USA > California > The Spanish Pioneers And The California Missions > Part 17
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and sent witches to the gibbet. The Franciscan foundation of California, on the contrary, was as clean a piece of devoted unselfishness as the annals of man can show. It was not for the missionaries, but for the heathen. It was to save their souls - and incidentally to teach them of a God of soap, and industry, and decency and art, as well as of the catechism.
It is pretty hard to read romance into the Puri- tans - beyond Priscilla and John Alden - whereas the whole Mission Era, both in its activity and its perennial influence, is saturated with romance - the thousands of Spanish place-names, the hundreds of Spanish fiestas, the innumerable Spanish songs, the remnants of the old Spanish ranchos, home of an incomparable hospitality and grace-for the Spanish Pastoral Era in California was notably the happiest and most charming life ever lived in this country. It is of an ever-living spring of Delight.
Fray Junípero could never have foreseen that he was to have a more contagious influence upon the building plans of an unguessed people a century and a half later, than all the Schools of Architecture they knew - but that is precisely what he did. The " Mission style" is epidemic in the land, for homes, and public buildings-and even for Methodist churches! True, tens of thousands of dwellings have been built elsewhere in the United States after old New England models, frequently in places most unfitted therefor; but this is merely Habit. That hundreds of thousands of dwellings and other
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edifices have been built after the lines first popu- larized in California by the old Missions -that is Conversion. It is another example of that gentle contagion which is carrying the influence of the California Missions onward through the generations.
The detailed story of the Missions is not within my scope. It was the patient heroism of all first frontier settlements in a savage wilderness, plus an exaltation of spirit and of religious fervor and an altruism without thought of personal advantage, wholly unmatched in the annals of any other fron- tier. It was not for a livelihood, as other new lands are broken, nor for gain, nor for fame; but a vol- untary sacrifice of every comfort of life; a per- petual vow of chastity and poverty; a constant endurance of hardship and danger -and all for the sake of bringing savages into a better mode of life.
The conversion of the heathen never figured in our own pioneering -whether with the Puritans nor the Virginians nor any others. John Eliot whom we dub "Apostle of the Indians," because he taught Natick aborigines, and made a translation of part of the Bible into their Algonquin tongue, had a dozen scattered congregations of "praying Indians" aggregating about 3,600 in the whole of Massachu- setts. But he had no imitators. And he simply taught them Creed.
Fancy Massachusetts-or another state -having twenty-one industrial schools for Indians, with from five hundred to three thousand pupils living in each school-old and young, men, women and
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children, learning not only the gospel and music and reading and writing, but soap making (and using) and carpentry and mason work and tanning and spinning and weaving and knitting and agriculture and fruit growing and stock raising! Imagine any commonwealth of ours getting its Indians to build such great temples not only to Worship but to Art, as Serra and his lieutenants kindled the lazy, naked California Indians to do - the most primitive and unprogressive aborigines that the Spanish found in all their exhaustive exploration of the New World; and incomparably inferior to the Algonquins of Massachusetts, or the Six Nations, or any of the other tribes with whom our people have come in sharp contact. In other words, our English- speaking colonization of the Atlantic Coast was purely for self, noble and far-reaching as its influ- ence was; while the colonization of California, though backed by the political need of Spain to protect its far-flung lands from being " jumped " by Russia or England, was in all its essential detail, which was the Missions, as altruistic and unselfish as human action can ever be.
It is true that at several points in the United States there are Government Indian Boarding Schools as large as the smallest of the California Missions maintained one hundred years ago; but they are hardly of the same category! They do not take the family as a unit, and raise it as much as they can. On the contrary, they aim to destroy the family ties, the home being merely a rabbitry to breed
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more pupils. Instead of being taught the homely arts of such life as our own grandfathers lived, and as I have mentioned as taught in these Mission Industrial Schools, the Indian Bureau Schools turn out expert plumbers and linotype operators and send them home to the Navajo Reservation of wilderness, and similar intelligent activities. Instead of foster- ing the marvelous blanket weaving and basket making and pottery making and other native arts of these First Americans, these Bureau Schools teach their girls to make extremely good crazy quilts and crocheting and to run gas ranges and electric lights - which makes them very useful as servants for white people, but doesn't go very far when they return to homes where the good old fire- place and griddle stone still rule.
