Glimpses of Three Coasts

by Helen Hunt Jackson

"At the end of sixty years the missionaries of Upper California found themselves in the possession of twenty-one prosperous missions, planted on a line of about seven hundred miles, running from San Diego north to the latitude of Sonoma. More than thirty thousand Indian converts were lodged in the mission buildings, receiving religious culture, assisting at divine worship, and cheerfully performing their easy tasks.... If we ask where are now the thirty thousand Christianized Indians who once enjoyed the beneficence and created the wealth of the twenty-one Catholic missions of California, and then contemplate the most wretched of all want of systems which has surrounded them under our own government, we shall not withhold our admiration from those good and devoted men who, with such wisdom, sagacity, and self-sacrifice, reared these wonderful institutions in the wilderness of California. They at least would have preserved these Indian races if they had been left to pursue unmolested their work of pious beneficence."[7]

Note.—The author desires to express her acknowledgments to H. H. Bancroft, of San Francisco, who kindly put at her disposal all the resources of his invaluable library; also to the Superior of the Franciscan College in Santa Barbara, for the loan of important books and manuscripts and the photograph of Father Junipero.

THE PRESENT CONDITION OF THE MISSION INDIANS IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA.

The old laws of the kingdom of the Indies are interesting reading, especially those portions of them relating to Indians. A certain fine and chivalrous quality of honor toward the helpless and tenderness toward the dependent runs all through their quaint and cumbrous paragraphs.

It is not until one studies these laws in connection with the history of the confusions and revolutions of the secularization period, and of the American conquest of California, that it becomes possible to understand how the California Mission Indians could have been left so absolutely unprotected, as they were, in the matter of ownership of the lands they had cultivated for sixty years.

"We command," said the Spanish king, "that the sale, grant, and composition of lands be executed with such attention that the Indians be left in possession of the full amount of lands belonging to them, either singly or in communities, together with their rivers and waters; and the lands which they shall have drained or otherwise improved, whereby they may by their own industry have rendered them fertile, are reserved, in the first place, and can in no case be sold or aliened. And the judges who have been sent thither shall specify what Indians they may have found on the land, and what lands they shall have left in possession of each of the elders of tribes, caciques, governors, or communities."

Grazing estates for cattle are ordered to be located "apart from the fields and villages of the Indians." The king's command is that no such estates shall be granted "in any parts or place where any damage can accrue to the Indians." Every grant of land must be made "without prejudice to the Indians;" and "such as may have been granted to their prejudice and injury" must be "restored to whomever they by right shall belong."

"In order to avoid the inconveniences and damages resulting from the sale or gift to Spaniards of tracts of land to the prejudice of Indians, upon the suspicious testimony of witnesses," the king orders that all sales and gifts are to be made before the attorneys of the royal audiencias, and "always with an eye to the benefit of the Indians;" and "the king's solicitors are to be protectors of the Indians and plead for them." "After distributing to the Indians what they may justly want to cultivate, sow, and raise cattle, confirming to them what they now hold, and granting what they may want besides, all the remaining land may be reserved to us," says the old decree, "clear of any incumbrance, for the purpose of being given as rewards, or disposed of according to our pleasure."

In those day's everything in New Spain was thus ordered by royal decrees. Nobody had grants of land in the sense in which we use the word. When the friars wished to reward an industrious and capable Indian, and test his capacity to take care of himself and family, by giving him a little farm of his own, all they had to do, or did, was to mark off the portion of land, put the Indian on it and tell him it was his. There would appear to have been little more formality than this in the establishing of the Indian pueblos which were formed in the beginning of the secularization period. Governor Figueroa, in an address in 1834, speaks of three of these, San Juan Capistrano, San Dieguito, and Las Flores, says that they are flourishing, and that the comparison between the condition of these Indians and that of the Spanish townsmen in the same region is altogether in favor of the Indians.