15 FATHER JUNIPERO AND HIS WORKA SKETCH OF THE FOUNDATION, PROSPERITY, AND RUIN OF THE FRANCISCAN MISSIONS IN CALIFORNIAI

DURING the years when Saint Francis went up and down the streets of Assisi, carrying in his delicate unused hands the stones for rebuilding St. Damiano, he is said to have been continually singing psalms, breaking forth into ejaculations of gratitude; his face beaming as that of one who saw visions of unspeakable delight. How much of the spirit or instinct of prophecy there might have been in his exultant joy, only he himself knew; but it would have been strange if there had not been vouchsafed to him at least a partial revelation of the splendid results which must of necessity follow the carrying out, in the world, of the divine impulses which had blazed up in his soul like a fire. As Columbus, from the trend of imperfectly known shores and tides, from the mysterious indications of vague untracked winds, could deduce the glorious certainty of hitherto undreamed 16 4 continents of westward land, so might the ardent spiritual discoverer see with inextinguishable faith the hitherto undreamed heights which must be surely reached and won by the path he pointed out. It is certain that very early in his career he had the purpose of founding an order whose members, being unselfish in life, should be fit heralds of God and mighty helpers of men. The absoluteness of self-renunciation which he inculcated and demanded startled even the thirteenth century's standard of religious devotion. Cardinals and pope alike doubted its being within the pale of human possibility; and it was not until after much entreaty that the Church gave its sanction to the "Seraphic Saint's" band of "Fratri Minores," and the organized work of the Franciscan Order began. This was in 1208. From then till now, the Franciscans have been, in the literal sense of the word, benefactors of men. Other of the orders in the Catholic Church have won more distinction, in the way of learning, political power, marvellous suffering of penances and deprivation; but the record of the Franciscans is in the main a record of lives and work, like the life and work of their founder; of whom a Protestant biographer has written: "So far as can be made out, he thought little of himself, even of his own soul to be saved, all his life. The trouble had been on his mind how sufficiently to work for God and to help men."

Under the head of helping men, come all enterprises of discovery, development, and civilization 17 5 which the earth has known; and in many more of these than the world generally suspects, has been an influence dating back to the saint of Assisi.

Father Junipero Serra

America most pre-eminently stands his debtor. Of the three to whom belongs the glory of its discovery, one, Juan Perez de Marchena, was a Franciscan friar; the other two, Queen Isabella and Columbus, were members of Saint Francis's Third Order; and of all the splendid 18 6 promise and wondrous development on the California coast to-day, Franciscan friars were the first founders.

In the Franciscan College at Santa Barbara is a daguerreotype, taken from an old portrait which was painted more than a hundred years ago, at the College of San Fernando, in Mexico. The face is one, once seen, never to be forgotten; full of spirituality and tenderness and unutterable pathos; the mouth and chin so delicately sensitive that one marvels how such a soul could have been capable of heroic endurance of hardship; the forehead and eyes strong, and radiant with quenchless purpose, but filled with that solemn, yearning, almost superhuman sadness, which has in all time been the sign and seal on the faces of men born to die for the sake of their fellows. It is the face of Father Junipero Serra, the first founder of Franciscan missions in South California. Studying the lineaments of this countenance, one recalls the earliest authentic portrait of Saint Francis, --the one painted by Pisano, which hangs in the sacristy of the Assisi church. There seems a notable likeness between the two faces: the small and delicate features, the broad forehead, and the expression of great gentleness are the same in both. But the saint had a joyousness which his illustrious follower never knew. The gayety of the troubadour melodies which Francis sung all through his youth never left his soul: but Serra's first and only songs were the solemn chants of the Church; his first lessons were received in a 19 7 convent; his earliest desire and hope was to become a priest.

Serra was born of lowly people in the island of Majorca, and while he was yet a little child sang as chorister in the convent of San Bernardino. He was but sixteen when he entered the Franciscan Order, and before he was eighteen he had taken the final vows. This was in the year 1730. His baptismal name, Michael Joseph, he laid aside on becoming a monk, and took the name of Junipero, after that quaintest and drollest of all Saint Francis's first companions; him of whom the saint said jocosely, "Would that I had a whole forest of such Junipers!"

Studying in the Majorca Convent at the same time with Serra, were three other young monks, beloved and intimate companions of his, --Palou, Verger, and Crespi´. The friendship thus early begun never waned; and the hearty and loving co-operation of the four had much to do with the success of the great enterprises in which, even in their student days, they looked forward with passionate longing. New Spain was, from the beginning, the goal of their most ardent wishes. All their conversations turned on this theme. Long years of delay and monastic routine did not dampen the ardor of the four friends. Again and again they petitioned to be sent as missionaries to the New World, and again and again were disappointed. At last, in 1749, there assembled in Cadiz a great body of missionaries, destined chiefly for Mexico; 20 8 and Serra and Palou received permission to join the band. Arriving at Cadiz, and finding two vacancies still left in the party, they pleaded warmly that Crespi´ and Verger be allowed to go also. At the very last moment this permission was given, and the four friends joyfully set sail in the same ship.

It is impossible at this distance of time to get any complete realization of the halo of exalted sentiment and rapture which then invested undertakings of this kind. From the highest to the lowest, the oldest to the youngest, it reached. Every art was lent to its service, every channel of expression stamped with its sign. Even on the rude atlases and charts of the day were pictures of monks embarking in ships of discovery; the Virgin herself looking on from the sky, with the motto above, "Matre Dei montravit via;" and on the ships' sails, "Unus non sufficit orbis."

In the memoir of Father Junipero, written by his friend Palou, are many interesting details of the voyage to Vera Cruz. It lasted ninety-nine days: provisions fell short; starvation threatened; terrific storms nearly wrecked the ship; but through all, Father Junipero's courage never failed. He said, "remembering the end for which they had come," he felt no fear. He performed mass each morning, and with psalms and exhortations cheered the sinking spirits of all on board.

For nineteen years after their arrival in Mexico, Father Junipero and his three friends were kept at work there, under the control of the College of San 21 9 Fernando, in founding missions and preaching. On the suppression of the Jesuit Order, in 1767, and its consequent expulsion from all the Spanish dominions, it was decided to send a band of Franciscans to California, to take charge of the Jesuit missions there. These were all in Lower California, no attempt at settlement having been yet made in Upper California.

Once more the friends, glad and exultant, joined a missionary band bound to new wildernesses. They were but three now, Verger remaining behind in the College of San Fernando. The band numbered sixteen. Serra was put in charge of it, and was appointed president of all the California missions. His biographer says he received this appointment "unable to speak a single word for tears." It was not strange, on the realization of a hope so long deferred. He was now fifty-six years old; and from boyhood his longing had been to labor among the Indians on the western shores of the New World.

It was now the purpose of the Spanish Government to proceed as soon as possible to the colonization of Upper California. The passion of the Church allied itself gladly with the purpose of the State; and the State itself had among its statesmen and soldiers many men who were hardly less fervid in religion than were those sworn exclusively to the Church's service. Such an one was Joseph de Galvez, who held the office of Visitor-General and Commander, representing the person of the King, and inspecting the working of the Government in every province of the 22 10 Spanish Empire. Upon him rested the responsibility of the practical organization of the first expedition into Upper California. It was he who ordered the carrying of all sorts of seeds of vegetables, grains, and flowers; everything that would grow in Old Spain he ordered to be planted in New. He ordered that two hundred head of cattle should be taken from the northernmost of the Lower California missions, and carried to the new posts. It was he also, as full of interest for chapel as for farm, who selected and packed with his own hands sacred ornaments and vessels for church ceremonies. A curious letter of his to Palou is extant, in which he says laughingly that he is a better sacristan than Father Junipero, having packed the holy vessels and ornaments quicker and better than he. There are also extant some of his original instructions to military and naval commanders which show his religious ardor and wisdom. He declares that the first object of the expedition is "to establish the Catholic religion among a numerous heathen people, submerged in the obscure darkness of paganism, to extend the dominion of the King our Lord, and to protect this peninsula from the ambitious views of foreign nations."

With no clearer knowledge than could be derived from scant records of Viscayno's voyage in 1602, he selected the two best and most salient points of the California coast, San Diego and Monterey, and ordered the founding of a mission at each. He also ordered the selection of a point midway between these 23

Santa Ynez Mission

24 25 13 two, for another mission to be called Buena Ventura. His activity, generosity, and enthusiasm were inexhaustible. He seems to have had humor as well; for when discussing the names of the missions to be founded, Father Junipero said to him, "But is there to be no mission for our Father Saint Francis?" he replied, "If Saint Francis wants a mission, let him show us his port, and we will put one there for him!"

The records of this first expedition into California are full of interest. It was divided into two parts, one to go by sea, and one by land; the sea party in two ships, and the land party in two divisions. Every possible precaution and provision was thought of by the wise Galvez; but neither precaution nor provision could make the journey other than a terrible one. Father Junipero, with his characteristic ardor, insisted on accompanying one of the land parties, although he was suffering severely from an inflamed leg, the result of an injury he had received twenty years before in journeying on foot from Vera Cruz to the city of Mexico. Galvez tried in vain to detain him; he said he would rather die on the road than not go, but that he should not die, for the Lord would carry him through. However, on the second day out, his pain became so great that he could neither sit, stand, nor sleep. Portala´, the military commander of the party, implored him to be carried in a litter; but this he could not brook. Calling one of the muleteers to him, he said, --

26 14

"Son, do you not know some remedy for this sore on my leg?"

"Father," replied the muleteer, "what remedy can I know? I have only cured beasts."

"Then consider me a beast," answered Serra; "consider this sore on my leg a sore back, and give me the same treatment you would apply to a beast."

Thus adjured, the muleteer took courage, and saying, "I will do it, Father, to please you," he proceeded to mix herbs in hot tallow, with which he anointed the wound, and so reduced the inflammation that Father Junipero slept all night, rose early, said matins and mass, and resumed his journey in comparative comfort. He bore this painful wound to the end of his life; and it was characteristic of the man as well as of the abnormal standards of the age, that he not only sought no measures for a radical cure of the diseased member, but, obstinately accepting the suffering as a cross, allowed the trouble to be aggravated in every way, by going without shoes or stockings and by taking long journeys on foot.

A diary kept by Father Crespi´ on his toilsome march from Vellicata´ to San Diego is full of quaint and curious entries, monotonous in its religious reiterations, but touching in its simplicity and unconscious testimony to his own single-heartedness and patience. The nearest approach to a complaint he makes is to say that "nothing abounds except stones and thorns." When they journey for days with no water except scanty rations from the 27 15 precious casks they are carrying, he always piously trusts water will be found on the morrow; and when they come to great tracts of impenetrable cactus thickets, through which they are obliged to hew a pathway with axes, as through a forest, and are drenched to the skin in cold rains, and deserted by the Christian Indians whom they had brought from Lower California as guides, he mentions the facts without a murmur, and has even for the deserters only a benediction: "May God guard the misguided ones!" A far more serious grievance to him is that toward the end of the journey he could no longer celebrate full mass because the wafers had given out. Sometimes the party found themselves hemmed in by mountains, and were forced to halt for days while scouts went ahead to find a pass. More than once, hoping that at last they had found a direct and easy route, they struck down to the sea-shore, only to discover themselves soon confronted by impassable spurs of the Coast Range, and forced to toil back again up into the labyrinths of mesas and cactus plains. It was Holy Thursday, the 24th of March, when they set out, and it was not until the 13th of May that they reached the high ground from which they had their first view of the bay of San Diego, and saw the masts of the ships lying at anchor there, --"which sight was a great joy and consolation to us all," says the diary.

They named this halting-place "Espiritu Santo." It must have been on, or very near, the ridge where now runs the boundary line between the United 28 16 States and Mexico, as laid down by the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. It is a grand promontory, ten miles southeast of San Diego, thrusting out to sea; bare of trees, but matted thick with the dewy ice-plant, and in early spring carpeted with flowers. An ugly monument of stone stands there, bearing the names of the American and Mexican commissioners who established this boundary line in October, 1849. It would seem much more fitting to have there a monument bearing the names of the heroic men--friars and soldiers of Spain--who on that spot, on May 14, 1769, sang the first Easter hymn heard on California shores.

It was a sore grief for Father Crespi´ that the commandant of the party would not wait here for him to say a mass of thanksgiving; but with the port in sight, impatience could not be restrained, and the little band pushed on. As soon as the San Diego camp was seen, the soldiers discharged a salute of fire-arms, which was answered instantly from shore and ship. Great joy filled every heart. The friars who had come by sea ran to meet and embrace their brothers. The gladness was dampened only by the sad condition of the ships' crews, many of whom were dead or dying. They had been four months, with their poor charts and poorer ships, making their way from La Paz up to San Diego; and in consequence of insufficient and unwholesome food, the scurvy had broken out among them. It was a melancholy beginning for the new enterprise. When, 29 17 six weeks later, the second land party with Father Junipero arrived, eager to proceed to the establishing of the mission, they found that their first duty was to the sick and dying of their own people. In fifteen days twenty-nine of the sailors and soldiers died. The Indians, who at first had been gentle and friendly, grew each day more insolent and thievish, even tearing off the clothes of the sick lying helpless in the tents or tule huts on the beach. At last, on the 16th of July, a cross was set up facing the port, and in a rude booth of branches and reeds, mass was celebrated and the grand hymn of "Veni Creator" was sung, the pilgrims "supplying the want of an organ by discharging fire-arms," says the old record, and with only the "smoke of muskets for incense." Thus was founded the Mission of San Diego; and thus was laid the corner-stone of the civilization of California on July 16, 1769.

Two days before this the indefatigable Crespi´ had set off with another overland party, Portala´ at its head, to find Monterey. On this journey, also, Father Crespi´ kept a diary, --little suspecting, probably, with how much interest it would be studied a century later. It was not strange that with only a compass and seventeenth-century charts to guide them along the zigzagging labyrinths of bays, headlands, and sandhills which make the California shore, they toiled to no purpose seeking the Monterey harbor. It is pitiful to read the record of the days when they were close upon it, setting up a cross on one of its hills, 30 18 and yet could not see it; even querying, so bewildered and lost were they, if it might not have been filled up with sands since Viscayno's time.

Bells of the San Gabriel Mission

Forty leagues north of it they went, and discovered the present bay of San Francisco, which they at once recognized by Viscayno's description; and recalling the speech of Galvez in regard to Saint Francis pointing out a port if he wanted a mission of his own name, the pious fathers thought it not unlikely that the Saint himself had hidden Monterey from their sight, and 31 19 led them to his own harbor. Month after month passed, and still they were wandering. They were footsore, weary, hungry, but not disheartened. Friendly Indians everywhere greeted them kindly, gave them nuts, and shell-fish, and bread made from acorn flour. At one time seventeen of the party were too ill to travel. Twice they halted and held council on the question of abandoning the search. Some were ready to continue as long as the provisions held out, then to eat their mules, and go back on foot. Fathers Crespi´ and Gomez volunteered to be left behind alone.

At last, on the 11th of November, it was decided to return by the route by which they had come. On the 20th, finding that their flour had been stolen by the soldiers, they divided the remainder into equal parts, giving to each person enough to last him two days. On Christmas Day they had a present of nuts from friendly Indians, and on New Year's Day they had the luck to kill a bear and three cubs, which gave them a feast for which they offered most devout thanksgivings. For the rest, they lived chiefly on mussels, with now and then a wild goose. On the 24th of January they came out on the table-lands above San Diego, six months and ten days from the time of their departure. Firing a salute, they were answered instantly by shots from the camp, and saw an eager crowd running to meet them, great anxiety having been felt at their long absence.

It is worth while, in studying the history of these 32 20 Franciscan missions, to dwell on the details of the hardships endured in the beginning by their founders. Only narrow-minded bigotry can fail to see in them proofs of a spiritual enthusiasm and exaltation of self-sacrifice which are rarely paralleled in the world's history. And to do justice to the results accomplished, it is necessary to understand thoroughly the conditions at the outset of the undertaking.

The weary, returned party found their comrades in sorry plight. The scurvy had spread, and many more had died. Father Junipero himself had been dangerously ill with it; provisions were running low; the Indians were only half friendly, and were not to be trusted out of sight. The supply-ships looked for from Mexico had not arrived.

A situation more helpless, unprotected, discouraging, could not be conceived than that of this little, suffering band, separated by leagues of desert and leagues of ocean from all possible succor. At last an examination showed that there were only provisions sufficient left to subsist the party long enough to make the journey back to Vellicata´. It seemed madness to remain longer; and Governor Portala´, spite of Father Junipero's entreaties, gave orders to prepare for the abandonment of the missions. He fixed the 20th of March as the last day he would wait for the arrival of the ship. This was Saint Joseph's Day. On the morning of it Father Junipero, who had been praying night and day for weeks, celebrated to Saint Joseph a high mass, with special supplications for relief. Before 33 21 noon a sail was seen on the horizon. One does not need to believe in saints and saints' interpositions to feel a thrill at this coincidence, and in fancying the effect the sudden vision of the relief-ship must have produced on the minds of devout men who had been starving. The ship appeared for a few moments, then disappeared; doubtless there were some who scoffed at it as a mere apparition. But Portala´ believed, and waited; and, four days later, in the ship came! --the "San Antonio," bringing bountiful stores of all that was needed.

Courage and cheer now filled the very air. No time was lost in organizing expeditions to go once more in search of the mysteriously hidden Monterey. In less than three weeks two parties had set off, --one by sea in the "San Antonio." With this went Father Junipero, still feeble from illness. Father Crespi´, undaunted by his former six months of wandering, joined the land party, reaching the Point of Pines, on Monterey Harbor, seven days before the ship arrived. As soon as she came in sight, bonfires were lighted on the rocks, and the ship answered by firing cannon. It was a great rejoicing. The next day, June 1st, the officers of the two parties met, and exchanged congratulations; and on the third they took formal possession of the place: first, in the name of the Church, by religious ceremonies; secondly, in the name of the King of Spain, unfurling the royal standard, and planting it in the ground, side by side with the cross.

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To one familiar with the beauty of the Monterey shore in June, the picture of this scene is vivid. The sand-dunes were ablaze with color; lupines in high, waving masses, white and yellow; and great mats of the glittering ice-plant, with myriads of rose-colored umbels, lying flat on the white sand. Many rods inland, the air was sweet with their fragrance, borne by the strong sea-wind. On long cliffs of broken, tempest-piled rocks stood ranks upon ranks of grand old cypress-trees, --gnarled, bent, twisted, defiant, full of both pathos and triumph in their loneliness, in this the only spot on earth to which they are native.

The booth of boughs in which the mass was performed was built under a large oak, on the same spot where Viscayno had landed and his Carmelite monks had said mass one hundred and sixty-seven years before. The ceremonies closed with a ringing Te Deum, --sailors, soldiers, monks, alike jubilant.

When the news of the founding of this second mission reached the city of Mexico, there was a furore of excitement. The bells of the city were rung; people ran up and down the streets telling each other; and the viceroy held at his palace a grand reception, to which went all persons of note, eager to congratulate him and Galvez. Printed proclamations, giving full accounts, were circulated, not only in Mexico but throughout Spain. No province so remote, no home so lowly, as to fail to hear the good news. It was indeed good news to both State and Church. The fact of the occupation of the new country was 35

Indian Booth at Pachunga, where Mass is celebrated

36 37 25 accomplished; the scheme for the conversion and salvation of the savage race was fairly inaugurated; Monterey and San Diego being assured, ultimate possession of the whole of the coast line between would follow. Little these gladdened people in Spain and Mexico realized, however, the cost of the triumph over which they rejoiced, or the true condition of the men who had won it.