Also our Indian Bureau Schools turn out such football teams and mandolin clubs as Father Serra never dreamed of. Also, it requires an army of six thousand well paid employees to enable the Indian Bureau to care for Our Wards, the First Americans, and to maintain its tremendous political machine- which is extremely important since the Bureau has in its hands over one hundred million dollars of Indian money, for which it is accountable to abso- lutely nobody, neither Indians nor court. From all of which it will be obvious that Junipero Serra and the civilizing of California are not at all translat- able into terms of today! Still, there are some archaic souls among us who can understand Heroism and Faith, and at the same time marvel the more
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that these should be united in so eminent a degree with two-fisted Efficiency - and that is not too strong a word to use, as anyone will say who looks at one of the mighty monuments reared by savages in a wilderness, under the exhortation of one or two brown-robed missionaries in each case.
And no less significant was the unerring skill with which Serra picked out, upon an uncharted wilder- ness, without settlements or landmarks or develop- ments, the choicest locations for human habitation. He never made a mistake in picking the very best spot; and from San Francisco the six hundred miles down to San Diego, there is not now an important population except where this strange ecstatic trail-finder picked the spot for a Mission -plus subsidiary towns that have grown up in the neigh- borhood after the prime location had been largely developed. Not only fertility of land and abundant water supply were secured -the most beautiful view in the region was specifically selected. Except for beach resorts, or oil towns, the urban popula- tions of Southern California are chiefly upon the sites picked by Junípero 140 years or more ago.
None of us today can pretend to realize the physi- cal and mental problems of building in a savage wilderness the temples which the Franciscans erected in California. Our forefathers laid their axe to the foot of the pine, and notched the logs, and laid them up into houses and churches. But they were trained and earnest men. But that was not so in the Mission area. It was the friendly and
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durable adobe, almost everywhere, that made the huts and houses (also the first chapels) ; and the brown-robed missionaries tucked up their gowns and trod bare-legged in the pit with the Indians to mix the mud to be sunburned into bricks. But these men were artists and architects; and after the first rude makeshift, they planned and created temples which will be monuments so long as they shall stand.
Fancy an American contractor undertaking any building whatever on such terms! No railroads, no roads, no tractors, no wagons; no brick-yards, or cement plants, or lumber yards, or saw mills, or iron foundries; no lime kilns, no ropes, no cables, no roofing material, no flooring; no steam shovels- in a word, no supplies of any kind whatever, and no place to get them !
Likewise, no skilled labor - nor much of anything you could call labor at all. No masons, no carpen- ters, no blacksmiths-" no nothing."
But our contractor has only to ring up a dozen bases of supplies. Junipero was his own base of sup- plies ! He magnetized or hypnotized the lazy and worthless Indians to be willing to work more or less; he showed them how to work. The nearest outcrop ledges of "country rock" he had them " quarry" by their intermittent pecking with crude tools; and dress the blocks to reasonable shape; and then roll them over and over to the site for the building. He found limestone and built kilns and made lime, and thus mortar. He went with his aborigines forty
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miles to the mountains, and helped them to fell big pines and trim them; then accompanied the log as it traversed the weary and pathless distance on the shoulders of his neophytes, and was peeled and sea- soned for the big ceiling-beams. He discovered the remote outcroppings of "brea," or native asphalt, and brought this long distances and melted it to water-proof his roofs -the big planks of the ceiling having been whip-sawed by the Indians in a saw-pit from logs brought as far.
Later, when the right quality of clay was discov- ered in proper quantity, the Franciscans made their roofs of the concave tiles, which are such a feature of all Spanish-American architecture. But here they had no molds, and each tile was shaped over the thigh of an Indian woman. I have one which keeps the imprint of the old veins and cords. As sawed lumber was neither desirable nor possible, they made their floors of flat tiles burnt of the same clay, and well flagged together. In the great "new" church of San Juan Capistrano, ruined by the earthquake of 1812 (and the gun powder of stupids in 1865), the floor was a beautiful mosaic of diamond-shaped tiles. And speaking of contracts in the wilderness, that church could not be duplicated today for $200,000.
