plans of Christian conquest, and Monterey was declared the capital of the
colonial empire.
For a time it appeared that nothing more would be needed to stimulate Spain
to hold the western coast of America against the world. But Castilian
enthusiasm was short-lived. The mystery of Monterey having been cleared
away and the event deliriously lauded, Spain lapsed into an indefinite
programme concerning the Californian coast. Both Madrid and Mexico all but
forgot Monterey and the activities of wandering friars who, radiating
thence, were unconsciously preparing the way for a national destiny as
glorious as Spain's, even at the height of her circumstance and pomp.
Now came the critical moment in Junípero's career, a moment that was to
decide the fate of the western half of the New World. Antonio Bucareli had
been installed as Viceroy of Mexico. A keen man of conventional wisdom, it
seemed to him to be a waste of public money to divert a stream of gold to
maintain the far-away civilizing dreams of mendicants centred at Carmel.
He would close the harbor of San Blas, then maintained to equip expeditions
to the Californian settlements, and abandon the fruitless undertaking of
trying to populate bleak promontories swept by winds that brought home no
rich argosies. The enterprise of his subjects should be devoted to more
lucrative pursuits.
Here was need and opportunity for a supreme test of the resources that had
made the founder of Monterey the heroic figure of the West. He saw, as did
no other Spaniard of his day, the splendid future awaiting the Pacific
coast. There was no time to halt between two opinions. Already Captain
Behring had explored northwestern waters in the name of Russia, and now the
fur traders of that empire, establishing their commercial posts at
Unalaska, were prepared to claim the coast as far south as sea-otters run.
Captain Cook and Vancouver were about to sail to try to nail the Union Jack
on every headland from Sitka to San Diego. Disguised under the standard of
Portugal, privateersmen of various nations were hoisting full sail in the
race for western conquest, and Louis XVI. was planning to equip François de
Gallup, Count de la Pérouse, to transplant the eagles of France to
California crags. The end of the Seven Years' War, a decade before
Bucareli's remarkable decision, had led to a recarving of America among
European powers, and jealousy and world-wide ambition now steered the sea
in search of new empire.
All this was not then apparent on the surface, but the cowled monk in his
Mission at Carmel divined events. Worldly power and possession by him were
trampled underfoot. In humility he had turned his back upon the emoluments
of scholarship to labor among savages in the remote wilderness. The fame he
had achieved by the rediscovery of Monterey was not of his choosing.
Although he counted all earthly things as dross he knew the action of
Bucareli meant the downfall of his spiritual kingdom. In the flutter of
foreign sails he read a menace to Spain's sovereignty on the coast. And so
it happened that in the same year that Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and
Dabney Carr in the Raleigh tavern were pleading the cause that was to wrest
the Atlantic colonies from George III., an aged cripple in coarse robe of
gray serge, tied at the waist with a girdle of hemp, employed his splendid
eloquence in the vice-regal palace of the Mexican capital to save the
Pacific coast from the hands of navigators who with roving commissions of
conquest from European kings and emperors were cruising in the wake of
Spanish indecision.
Here, again, Monterey was playing an all-important part in history, for it
was the fame Junípero had won through its rediscovery that sped his message
to the Viceroy and through him to the King. The humble monk had made the
long journey from Monterey with no other escort save an Indian acolyte, and
though lame, infirm, and of lowly mien, was received with the consideration
due an accredited ambassador.
Bucareli was not only won over to maintain the Californian settlements, but
was fired to achieve new conquests along the upper coast. Junípero's
memorial, forwarded to Madrid, reawakened the sentiments his rediscovery of
Monterey had stirred. By the King's order every recommendation of the
pioneer friar was adopted, offices for California were created at permanent
salaries, the treasury at Guadalajara was pledged to the colonization of
the Pacific coast and Monterey named as the abiding capital.
Thus an open highway to the sea was unconsciously reserved for the United
States. Russia was forced up against the Arctic Circle, England did not
gain a foothold south of the island Vancouver named, the privateers tacked
toward the South Seas, and when the French explorer, Count de la Pérouse,
sailed into the harbor of Monterey the only thing he could do to save his
name from engulfing obscurity was to introduce potatoes to a smiling land.