The history of the next fifteen years is a history of struggle, hardship, and heroic achievement. The indefatigable Serra was the mainspring and support of it all. There seemed no limit to his endurance, no bound to his desires; nothing daunted his courage or chilled his faith. When, in the sixth year after the founding of the San Diego Mission, it was attacked by hostile Indians, one of the fathers being most cruelly murdered, and the buildings burned to the ground, Father Junipero exclaimed, "Thank God! The seed of the Gospel is now watered by the blood of a martyr; that mission is henceforth established;" and in a few months he was on the spot, with money and materials, ready for rebuilding; pressing sailors, neophytes, soldiers, into the service; working with his own hands, also, spite of the fears and protestations of all, and only desisting on positive orders from the military commander. He journeyed, frequently on foot, back and forth through the country, founding a new mission whenever, by his urgent letters to the College of San Fernando and to the Mexican viceroys, he had gathered 38 26 together men and money enough to do so. In 1772, when perplexities seemed inextricably thickened and supplies had fallen so short that starvation threatened the missions, he took ship to San Blas. With no companion except one Indian boy, he toiled on foot from San Blas to Guadalajara, two hundred and forty miles. Here they both fell ill of fever, and sank so low that they were supposed to be dying, and the Holy Viaticum was administered to them. But they recovered, and while only partly convalescent, pushed on again, reaching the city of Mexico in February, 1773. Hard-hearted indeed must the Mexican viceroy have been to refuse to heed the prayers of an aged man who had given such proofs as this of his earnestness and devotion. The difficulties were cleared up, money and supplies obtained, and Father Junipero returned to his post with a joyful heart. Before leaving, he kissed the feet of the friars in the college, and asked their blessing, saying that they would never behold him more.

Father Junipero's most insatiable passion was for baptizing Indians; the saving of one soul thus from death filled him with unspeakable joy. His biographer illustrates this by the narrative of the first infant baptism attempted at the San Diego Mission. The Indians had been prevailed upon to bring an infant to receive the consecration. Everything was ready: Father Junipero had raised his hand to sprinkle the child's face; suddenly heathen terror 39 27 got the better of the parents, and in the twinkling of an eye they snatched their babe and ran. Tears rolled down Father Junipero's cheeks: he declared that only some unworthiness in himself could have led to such a disaster; and to the day of his death he could never tell the story without tears, thinking it must be owing to his sins that the soul of that particular child had been lost.

When he preached he was carried out of himself by the fervor of his desire to impress his hearers. Baring his breast, he would beat it violently with a stone, or burn the flesh with a lighted torch, to enhance the effect of his descriptions of the tortures of hell. There is in his memoir a curious engraving, showing him lifted high above a motley group of listeners, holding in his hands the blazing torch and the stone.

In the same book is an outline map of California as he knew it. It is of the coast line from San Diego to San Francisco, and the only objects marked on it are the missions and dotted lines showing the roads leading from one to another. All the rest is a blank.

There were nine of these missions, founded by Serra, before his death in 1784. They were founded in the following order: San Diego, July 16, 1769; San Carlos de Monterey, June 3, 1770; San Antonio de Padua, July 14, 1771; San Gabriel, Sept. 8, 1771; San Luis Obispo, Sept. 1, 1772; San Francisco (Dolores), Oct. 9, 1776; San Juan Capistrano, Nov. 40 28 1, 1776; Santa Clara, Jan. 18, 1777; San Buena Ventura, March 31, 1782.

The transports into which Father Junipero was thrown by the beginning of a new mission are graphically told by the companion who went with him to establish the mission of San Antonio. With his little train of soldiers, and mules laden with a few weeks' supplies, he wandered off into the unexplored wilderness sixty miles south of Monterey, looking eagerly for river valleys promising fertility. As soon as the beautiful oak-shaded plain, with its river swift and full even in July, caught his eye, he ordered a halt, seized the bells, tied them to an oak bough, and fell to ringing them with might and main, crying aloud: "Hear, hear, O ye Gentiles! Come to the Holy Church! Come to the faith of Jesus Christ!" Not a human creature was in sight, save his own band; and his companion remonstrated with him. "Let me alone," cried Father Junipero. "Let me unburden my heart, which could wish that this bell should be heard by all the world, or at least by all the Gentiles in these mountains;" and he rang on till the echoes answered, and one astonished Indian appeared, --the first instance in which a native had been present at the foundation of a mission. Not long afterward came a very aged Indian woman named Agreda, begging to be baptized, saying that she had seen a vision in the skies of a man clad like the friars, and that her father had repeated to her in her youth the same words they now spoke.

41

San Antonio Mission

42 43 31

The history of this San Antonio Mission justified Father Junipero's selection. The site proved one of the richest and most repaying, including, finally, seven large farms with a chapel on each, and being famous for the best wheat grown, and the best flour made in the country. The curious mill in which the flour was ground is still to be seen, --a most interesting ruin. It was run by water brought in a stone-walled ditch for many miles, and driven through a funnel-shaped flume so as to strike the side of a large water-wheel, revolving horizontally on a shaft. The building of this aqueduct and the placing of the wheel were the work of an Indian named Nolberto, who took the idea from the balance-wheel of a watch, and did all the work with his own hands. The walls are broken now; and the sands have so blown in and piled around the entrance, that the old wheel seems buried in a cellar; linnets have builded nests in the dusky corners, and are so seldom disturbed that their bright eyes gaze with placid unconcern at curious intruders.

Many interesting incidents are recorded in connection with the establishment of these first missions. At San Gabriel the Indians gathered in great force, and were about to attack the little band of ten soldiers and two friars preparing to plant their cross; but on the unfurling of a banner with a life-size picture of the Virgin painted on it, they flung away their bows and arrows, came running toward the banner with gestures of reverence and delight, and threw their 44 32 beads and other ornaments on the ground before it, as at the feet of a suddenly recognized queen.

The San Gabriel Indians seem to have been a superior race. they spoke a soft, musical language, now nearly lost.

Old Mill built by Indians at San Antonio

Their name for God signified "Giver of life." They had no belief in a devil or in hell, and persisted always in regarding them as concerning only white men. Robbery was unknown among them, murder was punished by death, and marriage between those near of kin was not allowed. They had names for the points of the compass, and knew 45 33 the North Star, calling it Runi. They had games at which they decked themselves with flower garlands, which wreathed their heads and hung down to their feet. They had certain usages of politeness, such as that a child, bringing water to an elder, must not taste it on the way; and that to pass between two who were speaking was an offence. They had song contests, often lasting many days, and sometimes handed down to the next generation. To a people of such customs as these, the symbols, shows, and ceremonies of the Catholic Church must needs have seemed especially beautiful and winning.

The records of the founding of these missions are similar in details, but are full of interest to one in sympathy either with their spiritual or their historical significance. The routine was the same in all cases. A cross was set up; a booth of branches was built; the ground and the booth were consecrated by holy water, and christened by the name of a saint; a mass was performed; the neighboring Indians, if there were any, were roused and summoned by the ringing of bells swung on limbs of trees; presents of cloth and trinkets were given them to inspire them with trust, and thus a mission was founded. Two monks (never, at first, more) were appointed to take charge of this cross and booth, and to win, baptize, convert, and teach all the Indians to be reached in the region. They had for guard and help a few soldiers, and sometimes a few already partly civilized and 46 34 christianized Indians; several head of cattle, some tools and seeds, and holy vessels for the church service, completed their store of weapons, spiritual and secular, offensive and defensive, with which to conquer the wilderness and its savages. There needs no work of the imagination to help this picture. Taken in its sternest realism, it is vivid and thrilling; contrasting the wretched poverty of these single-handed beginnings with the final splendor and riches attained, the result seems wellnigh miraculous.

From the rough booth of boughs and reeds of 1770 to the pillars, arched corridors, and domes of the stately stone churches of a half-century later, is a change only a degree less wonderful than the change in the Indian, from the naked savage with his one stone tool, grinding acorn-meal in a rock bowl, to the industrious tiller of soil, weaver of cloth, worker in metals, and singer of sacred hymns. The steps of this change were slow at first. In 1772, at the end of five years' work, five missions had been founded, and four hundred and ninety-one Indians baptized. There were then, in these five missions, but nineteen friars and sixty soldiers. In 1786, La Perouse, a French naval commander, who voyaged along the California coast, leaves it on record that there were but two hundred and eighty-two soldiers, and about one hundred officers and friars, all told, in both Upper and Lower California, from Cape St. Lucas to San Francisco, a line of eight hundred leagues. At this time there were five thousand one hundred and forty 47 35 three Indians, in the missions of Upper California alone. In the year 1800 there were, at the mission of San Diego, fifteen hundred and twenty-one Indians; and the San Diego garrison, three miles away from the mission, numbered only one hundred and sixty-seven souls, --officers, soldiers, servants, women, and children. Such figures as these seem sufficient refutation of the idea sometimes advanced, that the Indians were converted by force and held in subjection by terror. There is still preserved, in the archives of the Franciscan College at Santa Barbara, a letter written by Father Junipero to the Viceroy of Mexico, in 1776, imploring him to send a force of eighty soldiers to be divided among seven missions. He patiently explains that the friars, stationed by twos, at new missions, from sixty to a hundred miles distant from each other, cannot be expected to feel safe without a reasonable military protection; and he asks pertinently what defence could be made, "in case the enemy should tempt the Gentiles to attack us." That there was so little active hostility on the part of the savage tribes, that they looked so kindly as they did to the ways and restraints of the new life, is the strongest possible proof that the methods of the friars in dealing with them must have been both wise and humane.

During the first six years there was but one serious outbreak, --that at San Diego. No retaliation was shown toward the Indians for this; on the contrary, the orders of both friars and military commanders 48 36 were that they should be treated with even greater kindness than before; and in less than two years the mission buildings were rebuilt, under a guard of only a half-score of soldiers with hundreds of Indians looking on, and many helping cheerfully in the work. The San Carlos Mission at Monterey was Father Junipero's own charge. There he spent all his time, when not called away by his duties as president of the missions. There he died, and there he was buried. There, also, his beloved friend and brother, Father Crespi´, labored by his side for thirteen years. Crespi´ was a sanguine, joyous man, sometimes called El Beato, from his happy temperament. No doubt his gayety made Serra's sunshine in many a dark day; and grief at his death did much to break down the splendid old man's courage and strength. Only a few months before it occurred, they had gone together for a short visit to their comrade, Father Palou, at the San Francisco Mission. When they took leave of him, Crespi´ said, "Farewell forever; you will see me no more." This was late in the autumn of 1781, and on New Year's Day, 1782, he died, aged sixty years, and having spent half of those years in laboring for the Indians. Serra lived only two years longer, and is said never to have been afterwards the same as before. For many years he had been a great sufferer from an affection of the heart, --aggravated, if not induced, by his fierce beatings of his breast with a stone while he was preaching. But physical pain seemed to make no impression on his mind. If it did 49 37 not incapacitate him for action, he held it of no account. Only the year before his death, being then seventy years old, and very lame, he had journeyed on foot from San Diego to Monterey, visiting every mission and turning aside into all the Indian settlements on the way. At this time there were on the Santa Barbara coast alone, within a space of eighty miles, twenty-one villages of Indians, roughly estimated as containing between twenty and thirty thousand souls. He is said to have gone weeping from village to village because he could do nothing for them.

He reached San Carlos in January, 1784, and never again went away. The story of his last hours and death is in the old church records of Monterey, written there by the hand of the sorrowing Palou, the second day after he had closed his friend's eyes. It is a quaint and touching narrative.

Up to the day before his death, his indomitable will upholding the failing strength of his dying body, Father Junipero had read in the church the canonical offices of each day, a service requiring an hour and a half of time. The evening before his death he walked alone to the church to receive the last sacrament. The church was crowded to overflowing with Indians and whites, many crying aloud in uncontrollable grief.

Father Junipero knelt before the altar with great fervor of manner, while Father Palou, with tears rolling down his cheeks, read the services for the dying, 50 38 gave him absolution, and administered the Holy Viaticum. Then rose from choked and tremulous voices the strains of the grand hymn "Tantum Ergo,"-- "Tantum ergo SacramentumVeneremur cernui,Et antiquum documentumNovo cedat ritui;Præstet fides supplementumSensuum defectui."Genitori genitoqueLaus et jubilatio,Salus, honor, virtus quoqueSit et benedictio;Procedenti ab utroqueCompar sit laudatio."

A startled thrill ran through the church as Father Junipero's own voice, "high and strong as ever," says the record, joined in the hymn. One by one the voices of his people broke down, stifled by sobs, until at last the dying man's voice, almost alone, finished the hymn. After this he gave thanks, and returning to his cell-like room spent the whole of the night in listening to penitential psalms and litanies, and giving thanks to God; all the time kneeling or sitting on the ground supported by the loving and faithful Palou. In the morning, early, he asked for the plenary indulgence, for which he again knelt, and confessed again. At noon the chaplain and the captain of the bark "St. Joseph," then lying in port at Monterey, came to visit him. He welcomed them, and cordially embracing the chaplain, said, "You 51

Funeral of Father Junipero

52 53 41 have come just in time to cast the earth upon my body." After they took their leave, he asked Palou to read to him again the Recommendations of the Soul. At its conclusion he responded earnestly, in as clear voice as in health, adding, "Thank God, I am now without fear." Then with a firm step he walked to the kitchen, saying that he would like a cup of broth. As soon as he had taken the broth, he exclaimed, "I feel better now; I will rest;" and lying down he closed his eyes, and without another word or sign of struggle or pain ceased to breathe, entering indeed into a rest of which his last word had been solemnly prophetic.

Ever since morning the grief-stricken people had been waiting and listening for the tolling death-bell to announce that all was over. At its first note they came in crowds, breathless, weeping, and lamenting. It was with great difficulty that the soldiers could keep them from tearing Father Junipero's habit piece-meal from his body, so ardent was their desire to possess some relic of him. The corpse was laid at once in a coffin which he himself had ordered made many weeks before. The vessels in port fired a salute of one hundred and one guns, answered by the same from the guns of the presidio at Monterey, --an honor given to no one below the rank of general. But the hundred gun salutes were a paltry honor in comparison with the tears of the Indian congregation. Soldiers kept watch around his coffin night and day till the burial; but they could not hold back the 54 42 throngs of the poor creatures who pressed to touch the hand of the father they had so much loved, and to bear away something, if only a thread, of the garments he had worn.

His ardent and impassioned nature and his untiring labors had won their deepest affection and confidence. It was his habit when at San Carlos to spend all his time with them, working by their side in the fields, making adobe, digging, tilling, doing, in short, all that he required of them. Day after day he thus labored, only desisting at the hours for performing offices in the church. Whenever an Indian came to address him, he made the sign of the cross on his forehead, and spoke to him some words of spiritual injunction or benediction. The arbitrariness--or, as some of his enemies called it, haughty self-will--which brought Serra at times into conflict with the military authorities when their purposes or views clashed with his own, never came to the surface in his spiritual functions, or in his relation with the Indian converts. He loved them, and yearned over them as brands to be snatched from the burning. He had baptized over one thousand of them with his own hands; his whole life he spent for them, and was ready at any moment to lay it down if that would have benefited them more. Absolute single-heartedness like this is never misunderstood by, and never antagonizes equally single-hearted people, either high or low. But to be absolutely single-hearted in a moral purpose is almost inevitably to be doggedly 55 43 one-ideaed in regard to practical methods; and the single-hearted, one-ideaed man, with a great moral purpose, is sure to be often at swords' points with average men of selfish interests and mixed notions. This is the explanation of the fact that the later years of Serra's life were marred by occasional collisions with the military authorities in the country. No doubt the impetuosity of his nature made him sometimes hot in resentment and indiscreet of speech. But in spite of these failings, he yet remains the foremost, grandest figure in the missions' history. If his successors in their administration had been equal to him in spirituality, enthusiasm, and intellect, the mission establishments would never have been so utterly overthrown and ruined.

Father Junipero sleeps on the spot where he labored and died. His grave is under the ruins of the beautiful stone church of his mission, --the church which he saw only in ardent and longing fancy. It was perhaps the most beautiful, though not the grandest of the mission churches; and its ruins have to-day a charm far exceeding all the others. The fine yellow tint of the stone, the grand and unique contour of the arches, the beautiful star-shaped window in the front, the simple yet effective lines of carving on pilaster and pillar and doorway, the symmetrical Moorish tower and dome, the worn steps leading up to the belfry, --all make a picture whose beauty, apart from hallowing associations, is enough to hold one spell-bound. Reverent Nature 56 44 has rebuilt with grass and blossoms even the crumbling window-sills, across which the wind blows free from the blue ocean just beyond; and on the day we saw the place, golden wheat, fresh reaped, was piled in loose mounds on the south slope below the church's southern wall. It reminded me of the tales I had heard from many aged men and women of a beautiful custom the Indians had of scattering their choicest grains on the ground at the friars' feet, as a token of homage.

The roof of the church long ago fell in; its doors have stood open for years; and the fierce sea-gales have been sweeping in, piling sands until a great part of the floor is covered with solid earth on which every summer grasses and weeds grow high enough to be cut by sickles. Of the thousands of acres which the Mission Indians once cultivated in the San Carlos valley, only nine were finally decreed by the United States Government to belong to the church. These were so carelessly surveyed that no avenue of approach was left open to the mission buildings, and a part of the land had to be sold to buy a right of way to the church. The remnant left makes a little farm, by the rental of which a man can be hired to take charge of the whole place, and keep it, if possible, from further desecration and ruin. The present keeper is a devout Portugues, whose broken English becomes eloquent as he speaks of the old friars whose graves he guards.

"Dem work for civilize," he said, "not work for money. Dey work to religion."

57

Interior of San Carlos Mission, showing Original Spring of Roof and Curve of Walls

58 59 47

In clearing away the earth at the altar end of the church, in the winter of 1882, this man came upon stone slabs evidently covering graves. On opening one of these graves, it was found to hold three coffins. From the minute description, in the old records, of Father Junipero's place of burial, Father Casanova, the priest now in charge of the Monterey parish, became convinced that one of these coffins must be his. On the opposite side of the church is another grave, where are buried two of the earliest governors of California.

It is a disgrace to both the Catholic Church and the State of California that this grand old ruin, with its sacred sepulchres, should be left to crumble away. If nothing is done to protect and save it, one short hundred years more will see it a shapeless, wind-swept mound of sand. It is not in our power to confer honor or bring dishonor on the illustrious dead. We ourselves, alone, are dishonored when we fail in reverence to them. The grave of Junipero Serra may be buried centuries deep, and its very place forgotten; yet his name will not perish, nor his fame suffer. But for the men of the country whose civilization he founded, and of the Church whose faith he so glorified, to permit his burial-place to sink into oblivion, is a shame indeed!

II

IF the little grief-stricken band of monks who stood weeping around Junipero Serra's grave in 1784 could have foreseen the events of the next thirty years, their weeping would have been turned into exultant joy; but not the most daring enthusiast among them could have dreamed of the harvest of power destined to be raised from the seed thus sown in weakness.

Almost with his dying breath Father Junipero had promised to use "all his influence with God" in behalf of the missions. In the course of the next four months after his death more converts were baptized than in the whole three years previous; and it became at once the common belief that this soul had passed directly into heaven, and that this great wave of conversions was the result of his prayers. Prosperity continued steadily to increase. Mission after mission was successfully founded, until, in 1804, the occupation of the sea-coast line from San Francisco to San Diego was complete, there being nineteen mission establishments only an easy day's journey apart from each other.

61

Bell-post and Corridor at San Miguel Mission

62 63 51

The ten new missions were founded in the following order: Santa Barbara, Dec. 4, 1786; La Purissima, Dec. 8, 1787; Santa Cruz, Sept. 25, 1791; Soledad, Oct. 9, 1791; San Jose´, June 11, 1797; San Juan Bautista, June 24, 1797; San Miguel, July 25, 1797; San Fernando Rey, Sept. 8, 1797; San Luis Rey de Francia, June 18, 1798; Santa Inez, Sept. 7, 1804.

Beginnings had also been made on a projected second line, to be from thirty to fifty miles back from the sea; and this inland chain of settlements and development promised to be in no way inferior to the first. The wealth of the mission establishments had grown to an almost incredible degree. In several of them massive stone churches had been built, of an architecture at once so simple and harmonious that, even in ruins, it is to-day the grandest in America; and it will remain, so long as arch, pillar, or dome of it shall stand, a noble and touching monument of the patient Indian workers who built, and of the devoted friars who designed, its majestic and graceful proportions.

In all of the missions were buildings on a large scale, providing for hundreds of occupants, for all the necessary trades and manufactures, and many of the ornamental arts of civilized life. Enormous tracts of land were under high cultivation; the grains and cool fruits of the temperate zone flourishing, in the marvellous California air, side by side with the palm, olive, grape, fig, orange, and pomegranate. From the two hundred head of cattle sent by the wise Galvez, 64 52 had grown herds past numbering; and to these had been added vast flocks of sheep and herds of horses. In these nineteen missions were gathered over twenty thousand Indians, leading regular and industrious lives, and conforming to the usages of the Catholic religion.

