The California padres and their missions

Front matter

Copyii^ht}I°_

COPyRIGHT DEPOSm

^p 2r. S)meaton C|)a0e

Chapter Twenty

I. Mission Dolores and the Two Missions of the

Contra Costa 381

^ 11. The Rose and the Pine 392

How to Reach the Missions 403

Pronouncing Glossary of Spanish Words and Phrases . 407

In the Dominican Sisters' Garden, Mission San Jose Half-title

The San Carlos Mission at the Height of its

Activity Frontispiece

From a drawing by Eric Pape.

San Diego de Alcala i

Map showing Approximate Situations of the Franciscan Missions of California 3

Brush Chapel, Cross, and Bells formerly at Santa Ysabel, an Outpost of Mission San

Diego 26

Like this, doubtless, were the temporary structures erected at the founding of all the Missions, and serving until permanent buildings were established

San Luis Rey 31

Doorway and Old Fountain at Mission San Luis RJEY 34

San Antonio de Pala 47

San Juan Capistrano 63

One of the Bells, Mission San Juan Capistrano 66

San Gabriel ArcAngel 91

San Fernando 109

In the Rulned Church, Mission San Fernando .114

San Buenaventura 137

xi

Santa Barbara 155 /

Franciscan Brothers at Work, Mission Santa Barbara 162 ""'

Santa In£s 177

La Purisima 205

San Luis Obispo 225

San Miguel Arcangel 245 -

San Antonio de Padua 261

Old Adobe Outbuilding, said to have been used y as a Jail at Mission San Antonio de Padua . 266

An interesting survival of Mission architecture, showing method of roofing, arching of windows, etc.

SOLEDAD 277'

San Carlos de Monterey on the Carmel . . .289

San Juan Bautista 311 •

In the Indian Cemetery, Mission San Juan Bautista 322

Santa Cruz 325

Drawn from a photograph copyrighted, igo4, by C. C. Pierce 6° Co., Los Angeles, Cal.

Santa Clara de Asis 337

San Jos:fi 355

Dolores 379

In the Cemetery, Mission Dolores, San Francisco 382

C^(X\>t^ Ont

SAN DIEGO DE ALCALA i^l

Mi

MAP SHOWING APPROXIMATE SITUATIONS OF THE FRANCISCAN MISSIONS OF CALIFORNIA

San Diego de Alcala, the Mother Mission, and how THE Devil had a Beating there

O! an Diego's antiquities center at Old Town — the adobe ^^ cradle of modern California. There, in the spring of 1769, foregathered the friars and leather-jacketed soldiers, the ships and the mule trains, the servants and the cattle of Portola's motley expedition; their purpose, to make a start at insuring the title of CathoHc Spain to her long-claimed Upper California coast, upon which Russia and England were showing signs of poimcing; the means, not arms, but religion. And there on July 16 of that year, upon the slope of a hill overlooking the San Diego River Valley and the placid mirror of False Bay, was founded very modestly the Mother Mission of California, and dedicated to St. James of Alcala. A wooden cross had been planted and blessed and a httle brush chapel constructed, and in it high mass was celebrated by Padres Junipero Serra and Fernando Parron. A few soldiers, muleteers and Indian servants from the Missions of Lower California, kneeled on the ground while the aid of Mary Most Holy was implored for this undertaking of her suppliants who were zealous to put to flight the army of hell in the region roundabout, and place upon its savage folk the easy yoke of Christ.

To-day all that remains of those beginnings of civilization in California is one ancient date palm and some mounds of melted adobe. Amid the latter rises a huge cross, built of pieces of square tile and bearing a commemorative inscription in Spanish and English. There were some little girls watching me idling about, and I asked one where the tiles came from — from the old Mission buildings? "Oh, no, sir," she repHed joyously; " they come out of the ground. Us girls helped pick 'em" — which I record as first-hand evidence for future antiquaries.

It seems that first site proved undesirable for at least two reasons — proximity to the Presidio's corrupting influences, and lack of fertile soil at hand. The buildings were accordingly turned over to the Presidio in 1774, and a fresh start was made with the Mission at a place two leagues farther up the river where was an Indian rancheria called Nipaguay. That is the site of the Mission as we know it to-day, and, because of the adjacent aboriginal village, it was often referred to as San Diego de Nipaguay.

