Ortega held his half through family ties that reached across California's political landscape: his sister had married Pío Pico, who would become the last Mexican governor of California. This kind of connection determined who received land grants and who did not. Stokes arrived by a different path. He was born in England, sailed to the Pacific, landed in Hawaii, and eventually made his way to California, where he became a Mexican citizen, converted to Catholicism, and married into the territory's social structure. His path — from British sailor to California landowner — was unusual but not exceptional in a territory that was changing faster than its administrators could track. Stokes did not live to see what that land would become. He died in 1847, in the difficult months after the Battle of San Pasqual, the last major land battle of the Mexican-American War in California.

When the United States took control of California in 1848, it inherited Mexico's land grant system along with the territory itself. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo promised to honor existing grants, but the process of confirming them under American law was slow, contested, and often ruinous for the original grantees. Rancho Valle de Pamo was patented to the heirs of the original grantees in 1872 — nearly three decades after the original grant. By then, Ortega and Stokes were both dead. The land had passed through their families and through the hands of Bernard Etcheverry, a Basque settler who acquired a substantial portion. In 1886, Etcheverry sold 3,855 acres to Milton Santee, a developer who platted the town that would take the name Ramona.

The Luiseño people had occupied the Santa Maria Valley before the Spanish missions reorganized the landscape of Alta California. Rancho Valle de Pamo drew its name from the Pamo watershed that drained the valley — a Spanish rendering of a Luiseño place name, applied to a land grant that formalized the displacement of the people who gave it that name. By the time the rancho was granted in 1843, the mission system had already disrupted Indigenous communities throughout the region. What the grant documents record is ownership; what they do not record is the prior history that made the valley habitable — the trails, the water sources, the managed landscapes — that the new owners inherited without acknowledgment.

The acreage Milton Santee subdivided in 1886 became the core of Ramona. The rest of the original rancho dispersed across subsequent owners, becoming the ranches, orchards, and open lands that still characterize the Santa Maria Valley. The valley's character — inland and warm, buffered from the coast by a ridge of hills — preserved a kind of agricultural openness that development compressed elsewhere in San Diego County but did not entirely eliminate here. The Ramona Grasslands, a county preserve north of town, hold some of what was once the rancho's unfenced range. From altitude, the valley floor is still readable as a broad, open basin — a geography that determined the grant, the town, and everything that followed.