A description of the San Luis Rey Mission, written by De Mofras, an attache´ of the French Legation in Mexico in 1842, gives a clear idea of the form, and some of the methods, of the mission establishments:

"The building is a quadrilateral, four hundred and fifty feet square; the church occupies one of its wings; the facade is ornamented with a gallery. The building is two stories in height. The interior is formed by a court ornamented with fountains, and decorated with trees. Upon the gallery which runs around it open the dormitories of the monks, of the majors-domo, and of travellers, small workshops, schoolrooms, and storerooms. The hospitals are situated in the most quiet parts of the mission, where also the schools are kept. The young Indian girls dwell in halls called monasteries, and are called nuns. Placed under the care of Indian matrons, who are worthy of confidence, they learn to make cloth of wool, cotton, and flax, and do not leave the monastery until they are old enough to be married. The Indian children mingle in schools with those of the white colonists. A certain number chosen among the pupils who display the most intelligence learn music, chanting, the violin, flute, horn, violoncello, or other instruments. Those who distinguish themselves in the carpenters' shops, at the forge, or in agricultural labors are appointed alcaldes, or overseers, and charged with the directions of the laborers."

65 53

Surrounding these buildings, or arranged in regular streets upon one side of them, were the homes of the Indian families.

A Capacious Fireplace--San Luis Rey

These were built of adobe, or of reeds, after the native fashion. The daily routine of the Indians' life was simple and uniform. They were divided into squads of laborers. At sunrise the Angelus bell called them to mass. After the mass they breakfasted, and then dispersed to their various 66 54 labors. At eleven they were again summoned together for dinner, after which they rested until two, when they went again to work, and worked until the evening Angelus, just before sunset. After prayers and supper they were in the habit of dancing and playing games until bedtime. Their food was good. They had meat at noon, accompanied by posale , a sort of succotash made of corn, beans, and wheat, boiled together. Their breakfast and supper were usually of porridge made from different grains, called atole and pinole .

The men wore linen shirts, pantaloons, and blankets. The overseers and best workmen had suits of cloth like the Spaniards. The women received every year two chemises, one gown, and a blanket. De Mofras says:--

"When the hides, tallow, grain, wine, and oil were sold at good prices to ships from abroad, the monks distributed handkerchiefs, wearing apparel, tobacco, and trinkets among the Indians, and devoted the surplus to the embellishment of the churches, the purchase of musical instruments, pictures, church ornaments, etc.; still they were careful to keep a part of the harvest in the granaries to provide for years of scarcity."

The rule of the friars was in the main a kindly one. The vice of drunkenness was severely punished by flogging. Quarrelling between husbands and wives was also dealt with summarily, the offending parties being chained together by the leg till they were glad 67 55 to promise to keep peace. New converts and recruits were secured in many ways: sometimes by sending out parties of those already attached to the new mode of life, and letting them set forth to the savages the advantages and comforts of the Christian way; sometimes by luring strangers in with gifts; sometimes, it is said, by capturing them by main force; but of this there is only scanty evidence, and it is not probable that it was often practised. It has also been said that cruel and severe methods were used to compel the Indians to work; that they were driven under the lash by their overseers, and goaded with lances by the soldiers. No doubt there were individual instances of cruelty; seeds of it being indigenous in human nature, such absolute control of hundreds of human beings could not exist without some abuses of the power. But that the Indians were, on the whole, well treated and cared for, the fact that so many thousands of them chose to remain in the missions is proof. With open wilderness on all sides, and with thousands of savage friends and relatives close at hand, nothing but their own free will could have kept such numbers of them loyal and contented. Forbes, in his history of California, written in 1832, says:--

"The best and most unequivocal proof of the good conduct of the fathers is to be found in the unbounded affection and devotion invariably shown toward them by their Indian subjects. They venerate them not merely as friends and fathers, but with a degree of devotion approaching to adoration."

68 56

The picture of life in one of these missions during their period of prosperity is unique and attractive. The whole place was a hive of industry: trades plying indoors and outdoors; tillers, herders, vintagers by hundreds, going to and fro; children in schools; women spinning; bands of young men practising on musical instruments; music, the scores of which, in many instances, they had themselves written out; at evening, all sorts of games of running, leaping, dancing, and ball-throwing, and the picturesque ceremonies of a religion which has always been wise in availing itself of beautiful agencies in color, form, and harmony.

At every mission were walled gardens with waving palms, sparkling fountains, groves of olive trees, broad vineyards, and orchards of all manner of fruits; over all, the sunny, delicious, winterless California sky.

More than mortal, indeed, must the Franciscans have been, to have been able, under these conditions, to preserve intact the fervor and spirit of self-abnegation and deprivation inculcated by the rules of their order. There is a half-comic pathos in the records of occasional efforts made by one and another of the presidents to check the growing disposition toward ease on the part of the friars. At one time several of them were found to be carrying silver watches. The watches were taken away, and sent to Guadalajara to be sold, the money to be paid into the Church treasury. At another time an order was 69 57 issued, forbidding the wearing of shoes and stockings in place of sandals, and the occupying of too large and comfortable rooms. And one zealous president, finding that the friars occasionally rode in the carts belonging to their missions, had all the carts burned, to compel the fathers to go about on foot.

The friars were forced, by the very facts of their situation, into the exercise of a constant and abounding hospitality; and this of itself inevitably brought about large departures from the ascetic re´gime of living originally preached and practised. Most royally did they discharge the obligations of this hospitality. Travellers' rooms were kept always ready in every mission; and there were even set apart fruit orchards called "travellers' orchards." A man might ride from San Diego to Monterey by easy day's journeys, spending each night as guest in a mission establishment. As soon as he rode up, an Indian page would appear to take his horse; another to show him to one of the travellers' rooms. He was served with the best of food and wine as long as he liked to stay, and when he left he might, if he wished, take from the mission herd a fresh horse to carry him on his journey. All the California voyagers and travellers of the time speak in glowing terms of this generous and cordial entertaining by the friars. It was, undoubtedly, part of their policy as representatives of the State, but it was no less a part of their duty as Franciscans.

Some of the highest tributes which have been paid 70 58 to them, both as men and as administrators of affairs, have come from strangers who, thus sojourning under their roofs, had the best opportunity of knowing their lives. Says Forbes:--

"Their conduct has been marked by a degree of benevolence, humanity, and moderation probably unexampled in any other situation...I have never heard that they have not acted with the most perfect fidelity, or that they ever betrayed a trust, or acted with inhumanity."

This testimony is of the more weight that it comes from a man not in sympathy with either the religious or the secular system on which the friars' labors were based.

The tales still told by old people of festal occasions at the missions sound like tales of the Old World rather than of the New. There was a strange difference, fifty years ago, between the atmosphere of life on the east and west sides of the American continent: on the Atlantic shore, the descendants of the Puritans, weighed down by serious purpose, half grudging the time for their one staid yearly Thanksgiving, and driving the Indians farther and farther into the wilderness every year, fighting and killing them; on the sunny Pacific shore, the merry people of Mexican and Spanish blood, troubling themselves about nothing, dancing away whole days and nights like children, while their priests were gathering the Indians by thousands into communities, and feeding and teaching them.

71 59

The most beautiful woman known in California a half-century ago still lives in Santa Barbara, white-haired, bright-eyed, eloquent-tongued to-day. At the time of her marriage, her husband being a brother of the Superior of the Santa Barbara mission, her wedding banquet was spread on tables running the whole length of the outer corridor of the mission. For three days and three nights the feasting and dancing were kept up, and the whole town was bid. On the day after her wedding came the christening or blessing of the right tower of the church. She and her husband, having been chosen godfather and godmother to the tower, walked in solemn procession around it, carrying lighted candles in their hands, preceded by the friar, who sprinkled it with holy water and burned incense. In the four long streets of Indians' houses, then running eastward from the mission, booths of green boughs, decorated with flowers, were set up in front of all the doors. Companies of Indians from other missions came as guests, dancing and singing as they approached. Their Indian hosts went out to meet them, also singing, and pouring out seeds on the ground for them to walk on. These were descendants of the Indians who, when Viscayno anchored off Santa Barbara in 1602, came out in canoes, bringing their king, and rowed three times around Viscayno's ship, chanting a chorus of welcome. Then the king, going on board the ship, walked three times around the deck, chanting the same song. He then gave to the 72 60 Spaniards gifts of all the simple foods he had, and implored them to land, promising that if they would come and be their brothers, he would give to each man ten wives.

With the increase of success, wealth, and power on the part of the missions came increasing complexities in their relation to the military settlements in the country. The original Spanish plan of colonization was threefold, --religious, military, and civil. Its first two steps were a mission and a presidio, or garrison, --the presidio to be the guard of the mission; later was to come the pueblo,* or town. From indefiniteness in the understanding of property rights, and rights of authority, as vested under these three heads, there very soon arose confusion, which led to collisions, --collisions which have not yet ceased, and never will, so long as there remains a land-title in California to be quarrelled over. The law records of the State are brimful of briefs, counter-briefs, opinions, and counter-opinions regarding property issues, all turning on definitions which nobody has now clear right to make, of old pueblo and presidio titles and bounds.

"The term `pueblo' answers to that of the English word `town', in all its vagueness and all its precision. As the word `town' in English generally embraces every kind of population from the village to the city, and also, used specifically, signifies a town corporate and politic, so the word `pueblo' in Spanish ranges from the hamlet to the city, but, used emphatically, signifies a town corporate and politic"--DWINELLE'S Colonial History of San Francisco .

In the beginning there were no grants of land; 73

Church and Fountain, Santa Barbara

74 75 63 everything was done by royal decree. In the form of taking possession of the new lands, the Church, by right of sacred honor, came first, the religious ceremony always preceeding the military. Not till the cross was set up, and the ground consecrated and taken possession of, in the name of God, for the Church's purposes, did any military commander ever think of planting the royal standard, symbolizing the king's possession. In the early days the relations between the military and the ecclesiastical representatives of the king were comparatively simple: the soldiers were sent avowedly and specifically to protect the friars; moreover, in those earlier days, soldiers and friars were alike devout, and, no doubt, had the mission interests more equally at heart than they did later. But each year's increase of numbers in the garrisons, and of numbers and power in the missions, increased the possibilities of clashing, until finally the relations between the two underwent a singular reversal; and the friars, if disposed to be satirical, might well have said that, however bad a rule might be which would not work both ways, a rule which did was not of necessity a good one, it being now the duty of the missions to support the predidios; the military governors being authorized to draw upon the friars not only for supplies, but for contributions of money and for levies of laborers.*

In the decade between 1801 and 1810 the missions furnished to the presidios about eighteen thousand dollars' worth of supplies each year. 76 64

On the other hand, no lands could be set off or assigned for colonists without consent of the friars, and there were many other curious and entangling cross-purpose powers distributed between friars and military governors quite sufficient to make it next to impossible for things to go smoothly.

The mission affairs, so far as their own internal interests were concerned, were administered with admirable simplicity and system. The friars in charge of the missions were responsible directly to the president, or prefect, of the missions. He, in turn, was responsible to the president, or guardian, of the Franciscan College of San Fernando, in Mexico. One responsible officer, called procurador, was kept in the city of Mexico to buy supplies for the missions from stipends due, and from the drafts given to the friars by the presidio commanders for goods furnished to the presidios. There was also a syndic, or general agent, at San Blas, who attended to the shipping and forwarding of supplies. It was a happy combination of the minimum of functionaries with the maximum of responsibility.

The income supporting the missions was derived from two sources, the first of which was a fund, called the "Pious Fund," originally belonging to the Jesuit order, but on the suppression of that order, in 1768, taken possession of by the Spanish Government in trust for the Church. This fund, begun early in the eighteenth century, was made up of estates, mines, manufactories, and flocks, --all gifts of rich Catholics 77 65 to the Society of Jesus. It yielded an income of fifty thousand dollars a year, the whole of which belonged to the Church, and was to be used in paying stipends to the friars (to the Dominicans in Lower as well as to the Franciscans in Upper California), and in the purchasing of articles needed in the missions. The missions' second source of income was from the sales of their own products: first to the presidios, --these sales paid for by drafts on the Spanish or Mexican Government; second, to trading ships, coming more and more each year to the California coast.

As soon as revolutionary troubles began to agitate Spain and Mexico, the income of the missions from abroad began to fall off. The Pious Fund was too big a sum to be honestly administered by any government hard pressed for money. Spain began to filch from it early, to pay the bills of her wars with Portugal and England; and Mexico, as soon as she had the chance, followed Spain's example vigorously, selling whole estates and pocketing their price, farming the fund out for the benefit of the State treasury, and, finally, in Santa Anna's time, selling the whole outright to two banking-houses. During these troublous times the friars not only failed frequently to receive their regular stipends allotted from the interest of this Pious Fund, but their agent was unable to collect the money due them for the supplies furnished to the presidios. The sums of which they were thus robbed by two governments--that, being ostensibly of the Catholic faith, should surely have 78 66 held the Church's property sacred--mounted up in a few years to such enormous figures that restitution would have been practically impossible, and, except for their own internal sources of revenue, the missions must have come to bankruptcy and ruin.

However, the elements which were to bring about this ruin were already at work, --were, indeed, inherent in the very system on which they had been founded. The Spanish Government was impatient to see carried out, and to reap the benefit of, the pueblo feature of its colonization plan. With a singular lack of realization of the time needed to make citizens out of savages, it had set ten years as the period at the expiration of which the Indian communities attached to the missions were to be formed into pueblos, --the missions to be secularized, that is, turned into curacies, the pueblo being the parish. This was, no doubt, the wise and proper ultimate scheme, --the only one, in fact, which provided either for the entire civilization of the Indian or the successful colonization of the country. But five times ten years would have been little enough to allow for getting such a scheme fairly under way, and another five times ten years for the finishing and rounding of the work. It is strange how sure civilized peoples are, when planning and legislating for savages, to forget that it has always taken centuries to graft on or evolve out of savagery anything like civilization.

Aiming towards this completing of their 79

In the Mission Garden, San Juan Bautista

80 81 69 colonization plan, the Spanish Government had very early founded the pueblos of Los Angeles and San Jose´. A second class of pueblos, called, in the legal phrase of California's later days, "Presidial Pueblos," had originated in the settlement of the presidios, and gradually grown up around them. There were four of these, --San Diego, Monterey, Santa Barbara, and San Francisco.

It is easy to see how, as these settlements increased, of persons more or less unconnected with the missions, there must have grown up discontent at the Church's occupation and control of so large a proportion of the country. Ready for alliance with this discontent was the constant jealousy on the part of the military authorities, whose measures were often--and, no doubt, often rightly--opposed by the friars. These fomenting causes of disquiet reacted on the impatience and greed in Spain; all together slowly, steadily working against the missions, until, in 1813, the Spanish Cortes passed an act decreeing their secularization. This was set forth in sounding phrase as an act purely for the benefit of the Indians, that they might become citizens of towns. But it was, to say the least of it, as much for Spain as for the Indians, since, by its provisions, one half of the mission lands were to be sold for the payment of Spain's national debt. This act, so manifestly premature, remained a dead letter; but it alarmed the friars, and with reason. It was the tocsin of their doom, of the downfall of their establishments, and the ruin of their work.

82 70

Affairs grew more and more unsettled. Spanish viceroys and Mexican insurgents took turns at ruling in Mexico, and the representatives of each took turns at ruling in California. The waves of every Mexican revolution broke on the California shore. The College of San Fernando, in Mexico, also shared in the general confusion, and many of its members returned to Spain.

From 1817 to 1820 great requisitions were made by the Government upon the missions. They responded generously. They gave not only food, but money. They submitted to a tax, per capita , on all their thousands of Indians, to pay the expenses of a deputy to sit in the Mexican Congress. They allowed troops to be quartered in the mission buildings. At the end of the year 1820 the outstanding drafts on the Government, in favor of the missions, amounted to four hundred thousand dollars.

It is impossible, in studying the records of this time, not to feel that the friars were, in the main, disposed to work in good faith for the best interests of the State. That they opposed the secularization project is true; but it is unjust to assume that their motives in so doing were purely selfish. Most certainly, the results of the carrying out of that project were such as to prove all that they claimed of its untimeliness. It is easy saying, as their enemies do, that they would never have advocated it, and were not training the Indians with a view to it: but the first assertion is an assumption, and nothing more; 83 71 and the refutation of the second lies in the fact that even in that short time they had made the savages into "masons, carpenters, plasterers, soap-makers, tanners, shoe-makers, blacksmiths, millers, bakers, cooks, brickmakers, carters and cart-makers, weavers and spinners, saddlers, ship hands, agriculturists, herdsmen, vintagers; in a word, they filled all the laborious occupations known to civilized society."* Moreover, in many of the missions, plots of land had already been given to individual neophytes who seemed to have intelligence and energy enough to begin an independent life for themselves. But it is idle speculating now as to what would or would not have been done under conditions which never existed.

Special Report of the Hon. B. D. Wilson, of Los Angeles, Cal., to the Interior Department in 1852.

So long as Spain refused to recognize Mexico's independence, the majority of the friars, as was natural, remained loyal to the Spanish Government, and yielded with reluctance and under protest, in every instance, to Mexico's control. For some years President Sarria was under arrest for refusing to take the oath of allegiance to the Mexican republic. Nevertheless, it not being convenient to remove him and fill his place, he performed all his functions as president of the missions through that time. Many other friars refused to take the oath, and left the country in consequence. During three years the secularization project was continually agitated, and at intervals 84 72 measures initiatory to it were decreed and sometimes acted upon.

The shifting governors of unfortunate California legislated for or against the mission interests according to the exigencies of their needs or the warmness or lukewarmness of their religious faith.

An act of one year, declaring the Indians liberated, and ordering the friars to turn over the mission properties to administrators, would be followed a few years later by an act restoring the power of the friars, and giving back to them all that remained to be rescued of the mission properties and converts. All was anarchy and confusion. During the fifty-five years that California was under Spanish rule she had but nine governors. During the twenty-four that she was under Mexican misrule she had thirteen. It would be interesting to know what the Indian populations thought, as they watched these quarrellings and intrigues among the Christians who were held up to them as patterns for imitation.

In a curious pamphlet left by one of the old friars, Father Boscana, is told a droll story of the logical inferences some of them drew from the political situations among their supposed betters. It was a band of San Diego Indians. When they heard that the Spanish viceroy in the city of Mexico had been killed, and a Mexican made emperor in his place, they forthwith made a great feast, burned up their chief, and elected a new one in his stead. To the stringent 85 73 reproofs of the horrified friars they made answer: "Have you not done the same in Mexico? You say your king was not good, and you killed him. Well, our captain was not good, and we burned him. If the new one turns out bad, we will burn him too,"--a memorable instance of the superiority of example to precept.

At last, in 1834, the final blow fell on the missions. The Governor of California, in compliance with instructions received from Mexico, issued an authoritative edict for their secularization. It was a long document, and had many significant provisions in it. It said that the Indians were now to be "emancipated." But the sixteenth article said that they "should be obliged to join in such labors of community as are indispensable, in the opinion of the political chief, in the cultivation of the vineyards, gardens, and fields, which for the present remain unapportioned." This was a curious sort of emancipation; and it is not surprising to read, in the political records of the time, such paragraphs as this: "Out of one hundred and sixty Indian families at San Diego, to whom emancipation was offered by Governor Figueroa, only ten could be induced to accept it." The friars were to hand over all records and inventories to stewards or administrators appointed. Boards of magistrates were also appointed for each village. One half of the movable property was to be divided among the "emancipated persons," and to each head of a family was to be given four hundred 86 74 square yards of land. Everything else--lands, movable properties, property of all classes--was to be

Interior of La Purissima Mission

put into the hands of the administrator, to be held subject to the Federal Government. Out of these properties the administrators were to provide 87 75 properly for the support of the father or fathers left in charge of the church, the church properties, and the souls of the "emancipated persons." A more complete and ingenious subversion of the previously existing state of things could not have been devised; and it is hard to conceive how any student of the history of the period can see, in its shaping and sudden enforcing, anything except bold and unprincipled greed hiding itself under specious cloaks of right. Says Dwinelle, in his "Colonial History":--

"Beneath these specious pretexts was undoubtedly a perfect understanding between the Government of Mexico and the leading men in California, that in such a condition of things the Supreme Government might absorb the Pious Fund, under the pretence that it was no longer necessary for missionary purposes, and thus had reverted to the State as a quasi escheat, while the coactors in California should appropriate the local wealth of the missions by the rapid and sure process of administering their temporalities."

