went steadily on from bad to worse with the missions. Each governor
had his own plans and devices for making the most out of them, renting
them, dividing them into parcels for the use of colonists,
establishing pueblos on them, making them subject to laws of
bankruptcy, and finally selling them. The departmental assemblies
sometimes indorsed and sometimes annulled the acts of the governors.
In 1842 Governor Micheltorena proclaimed that the twelve southern
missions should be restored to the Church, and that the Government
would not make another grant of land without the consent of the
friars. This led to a revolution, or rather an ebullition, and
Micheltorena was sent out of the country. To him succeeded Pio Pico,
who remained in power till the occupation of California by the United
States forces in 1846. During the reign of Pio Pico, the ruin of the
mission establishments was completed. They were at first sold or
rented in batches to the highest bidders. There was first a
preliminary farce of proclamation to the Indians to return and take
possession of the missions if they did not want them sold. These
proclamations were posted up in the pueblos for months before the
sales. In 1844 the Indians of Dolores, Soledad, San Miguel, La
Purissima, and San Rafael[6] were thus summoned to come back to their
missions,--a curious bit of half conscience-stricken, half politic
recognition of the Indians' ownership of the lands, the act of the
Departmental Assembly saying that if they (the Indians) did not return
before such a date, the Government would declare said missions to be
"without owners," and dispose of them accordingly. There must have
been much bitter speech in those days when news of these proclamations
reached the wilds where the mission Indians had taken refuge.
At last, in March, 1846, an act of the Departmental Assembly made the
missions liable to the laws of bankruptcy, and authorized the governor
to sell them to private persons. As by this time all the missions that
had any pretence of existence left had been run hopelessly into debt,
proceedings in regard to them were much simplified by this act. In the
same year the President of Mexico issued an order to Governor Pico to
use all means within his power to raise money to defend the country
against the United States; and under color of this double
authorization the governor forthwith proceeded to sell missions right
and left. He sold them at illegal private sales; he sold them for
insignificant sums, and for sums not paid at all; whether he was, to
use the words of a well-known legal brief in one of the celebrated
California land cases, "wilfully ignorant or grossly corrupt," there
is no knowing, and it made no difference in the result.
One of the last acts of the Departmental Assembly, before the
surrender of the country, was to declare all Governor Pico's sales of
mission property null and void. And one of Governor Pico's last acts
was, as soon as he had made up his mind to run away out of the
country, to write to some of his special friends and ask them if there
were anything else they would like to have him give them before his
departure.
On the 7th of July, 1846, the American flag was raised in Monterey,
and formal possession of California was taken by the United States.
The proclamation of Admiral Sloat on this memorable occasion included
these words: "All persons holding title to real estate, or in quiet
possession of lands under color of right, shall have those titles and
rights guaranteed to them." "Color of right" is a legal phrase,
embodying a moral idea, an obligation of equity. If the United States
Government had kept this guarantee, there would be living in
comfortable homesteads in California to-day many hundreds of people
that are now homeless and beggared,--Mexicans as well as Indians.
The army officers in charge of different posts in California, in these
first days of the United States' occupation of the country, were
perplexed and embarrassed by nothing so much as by the confusion
existing in regard to the mission properties and lands. Everywhere men
turned up with bills of sale from Governor Pico. At the San Diego
mission the ostensible owner, one Estudillo by name, confessed frankly
that he "did not think it right to dispose of the Indians' property in
that way; but as everybody was buying missions, he thought he might as
well have one."
In many of the missions, squatters, without show or semblance of
title, were found; these the officers turned out. Finally, General
Kearney, to save the trouble of cutting any more Gordian knots,
declared that all titles of missions and mission lands must be held
in abeyance till the United States Government should pronounce on
them.
