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 CALIFORNIA

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CALIFORNIA

During their long incumbency, which lasted to about the year 1S40, the Dominicans established the following new missions between San Fernando de Velicata and San Diego: Rosario (1774); Santo Domingo (1775); San Vincente Ferrer (1780); San Miguel (1787); Santo Tomas (1791); San Pedro Martir (1794); and Santa Catarina Martir (1797). Little is on record about the activity of these friars. As far as known, down to the year 1800, seventy Dominicans came to the peninsula. How many died at their missions, or how many arrived after that year, it is impossible to say. The missions were finally secularized by the Mexican Government in 1834. The management of the land, stock, and other temporalities was taken from the missionaries and turned over to hired comisionados, with the same result that was experienced after the departure of the Jesuits. The Indians gradually disappeared and the missions decayed, so much so that a government report in 1S56 declared the missions to be in ruins, and gave the Indian population of the whole penin- sula as only 193S souls.

II. Upper California. — Don Jose 1 de Galvez, the inspector-general, was sent to Lower California not merely for the purpose of correcting abuses; he had been directed to secure for the Crown of Spain the whole north- west coast as far as it had been dis- covered and ex- plored by Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo in 1542, and by SebastianVizcaino in 1602-1603. The Russians had often visited that ter- ritory with a view, Spain believed, of taking possession which would have endangered the lucrative Philip- pine trade. To prevent any for- eign power from acquiring the country, which Spain claimed by right of discovery, the Spanish king resolved to found missions among the natives and to erect forts or presidios for their protection. Galvez consulted Father Junipero Serra, then superior of the penin- sula missions, who enthusiastically agreed to the plan, as it gave to his insatiable zeal a wider sphere. Two ships, the San Carlos and the San Antonio, were equipped and freighted with pro- visions, agricultural implements, and church-goods. The San Carlos sailed for the port of San Diego from La Paz in January, 1769; the San Antonio departed from Cape San Lucas in February. The latter ship, having on board a Franciscan friar, reached the port on the 1 1th of April; the San Carlos, also bringing a friar, and with a crew suffering from scurvy, arrived on the 29th of April.

Meanwhile Galvez also sent out two land expedi- tions for the same port. The first under Captain Rivera arrived at San Diego with Father Juan Crespi on the 11th of May; the other, under Governor Portola with Father Junipero Serra, came up 1 July, 1769. By order of the inspector-general all the missions along the route contributed church- goods, provisions, and live-stock according to their means for the benefit of the new establishments in the north. San Diego had been discovered by Ca-

Statue of Jun:

brillo and named San Miguel for the archangel; the appellation San Diego was given by Vizcaino who also named a bay farther north Monterey. It was at this bay that the presidio or fort was to be located. Governor Portola therefore set out by land to find it, but failed and instead discovered the present San Francisco Bay, 1 November, 1769. Meanwhile Father Junipero founded, 16 July, 1769, the first in the chain of missions which extended from San Diego to Sonoma, a distance of about six hundred miles.

A second expedition by land, and another by sea, at last reached the port of Monterey in May. 1770; thereafter it was the headquarters for the governor as well as the presidente of the missions. The con- ditions in Upper California were much more fa- vourable to the system under which it was intended to convert and civilize the natives, and the latter were found less dull and brutish than those of the peninsula. The Indians about San Diego, however, stubbornly resisted the Gospel, even by force of arms, so that prior to April, 1770, a full year after the ap- pearance of the first missionary, Father Serra and his companions, with all their kindness, persuasive- ness, and presents, did not succeed in gaining a single soul, a fact which makes the historian Bancroft ex- claim: "In all the missionary annals of the northwest there is no other instance where paganism remained stubborn so long."

When a sufficient number of religious had arrived, Father Serra, in compliance with the rules of his apostolic college, which forbade a friar to live alone, placed two fathers at each mission. To these the governor assigned a guard of five or six soldiers under a corporal. The latter generally acted as steward of the mission temporalities subject to the missionaries. For the erection of the temporary church and other structures at each mission, and for the purchase of agricultural implements and church-goods, the Gov- ernment, out of the revenues of the Pious Fund, paid to the procurator of the Franciscan college in Mexico the sum of one thousand dollars. Each missionary was allowed an annual stipend of four hundred dol- lars. This money was likewise paid to the procurator who would purchase the articles designated by the missionaries. Money was never sent to the religious in California. When a site had been selected for a mission, the temporary buildings were constructed. As soon as practical, permanent structures took their place, and were built of adobe or sunburnt brick, or in a few cases of stone, generally in the form of a square. The church was located usually in one corner, and adjoining this stood the quarters of the missionaries to which women or girls had no admit- tance. Then followed the rooms of the attendants and cooks, who were Indian youths selected from among the converts. The sides and rear of the mission square, enclosing a courtyard called the patio, contained the shops, store-rooms, granary, stables, and apartments for the young women. This last- named part of the mission was called the monjerio or nunnery, and the inmates went by the name of nuns, though of course they were not nuns in reality. The monjerio was an important and necessary institution of the mission system and due to the carnal propen- sity of the Indians. According to this arrangement girls twelve years of age and more, and younger girls who had lost both parents, made their home at the mission in charge of a trustworthy matron, where they lived pretty much like the girls at an orphanage or boarding school. During the day. when rot occu- pied at work in their shops, they wore permitted to visit their parents in the neophyte village, but at night they had to rest in the mission building under the eyes "of the matron. Young men, too, though not kept so strictly, had their quarters in another section of the mission buildings in charge of the mis-