USA > California > Los Angeles County > Los Angeles > Los Angeles from the mountains to the sea : with selected biography of actors and witnesses to the period of growth and achievement, Volume I > Part 5
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In order to ascertain how San Gabriel came to be, we must go back again to that great Franciscan enterprise of which Fray Junipero Serra was the soul, because this it was that set things going here at the start and that has left an influ- ence upon the country that time has been futile to obliterate. Nor is it probable that time will ever be able to obliterate Fray Junipero's spirit. And this is well, for happy is that land which has a definite ideal.
When Father Serra left Mexico to establish the white man's Christianity and civilization in California, his instruc- tions were to found and erect three mission establishments. The first was to be at San Diego, the second at Monterey, and the third at a place between to be called San Buena Ventura.
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It is to be supposed, of course, that after these three missions were established, others would be built. Anyway, it turned out that way. Serra and the expedition with which he came, and which was under the command and direction of the great Don Gaspar de Portola, California's first governor and im- mortal as the discoverer of San Francisco Bay, the greatest of all the world's harbors, reached San Diego, as before men- tioned, in July, 1769, and it was on the sixteenth day of that month in that year that the mission of San Diego was founded and the roof of the first white man's habitation on the western shores of America erected.
As soon as this had been done, Serra went to Monterey, and in the following year, 1770, he founded there the mission of San Carlos, which he made his headquarters and which remained as such during his lifetime. In the same year he founded at his own initiative the mission of San Antonio de Padua, seventy-five miles east of Monterey, where its ex- quisitely beautiful ruins are still to be seen by the traveler who has the wisdom to turn aside from the beaten tracks of traffic and travel.
The mission of San Bueno Ventura, which was to have been the third mission, had to wait a long time to come into existence. Fray Junipero was by this time aflame with en- thusiasm, and his restless energies blazed forth upon the entire length of California. He seemed to have had a desire to build missions as if by magic, and was impatient to bring the native Indians into the Christian fold and to teach their hands to know the glory and the joy of work. So he dis- patched orders to San Diego to the mission fathers and the soldiers of the garrisons there to set out without further delay to found the fourth mission in that mighty chain which ultimately stretched 700 miles along the golden vistas of the King's Highway between San Diego and Sonoma.
The founding of a Franciscan mission in California was a notable event in those old days that are passed away now forever, and each foundation was distinguished, as it happens, by extraordinary incidents which come down to us now golden with the glamour of romance. And it may be said that of all the twenty-one missions which the Franciscans founded in
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California between 1769 and 1823, the events which attended the founding of San Gabriel are perhaps the most dramatic of any.
The fathers at San Diego who were assigned to found this first mission were Padres Benitos Cambon and Angel Somera. Fired with the same zeal that inspired their great leader, Junipero, these two brown-robed priests were eager for the new conquest which they were about to achieve, but it ap- pears that they had a difficult time to get an expedition in shape. It was only after the most urgent pleadings that the military authorities consented to let them have ten soldiers as an escort. They were also able at last to get together the necessary supplies and pack animals and to bring with them a few of the Christianized Indians who had been brought up from Mexico.
It was upon August 6, 1771, that the expedition left San Diego, and after traveling forty-six leagues they came to the place that had been selected for the site of the new mission.
As we look backward now in imagination we can picture with what fascinated interest these wonderful pioneers must have made the journey from San Diego to the place which was to be known ever afterward as San Gabriel. They passed by the wonder of the sunset sea with its white shore of glory, through the live oak groves of the mountain passes, up and down the brown sunlit hills, across the shimmering waters of the Santa Margarita and other dimpled streams; camping at night under the canopy of the soft summer stars.
One night they camped on the banks of the Santa Ana, which Father Crespi, who had made the same journey with Portola two years before, had called the River of the Tem- blores, because of the earthquake shocks that they had expe- rienced there. The Indians they met on the way were friendly and hospitable and were profuse in their invitations for the travelers to remain with them. But the expedition pushed forward until it at length arrived at the sought-for spot on a beautiful hill above a river, now in these modern times a wil- derness of oil derricks.
