The Interior of Pala Chapel After the Restoration.
The Ruins of the Pala Campanile, After Its Fall in January, 1916.
The Pala outpost shared the fate of the mother mission, San Luis Rey. It became a prey to the elements and to vandalism. It was soon a ruin, uninhabited and unhabitable. Even the water ditch, not being kept in repair, soon became useless. Thus matters stood until the United States decided to remove the Indians living on Warner's Ranch to Pala.
Longevity used to be quite common among the Pala and other Indians. To attain the age of a hundred years was nothing uncommon, and some lived to be a hundred and fifty and even more years old. A short time ago Leona Ardilla died at Temecula, which, like Pala, used to be a part of the Mission of San Luis Rey. Leona was computed to be fully 113 years old. She well remembered Padre Peyri,—el buena padre, she called him,—and could tell definitely of his going away, of the Indians following him to San Diego, and their grief that they could not bring him back. Often have I heard her tell the story of the eviction of the Indians from San Pasqual, as described in Ramona, and the struggle her people had for the necessities of life after that disastrous event.
Of gentle disposition, uncomplaining regarding the many and great wrongs done her people by the white man, she lived a simple Indian life, eating her porridge of weewish, the bellota of the Spanish, that is, acorn. This was for years her staple food. She ate it as she worked on her baskets, with the prayers on her lips which were taught her by Padre Peyri.
Though deaf and nearly blind for over 20 years, Leona sat daily in the open with some boughs at her back, the primitive, unroofed break-wind described as the only habitation of many of the Indians at the advent of the spiritual conquistadores of California. There, in the shade of her kish, she sat and wove baskets. A few days before she died she tried to finish a basket which had been begun over a month before, but her death intervened and it remains unfinished.
A year hence, when the Indians hold their memorial dance of the dead, this basket will be burned, together with whatever articles of clothing she may have left.
The old basket maker's only living child was Michaela. She is 80 years of age, and was at her mother's death-bed.