Pauma. The Rincon is at the head of the valley, snugged up against the
mountains, as its name signifies, in a "corner." Here were fences,
irrigating ditches, fields of barley, wheat, hay, and peas; a little
herd of horses and cows grazing, and several flocks of sheep. The men
were all away sheep-shearing; the women were at work in the fields,
some hoeing, some clearing out the irrigating ditches, and all the old
women plaiting baskets. These Rincon Indians, we were told, had
refused a school offered them by the Government; they said they would
accept nothing at the hands of the Government until it gave them a
title to their lands.
The most picturesque of all the Mission Indians' hiding-places which
we saw was that on the Carmel River, a few miles from the San Carlos
Mission. Except by help of a guide it cannot be found. A faint trail
turning off from the road in the river-bottom leads down to the
river's edge. You follow it into the river and across, supposing it a
ford. On the opposite bank there is no trail, no sign of one. Whether
it is that the Indians purposely always go ashore at different points
of the bank, so as to leave no trail; or whether they so seldom go
out, except on foot, that the trail has faded away, I do not know. But
certainly, if we had had no guide, we should have turned back, sure we
were wrong. A few rods up from the river-bank, a stealthy narrow
footpath appeared; through willow copses, sunk in meadow grasses,
across shingly bits of alder-walled beach it creeps, till it comes out
in a lovely spot,--half basin, half rocky knoll,--where, tucked away
in nooks and hollows, are the little Indian houses, eight or ten of
them, some of adobe, some of the tule-reeds: small patches of corn,
barley, potatoes, and hay; and each little front yard fenced in by
palings, with roses, sweet-peas, poppies, and mignonette growing
inside. In the first house we reached, a woman was living alone. She
was so alarmed at the sight of us that she shook. There could not be a
more pitiful comment on the state of perpetual distrust and alarm in
which the poor creatures live, than this woman's face and behavior. We
tried in vain to reassure her; we bought all the lace she had to sell,
chatted with her about it, and asked her to show us how it was made.
Even then she was so terrified that although she willingly took down
her lace-frame to sew a few stitches for us to see, her hands still
trembled. In another house we found an old woman evidently past
eighty, without glasses working button-holes in fine thread. Her
daughter-in-law--a beautiful half-breed, with a still more beautiful
baby in her arms--asked the old woman, for us, how old she was. She
laughed merrily at the silly question. "She never thought about it,"
she said; "it was written down once in a book at the Mission, but the
book was lost."
There was not a man in the village. They were all away at work,
farming or fishing. This little handful of people are living on land
to which they have no shadow of title, and from which they may be
driven any day,--these Carmel Mission lands having been rented out, by
their present owner, in great dairy farms. The parish priest of
Monterey told me much of the pitiable condition of these remnants of
the San Carlos Indians. He can do little or nothing for them, though
their condition makes his heart ache daily. In that half-foreign
English which is always so much more eloquent a language than the
English-speaking peoples use, he said: "They have their homes there
only by the patience of the thief; it may be that the patience do not
last to-morrow." The phrase is worth preserving: it embodies so much
history,--history of two races.
In Mr. Wilson's report are many eloquent and strong paragraphs,
bearing on the question of the Indians' right to the lands they had
under cultivation at the time of the secularization. He says:--
"It is not natural rights I speak of, nor merely possessory
rights, but rights acquired and contracts made,--acquired and
made when the laws of the Indies had force here, and never
assailed by any laws or executive acts since, till 1834 and
1846; and impregnable to these.... No past maladministration of
laws can be suffered to destroy their true intent, while the
victims of the maladministration live to complain, and the
rewards of wrong have not been consumed."
Of Mr. Wilson's report in 1852, of Mr. Ames's report in 1873, and of
the various other reports called for by the Government from time to
time, nothing came, except the occasional setting off of reservations
by executive orders, which, if the lands reserved were worth anything,
were speedily revoked at the bidding of California politicians. There
are still some reservations left, chiefly of desert and mountainous
lands, which nobody wants, and on which the Indians could not live.