Of the manner in which the project was executed, Dwinelle goes on to say:--

"These laws, whose ostensible purpose was to convert the missionary establishments into Indian pueblos, their churches into parish churches, and to elevate the Christianized Indians to the rank of citizens, were after all executed in such a manner that the so-called secularization of the missions resulted in their plunder and complete ruin, and in the demoralization and dispersion of the Christianized Indians."

88 76

It is only just to remember, however, that these laws and measures were set in force in a time of revolution, when even the best measures and laws could have small chance of being fairly executed, and that a government which is driven, as Mexico was, to recruiting its colonial forces by batches of selected prison convicts, is entitled to pity, if not charity, in our estimates of its conduct. Of course, the position of administrator of a mission became at once a political reward and a chance for big gains, and simply, therefore, a source and centre of bribery and corruption.

Between the governors--who now regarded the mission establishments as State property, taking their cattle or grain as freely as they would any other revenue, and sending orders to a mission for tallow as they would draw checks on the treasury--and the administrators, who equally regarded them as easy places for the filling of pockets, the wealth of the mission disappeared as dew melts in the sun. Through all this the Indians were the victims. They were, under the administrators, compelled to work far harder than before; they were ill-fed and ill-treated; they were hired out in gangs to work in towns or on farms, under masters who regarded them simply as beasts of burden; their rights to the plots of land which had been set off for them were, almost without exception, ignored. A more pitiable sight has not often been seen on earth than the spectacle of this great body of helpless, dependent creatures, 89 77 suddenly deprived of their teachers and protectors, thrown on their own resources, and at the mercy of rapacious and unscrupulous communities, in time of revolution. The best comment on their sufferings is to be found in the statistics of the mission establishments after a few years of the administrators' reign.

In 1834 there were, according to the lowest estimates, from fifteen to twenty thousand Indians in the missions. De Mofras's statistics give the number as 30,620. In 1840 there were left, all told, but six thousand. In many of the missions there were less than one hundred. According to De Mofras, the cattle, sheep, horses, and mules, in 1834, numbered 808,000; in 1842, but 6,320. Other estimates put the figures for 1834 considerably lower. It is not easy to determine which are true; but the most moderate estimates of all tell the story with sufficient emphasis. There is also verbal testimony on these points still to be heard in California, if one has patience and interest enough in the subject to listen to it. There are still living, wandering about, half blind, half starved, in the neighborhood of the mission sites, old Indians who recollect the mission times in the height of their glory. Their faces kindle with a sad flicker of recollected happiness, as they tell of the days when they had all they wanted to eat, and the padres were so good and kind: "Bueno tiempo! Bueno tiempo!" they say, with a hopeless sigh and shake of the head.

90 78

Under the new re´gime the friars suffered hardly less than the Indians. Some fled the country, unable to bear the humiliations and hardships of their positions under the control of the administrators or majorsdomo, and dependent on their caprice for shelter and even for food. Among this number was Father Antonio Peyri, who had been for over thirty years in charge of the splendid mission of San Luis Rey. In 1800, two years after its founding, this mission had 369 Indians. In 1827 it had 2,686; it owned over twenty thousand head of cattle, and nearly twenty thousand sheep. It controlled over two hundred thousand acres of land, and there were raised in its fields in one year three thousand bushels of wheat, six thousand of barley, and ten thousand of corn. No other mission had so fine a church. It was one hundred and sixty feet long, fifty wide, and sixty high, with walls four feet thick. A tower at one side held a belfry for eight bells. The corridor on the opposite side had two hundred and fifty-six arches. Its gold and silver ornaments are said to have been superb.

When Father Peyri made up his mind to leave the country, he slipped off by night to San Diego, hoping to escape without the Indians' knowledge. But, missing him in the morning, and knowing only too well what it meant, five hundred of them mounted their ponies in hot haste, and galloped all the way to San Diego, forty-five miles, to bring him back by force. They arrived just as the ship, with Father 91 79 Peyri on board, was weighing anchor. Standing on the deck, with outstretched arms he blessed them, amid their tears and loud cries. Some flung themselves into the water and swam after the ship. Four reached it, and clinging to its sides, so implored to be taken that the father consented, and carried them with him to Rome, where one of them became a priest.

There were other touching instances in which the fathers refused to be separated from their Indian converts, and remained till the last by their side, sharing all their miseries and deprivations. De Mofras, in his visit to the country in 1842, found, at the mission of San Luis Obispo, Father Azagonais, a very old man, living in a hut, like the Indians, sleeping on a rawhide on the bare ground, with no drinking-vessel but an ox-horn, and no food but some dried meat hanging in the sun. The little he had he shared with the few Indians who still lingered there. Benevolent persons had offered him asylum; but he refused, saying that he would die at his post. At the San Antonio mission De Mofras found another aged friar, Father Gutierrez, living in great misery. The administrator of this mission was a man who had been formerly a menial servant in the establishment; he had refused to provide Father Gutierrez with the commonest necessaries, and had put him on an allowance of food barely sufficient to keep him alive.

At Soledad was a still more pitiful case. Father Sarria, who had labored there for thirty years, 92 80 refused to leave the spot, even after the mission was so ruined that it was not worth any administrator's while to keep it. He and the handful of Indians who remained loyal to their faith and to him lived on there, growing poorer and poorer each day; he sharing his every morsel of food with them, and starving himself, till, one Sunday morning, saying mass at the crumbling altar, he fainted, fell forward, and died in their arms, of starvation. This was in 1838. Only eight years before, this Soledad mission had owned thirty-six thousand cattle, seventy thousand sheep, three hundred yoke of working oxen, more horses than any other mission, and had an aqueduct, fifteen miles long, supplying water enough to irrigate twenty thousand acres of land.

For ten years after the passage of the Secularization Act, affairs went steadily on from bad to worse with the missions. Each governor had his own plans and devices for making the most out of them, renting them, dividing them into parcels for use of colonists, establishing pueblos on them, making them subject to laws of bankruptcy, and finally selling them. The departmental assemblies sometimes indorsed and sometimes annulled the acts of the governors. In 1842 Governor Micheltorena proclaimed that the twelve southern missions should be restored to the Church, and that the Government would not make another grant of land without the consent of the friars. This led to a revolution, or rather an ebullition, and Micheltorena was sent out of the country.

93

Church and Graveyard of San Luis Rey

94 95 83

To him succeeded Pio Pico, who remained in power till the occupation of California by the United States forces in 1846. During the reign of Pio Pico, the ruin of the mission establishments was completed. They were at first sold or rented in batches to the highest bidders. There was first a preliminary farce of proclamation to the Indians to return and take possession of the missions if they did not want them sold. These proclamations were posted up in the pueblos for months before the sales. In 1844 the Indians of Dolores, Soledad, San Miguel, La Purissima, and San Rafael* were thus summoned to come back to their missions, --a curious bit of half-conscience-stricken, half-politic recognition of the Indians' ownership of the lands, the act of the Departmental Assembly saying that if they (the Indians) did not return before such a date, the Government would declare said missions to be "without owner," and dispose of them accordingly. There must have been much bitter speech in those days when news of these proclamations reached the wilds where the mission Indians had taken refuge.

The missions of San Rafael and San Francisco de Solano were the last founded; the first in 1819, and the latter in 1823, --too late to attain any great success or importance.

At last, in March, 1846, an act of the Departmental Assembly made the missions liable to the laws of bankruptey, and authorized the governor to sell them to private persons. As by this time all the missions that had any pretence of existence left had been run 96 84 hopelessly into debt, proceedings in regard to them were much simplified by this act. In the same year the President of Mexico issued an order to Governor Pico to use all means within his power to raise money to defend the country against the United States; and under color of this double authorization the governor forthwith proceeded to sell missions right and left. He sold them at illegal private sales; he sold them for insignificant sums, and for sums not paid at all; whether he was, to use the words of a well-known legal brief in one of the celebrated California land cases, "wilfully ignorant or grossly corrupt," there is no knowing, and it made no difference in the result.

One of the last acts of the Departmental Assembly, before the surrender of the country, was to declare all Governor Pico's sales of mission property null and void; and one of Governor Pico's last acts was, as soon as he had made up his mind to run away out of the country, to write to some of his special friends and ask them if there were anything else they would like to have him give them before his departure.

On the 7th of July, 1846, the American flag was raised in Monterey, and formal possession of California was taken by the United States. The proclamation of Admiral Sloat on this memorable occasion included these words: "All persons holding title to real estate, or in quiet possession of lands under color of right, shall have those titles and rights guaranteed to them." "Color of right" is a legal phrase, embodying a moral 97 85 idea, an obligation of equity. If the United States Government had kept this guarantee, there would be living in comfortable homesteads in California to-day many hundreds of people that are now homeless and beggared, --Mexicans as well as Indians.

The army officers in charge of different posts in California, in these first days of the United States' occupation of the country, were perplexed and embarrassed by nothing so much as by the confusion existing in regard to the mission properties and lands. Everywhere men turned up with bills of sale from Governor Pico. At the San Diego mission the ostensible owner, one Estudillo by name, confessed frankly that he "did not think it right to dispose of the Indians' property in that way; but as everybody was buying missions, he thought he might as well have one."

In many of the missions, squatters, without show or semblance of title, were found; these the officers turned out. Finally, General Kearney, to save the trouble of cutting any more Gordian knots, declared that all titles of missions and mission lands must be held in abeyance till the United States Government should pronounce on them.

For several years the question remained unsettled, and the mission properties were held by those who had them in possession at the time of the surrender. But in 1856 the United States Land Commission gave, in reply to a claim and petition from the Catholic Bishop of California, a decision which, 98 86 considered with reference to the situation of the mission properties at the time of the United States' possession, was perhaps as near to being equitable as the circumstances would admit. But, considered with reference to the status of the mission establishments under the Spanish rule, to their original extent, the scope of the work, and the magnificent success of their experiment up to the time of the revolutions, it seems a sadly inadequate return of property once rightfully held. Still, it was not the province of the United States to repair the injustices or make good the thefts of Spain and Mexico; and any attempt to clear up the tangle of confiscations, debts, frauds, and robberies in California, for the last quarter of a century before the surrender, would have been bootless work.

Old Door and Corridor Arches, San Juan

The Land Commissioner's decision was based on the old Spanish law which divided church property into two classes, sacred and ecclesiastical, and held it to be inalienable, except in case of necessity, 99 87 and then only according to provisions of canon law; in the legal term, it was said to be "out of commerce." The sacred property was that which had been in a formal manner consecrated to God, --church buildings, sacred vessels, vestments, etc. Ecclesiastical property was land held by the Church, and appropriated to the maintenance of divine worship, or the support of the ministry; buildings occupied by the priests, or necessary for their convenience; gardens, etc. Following a similar division, the property of the mission establishments was held by the Land Commission to be of two sorts, --mission property and church property: the mission property, embracing the great tracts of land formerly cultivated for the community's purpose, it was decided, must be considered as Government property; the church property, including, with the church buildings, houses of priests, etc., such smaller portions of land as were devoted to the immediate needs of the ministry, it was decided must still rightfully go to the Church. How many acres of the old gardens, orchards, vineyards, of the missions could properly be claimed by the Church under this head, was of course a question; and it seems to have been decided on very different bases in different missions, as some received much more than others. But all the church buildings, priests' houses, and some acres of land, more or less, with each, were pronounced by this decision to have been "before the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo solemnly dedicated to the use 100 88 of the Church, and therefore withdrawn from commerce;" "such an interest is protected by the provisions of the treaty, and must be held inviolate under our laws." Thus were returned at last, into the inalienable possession of the Catholic Church, all that were left of the old mission churches, and some fragments of the mission lands. Many of them are still in operation as curacies; others are in ruins; of some not a trace is left, --not even a stone.

At San Diego the walls of the old church are still standing, unroofed, and crumbling daily. It was used as a cavalry barracks during the war of 1846, and has been a sheepfold since. Opposite it is an olive orchard, of superb hoary trees still in bearing; a cactus wall twenty feet high, and a cluster of date palms, are all that remain of the friars' garden.

At San Juan Capistrano, the next mission to the north, some parts of the buildings are still habitable. Service is held regularly in one of the small chapels. The priest lives there, and ekes out his little income by renting some of the mouldering rooms. The church is a splendid ruin. It was of stone, a hundred and fifty feet long by a hundred in width, with walls five feet thick, a dome eighty feet high, and a fine belfry of arches in which four bells rang. It was thrown down by an earthquake in 1812, on the day of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Morning mass was going on, and the church was thronged; thirty persons were killed, and many more injured.

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At Santa Barbara Mission

102 103 91

The little hamlet of San Juan Capistrano lies in harbor, as it were, looking out on its glimpse of sea, between two low spurs of broken and rolling hills, which in June are covered with shining yellow and blue and green, iridescent as a peacock's neck. It is worth going across the continent to come into the village at sunset of a June day. The peace, silence, and beauty of the spot are brooded over and dominated by the grand gray ruin, lifting the whole scene into an ineffable harmony. Wandering in room after room, court after court, through corridors with red-tiled roofs and hundreds of broad Roman arches, over fallen pillars, and through carved doorways, whose untrodden thresholds have sunk out of sight in summer grasses, one asks himself if he be indeed in America. On the interior walls are still to be seen spaces of brilliant fresco-work, in Byzantine patterns of superb red, pale green, gray, and blue; and the corridors are paved with tiles, large and square. It was our good fortune to have with us, in San Juan Capistrano, a white-haired Mexican who in his boyhood had spent a year in the mission. He remembered as if it were yesterday its bustling life of fifty years ago, when the arched corridor ran unbroken around the great courtyard, three hundred feet square, and was often filled with Indians, friars, officers, and gay Mexican ladies looking on at a bull-fight in the centre. He remembered the splendid library, filled from ceiling to floor with books, extending one whole side of the square; in a corner, where had been the 104 92 room in which he used to see sixty Indian women weaving at looms, we stood ankle-deep in furzy weeds and grass. He showed us the doorway, now closed up, which led into the friars' parlor. To this door, every Sunday, after mass, came the Indians, in long processions, to get their weekly gifts. Each one received something, --a handkerchief, dress, trinket, or money. While their gifts were being distributed, a band of ten or twelve performers, all Indians, played lively airs on brass and stringed instruments. In a little baptistery, dusky with cobweb and mould, we found huddled a group of wooden statues of saints, which once stood in niches in the church; on their heads were faded and brittle wreaths, left from the last occasion on which they had done duty. One had lost an eye; another a hand. The gilding and covering of their robes were dimmed and defaced. But they had a dignity which nothing could destroy. The contours were singularly expressive and fine, and the rendering of the drapery was indeed wonderful, --flowing robes and gathered and lifted mantles, all carved in solid wood.

There are statues of this sort to be seen in several of the old mission churches. They were all carved by the Indians, many of whom showed great talent in that direction. There is also in the office of the justice--or alcalde, as he is still called--of San Juan Capistrano, a carved chair of noticeably bold and graceful design made by Indian workmen. A few tatters of heavy crimson brocade hang on it still, relics 105 93 of the time when it formed part of a gorgeous paraphernalia and service.

Even finer than the ruins of San Juan Capistrano are those of the church at San Luis Rey. It has a perfectly proportioned dome over the chancel, and beautiful groined arches on either hand and over the altar. Four broad pilasters on each side of the church are frescoed in a curious mixing of blues, light and dark, with reds and black, which have faded and blended into a delicious tone. A Byzantine pulpit hanging high on the wall, and three old wooden statues in niches, are the only decorations left. Piles of dirt and rubbish fill the space in front of the altar, and grass and weeds are growing in the corners; great flocks of wild doves live in the roof, and have made the whole place unclean and foul-aired. An old Mexican, eighty years old, a former servant of the mission, has the ruin in charge, and keeps the doors locked still, as if there were treasure to guard. The old man is called "alcalde" by the village people, and seems pleased to be so addressed. His face is like wrinkled parchment, and he walks bent into a parenthesis, but his eyes are bright and young. As he totters along, literally holding his rags together, discoursing warmly of the splendors he recollects, he seems indeed a ghost from the old times.

The most desolate ruin of all is that of La Purissima Mission. It is in the Lompoc valley, two days' easy journey north of Santa Barbara. Nothing 106 94 is left there but one long, low adobe building, with a few arches of the corridor; the doors stand open, the roof is falling in: it has been so often used as a stable and sheepfold, that even the grasses are killed around it. The painted pulpit hangs half falling on the wall, its stairs are gone, and its sounding-board is slanting awry. Inside the broken altar-rail is a pile of stones, earth, and rubbish thrown up by seekers after buried treasures; in the farther corner another pile and hole, the home of a badger; mud-swallows' nests are thick on the cornice, and cobwebbed rags of the old canvas ceiling hang fluttering overhead. The only trace of the ancient cultivation is a pear-orchard a few rods off, which must have been a splendid sight in its day; it is at least two hundred yards square, with a double row of trees all around, so placed as to leave between them a walk fifty or sixty feet wide. Bits of broken aqueduct here and there, and a large, round stone tank overgrown by grass, showed where the life of the orchard used to flow in. It has been many years slowly dying of thirst. Many of the trees are gone, and those that remain stretch out gaunt and shrivelled boughs, which, though still bearing fruit, look like arms tossing in vain reproach and entreaty; a few pinched little blossoms seemed to heighten rather than lessen their melancholy look.

At San Juan Bautista there lingers more of the atmosphere of the olden time than is to be found in any other place in California. The mission church is well preserved; its grounds are enclosed and cared for; 107

San Juan Bautista

108 109 97 in its garden are still blooming roses and vines, in the shelter of palms, and with the old stone sun-dial to tell time. In the sacristy are oak chests, full of gorgeous vestments of brocades, with silver and gold laces. On one of these robes is an interesting relic. A lost or worn-out silken tassel had been replaced by the patient Indian workers with one of fine-shredded rawhide; the shreds wound with silver wire, and twisted into tiny rosettes and loops, closely imitating the silver device. The church fronts south, on a little green-locust walled plaza, --the sleepiest, sunniest, dreamiest place in the world. To the east the land falls off abruptly, so that the paling on that side of the plaza is outlined against the sky, and its little locked gate looks as if it would open into the heavens. The mission buildings used to surround this plaza; after the friars' day came rich men living there; and a charming inn is kept now in one of their old adobe houses. On the east side of the church is a succession of three terraces leading down to a valley. On the upper one is the old graveyard, in which it is said there are sleeping four thousand Indians.

In 1825 there were spoken at this mission thirteen different Indian dialects.

Just behind the church is an orphan girls' school, kept by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart. At six o'clock every morning the bells of the church ring for mass as they used to ring when over a thousand Indians flocked at the summons. To-day, at the sound, there comes a procession of little girls and 110 98 young maidens, the black-robed sisters walking before them with crossed hands and placid faces. One or two Mexican women, with shawls over their heads, steal across the faint paths of the plaza, and enter the church.

I shall always recollect the morning when I went, too. The silence of the plaza was in itself a memorial service, with locust blossoms swinging incense. It was barely dawn in the church. As the shrill yet sweet childish voices lifted up the strains of the Kyrie Eleison, I seemed to see the face of Father Junipero in the dim lighted chancel, and the benediction was as solemn as if he himself had spoken it. Why the little town of San Juan Bautista continues to exist is a marvel. It is shut out and cut off from everything; only two or three hundred souls are left in it; its streets are grass-grown; half its houses are empty. But it has a charm of sun, valley, hill, and seaward off-look unsurpassed in all California. Lingering out a peaceful century there are many old men and women, whose memories are like magic glasses, reproducing the pictures of the past. One such we found: a Mexican woman eighty-five years old, portly, jolly, keen-tongued, keen-eyed; the widow of one of the soldiers of the old mission guard. She had had twelve children; she had never been ill a week in her life; she is now the village nurse, and almost doctor. Sixty years back she remembered. "The Indians used to be in San Juan Bautista like sheep," she said, "by the thousand and thousand." They were always good, 111 99 and the padres were always kind. Fifty oxen were killed for food every eight days, and everybody had all he wanted to eat. There was much more water then than now, plenty of rain, and the streams always full. "I don't know whether you or we were bad, that it has been taken away by God," she said, with a quick glance, half humorous, half antagonistic.

