Page:Mexico, Aztec, Spanish and Republican, Vol 2.djvu/441





Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo confirmed the title to Upper California which the United States had gained by war. Although the geographical position of that region, the security of its harbors, and the supposed value of its soil, had attracted the attention of our people at an early day, it was not imagined, at the period of the cession, that the new territory would so soon become the nucleus of the first Anglo-Saxon empire on the shores of the Pacific. Its rapid development was owing rather to circumstances of an extraordinary character, than to the commercial and progressive spirit of our citizens; but the national energy which is always alive to individual interests, was never more completely illustrated than by the alacrity with which all classes rushed to the new scenes of labor, and turned to gold the soils that Indians and Mexicans had trodden for centuries as worthless sand.

Lower California was discovered, visited, and partly settled by the Spanish adventurers soon after the Mexican conquest, and although the coasts of Upper California had been explored in 1542, it was not until the eighteenth century that the "spiritual conquest" of that distant region was undertaken by the Roman clergy, under whose directions the missions were founded upon a "pious fund," created by the zealous Catholics of Mexico. At that time it was supposed that the civilizing influences of religion would not only win thousands of savages to the worship of God, but that by blending agriculture and trade under the tutelage of the church, the Indians