Part 4 (2/2)
second source of income was from the sales of their own products: first to the presidios,--these sales paid for by drafts on the Spanish or Mexican Government; second, to trading s.h.i.+ps, coming more and more each year to the California coast.
As soon as revolutionary troubles began to agitate Spain and Mexico, the income of the missions from abroad began to fall off. The Pious Fund was too big a sum to be honestly administered by any government hard pressed for money. Spain began to filch from it early, to pay the bills of her wars with Portugal and England; and Mexico, as soon as she had the chance, followed Spain's example vigorously, selling whole estates and pocketing their price, farming the fund out for the benefit of the State treasury, and, finally, in Santa Anna's time, selling the whole outright to two banking-houses. During these troublous times the friars not only failed frequently to receive their regular stipends allotted from the interest of this Pious Fund, but their agent was unable to collect the money due them for the supplies furnished to the presidios. The sums of which they were thus robbed by two governments--that, being ostensibly of the Catholic faith, should surely have held the Church's property sacred--mounted up in a few years to such enormous figures that rest.i.tution would have been practically impossible, and, except for their own internal sources of revenue, the missions must have come to bankruptcy and ruin.
However, the elements which were to bring about this ruin were already at work,--were, indeed, inherent in the very system on which they had been founded. The Spanish Government was impatient to see carried out, and to reap the benefit of, the pueblo feature of its colonization plan. With a singular lack of realization of the time needed to make citizens out of savages, it had set ten years as the period at the expiration of which the Indian communities attached to the missions were to be formed into pueblos,--the missions to be secularized, that is, turned into curacies, the pueblo being the parish. This was, no doubt, the wise and proper ultimate scheme,--the only one, in fact, which provided either for the entire civilization of the Indian or the successful colonization of the country. But five times ten years would have been little enough to allow for getting such a scheme fairly under way, and another five times ten years for the finis.h.i.+ng and rounding of the work. It is strange how sure civilized peoples are, when planning and legislating for savages, to forget that it has always taken centuries to graft on or evolve out of savagery anything like civilization.
Aiming towards this completing of their colonization plan, the Spanish Government had very early founded the pueblos of Los Angeles and San Jose. A second cla.s.s of pueblos, called, in the legal phrase of California's later days, ”Presidial Pueblos,” had originated in the settlement of the presidios, and gradually grown up around them. There were four of these,--San Diego, Monterey, Santa Barbara, and San Francisco.
It is easy to see how, as these settlements increased, of persons more or less unconnected with the missions, there must have grown up discontent at the Church's occupation and control of so large a proportion of the country. Ready for alliance with this discontent was the constant jealousy on the part of the military authorities, whose measures were often--and, no doubt, often rightly--opposed by the friars. These fomenting causes of disquiet reacted on the impatience and greed in Spain; all together slowly, steadily working against the missions, until, in 1813, the Spanish Cortes pa.s.sed an act decreeing their secularization. This was set forth in sounding phrase as an act purely for the benefit of the Indians, that they might become citizens of towns. But it was, to say the least of it, as much for Spain as for the Indians, since, by its provisions, one half of the mission lands were to be sold for the payment of Spain's national debt. This act, so manifestly premature, remained a dead letter; but it alarmed the friars, and with reason. It was the tocsin of their doom, of the downfall of their establishments, and the ruin of their work.
Affairs grew more and more unsettled. Spanish viceroys and Mexican insurgents took turns at ruling in Mexico, and the representatives of each took turns at ruling in California. The waves of every Mexican revolution broke on the California sh.o.r.e. The College of San Fernando, in Mexico, also shared in the general confusion, and many of its members returned to Spain.
From 1817 to 1820 great requisitions were made by the Government upon the missions. They responded generously. They gave not only food, but money. They submitted to a tax, _per capita_, on all their thousands of Indians, to pay the expenses of a deputy to sit in the Mexican Congress. They allowed troops to be quartered in the mission buildings. At the end of the year 1820 the outstanding drafts on the Government, in favor of the missions, amounted to four hundred thousand dollars.