For several years the question remained unsettled, and the mission
properties were held by those who had them in possession at the time
of the surrender. But in 1856 the United States Land Commission gave,
in reply to a claim and petition from the Catholic Bishop of
California, a decision which, considered with reference to the
situation of the mission properties at the time of the United States'
possession, was perhaps as near to being equitable as the
circumstances would admit. But, considered with reference to the
status of the mission establishments under the Spanish rule, to their
original extent, the scope of the work, and the magnificent success of
their experiment up to the time of the revolutions, it seems a sadly
inadequate return of property once rightfully held. Still, it was not
the province of the United States to repair the injustices or make
good the thefts of Spain and Mexico; and any attempt to clear up the
tangle of confiscations, debts, frauds, and robberies in California,
for the last quarter of a century before the surrender, would have
been bootless work.
The Land Commissioner's decision was based on the old Spanish law
which divided church property into two classes, sacred and
ecclesiastical, and held it to be inalienable, except in case of
necessity, and then only according to provisions of canon law; in the
legal term, it was said to be "out of commerce." The sacred property
was that which had been in a formal manner consecrated to God,--church
buildings, sacred vessels, vestments, etc. Ecclesiastical property was
land held by the Church, and appropriated to the maintenance of divine
worship, or the support of the ministry; buildings occupied by the
priests, or necessary for their convenience; gardens, etc. Following a
similar division, the property of the mission establishments was held
by the Land Commission to be of two sorts,--mission property and
church property: the mission property, embracing the great tracts of
land formerly cultivated for the community's purpose, it was decided,
must be considered as government property; the church property,
including, with the church buildings, houses of priests, etc., such
smaller portions of land as were devoted to the immediate needs of the
ministry, it was decided must still rightfully go to the Church. How
many acres of the old gardens, orchards, vineyards, of the missions
could properly be claimed by the Church under this head, was of course
a question; and it seems to have been decided on very different bases
in different missions, as some received much more than others. But all
the church buildings, priests' houses, and some acres of land, more or
less, with each, were pronounced by this decision to have been "before
the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo solemnly dedicated to the use of the
Church, and therefore withdrawn from commerce;" "such an interest is
protected by the provisions of the treaty, and must be held inviolate
under our laws." Thus were returned at last, into the inalienable
possession of the Catholic Church, all that were left of the old
mission churches, and some fragments of the mission lands. Many of
them are still in operation as curacies; others are in ruins; of some
not a trace is left,--not even a stone.
At San Diego the walls of the old church are still standing, unroofed,
and crumbling daily. It was used as a cavalry barracks during the war
of 1846, and has been a sheepfold since. Opposite it is an olive
orchard, of superb hoary trees still in bearing; a cactus wall twenty
feet high, and a cluster of date palms, are all that remain of the
friars' garden.
At San Juan Capistrano, the next mission to the north, some parts of
the buildings are still habitable. Service is held regularly in one of
the small chapels. The priest lives there, and ekes out his little
income by renting some of the mouldering rooms. The church is a
splendid ruin. It was of stone, a hundred and fifty feet long by a
hundred in width, with walls five feet thick, a dome eighty feet high,
and a fine belfry of arches in which four bells rang. It was thrown
down by an earthquake in 1812, on the day of the Feast of the
Immaculate Conception. Morning mass was going on, and the church was
thronged; thirty persons were killed, and many more injured.