It seemed that the conquest was to be a happy and a most peaceful one, but just as the padres and the other members
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of the expedition were congratulating themselves upon this belief, they were suddenly horrified to behold the approach of a great horde of savages armed with bows and arrows bear- ing down upon them with wild cries, bent upon no other pur- pose than to annihilate the strangers. Never was tragedy more imminent than at that moment. It was apparent that only the interception of the hand of Providence could save the missionaries and their companions. And it seems that Providence did intervene. At least, we may accept what hap- pened as supernatural or else decline to accept any other event attributed in history or tradition to the intervention of the Divine Power.
And what happened was this : When the missionary fathers saw that great, wild, savage mob of bloodthirsty creatures bearing down upon them, they unfurled to the winds a banner on which was painted an image of Mary, the mother of Christ. The effect was magical, if not miraculous. The savages in- stantly halted and, gazing in awe upon the holy image, they threw down their bows and arrows, fell upon their knees, and in deepest contrition made signs to the padres that they de- sired to submit themselves to them.
And so, after all, the mission of San Gabriel was founded in peace and safety. The date was September 8, 1771. This original mission, it is well to state, was not erected on the site of the present mission of San Gabriel familiar now to us all and famous the world over. The original site was about two miles distant and was abandoned five years after its foun- dation for the present location on account of the disastrous floods of the river.
We have a vivid picture of the original foundation of the mission of San Gabriel from the pen of Fray Francisco Palou, the great first-source of all reliable information concerning the beginning of things in California.
Palou was the intimate friend and the beloved companion of Fray Junipero Serra, and when the grand old founder of our civilization gave up the ghost and was laid in his quiet grave beside Juan Crespi in beautiful Carmel, Palou for a time served as Serra's successor in the office of father president of the missions. He then retired to the mother house of the
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Franciscan order in Mexico, the college of San Fernando, and there devoted the remaining years of his useful life to writ- ing not only the history of the Franciscan missionary enter- prise in California, but also writing a life and biography of Father Junipero. Both of these works, the first commonly known as the "Noticias" and the second as the "Vida," are not only invaluable as authentic records and chronicles, but are exquisite also as literary classics.
And this is the account of the founding of the first mission of Gabriel the Arcangel as written by Francisco Palou:
"The Fathers who were going to establish the mission of "
MISSION SAN GABRIEL
San Gabriel arrived at the Rio de Los Temblores, they ex- amined its banks, it did not suit them, they went onward to the valley of San Miguel and near the river of this name, not very far from its source, seemed to them more suitable for the mission, thus they determined to found it on a hill extending from said valley, at the foot of which ran good ditches of water with which they could irrigate the fine lands distant from the river about one half a league. The said ditches were wooded with cotton woods, willows and other trees and much bramble and innumberable wild vines. About a league from
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the said place there is a great wood of oaks with many ditches of running water.
"Appreciating all these points they commenced the foun- dation of the eighth day of September of the said year of 1771, day of the birth of our Lady, they were raising the holy cross, standard of our redemption, on a little bower which for the present served for a church that celebrated the first mass giving a beginning to this mission dedicated to the arcangel, San Gabriel."
The first few years of the existence of the new mission of San Gabriel were filled with trials and difficulties. The fathers met with discouragements sufficient to have dismayed men of any other caliber. And it was all because of the dis- reputable Catalonian soldiers who had been assigned to act as the military guardians of the place. These soldiers were unspeakably immoral, and the outrages they committed against the Indian women were so frequent and of such a foul nature as to have aroused the bitterest hatred in the hearts of the natives.
