California’s Great Missions: Romance, Controversy, Heritage
Some places were founded by great armies as they emerged victorious from difficult battles and successful invasions. Others became places by royal decree. But California, one of the largest economies in the world, was founded with a degree of humility by a five-foot two-inch priest named Junípero Serra.
Fourth-grade teachers across the state of California continue to take their classes on field trips to the rebuilt missions of San Juan Capistrano, San Fernando, Santa Barbara, and San Rafael. If one grew up in California, these experientially enhanced history lessons helped one learn about Father Serra’s missions to convert native peoples and became part of one’s own heritage. A child’s eye might focus on the wide, sweeping arches and red-tiled roofs of the buildings or the magnificent altarpieces inside these sacred spaces. The quiet, still places of the missions engage the attention of California fourth graders every year but they should also attract the attention of a more worldly audience, especially those who appreciate wine.
Those fortunate enough to live anywhere near the coast of California are almost all within just a few driving hours of a mission still standing today. Travel to the mission south of Point Reyes in Marin County or to those in San Francisco, Santa Barbara, or Los Angeles. Although the Central Coast mission at San Miguel sustained damage during a 2003 earthquake, it has worked to repair itself through the help of federal and local governments and organizations as well as individuals committed to the sustainability of this particular mission. Other famous missions in San Juan Capistrano and San Diego attract the student and tourist alike.
When Britain was still the uncontested ruler of a handful of colonies along the Atlantic coast approximately 250 years ago, Spain struggled with how to control the lands north of the Sonora Desert without more colonists on the ground. Without detailed maps, no one knew what was out there in this terra incognito. Spain sensed the increasing pressure from individual entrepreneurs and the national forces behind them who likewise harbored powerful feelings about the west coast of the North American continent.
Charles III, king of Spain, the ostensible “ruler” of this area at the beginning of the North American revolutionary war, faced a problem: the Russians were coming right down the coast from Alaska to hunt sea otter. Charles III didn’t want them interfering with the second biggest jewel in his crown, the Viceroyalty of New Spain, now known as Mexico. He needed the Spanish flag firmly planted as far north as possible and the land not merely claimed for his empire but sufficiently occupied to deter the Russians from settling and claiming California for themselves. He also needed it done cheaply. Perhaps the church could help?
Although Charles III didn’t care for friars or for religious interference in government, he decided to send north small numbers of Franciscans along with roughly a company of his army. The soldiers would show the Spanish flag. The idea was that the Franciscans would induce the native population to convert to Catholicism and become Spanish subjects before the Russians could grab this valuable turf for themselves.
On July 16, 1769, Father Junípero Serra officially founded the first mission and raised a cross at Mission San Diego de Alcalá. Around this time, the Spanish naval commander Gaspar de Portolà went north to settle Monterey as the capital of the province of Alta California.
Father Serra and his successors founded a total of 21 missions between San Diego and Sonoma, each of them two days’ ride apart by horse. Between the missions, they established much smaller inns, or asistencias (or estancias) to aid travelers and where they also raised cattle. The Franciscans called the road between the missions, at least as far as Monterey, “El Camino Real” or “the King’s Highway.”
According to a legend taught to millions of school children, the band of friars scattered mustard seeds along the way to mark the road for travelers. Proliferation of those mustard seeds can still be seen on every open hillside along El Camino Real and beyond, especially during the spring when they produce millions of bright yellow flowers. During the 60-year life of the Spanish missions of California, from their founding by the Spanish Crown to their secularization by the Mexican republic, these flowers were emblematic of mission rule. Scattering the seeds was a simple convenience, attractive and well meaning, but the Franciscans’ trail-marker unwittingly crowded out native vegetation.
When the seeds were scattered and missions were founded, 300,000 native people lived in the area we now know as California. By the end of the mission era in the 1830’s, that population declined by two-thirds and most native cultures were extinct. Such unfortunate data begs the question: were the missions a good thing or not?
Mission Legacy
If you listen to the traditional view taught to generations of school children, the missions were islands of tranquility dotted with happy people living safe and bountiful lives under the benevolent rule of pious and kindly friars. However, if you listen to revisionist historians, the missions were slave labor camps into which the native population was forced, a process the Spanish called “reduction.” Men and women were separated, unless married in a church, and forced to live under a highly rigorous schedule of work and prayer regulated by the pealing of church bells.
A more moderate view refutes both arguments. Little evidence suggests that the native Californian Indians were kidnapped, dragged off their land, or chained to plows. As Jim Graves, a docent at the San Juan Capistrano Mission, says, “How could two padres and six Spanish soldiers force a thousand Indians to do anything?”
Professor James Sandos agrees that the Franciscans didn’t force anyone onto the missions. As Farquhar Professor of the Southwest at the University of Redlands, Sandos wrote Converting California: Indians and Franciscans in the Missions. He serves as a renowned expert in the history of the mission period and refutes the charges of institutional slavery. “[Native peoples] came [to the missions] for a variety of reasons,” Sandos says. “Some in the north fled war between hostile tribes. Some eventually ran away from the missions, perhaps 10 percent, but the term slavery is inappropriate. No Indian was ever bought or sold. The Franciscans considered them wards who needed to be educated. [Contrary to practices at the missions], no plantation owner ever gave a slave six weeks off each year to visit relatives or ever promised a slave, ‘One day, all of this will be yours.’” The Franciscans offered both of these benefits to their Indian workers. Unfortunately, these promises were broken after Mexican intervention.
While he can identify some positive influence on the native peoples, Sandos also believes that the Franciscans were out of touch with reality because they wanted the native peoples to become just like them. “[The Franciscans] were creatures of their religious culture, which was obsolete even in their day. These mission fathers believed that conversion to Christianity required expunging the past.”
Why did these native peoples comply with such a new approach to the world made possible by the Catholic church? Perhaps the Indians gave up their traditions and joined missions simply to have access to a stable food supply. Sandos and others suggest that the Franciscans inadvertently forced the Indians onto the missions by allowing their own cattle to eat, trample and drive out the native sweet grasses that were a main food supply: “Cattle loved the native grasses, ate them, knocked them down and left the seeds of inedible foreign grasses in their droppings, leaving the natives with little choice. It appears that the first Mission San Diego was actually founded right on a sweet grass field, which deeply angered the Indians and sparked a rebellion.” The first mission at San Diego was burned in 1775 by Indians from surrounding villages.
Beyond the sweetgrass trespass, the worst thing the mission fathers did, according to Sandos, was also unintentional. The Franciscans and their Spanish soldiers and tradesmen brought infectious diseases with them to the New World which decimated the mission wards and which left their survivors sterile. European populations and the Indian populations of “New Spain” had become accustomed to these plagues, but the Californian native peoples had not.
By the time the missions were dissolved by fiat of the Mexican government in 1833, their population had been reduced by two-thirds. The survivors were left leaderless and destitute. The lands the Franciscans had held in trust for the Indians were sold or given to wealthy Mexicans to build vast ranchos, which have also left their mark on California.
Mostly built of adobe, many mission buildings constructed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries rapidly fell into ruin and simply washed away. The initial power of the California missions lasted for roughly 60 years but it has continued on with modern-day Californians funding faux mission-style buildings for more than 100 years. Sandos believes much of the legend was created to finance reconstruction and, indeed, builders still feel the urge to capitalize on the mission mystique with their false tile roofs.
– by Stan Brin
– photos by Eric Stoner