The little hamlet of San Juan Capistrano lies in harbor, as it were,
looking out on its glimpse of sea, between two low spurs of broken and
rolling hills, which in June are covered with shining yellow and blue
and green, iridescent as a peacock's neck. It is worth going across
the continent to come into the village at sunset of a June day. The
peace, silence, and beauty of the spot are brooded over and dominated
by the grand gray ruin, lifting the whole scene into an ineffable
harmony. Wandering in room after room, court after court, through
corridors with red-tiled roofs and hundreds of broad Roman arches,
over fallen pillars, and through carved doorways, whose untrodden
thresholds have sunk out of sight in summer grasses, one asks himself
if he be indeed in America. On the interior walls are still to be seen
spaces of brilliant fresco-work, in Byzantine patterns of superb red,
pale green, gray and blue; and the corridors are paved with tiles,
large and square. It was our good fortune to have with us, in San Juan
Capistrano, a white-haired Mexican, who in his boyhood had spent a
year in the mission. He remembered as if it were yesterday its
bustling life of fifty years ago, when the arched corridor ran
unbroken around the great courtyard, three hundred feet square, and
was often filled with Indians, friars, officers, and gay Mexican
ladies looking on at a bull-fight in the centre. He remembered the
splendid library, filled from ceiling to floor with books, extending
one whole side of the square: in a corner, where had been the room in
which he used to see sixty Indian women weaving at looms, we stood
ankle-deep in furzy weeds and grass. He showed us the doorway, now
closed up, which led into the friars' parlor. To this door, every
Sunday, after mass, came the Indians, in long processions, to get
their weekly gifts. Each one received something,--a handkerchief,
dress, trinket, or money. While their gifts were being distributed, a
band of ten or twelve performers, all Indians, played lively airs on
brass and stringed instruments. In a little baptistery, dusky with
cobweb and mould, we found huddled a group of wooden statues of
saints, which once stood in niches in the church; on their heads were
faded and brittle wreaths, left from the last occasion on which they
had done duty. One had lost an eye; another a hand. The gilding and
covering of their robes were dimmed and defaced. But they had a
dignity which nothing could destroy. The contours were singularly
expressive and fine, and the rendering of the drapery was indeed
wonderful,--flowing robes and gathered and lifted mantles, all carved
in solid wood.
There are statues of this sort to be seen in several of the old
mission churches. They were all carved by the Indians, many of whom
showed great talent in that direction. There is also in the office of
the justice--or alcalde, as he is still called--of San Juan
Capistrano, a carved chair of noticeably bold and graceful design made
by Indian workmen. A few tatters of heavy crimson brocade hang on it
still, relics of the time when it formed part of a gorgeous
paraphernalia and service.
Even finer than the ruins of San Juan Capistrano are those of the
church at San Luis Rey. It has a perfectly proportioned dome over the
chancel, and beautiful groined arches on either hand and over the
altar. Four broad pilasters on each side of the church are frescoed in
a curious mixing of blues, light and dark, with reds and black, which
have faded and blended into a delicious tone. A Byzantine pulpit
hanging high on the wall, and three old wooden statues in niches, are
the only decorations left. Piles of dirt and rubbish fill the space in
front of the altar, and grass and weeds are growing in the corners;
great flocks of wild doves live in the roof, and have made the whole
place unclean and foul-aired. An old Mexican, eighty years old, a
former servant of the mission, has the ruin in charge, and keeps the
doors locked still, as if there were treasure to guard. The old man is
called "alcalde" by the village people, and seems pleased to be so
addressed. His face is like wrinkled parchment, and he walks bent into
a parenthesis, but his eyes are bright and young. As he totters along,
literally holding his rags together, discoursing warmly of the
splendors he recollects, he seems indeed a ghost from the old times.
The most desolate ruin of all is that of the La Purissima Mission. It
is in the Lompoc valley, two days' easy journey north of Santa
Barbara. Nothing is left there but one long, low adobe building, with
a few arches of the corridor; the doors stand open, the roof is
falling in: it has been so often used as a stable and sheepfold, that
even the grasses are killed around it. The painted pulpit hangs half
falling on the wall, its stairs are gone, and its sounding-board is
slanting awry. Inside the broken altar-rail is a pile of stones,
earth, and rubbish, thrown up by seekers after buried treasures; in
the farther corner another pile and hole, the home of a badger;
mud-swallows' nests are thick on the cornice, and cobwebbed rags of
the old canvas ceiling hang fluttering overhead. The only trace of the
ancient cultivation is a pear-orchard a few rods off, which must have
been a splendid sight in its day; it is at least two hundred yards
square, with a double row of trees all around, so placed as to leave
between them a walk fifty or sixty feet wide. Bits of broken aqueduct
here and there, and a large, round stone tank overgrown by grass,
showed where the life of the orchard used to flow in, it has been many
years slowly dying of thirst. Many of the trees are gone, and those
that remain stretch out gaunt and shrivelled boughs, which, though
still bearing fruit, look like arms tossing in vain reproach and
entreaty; a few pinched little blossoms seemed to heighten rather than
lessen their melancholy look.
