USA > California > San Francisco County > San Francisco > A history of the city of San Francisco; and incidentally of the state of California > Part 4
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SEC. 19. Indian Work. At sunrise all the peo- ple near the Mission were summoned to mass by the bell, and attendance was compulsory. After mass came breakfast, and then all the men and the unmar- ried women were required to work till eleven o'clock. A rest of three hours was allowed at noon, after which they worked till the afternoon mass, an hour before sunset. The chief occupations of the men were plowing, sowing, harrowing, harvesting, threshing and hauling grain, herding the cattle, breaking horses, cutting and bringing wood for fuel, building houses,
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HISTORY OF SAN FRANCISCO.
baking tiles and weaving. There were a few carpen- ters, blacksmiths, tanners and shoemakers at every Mission, but they knew little of their trades, and had a scanty supply of bad tools.
The processes of agricultural labor were extremely rude. The plow was shod with a piece of iron a little larger than a man's hand, and it scratched the ground but did not turn a furrow nor even cut one. It was drawn by one yoke of oxen and the yoke was tied to their horns with strips of rawhide. One plow made a little scratch, another followed in the same track, and then another, and six plows were required to do as much work, though not so well, as one Ameri- can would with an American plow. Horses were not used for draft purposes; and there was not a light wagon in the country. The only vehicle was the carreta, or cart, with wheels of solid wood six inches wide at the tire and eight or ten inches at the hub. The carreta was twice as heavy as its load, and it sometimes moved faster than a mile an hour. The harrow was a branch of a tree; and grain was cut with a sickle or pulled up by the roots, and threshed by treading it out with horses, and separated from the chaff by throwing it up into the air on a windy day.
SEC. 20. No Education. The submission of the Indians to the friars; their acceptance of baptism; their repetition of the names of the mysteries, divine persons and saints, their regular attendance at worship; their observance of the disciplinary rules, even if under compulsion; their freedom from all heretical ideas and
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THE MISSION ERA.
their veneration for the sacred images and other emblems of the Catholic faith, were considered all that was necessary to fit them for full membership in the church.
The friars did not restrict themselves to persuasion in getting converts after they had brought all the tribes in the near vicinity of the Mission under their power; they sent out soldiers with tame Indians to bring in others. Such an expedition was despatched from San Francisco nearly every winter in the early part of this century, to the foot-hills of the Sierra Nevada, and sometimes returned with a hundred or more captives, who had been surprised in their ranch- erias. To go out for a purpose was styled ir a la conquista, " to go out conquering;" or hacer reducciones, "to make reductions" for the cause of Jesus. The attempts to catch subjects for conversion in the sum- mer were usually failures, and were not always suc- cessful in the winter. While Beechey was in San Francisco bay with his exploring vessel in 1826, a party from the Mission of Santa Clara were beaten off in an attack on a rancheria in the Sierra Nevada with a loss of thirty-four men, and a new expedition sent out to the same place lost forty-one men, but captured forty-four Indians, mostly women and chil- dren. Sometimes the wild Indians came to the Mis- sions voluntarily, under persuasion of their relatives; and often the harboring of fugitives, or the stealing of cattle from the Mission was the cause of attack on wild tribes, whose proximity and hostility to the Mis- sions were frequently the cause of trouble.
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HISTORY OF SAN FRANCISCO.
SEC. 21. Number of Indians. The increase in the number of Indians under the control of the Mission was due to the introduction of new stock from with- out, and not to the increase from within by the nat- ural surplus of births over deaths. The Indians of California did not thrive anywhere under the care of the friars; and perhaps there was no Mission where they throve less than at San Francisco. The women gave birth to few children, and reared four boys for three girls. They must have discriminated in the treatment of the two sexes. Nothing but deliberate intention entertained by many mothers could account for the small proportion of girls. Such a purpose to check the increase of women has often been observed among savages; and unless we suppose its existence at the Mission, we cannot account for the excess of males.
