"We are glad, indeed, to see you," he said. "Santa Ynez is a lonely place and our visitors do much to break the monotony of our lives."
To him it was a labor of love to tell the history of the mission and of his own connection with it, nor did he attempt to conceal his pride over the work he had accomplished. He first directed our attention to the beauty of the site—the fertile plain with luxuriant green fields and fruit-tree groves, surrounded by a wide arc of mountain peaks with rounded green foothills nearer at hand. Through the center of the valley, but a few hundred yards from the mission, flows the tree-fringed Santa Ynez River, a stream of goodly volume in the springtime and well stocked with mountain trout.
"Oh, they were shrewd, far-sighted men, those old Franciscan padres," said Father Buckler, "when it came to choosing a site for a mission. Do you know that old Governor Borica, who declared California 'the most peaceful and quiet country on earth,' was the man who located Santa Ynez in this spot, which he styled 'beautiful for situation' in making his report? Surely he knew, for he himself had made long explorations in the mountainous regions by the coast and five missions in 1796-7 were established by Padre Lasuen under the Governor's orders. Santa Ynez was founded in 1804; it was not one of the great missions, since its greatest population was only seven hundred and sixty-eight in 1816, but it was one of the most prosperous in proportion to its size. Its first church was destroyed by the earthquake of 1812, but five years later the chapel which you now see was completed. The arrangement and style of the buildings here in 1830 were much like Santa Barbara, though everything was on a smaller scale. The secularization took place five years later, at which time the property was considered worth almost fifty thousand dollars—which meant a good deal more than it would now. The Mexican Government had such poor success with the Indians that they gave the mission back to the padres in 1843, but the evil work had been done and prosperous days never returned. In 1850 it was abandoned and gradually fell into ruin.
BELL TOWER, SANTA YNEZ
From Photograph by Dassonville
"I was sent here with instructions to report on the feasibility of restoring the mission. I expected to remain but two months at most, and now eleven years have passed since I came. My work was well under way when the earthquake of 1906 compelled me to start over again and it was but two years ago that the bell-tower and several buttresses of the church suddenly crumbled and fell in a heap in the cemetery. We were only too thankful when we found the four ancient bells unharmed—the rest I was sure we could rebuild, and we did it in enduring concrete. Last Easter we held a special service to celebrate the restoration, and chimes were rung on the old bells from their place in the new tower.
"Our congregation is a small one and very poor. It includes about sixty Indians, most of whom live in and about Santa Ynez. They are all very religious and have great reverence for old paintings and figures. Many valuable relics have been looted from Santa Ynez Mission, but never by an Indian—the educated white man is usually the thief. Indeed, it was a college professor who stole a beautiful hand-wrought plate from the old door. Come with me, my friends, and see what we have done."
He led the way first to the chapel, a long, narrow, heavily buttressed structure built of adobe. The "fachada" is the restoration spoken of and the father hopes gradually to reproduce the ancient building in the same enduring material. In the chapel is a large collection of pictures, statues and candlesticks, some of them ancient and others of little value. Traces of the old decorations remain, mostly sadly defaced, except in the chancel, where the original design and coloring are still fairly perfect.
The padre then led us to his curio room, containing relics of ancient days. He is a true antiquarian and few if any of the missions had as good a collection. The most curious was a mechanical organ player, an extremely ingenious contrivance for enabling one with little musical ability to play the instrument, and an old horse fiddle, still capable of producing a hideous noise. Besides these there were rusty little cannons, antique flintlock muskets and pistols and swords of various kinds; candlesticks in silver and brass; ponderous locks and keys; church music done on parchment; great tomes of church records, bound in rawhide, and a great variety of vessels for ecclesiastical and domestic use. There was a huge yellow silk umbrella which was carried by the padres in days of old on their pedestrian trips from mission to mission, for the rules of the order forbade riding. So strict were they on this score that at one of the missions where the monks had been guilty of riding in carts the president ordered that these vehicles should all be burned.