[ THE DISCOVERY OF SAN FRANCISCO BAY. FROM THE PAINTING BY A.F. MATHEWS.]

Hostile tribes from the south had lately fallen upon the Indians of the peninsula, firing their rancherias, murdering many of the inhabitants, and terrorizing the rest into flight. So the savages proved scarce at first. Even in 1802 the Indians at the Mission numbered only about eight hundred. But these natives, like all the Californian Indians, though quite docile, proved stupid and brutish and lazy. They made little progress from savagery to the state of gentes de razon, or "reasonable beings," fit to populate the pueblos.

This mission régime, however futile it may have been, however formal and external its religious training, seems to have touched upon some of the educational and sociological thought of our own time. It made use of the wisdom Spain had learned from her Roman conquerors—the taking of the conquered into full partnership. The idea of the daily contact of superior with inferior; of community of property and co-operation in labor; of the union of manual work with mental drill—all these were rudely exemplified in the mission life. Sixty years was the span of the experiment, a brief time for an effort in civilization.

[ MISSION DOLORES. BUILT IN 1776.]

The Mission Dolores grew after the general plan of the score of others in California. It was built about an open court, the place for work or recreation. The chapel stood at one end of the rectangle; the living rooms, storehouses, and shops lined the other sides. Only the chapel, thrice restored, with its campo santo beside it, remains of the Dolores structure. When Beechy visited it in 1829, it was already a crumbling ruin. The sun-dried bricks, here as at the other unprotected mission relics, are fast melting back into the earth. The adobe, like the swallow's nest, cannot endure the hammers and chisels of wind and rain and sun.

Little of moment occurred at Dolores till the days of secularization. The barren, sand-driven, wind-swept hills were not attractive to the Spanish, and the Mission was not in high estimation with the authorities. Don Pedro de Aberini wrote of it in 1776: "Of all sites in California this Mission is situated upon the worst." Nevertheless, in 1825, the Mission, from a few head of stock and a few sacks of seed brought in 1776, had accumulated 76,000 cattle, 79,000 sheep, 40,000 horses, and $60,000 in money and products.

Mexico's jealousy of the sympathy which the padres felt for Spain, from whom Mexico had torn herself in 1822; the clamoring of settlers for the lands held by the missions; quixotic pleas of Mexican statesmen for Indian autocracy; and perhaps, under all, an itching for the Pious Fund that supported the mission work—these led on to the secularization of the missions in 1836. The Indian, civilized only surface-deep, was unready for civilized self-government; and so he fell back to barbarism, plus dissipation—his last state worse than the first.

The Dolores Indians were especially incompetent, and no attempt was made to organize a pueblo for them. So Dolores, after secularization, dragged out an anomalous existence as a lapsed mission, carried on by political rather than by ecclesiastical rule, with an alcalde rather than a padre in charge.

In 1835 the embarcadero of Yerba Buena two miles from the Presidio, was, at command of Governor Figueroa, made the port of entry. This place (named from a medicinal weed growing about the cove) was only a landing-place for fishermen and hide droghers. Only one house stood here at this time. Not a sail shadowed the bay. Herds of deer came down to the water and schools of seal swam to the shore. Yet Yerba Buena afterward absorbed the Mission and the Presidio on the margin of Golden Gate, and took the name of the Bay, thus becoming the germ of the present city.

A knowledge of the charm and worth of the sovereign bay queening the western shore of North America was rapidly travelling the world. In 1806, the Russian Rezanof had visited it officially. His coming and going has a romantic interest, as his betrothal to Doña Concepcion, the beautiful daughter of Arguello, commandant of the Presidio, his tragic death on his way home, and her retirement to a convent, made the Evangeline tale of early California. England in 1840 sent Belcher to the bay to gather information, and France sent de Mofras.