The following season, instead of the fleur-delis, potato blossoms in the
flowering Carmel were the only token that the King of France had ever had
designs upon the coast.
[Illustration OLD MEXICAN JAIL.]
The relief the Viceroy sent to Monterey in response to Junípero's plea came
none too soon. For thirty-seven days the latter's boyhood friend and
lifelong collaborator, Palou, and his comrades at Carmel had gone without a
tortilla or a crumb of bread, subsisting patiently on a little meal ground
from peas. But now began the years of mission prosperity and peace, and
thereafter in Monterey was presented in miniature the story of the glory
and decline of Spain.
For half a century it was the brilliant capital of Spain's new empire. It
was a thriving metropolis and the gay seat of the Spanish Court fifty years
before the settlement at San Francisco became more than a straggling
pueblo, struggling to survive against wind and sand. In fact, for two
generations after the founding of Monterey San Francisco's chief claim to
distinction was that the first craft to pass through the pillared channel
that leads to its incomparable harbor was a launch hewn from a redwood
felled by Ayala on the banks of the Carmel.
Year after year in Monterey were great fêtes, the laughter of beautifully
gowned women, the melody of troubadours, the click of castanets, the
trampling of horsemen in gay attire, the triumphs of governors and
captains, and the booming of guns in the walled presidio. Here at this
capital titled officials sat at the receipt of customs; here galleons from
Manila put in for repairs and departed with cargoes of furs, and hither
came fragatas and paquebotes from the Mexican coast and imposing craft from
the four corners of the earth. Over picturesque adobe consulates in
Monterey floated the flags of foreign nations when the only standard reared
in San Francisco was a desolate wooden cross in the Mission Dolores. And
the road through the mountain pines to Junípero's spiritual capital, his
cabecera, three miles away, over which governors followed by glittering
retinues marched to solemnize their oaths of office and whither they were
borne for sepulture, was worn to its primal rocks long before the path from
the San Francisco Mission to the bay became more than a shifting trail.
San Francisco now can stand these invidious comparisons, for when glory
finally sailed through the Golden Gate, fame departed from Monterey.
The genius of Junípero gave to Monterey an impetus that long survived his
death. As unconscious trustee, Spain, centring power at Monterey, was
holding the coast for the larger destiny to follow.
The shadow of new events crept toward Portala's cross. In a winter month in
the third decade of the nineteenth century an unprecedented happening
awakened the fears of the Franciscans at Carmel,--the holy water in the
baptismal font in the San Carlos Mission was found to be frozen. This
unparalleled thing in that bland clime could not, they believed, but
portend some unhappy fate. In confirmation of their worst fears came the
news that the Viceroy had repudiated allegiance to the King. The eagle of
Mexico had soared above the lion of Castile, and a rebel had supplanted
the King in the litany of prayers. The conerstone of the mission system had
been broken; the crumbling process was at hand.
Then came Fernandez, the Canónigo, the most exalted ecclesiastical
dignitary that had ever set foot in Monterey. Junípero was a Puritan of
humble and contrite virtue. The Canónigo was a swaggering roysterer,
pledging the revenues of the Church in games of chance. On the occasions of
Junípero's journeyings from his capital, the tears of his neophytes, the
sound of mission bells, and the prayers of his comrades attested the
reverence he had won. Races, revels, and bull-fights in Monterey celebrated
the convivial departure of Fernandez.
A new era was at hand. Under the unstable Mexican _régime_, chaos followed
confusion. In the twenty-four years that intervened before the Stars and
Stripes, hoisted over Monterey, proclaimed the advent of the golden age in
the West, that city saw thirteen governors come and go. Communication with
Mexico was difficult. A governor at Monterey when he rose in the morning
did not know whether to salute the flag of a liberator, an emperor, a
rebel, a president, or a king. Monterey, too, had turmoils and revolutions
of her own. Ambitious intrigue placarded her adobe walls with flaming
ultimatos. The alcalde and regidores of one day were prisoners in irons the
next. Anarchy to-day sat gravely in the Ayuntamiento to-morrow, and
governors turned fugitive as usurpers assumed control.
