Part 7 (2/2)
If the United States Government does not take steps to avert this danger, to give them lands and protect them in their rights, the chapter of the history of the Mission Indians will be the blackest one in the black record of our dealings with the Indian race.
It must be done speedily if at all, for there is only a small remnant left to be saved. These are in their present homes ”only on the patience of the thief; and it may be that the patience do not last to-morrow.”
ECHOES IN THE CITY OF THE ANGELS.
The tale of the founding of the city of Los Angeles is a tale for verse rather than for prose. It reads like a page out of some new ”Earthly Paradise,” and would fit well into song such as William Morris has sung.
It is only a hundred years old, however, and that is not time enough for such song to simmer. It will come later, with the perfume of century-long summers added to its flavor. Summers century-long? One might say a stronger thing than that of them, seeing that their blossoming never stops, year in nor year out, and will endure as long as the visible frame of the earth.
The twelve devout Spanish soldiers who founded the city named it at their leisure with a long name, musical as a chime of bells. It answered well enough, no doubt, for the first fifty years of the city's life, during which not a munic.i.p.al record of any sort or kind was written,--”Nuestra Senora Reina de los Angeles,” ”Our Lady the Queen of the Angels;” and her portrait made a goodly companion flag, unfurled always by the side of the flag of Spain.
There is a legend, that sounds older than it is, of the ceremonies with which the soldiers took possession of their new home. They were no longer young. They had fought for Spain in many parts of the Old World, and followed her uncertain fortunes to the New. Ten years some of them had been faithfully serving Church and King in sight of these fair lands, for which they hankered, and with reason.
In those days the soft, rolling, treeless hills and valleys, between which the Los Angeles River now takes its s.h.i.+lly-shallying course seaward, were forest slopes and meadows, with lakes great and small.
This abundance of trees, with s.h.i.+ning waters playing among them, added to the limitless bloom of the plains and the splendor of the snow-topped mountains, must have made the whole region indeed a paradise.
Navarro, Villavicencia, Rodriguez, Quintero, Moreno, Lara, Banegas, Rosas, and Canero, these were their names: happy soldiers all, honored of their king, and discharged with so royal a gift of lands thus fair.
Looking out across the Los Angeles hills and meadows to-day, one easily lives over again the joy they must have felt. Twenty-three young children there were in the band, poor little waifs of camp and march. What a ”braw flitting” was it for them, away from the drum-beat forever into the shelter of their own sunny home! The legend says not a word of the mothers, except that there were eleven of them, and in the procession they walked with their children behind the men.
Doubtless they rejoiced the most.
The Fathers from the San Gabriel Mission were there, with many Indian neophytes, and Don Felipe, the military governor, with his showy guard of soldiers.
The priests and neophytes chanted. The Cross was set up, the flag of Spain and the banner of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels unfurled, and the new town marked out around a square, a little to the north of the present plaza of Los Angeles.
If communities, as well as individuals, are happy when history finds nothing to record of them, the city of the Queen of the Angels must have been a happy spot during the first fifty years of its life; for not a written record of the period remains, not even a record of grants of land. The kind of grant that these worthy Spanish soldiers and their sons contented themselves with, however, hardly deserved recording,--in fact, was not a grant at all, since its continuance depended entirely on the care a man took of his house and the improvement he put on his land. If he left his house unoccupied, or let it fall out of repair, if he left a field uncultivated for two years, any neighbor who saw fit might denounce him, and by so doing acquire a right to the property. This sounds incredible, but all the historical accounts of the time agree on the point. They say,--
”The granting authorities could, and were by law required, upon a proper showing of the abandonment, to grant the property to the informant, who then acquired the same and no better rights than those possessed by his predecessor.”
This was a premium indeed on staying at home and minding one's business,--a premium which amounted to coercion. One would think that there must have been left from those days teeming records of alienated estates, s.h.i.+fted tenures, and angry feuds between neighbor and neighbor. But no evidence remains of such strifes. Life was too simple, and the people were too ignorant.
Their houses were little more than hovels, built of mud, eight feet high, with flat roofs made of reeds and asphaltum. Their fields, with slight cultivation, produced all they needed; and if anything lacked, the rich vineyards, wheat-fields, and orchards of the San Gabriel Mission lay only twelve miles away. These vineyards, orchards, and granaries, so near at hand, must have been sore temptation to idleness. Each head of a family had been presented, by the paternal Spanish king, with ”two oxen, two mules, two mares, two sheep, two goats, two cows, one calf, an a.s.s, and one hoe.” For these they were to pay in such small instalments as they were able to spare out of their pay and rations, which were still continued by the generous king.
In a climate in which flowers blossom winter and summer alike, man may bask in sun all the year round if he chooses. Why, then, should those happy Spanish soldiers work? Even the king had thought it unnecessary, it seems, to give them any implements of labor except ”one hoe.” What could a family do, in the way of work, with ”one hoe”? Evidently, they did not work, neither they, nor their sons, nor their sons' sons after them; for, half a century later, they were still living a life of almost incredible ignorance, redeemed only by its simplicity and childlike adherence to the old religious observances.
Many of those were beautiful. As late as 1830 it was the custom throughout the town, in all the families of the early settlers, for the oldest member of the family--oftenest it was a grandfather or grandmother--to rise every morning at the rising of the morning star, and at once to strike up a hymn. At the first note every person in the house would rise, or sit up in bed and join in the song. From house to house, street to street, the singing spread; and the volume of musical sound swelled, until it was as if the whole town sang.
The hymns were usually invocations to the Virgin, to Jesus, or to some saint. The opening line of many of them was,--
”Rejoice, O Mother of G.o.d.”
A ma.n.u.script copy of one of these old morning songs I have seen, and had the good fortune to win a literal translation of part of it, in the soft, Spanish-voiced, broken English, so pleasant to hear. The first stanza is the chorus, and was repeated after each of the others:--
”Come, O sinners, Come, and we will sing Tender hymns To our refuge.
”Singers at dawn, From the heavens above, People all regions; Gladly we too sing.
”Singing harmoniously, Saying to Mary, 'O beautiful Queen, Princess of Heaven!
”'Your beautiful head Crowned we see; The stars are adorning Your beautiful hair;
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