At San Juan Bautista there lingers more of the atmosphere of the olden
time than is to be found in any other place in California. The mission
church is well preserved; its grounds are enclosed and cared for; in
its garden are still blooming roses and vines, in the shelter of
palms, and with the old stone sun-dial to tell time. In the sacristy
are oak chests, full of gorgeous vestments of brocades, with silver
and gold laces. On one of these robes is an interesting relic. A lost
or worn-out silken tassel had been replaced by the patient Indian
workers with one of fine-shredded rawhide; the shreds wound with
silver wire, and twisted into tiny rosettes and loops, closely
imitating the silver device. The church fronts south, on a little
green locust walled plaza,--the sleepiest, sunniest, dreamiest place
in the world. To the east the land falls off abruptly, so that the
paling on that side of the plaza is outlined against the sky, and its
little locked gate looks as if it would open into the heavens. The
mission buildings used to surround this plaza; after the friars' day
came rich men living there; and a charming inn is kept now in one of
their old adobe houses. On the east side of the church is a succession
of three terraces leading down to a valley. On the upper one is the
old graveyard, in which it is said there are sleeping four thousand
Indians.
In 1825 there were spoken at this mission thirteen different Indian
dialects.
Just behind the church is an orphan girls' school, kept by the Sisters
of the Sacred Heart. At six o'clock every morning the bells of the
church ring for mass as they used to ring when over a thousand Indians
flocked at the summons. To-day, at the sound, there comes a procession
of little girls and young maidens, the black-robed sisters walking
before them with crossed hands and placid faces. One or two Mexican
women, with shawls over their heads, steal across the faint paths of
the plaza, and enter the church.
I shall always recollect the morning when I went, too. The silence of
the plaza was in itself a memorial service, with locust blossoms
swinging incense. It was barely dawn in the church. As the shrill yet
sweet childish voices lifted up the strains of the Kyrie Eleison, I
seemed to see the face of Father Junipero in the dim lighted chancel,
and the benediction was as solemn as if he himself had spoken it. Why
the little town of San Juan Bautista continues to exist is a marvel.
It is shut out and cut off from everything; only two or three hundred
souls are left in it; its streets are grass-grown; half its houses are
empty. But it has a charm of sun, valley, hill, and seaward off-look
unsurpassed in all California. Lingering out a peaceful century there
are many old men and women, whose memories are like magic glasses,
reproducing the pictures of the past. One such we found: a Mexican
woman eighty-five years old, portly, jolly, keen-tongued, keen-eyed;
the widow of one of the soldiers of the old mission guard. She had had
twelve children; she had never been ill a week in her life; she is now
the village nurse, and almost doctor. Sixty years back she remembered.
"The Indians used to be in San Juan Bautista like sheep," she said,
"by the thousand and thousand." They were always good, and the padres
were always kind. Fifty oxen were killed for food every eight days,
and everybody had all he wanted to eat. There was much more water then
than now, plenty of rain, and the streams always full. "I don't know
whether you or we were bad, that it has been taken away by God," she
said, with a quick glance, half humorous, half antagonistic.
The Santa Barbara Mission is still in the charge of Franciscans, the
only one remaining in their possession. It is now called a college for
apostolic missionary work, and there are living within its walls eight
members of the order. One of them is very old,--a friar of the ancient
_régime_; his benevolent face is well known throughout the country,
and there are in many a town and remote hamlet men and women who wait
always for his coming before they will make confession. He is like St.
Francis's first followers: the obligations of poverty and charity
still hold to him the literal fulness of the original bond. He gives
away garment after garment, leaving himself without protection against
cold; and the brothers are forced to lock up and hide from him all
provisions, or he would leave the house bare of food. He often kneels
from midnight to dawn on the stone floor of the church, praying and
chanting psalms; and when a terrible epidemic of small-pox broke out
some years ago, he labored day and night, nursing the worst victims of
it, shriving them, and burying them with his own hands. He is past
eighty, and has not much longer to stay. He has outlived many things
beside his own prime: the day of the sort of faith and work to which
his spirit is attuned has passed by forever.
