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A note on history. I've been hunting down cities and towns East of the Mississippi that were laid out under the Spanish Law of the Indies. Some folks imagine there to have been none, but in reality there were several dozen.

The big deal here, given the availability of land, was to issue the smallest grant in terms of 1,000 arpents!

The grantee ~ which might have been a government agent at a Villa Real (yup, St. Louis wasn't the only one of those), would subdivide it into 10 arpent sites which were just big enough to feed a horse and family ~ plus, they'd cut roads in there to provide for circulation around the townsite.

One place in Illinois not far from Champaign, going South, was enclosed in a stockade fence all the way around ~ with towers in the corner to fight invaders.

The Spanish may well have provided title to the properties but when they pulled out of the region after the end of Queen Anne's War they took the records ~ whatever they were ~ with them. I suspect many of them still exist.

In some cases I have been able to identify an earlier Spanish resident of one of these grants simply by looking to see who the first fellow was to file for a title under the American government. These guys are ALL hispanic! The French, with a different system, chose to file claim with the US government and wait 25 years for a title. The Spanish went right to the government's land agents to make their claims.

Obviously all the earliest settlers knew about land titles and the power they gave an individual. Even the Oneida were as exacting as the Spanish in their own land grants ~ look up a guy named Allen who was the first settler of Rochester ~ trace his story back to the grants the Oneida gave him. They were far from primitive savages.

From the earliest times American land title systems have protected the poor from the rich, and the rich against each other.