Beginning in the 1860s, Tyler Curtis began to sell off Rancho Bodega, that had been left by Captain Stephen Smith's will at his death in 1855 to his wife Manuela Curtis and their three children. In 1856, Manuela Smith remarried to Tyler Curtis. Tyler succeeded in getting the California State Legislature to pass an act in 1861, giving him the right as guardian to sell the children's interest in the rancho. Despite a lawsuit brought by Captain Smith's son, James Smith, in 1877, the California Supreme Court ruled that the land sales by Curtis were legal.