# Is "The Squatter and the Don" by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton (as "C. Loyal") a First Edition?

> **Quick answer.** A first edition of The Squatter and the Don by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton (as "C. Loyal") (Privately printed, San Francisco — no publisher named on the title page; catalogued as "[S. Carson & Co.]", 1885) is identified by: Confirmed from the text of the book itself, against three separate copies/transcriptions. San Francisco 1885 is the true first and the only nineteenth-century edition — the earliest Californio novel written and published in English, and the first fictional narrative in English from the perspective of the conquered Mexican population of California.

**Checklist — a true first has these:**
- Confirmed from the text of the book itself, against three separate copies/transcriptions
- The title page reads: "THE SQUATTER AND THE DON. A NOVEL DESCRIPTIVE OF CONTEMPORARY OCCURRENCES IN CALIFORNIA. BY C. LOYAL. SAN FRANCISCO: 1885." — with NO publisher imprint on the title page
- The copyright page reads: "Copyright, 1885
- San Francisco, Cal
- All Rights Reserved." 421 pp, 20 cm
- LCCN 06022255
- Publisher imprint reads Privately printed, San Francisco — no publisher named on the title page; catalogued as "[S. Carson & Co.]"

| | |
|---|---|
| Author | María Amparo Ruiz de Burton (as "C. Loyal") |
| Publisher | Privately printed, San Francisco — no publisher named on the title page; catalogued as "[S. Carson & Co.]" |
| Year | 1885 |
| True first | UK edition |
| Format | Hardcover (trade) |
| Key point | Confirmed from the text of the book itself, against three separate copies/transcriptions |
| Book-club edition exists? | No |

## Points of issue
Confirmed from the text of the book itself, against three separate copies/transcriptions. The title page reads: "THE SQUATTER AND THE DON. A NOVEL DESCRIPTIVE OF CONTEMPORARY OCCURRENCES IN CALIFORNIA. BY C. LOYAL. SAN FRANCISCO: 1885." — with NO publisher imprint on the title page. The copyright page reads: "Copyright, 1885. C. Loyal. San Francisco, Cal. All Rights Reserved." 421 pp, 20 cm. LCCN 06022255; OCLC 4323620. Because no publisher is named on the title leaf, library catalogues supply the imprint in square brackets as "[S. Carson & Co.]" — the bracketing is itself the tell that the imprint is editorial rather than printed, and a copy is not defective for lacking a publisher's name. Verified independently against the University of California Libraries scan, the New York Public Library/Google scan, and the proofread Project Gutenberg transcription (eBook 35538). IMPORTANT WARNING: OCR of the NYPL/Google scan renders both the title-page and copyright dates as 1884. This is an OCR artifact, not a variant — the proofread transcription and the UC copy both read 1885, and no 1884-dated issue is documented anywhere. Do not record an 1884 state.

## Is this the true first?
San Francisco 1885 is the true first and the only nineteenth-century edition — the earliest Californio novel written and published in English, and the first fictional narrative in English from the perspective of the conquered Mexican population of California. No UK edition and no Spanish-language predecessor, so no precedence question arises. The census's "privately printed" characterisation is BORNE OUT by the title page, which names no publisher; scholarship records that the work was copyrighted by "C. Loyal" and then associated with the San Francisco house of Samuel Carson & Co. in the same year, which is why catalogues assign the Carson imprint in brackets. Both descriptions are defensible; the title page is the authority. The pseudonym "C. Loyal" stands for "Ciudadano Leal" (Loyal Citizen), a conventional nineteenth-century Mexican letter-closing.

## Telling it from reprints & book-club editions
No nineteenth-century book-club or reprint issue documented. The modern recovery editions are the trap and are what most copies offered as this title actually are: Arte Público Press (Houston), first issued 1994 with a second edition in 1997, edited and introduced by Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita in the "Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage" series (352-page trade paperback, ISBN 9781558851856), plus numerous print-on-demand "annotated" editions. Any ISBN, any named editor, trade-paperback format, or a 352-page collation (versus the original's 421 pp) identifies a modern reprint rather than the 1885 first.

## Source
New Mexico Literacy Project — Is *The Squatter and the Don* by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton (as "C. Loyal") a first edition? https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/first-edition/the-squatter-and-the-don
CC BY 4.0. Part of the Canonical First-Edition Points of Issue dataset (https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/api/first-edition-titles.json). Last reviewed 2026-07-04.