The most notorious incident was the case of a soldier tak- ing the wife of an Indian chief. When the chief resented the indignity, the soldiers killed him, cut his head off, and stuck it on a pole in front of the mission gates. It was only by the exercise of almost miraculous power that the mission- aries were able to keep the Indians in hand when this incident occurred. All through the history of the missions we find that the greatest obstacles which the fathers had to surmount was the immoral example of the Spanish soldiers.
And that the mission fathers succeeded despite all this is evidenced not alone by the fact that they finally brought the whole race of California Indians into the fold of the faith, but it is also well illustrated by many specific and eloquent in- stances. One of these instances concerns the great Fray Junipero himself.
It is related that one time he came up from San Juan Capistrano, when that mission was being builded, to secure provisions and cattle for it from San Gabriel, which had then come to be a flourishing establishment. Only one soldier and one of the San Gabriel Indians accompanied Father Junipero.
Fol. 1-2
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On the way the three were attacked by a band of painted, hostile savages armed with bows and poisoned arrows. When the faithful San Gabriel Indian saw the danger and realized that Father Junipero would undoubtedly be killed if some- thing were not quickly done in his defense, he cried out to the savages that a great company of soldiers was following and was near at hand, and that if they did not turn and flee at once the soldiers would kill them. The stratagem worked like a charm. But what it proves more than anything else is that the Indians, when Christianized, loved the padres and were devoted to them, and that they were also able to dis- criminate between the goodness of the missionary fathers and the wickedness of the soldiers.
After the first few difficult years, however, San Gabriel flourished amazingly and finally came to be quite the greatest of all the missions. Indeed it was called the "Queen of the Missions." Thousands and thousands of Indian neophytes were housed and taught within its great walls. It became famous for its grapes and wines, and it had an orange grove and beautiful gardens and great pastures for the almost countless herds and flocks of the field; and there came even a time when a ship was builded there. They went back into the mountain canyon, cut down great trees, hewed them into planks and brought them to the mission where they framed the vessel, and they then carried it in pieces to the harbor of San Pedro and launched it there.
Los Angeles is a city builded on a desert, and wherever there is an instance of this kind in history, we find, of course, that the great problem to contend with as population in- creased was a water supply both for domestic and irrigation purposes, and as we go back through the dusty pages of his- tory, we discover that it was from San Gabriel, the mother of Los Angeles, that Los Angeles learned all that it has ever known down to this day concerning water supply. Even now, after a century and a half of time has passed away, the re- mains of the great aqueduct at San Gabriel are still to be seen, the ditches that were builded with such sturdy masonry still refusing to crumble.
What wonderful men they were, these first Franciscan
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pioneers of California! They were engineers and craftsmen of the first order. They knew all the trades that civilized men of their time knew, and the work they taught the Indians to perform was of such an enduring character that the rain and sun of 150 years of neglect and decay have been futile to break it down. The strongest dynamite was necessary to break the old irrigation ditches and head-gates that still remain at San Gabriel.
There are a lot of things of which we boast as new in our modern California which are really old. And in this regard we might mention our manual arts schools and our normal schools. Every mission was a manual arts school-great industrial schools in which the natives were taught to be skilled in more than half a hundred trades. When we look upon the great manual training schools of modern Los An- geles, it is interesting to know that there was a manual train- ing school in San Gabriel a century and a half ago. And when we regard with satisfaction, as we should, the great normal schools of the state, it will help us the more to admire those who went before us in the distant past, to know that they did also these same things and did them as well as we are doing them now and under incomparably more difficult cir- cumstances. There was a normal school in the old times at San Gabriel mission to which were sent young Indian men from all the surrounding country to be trained as school teachers for their people.
Long before Los Angeles was dreamed of, San Gabriel was an important place. Besides, it was a happy place, filled with peace and plenty, joyous with the day's work and holy with the voice of prayer. On the great feast days, when the population gave itself over to recreation and enjoyment, the old plaza of San Gabriel, a great sunlit quadrangle now pit- iably narrowed and shut in, was the scene of many notable celebrations.