The mission buildings stand on high ground, three miles from the
beach, west of the town and above it, looking to the sea. In the
morning the sun's first rays flash full on its front, and at evening
they linger late on its western wall. It is an inalienable benediction
to the place. The longer one stays there the more he is aware of the
influence on his soul, as well as of the importance in the landscape
of the benign and stately edifice.
On the corridor of the inner court hangs a bell which is rung for the
hours of the daily offices and secular duties. It is also struck
whenever a friar dies, to announce that all is over. It is the duty of
the brother who has watched the last breath of the dying one to go
immediately and strike this bell. Its sad note has echoed many times
through the corridors. One of the brothers said, last year,--
"The first time I rang that bell to announce a death, there were
fifteen of us left. Now there are only eight."
The sentence itself fell on my ear like the note of a passing-bell. It
seems a not unfitting last word to this slight and fragmentary sketch
of the labors of the Franciscan Order in California.
Still more fitting, however, are the words of a historian, who, living
in California and thoroughly knowing its history from first to last,
has borne the following eloquent testimony to the friars and their
work:--
"The results of the mission scheme of Christianization and
colonization were such as to justify the plans of the wise
statesman who devised it, and to gladden the hearts of the
pious men who devoted their lives to its execution.
"At the end of sixty years the missionaries of Upper California
found themselves in the possession of twenty-one prosperous
missions, planted on a line of about seven hundred miles,
running from San Diego north to the latitude of Sonoma. More
than thirty thousand Indian converts were lodged in the mission
buildings, receiving religious culture, assisting at divine
worship, and cheerfully performing their easy tasks.... If we
ask where are now the thirty thousand Christianized Indians who
once enjoyed the beneficence and created the wealth of the
twenty-one Catholic missions of California, and then
contemplate the most wretched of all want of systems which has
surrounded them under our own government, we shall not withhold
our admiration from those good and devoted men who, with such
wisdom, sagacity, and self-sacrifice, reared these wonderful
institutions in the wilderness of California. They at least
would have preserved these Indian races if they had been left
to pursue unmolested their work of pious beneficence."[7]
NOTE.--The author desires to express her acknowledgments to H.
H. Bancroft, of San Francisco, who kindly put at her disposal
all the resources of his invaluable library; also to the
Superior of the Franciscan College in Santa Barbara, for the
loan of important books and manuscripts and the photograph of
Father Junipero.
THE PRESENT CONDITION OF THE MISSION INDIANS IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA.
The old laws of the kingdom of the Indies are interesting reading,
especially those portions of them relating to Indians. A certain fine
and chivalrous quality of honor toward the helpless and tenderness
toward the dependent runs all through their quaint and cumbrous
paragraphs.
It is not until one studies these laws in connection with the history
of the confusions and revolutions of the secularization period, and of
the American conquest of California, that it becomes possible to
understand how the California Mission Indians could have been left so
absolutely unprotected, as they were, in the matter of ownership of
the lands they had cultivated for sixty years.
"We command," said the Spanish king, "that the sale, grant, and
composition of lands be executed with such attention that the Indians
be left in possession of the full amount of lands belonging to them,
either singly or in communities, together with their rivers and
waters; and the lands which they shall have drained or otherwise
improved, whereby they may by their own industry have rendered them
fertile, are reserved, in the first place, and can in no case be sold
or aliened. And the judges who have been sent thither shall specify
what Indians they may have found on the land, and what lands they
shall have left in possession of each of the elders of tribes,
caciques, governors, or communities."
Grazing estates for cattle are ordered to be located "apart from the
fields and villages of the Indians." The king's command is that no
such estates shall be granted "in any parts or place where any damage
can accrue to the Indians." Every grant of land must be made "without
prejudice to the Indians;" and "such as may have been granted to their
prejudice and injury" must be "restored to whomever they by right
shall belong."