Smith settled near San Bernardino and established a farm. He had been warned by church leadership that keeping enslaved people in California was illegal. He proceeded anyway. For nearly five years, Biddy Mason and her children lived in San Bernardino as his property, in a state whose constitution said they could not be.
During these California years, Biddy Mason continued her midwifery work. The skills she had developed in Mississippi and refined over thousands of miles of trail travel were applicable in the growing settlement communities of Southern California. She worked for Smith and, in some capacity, for others in the area. She also met, through the overlapping networks of Southern California’s small but growing community, the people who would eventually help her make her case to the courts.
Among the most important of these connections was her friendship with the Owens family. Robert Owens was a free Black man who had established himself successfully in Los Angeles, becoming a businessman with livestock operations and real estate. His son Charles Owens was romantically interested in Mason’s eldest daughter, Ellen. This personal connection gave the Owens family a direct stake in Mason’s legal situation: if Smith were to take the Mason family to Texas, Charles Owens would lose the woman he intended to marry.
## The Move to Texas and the Intervention
In December 1855, something changed. Robert Smith was, by some accounts, in financial difficulty. He decided to move his household to Texas, a slave state, and there were indications that he intended to sell the people he had been holding as slaves, or at minimum to consolidate his claim on them in a jurisdiction where that claim had full legal force. He announced the move and began preparing to leave California.