Very soon after the white men established them- selves in the country, the Indians began to diminish. Various destructive diseases, unknown before, made their appearance. The small pox raged with fearful violence; the measles carried off many adults as well as children, and an infection caught from the soldiers spread like a slow but sure poison. There was no physician in the territory, nor any intelligent medical attendance for any of the new diseases. Vaccination was practiced on a few of the whites, but was not applied to the red men, nor was the more convenient and yet effective inoculation tried. The food was sometimes scanty and not always wholesome; and in-
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THE MISSION ERA.
jurious effects were attributed to the practice of locking up the unmarried adults at night in close, filthy chambers.
SEC. 22. Great Mortality. Whatever may have been the causes of the mortality among the Indians of the Mission of San Francisco, there is no room for doubt about the results. The deaths, instead of being four for each hundred persons, as they are in sickly seasons among highly civilized people, numbered from ten to twenty annually, and sometimes even more. The females, instead of being as numerous as the males, were usually fewer by one fourth or a larger proportion, The women should have reared three children each on an average to prevent a decrease of the population, but they did not rear two. About half the children baptized were born of Gentile par- ents, or of parents recently brought to the Mission.
It is a mistake to suppose that the Missions were prosperous institutions until their secularization. They were not even self-supporting. They were for a long time a burden on the government. The friars com- plained of serious inconvenience when their salaries of four hundred.dollars each (spent usually not for their personal advantage, but for the purchase of articles needed by the Missions) were cut off by the civil war in Mexico; and though there was a steady increase in the number of Indians under control of the friars until about 1815, there was a rapid decrease of the total number of Indians within reach of the Missions, indicating the probability that the race would in a
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HISTORY OF SAN FRANCISCO.
few centuries disappear, as it has since disappeared in nearly all those districts of California once occupied by the Missions. There could, of course, be no true prosperity of the Indians with a steady and rapid de- crease of their number. Such a decline is undeniable. We might suspect that there was some physical weak- ness in the Indian blood, but no proof can be found to sustain such a supposition. The descendants of the Indian women who married Spaniards became a strong, large, healthy, and remarkably prolific race, with pleasant countenances and respectable capacities. Those Indians who never came to the Missions were healthy and strong, and, though not very prolific, did not commence to die off rapidly till after the Ameri- cans took possession of their country.
The result was the same at most of the other Mis- sions. Not an Indian remains at San Rafael, Sonoma, San José or Santa Clara; and those who survive about the Missions farther south do no credit as a class to the instruction given to their fathers. But, however defective may have been the system of the friars, we have the most conclusive evidence that the weakening and overthrow of the Spanish authority, the seculariza- tion of the Missions, and the American conquest, were more disastrous to the aborigines of California. They were happier when the Missions were at the summit of their power than ever afterward. From the time when they first heard of the rebellion for independence in Mexico until now, nearly every political change affecting their condition has been a change seriously
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THE MISSION ERA.
for the worse as to them. If the Missions did not succeed in establishing a high and permanent civiliza- tion among the red men of California, the blame must not be thrown upon the Franciscan friars. The Jesuit Missions in Lower California, after the labors of three quarters of a century, had not secured better results ; and the reservations maintained by the federal govern- ment in this state, for the last twenty years, have been miserable failures. The Franciscan experiment does not suffer by comparison with the influence of the Jesuits, or of the Mexican or American politicians upon the aborigines of the coast, and may even be said, unsatisfactory as it was, to have been a relative suc- cess.
It was perhaps well that the Indians were not capa- ble, under such instructions as they received, of rais- ing themselves to the level of Spanish civilization. It would have been a great misfortune for California to have been occupied in 1846 by a dense Indian popula- tion, knowing just enough to support and defend them- selves, ignorant, fanatical, idle, and hostile to foreigners and foreign ideas, manners, machinery and mode of working. There would have been little room for Americans, and the few, who would have come, would have found themselves powerless unless they submitted themselves to base prejudices, and thus sacrificed a large part of their superiority. The state might have struggled for centuries before its inhabitants reached the highest level of civilization, as they have now done in a single generation.
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HISTORY OF SAN FRANCISCO.
The number of the Indians was never ascertained, or officially estimated under Spanish or Mexican do- minion, but several early travelers speak in vague terms of multitudes in some of the larger valleys. As they had no agriculture, commerce, manufacturing industry, regular supply of wholesome food, or secure peace, and they were exposed to the occasional, if not the frequent, ravages of war, pestilence and famine, so the land could not maintain a dense population, and it probably never had more than one hundred thousand or one hundred and fifty thousand aboriginal inhabi- tants.
