In 1839, Governor Juan B. Alvarado granted Rancho Cañada de Pala to Jose de Jesus Bernal. The land stretched across the foothills and mountains of the Diablo Range, rolling terrain east of the Santa Clara Valley where oak-studded grasslands gave way to steeper, wilder country. Jose de Jesus and his two brothers built their homes, traditional adobes, around a spring-fed pond on a ridge overlooking the valley below. From that vantage point they could see the flatlands where the Pueblo de San Jose was growing, while their cattle and horses grazed the hills behind them. The Bernals were part of a web of Californio families whose land grants carved up the region. Jose de Jesus's uncle, Joaquin Bernal, held the neighboring Rancho Santa Teresa, making the family's presence here both personal and strategic.

The Mexican-American War ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, which promised that Mexican land grants would be honored under American law. The promise came with paperwork. The Land Act of 1851 required every grant holder to prove their claim before the Public Land Commission, and in 1852, a claim for Rancho Cañada de Pala was filed. Eleven years later, in 1863, the grant was finally patented to Jose de Jesus Bernal, Jose Antonio Bernal, and Juan Bernal. The legal process was expensive enough to reshape the land itself. The area known as Halls Valley, encompassing most of what is now Grant Ranch Park, was deeded to Frederick Hall, the Bernals' attorney, as payment for processing their claim. A lawyer walked away with some of the finest parkland in Santa Clara County.

New owners arrived with American ambition. In 1850, even before the patent was settled, the southern third of the rancho was sold to Samuel Q. Broughton, a Kentucky native who had come overland to California in 1846, drawn by the same restless energy that would soon bring the Gold Rush. Adam Grant arrived later, in 1880, with a different kind of fortune. He was a founder of Murphy, Grant, & Company, a dry goods store that had profited handsomely from selling supplies to gold miners. Grant bought his initial holding of Cañada de Pala and his son, Joseph D. Grant, eventually expanded the family's stake to approximately 9,533 acres. The Grant name stuck to the land long after the family's era ended. In 1974, Santa Clara County purchased Grant Ranch for park use, turning a private estate into public open space.

Today, the old rancho lives on in two forms. Grant Ranch Park preserves the rolling hills and oak woodlands that the Bernals would recognize, a landscape of ridgelines and seasonal creeks where the Diablo Range meets the edge of Silicon Valley's urbanization. The Blue Oak Ranch Reserve, encompassing all of what was once the rancho's wilder territory, operates as a University of California research station. Between them, these two parcels protect most of the original 15,714-acre grant from development. The spring-fed pond where the Bernals built their adobes is long gone as a homesite, but the water still flows. Whether "pala" meant shovel or water, the land has outlasted every name imposed upon it.