William M. Tipton was born in Dayton, Ohio on February 20th, 1857. His family moved to Brownsville, Nebraska the following year and his father Thomas Weston Tipton was elected to the United States Senate after the end of the Civil War. During Thomas Tipton’s incumbency, the family lived in Washington, D.C. where William Tipton was educated at the Emerson Institute. William Tipton briefly taught in the Brownsville, Nebraska public schools before accepting a position in the office of the Surveyor General of the Territory of New Mexico in Santa Fe. In order to read old governmental documents from New Mexico from its time under the governance of Spain and Mexico, Tipton learned Spanish and began to develop skilled understanding of land grants and how to handle Spanish language documents specifically. Because of this self-taught expertise, he worked as a land surveyor and protected the U.S. government from fraudulent land claims in the New Mexico Territory.

On August 15, 1892, Tipton was appointed a Special Agent and Spanish Expert to the United States Attorney for the Court of Private Land Claims. The court was organized to address and settle land claims in New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, and Arizona in the aftermath of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. In 1901, Tipton was sent by the United States government to the Philippines at the beginning of the U.S. occupation following the 1898 Treaty of Paris. He established the Bureau of Public Lands and became of the first head of the Bureau. After a few years working in Manila, Tipton returned to the United States and worked in different federal and New Mexican state government positions before his retirement in 1921.

He then moved to Santa Clara County with his second wife, Alice J. Tipton, and lived on a ranch there until his death in 1922 at the age of 65.

Throughout his life, Tipton complied lists of Spanish terms with the hope of adding them to a Spanish-English dictionary. These lists make up the majority of his personal papers.

The biographical information for this finding aid comes mostly from a letter written by William Tipton’s second wife Alice J. Tipton to the University President Rev. Zacheus J. Maher, S.J. from when she transferred William Tipton’s papers to the University Library in 1923 and from an article from the The American Surveyor.

Bibliography Roeder, Fred, LS. "Will Tipton of the Spanish Archives." AmeriSurv.com. The American Surveyor, 11 Aug. 2009. 05 Aug. 2016.

Santa Clara University was founded in 1851 by the Society of Jesus as Santa Clara College and is California’s oldest operating institution of higher learning. It was established on the grounds of Mission Santa Clara de Asìs, the eighth of the original 21 California missions. The college originally operated as a preparatory school and did not offer courses of collegiate rank until 1853. The institution became known as the University of Santa Clara in 1912, when the schools of engineering and law were added. For 110 years, Santa Clara University was an all-male school. In 1961, women were accepted as undergraduates and Santa Clara University became the first coeducational Catholic university in California. The number of students and faculty tripled over the next decade and the university began the largest building program in school history with eight residence halls, a student union, and an athletic stadium. In the early 1970s, the Board of Trustees voted to limit the size of the undergraduate population, an action that was intended to preserve the character and ensure the quality of the university for generations to come. In 1985, the university adopted Santa Clara University as its official name. Bibliography: Santa Clara University. “About SCU – History.” www.scu.edu/about/history.cfm (Accessed Nov. 23, 2010) McKevitt, Gerald, S.J. The University of Santa Clara: A History, 1851-1977. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1979.