It is impossible, in studying the records of this time, not to feel that the friars were, in the main, disposed to work in good faith for the best interests of the State. That they opposed the secularization project is true; but it is unjust to a.s.sume that their motives in so doing were purely selfish. Most certainly, the results of the carrying out of that project were such as to prove all that they claimed of its untimeliness. It is easy saying, as their enemies do, that they would never have advocated it, and were not training the Indians with a view to it: but the first a.s.sertion is an a.s.sumption, and nothing more; and the refutation of the second lies in the fact that even in that short time they had made the savages into ”masons, carpenters, plasterers, soap-makers, tanners, shoe-makers, blacksmiths, millers, bakers, cooks, brick-makers, carters and cart-makers, weavers and spinners, saddlers, s.h.i.+p hands, agriculturists, herdsmen, vintagers;--in a word, they filled all the laborious occupations known to civilized society.”[5] Moreover, in many of the missions, plots of land had already been given to individual neophytes who seemed to have intelligence and energy enough to begin an independent life for themselves. But it is idle speculating now as to what would or would not have been done under conditions which never existed.
So long as Spain refused to recognize Mexico's independence, the majority of the friars, as was natural, remained loyal to the Spanish Government, and yielded with reluctance and under protest, in every instance, to Mexico's control. For some years President Sarria was under arrest for refusing to take the oath of allegiance to the Mexican republic. Nevertheless, it not being convenient to remove him and fill his place, he performed all his functions as president of the missions through that time. Many other friars refused to take the oath, and left the country in consequence. During three years the secularization project was continually agitated, and at intervals measures initiatory to it were decreed and sometimes acted upon.
The s.h.i.+fting governors of unfortunate California legislated for or against the mission interests according to the exigencies of their needs or the warmness or lukewarmness of their religious faith.
An act of one year, declaring the Indians liberated, and ordering the friars to turn over the mission properties to administrators, would be followed a few years later by an act restoring the power of the friars, and giving back to them all that remained to be rescued of the mission properties and converts. All was anarchy and confusion. During the fifty-five years that California was under Spanish rule she had but nine governors. During the twenty-four that she was under Mexican misrule she had thirteen. It would be interesting to know what the Indian populations thought, as they watched these quarrellings and intrigues among the Christians who were held up to them as patterns for imitation.
In a curious pamphlet left by one of the old friars, Father Boscana, is told a droll story of the logical inferences some of them drew from the political situations among their supposed betters. It was a band of San Diego Indians. When they heard that the Spanish viceroy in the city of Mexico had been killed, and a Mexican made emperor in his place, they forthwith made a great feast, burned up their chief, and elected a new one in his stead. To the stringent reproofs of the horrified friars they made answer: ”Have you not done the same in Mexico? You say your king was not good, and you killed him. Well, our captain was not good, and we burned him. If the new one turns out bad, we will burn him too,”--a memorable instance of the superiority of example to precept.
At last, in 1834, the final blow fell on the missions. The Governor of California, in compliance with instructions received from Mexico, issued an authoritative edict for their secularization. It was a long doc.u.ment, and had many significant provisions in it. It said that the Indians were now to be ”emanc.i.p.ated.” But the 16th article said that they ”should be obliged to join in such labors of community as are indispensable, in the opinion of the political chief, in the cultivation of the vineyards, gardens, and fields, which for the present remain unapportioned.” This was a curious sort of emanc.i.p.ation; and it is not surprising to read, in the political records of the time, such paragraphs as this: ”Out of one hundred and sixty Indian families at San Diego, to whom emanc.i.p.ation was offered by Governor Figueroa, only ten could be induced to accept it.” The friars were to hand over all records and inventories to stewards or administrators appointed. Boards of magistrates were also appointed for each village. One half of the movable property was to be divided among the ”emanc.i.p.ated persons,” and to each head of a family was to be given four hundred square yards of land. Everything else--lands, movable properties, property of all cla.s.ses--was to be put into the hands of the administrator, to be held subject to the Federal Government. Out of these properties the administrators were to provide properly for the support of the father or fathers left in charge of the church, the church properties, and the souls of the ”emanc.i.p.ated persons.” A more complete and ingenious subversion of the previously existing state of things could not have been devised; and it is hard to conceive how any student of the history of the period can see, in its shaping and sudden enforcing, anything except bold and unprincipled greed hiding itself under specious cloaks of right. Says Dwinelle, in his ”Colonial History:”--
”Beneath these specious pretexts was undoubtedly a perfect understanding between the Government of Mexico and the leading men in California, that in such a condition of things the Supreme Government might absorb the Pious Fund, under the pretence that it was no longer necessary for missionary purposes, and thus had reverted to the State as a quasi escheat, while the co-actors in California should appropriate the local wealth of the missions by the rapid and sure process of administering their temporalities.”