The Santa Barbara Mission is still in the charge of Franciscans, the only one remaining in their possession. It is now called a college for apostolic missionary work, and there are living within its walls eight members of the order. One of them is very old, --a friar of the ancient re´gime ; his benevolent face is well known throughout the country, and there are in many a town and remote hamlet men and women who wait always for his coming before they will make confession. He is like Saint Francis's first followers: the obligations of poverty and charity still hold to him the literal fulness of the original bond. He gives away garment after garment, leaving himself without protection against cold; and the brothers are forced to lock up and hide from him all provisions, or he would leave the house bare of food. He often kneels from midnight to dawn on the stone floor of the church, praying and chanting psalms; and when a terrible epidemic of smallpox broke out some years ago, he labored day and night, nursing the worst victims of it, shriving them, and burying them with his own hands. He is past eighty and has not much longer to stay. He has outlived many things beside 112 100 his own prime: the day of the sort of faith and work to which his spirit is attuned has passed by forever.

The mission buildings stand on high ground, three miles from the beach, west of the town and above it, looking to the sea. In the morning the sun's first rays flash full on its front, and at evening they linger late on its western wall. It is an inalienable benediction to the place. The longer one stays there the more he is aware of the influence on his soul, as well as of the importance in the landscape of the benign and stately edifice.

On the corridor of the inner court hangs a bell which is rung for the hours of the daily offices and secular duties. It is also struck whenever a friar dies, to announce that all is over. It is the duty of the brother who has watched the last breath of the dying one to go immediately and strike this bell. Its sad note has echoed many times through the corridors. One of the brothers said, last year, --

"The first time I rang that bell to announce a death, there were fifteen of us left. Now there are only eight."

The sentence itself fell on my ear like the note of a passing-bell. It seems a not unfitting last word to this slight and fragmentary sketch of the labors of the Franciscan Order in California.

Still more fitting, however, are the words of a historian who, living in California and thoroughly knowing its history from first to last, has borne the 113 101 following eloquent testimony to the friars and their work:--

"The results of the mission scheme of Christianization and colonization were such as to justify the plans of the wise statesman who devised it, and to gladden the hearts of the pious men who devoted their lives to its execution.

"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."* *

John W. Dwinelle's Colonial History of San Francisco, pp. 44-87. 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. 114 115

THE PRESENT CONDITION OF THE MISSION INDIANS IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

116 117

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 118 106 drained or otherwise improved, whereby they may by their own industry have rendered them fertile, are reserved, in the 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 119

Old Squaw Weaving Baskets

120 121 109 any incumbrance, for the purpose of being given as rewards, or disposed of according to our pleasure.

In those days 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.

On Nov. 16, 1835, eighty-one "desafiliados" --as the ex-neophytes of missions were called--of the San Luis Rey Mission settled themselves in the San Pasqual valley, which was an appanage of that mission. These Indian communities appear to have had no documents to show their right, either as communities or individuals, to the land on which they had settled. At any rate, they had nothing which amounted to a protection, or stood in the way of settlers who coveted their lands. It is years since the last trace of the 122 110 pueblos Las Flores and San Dieguito disappeared; and the San Pasqual valley is entirely taken up by white settlers, chiefly on pre-emption claims. San Juan Capistrano is the only one of the four where are to be found any Indians' homes. If those who had banded themselves together and had been set off into pueblos had no recognizable or defensible title, how much more helpless and defenceless were individuals, or small communities without any such semblance of pueblo organization!

Most of the original Mexican grants included tracts of land on which Indians were living, sometimes large villages of them. In many of these grants, in accordance with the old Spanish law or custom, was incorporated a clause protecting the Indians. They were to be left undisturbed in their homes: the portion of the grant occupied by them did not belong to the grantee in any such sense as to entitle him to eject them. The land on which they were living, and the land they were cultivating at the time of the grant, belonged to them as long as they pleased to occupy it. In many of the grants the boundaries of the Indians' reserved portion of the property were carefully marked off; and the instances were rare in which Mexican grantees disturbed or in any way interfered with Indians living on their estates. There was no reason why they should. There was plenty of land and to spare, and it was simply a convenience and an advantage to have the skilled and docile Indian laborer on the ground.

123 111

But when the easy-going, generous, improvident Mexican needed or desired to sell his grant, and the sharp American was on hand to buy it, then was

Old Mission Indian, and Ruins of Mission. San Juan Capistrano

124 112 brought to light the helplessness of the Indians' position. What cared the sharp American for that sentimental clause, "without injury to the Indians"? Not a farthing. Why should he? His government, before him, had decided that all the lands belonging to the old missions, excepting the small portions technically held as church property, and therefore "out of commerce," were government lands. None of the Indians living on those lands at the time of the American possession were held to have any right--not even "color of right" --to them. That they and their ancestors had been cultivating them for three quarters of a century made no difference. Americans wishing to pre-empt claims on any of these so-called government lands did not regard the presence on them of Indian families or communities as any more of a barrier than the presence of so many coyotes or foxes. They would not hesitate to certify to the land office that such lands were "unoccupied." Still less, then, need the purchaser of tracts covered by old Mexican grants hold himself bound to regard the poor cumberers of the ground, who, having no legal right whatever, had been all their years living on the tolerance of a silly, good-hearted Mexican proprietor. The American wanted every rod of his land, every drop of water on it; his schemes were boundless; his greed insatiable; he had no use for Indians. His plan did not embrace them, and could not enlarge itself to take them in. They must go. This is, in brief, the summing up of the way in which has come 125 113 about the present pitiable state of the California Mission Indians.

In 1852 a report in regard to these Indians was made to the Interior Department by the Hon. B. D. Wilson, of Los Angeles. It is an admirable paper, clear and exhaustive. Mr. Wilson was an old Californian, had known the Indians well, and had been eyewitness to much of the cruelty and injustice done them. He says:--

"In the fall of the missions, accomplished by private cupidity and political ambition, philanthropy laments the failure of one of the grandest experiments ever made for the elevation of this unfortunate race."

He estimates that there were at that time in the counties of Tulare, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, and San Diego over fifteen thousand Indians who had been connected with the missions in those counties. They were classified as the Tularen˜os, Cahuillas, San Luisen˜os, and Dieguen˜os, the latter two being practically one nation, speaking one language, and being more generally Christianized than the others. They furnished, Mr. Wilson says, "the majority of the laborers, mechanics, and servants of San Diego and Los Angeles counties." They all spoke the Spanish language, and a not inconsiderable number could read and write it. They had built all the houses in the country, had taught the whites how to make brick, mud mortar, how to use asphalt on roofs; they understood irrigation, were good herders, 126 114 reapers, etc. They were paid only half the wages given to whites; and being immoderate gamblers, often gambled away on Saturday night and Sunday all they had earned in the week. At that time in Los Angeles nearly every other house in town was a grog-shop for Indians. In the San Pasqual valley there were twenty white vagabonds, all rumsellers, squatted at one time around the Indian pueblo. The Los Angeles ayuntamiento had passed an edict declaring that "all Indians without masters"--significant phrase!--must live outside the town limits; also, that all Indians who could not show papers from the alcalde of the pueblo in which they lived, should be treated as "horse thieves and enemies."

On Sunday nights the squares and streets of Los Angeles were often to be seen full of Indians lying about helpless in every stage of intoxication. They were picked up by scores, unconscious, carried to jail, locked up, and early Monday morning hired out to the highest bidders at the jail gates. Horrible outrages were committed on Indian women and children. In some instances the Indians armed to avenge these, and were themselves killed.

These are a few out of hundreds of similar items to be gathered from the newspaper records of the time. Conditions such as these could have but one outcome. Twenty years later, when another special report on the condition of the California Mission Indians was asked for by the Government, not over 127 115 five thousand Indians remained to be reported on. Vice and cruelty had reaped large harvests each year. Many of the rich valleys, which at the time of Mr. Wilson's report had been under cultivation by Indians, were now filled by white settlers, the Indians all gone, no one could tell where. In some instances whole villages of them had been driven off at once by fraudulently procured and fraudulently enforced claims. One of the most heartrending of these cases was that of the Temecula Indians.

The Temecula valley lies in the northeast corner of San Diego County. It is watered by two streams and has a good soil. The Southern California Railroad now crosses it. It was an appanage of the San Luis Rey Mission, and the two hundred Indians who were living there were the children and grand-children of San Luis Rey neophytes. The greater part of the valley was under cultivation. They had cattle, horses, sheep. In 1865 a "special agent" of the United States Government held a grand Indian convention there. Eighteen villages were represented, and the numbers of inhabitants, stock, vineyards, orchards, were reported. The Indians were greatly elated at this evidence of the Government's good intentions toward them. They set up a tall liberty-pole, and bringing forth a United States flag, which they had kept carefully hidden away ever since the beginning of the civil war, they flung it out to the winds in token of their loyalty. "It is astonishing," says one of the San Diego newspapers 128 116 of the day, "that these Indians have behaved so well, considering the pernicious teachings they have had from the secessionists in our midst."

There was already anxiety in the minds of the Temecula Indians as to their title to their lands. All that was in existence to show that they had any was the protecting clause in an old Mexican grant. To be sure, the man was still alive who had assisted in marking off the boundaries of their part of this original Temecula grant; but his testimony could establish nothing beyond the letter of the clause as it stood. They earnestly implored the agent to lay the case before the Interior Department. Whether he did or not I do not know, but this is the sequel: On April 15, 1869, an action was brought in the District Court, in San Francisco, by five men, against "Andrew Johnson, Thaddeus Stevens, Horace Greeley, and one thousand Indians, and other parties whose names are unknown." It was "a bill to quit title," an "action to recover possession of certain real estate bounded thus and thus." It included the Temecula valley. It was based on grants made by Governor Micheltorena in 1844. The defendants cited were to appear in court within twenty days.

The Indians appealed to the Catholic bishop to help them. He wrote to one of the judges an imploring letter, saying, "Can you not do something to save these poor Indians from being driven out?" But the scheme had been too skilfully plotted.

129

Indian Carts and Houses. Ricon Mission

130 131 119

There was no way--or, at any rate, no way was found--of protecting the Indians. The day came when a sheriff, bringing a posse of men and a warrant which could not be legally resisted, arrived to eject the Indian families from their houses and drive them out of the valley. The Indians' first impulse was as determined as it could have been if they had been white, to resist the outrage. But on being reasoned with by friends, who sadly and with shame explained to them that by thus resisting they would simply make it the duty of the sheriff to eject them by force, and, if necessary, shoot down any who opposed the executing of his warrant, they submitted. But they refused to lift hand to the moving. They sat down, men and women, on the ground, and looked on, some wailing and weeping, some dogged and silent, while the sheriff and his men took out of the neat little adobe houses their small stores of furniture, clothes, and food, and piled them on wagons to be carried--where?--anywhere the exiles chose, so long as they did not chance to choose a piece of any white man's land.

A Mexican woman is now living in that Temecula valley who told me the story of this moving. The facts I had learned before from records of one sort and another. But standing on the spot, looking at the ruins of the little adobe houses, and the walled graveyard full of graves, and hearing this woman tell how she kept her doors and windows shut, and could not bear to look out while the deed was being 132 120 done, I realized forcibly how different a thing is history seen from history written and read.

It took three days to move them. Procession after procession, with cries and tears, walked slowly behind the wagons carrying their household goods. They took the tule roofs off the little houses, and carried them along. They could be used again. Some of these Indians, wishing to stay as near as possible to their old home, settled in a small valley, only three miles and a half away to the south. It was a dreary, hot little valley, bare, with low, rocky buttes cropping out on either side, and with scanty growths of bushes; there was not a drop of water in it. Here the exiles went to work again; built their huts of reeds and straw; set up a booth of boughs for the priest, when he came, to say mass in; and a rude wooden cross to consecrate their new graveyard on a stony hill-side. They put their huts on barren knolls here and there, where nothing could grow. On the tillable land they planted wheat or barley or orchards, --some patches not ten feet square, the largest not over three or four acres. They hollowed out the base of one of the rocky buttes, sunk a well there, and found water.

I think none of us who saw this little refugee village will ever forget it. The whole place was a series of pictures; and knowing its history, we found in each low roof and paling the dignity of heroic achievement. Near many of the huts stood great round baskets woven of twigs, reaching half-way up to the eaves 133 121 and looking like huge birds'-nests. These were their granaries, holding acorns and wheat. Women with red pottery jars on their heads and on their backs were going to and from the well; old men were creeping about, bent over, carrying loads of fagots that would have seemed heavy for a donkey; aged women sitting on the ground were diligently plaiting baskets, too busy or too old to give more than a passing look at us. A group of women was at work washing wool in great stone bowls, probably hundreds of years old. The interiors of some of the houses were exquisitely neat and orderly, with touching attempts at adornment, --pretty baskets and shelves hanging on the walls, and over the beds canopies of bright calico. On some of the beds the sheets and pillow-cases were trimmed with wide hand-wrought lace, made by the Indian women themselves. This is one of their arts which date back to the mission days. Some of the lace is beautiful and fine, and of patterns like the old church laces. It was pitiful to see the poor creatures in almost every one of the hovels bringing out a yard or two of their lace to sell; and there was hardly a house which had not the lace-maker's frame hanging on the wall, with an unfinished piece of lace stretched in it. The making of this lace requires much time and patience. It is done by first drawing out all the lengthwise threads of a piece of fine linen or cotton; then the threads which are left are sewed over and over into an endless variety of intricate patterns. Sometimes the whole design is done in solid 134 122 button hole stitch, or solid figures are filled in on an open network made of the threads. The baskets were finely woven, of good shapes, and excellent decorative patterns in brown and black on yellow or white.

Every face, except those of the very young, was sad beyond description. They were stamped indelibly by generations of suffering, immovable distrust also underlying the sorrow. It was hard to make them smile. To all our expressions of good-will and interest they seemed indifferent, and received in silence the money we paid them for baskets and lace.

"The word "Temecula" is an Indian word, signifying "grief" or "mourning." It seems to have had a strangely prophetic fitness for the valley to which it was given.

While I am writing these lines, the news comes that, by an executive order of the President, the little valley in which these Indians took refuge has been set apart for them as a reservation. No doubt they know how much executive orders creating Indian reservations are worth. There have been several such made and revoked in California within their memories. The San Pasqual valley was at one time set apart by executive order as a reservation for Indians. This was in 1870. There were then living in the valley between two and three hundred Indians; some of them had been members of the original pueblo established there in 1835.

The comments of the California newspapers on this executive order are amusing, or would be if they did 135

Indian Interior, Rincon

136 137 125 not record such tragedy. It was followed by an outburst of virtuous indignation all along the coast. One paper said:--

"The iniquity of this scheme is made manifest when we state the fact that the Indians of that part of the State are Mission Indians who are settled in villages and engaged in farming like the white settlers....It would be gross injustice to the Indians themselves as well as to the white settlers in San Pasqual....These Indians are as fixed in their habitations as the whites, and have fruit-trees, buildings, and other valuable improvements to make them contented and comfortable. Until within the past two or three years they raised more fruit than the white settlers of the southern counties. There is belonging to an Indian family there a fig-tree that is the largest in the State, covering a space sixty paces in diameter....A remonstrance signed by over five hundred citizens and endorsed by every office-holder in the county has gone on to Washington against this swindle....This act on the part of the Government is no better than highway robbery, and the persons engaged in it are too base to be called men. There is not a person in either of these valleys that will not be ruined pecuniarily if these orders are enforced."

Looking through files of newspapers of that time, I found only one that had the moral courage to up-hold the measure. That paper said, --

"Most of the inhabitants are now Indians who desire to be protected in their ancient possessions; and the Government is about to give them that protection, after a long delay." 138 126 One editor, having nearly exhausted the resources of invective and false statement, actually had the hardihood to say that Indians could not be induced to live on this reservation because "there are no acorn-bearing trees there, and the acorns furnish their principal food."

The congressmen and their clients were successful. The order was revoked. In less than four years the San Pasqual Indians are heard from again. A justice of the peace in the San Pasqual valley writes to the district attorney to know if anything can be done to protect these Indians.

"Last year," he says, "the heart of this rancheria (village) was filed on and pre-empted. The settlers are beginning to plough up the land. The Los Angeles Land Office has informed the Indians that, not being citizens, they cannot retain any claim. It seems very hard," says the judge, "aside from the danger of difficulties likely to arise from it."

About this time a bill introduced in Congress to provide homes for the Mission Indians on the reservation plan was reported unfavorably upon by a Senate committee, on the ground that all the Mission Indians were really American citizens. The year following, the chief of the Pala Indians, being brought to the county clerk's office to register as a voter, was refused on the ground that, being an Indian, he was not a citizen. In 1850 a small band of Indians living in San Diego County were taxed to the amount of six hundred dollars, which they paid, 139 127 the sheriff said, "without a murmur." The next year they refused. The sheriff wrote to the district attorney, who replied that the tax must be paid. The Indians said they had no money. They had only bows, arrows, wigwams, and a few cattle. Finally, they were compelled to drive in enough of their cattle to pay the tax. One of the San Diego newspapers spoke of the transaction as "a small business to undertake to collect taxes from a parcel of naked Indians."

The year before these events happened a special agent, John G. Ames, had been sent out by the Government to investigate and report upon the condition of the Mission Indians. He had assured them "of the sincere desire of the Government to secure their rights and promote their interests, and of its intention to do whatever might be found practicable in this direction." He told them he had been "sent out by the Government to hear their story, to examine carefully into their condition, and to recommend such measures as seemed under the circumstances most desirable."

Mr. Ames found in the San Pasqual valley a white man who had just built for himself a good house, and claimed to have pre-empted the greater part of the Indians' village. He "had actually paid the price of the land to the register of the land office of the district, and was daily expecting the patent from Washington. He owned that it was hard to wrest from these well-disposed and industrious creatures 140 128 the homes they had built up. `But,' said he, `if I had not done it, somebody else would; for all agree that the Indian has no right to public lands.'"

Woven Granaries

This sketch of the history of the San Pasqual and Temecula bands of Indians is a fair showing of what, with little variation, has been the fate of the Mission Indians all through Southern California. The combination of cruelty and unprincipled greed on the part of the American settlers, with culpable ignorance, indifference, and neglect on the part of the 141 129 Government at Washington, has resulted in an aggregate of monstrous injustice, which no one can fully realize without studying the facts on the ground. In the winter of 1882 I visited this San Pasqual valley. I drove over from San Diego with the Catholic priest, who goes there three or four Sundays in a year, to hold service in a little adobe chapel built by the Indians in the days of their prosperity. This beautiful valley is from one to three miles wide, and perhaps twelve long. It is walled by high-rolling, soft-contoured hills, which are now one continuous wheat-field. There are, in sight of the chapel, a dozen or so adobe houses, many of which were built by the Indians; in all of them except one are now living the robber whites, who have driven the Indians out; only one Indian still remains in the valley. He earns a meagre living for himself and family by doing day's work for the farmers who have taken his land. The rest of the Indians are hidden away in the can˜ons and rifts of the near hills, --wherever they can find a bit of ground to keep a horse or two and raise a little grain. They have sought the most inaccessible spots, reached often by miles of difficult trail. They have fled into secret lairs like hunted wild beasts. The Catholic priest of San Diego is much beloved by them. He has been their friend for many years. When he goes to hold service, they gather from their various hiding-places and refuges; sometimes, on a special feˆte day, over two hundred come. But on the day I was there, 142 130 the priest being a young man who was a stranger to them, only a few were present. It was a pitiful sight. The dilapidated adobe building, empty and comfortless; the ragged poverty-stricken creatures, kneeling on the bare ground, --a few Mexicans, with some gaudiness of attire, setting off the Indians' poverty still more. In front of the chapel, on a rough cross-beam supported by two forked posts, set awry in the ground, swung a bell bearing the date of 1770. It was one of the bells of the old San Diego Mission. Standing bareheaded, the priest rang it long and loud: he rang it several times before the leisurely groups that were plainly to be seen in doorways or on roadsides bestirred themselves to make any haste to come. After the service I had a long talk, through an interpreter, with an aged Indian, the oldest now living in the county. He is said to be considerably over a hundred, and his looks corroborate the statement. He is almost blind, and has snow-white hair, and a strange voice, a kind of shrill whisper. He says he recollects the rebuilding of the San Diego Mission; though he was a very little boy then, he helped to carry the mud mortar. This was one hundred and three years ago. Instances of much greater longevity than this, however, are not uncommon among the California Indians. I asked if he had a good time in the mission. "Yes, yes," he said, turning his sightless eyes up to the sky; "much good time," "plenty to eat," " atole ," " pozzole ," "meat;" now, "no meat;" "all the time 143

Indian Woman

144 145 133 to beg, beg;" "all the time hungry." His wife, who is older than he, is still living, though "her hair is not so white." She was ill, and was with relatives far away in the mountains; he lifted his hand and pointed in the direction of the place. "Much sick, much sick; she will never walk any more," he said, with deep feeling in his voice.