In addition to the busy yet happy life that it led within itself in its own bright little world, San Gabriel was a hospice in the land. It was there that the travelers up and down the King's Highway stopped for shelter and for food. And there came to its great oaken doors also-the great doors that
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swung ever inward with welcome for whosoever might come -- the caravans that toiled their way on the inland trails up from Sonora to the capital at Monterey. And in the days of the Argonauts, when the plains and the deserts were filled with gold-seekers on their way to sudden and unparalleled fortune, San Gabriel was the wayside inn that sheltered many a weary head. There never was a price to pay, and it did not matter who the man might be or what his creed or nation, he was welcome to shelter and food and rest at San Gabriel though he had not a penny in his pocket.
San Gabriel was also the half-way house in that empire which the Spanish king had flung from the heart of Mexico up across the hills and valleys to the Bay of San Francisco. In short, before ever a stake was driven in the chaparral where Los Angeles stands today, San Gabriel built its mile posts on the high-roads of civilization. Its bells, that still ring the music of the Angelus across the great green valley and up to the echoing hills, were ringing in their gray watch towers long before the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia rang its fateful message across the world.
For almost three-quarters of a century San Gabriel thrived and prospered. Then came the day of its doom. And the way of it was this:
When nearly fifty years of time had passed after the foun- dation of the first Franciscan mission at San Diego by Fray Junipero Serra, and when these great establishments had grown strong and rich through the labor of the Indians and the marvelous management of the padres, the politicians in civil life and the camp-followers of kings came to look with greedy eyes upon all this wealth which had been acquired solely for the betterment, the prosperity and happiness of the Indians.
As to the missionary fathers, the Franciscans, the mere material wealth of the missions had no appeal to them what- ever. The Franciscan friar is wedded to poverty. He can own no more than the rough brown robe on his back and the sandals on his feet. So, when the missions were confiscated by the civil power, it was not the friars who were robbed, be- cause how can you rob a man of something that he does not
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have? It was the Indians who were despoiled; and it is a bitter, black story.
In the year 1813 the Spanish Cortes promulgated a decree which set forth that the Indian missions in California be "secularized." This was a polite way of saying that they should be seized and confiscated.
Now, this move of secularization would have been dis- honest under any circumstances, but it was doubly so in view of the fact that it was not the Spanish Government or the Republic of Mexico that furnished one penny of the money through which the Franciscans were enabled to begin and carry on the work of the missions with such marvelous suc- cess. The money was contributed by private persons in Spain and Old Mexico, and the fund which was thus accumulated came to be known as the "Pious Fund" for the reason, it is to be supposed, that it was money contributed by pious indi- viduals eager for the spread of the gospel and the glory of the church.
This fact, however, was airily and very brazenly ignored by the Spanish Cortes, and the decree declared that the Fran- ciscan friars should be put out of the mission and their places taken by secular clergy, which is to say by priests who did not belong to either the Franciscan order or any of the other orders of the church. It was declared that the mis- sions should be converted into parishes, and that it was time for the Indian to stand alone and to throw off the friars' gentle yoke.
The idea was a fearfully mistaken one, and any disinter- ested person would not have hesitated to say that its results would prove tragically disastrous. The Indian had not reached that stature where he could stand alone. It was true that he had learned to do a white man's work, that he could sing and say his prayers and play upon musical instruments, paint pictures and carve on wood and speak the Spanish tongue, and that he could read and write. But he was still a child, no more fit to stand alone than a child would be, and the events which ensued after secularization really took place amply proves the truth of these statements.
Happily, however, the decree of the Spanish Cortes in 1813
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was never actually carried out, and San Gabriel and all the other missions up and down the sunny stretches of El Camino Real went on, happy and prosperous, oblivious to the impend- ing doom.