SEC. 23. Friars. It was the rule that there should be two friars at each Mission; the elder, as su- perior in authority, to conduct the worship on im- portant occasions, to instruct and govern the Indians, manage the finances and keep the records; the younger to supervise the manual labor. Every year the Supe- rior made a report of the number of the baptisms, mar- riages, births, deaths, neat cattle, horses, sheep, goats, swine, and bushels of grain harvested, to the Pres- ident of the Missions, at Monterey; and he compiled a table of all the Missions under him for the Vice- roy of Mexico, who transmitted a copy to the King at Madrid. The feeling between the Indians and the friars was usually a very friendly one. The friar when he met an Indian said to him, " Love God, my son;" and the reply was, " Love God, father."
Eight or ten soldiers were stationed at each Mis- sion. One was always on guard in front of the main
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THE MISSION ERA.
entrance; another was usually out as herdsman with the horses and cattle; and when a friar was called away from a Mission for any transient purpose, or sent a letter, a soldier served as companion or mes- senger.
The red men were spoken of as wards, who owned the property of the Mission, and the friars were the guardians, who had absolute control of the persons and property of their wards. Humble and poor as the Franciscan order claimed to be, the Franciscans in California held and enjoyed nearly all the power and wealth of the country, such as they were. Their au- thority over the Indians was despotic, but it was not used harshly. Every Indian was required to work, but the labor was not arduous nor long continued. Though the friars kept the best of everything for themselves, the best was not very good. They dressed meanly, had a simple table, and plain apartments.
Of the friars who had charge of the Mission of San Francisco, we know little beyond the names, with the exception of Francisco Palou, who reached higher office than any of his associates, ending his career as principal of the order in Mexico. Although he had little education, and lived in the mental atmosphere of the thirteenth instead of that of the latter part of the seventeenth century, still he had good powers of observation and an active mind, and was probably the ablest of all the Franciscans who came to California. He was the only one who wrote for the press, and he has left the most enduring and accessible evidences
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HISTORY OF SAN FRANCISCO.
of his capacity. His biography of Junipero Serra enables us to see nearly as much of his own as of his hero's character, and entitles him to as much admira- tion. This book and his Notes on New California, have a permanent historical interest, for California at least.
The later friars wrote little, save the annual statistical reports, and nothing from which we can obtain dis- tinct ideas of their character or influence. They fur- nished no other material for the historian or antiqua- rian. Soon after the death of Serra, which occurred in 1787, Palou returned to Mexico, and Cambon, his younger associate, became the Superior friar at San Francisco, but was soon superseded by Danti; and he by Abella, who served for twenty years, commencing in 1797. Altimira was in charge when Mexico de- clared her independence, but not liking the new dominion, he left the country. Estenaga, who had been his junior associate, succeeded him, and was alone for twelve years, remaining until after the secu- larization.
SEC. 24. Mission Buildings. Materials for a his- tory of the Mission buildings are very scanty. The adobe church, erected in the last century, is pre- sumptively the same structure which still stands on Dolores street, near Sixteenth. Ten years is not an unreasonable period to assume as the interval between the foundation of the Mission and the final consecra- tion of its permanent house of worship. The work was nearly all done by the Indians, who had to be
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THE MISSION ERA.
previously converted, conciliated, and instructed in Spanish and in various useful arts unknown to them in their savage state. The making of a supply of adobes sufficient for such a building was a simple pro- cess, but it required a combination and persistence in labor beyond the experience of the red men of Cali- fornia. It was necessary, also, to get timbers for rafters, and even if we suppose that these were noth- ing but rude poles, to place them on the ground was a serious task. Even as late as 1820, not a good wagon or a good boat had been made, nor even pur- chased, for ordinary business purposes, by any Span- ish Californian at San Francisco ; and it is probable that many of the timbers used in building in the last century were transported from the forests on the shoulders of men.