During the afternoon the Indians were continually coming and going at the shop connected with the inn where we had stopped, some four miles from the valley. The keeper of the shop and inn said he always trusted them. They were "good pay." "Give them their time and they'll always pay; and if they die their relations will pay the last cent." Some of them he would "trust any time as high as twenty dollars." When I asked him how they earned their money, he seemed to have no very distinct idea. Some of them had a little stock; they might now and then sell a horse or a cow, he said; they hired as laborers whenever they could get a chance, working at sheep-shearing in the spring and autumn, and at grape-picking in the vintage season. A few of them had a little wheat to sell; sometimes they paid him in wheat. There were not nearly so many of them, however, as there had been when he first opened his shop; not half so many, he thought. Where had they gone? He shrugged his shoulders. "Who knows?" he said.

The most wretched of all the Mission Indians now, however, are not these who have been thus driven 146 134 into hill fastnesses and waterless valleys to wrest a living where white men would starve. There is in their fate the climax of misery, but not of degradation. The latter cannot be reached in the wilderness. It takes the neighborhood of the white man to accomplish it. On the outskirts of the town of San Diego are to be seen, here and there, huddled groups of what, at a distance, might be taken for piles of refuse and brush, old blankets, old patches of sailcloth, old calico, dead pine boughs, and sticks all heaped together in shapeless mounds; hollow, one perceives on coming nearer them, and high enough for human beings to creep under. These are the homes of Indians. I have seen the poorest huts of the most poverty-stricken wilds in Italy, Bavaria, Norway, and New Mexico; but never have I seen anything, in shape of shelter for human creatures, so loathsome as the kennels in which some of the San Diego Indians are living. Most of these Indians are miserable, worthless beggars, drunkards of course, and worse. Even for its own sake, it would seem that the town would devise some scheme of help and redemption for such outcasts. There is a school in San Diego for the Indian children; it is supported in part by the Government, in part by charity; but work must be practically thrown away on children that are to spend eighteen hours out of the twenty-four surrounded by such filth and vice.

Coming from the study of the records of the old mission times, with the picture fresh and vivid of the 147

The Call to Sunrise Mass, Pala

148 149 137 tranquil industry and comfort of the Indians' lives in the mission establishments, one gazes with double grief on such a spectacle as this. Some of these Indian hovels are within a short distance of the beach where the friars first landed, in 1769, and began their work. No doubt, Father Junipero and Father Crespi´, arm in arm, in ardent converse, full of glowing anticipation of the grand future results of their labors, walked again and again, up and down, on the very spot where these miserable wretches are living today. One cannot fancy Father Junipero's fiery soul, to whatever far sphere it may have been translated, looking down on this ruin without pangs of indignation.

There are still left in the mountain ranges of South California a few Indian villages which will probably, for some time to come, preserve their independent existence. Some of them number as many as two or three hundred inhabitants. Each has its chief, or, as he is now called, "capitan." They have their own system of government of the villages; it is autocratic, but in the main it works well. In one of these villages, that of the Cahuillas, situated in the San Jacinto range, is a school whose teacher is paid by the United States Government. She is a widow with one little daughter. She has built for herself a room adjoining the school-house. In this she lives alone, with her child, in the heart of the Indian village; there is not a white person within ten miles. She says that the village is as well-ordered, quiet, and peaceable as it 150 138 is possible for a village to be; and she feels far safer, surrounded by these three hundred Cahuillas, than she would feel in most of the California towns. The Cahuillas (pronounced Kaweeyahs) were one of the fiercest and most powerful of the tribes. The name signifies "master," or "powerful nation." A great number of the neophytes of the San Gabriel Mission were from this tribe; but a large proportion of them were never attached to any mission.

Their last great chief, Juan Antonio, died twenty years ago. At the time of the Mexican War he received the title of General from General Kearney, and never afterward appeared in the villages of the whites without some fragmentary attempts at military uniform. He must have been a grand character, with all his barbarism. He ruled his band like an emperor, and never rode abroad without an escort of from twenty to thirty men. When he stopped one of his Indians ran forward, bent down, took off his spurs, then, kneeling on all-fours made of his back a stool, on which Juan stepped in dismounting and mounting. In 1850 an Indian of this tribe, having murdered another Indian, was taken prisoner by the civil authorities and carried to Jurupa to be tried. Before the proceedings had begun, Juan, with a big following of armed Indians, dashed up to the court-house, strode in alone, and demanded that the prisoner be surrendered to him.

"I come not here as a child," he said. "I wish to punish my people my own way. If they deserve 151 139 hanging, I will hang them. If a white man deserves hanging, let the white man hang him. I am done."

The prisoner was given up. The Indians strapped him on a horse, and rode back to their village, where, in an open grave, the body of the murdered man had been laid. Into this grave, on top of the corpse of his victim, Juan Antonio, with his own hands flung the murderer alive, and ordered the grave instantly filled up with earth.

There are said to have been other instances of his dealings with offenders nearly as summary and severe as this. He is described as looking like an old African lion, shaggy and fierce; but he was always cordial and affectionate in his relations with the whites. He died in 1863, of smallpox, in a terrible epidemic which carried off thousands of Indians.

This Cahuilla village is in a small valley, high up in the San Jacinto range. The Indians are very poor, but they are industrious and hard-working. The men raise stock, and go out in bands as sheep-shearers and harvesters. The women make baskets, lace, and from the fibre of the yucca plant beautiful and durable mats, called "cocas," which are much sought after by California ranchmen as saddle-mats. The yucca fibres are soaked and beaten like flax; some are dyed brown, some bleached white, and the two woven together in a great variety of patterns.

In the San Jacinto valley, some thirty miles south of these Cahuillas, is another Indian village called 152 140 Saboba. These Indians have occupied and cultivated this ground since the days of the missions. They have good adobe houses, many acres of wheat-fields, little peach and apricot orchards, irrigating ditches, and some fences. In one of the houses I found a neatly laid wooden floor, a sewing-machine, and the walls covered with pictures cut from illustrated newspapers which had been given to them by the school teacher. There is a Government school here, numbering from twenty to thirty; the children read as well as average white children of their age, and in manners and in apparent interest in their studies were far above the average of children in the public schools.

One of the colony schemes, so common now in California, has been formed for the opening up and settling of the San Jacinto valley. This Indian village will be in the colony's way. In fact, the colony must have its lands and its water. It is only a question of a very little time, the driving out of these Saboba families as the Temeculas and San Pasquales were driven, --by force, just as truly as if at the point of the bayonet.

In one of the beautiful can˜ons opening on this valley is the home of Victoriano, an aged chief of the band. He is living with his daughter and grandchildren, in a comfortable adobe house at the head of the can˜on. The vineyard and peach orchard which his father planted there, are in good bearing. His grandson Jesus, a young man twenty years old, in 153 141 the summer of 1881 ploughed up and planted twenty acres of wheat. The boy also studied so faithfully in school that year--his first year at school--that he learned to read well in the "Fourth Reader;" this in spite of his being absent six weeks, in both spring and autumn, with the sheep-shearing band. A letter of his, written, at my request, to the Secretary of the Interior in behalf of his people, is touching in its simple dignity.

SAN JACINTO, May 29, 1882.

MR. TELLER.

DEAR SIR, --At the request of my friends, I write you in regard to the land of my people.

More than one hundred years ago my great-grandfather, who was chief of his tribe, settled with his people in the San Jacinto valley. The people have always been peaceful, never caring for war, and have welcomed Americans into the valley.

Some years ago a grant of land was given to the Estudillos by the Mexican Government. The first survey did not take in any of the land claimed by the Indians; but four years ago a new survey was made, taking in all the little farms, the stream of water, and the village. Upon this survey the United States Government gave a patent. It seems hard for us to be driven from our homes that we love as much as other people do theirs; and this danger is at our doors now, for the grant is being divided and the village and land will be assigned to some of the present owners of the grant.

And now, dear sir, after this statement of facts, I, for my people (I ask nothing for myself), appeal to you for help.

154 142

Cannot you find some way to right this great wrong done to a quiet and industrious people?

Hoping that we may have justice done us, I am

Respectfully yours,

JOSE´ JESUS CASTILLO.

He was at first unwilling to write it, fearing he should be supposed to be begging for himself rather than for his people. His father was a Mexican; and he has hoped that on that account their family would be exempt from the fate of the village when the colony comes into the valley. But it is not probable that in a country where water is gold, a stream of water such as runs by Victoriano's door will be left long in the possession of any Indian family, whatever may be its relations to rich Mexican proprietors in the neighborhood. Jesus's mother is a tall, superbly formed woman, with a clear skin, hazel nut-brown eyes that thrill one with their limpid brightness, a nose straight and strong, and a mouth like an Egyptian priestess. She is past forty, but she is strikingly handsome still; and one does not wonder at hearing the tragedy of her early youth, when, for years, she believed herself the wife of Jesus's father, lived in his house as a wife, worked as a wife, and bore him his children. Her heart broke when she was sent adrift, a sadder than Hagar, with her half-disowned offspring. Money and lands did not heal the wound. Her face is dark with the sting of it today. When I asked her to sell me the lace-trimmed pillow-case and sheet from her bed, her cheeks flushed 155

Laura, said to be 102 years of age. Benjamina, 117 years

156 157 145 at first, and she looked away haughtily before replying. But, after a moment, she consented. They needed the money. She knows well that days of trouble are in store for them.

Since the writing of this paper news has come that the long-expected blow has fallen on this Indian village. The colony scheme has been completed; the valley has been divided up; the land on which the village of Saboba stands is now the property of a San Bernardino merchant. Any day he chooses, he can eject these Indians as the Temecula and the San Pasqual bands were ejected, and with far more show of legal right.

In the vicinity of the San Juan Capistrano Mission are living a few families of Indians, some of them the former neophytes of the mission. An old woman there, named Carmen, is a splendid specimen of the best longevity which her race and the California air can produce. We found her in bed, where she spends most of her time, --not lying, but sitting cross-legged, looking brisk and energetic, and always busy making lace. Nobody makes finer lace than hers. Yet she laughed when we asked if she could see to do such fine work without spectacles.

"Where could I get spectacles?" she said, her eyes twinkling. Then she stretched out her hand for the spectacles of our old Mexican friend who had asked her this question for us; took them, turned them over curiously, tried to look through them, shook her head, and handed them back to him with a shrug and 158 146 a smile. She was twenty years older than he; but her strong, young eyes could not see through his glasses. He recollected her well, fifty years before, an active, handsome woman, taking care of the sacristy, washing the priests' laces, mending vestments, and filling various offices of trust in the mission. A sailor from a French vessel lying in the harbor wished to marry her; but the friars would not give their consent, because the man was a drunkard and dishonest. Carmen was well disposed to him, and much flattered by his love-making. He used to write letters to her, which she brought to this Mexican boy to read. It was a droll sight to see her face, as he, now white-haired and looking fully as old as she, reminded her of that time and of those letters, tapping her jocosely on her cheek, and saying some things I am sure he did not quite literally translate to us. She fairly colored, buried her face in her hands for a second, then laughed till she shook, and answered in voluble Spanish, of which also I suspect we did not get a full translation. She was the happiest Indian we saw; indeed, the only one who seemed really gay of heart or even content.

A few rods from the old mission church of San Gabriel, in a hut made of bundles of the tule reeds lashed to sycamore poles, as the San Gabriel Indians made them a hundred years ago, live two old Indian women, Laura and Benjamina. Laura is one hundred and two years old, Benjamina one hundred and seventeen. The record of their baptisms is still to be seen 159 147 in the church books, so there can be no dispute as to their age. It seems not at all incredible, however. If I had been told that Benjamina was a three-thousand-year-old Nile mummy, resuscitated by some mysterious process, I should not have demurred much at the tale. The first time I saw them, the two were crouching over a fire on the ground, under a sort of booth porch, in front of their hovel. Laura was making a feint of grinding acorn-meal in a stone bowl; Benjamina was raking the ashes, with her claw-like old fingers, for hot coals to start the fire afresh; her skin was like an elephant's, shrivelled, black, hanging in folds and welts on her neck and breast and bony arms; it was not like anything human; her shrunken eyes, bright as beads, peered out from under thickets of coarse grizzled gray hair. Laura wore a white cloth band around her head, tied on with a strip of scarlet flannel; above that, a tattered black shawl, which gave her the look of an aged imp. Old baskets, old pots, old pans, old stone mortars and pestles, broken tiles and bricks, rags, straw, boxes, legless chairs, --in short, all conceivable rubbish, --were strewn about or piled up in the place, making the weirdest of backgrounds for the aged crones' figures. Inside the hut were two bedsteads and a few boxes, baskets, and nets; and drying grapes and peppers hung on the walls. A few feet away was another hut, only a trifle better than this; four generations were living in the two. Benjamina's step-daughter, aged eighty, was a fine creature. With a white band 160 148 straight around her forehead close to the eyebrows and a gay plaid handkerchief thrown on above it, falling squarely each side of her face, she looked like an old Bedouin sheik.

Our Mexican friend remembered Laura as she was fifty years ago. She was then, even at fifty-two, celebrated as one of the swiftest runners and best ballplayers in all the San Gabriel games. She was a singer, too, in the choir. Coaxing her up on her feet, patting her shoulders, entreating and caressing her as one would a child, he succeeded in persuading her to chant for us the Lord's Prayer and part of the litanies, as she had been wont to do it in the old days. It was a grotesque and incredible sight. The more she stirred and sang and lifted her arms, the less alive she looked. We asked the step-daughter if they were happy and wished to live. Laughing, she repeated the question to them. "Oh, yes, we wish to live forever," they replied. They were greatly terrified, the daughter said, when the railway cars first ran through San Gabriel. They thought it was the devil bringing fire to burn up the world. Their chief solace is tobacco. To beg it, Benjamina will creep about in the village by the hour, bent double over her staff, tottering at evey step. They sit for the most part silent, motionless, on the ground; their knees drawn up, their hands clasped over them, their heads sunk on their breasts. In my drives in the San Gabriel valley I often saw them sitting thus, as if they were dead. The sight had an 161 149 indescribable fascination. It seemed that to be able to penetrate into the recesses of their thoughts would be to lay hold upon secrets as old as the earth.

Dove-cote. Rincon Mission

One of the most beautiful appanages of the San Luis Rey Mission, in the time of its prosperity, was the Pala valley. It lies about twenty-five miles east of San Luis, among broken spurs of the Coast Range, watered by the San Luis River, and also by its own little stream, the Pala Creek. It was always a favorite home of the Indians; and at the time of the secularization, 162 150 over a thousand of them used to gather at the weekly mass in its chapel. Now, on the occasional visits of the San Juan Capistrano priest, to hold service there, the dilapidated little church is not half filled, and the numbers are growing smaller each year. The buildings are all in decay; the stone steps leading to the belfry have crumbled; the walls of the little graveyard are broken in many places, the paling and the graves are thrown down. On the day we were there, a memorial service for the dead was going on in the chapel; a great square altar was draped with black, decorated with silver lace and ghastly funereal emblems; candles were burning; a row of kneeling black-shawled women were holding lighted candles in their hands; two old Indians were chanting a Latin Mass from a tattered missal bound in rawhide; the whole place was full of chilly gloom, in sharp contrast to the bright valley outside, with its sunlight and silence. This mass was for the soul of an old Indian woman named Margarita, sister of Manuelito, a somewhat famous chief of several bands of the San Luisen˜os. Her home was at the Potrero, --a mountain meadow, or pasture, as the word signifies, --about ten miles from Pala, high up the mountain-side, and reached by an almost impassable road. This farm--or "saeter" it would be called in Norway--was given to Margarita by the friars; and by some exceptional good fortune she had a title which, it is said, can be maintained by her heirs. In 1871, in a revolt of 163 151 some of Manuelito's bands, Margarita was hung up by her wrists till she was near dying, but was cut down at the last minute and saved.

One of her daughters speaks a little English; and finding that we had visited Pala solely on account of our interest in the Indians, she asked us to come up to the Potrero and pass the night. She said timidly that they had plenty of beds, and would do all that they knew how to do to make us comfortable. One might be in many a dear-priced hotel less comfortably lodged and served than we were by these hospitable Indians in their mud house, floored with earth. In my bedroom were three beds, all neatly made, with lace-trimmed sheets and pillow-cases and patch-work coverlids. One small square window with a wooden shutter was the only aperture for air, and there was no furniture except one chair and a half-dozen trunks. The Indians, like the Norwegian peasants, keep their clothes and various properties all neatly packed away in boxes or trunks. As I fell asleep, I wondered if in the morning I should see Indian heads on the pillows opposite me; the whole place was swarming with men, women, and babies, and it seemed impossible for them to spare so many beds; but, no, when I waked, there were the beds still undisturbed; a soft-eyed Indian girl was on her knees rummaging in one of the trunks; seeing me awake, she murmured a few words in Indian, which conveyed her apology as well as if I had understood them. From the very bottom of the trunk she drew 164 152 out a gilt-edged china mug, darted out of the room, and came back bringing it filled with fresh water. As she set it in the chair, in which she had already put a tin pan of water and a clean coarse towel, she smiled, and made a sign that it was for my teeth. There was a thoughtfulness and delicacy in the attention which lifted it far beyond the level of its literal value. The gilt-edged mug was her most precious possession; and, in remembering water for the teeth, she had provided me with the last superfluity in the way of white man's comfort of which she could think.

The food which they gave us was a surprise; it was far better than we had found the night before in the house of an Austrian colonel's son, at Pala. Chicken, deliciously cooked, with rice and chile; soda-biscuits delicately made; good milk and butter, all laid in orderly fashion, with a clean table-cloth, and clean, white stone china. When I said to our hostess that I regretted very much that they had given up their beds in my room, that they ought not to have done it, she answered me with a wave of her hand that "it was nothing; they hoped I had slept well; that they had plenty of other beds." The hospitable lie did not deceive me, for by examination I had convinced myself that the greater part of the family must have slept on the bare earth in the kitchen. They would not have taken pay for our lodging, except that they had just been forced to give so much for the mass for Margarita's soul, and 165 153 it had been hard for them to raise the money. Twelve dollars the priest had charged for the mass; and in addition they had to pay for the candles, silver lace, black cloth, etc., nearly as much more. They had earnestly desired to have the mass said at the Potrero, but the priest would not come up there for less than twenty dollars, and that, Antonia said, with a sigh, they could not possibly pay. We left at six o'clock in the morning; Margarita's husband, the "capitan," riding off with us to see us safe on our way. When we had passed the worst gullies and boulders, he whirled his horse, lifted his ragged old sombrero with the grace of a cavalier, smiled, wished us good-day and good luck, and was out of sight in a second, his little wild pony galloping up the rough trail as if it were as smooth as a race-course.

Between the Potrero and Pala are two Indian villages, the Rincon and Pauma. The Rincon is at the head of the valley, snugged up against the mountains, as its name signifies, in a "corner." Here were fences, irrigating ditches, fields of barley, wheat, hay, and peas; a little herd of horses and cows grazing, and several flocks of sheep. The men were all away sheep-shearing; the women were at work in the fields, some hoeing, some clearing out the irrigating ditches, and all the old women plaiting baskets. These Rincon Indians, we were told, had refused a school offered them by the Government; they said they would accept nothing at the hands of 166 154 the Government until it gave them a title to their lands.