I found it a pleasant five-mile walk on an old-fashioned country road from Old Town to the Mission. Cattle grazed in the river bottom, half hidden in guatamote, as old San Diegans call the groundsel bushes; little ranch houses smiled at me from amidst their palms and olives, figs and pomegranates; and far ahead the mountains fifted their alluring peaks, cumulus clouds, thrust up by the desert, drifting along them. By this way walked the old ^ Padres, sandal-shod, journeying between Mission and port; and along it, too, the screeching ox carts, piled with hides and tallow, jolted their slow way to the beach when the droghers of Yankeedom awaited them there. No ox carts or Padres passed me, but an occasional automobile did; and from the crest of the hills that walled the little valley in at the south, the trim bungalows and villas of twentieth-century San Diego looked coldly down. Only a shy wild " rose of Castile," lifting its blessed face from the wayside

^ I say "old," merely meaning long ago. In point of fact, most of the Missionaries were youngish men — at least on the sunny side of forty — when they entered into their wilderness work. It took the enthusiasm and physical vigor of life's prime to carry forward an enterprise of that sort.

tangle, and the meadowlarks pouring liquid melody down the air, spoke of the Padres' day.

Where the highway turns to cross the stream by a bridge, I cut down by an old wagon track through the willows and across the dry river bed to reach the Mission by the back way. Skirting the old olive orchard, whose olives, tradition says, were the equal of Seville's, I came to a white cross attached to a boxlike arrangement of paling fence, such as often encloses graves in Mexican cemeteries. There was no inscription, and the whole affair was tottering on the brink of a gully. A teamster was resting his horses near by and refreshing himself with a pull at his pipe.

"That marks where a priest dropped once when he was killed by the Indians," he remarked, in reply to my inquiry. " Yess'r. You see, it was like this. In them days the Mission up there — you see it on the hill — was all walled in, they say, and this here priest, he was a young fellow, yess'r, and enthusiastic like, and he said, begosh, he'd go outside and preach to the Indians, and the wall be hanged to it. Yess'r; and so he did; and, while he was preaching, one of them red devils up and shot him dead with a bow and arrow. Yess'r; and the Padre he dropped in his tracks, with his head where the cross is and his legs the other direction. They put that fence there to mark the place. Of course, the priest ain't there: they buried him up at Old Town safe enough. This here fence gits rotten every once in so often, and then they put up a new one. They're mighty partic'lar about that. Yess'r."

In such crabbed fashion is the story of CaHfornia's first Christian martyrdom passed along; for the little cross does stand for that — hallowing the spot where, so far as known, Padre Luis Jayme ^ was brutally murdered. San Diego de

^ There is a difference of authorities about this name. Engelhardt, who ought to know, writes it as above, which is the spelling in the Spanish text

s

Nipaguay had been established little over a year, and the zeal of Padre Jayme and his companero, Fr. Vicente Fuster, had been blessed with many conversions. On a single day, indeed, October 3, 1775, the remarkable record of sixty baptisms was made. This conspicuous encroachment upon the devil's kingdom, as Padre Palou, the Franciscan historian, saw the matter, aroused "the infernal fury," and two apostate neophytes were diaboHcally inspired to spread a report throughout the tributary territory that the Padres had started a campaign to force all gentiles to embrace Christianity willy-nilly. Accordingly, a plot was hatched involving about five hundred gentiles ^ to wipe the Mission out of existence.

Of this plot the Fathers had no warning: and when, in the middle of the night of November 4-5, Indian shouts and the glare of burning buildings aroused them from their beds, they thought only of some accident having occurred, and rushed out to see what. Fray Luis ran into the midst of a yelling mob whom, taking them for his neophytes, he saluted with the customary "Amar d Dios, mis hijos" — "Love God, my children." The response was a cruel shower of blows from wooden swords and stones, under which the bhnded friar dropped ; and then, like the proto-martyr of Christianity, he "fell asleep," a prayer upon his lips. When his body was found next day, near the river, it was, Palou tells us, without other garment than a garment of blood — a mass of wounds from head to foot — "only his consecrated hands uninjured."

of Palou's Life of Serra. Bancroft, on the other hand, uniformly writes it Jaume, which I notice is the spelling of Serra 's manuscript preface to the San Diego Mission Book of Deaths and Burials.

* In the language of the Franciscans, the unchristianized Indians were called "gentiles." When baptized and attached to the Mission, they were nedfitos, i.e., neophytes. Perhaps it need hardly be said that baptism, far from being forced on the Indians, was administered only after preliminary instruction; except, of course, in the case of infants, and then parents were consenting.

The total white population, opposed to that frenzied mob of five hundred, was but nine men and two boys. Of the eleven, two were killed outright and one mortally wounded ^ before the situation was realized; and one marvels that a single Spaniard lived to tell the tale. The remaining eight were soon forced out of the blazing buildings and took refuge in a small adobe enclosure, about eight feet square. Here, assailed on all sides, they fought it out with the courage of old Romans, their musketry and prayers to the saints pitted against Indian arrows, stones, and firebrands. In this devoted band (all, sooner or later, suffering from wounds) Padre Fuster made a striking figure. While two men reloaded the muskets and handed them up to the corporal to fire at the savages, who continued discharging their missiles imder cover of the dark, this doughty friar covered with his outspread skirts the stock of gunpowder, thus perilously shielding it from falling firebrands. His trust in God was sure, but he was the sort that keeps the powder dry, too.

