José María Amador
José María Amador (1781 in San Francisco – 1883 in Watsonville, buried in Gilroy, California) was a Californio soldier, rancher, and gold miner. After he found gold at the "Little Amador" mine, Amador City grew around the nearby "Keystone" mine, locations which today are in Amador County.
He was born at the Presidio of San Francisco, one of the youngest of eleven children of Pedro Amador and Ramona Noriega. He very probably named his later ranch after his mother and his maternal grandfather, Ramón Noriega. He was a younger brother of Sinforosa Amador (1788-1841).
He spent his early years as a soldier and explorer, serving in the Spanish army of Nueva España, 1810-1827, then from 1827 to 1835 was mayordomo, or administrator, at the Mission San José. He was granted 4,400 acres of Mission land in 1835, which he named Rancho San Ramon.
Amador was married three times and had 22 children. He built several adobes at his rancho headquarters near Alamilla Springs in today’s Dublin, California, including a two-story adobe which was used by James Dougherty in the 1860s, thereafter named Dougherty, Alameda County, California. He gradually sold the land till none was left at his death.
In 1877, he was living at Whiskey Hill, Santa Cruz County when Thomas Savage recorded Amador's “Memorias sobre la Historia de California,” which survives as a manuscript in the Bancroft Library.
With the cession of California to the United States following the Mexican-American War, the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo provided that the land grants would be honored. As required by the Land Act of 1851, a claim for Rancho San Ramon was filed with the Public Land Commission in 1852, and 16,517 acres (66.8 km2) of the grant was patented to Jose Maria Amador in 1865. Amador gradually sold his rancho. James Witt Dougherty bought 10,000 acres (40 km2) in 1852.
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