In Petra, Island of Mallorca, Spain, on the 24th of November, 1713, was born a small and sickly man-child to Antonio Serra, and Margarita Ferrer,
JUNIPERO SERRA'S AUTOGRAPH
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6 Viervo, y Capella alevenera &C . Or Junifero Verra
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oyprendo
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humble laborers. There was no strange portent. The family income was about twenty-five cents a day in our money -a goodly wage for a peasant of that time. He was christened Miguel José; but in his youth chose the name of Junipero, after the companion of St. Francis, to whose service he early vowed himself. He took the habit of a Franciscan at the Convent of Jesus at Palma, capital of Mal- lorca, September 14, 1730. Before he was ordained, he was appointed reader of philosophy in the con- vent and served for three years, having seventy pupils. He was then given the chair of Doctor of Sacred Theology. He became famous as a preacher, noted not only for eloquence and piety but for a nobly sonorous voice.
In 1740, Francisco Palou became his disciple; and was his companion thenceforth until Serra's death in 1784, and later his very competent biographer as well as successor as head of the California Missions. At the height of his success as a professor at Palma, Serra felt a call to America to convert the heathen. He went and preached a farewell sermon in the parish church where he had been baptized thirty- six years before; visited his venerable parents; and with Palou embarked for Malaga on an English packet, whose heretic captain attacked him and put a dagger to his throat, but was awed by Serra's cool- ness and gentleness. A two-weeks' voyage to Ma- laga, thence to Cadiz; and thence embarked August 28, 1749, for America, with twenty other " Religious,"
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among them Father Palou and the later famous Father Juan Crespi.
It was a ninety-nine days' voyage to Vera Cruz, with storms and mutiny for accompaniment, and shortness of water for the last fifteen days. His remedy for thirst was discovered at this time: "I have found some means not to be thirsty; that is to eat little and talk less, so as not to waste my saliva." They landed at Vera Cruz December 7, 1749. The Viceroy had furnished " carriages" to bring the " Religious" up from the seaport to the City of Mexico, a hundred leagues, over the wonderful Calzada or rough-shod flagstone road over which the vast pack trains of mules had already for two centuries been carrying the silver bullion of the incalculable mines of Zacatecas and Guanajuato. But Serra asked permission to walk, and made the 300 miles on foot. A day or two after the start, he suffered a serious wound to his leg from insects - doubtless the burrowing chigres - and an infec- tion set in from which he never recovered, nor even found much relief. The incalculable tramps he made in the next thirty-five years were always with this aggravated wound. It was part of the vow of humility. He halted only a day for it; and con- tinued his march, reaching Mexico City the last day of December, 1749, and entering the College of San Fernando the next day. After five months he was sent to the College of Santa Cruz, Querétaro. Thence he was sent to conduct the Missions of the
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Sierra Gorda thirty leagues distant, arriving with Palou, June 16, 1750.
He learned the language of these Pame Indians, and translated the catechism into their idiom. He taught them farming and stock raising; made them masons, carpenters, painters, gilders, tanners and so on; taught the women to spin and weave, make stockings, sew, make cloth, etc. He built with seven years' work a church 146 feet long and 30 feet wide, besides its transept and sacristy, all of masonry; put an organ in and taught the Indians to play it. He was there nine years; and baptized all the Indians, and wound up with this church out of debt and ten thousand bushels of corn in its cribs.
