The Fondo Piadoso de las Californias — a private endowment that paid for a royal frontier

A charitable fund built from private Mexican donations that financed the settlement of the Californias from 1697, at a moment when the royal treasury had given up paying for it. It carried the missions, the soldiers and the ships; it was expropriated in administration when the Jesuits were expelled in 1767, with its purpose preserved in the decree that took it; and it ended as the first case decided at The Hague in 1902.