The last report made to the Indian Bureau by their present agent
closes in the following words:--
"The necessity of providing suitable lands for them in the form
of one or more reservations has been pressed on the attention
of the Department in my former reports; and I now, for the
third and perhaps the last time, emphasize that necessity by
saying that whether Government will immediately heed the pleas
that have been made in behalf of these people or not, it must
sooner or later deal with this question in a practical way, or
else see a population of over three thousand Indians become
homeless wanderers in a desert region."
I have shown a few glimpses of the homes, of the industry, the
patience, the long-suffering of the people who are in this immediate
danger of being driven out from their last footholds of refuge,
"homeless wanderers in a desert."
If the United States Government does not take steps to avert this
danger, to give them lands and protect them in their rights, the
chapter of the history of the Mission Indians will be the blackest one
in the black record of our dealings with the Indian race.
It must be done speedily if at all, for there is only a small remnant
left to be saved. These are in their present homes "only on the
patience of the thief; and it may be that the patience do not last
to-morrow."
ECHOES IN THE CITY OF THE ANGELS.
The tale of the founding of the city of Los Angeles is a tale for
verse rather than for prose. It reads like a page out of some new
"Earthly Paradise," and would fit well into song such as William
Morris has sung.
It is only a hundred years old, however, and that is not time enough
for such song to simmer. It will come later, with the perfume of
century-long summers added to its flavor. Summers century-long? One
might say a stronger thing than that of them, seeing that their
blossoming never stops, year in nor year out, and will endure as long
as the visible frame of the earth.
The twelve devout Spanish soldiers who founded the city named it at
their leisure with a long name, musical as a chime of bells. It
answered well enough, no doubt, for the first fifty years of the
city's life, during which not a municipal record of any sort or kind
was written,--"Nuestra Señora Reina de los Angeles," "Our Lady the
Queen of the Angels;" and her portrait made a goodly companion flag,
unfurled always by the side of the flag of Spain.
There is a legend, that sounds older than it is, of the ceremonies
with which the soldiers took possession of their new home. They were
no longer young. They had fought for Spain in many parts of the Old
World, and followed her uncertain fortunes to the New. Ten years some
of them had been faithfully serving Church and King in sight of these
fair lands, for which they hankered, and with reason.
In those days the soft, rolling, treeless hills and valleys, between
which the Los Angeles River now takes its shilly-shallying course
seaward, were forest slopes and meadows, with lakes great and small.
This abundance of trees, with shining waters playing among them, added
to the limitless bloom of the plains and the splendor of the
snow-topped mountains, must have made the whole region indeed a
paradise.
Navarro, Villavicencia, Rodriguez, Quintero, Moreno, Lara, Banegas,
Rosas, and Canero, these were their names: happy soldiers all, honored
of their king, and discharged with so royal a gift of lands thus fair.
Looking out across the Los Angeles hills and meadows to-day, one
easily lives over again the joy they must have felt. Twenty-three
young children there were in the band, poor little waifs of camp and
march. What a "braw flitting" was it for them, away from the drum-beat
forever into the shelter of their own sunny home! The legend says not
a word of the mothers, except that there were eleven of them, and in
the procession they walked with their children behind the men.
Doubtless they rejoiced the most.
The Fathers from the San Gabriel Mission were there, with many Indian
neophytes, and Don Felipe, the military governor, with his showy guard
of soldiers.
The priests and neophytes chanted. The Cross was set up, the flag of
Spain and the banner of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels unfurled, and
the new town marked out around a square, a little to the north of the
present plaza of Los Angeles.
If communities, as well as individuals, are happy when history finds
nothing to record of them, the city of the Queen of the Angels must
have been a happy spot during the first fifty years of its life; for
not a written record of the period remains, not even a record of
grants of land. The kind of grant that these worthy Spanish soldiers
and their sons contented themselves with, however, hardly deserved
recording,--in fact, was not a grant at all, since its continuance
depended entirely on the care a man took of his house and the
improvement he put on his land. If he left his house unoccupied, or
let it fall out of repair, if he left a field uncultivated for two
years, any neighbor who saw fit might denounce him, and by so doing
acquire a right to the property. This sounds incredible, but all the
historical accounts of the time agree on the point. They say,--
"The granting authorities could, and were by law required, upon
a proper showing of the abandonment, to grant the property to
the informant, who then acquired the same and no better rights
than those possessed by his predecessor."