Other matters required attention before the build- ing of the church. The erection of dwellings for the friars, soldiers and converts, the cultivation of the ground and the herding of the cattle, took precedence. All this went very slowly, because of the absolute ignorance of the Indians, of whom there were for years very few. The first converts were made in 1777, when three were baptized; and we have no report of the numbers from that time until seven years later, when there were two hundred and sixty red Chris- tians. The average increase was about thirty in a year, and not more than one in four was an adult male competent to do much work. If the Indians learned to speak Spanish, to break horses, to herd
5
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HISTORY OF SAN FRANCISCO.
cattle, to plow, sow, reap and thresh, to make and lay adobes, and to cut and hew timber, besides building their dwellings and their church, in ten years, they must have been driven harder than it was the custom of the friars to drive them in later times.
The church, when first built, was doubtless thatched with flags or tules, which could be obtained without trouble and supported on light poles; whereas the molding and burning of tiles were comparatively ab- struse arts, and the tiles when made required a strong framework to bear their weight.
We do not find any account that the Mission church at San Francisco was ever rebuilt or seriously injured. An earthquake in 1808 shattered the houses at the presidio, but the annual report of Friar Abella for that year mentions no damage at the Mission. In 1812, the church at San Juan Capistrano was thrown down, and the buildings at Purisima, Santa Inez, San Buenaventura and Santa Barbara injured; but San Francisco was spared. So it was again in 1818, when Santa Clara suffered so much by earthquake that a new church was erected there.
SEC. 25. Mission Income. There was an average increase of about thirty Indians annually at San Fran- cisco, from its foundation for nearly forty years till 1813, when the number was one thousand two hundred and five; and then there was a decrease at about the same rate till the secularization in 1835. The most remarkable break in the regularity of the figures oc- curred between 1822, when there were nine hundred
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THE MISSION ERA.
and fifty eight Indians, and 1823, when only two hun- dred were left. In 1808, eighty-four Indians fled and never were brought back; and in 1823 so many fled that not enough remained to take care of the Mission property. Part of the decrease in 1822 was caused by the transfer of Indians to the new Missions of San Rafael and Sonoma. The wealth of the Mission rose and fell with the number of its subjects. The follow- ing table shows how many Indians, neat cattle, horses and sheep, and bushels of grain in annual crop, it had in various years of its existence :
Years.
1783
1793
1804
1813
1822
1832.
Indians.
215
704
1103
1205
958
204
Cattle .
308
2700
8120
9270
4049
5000
Sheep
183
2300
10400
10120
8830
3500
Horses
31
314
730
622
806
1000
Grain
2474
6114
4124
691
Before 1815, the Mission produced little that had any salable value. The only vessels admitted into the ports of the country for purposes of trade belonged to Spain, and they were so slow and so badly managed that the freight left no margin for profit in exportation. It was not until after the independence of Mexico had been established that the exportation of hides and tallow became an extensive business. About 1840 a ranchero could sell one fourth of his neat cattle every year, getting five dollars from each animal slaughtered, two dollars for its hide and three dollars for its tallow. The management of the Missions was not so strict as that of individuals, and the hides and tallow which
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HISTORY OF SAN FRANCISCO.
the former could dispose of annually was as much as they could get by killing one seventh of their neat cattle. The Mission of San Francisco thus could ob- tain from three thousand five hundred dollars to five thousand dollars a year from its hides and tallow annually, after 1822, and it had no other merchantable article to spare. It needed all its grain for home con- sumption, and horses and sheep were ordinarily not salable. The pay for its exports was a small sum to purchase imports for several hundred persons, and it was besides usually given in merchandise not of the best quality, and at high prices.
SEC. 26. Decay of Missions. The rebellion that broke out in Mexico in 1810 soon made itself felt in California. From 1811 to 1818 the government failed to pay the four hundred dollars, promised annually to each friar, and the government vessels which had brought the imports and carried away the exports ceased tomake their trips regularly. The revolutionary and anti-ecclesiastical spirit of the time declared that the Missions ought to be secularized, and the friars and the people understood that this idea would be made the basis of a law at some future period. The civil and military officials, who had never agreed very well with the friars, became more antagonistic to them; and the latter, feeling less secure, were less con- tented and less zealous. The friars born in Spain were attached to the Spanish crown. They hated the rev- olution and the institutions which it had established. The new government, finding that the priests and
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THE MISSION ERA.
friars were not friendly to it, became hostile to them; and one measure of hostility was secularization, which had been demanded by the Spanish Cortes as early as 1813. It meant that the Indians should be taken from the control of the friars and converted into free and independent citizens, with full power to own property, select their place of residence, and direct their own conduct; that each head of a family should be entitled to the gift of as much land as he could cultivate; that the herds and tools and other personal property of each Mission should be divided among its Indians; and that the surplus land should be given to white colonists. While secularization was considered just and patriotic, it was also in favor with the poli- ticians as a measure that would reduce the political power and money resources of the clergy.
