Rancho Temecula was a 26,609-acre (107.68 km2) Mexican land grant in present-day Riverside County, California given on December 14, 1844[1] by Governor Manuel Micheltorena to Feliz Valdez.
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.
[5][6][7] In 1853, squatters David Cline (or Kline) and William Moody, started a ranch with 200 acres fenced in, growing wheat and cutting hay at Alamos Springs on the land of the rancho, in an attempt to challenge the title.
It then became a Union Army cavalry camp in 1862, part of the supply route for Fort Yuma and the California Column march into New Mexico Territory.
In 1964, the Vails sold the ranch to the Kaiser Steel Company, which master-planned Rancho California, the communities that today comprise the cities of Temecula and Murrieta.