Came then a time when Mexico threw off the yoke of Spain and took its place among the free republics of the world. Cal- ifornia, that was always before a Spanish territory, then became a territory of Mexico. And the lazy, shiftless pol- iticians of both Mexico and California, whose numbers were countless, seeing the great mission establishments with bursting granaries and countless herds and flocks, with or- chards and vineyards, richer with every passing year, be- thought themselves of this old decree of the Spanish Cortes, and immediately they took pains to have it actually carried into effect.
In the year 1830 the territorial deputation in California, which was a sort of a local legislature, adopted a plan of legislation through which, under cover of civil authority, the old scheme of 1813 could be realized with many additional advantages to the confiscators. Three years afterward, in 1833, the Mexican Congress passed an act putting the wheels of confiscation in actual motion. It was ordered that the Gov- ernment should seize the missions. But, as though to make a show of justice, glittering assurances were given the church that it should be well cared for out of the spoils. It is need- less to say that these promises were never kept. The typical Mexican politician was a shifty man who did not allow a promise made to haunt him or to keep him awake at night.
And so the dirty deed was done. The brown-robed priests that had come to the desolation of a wilderness, giving up their beautiful lives for the sake of God's most wretched creatures, and who, through infinite patience and sacrifice and toil had taught the Indian to labor and to pray and to make the desert blossom as the rose, were driven forth like dogs from the stately arches and the great rafters which they had reared. And the Indian, suddenly deprived of the padres' fatherly care, went back to the hills, dazed and helpless, to starve and to die.
The missions, one after the other, were auctioned off by
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their despoilers, each one for a song to whoever had the voice to sing, and among them was San Gabriel, queen of them all -the mother of Los Angeles. And so, with no one to do the work that was to be done, no hand at the plow, no herder for the flocks, no one to garner the grain or the fruit of the fig tree and the vine, a silence lonelier by far than death fell upon the gray mission tower and over all its far-flung walls and fields. The old joyous life that once was there, the music, the song and laughter, the ring of the anvil and whir of the loom, departed never to return.
But it was before the day of doom-and long before it- that San Gabriel became the mother of Los Angeles. On a sunny morning in the year 1781 the Gobernador came down from Monterey with a troop of cavalry to San Gabriel, and the next day he rode out with his horsemen and the neophytes and the padres and the pobladores. They marched three leagues eastward toward the sea and the setting sun. And they came to a place which is now the old plaza of Los Angeles, but where there was then not even the footprints of a man. And they reared a cross, fired volleys of musketry, sang the Te Deum and read to the multitude the proclamation of Carlos III, King of Aragon and Castile, Emperor of the Indies and Master of half the world, wherein it was decreed that there on that spot a city should be laid and that they should fashion its name in honor of the Mother of God.
CHAPTER III
THE FOUNDING OF THE PUEBLO
Wherever a city in America or elsewhere can identify its founder, it never fails to do so with feeling of pride. We suppose the sentiment is the same that influences an individ- ual to trace back his family history to an original ancestor. Los Angeles, of course, is no exception to this rule, and it enjoys the good fortune of knowing well who its founder was and what manner of man he was.
Taking him by and large he was a fairly good man, too, and in some ways he was also a great man. He had his faults, it is true, but all men, great or small, also have had their faults, and it is not to be expected that there will ever be a man without some weakness or other of character so long as hu- man nature remains as it is and we are clothed in the weak- ness of flesh and blood.
The name of the founder of Los Angeles was Felipe de Neve, and he was the third governor of California. There have been a great many governors of California from the first one down to the present time, and it is with no small degree of satisfaction that we find Don Felipe de Neve holding his own among them in history as an executive of consequence and of parts. Wherefore, our city of wonder may look back to its flesh and blood ancestor with some smugness of con- tent, and certainly with little or nothing of which to be ashamed.
The great seal of the City of Los Angeles-one of the most artistic and beautiful of all municipal seals-relates in its colorful heraldry that the city has passed, so far, under the dominion of four flags. It was first a city of a province of Spain; then a city of a territory of the Republic of Mexico; again, after a very brief but thrilling and immortal period, a city of the Republic of California, popularly known as the
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