"Why should we lock our doors in the place where we live? There are no white men there!"
I will confess that as a representative of the dominant Caucasian stock I had, for the moment, no apt reply ready. Later I thought of a very fitting retort, which undoubtedly would have flattened that impertinent Indian as flat as a flounder; unfortunately, though, it only came to me after several days of study, and by that time I was upward of a thousand miles away from him. But I am saving it to use on him the next time I go back to the Grand Cañon. No mere Indian can slander our race, even if he is telling the truth—not while I'm around!
Down in Southern California I rather figured on finding a large swarm of Mission Indians clustering about every Mission; but, alas! they weren't there, either. We saw a few worshipers and plenty of tourists, but no Indians—at least, I didn't see any personally. There is something wonderfully impressive about a first trip to any one of those old gray churches; everything about it is eloquent with memories of that older civilization which this Western country knew long before the Celt and the Anglo-Saxon breeds came over the Divide and down the Pacific Slope, filled with their lust for gold and lands, craving ever more power and more territory over which to float the Stars and Stripes.
The vanished day of the Spaniard now lives only within the walls of the early Missions, but it invests them with that added veneration which attaches to whatever is old and traditional and historic. We haven't a great deal that is very old in our own country; maybe that explains why we fuss over it so when we come across it in Europe.
AS SHE LEVELED THE LENS A YELL WENT UP FROM SOMEWHERE
There is one Mission which in itself, it seemed to me, is almost worth a trip clear across the continent to see—the one at Santa Barbara. It is up the side of a gentle foothill, with the mountains of the Coast Range behind it. Down below the roofs and spires of a brisk little city show through green clumpage, and still farther beyond the blue waters of the Pacific may be seen.
Parts of this Mission are comparatively new; there are retouchings and restorations that date back only sixty or seventy years, but most of it speaks to you of an earlier century than this and an earlier race than the one that now peoples the land. You pass through walls of solid masonry that are sixteen feet thick and pierced by narrow passages; you climb winding stairs to a squat tower where sundry cracked brazen bells, the gifts of Spanish gentlemen who died a hundred years ago perhaps, swing by withes of ancient rawhide from great, worm-gnawed, hand-riven beams; you walk through the Mission burying-ground, past crumbly old family vaults with half-obliterated names and titles and dates upon their ovenlike fronts, and you wander at will among the sunken individual graves under the palms and pepper trees.
Most convincing of all to me were the stone-flagged steps at the door of the church itself, for they are all worn down like the teeth of an old horse—in places they are almost worn in two. Better than any guidebook patter of facts and figures—better than the bells and the graves and the hand-made beams—these steps convey to the mind a sense of age.