Part 27 (1/2)
The one break in the mountain wall of the California Coast Range is the Golden Gate, the watery pa.s.s that leads from San Francisco to the Pacific.
Spurs and peaks and cross ridges of this mountain chain would at long range seem to encompa.s.s the city round about; but, on nearer view, the edging waters on three sides make her distinctly a city of the sea.
Looking from the bay, past the fortified islands of the city, one may see San Francisco to the west, rising in airy beauty on cl.u.s.tered gray hills.
At night the city hangs against the horizon like a lower sky, pulsing with starry lamps. By day it stretches in profile long and undulating, with spires and domes climbing up the steeps from a sh.o.r.e lined with the s.h.i.+pping of every nation--felucca, ironclad, merchantman, junk, together with bevies of tiny busybody craft, all of them circled and followed by slow-swinging gulls.
[Ill.u.s.tration VIEW NORTHWEST FROM SPRECKELS' BUILDING.]
For years after the magnificent, all-inclusive claims of the Cabots at Labrador in 1497, nothing was known of the west coast of North America.
Cabrillo felt his way along it in 1542, claiming it for Spain. In 1579, Francis Drake, fleeing from plundered Spanish galleons, tarried for repairs beside Cape Reyes, the Cape of Kings, and claimed the country, as New Albion, for Elizabeth of England. Although anch.o.r.ed in a cove within a mile of San Francis...o...b..y, he doubtless sailed away without guessing its existence behind the forest-covered mountains.
In 1602, Vizcaino, charting the west for Spain, as Gosnold was mapping the east for England, made stay in Drake's old anchorage, and named it the Port of San Francisco.
Notwithstanding the reiterated desire of the Spanish Crown that Mexico, or New Spain, should set about colonizing upper California, it was not till 1769 that the work was begun. Spain needed a harbor in which to retire on the way from the Philippines. The Russian fur-traders were heading down the coast. The French and the English were rumored to be nearing from the east.
So it behooved Spain to be on the alert to maintain her right to the new territory.
Jose de Galvaez, _Visitador_ of Spain, who had been sent to Mexico with powers extraordinary, ”to examine and reform all branches of government,”
seized upon the project of colonization, and found the administrator of his plans in Padre Junipero Serra, of fragrant memory,--a Franciscan monk, who had all his life pa.s.sioned to save Indians as a Tamerlane would have pa.s.sioned to destroy them.
Spain's plan of colonization comprehended a triple series of establishments: the ecclesiastical or the mission, the military or the presidio, the civil or the pueblo. The theory of colonization carried the idea of a military and a religious conquest of the new lands. The Indians, whenever belligerent, were to be overcome by force; but as far as possible, they were to be drawn into the mission life by peaceable expedients.
In 1769, four expeditions, composed of soldiers, settlers, and Franciscan friars, set out from Mexico to enter upon the work of colonizing and civilizing California. If in the mists of coming ages the aeneid of California be lost, Spain may prove her sponsors.h.i.+p of the Californian province by the litany of seraphic and apostolic names given to mountain and mesa, to coast and canon. Andalusian names of saints and angels chime wherever the padres stepped or stopped.
One of the four expeditions, pus.h.i.+ng northward by land, unwittingly pa.s.sed Monterey; and a fragment of the company, while out hunting, came suddenly in sight of the waters now known as the Golden Gate and the San Francis...o...b..y. For the name San Francisco was soon transferred to this greater water from the old port known to Drake and Vizcaino.
In the summer of 1776 a company of padres, soldiers, and families, with stock and seeds, arrived on the San Francisco peninsula, and built temporary shelter of brush and tules plastered with mud. On September 17th, the feast of the stigmata of St. Francis, solemn possession was taken of the presidio in the name of Spain; and on October 4th, the day of St.
Francis, the mission was formally dedicated. The cross was raised, the Te Deum was chanted, while bells and guns chorused to sea and sky.
The mission was in a little fertile valley four miles from the Presidio, near a small creek now filled in. It became known as the Mission de los Dolores, in honor of the sorrows of Mary.