This was a premium indeed on staying at home and minding one's
business,--a premium which amounted to coercion. One would think that
there must have been left from those days teeming records of alienated
estates, shifted tenures, and angry feuds between neighbor and
neighbor. But no evidence remains of such strifes. Life was too
simple, and the people were too ignorant.
Their houses were little more than hovels, built of mud, eight feet
high, with flat roofs made of reeds and asphaltum. Their fields, with
slight cultivation, produced all they needed; and if anything lacked,
the rich vineyards, wheat-fields, and orchards of the San Gabriel
Mission lay only twelve miles away. These vineyards, orchards, and
granaries, so near at hand, must have been sore temptation to
idleness. Each head of a family had been presented, by the paternal
Spanish king, with "two oxen, two mules, two mares, two sheep, two
goats, two cows, one calf, an ass, and one hoe." For these they were
to pay in such small instalments as they were able to spare out of
their pay and rations, which were still continued by the generous
king.
In a climate in which flowers blossom winter and summer alike, man may
bask in sun all the year round if he chooses. Why, then, should those
happy Spanish soldiers work? Even the king had thought it unnecessary,
it seems, to give them any implements of labor except "one hoe." What
could a family do, in the way of work, with "one hoe"? Evidently, they
did not work, neither they, nor their sons, nor their sons' sons after
them; for, half a century later, they were still living a life of
almost incredible ignorance, redeemed only by its simplicity and
childlike adherence to the old religious observances.
Many of those were beautiful. As late as 1830 it was the custom
throughout the town, in all the families of the early settlers, for
the oldest member of the family--oftenest it was a grandfather or
grandmother--to rise every morning at the rising of the morning star,
and at once to strike up a hymn. At the first note every person in the
house would rise, or sit up in bed and join in the song. From house to
house, street to street, the singing spread; and the volume of musical
sound swelled, until it was as if the whole town sang.
The hymns were usually invocations to the Virgin, to Jesus, or to some
saint. The opening line of many of them was,--
"Rejoice, O Mother of God."
A manuscript copy of one of these old morning songs I have seen, and
had the good fortune to win a literal translation of part of it, in
the soft, Spanish-voiced, broken English, so pleasant to hear. The
first stanza is the chorus, and was repeated after each of the
others:--
"Come, O sinners,
Come, and we will sing
Tender hymns
To our refuge.
"Singers at dawn,
From the heavens above,
People all regions;
Gladly we too sing.
"Singing harmoniously,
Saying to Mary,
'O beautiful Queen,
Princess of Heaven!
"'Your beautiful head
Crowned we see;
The stars are adorning
Your beautiful hair;
"'Your eyebrows are arched,
Your forehead serene;
Your face turned always
Looks toward God;
"'Your eyes' radiance
Is like beautiful stars;
Like a white dove,
You are true to your spouse.'"
Each of these stanzas was sung first alone by the aged leader of the
family choir. Then the rest repeated it; then all joined in the
chorus.
It is said that there are still to be found, in lonely country regions
in California, Mexican homes in which these sweet and holy "songs
before sunrise" are sung.
Looking forward to death, the greatest anxiety of these simple souls
was to provide themselves with a priest's cast-off robe to be buried
in. These were begged or bought as the greatest of treasures; kept in
sight, or always at hand, to remind them of approaching death. When
their last hour drew near, this robe was flung over their breasts, and
they died happy, their stiffening fingers grasping its folds. The dead
body was wrapped in it, and laid on the mud floor of the house, a
stone being placed under the head to raise it a few inches. Thus the
body must lie till the time of burial. Around it, day and night,
squatted, praying and singing, friends who wished not only to show
their affection for the deceased, but to win indulgences for
themselves; every prayer said thus, by the side of a corpse, having a
special and specified value.