Yet these Monterey revolutions were anæmic, attended with less shedding of
blood than the bull-fights that celebrated the triumphs of her voluble
warriors. It was the opera-bouffe warfare of little statesmen making their
clamoring exit from the stage of history.
The spectacular caballero in his jacket laced with gold was passing away
with the phantoms he had chased. The Mission bells grew silent. New
horsemen thronged over the mountain roads. New sailors cast anchor in the
harbor. A new flag floated over the presidio, a flag that was not to be
pulled down. The American Republic had reached the western sea.
Of these later events the guide informs you with some fidelity to the facts
as you start on the famous Twenty-Mile Drive. He tells you how the brig
_Natalia_, upon which Napoleon escaped from Elba, was wrecked by storms in
Monterey Bay in 1834 to typify that Europe's power over California was
gone forever, and he will sell you fragments of the wreck; he will tell you
how Commodore Jones in 1842, by mistake but in prophecy of things to come,
hoisted the American ensign over Monterey; how in 1846, that flag, in the
hands of Commodore Sloat, went up to stay; how in the following month the
first newspaper published on the Pacific coast made its appearance in
Monterey; in the corners of the public squares he will show you the cannon
of John C. Frémont, and he will point you to the Gabilan Mountains where on
their highest peak overlooking Monterey the famed "pathfinder" unfurled
the colors of his country and bade defiance to the Mexicans, even before he
knew that war raged between the two republics. Then your proud historian
will show you the ancient adobe capitol where in 1849, just one hundred
years from the time Junípero set sail from Majorca, the first convention
met to form the commonwealth of California,--a convention which, though
composed in the major part of adventurers, some of whom looked upon murder
as a pastime, sent to Washington the unanimous declaration that slavery
should never stain the Golden West, and thus revived the great conflict in
the Senate and caused the famous compromise.
[Illustration FISHING VILLAGE.]
Then your pilot will guide you to the fishing villages whence Spanish
pescadores once put out in their shallops to harvest the bay for the
governor and his Court. Later came the American whalers before the tide of
commerce turned the sperm whale and the finback to remoter waters.
Occasionally yet comes a sulphurbottom following the tides of the Kuro
Sirva, and then there is vast excitement in Pescadero Bay.
[Illustration ANCIENT CYPRESS AT CYPRESS POINT.]
Now through the groves of giant pines at the edge of the sea where the
western Chautauqua meets, and then to Cypress Point, whose trees, the guide
informs you loftily, are identical with the cedars of Lebanon, and you are
nearing the resting-place of Junípero.
[Illustration STATUE OF JUNIPERO SERRA.]
With the adjournment of the convention that met at Monterey in response to
the proclamation of the military governor to frame a State, the capital
passed from that historic town, and for many years the grave of its founder
was forgotten. The rush to the gold mines trod underfoot the old-time
glories of Monterey. From a throbbing capital it became for a while a
deserted village. Lichens grew in its streets and the roofs of its houses
crumbled.
As for the Mission at Carmel, rust muffled its chimes; Spanish moss covered
its tumbling pilasters; its sanctuary was choked with wild mustard; storms
blew through the fallen roof. The lizard alone kept watch of the ruin.
But when the new civilization had built its cities and established its
railways and there was time again to cultivate the arts of rest, romance
turned once more to Monterey. Capital saw in its ruins an opportunity for
gain. In its environs Stevenson beheld a paradise for poets, and Monterey
became a field of dalliance, a mecca for millionaires at play, an unfailing
inspiration to every spirit in a mood to dream.
Junípero at Monterey initiated the activities that held the coast against
envious nations, and now to his tomb comes the tide of travel. A few years
ago Mrs. Leland Stanford, representing patriotic citizens and students whom
the eloquent writings of the historian Hittell had inspired to veneration
of Junípero, restored the ruined Mission, so that now his tomb is marked by
no traces of neglect, and there with the Carmel surf chanting his eternal
requiem, side by side with the comrades he loved and the governors he and
his followers installed, this unconquerable friar who trudged, lamely, ten
thousand miles in the name of God, establishing the outposts of
Christianity and opening the way for the Democracy to come, is receiving
the tardy homage his genius and character deserve.