The most picturesque of all the Mission Indians' hiding-places which we saw was that on the Carmel River, a few miles from the San Carlos Mission. Except by help of a guide it cannot be found. A faint trail turning off from the road in the riverbottom leads down to the river's edge. You follow it into the river and across, supposing it a ford. On the opposite bank there is no trail, no sign of one. Whether it is that the Indians purposely always go ashore at different points of the bank, so as to leave no trail; or whether they so seldom go out, except on foot, that the trail has faded away, I do not know. But certainly, if we had had no guide, we should have turned back, sure we were wrong. A few rods up from the river-bank, a stealthy narrow footpath appeared; through willow copses, sunk in meadow grasses, across shingly bits of alder-walled beach it creeps, till it comes out in a lovely spot, --half basin, half rocky knoll, --where, tucked away in nooks and hollows, are the little Indian houses, eight or ten of them, some of adobe, some of the tule-reeds; small patches of corn, barley, potatoes, and hay; and each little front yard fenced in by palings, with roses, sweet-peas, poppies, and mignonette growing inside. In the first house we reached, a woman was living alone. She was so alarmed at the sight of us that she shook. There could not be a more pitiful comment on the state of perpetual distrust and alarm in 167

Mass for the Dead, Pala

168 169 157 which the poor creatures live, than this woman's face and behavior. We tried in vain to reassure her; we bought all the lace she had to sell, chatted with her about it, and asked her to show us how it was made. Even then she was so terrified that although she willingly took down her lace-frame to sew a few stitches for us to see, her hands still trembled. In another house we found an old woman evidently past eighty, without glasses working button-holes in fine thread. Her daughter-in-law--a beautiful half-breed, with a still more beautiful baby in her arms--asked the old woman, for us, how old she was. She laughed merrily at the silly question, "She never thought about it," she said; "it was written down once in a book at the Mission, but the book was lost."

There was not a man in the village. They were all away at work, farming or fishing. This little handful of people are living on land to which they have no shadow of title, and from which they may be driven any day, --these Carmel Mission lands having been rented out, by their present owner, in great dairy farms. The parish priest of Monterey told me much of the pitiable condition of these remnants of the San Carlos Indians. He can do little or nothing for them, though their condition makes his heart ache daily. In that half-foreign English which is always so much more eloquent a language than the English-speaking peoples use, he said: "They have their homes there only by the patience of the thief; it may be that the patience do not last to-morrow." The phrase is worth 170 158 preserving; it embodies so much history, --history of two races.

In Mr. Wilson's report are many eloquent and strong paragraphs, bearing on the question of the Indians' right to the lands they had under cultivation at the time of the secularization. He says:--

"It is not natural rights I speak of, nor merely possessory rights, but rights acquired and contracts made, --acquired and made when the laws of the Indies had force here, and never assailed by any laws or executive acts since, till 1834 and 1846; and impregnable to these....No past maladministration of laws can be suffered to destroy their true intent, while the victims of the maladministration live to complain, and the rewards of wrong have not been consumed."

Of Mr. Wilson's report in 1852, of Mr. Ames's report in 1873, and of the various other reports called for by the Government from time to time, nothing came, except the occasional setting off of reservations by executive orders, which, if the lands reserved were worth anything, were speedily revoked at the bidding of California politicians. There are still some reservations left, chiefly of desert and mountainous lands, which nobody wants, and on which the Indians could not live.

The last report made to the Indian Bureau by their present agent closes in the following words:--

"The necessity of providing suitable lands for them in the form of one or more reservations has been pressed on the attention of the Department in my former reports; 171 159 and I now, for the third and perhaps the last time, emphasize that necessity by saying that whether Government will immediately heed the pleas that have been made in behalf of these people or not it must sooner or later deal with this question in a practical way, or else see a population of over three thousand Indians become homeless wanderers in a desert region."

I have shown a few glimpses of the homes, of the industry, the patience, the long-suffering of the people who are in this immediate danger of being driven out from their last footholds of refuge, "homeless wanderers in a desert."

If the United States Government does not take steps to avert this danger, to give them lands and protect them in their rights, the chapter of the history of the Mission Indians will be the blackest one in the black record of our dealings with the Indian race.

It must be done speedily if at all, for there is only a small remnant left to be saved. These are in their present homes "only by the patience of the thief; it may be that the patience do not last to-morrow."

172 173

ECHOES IN THE CITY OF THE ANGELS

174 175

ECHOES IN THE CITY OF THE ANGELS

THE tale of the founding of the city of Los Angeles is a tale for verse rather than for prose. It reads like a page out of some new "Earthly Paradise," and would fit well into song such as William Morris has sung.

It is only a hundred years old, however, and that is not time enough for such song to simmer. It will come later, with the perfume of century-long summers added to its flavor. Summers century-long? One might say a stronger thing than that of them, seeing that their blossoming never stops, year in nor year out, and will endure as long as the visible frame of the earth.

The twelve devout Spanish soldiers who founded the city named it at their leisure with a long name, musical as a chime of bells. It answered well enough, no doubt, for the first fifty years of the city's life, during which not a municipal record of any sort or kind was written, --"Nuestra Sen˜ora Reina de los Angeles," "Our Lady the Queen of the Angels;" and her portrait made a goodly companion flag, unfurled always by the side of the flag of Spain.

176 164

There is a legend, that sounds older than it is, of the ceremonies with which the soldiers took possession of their new home. They were no longer young. They had fought for Spain in many parts of the Old World, and followed her uncertain fortunes to the New. Ten years some of them had been faithfully serving Church and king in sight of these fair lands, for which they hankered, and with reason.

In those days the soft, rolling, treeless hills and valleys, between which the Los Angeles River now takes its shilly-shallying course seaward, were forest slopes and meadows, with lakes great and small. This abundance of trees, with shining waters playing among them, added to the limitless bloom of the plains and the splendor of the snow-topped mountains, must have made the whole region indeed a paradise.

Navarro, Villavicencia, Rodriguez, Quintero, Moreno, Lara, Banegas, Rosas, and Canero, these were their names: happy soldiers all, honored of their king, and discharged with so royal a gift of lands thus fair.

Looking out across the Los Angeles hills and meadows to-day, one easily lives over again the joy they must have felt. Twenty-three young children there were in the band, poor little waifs of camp and march. What a "braw flitting" was it for them, away from the drum-beat forever into the shelter of their own sunny home! The legend says not a word of the mothers, except that there were eleven of them, 177 165 and in the procession they walked with their children behind the men. Doubtless they rejoiced the most.

The Fathers from the San Gabriel Mission were there, with many Indian neophytes, and Don Felipe, the military governor, with his showy guard of soldiers.

The priests and neophytes chanted. The Cross was set up, the flag of Spain and the banner of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels unfurled, and the new town marked out around a square, a little to the north of the present plaza of Los Angeles.

If communities, as well as individuals, are happy when history finds nothing to record of them, the city of the Queen of the Angels must have been a happy spot during the first fifty years of its life; for not a written record of the period remains, not even a record of grants of land. The kind of grant that these worthy Spanish soldiers and their sons contented themselves with, however, hardly deserved recording, --in fact, was not a grant at all, since its continuance depended entirely on the care a man took of his house and the improvement he put on his land. If he left his house unoccupied or let it fall out of repair, if he left a field uncultivated for two years, any neighbor who saw fit might denounce him, and by so doing acquire a right to the property. This sounds incredible, but all the historical accounts of the time agree on the point. They say:--

178 166

"The granting authorities could, and were by law required, upon a proper showing of the abandonment, to grant the property to the informant, who then acquired the same and no better rights than those possessed by his predecessor."

This was a premium indeed on staying at home and minding one's business, --a premium which amounted to coercion. One would think that there must have been left from those days teeming records of alienated estates, shifted tenures, and angry feuds between neighbor and neighbor. But no evidence remains of such strifes. Life was too simple, and the people were too ignorant.

Their houses were little more than hovels, built of mud, eight feet high, with flat roofs made of reeds and asphaltum. Their fields, with slight cultivation, produced all they needed; and if anything lacked, the rich vineyards, wheat-fields, and orchards of the San Gabriel Mission lay only twelve miles away. These vineyards, orchards, and granaries, so near at hand, must have been sore temptation to idleness. Each head of a family had been presented, by the paternal Spanish king, with "two oxen, two mules, two mares, two sheep, two goats, two cows, one calf, an ass, and one hoe." For these they were to pay in such small instalments as they were able to spare out of their pay and rations, which were still continued by the generous king.

In a climate in which flowers blossom winter and summer alike, man may bask in sun all the year 179 167 round if he chooses. Why, then, should those happy Spanish soldiers work? Even the king had thought it unnecessary, it seems, to give them any implements of labor except "one hoe." What could a family do, in the way of work, with "one hoe"? Evidently they did not work, --neither they, nor their sons, nor their sons' sons after them; for, half a century later, they were still living a life of almost incredible ignorance, redeemed only by its simplicity and childlike adherence to the old religious observances.

Many of those were beautiful. As late as 1830 it was the custom throughout the town, in all the families of the early settlers, for the oldest member of the family--oftenest it was a grandfather or grandmother--to rise every morning at the rising of the morning star, and at once to strike up a hymn. At the first note every person in the house would rise, or sit up in bed and join in the song. From house to house, street to street, the singing spread; and the volume of musical sound swelled, until it was as if the whole town sang.

The hymns were usually invocations to the Virgin, to Jesus, or to some saint. The opening line of many of them was, -- "Rejoice, O Mother of God."

A manuscript copy of one of these old morning songs I have seen, and had the good fortune to win a literal translation of part of it, in the soft, Spanish-voiced, broken English, so pleasant to hear. The 180 168 first stanza is the chorus, and was repeated after each of the others--: "Come, O sinners,Come, and we will singTender hymnsTo our refuge."Singers at dawn,From the heavens above,People all regions;Gladly we too sing."Singing harmoniously,Saying to Mary,`O beautiful Queen,Princess of Heaven!"`Your beautiful headCrowned we see;The stars are adorningYour beautiful hair;"`Your eyebrows are arched,Your forehead serene;Your face turned alwaysLooks toward God;"`Your eyes' radianceIs like beautiful stars;Like a white dove,You are true to your spouse.'"

Each of these stanzas was sung first alone by the aged leader of the family choir. Then the rest repeated it; then all joined in the chorus.

It is said that there are still to be found, in lonely country regions in California, Mexican homes in 181 169 which these sweet and holy "songs before sunrise" are sung.

Looking forward to death, the greatest anxiety of these simple souls was to provide themselves with a priest's cast-off robe to be buried in. These were begged or bought as the greatest of treasures; kept in sight, or always at hand, to remind them of approaching death. When their last hour drew near, this robe was flung over their breasts, and they died happy, their stiffening fingers grasping its folds. The dead body was wrapped in it, and laid on the mud floor of the house, a stone being placed under the head to raise it a few inches. Thus the body must lie till the time of burial. Around it, day and night, squatted, praying and singing, friends who wished not only to show their affection for the deceased, but to win indulgences for themselves; every prayer said thus, by the side of a corpse, having a special and specified value.

A strange demarkation between the sexes was enforced in these ceremonies. If it were a woman who lay dead, only women might kneel and pray and watch with her body; if a man, the circle of watchers must be exclusively of men.

A rough box, of boards nailed together, was the coffin. The body, rolled in the old robe whose virtues had so comforted its last conscious moments, was carried to the grave on a board, in the centre of a procession of friends chanting and singing. Not until the last moment was it laid in the box.

182 170

The first attempts to introduce more civilized forms of burial met with opposition, and it was only by slow degrees that changes were wrought. A Frenchman, who had come from France to Los Angeles, by way of the Sandwich Islands, bringing a store of sacred ornaments and trinkets, and had grown rich by sale of them to the devout, owned a spring wagon, the only one in the country. By dint of entreaty, the people were finally prevailed upon to allow their dead to be carried in this wagon to the burial-place. For a long time, however, they refused to have horses put to the wagon, but drew it by hand all the way; women drawing women, and men drawing men, with the same scrupulous partition of the sexes as in the earlier ceremonies. The picture must have been a strange one, and not without pathos, --the wagon, wound and draped with black and white, drawn up and down the steep hills by the band of silent mourners.

The next innovation was the introduction of stately catafalques for the dead to repose on, either in house or church, during the interval between their death and burial. There had been brought into the town a few old-fashioned, high-post, canopied bedsteads, and from these the first catafalques were made. Gilded, decorated with gold and silver lace, and hung with white and black draperies, they made a by no means insignificant show, which doubtless went far to reconcile people's minds to the new methods.

In 1838 there was a memorable funeral of a woman 183

The Burial of a Founder

184 185 173 over a hundred years old. Fourteen old women watched with her body, which lay stretched on the floor, in the ancient fashion, with only a stone beneath the head. The youngest of these watchers was eighty-five. One of them, Tomasa Camera by name, was herself over a hundred years old. Tomasa was infirm of foot; so they propped her with pillows in a little cart, and drew her to the house that she might not miss of the occasion. All night long, the fourteen squatted or sat on rawhides spread on the floor, and sang and prayed and smoked: as fine a wake as was ever seen. They smoked cigarettes, which they rolled on the spot, out of corn-husks slit fine for the purpose, their being at that day in Los Angeles no paper fit for cigarettes.

Outside this body-guard of aged women knelt a circle of friends and relatives, also chanting, praying, and smoking. In this outer circle any one might come and go at pleasure; but into the inner ring of the watching none must come, and none must go out of it till the night was spent.

With the beginning of the prosperity of the City of the Angels, came the end of its primeval peace. Spanish viceroys, Mexican alcaldes and governors, United States commanders, naval and military, followed on each other's heels, with or without frays, ruling California through a succession of tumultuous years. Greedy traders from all parts of the world added their rivalries and interventions to the civil and military disputation. In the general anarchy 186 174 and confusion, the peaceful and peace-loving Catholic Fathers were robbed of their lands, their converts were scattered, their industries broken up. Nowhere were these uncomfortable years more uncomfortable than in Los Angeles. Revolts, occupations, surrenders, retakings, and resurrenders kept the little town in perpetual ferment. Disorders were the order of the day and of the night, in small matters as well as in great.

The California fought as impetuously for his old way of dancing as for his political allegiance. There are comical traditions of the men's determination never to wear long trousers to dances; nor to permit dances to be held in houses or halls, it having been the practice always to give them in outdoor booths or bowers, with lattice-work walls of sycamore poles lashed together by thongs of rawhide.

Outside these booths the men sat on their horses looking in at the dancing, which was chiefly done by the women. An old man standing in the centre of the enclosure directed the dances. Stopping in front of the girl whom he wished to have join the set, he clapped his hands. She then rose and took her place on the floor; if she could not dance, or wished to decline, she made a low bow and resumed her seat.

To look in on all this was great sport. Sometimes, unable to resist the spell, a man would fling himself off his horse, dash into the enclosure, seize a girl by the waist, whirl around with her through one dance, then out again and into the saddle, where he sat, 187 175 proudly aware of his vantage. The decorations of masculine attire at this time were such as to make riding a fine show. Around the crown of the broad-brimmed sombrero was twisted a coil of gold or silver cord; over the shoulders was flung, with ostentatious carelessness, a short cloak of velvet or brocade; the waistcoats were embroidered in gold, silver, or gay colors; so also were the knee-breeches, leggings, and stockings. Long silken garters, with ornamented tassels at the ends, were wound round and round to hold the stockings in place. Even the cumbrous wooden stirrups were carved in elaborate designs. No wonder that men accustomed to such braveries as these saw ignominy in the plain American trousers.

They seem to have been a variety of Centaur, these early Californian men. They were seldom off their horses except to eat and sleep. They mounted, with jingling silver spur and glittering bridle, for the shortest distances, even to cross a plaza. They paid long visits on horseback, without dismounting. Clattering up to the window or door-sill, halting, throwing one knee over the crupper, the reins lying loose, they sat at ease, far more at ease than in a house. Only at church, where the separation was inevitable, would they be parted from their horses. They turned the near neighborhood of a church on Sunday into a sort of picket-ground, or horse-trainers' yard, full of horse-posts and horses; and the scene was far more like a horse-fair than like an occasion of holy observance. There seems to have been a 188 176 curious mixture of reverence and irreverence in their natures. They confessed sins and underwent penances with the simplicity of children; but when, in 1821,

The Old Mexican Woman

189 177 the Church issued an edict against that "escandalosisima" dance, the waltz, declaring that whoever dared to dance it should be excommunicated, the merry sinners waltzed on only the harder and faster, and laughed in their priests' faces. And when the advocates of decorum, good order, and indoor dancing gave their first ball in a public hall in Los Angeles, the same merry outdoor party broke every window and door in the building, and put a stop to the festivity. They persisted in taking this same summary vengeance on occasion after occasion, until, finally, any person wishing to give a ball in his own house was forced to surround the house by a cordon of police to protect it.

The City of the Angeles is a prosperous city now. It has business thoroughfares, blocks of fine stone buildings, hotels, shops, banks, and is growing daily. Its outlying regions are a great circuit of gardens, orchards, vineyards, and corn-fields, and its suburbs are fast filling up with houses of a showy though cheap architecture. But it has not yet shaken off its past. A certain indefinable, delicious aroma from the old, ignorant, picturesque times lingers still, not only in byways and corners, but in the very centres of its newest activities.

Mexican women, their heads wrapped in black shawls, and their bright eyes peering out between the close-gathered folds, glide about everywhere; the soft Spanish speech is continually heard; long-robed priests hurry to and fro; and at each dawn ancient, 190 178 jangling bells from the Church of the Lady of the Angels ring out the night and in the day. Venders of strange commodities drive in stranger vehicles up and down the streets; antiquated carts piled high with oranges, their golden opulence contrasting weirdly with the shabbiness of their surroundings and the evident poverty of their owner; close following on the gold of one of these, one has sometimes the luck to see another cart, still more antiquated and rickety, piled high with something--he cannot imagine what--terra-cotta red in grotesque shapes; it is fuel, --the same sort which Villavicencia, Quintero, and the rest probably burned, when they burned any, a hundred years ago. It is the roots and root-shoots of manzanita and other shrubs. The colors are super, --terra-cotta reds, shading up to flesh pink, and down to dark mahogany; but the forms are grotesque beyond comparison: twists, querls, contortions, a boxful of them is an uncomfortable presence in one's room, and putting them on the fire is like cremating the vertebræ and double teeth of colossal monsters of the Pterodactyl period.

The present plaza of the city is near the original plaza marked out at the time of the first settlement; the low adobe house of one of the early governors stands yet on its east side, and is still a habitable building.

The plaza is a dusty and dismal little place, with a parsimonious fountain in the centre, surrounded by spokes of thin turf, and walled at its outer 191 179 circumference by a row of tall Monterey cypresses, shorn and clipped into the shape of huge croquettes or bradawls standing broad end down. At all hours of the day idle boys and still idler men are to be seen basking on the fountain's stone rim, or lying, face down, heels in air, in the triangles of shade made by the cypress croquettes. There is in Los Angeles much of this ancient and ingenious style of shearing and compressing foliage into unnatural and distorted shapes. It comes, no doubt, of lingering reverence for the traditions of what was thought beautiful in Spain centuries ago; and it gives to the town a certain quaint and foreign look, in admirable keeping with its irregular levels, zigzag, toppling precipices, and houses in tiers one above another.

One comes sometimes abruptly on a picture which seems bewilderingly un-American, of a precipice wall covered with bird-cage cottages, the little, palingwalled yard of one jutting out in a line with the chimney-tops of the next one below, and so on down to the street at the base of the hill. Wooden staircases and bits of terrace link and loop the odd little perches together; bright green pepper-trees, sometimes tall enough to shade two or three tiers of roofs, give a graceful plumed draping at the sides, and some of the steep fronts are covered with bloom, in solid curtains, of geranium, sweet alyssum, heliotrope, and ivy. These terraced eyries are not the homes of the rich: the houses are lilliputian in size, and of cheap quality; but they do more for the picturesqueness 192 180 of the city than all the large, fine, and costly houses put together.

Moreover, they are the only houses that command the situation, possess distance and a horizon. From some of these little ten-by-twelve flower-beds of homes is a stretch of view which makes each hour of the day a succession of changing splendors, --the snowy peaks of San Bernardino and San Jacinto in the east and south; to the west, vast open country, billowy green with vineyard and orchard; beyond this, in clear weather, shining glints and threads of ocean, and again beyond, in the farthest outing, hill-crowned islands, misty blue against the sky. No one knows Los Angeles who does not climb to these sunny outlying heights, and roam and linger on them many a day. Nor, even thus lingering, will any one ever know more of Los Angeles than its lovely outward semblances and mysterious suggestions, unless he have the good fortune to win past the barrier of proud, sensitive, tender reserve, behind which is hid the life of the few remaining survivors of the old Spanish and Mexican re´gime .