A strange demarkation between the sexes was enforced in these
ceremonies. If it were a woman who lay dead, only women might kneel
and pray and watch with her body; if a man, the circle of watchers
must be exclusively of men.
A rough box, of boards nailed together, was the coffin. The body,
rolled in the old robe whose virtues had so comforted its last
conscious moments, was carried to the grave on a board, in the centre
of a procession of friends chanting and singing. Not until the last
moment was it laid in the box.
The first attempts to introduce more civilized forms of burial met
with opposition, and it was only by slow degrees that changes were
wrought. A Frenchman, who had come from France to Los Angeles, by way
of the Sandwich Islands, bringing a store of sacred ornaments and
trinkets, and had grown rich by sale of them to the devout, owned a
spring wagon, the only one in the country. By dint of entreaty, the
people were finally prevailed upon to allow their dead to be carried
in this wagon to the burial-place. For a long time, however, they
refused to have horses put to the wagon, but drew it by hand all the
way; women drawing women, and men drawing men, with the same
scrupulous partition of the sexes as in the earlier ceremonies. The
picture must have been a strange one, and not without pathos,--the
wagon, wound and draped with black and white, drawn up and down the
steep hills by the band of silent mourners.
The next innovation was the introduction of stately catafalques for
the dead to repose on, either in house or church, during the interval
between their death and burial. There had been brought into the town a
few old-fashioned, high-post, canopied bedsteads, and from these the
first catafalques were made. Gilded, decorated with gold and silver
lace, and hung with white and black draperies, they made a by no means
insignificant show, which doubtless went far to reconcile people's
minds to the new methods.
In 1838 there was a memorable funeral of a woman over a hundred years
old. Fourteen old women watched with her body, which lay stretched on
the floor, in the ancient fashion, with only a stone beneath the head.
The youngest of these watchers was eighty-five. One of them, Tomasa
Camera by name, was herself over a hundred years old. Tomasa was
infirm of foot; so they propped her with pillows in a little cart, and
drew her to the house that she might not miss of the occasion. All
night long, the fourteen squatted or sat on rawhides spread on the
floor, and sang and prayed and smoked: as fine a wake as was ever
seen. They smoked cigarettes, which they rolled on the spot, out of
corn-husks slit fine for the purpose, there being at that day in Los
Angeles no paper fit for cigarettes.
Outside this body-guard of aged women knelt a circle of friends and
relatives, also chanting, praying, and smoking. In this outer circle
any one might come and go at pleasure; but into the inner ring of the
watching none must come, and none must go out of it till the night was
spent.
With the beginning of the prosperity of the City of the Angels, came
the end of its primeval peace. Spanish viceroys, Mexican alcaldes and
governors, United States commanders, naval and military, followed on
each other's heels, with or without frays, ruling California through a
succession of tumultuous years. Greedy traders from all parts of the
world added their rivalries and interventions to the civil and
military disputation. In the general anarchy and confusion, the
peaceful and peace-loving Catholic Fathers were robbed of their lands,
their converts were scattered, their industries broken up. Nowhere
were these uncomfortable years more uncomfortable than in Los Angeles.
Revolts, occupations, surrenders, retakings, and resurrenders kept the
little town in perpetual ferment. Disorders were the order of the day
and of the night, in small matters as well as in great.
The Californian fought as impetuously for his old way of dancing as
for his political allegiance. There are comical traditions of the
men's determination never to wear long trousers to dances; nor to
permit dances to be held in houses or halls, it having been the
practice always to give them in outdoor booths or bowers, with
lattice-work walls of sycamore poles lashed together by thongs of
rawhide.
Outside these booths the men sat on their horses looking in at the
dancing, which was chiefly done by the women. An old man standing in
the centre of the enclosure directed the dances. Stopping in front of
the girl whom he wished to have join the set, he clapped his hands.
She then rose and took her place on the floor; if she could not dance,
or wished to decline, she made a low bow and resumed her seat.