He was indeed one of Emerson's men who "pin continents together."
[Illustration OLD MEXICAN CUSTOM-HOUSE.]
Now you climb to the crest of the cordillera. Before you is the circling
bay with its border of white beaches. Beyond, Frémont's Peak, the tall
sentinel that first proclaimed the advent of the dominant American. At your
feet the quaint capital that Junípero founded, half adobe, half modern. You
can distinguish the time-tumbled walls that tell of Spain's departed glory,
and you see the crumbling Cuartel and Custom-House of the Mexicans, who
lacked the Spaniards' Moorish taste in their homes and public buildings.
The old capital has outlived its day. It thrives now on trinkets and
abelone shells, painted with memories of the past. But on your left, set in
the midst of five hundred acres of flowers and oaks and pines, are
luxurious touches of modern life where business comes to forget its cares,
and romance spends its honeymoon.
[Illustration ANCIENT ADOBE CABIN, MONTEREY.]
Descend the slope toward the city, passing on your way ruined adobe cabins.
Rounding a turn in the historic road you see the smoke of an incoming
steamer bringing holiday passengers through waters where, aforetime,
Spanish corvettes lurked for wily smugglers. From the Cuartel as you near
the old capital you hear, instead of the war ballads of quixotic guerreros,
the merriment of school-children at play. On the streets, instead of the
alférez coming on caparisoned horse to announce the presence in the harbor
of a stranger craft, you encounter hotel-runners clattering in 'buses to
the pier. On surviving fragments of villa walls you discern no solemn
reglamentos. Advertisements of swimming suits and fishing tackle have
supplanted the rhetorical decrees of the Spanish governors. The descendants
of the naked Indians that crowded round the royal carriage of Doña Eulalia
of Catalonia a century ago, shocking that titled lady to throw them some of
her purple and fine linen, now shamble by you in slattern calico and jeans,
bearing bundles of laundry to a neighboring lagoon. The cleansing process
of their trade has for them no personal contagion. In curio shops that
crowd the site of the old presidio where the soldiers of Charles III.
performed their part in the programme of civilization Junípero had
outlined, you buy your souvenirs.
Then climb to Vizcanio's oak. Beyond the cross reared here are the
tottering memorials in the ancient graveyard. A century of strange and
stirring romance is buried there. From this weed-grown cemetery haunted by
memories which your guide cannot recall, you again see the town and harbor
in panorama, and you get clearer glimpses of the paradise into which
landscape-gardeners have transformed surrounding acres of sand-dunes over
which pobladores once ranged seeking pasturage for their herds.
At your feet, along a well-kept road of pounded shells, and across bridges
framed of the skeletons of whales buttressed with moss-grown rocks, roll
automobiles and victorias in the pursuit of pleasure. Follow them blithely,
if you will, waving your hand to the past; or, in the true spirit of
historic pilgrimage, kneel in this place of burial and spell the
imperfectly chiselled story of the Spanish pioneers who, despite their
visionary dreams, held, for the government Washington was founding, a
highway to the Pacific.
[Illustration]
LOS ANGELES
THE CITY OF THE ANGELS
BY FLORENCE E. WINSLOW
"Very near the terrestrial paradise," said the old Spanish explorer of the
sunlit country, where stood in a later century the pueblo of Los Angeles.
Very near the terrestrial paradise has it seemed to weary travellers,
hopeful invalids, and delighted home-makers, who have from year to year
wandered across the desert to find rest, health, and comfort in a climate
where the terms winter and summer are misnomers, where snows are seen only
on the mountain-tops above the flowering plain, where severe heats are
unknown, and where Nature rewards those who seek her gifts in largest
measure. Climate and situation are the environing elements which count for
most in the development of the history of Los Angeles. These are
responsible both for the easy, courteous, pleasure-loving lives of the
Spanish rancheros, and the strenuous, vivid, progressive, municipal
experiences of the Americans in this modern "pleasure city."