Of the manner in which the project was executed, Dwinelle goes on to say:--
”These laws, whose ostensible purpose was to convert the missionary establishments into Indian pueblos, their churches into parish churches, and to elevate the Christianized Indians to the rank of citizens, were after all executed in such a manner that the so-called secularization of the missions resulted in their plunder and complete ruin, and in the demoralization and dispersion of the Christianized Indians.”
It is only just to remember, however, that these laws and measures were set in force in a time of revolution, when even the best measures and laws could have small chance of being fairly executed, and that a government which is driven, as Mexico was, to recruiting its colonial forces by batches of selected prison convicts, is ent.i.tled to pity, if not charity, in our estimates of its conduct. Of course, the position of administrator of a mission became at once a political reward and a chance for big gains, and simply, therefore, a source and centre of bribery and corruption.
Between the governors--who now regarded the mission establishments as State property, taking their cattle or grain as freely as they would any other revenue, and sending orders to a mission for tallow as they would draw checks on the treasury--and the administrators, who equally regarded them as easy places for the filling of pockets, the wealth of the missions disappeared as dew melts in the sun. Through all this the Indians were the victims. They were, under the administrators, compelled to work far harder than before; they were ill-fed and ill-treated; they were hired out in gangs to work in towns or on farms, under masters who regarded them simply as beasts of burden; their rights to the plots of land which had been set off for them were, almost without exception, ignored. A more pitiable sight has not often been seen on earth than the spectacle of this great body of helpless, dependent creatures, suddenly deprived of their teachers and protectors, thrown on their own resources, and at the mercy of rapacious and unscrupulous communities, in time of revolution. The best comment on their sufferings is to be found in the statistics of the mission establishments after a few years of the administrators'
reign.
In 1834 there were, according to the lowest estimates, from fifteen to twenty thousand Indians in the missions. De Mofras's statistics give the number as 30,620. In 1840 there were left, all told, but six thousand. In many of the missions there were less than one hundred.
According to De Mofras, the cattle, sheep, horses, and mules, in 1834, numbered 808,000; in 1842, but 6,320. Other estimates put the figures for 1834 considerably lower. It is not easy to determine which are true; but the most moderate estimates of all tell the story with sufficient emphasis. There is also verbal testimony on these points still to be heard in California, if one has patience and interest enough in the subject to listen to it. There are still living, wandering about, half blind, half starved, in the neighborhood of the mission sites, old Indians who recollect the mission times in the height of their glory. Their faces kindle with a sad flicker of recollected happiness, as they tell of the days when they had all they wanted to eat, and the _padres_ were so good and kind: ”Bueno tiempo!
Bueno tiempo,” they say, with a hopeless sigh and shake of the head.
Under the new _regime_ the friars suffered hardly less than the Indians. Some fled the country, unable to bear the humiliations and hards.h.i.+ps of their positions under the control of the administrators or majors-domo, and dependent on their caprice for shelter and even for food. Among this number was Father Antonio Peyri, who had been for over thirty years in charge of the splendid mission of San Luis Rey.
In 1800, two years after its founding, this mission had 369 Indians.
In 1827 it had 2,686; it owned over twenty thousand head of cattle, and nearly twenty thousand sheep. It controlled over two hundred thousand acres of land, and there were raised in its fields in one year three thousand bushels of wheat, six thousand of barley, and ten thousand of corn. No other mission had so fine a church. It was one hundred and sixty feet long, fifty wide, and sixty high, with walls four feet thick. A tower at one side held a belfry for eight bells.
The corridor on the opposite side had two hundred and fifty-six arches. Its gold and silver ornaments are said to have been superb.
When Father Peyri made up his mind to leave the country, he slipped off by night to San Diego, hoping to escape without the Indians'
<script>