To look in on all this was great sport. Sometimes, unable to resist
the spell, a man would fling himself off his horse, dash into the
enclosure, seize a girl by the waist, whirl around with her through
one dance, then out again and into the saddle, where he sat, proudly
aware of his vantage. The decorations of masculine attire at this time
were such as to make riding a fine show. Around the crown of the
broad-brimmed sombrero was twisted a coil of gold or silver cord; over
the shoulders was flung, with ostentatious carelessness, a short cloak
of velvet or brocade; the waistcoats were embroidered in gold, silver,
or gay colors; so also were the knee-breeches, leggings, and
stockings. Long silken garters, with ornamented tassels at the ends,
were wound round and round to hold the stockings in place. Even the
cumbrous wooden stirrups were carved in elaborate designs. No wonder
that men accustomed to such braveries as these saw ignominy in the
plain American trousers.
They seem to have been a variety of Centaur, these early Californian
men. They were seldom off their horses except to eat and sleep. They
mounted, with jingling silver spur and glittering bridle, for the
shortest distances, even to cross a plaza. They paid long visits on
horseback, without dismounting. Clattering up to the window or
door-sill, halting, throwing one knee over the crupper, the reins
lying loose, they sat at ease, far more at ease than in a house. Only
at church, where the separation was inevitable, would they be parted
from their horses. They turned the near neighborhood of a church on
Sunday into a sort of picket-ground, or horse-trainers' yard, full of
horse-posts and horses; and the scene was far more like a horse-fair
than like an occasion of holy observance. There seems to have been a
curious mixture of reverence and irreverence in their natures. They
confessed sins and underwent penances with the simplicity of children;
but when, in 1821, the Church issued an edict against that
"escandalosisima" dance, the waltz, declaring that whoever dared to
dance it should be excommunicated, the merry sinners waltzed on only
the harder and faster, and laughed in their priests' faces. And when
the advocates of decorum, good order, and indoor dancing gave their
first ball in a public hall in Los Angeles, the same merry outdoor
party broke every window and door in the building, and put a stop to
the festivity. They persisted in taking this same summary vengeance on
occasion after occasion, until, finally, any person wishing to give a
ball in his own house was forced to surround the house by a cordon of
police to protect it.
The City of the Angels is a prosperous city now. It has business
thoroughfares, blocks of fine stone buildings, hotels, shops, banks,
and is growing daily. Its outlying regions are a great circuit of
gardens, orchards, vineyards, and corn-fields, and its suburbs are
fast filling up with houses of a showy though cheap architecture. But
it has not yet shaken off its past. A certain indefinable, delicious
aroma from the old, ignorant, picturesque times lingers still, not
only in byways and corners, but in the very centres of its newest
activities.
Mexican women, their heads wrapped in black shawls, and their bright
eyes peering out between the close-gathered folds, glide about
everywhere; the soft Spanish speech is continually heard; long-robed
priests hurry to and fro; and at each dawn ancient, jangling bells
from the Church of the Lady of the Angels ring out the night and in
the day. Venders of strange commodities drive in stranger vehicles up
and down the streets: antiquated carts piled high with oranges, their
golden opulence contrasting weirdly with the shabbiness of their
surroundings and the evident poverty of their owner; close following
on the gold of one of these, one has sometimes the luck to see another
cart, still more antiquated and rickety, piled high with something--he
cannot imagine what--terra-cotta red in grotesque shapes; it is
fuel,--the same sort which Villavicencia, Quintero, and the rest
probably burned, when they burned any, a hundred years ago. It is the
roots and root-shoots of manzanita and other shrubs. The colors are
superb,--terra-cotta reds, shading up to flesh pink, and down to dark
mahogany; but the forms are grotesque beyond comparison: twists,
querls, contortions, a boxful of them is an uncomfortable presence in
one's room, and putting them on the fire is like cremating the
vertebræ and double teeth of colossal monsters of the Pterodactyl
period.
The present plaza of the city is near the original plaza marked out at
the time of the first settlement; the low adobe house of one of the
early governors stands yet on its east side, and is still a habitable
building.