Los Angeles treasures the memory of ancient Spanish days of daring and
romance, among which lie the beginnings of its civil life. All that is left
of the old Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles may be seen now
clustered about the old plaza, with its church, in what is known as Sonora
town. Here the sun-baked adobe walls of the houses nestle, with their
Mexican residents, in the midst of the bustling city, awaiting the final
decay which marks the passing of the Pueblo.
[Illustration BELLS OF SAN GABRIEL.]
Precedent to later social conditions of ease, the careful student will find
in the lives of the earlier settlers of Alta California a strong, vital,
self-sacrificing religious impulse, which, upon Pacific as upon Atlantic
shores, induced the initial movement in a civilization which moved to its
attempted end indifferent to climate or environment, and using the material
only to subserve the interests of the dominant spiritual. Junípero Serra,
with his mission settlers of 1769, was in subtlest ways akin to the Pilgrim
Fathers of the preceding century. As Los Angeles was but a humble dependent
on San Gabriel Mission, its beginnings may best be traced in connection
with the history of the mission fathers, the earliest colonizers and
civilizers of the sunset land. Their unstinted and self-sacrificing
devotion to the Indians of California, their great mission trade-schools,
where not only the salvation of souls but the training of the minds and
hands of the neophytes was undertaken, their wise administration of their
trusts, both spiritual and material, make this initial movement in the
colonization of California one of the brightest incidents in the story of
the Golden West.
Out of the mists of romance which envelop the earlier explorers of the
Pacific Coasts appear the forms of Cabrillo and Vizcaino, the first
historic visitors to Southern California.
It may be that Francisco de Ulloa had in 1539 gained from the Pacific a
glimpse of the land, or that Hernando de Alarçon from the Gila country saw
the plain of Los Angeles in 1540. Sure it is that Cabrillo in 1542, and
Vizcaino in 1603 visited San Diego and San Pedro, the port of Los Angeles.
The latter landed at San Diego, seeking a suitable port for ships engaged
in trade with the Philippines, dug wells, and erected a church tent for
three friars who were of the party, and then for 166 years this "fair land
without snow" drops out of history. It is left to its Indian residents,
left treasuring its resources for future generations, for new peoples.
[Illustration SAN DIEGO MISSION. FOUNDED 1769.]
In 1769 came Junípero Serra--saint, hero, and Franciscan father. In him the
romance of missionary enterprise finds embodiment; with him and his
missions the colonization of Alta California began. The missions in the
peninsula of Lower California were, by the expulsion of the Jesuits in
1767, left in charge of the Franciscans, and Serra's burning zeal for the
conversion of the Indians led him to urge the prosecution of a
long-cherished plan of the Government. This was to provide the Manila ships
with good ports on the northwest coasts and to promote settlements there.
There was a union of spiritual and physical forces--soldiers under the
military government of Portolá co-operating with the missionaries under
Serra. Four expeditions, two proceeding by sea and two by land, were
reunited at San Diego, where, on July 16th, the noble missionary dedicated
the first mission in Alta California. It was but two years later that the
Mission San Gabriel Arcangel was founded, with solemn chants of Veni,
Creator Spiritus and Te Deum Laudamus, and in the presence of many Indians.
Serra, who had entered in a litter the land of promise where his zeal and
courage were to accomplish so much, had already travelled toward San
Francisco, crossing mountain and desert on foot, and establishing the
Mission of San Carlos. The missions were firmly organized and devoutly
conducted, and there were eighteen of them by the end of the century. Forty
padres had gathered in these first industrial training-schools a population
of 13,500 converted Indian neophytes, to whom they had taught the arts of
civilization.
San Gabriel became one of the richest missions. Its church has never been
disused; to-day it welcomes strangers as in the time when it received those
weary pilgrims, the founders of Los Angeles, who came from Loreto across
the deserts of Colorado, on the route first taken by Anza through the San
Gorgonio pass, and were provided by the hospitable fathers with all that
was needed for rest and refreshment. The centre of the civilized and
agricultural life of the district, San Gabriel, was a great material as
well as spiritual force. It had its guard of ten soldiers and its three
padres. Two of these, Cruzado and Sanchez, ministered side by side to the
California Indians for thirty years, and the latter had a missionary
experience of fifty-five years.