Thence he felt called to the Apaches of the Rio San Saba, four hundred leagues north of the City of Mexico, where the missionaries had been murdered; but the death of the Viceroy prevented his going. He preached two years in and around the capital, remaining in the College of San Fernando till 1767. He was noted for his acts of contrition, whipping himself with a chain, beating his breast with a stone, and so on. He worked in the bishoprics of Puebla and Oaxaca, and down to Tabasco, walking everywhere. His recorded journeys in Mexico alone aggregated over six thousand miles of tramping. In 1767, with the expulsion of the Jesuits, the Missions that order had begun to found in Lower California (the peninsula) in 1699, were transferred to the Dominicans; and the Franciscans were entrusted with the conversion and settlement of New or
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Upper California -our present state. Serra was made president of these new " Conversions." He left Mexico July 14, 1767, for San Blas, a thirty-nine days' trip. After waiting at this seaport on the Pacific Coast of Mexico for boats till March 12, 1768, they finally reached Loreto, Lower California, April 1, on Good Friday. On the Peninsula he re- mained over a year, working among the Missions already established there by the now evicted Jesuits; and May 14, 1769, Serra founded the one Franciscan Mission in Lower California-that of San Fer- nando of Velicatá. It was while in the Peninsula that an incident of his grim humor is related. The infection of his leg became so aggravated that he could not walk at all; and the Captain had a litter made in which Indians could carry him. But this was too much for Serra to "trouble" others. There were no doctors, but the muleteer Juan Antonio Coronel was something of a veterinary; and the Padre applied to him for a cure for his sore. "But I am just a muleteer, and doctor only animals," said Coronel. "Pues," answered Serra, "let us pretend that I am an animal, and give me the same cure you would to a mule." So the arriero mashed a little tallow between two stones, mixing in some herbs that he gathered round about, and placed the mash upon the sore leg like a poultice. Serra fell into a sound sleep till the next morning, then arose re- lieved of pain, and celebrated Mass and went about his affairs, preparing for the expedition to Upper California. His recorded journeys on foot in the
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Peninsula - always with this agonizing leg -total more than three hundred leagues.
The expedition to colonize Upper California was sent by the Viceroy in four divisions, two by water and two by land. The little "San Carlos" sailed from La Paz, January 9, 1769- and did not reach San Diego Bay till April 29-with all its crew stricken with scurvy. Less than a third of the ninety sailors and soldiers recovered. Serra accompanied the second land division, under command of Gover- nor Gaspar de Portolá, starting north from Santa Maria May 11, and arriving at San Diego July 1st.
Many years ago I had in my keeping for some months the original diary of Junipero Serra on this epoch-making journey, and published a critical translation of it in my magazine, the "Land of Sunshine." It is marked not only by his profound piety and zeal for the salvation of pagan souls, but by abundant dry humor-as where he records the infinite trouble he had when one of the heathen Indians along the road asked to put on the Father's spectacles - and then ran away with them, leaving the Fraile greatly handicapped. And ever and again a touch of such tenderness as where he wept at com- ing upon great thickets of the " Rosa de Castilla "- the Rose of Castile, which grew wild in great pro- fusion in both Californias.
Arrived at this beautiful and strategic point of San Diego Bay, and after ministering to the sick, Serra raised a cross and hung a bell on sticks and July 16, 1769 (a month before the birth of Na-
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poleon), founded the first European settlement on our Pacific Coast, and dedicated the first Mission. It was a cornerstone in history; the actual " home- steading" for Spain of California and the Pacific Coast; the planting of civilization and education and religion in a vast wilderness which has become the garden of the world, and politically has given the United States the continental span. The nearest European settlements at that time were those of the Spanish of New Mexico, eight hundred miles to the east; and there was nothing to the north until Alaska, whence Russia was already reaching down with its fur-hunters to acquire this attractive terri- tory. It was over three thousand miles eastward to the nearest English-speaking settlement - Ten- nessee. There was no United States of course; but the population of our Thirteen Colonies and the other provinces which were not in that coalition, was only about three million souls. This Mother Mission was named in honor of San Diego de Alcalá for whom Sebastian Vizcaino had called this en- chanted bay one hundred and sixty-seven years earlier.
A month later, the Indians fell on the little colony with bows and arrows, wooden sabres and war- clubs, and robbed the sheets from off the sick. The soldiers and blacksmith fired their old muskets and killed some Indians and wounded more. One Indian servant was killed by the hostiles. Fray Juan Viz- caino was crippled for life by an arrow through his hand. The Indians were long suspicious; and the
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most devoted efforts of Fray Junipero to secure chil- dren for baptism were in vain.
The expedition was strictly charged to find the Bay of Monterey, described by Vizcaino in 1602. A land party to find Monterey left San Diego, July 14, and got back January 24, six months and 10 days. They could not find that famous harbor at all; but Governor Portola did discover the vastly more important Bay of San Francisco.
