CHAPTER XXXIII.
THE MISSION ESTABLISHMENTS IN CALIFORNIA.—THEIR ORIGIN, OBJECTS, LOCALITIES, LANDS, REVENUES, OVERTHROW.
The missions of California are the most prominent features in her history. They were established to propagate the Roman faith, and extend the domain of the Spanish crown. They contemplated the conversion of the untutored natives, and a permanent possession of the soil. They were an extension of the same system which, half a century previous, had achieved such signal triumphs on the peninsula and through the northern provinces of Mexico. The founders were men of unwearied zeal and heroic action; their enterprise, fortitude, and unshaken purpose might rouse all the slumbering strings of the religious minstrel.
In Alta California these missions formed a religious cordon the entire extent of the coast. They were reared at intervals of twelve or fourteen leagues in all the great fertile valleys opening on the sea. The first was founded in 1769; others followed fast, and before the close of the century the whole twenty were in effective operation. Each establishment contained within itself the elements of its strength, the sources of its aggrandizement. It embraced a massive church, garnished with costly plate; dwellings, storehouses, and workshops, suited to the wants of a growing colony; broad lands, encircling meadows, forests, streams, orchards, and cultured fields, with cattle, sheep, and horses, grazing on a “thousand hills,” and game in every glade; and above all, a faith that could scoop up whole tribes of savages, dazzling them with the symbols of religion, and impressing them with the conviction that submission to the padres was obedience to God.
These vast establishments absorbed the lands, capital, and business of the country; shut out emigration, suppressed enterprise, and moulded every interest into an implement of ecclesiastical sway. In 1833, the supreme government of Mexico issued a decree which converted them into civil institutions, subject to the control of the state. The consequence was, the padres lost their power, and with that departed the enterprise and wealth of their establishments. The civil administrators plundered them of their stock, the governors granted to favorites sections of their lands, till, with few exceptions, only the huge buildings remain. Their localities will serve as important guides to emigrants in quest of lands adapted to pasturage and agriculture, and their statistics will show, to some extent, the productive forces of the soil. These have been gathered, with some pains, from the archives of each mission, and are grouped for the first time in these pages. They are like the missions themselves—skeletons. California, though seemingly young, is piled with the wrecks of the past; around the stately ruin flits the shade of the padre; his warm welcome to streaming guests still lingers in the hall; and the loud mirth of the festive crowds still echoes in the darkened arches. But all these good olden times are passed—their glorious realities are gone—like the sound and sunlit splendors of the wave dashed and broken on the remorseless rock.