With the dawn the cowardly crew made off to the hills. The night of horror was ended, and the neophytes, who claimed to have been imprisoned in their huts by the gentiles during the fight, straggled in to talk it over around the Mission's smoking ashes. Serra, when the news reached him, thanked God for the blessing of a martyr; for, now that the land was watered with such blood, gentilism could not longer hold out, he thought. Of course, the military government was for bloody vengeance; but Serra pleaded forgiveness, and, through his

^ This man was a carpenter named Urselino, who gave a remarkable exhibition of practical Christianity. He was sick at the time of the attack, and some Indians shot arrows into him as he lay in bed. Feeling himself mortally struck, he cried: "Ha, India, que me has muertol Dios te lo perdone!" ("Ah,. Indian, you have killed me. May God forgive you!") He died a few days later, but, before he died, made a will, and, having no legal heirs, he left his estate (the savings of his wages for some years) to the selfsame Indians who had murdered him. Had a king done so, would not all the school-books record it?

Z^t CaCifotnia ^cibxt^

influence with the Viceroy, carried his point — gaining for his graceless Indians a literal appUcation of the law of Christ; but, like the practical dreamer he was, he did not object to an increase in the Mission guard. "Let the living Padres," he exhorted, "be guarded as the apple of God's eye; but let the dead one be left to enjoy God : and thus good be returned for evil." There was no further uprising. The Mission was rebuilt the following year, Serra himself working with the rest, and the "conquest" was peacefully resumed as if nothing had happened. So successfully, indeed, did it proceed that San Diego was the first Mission to score one thousand baptisms, and was for years the most populous of all. Obviously Satan had met his match in Padre Junipero.

The Mission church, whose fagade we now see, is not that which rose from the ashes of 1775, but is of much later date, having been finished and dedicated in November, 18 13. It was never architecturally ambitious, but the present wreck gives little idea of the original look. An old painting now in St. Joseph's rectory, San Diego, shows a triple-storied belfry at the west corner of the church. There were corridors, too, extending not only along the front of the convento wing where the Padres' living-rooms were (now practically gone), but before the church entrance also.

It would seem as though of all the landmarks in California this Mother Mission should be especially cherished, holding as it does somewhere within its bounds the dust of the martyr Jayme, as well as of others of Serra's "seraphic and apostolic squadron"; yet none has been more shamefully treated. The French traveler Duflot de Mofras found it in 184 1 in sad disrepair, its fields and vineyards waste for want of workers, and the only occupants of the decaying buildings one white family, a few Indians, and faithful old Padre Vicente Pascual de Oliva, an Arragonese Franciscan who had been there since

1820. His companion friar for sixteen years, Padre Jose Bernardo Sanchez, had passed away years before at San Gabriel. Fat and jovial with a kind word for everybody, Padre Jose died at last of a broken heart, it is said, because of the secularization of the Missions.^ In 1846 Padre Vicente, too, gave up the game, departing sadly to San Juan Capistrano where soon he was laid to rest. Then came the American soldiers, during the war with Mexico, occupying the buildings as barracks and stables; and after them followed the stripping of timbers and tiles by rancheros in need of building material.

To-day the Mission is all but abandoned. There are still a few acres of land belonging to it, which are farmed out, and from 1 89 1 until four or five years ago, a Sisters' school for Indian children flourished in a big barn of a building erected for the purpose hard by the Mission church. Some Federal law put a quietus on that educational effort, and now the schoolhouse is as silent as the Mission, save when divine service is held, as it is occasionally, in its tiny chapel. The visiting priest — a quiet, kindly Frenchman — happened to be present the day of my call, and showed me what there was to be seen: a few reUcs in the chapel, the remains of some ancient irrigation works that brought water from miles back in the hills, the old well at the foot of the slope whence a tunnel ran up to the Mission to connect the Fathers with their water

^ Secularization, it may not be amiss to say, was in effect the depriving of the Missionaries of all control over the Mission's temporalities, which then reverted to the State, barring provision of a bit of land to each neophyte family. These Indians, however, seem rarely to have had wit enough to hold it long against white cupidity and aguardiente. The Missions thus became reduced from what were practically great ecclesiastical manors to the status of parish churches. With this change of estate, the Missionaries in some instances left for fresh fields of usefulness: 'n other cases, remained with shorn authority as curates, to serve the Indians as spiritual fathers so long as life was spared them and there were any Indians left to serve.