On the return of the Governor from his " fruit- less" search, things went from bad to worse in the little colony. Sickness, and scarcity of food, and failure of communication from Mexico were all disheartening. Portolá announced that if by St. Joseph's Day (March 19) none of the vessels had returned from San Blas with provisions, he would abandon San Diego and Upper California al- together, and march back to Mexico. He was not a tenderfoot-the northern exploration had been a tremendous hardship; and they were kept from starvation only by eating their mules. They had now had no communication with Mexico for some ten months, nor was there promise of any.
But Fray Junipero had no intention of quitting California. He begged Portolá for more time, and insisted that he would stay alone if the rest of the Spaniards returned to Mexico.
On March 19, the fateful day, a Novena (Mass) was held for St. Joseph. The same afternoon they saw the sail of a little "paquebot " (sloop) far out
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beyond Point Loma. It did not come into port for four days- and had no intention of coming in, but it providentially lost an anchor and had to come back to borrow one from the "San Carlos." And on so little a chance, hinged California! For the sight of the sail caused Portola to wait. The " San Antonio," which saved the day, had been sent down from San Diego in July, 1769, to San Blas for pro- visions, and for a crew for the " San Carlos," whose men had practically all died of scurvy. It came back loaded with men and provisions - for Monterey.
A new expedition by sea and land to find Mon- terey ! Fray Junípero went on the "San Antonio," Fray Juan Crespi, by land. The sea expedition took forty-six days altogether to Monterey, the land party, thirty-eight (it is about five hundred miles).
And this time they found the long-storied and " Famous Port of Monterey." Here, June 3, 1770, the military officials took possession of the country for the King, and Fray Junipero founded his second Mission, that of San Carlos. He sent that day a courier to Father Palou at Todos Santos (Lower California), 560 leagues, and the message arrived there in two-and-one-half months. In his letter, Serra says: "It is a year last month since I had word from you." It takes some adjustment for us in these air-mail days to realize what that detachment from the world meant, not only in pleasure, but in accomplishment. Advices to the Viceroy sent by
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launch to San Blas, reached Mexico City in a little over two months.
The two-fisted apostle built at San Carlos a chapel surrounded with a stockade. The founding of the third Mission, San Buenaventura, had to be delayed until the arrival of a captain. Meantime, Fray Juni- pero and Crespi worked mightily, converting the Indians of Monterey with the assistance of an Indian boy brought up from Lower California. The first baptism was celebrated December 26. Three years later, there were 165 conversions; when Serra ended his career, he left 1014 baptized at this Mission.
There was high rejoicing in the capital of Mexico when the great news got there that Monterey had been found at last, and a Mission established. The Viceroy promptly ordered new and more generous equipment for the California Missions, both in money and in men. He sent up one thousand " pesos " (dollars) for each Mission; ten mission- aries enroute to Monterey sailed on the "San An- tonio" January 2, 1771 and reached San Diego, March 12. In 1771 also the Viceroy, Marquis de Croix, turned over his office to the Knight Commander Don Antonio Maria Bucareli y Ursua. The Domini- cans and Franciscans made an agreement that all Missions formerly administered by the Jesuits should go to the Dominicans - who must establish five new Missions along the coast, reaching up to the port of San Diego.
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Fray Junipero rejoiced when ten new missionaries arrived at Carmel (Monterey) May 21, 1771. It was "laborers in the vineyard of the Lord" that he needed most. He weighed the newcomers and assigned them. His judgment of men was as unerr- ing as his judgment of sites for civilization - but he had only a few men to pick from, and all of Cal- ifornia. Fathers Paterna and Cruzado, he appointed to San Buenaventura, the " Mission Between." For San Gabriel, Fathers Somera and Cambon. These sailed on the packet bound for San Diego July 7. Two days later Serra explored the Carmel River to find a better place for the San Carlos Mission, and began construction of houses on the new site. Then with a little guard of soldiers and the necessary equipment, he trudged twenty-five leagues down into the Santa Lucia Range, picked a spot on the plain, and July 14, 1771, founded the Mission of San Antonio de Pádua. Here the Indians were gentle and trusting, and took kindly to the teachings of the missionaries left by Fray Junípero on his return to Monterey. The new buildings of the San Carlos Mission were finished, on the Carmel River, by the close of 1771, and the Mission was moved thither by Junípero and Crespi.
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