[Ill.u.s.tration THE DISCOVERY OF SAN FRANCIs...o...b..Y. FROM THE PAINTING BY A.F.
MATHEWS.]
Hostile tribes from the south had lately fallen upon the Indians of the peninsula, firing their _rancherias_, murdering many of the inhabitants, and terrorizing the rest into flight. So the savages proved scarce at first. Even in 1802 the Indians at the Mission numbered only about eight hundred. But these natives, like all the Californian Indians, though quite docile, proved stupid and brutish and lazy. They made little progress from savagery to the state of _gentes de razon_, or ”reasonable beings,” fit to populate the pueblos.
This mission _regime_, however futile it may have been, however formal and external its religious training, seems to have touched upon some of the educational and sociological thought of our own time. It made use of the wisdom Spain had learned from her Roman conquerors--the taking of the conquered into full partners.h.i.+p. The idea of the daily contact of superior with inferior; of community of property and co-operation in labor; of the union of manual work with mental drill--all these were rudely exemplified in the mission life. Sixty years was the span of the experiment, a brief time for an effort in civilization.
[Ill.u.s.tration MISSION DOLORES. BUILT IN 1776.]
The Mission Dolores grew after the general plan of the score of others in California. It was built about an open court, the place for work or recreation. The chapel stood at one end of the rectangle; the living rooms, storehouses, and shops lined the other sides. Only the chapel, thrice restored, with its _campo santo_ beside it, remains of the Dolores structure. When Beechy visited it in 1829, it was already a crumbling ruin. The sun-dried bricks, here as at the other unprotected mission relics, are fast melting back into the earth. The adobe, like the swallow's nest, cannot endure the hammers and chisels of wind and rain and sun.
Little of moment occurred at Dolores till the days of secularization. The barren, sand-driven, wind-swept hills were not attractive to the Spanish, and the Mission was not in high estimation with the authorities. Don Pedro de Aberini wrote of it in 1776: ”Of all sites in California this Mission is situated upon the worst.” Nevertheless, in 1825, the Mission, from a few head of stock and a few sacks of seed brought in 1776, had acc.u.mulated 76,000 cattle, 79,000 sheep, 40,000 horses, and $60,000 in money and products.
Mexico's jealousy of the sympathy which the padres felt for Spain, from whom Mexico had torn herself in 1822; the clamoring of settlers for the lands held by the missions; quixotic pleas of Mexican statesmen for Indian autocracy; and perhaps, under all, an itching for the Pious Fund that supported the mission work--these led on to the secularization of the missions in 1836. The Indian, civilized only surface-deep, was unready for civilized self-government; and so he fell back to barbarism, plus dissipation--his last state worse than the first.
The Dolores Indians were especially incompetent, and no attempt was made to organize a pueblo for them. So Dolores, after secularization, dragged out an anomalous existence as a lapsed mission, carried on by political rather than by ecclesiastical rule, with an alcalde rather than a padre in charge.
In 1835 the embarcadero of Yerba Buena two miles from the Presidio, was, at command of Governor Figueroa, made the port of entry. This place (named from a medicinal weed growing about the cove) was only a landing-place for fishermen and hide droghers. Only one house stood here at this time. Not a sail shadowed the bay. Herds of deer came down to the water and schools of seal swam to the sh.o.r.e. Yet Yerba Buena afterward absorbed the Mission and the Presidio on the margin of Golden Gate, and took the name of the Bay, thus becoming the germ of the present city.
A knowledge of the charm and worth of the sovereign bay queening the western sh.o.r.e of North America was rapidly travelling the world. In 1806, the Russian Rezanof had visited it officially. His coming and going has a romantic interest, as his betrothal to Dona Concepcion, the beautiful daughter of Arguello, commandant of the Presidio, his tragic death on his way home, and her retirement to a convent, made the Evangeline tale of early California. England in 1840 sent Belcher to the bay to gather information, and France sent de Mofras.