through words such as “sleeping”, “intoxicating”, were meant to construct the image of an alluring and prized maiden–a sleeping beauty in wait of the perfect suitor. [3] This use of promotional metaphors describing land as a beautiful maidens, was also used to draw Puritan settlers in New England. [4] These metaphors alluding to maidens connected the ideas of the subjugation and domestication of the wilderness and the subjugation and domestication of women. [5]

However, these descriptions draw on the false conception that the land was uninhabited and therefore available for the taking. [6] Firstly, the land had long been inhabited by Indigenous Californian tribes and tribelets for thousands of years, with some assessments estimating around 20,000 years. [7] Secondly, many indigenous Californians interacted differently from Europeans and white Americans with the land, so concepts such as land ownership were viewed differently. For example, before the arrival of the Spaniards, indigenous groups such as the Ohlone moved from place to place throughout the year and did not have a singular place of settlement. [8] (However, it should be pointed out, that even though Indigenous people did not claim territory as Europeans had and had a different relationship with the land, this did not mean that the land was open for settler's claim.)