€^t CaCifotma ^cibxt& supply in event of an Indian siege. And, of course, the olive orchard was to be inspected — the first planted in California — and the fine old date palms.

Excepting Carmel, no other Mission is so intimately associated with Junipero Serra as is San Diego, though these associations cluster more particularly about the original site at Old Town. It was there that occurred that dramatic victory of his faith which is credited with saving the whole Mission enterprise from the defeat that threatened it at its very outset. This first Mission began amid great discouragement. Scurvy had attacked the Spaniards to such an extent that their camp on the shores of the bay was literally a hospital, and men were daily dying. As time ran on, food supplies became low ; the Diegueno Indians, by no means of a kindly sort, were thieving and troublesome and had finally to be taught the lesson of gunpowder and lead to be held in check at all. Moreover, they were so indifferent to missionary effort that, for the first twelve months, not a single convert was made. Then the expedition of Portola northward in quest of the lost port of Monterey, had returned after six months' absence, reduced to the verge of starvation, "with the merit of having suffered much, eaten their mules, and finding no such port as Monterey," as Serra puts it. Worst of all, a ship that had been dispatched early in July (1769) to Mexico for suppHes and reinforcements, had still not returned in the following February, and the days could be counted to the bottom of the barrel. Accordingly Portola, as commander of the expedition, notified Serra that if succor did not arrive by the day of the Feast of St. Joseph (that is, March 19, 1770), he would start back with all to Mexico on the day following. Remonstrance was futile. The bluff comandante declared the Mission might be a failure, anyhow, and he had not brought his men to that wilderness to perish of hunger.

This decision, if carried out, meant the postponement indefinitely, if not forever, of Serra's passionate desire to rescue Alta California from the grip of Satan — a glorious spiritual conquest which was the dream of his mediaeval soul. It was in anticipation of such a triumph that he had purposely selected for the founding of this first of his Missions the date of July 1 6, which, in the Catholic calendar, is the feast day of the Triumph of the Holy Cross — the day in 1 2 1 2 when Spanish Christendom, under that holy standard on the field of Las Navas de Tolosa, broke forever the Moorish power in Spain. All the zeal of his intense spirit flamed up at the thought of possible frustration to his hopes, now, of all times, when the enemy was before his eyes. It had taken one hundred and sixty-six years since Vizcaino's christening of the harbor of San Diego de Alcala, to get an expedition there to found the Mission. If, now, this expedition departed, abandoning the pitiful little tule buildings to rot away within their stockade, might not its going be forever — para siempre jamas ? Night and day, Serra besieged the Throne of Heaven with his prayers, imploring God to bring the relief ship quickly that the work, undertaken for his glory, might go on. Meantime the heroic priest made up his mind that, even if the expedition did desert, he would himself remain if one friar would stay with him, and Padre Juan Crespi said he would be the one. Joyous Padre Juan! Is it any wonder that, as we shall see later, Serra's dying wish was to lie forever by his side at Carmel? So, we find Serra comfortably taking advantage of some soldiers' going south to dispatch a letter to Palou in one of the Lower California Missions, requesting him to send up a supply of incense and holy oils. Of course, Heaven helped such a spirit.

The Feast of St. Joseph at last arrived, but no sign of the ship; and the preparations for departure, which had been car-

II ried on simultaneously with Serra's praying, were complete for the following morning. For nine consecutive days at the last, prayers had been addressed to St. Joseph himself, as patron of the California Spiritual Conquest (he had been so nominated before the expedition set out from Mexico), and the invocations culminated in a high mass. Then, as evening drew on, a response came. To the eyes of watchers scanning the lonely waters of the South Sea there appeared with perfect distinctness a ship : and then it disappeared. But the sight was enough to stagger Portola, and the Mission got a reprieve. Four days later, the relief ship was seen heading gallantly into the harbor. She had, it seems, on leaving Mexico been ordered to make directly for Monterey where it was expected the Portola party would then be; but mishaps in the region of the Santa Barbara channel had forced her to put about and make for San Diego for repairs. Was that vision of St. Joseph's day really the ship, or was it a miracle graciously vouchsafed in response to the prayers of faith? Pious Padre Palou, who has recorded the details in his "Life" of Serra, has no doubt about its being a case of heavenly intervention; and had you been through all that lonely little band of Spaniards underwent for the best part of a year, you, too, would doubtless join with them in giving God and St. Joseph the credit. As for Serra, so great were his joy and gratitude that he said high mass in honor of the Patriarch on the nineteenth of each month thereafter till the end of his life.