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HISTORY OF SAN FRANCISCO.
CHAPTER III.
THE VILLAGE ERA.
SECTION 27. Secularization. The Mexican Con- gress, assuming that the people were competent to maintain an orderly republican government, and be- lieving that the Mission Indians of California, most of whom had been born under the dominion and bred under the instruction of the friars, must be competent for the duties of civilized life and equal political priv- ileges, on August 17, 1833, passed a bill announcing that the government would proceed to secularize the Missions of Upper and Lower California, but making no provision for the time or manner of carrying the intention into effect.
The matter was thus left to the discretion of the executive department, and on August 9, 1834, Gov- ernor Figueroa, of California, acting under instructions from the President of the Republic, issued a decree that he would, in August, 1835, convert ten of the Missions into pueblos or towns. These ten were not then nor afterwards named. The friars at the Mis- sions were to be deprived of all control over the Mis- sion property, which should be placed in charge of an administrator, who should give to every adult male In- dian a tract of twenty-eight acres; and his fair share of one half of the domestic animals and tools of the Mis- sion; the other half to be held for the benefit of the government.
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THE VILLAGE ERA.
Subsequently, Gumecindo Flores was appointed administrator of the Mission of San Francisco; but between the time of the announcement that the secu- larization would be made and his appointment, many of the cattle had been driven off; the Indians, left without control, went away; and soon there was noth- ing to divide and nobody to receive the dividends. We have no precise account of the manner in which
Flores administered his trust. We know, however, that in the brief period of forty years since the secu- larization, all the Indian tribes of the San Francisco peninsula, so far at least as the pure blood is con- cerned, have disappeared from the face of the earth. Immediately upon the announcement that the friars were to be deprived of their power, cultivation was neglected; and the Indians, instead of proving their capacity to become independent and prosperous citi- zens, wasted what little property was given to them, and fell into idle or dissolute habits. Some became the servants of rancheros; others went to the mount- ains and ran wild; and a few remained about the Mis- sion in beggary, or on its verge. Such were the re- sults of emancipating the Indians of San Francisco from the subjection in which they had been bred.
When the friars were deprived of their authority by the order of secularization, twenty-one Missions were in existence, all near the coast, reaching from San Diego to Sonoma, five hundred miles in a direct line, but the average distance between neighboring Missions by the roads was forty miles, or a day's
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HISTORY OF SAN FRANCISCO.
ride. Their jurisdictions met, so that the whole coast from Sonoma southward, was considered to be occu- pied. The only towns were Los Angeles, Branciforte (near Santa Cruz), and San José, and the entire white population was estimated to number five thousand, of whom all, save perhaps two score, were of Spanish blood. The Mexicans relied on their herds for sup- port, lived with little effort or care, and generally knew nothing of schools, books, or newspapers.
SEC. 28. Land Grants. The private land titles of the peninsula of San Francisco date from 1835, pre- vious to which time the Mission held control for thirty miles southward from the Golden Gate, meeting the old domain of the Mission of Santa Clara at San Francisquito creek. Although great abuses were practiced in the overthrow, or, as it was officially called, the "secularization" of the Missions, the measure was demanded by sound statesmanship. Without it there was no hope for the progress of the country. It was required as a matter of justice to the Spanish-American settlers, whose fathers had been induced to come to California in 1773 with the promise that they should be raised to the position of independent colonists ; but after a lapse of sixty years they, or rather their children, were still the tenants at will of the Mission, with little chance of support save such as they could find at the ruined presidio. The government had forbidden them to own land, gave them no encouragement to build houses, provided no pasture for their cattle, discouraged the sale of their
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