Once past this, he gets glimpses of the same stintless hospitality and immeasurable courtesy which gave to the old Franciscan establishments a world-wide fame, and to the society whose tone and customs they created an atmosphere of simple-hearted joyousness and generosity never known by any other communities on the American continent.

In houses whose doors seldom open to 193 181 English-speaking people, there are rooms full of relics of that fast-vanishing past, --strongholds also of a religious faith, almost as obsolete, in its sort and degree, as are the garments of the aged creatures who are peacefully resting their last days on its support.

In one of these houses, in a poverty-stricken but gayly decorated little bedroom, hangs a small oilpainting, a portrait of Saint Francis de Paula. It was brought from Mexico, fifty-five years ago, by the woman who still owns it, and has knelt before it and prayed to it every day of the fifty-five years. Below it is a small altar covered with flowers, candlesticks, vases, and innumerable knick-knacks. A long string under the picture is hung full of tiny gold and silver votive offerings from persons who have been miraculously cured in answer to prayers made to the saint. Legs, arms, hands, eyes, hearts, heads, babies, dogs, horses, --no organ, no creature, that could suffer, is unrepresented. The old woman has at her tongue's end the tale of each one of these miracles. She is herself a sad cripple; her feet swollen by inflammation, which for many years has given her incessant torture and made it impossible for her to walk, except with tottering steps, from room to room, by help of a staff. This, she says, is the only thing her saint has not cured. It is her "cross," her "mortification of the flesh," "to take her to heaven." "He knows best." As she speaks, her eyes perpetually seek the picture, resting on it with a look of ineffable adoration. She has seen tears roll down its cheeks more than once, 194 182 she says; and it often smiles on her when they are alone. When strangers enter the room, she can always tell, by its expression, whether the saint is or is not pleased with them, and whether their prayers will be granted. She was good enough to remark that he was very glad to see us; she was sure of it by the smile in his eye. He had wrought many beautiful miracles for her. Nothing was too trivial for his sympathy and help. Once when she had broken a vase in which she had been in the habit of keeping flowers on the altar, she took the pieces in her hands, and standing before him, said: "You know you will miss this vase. I always put your flowers in it, and I am too poor to buy another. Now, do mend this for me. I have nobody but you to help me." And the vase grew together again whole while she was speaking. In the same way he mended for her a high glass flower-case which stood on the altar.

Thus she jabbered away breathlessly in Spanish, almost too fast to be followed. Sitting in a high chair, her poor distorted feet propped on a cushion, a black silk handkerchief wound like a turban around her head, a plaid ribosa across her shoulders, contrasting sharply with her shabby wine-colored gown, her hands clasped around a yellow staff, on which she leaned as she bent forward in her eager speaking, she made a study for an artist.

She was very beautiful in her youth, she said; her cheeks so red that people thought they were painted, 195 183 and she was so strong that she was never tired; and when, in the first year of her widowhood, a stranger came to her "with a letter of recommendation" to be her second husband, and before she had time to speak had fallen on his knees at her feet, she seized him by the throat, and toppling him backward, pinned him against the wall till he was black in the face. And her sister came running up in terror, imploring her not to kill him. But all that strength is gone now, she says sadly; her memory also. Each day, as soon as she has finished her prayers, she has to put away her rosary in a special place, or else she forgets that the prayers have been said. Many priests have desired to possess her precious miracle-working saint; but never till she dies will it leave her bedroom. Not a week passes without some one's arriving to implore its aid. Sometimes the deeply distressed come on their knees all the way from the gate before the house, up the steps, through the hall, and into her bedroom. Such occasions as these are to her full of solemn joy, and no doubt, also, of a secret exultation whose kinship to pride she does not suspect.

In another unpretending little adobe house, not far from this Saint Francis shrine, lives the granddaughter of Moreno, one of the twelve Spanish soldiers who founded the city. She speaks no word of English; and her soft black eyes are timid, though she is the widow of a general, and in the stormy days of the City of the Angels passed through many a crisis of peril and adventure. Her house is full of curious 196 184 relics, which she shows with a gentle, half-amused courtesy. It is not easy for her to believe that any American can feel real reverence for the symbols, tokens, and relics of the life and customs which his people destroyed. In her mind Americans remain to-day as completely foreigners as they were when her husband girded on his sword and went out to fight them, forty years ago. Many of her relics have been rescued at one time or another from plunderers of the missions. She has an old bronze kettle which once held holy water at San Fernando; an incense cup and spoon, and massive silver candlesticks; cartridge-boxes of leather, with Spain's ancient seal stamped on them; a huge copper caldron and scales from San Gabriel; a bunch of keys of hammered iron, locks, scissors, reaping-hooks, shovels, carding-brushes for wool and for flax: all made by the Indian workmen in the missions. There was also one old lock, in which the key was rusted fast and immovable, which seemed to me fuller of suggestion than anything else there of the sealed and ended past to which it had belonged; and a curious little iron cannon, in shape like an alemug, about eight inches high, with a hole in the side and in the top, to be used by setting it on the ground and laying a trail of powder to the opening in the side. This gave the Indians great delight. It was fired at the times of church festivals, and in seasons of drought to bring rain. Another curious instrument of racket was the matrarca, a strip of board with two small swinging iron handles so set in it that in 197

A Street in Los Angeles

198 199 187 swinging back and forth they hit iron plates. In the time of Lent when all ringing of bells was forbidden, these were rattled to call the Indians to church. The noise one of them can make when vigorously shaken is astonishing. In crumpled bundles, their stiffened meshes opening out reluctantly, were two curious rush-woven nets which had been used by Indian women fifty years ago in carrying burdens. Similar nets, made of twine, are used by them still. Fastened to a leather strap or band passing around the forehead, they hang down behind far below the waist, and when filled out to their utmost holding capacity are so heavy that the poor creatures bend nearly double beneath them. But the women stand as uncomplainingly as camels while weight after weight is piled in; then slipping the band over their heads, they adjust the huge burden and set off at a trot. "This is the squaw's horse," said an Indian woman in the San Jacinto valley one day, tapping her forehead and laughing good-naturedly, when the shopkeeper remonstrated with her husband, who was heaping article after article, and finally a large sack of flour, on her shoulders; "squaw's horse very strong."

The original site of the San Gabriel Mission was a few miles to the east of the City of the Angels. Its lands are now divided into ranches and colony settlements, only a few acres remaining in the possession of the Church. But the old chapel is still standing in a fair state of preservation, used for the daily services of the San Gabriel parish; and there are in its near 200 188 neighborhood a few crumbling adobe hovels left, the only remains of the once splendid and opulent mission. In one of these lives a Mexican woman, eighty-two years old, who for more than half a century has washed and mended the priests' laces, repaired the robes, and remodelled the vestments of San Gabriel. She is worth crossing the continent to see: all white from head to foot, as if bleached by some strange gramarye; white hair, white skin, blue eyes faded nearly to white; white cotton clothes, ragged and not over clean, yet not a trace of color in them; a white linen handkerchief, delicately embroidered by herself, always tied loosely around her throat. She sits on a low box, leaning against the wall, with three white pillows at her back, her feet on a cushion on the ground; in front of her, another low box, on this a lace-maker's pillow, with knotted fringe stretched on it; at her left hand a battered copper caldron, holding hot coals to warm her fingers and to light her cigarettes. A match she will never use; and she has seldom been without a cigarette in her mouth since she was six years old. On her right hand is a chest filled with her treasures,--rags of damask, silk, velvet, lace, muslin, ribbon, artificial flowers, flosses, worsteds, silks on spools; here she sits, day in, day out, making cotton fringes and, out of shreds of silk, tiny embroidered scapulars, which she sells to all devout and charitable people of the region. She also teaches the children of the parish to read and to pray. The walls of her hovel are papered with tattered pictures, 201 189 including many gay-colored ones, taken off tin cans, their flaunting signs reading drolly,--"Perfection Press Mackerel, Boston, Mass.," "Charm Baking Powder," and "Knowlton's Inks," alternating with "Toledo Blades" and clipper-ship advertisements. She finds these of great use in both teaching and amusing the children. The ceiling, of canvas, black with smoke and festooned with cobwebs, sags down in folds, and shows many a rent. When it rains, her poor little place must be drenched in spots. One end of the room is curtained off with calico; this is her bedchamber. At the other end is a raised dais, on which stands an altar, holding a small statuette of the Infant Jesus. It is a copy in wood of the famous Little Jesus of Atoches in Mexico, which is worshipped by all the people in that region. It has been her constant companion and protector for fifty years. Over the altar is a canopy of calico, decorated with paper flowers, whirligigs, doves, and little gourds; with votive offerings, also, of gold or silver, from grateful people helped or cured by the Little Jesus. On the statuette's head is a tiny hat of real gold, and a real gold sceptre in the little hand; the breast of its fine white linen cambric gown is pinned by a gold pin. It has a wardrobe with as many changes as an actor. She keeps these carefully hid away in a small camphor-wood trunk, but she brought them all out to show to us.

Two of her barefooted ragged little pupils scampered in as she was unfolding these gay doll's clothes. 202 190 They crowded close around her knees and looked on, with open-mouthed awe and admiration: a purple velvet cape with white fringe for feast days; capes of satin, of brocade; a dozen shirts of finest linen, embroidered or trimmed with lace; a tiny plume not more than an inch long, of gold exquisitely carved,--this was her chief treasure. It looked beautiful in his hat, she said, but it was too valuable to wear often. Hid away here among the image's best clothes were more of the gold votive offerings it had received: one a head cut out of solid gold; several rosaries of carved beads, silver and gold. Spite of her apparently unbounded faith in the Little Jesus' power to protect her and himself, the old woman thought it wiser to keep these valuables concealed from the common gaze.

Holding up a silken pillow some sixteen inches square, she said, "You could not guess with what that pillow is filled." We could not, indeed. It was her own hair. With pride she asked us to take it in our hands, that we might see how heavy it was. For sixteen years she had been saving it, and it was to be put under her head in her coffin. The friend who had taken us to her home exclaimed on hearing this, "And I can tell you it was beautiful hair. I recollect it forty-five years ago, bright brown, and down to her ankles, and enough of it to roll herself up in." The old woman nodded and laughed, much pleased at this compliment. She did not know why the Lord had preserved her life so long, she 203 191 said; but she was very happy. Her nieces had asked her to go and live with them in Santa Ana; but she could not go away from San Gabriel. She told them that there was plenty of water in the ditch close by her door, and that God would take care of the rest, and so he had; she never wants for anything; not only is she never hungry herself, but she always has food to give away. No one would suppose it, but many people come to eat with her in her house. God never forgets her one minute. She is very happy. She is never ill; or if she is, she has two remedies, which, in all her life, have never failed to cure her, and they cost nothing, --saliva and earwax. For a pain, the sign of the cross, made with saliva on the spot which is in pain, is instantaneously effective; for an eruption or any skin disorder, the application of ear-wax is a sure cure. She is very glad to live so close to the church; the Father has promised her this room as long as she lives; when she dies, it will be no trouble, he says, to pick her up and carry her across the road to the church. In a gay painted box, standing on two chairs, so as to be kept from the dampness of the bare earth floor, she cherishes the few relics of her better days: a shawl and a ribosa of silk, and two gowns, one of black silk, one of dark blue satin. These are of the fashions of twenty years ago; they were given to her by her husband. She wears them now when she goes to church; so it is as if she were "married again," she says, and is "her husband's work still." She seems 204 192 to be a character well known and held in some regard by the clergy of her church. When the bishop returned a few years ago from a visit to Rome, he brought her a little gift, a carved figure of a saint. She asked him if he could not get for her a bit of the relics of Saint Viviano. "Oh, let alone!" he replied; "give you relics? Wait a bit; and as soon as you die, I'll have you made into relics yourself." She laughed as heartily, telling this somewhat unecclesiastical rejoinder, as if it had been made at some other person's expense.

In the marvellously preserving air of California, added to her own contented temperament, there is no reason why this happy old lady should not last, as some of her Indian neighbors have, well into a second century. Before she ceases from her peaceful, pitiful little labors, new generations of millionaires in her country will no doubt have piled up bigger fortunes than this generation ever dreams of, but there will not be a man of them all so rich as she.

In the western suburbs of Los Angeles is a low adobe house, built after the ancient style, on three sides of a square, surrounded by orchards, vineyards, and orange groves, and looking out on an old-fashioned garden, in which southernwood, rue, lavender, mint, marigolds, and gillyflowers hold their own bravely, growing in straight and angular beds among the newer splendors of verbenas, roses, carnations, and geraniums. On two sides of the house runs a broad porch, where stand rows of geraniums and 205 193 Chrysanthemums growing in odd-shaped earthen pots. Here may often be seen a beautiful young Mexican woman, flitting about among the plants, or sporting with a superb Saint Bernard dog. Her clear olive skin, soft brown eyes, delicate sensitive nostrils, and broad smiling mouth, are all of the Spanish madonna type; and when her low brow is bound, as is often her wont, by turban folds of soft brown or green gauze, her face becomes a picture indeed. She is the young wife of a gray-headed Mexican sen˜or, of whom--by his own most gracious permission--I shall speak by his familiar name, Don Antonio. Whoever has the fortune to pass as a friend across the threshold of this house finds himself transported, as by a miracle, into the life of a half-century ago. The rooms are ornamented with fans, shells, feather and wax flowers, pictures, saints' images, old laces, and stuffs, in the quaint gay Mexican fashion. On the day when I first saw them, they were brilliant with bloom. In every one of the deep window-seats stood a cone of bright flowers, its base made by large white datura blossoms, their creamy whorls all turned outward, making a superb decoration. I went for but a few moments' call. I stayed three hours, and left carrying with me bewildering treasures of pictures of the olden time.

Don Antonio speaks little English; but the sen˜ora knows just enough of the language to make her use of it delicious, as she translates for her husband. It is an entrancing sight to watch his dark 206 194 weatherbeaten face, full of lightning changes as he pours out torrents of his nervous, eloquent Spanish speech; watching his wife intently, hearkening to each work she uses, sometimes interrupting her urgently with, "No, no; that is not it,"--for he well understands the tongue he cannot or will not use for himself. He is sixty-five years of age, but he is young: the best waltzer in Los Angeles to-day; his eye keen, his blood fiery quick; his memory like a burning-glass bringing into sharp light and focus a half-century as if it were a yesterday. Full of sentiment, of an intense and poetic nature, he looks back to the lost empire of his race and people on the California shores with a sorrow far too proud for any antagonisms or complaints. He recognizes the inexorableness of the laws under whose workings his nation is slowly, surely giving place to one more representative of the age. Intellectually he is in sympathy with progress, with reform, with civilization at its utmost; he would not have had them stayed or changed, because his people could not keep up and were not ready. But his heart is none the less saddened and lonely.

This is probably the position and point of view of most cultivated Mexican men of his age. The suffering involved in it is inevitable. It is part of the great, unreckoned price which must always be paid for the gain the world gets when the young and strong supersede the old and weak.

A sunny little southeast corner room in Don 207

Copy of a Page from a Register of Branded Cattle. Every tenth one belonged to the Church

208 197 Antonio's house is full of the relics of the time when he and his father were foremost representatives of ideas and progress in the City of the Angels, and taught the first school that was kept in the place. This was nearly a half-century ago. On the walls of the room still hang maps and charts which they used; and carefully preserved, with the tender reverence of which only poetic natures are capable, are still to be seen there the old atlases, primers, catechisms, grammars, reading-books, which meant toil and trouble to the merry, ignorant children of the merry and ignorant people of that time.

The leathern covers of the books are thin and frayed by long handling; the edges of the leaves worn down as if mice had gnawed them: tattered, loose, hanging by yellow threads, they look far older than they are, and bear vivid record of the days when books were so rare and precious that each book did doubled and redoubled duty, passing from hand to hand and house to house. It was on the old Lancaster system that Los Angeles set out in educating its children; and here are still preserved the formal and elaborate instructions for teachers and schools on that plan; also volumes of Spain's laws for military judges in 1781, and a quaint old volume called "Secrets of Agriculture, Fields and Pastures," written by a Catholic Father in 1617, reprinted in 1781, and held of great value in its day as a sure guide to success with crops. Accompanying it was a chart, a perpetual circle, by which might be foretold 209 198 with certainty what years would be barren and what ones fruitful.

Almanacs, histories, arithmetics, dating back to 1750, drawing-books, multiplication tables, music, and bundles of records of the branding of cattle at the San Gabriel Mission, are among the curiosities of this room. The music of the first quadrilles ever danced in Mexico is here: a ragged pamphlet, which, no doubt, went gleeful rounds in the City of the Angels for many a year. It is a merry music, simple in melody, but with an especial quality of light-heartedness, suiting the people who danced to it.

There are also in the little room many relics of a more substantial sort than tattered papers and books: a branding-iron and a pair of handcuffs from the San Gabriel Mission; curiously decorated clubs and sticks used by the Indians in their games; boxes of silver rings and balls made for decorations of bridles and on leggings and knee-breeches. The place of honor in the room is given, as well it might be, to a small cannon, the first cannon brought into California. It was made in 1717, and was brought by Father Junipero Serra to San Diego in 1769. Afterward it was given, to the San Gabriel Mission, but it still bears its old name, "San Diego." It is an odd little arm, only about two feet long, and requiring but six ounces of powder. Its swivel is made with a rest to set firm in the ground. It has taken many long journeys on the backs of mules, having been in great 210 199 requisition in the early mission days for the firing of salutes at festivals and feasts.

Don Antonio was but a lad when his father's family removed from the city of Mexico to California. They came in one of the many unfortunate colonies sent out by the Mexican Government during the first years of the secularization period, having had a toilsome and suffering two months, going in wagons from Mexico to San Blas, then a tedious and uncomfortable voyage of several weeks from San Blas to Monterey, where they arrived only to find them selves deceived and disappointed in every particular, and surrounded by hostilities, plots, and dangers on all sides. So great was the antagonism to them that it was at times difficult for a colonist to obtain food from a Californian. They were arrested on false pretences, thrown into prison, shipped off like convicts from place to place, with no one to protect them or plead their cause. Revolution succeeded upon revolution, and it was a most unhappy period for all refined and cultivated persons who had joined the colony enterprises. Young men of education and breeding were glad to earn their daily bread by any menial labor that offered. Don Antonio and several of his young friends, who had all studied medicine together, spent the greater part of a year in making shingles. The one hope and aim of most of them was to earn money enough to get back to Mexico. Don Antonio, however, seems to have had more versatility and capacity than his friends, for he never lost 211 200 courage; and it was owing to him that at last his whole family gathered in Los Angeles and established a home there. This was in 1836. There were then only about eight hundred people in the pueblo, and the customs, superstitions, and ignorances of the earliest days still held sway. The missions were still rich and powerful, though the confusions and conflicts of their ruin had begun. At this time the young Antonio, being quick at accounts and naturally ingenious at all sorts of mechanical crafts, found profit as well as pleasure in journeying from mission to mission, sometimes spending two or three months in one place, keeping books, or repairing silver and gold ornaments. The blowpipe which he made for himself at that time his wife exhibits now with affectionate pride; and there are few things she enjoys better than translating to an eager listener his graphic stories of the incidents and adventures of that portion of his life.

While he was at the San Antonio Mission, a strange thing happened. It is a good illustration of the stintless hospitality of those old missions, that staying there at that time were a notorious gambler and a celebrated juggler who had come out in the colony from Mexico. The juggler threatened to turn the gambler into a crow; the gambler, after watching his tricks for a short time, became frightened, and asked young Antonio, in serious good faith, if he did not believe the juggler had made a league with the devil. A few nights afterward, at midnight, a terrible noise was heard in the gambler's room. He was found in 212 201 convulsions, foaming at the mouth, and crying, "Oh, Father! Father! I have got the devil inside of me! Take him away!" The priest dragged him into the chapel, showered him with holy water, and exorcised the devil, first making the gambler promise to leave off his gambling forever. All the rest of the night the rescued sinner spent in the chapel, praying and weeping. In the morning he announced his intention of becoming a priest, and began his studies at once. These he faithfully pursued for a year, leading all the while a life of great devotion. At the end of that time preparations were made for his ordination at San Jose´. The day was set, the hour came: he was in the sacristy, had put on the sacred vestments, and was just going toward the church door, when he fell to the floor, dead. Soon after this the juggler was banished from the country, trouble and disaster having everywhere followed on his presence.

On the first breaking out of hostilities between California and the United States, Don Antonio took command of a company of Los Angeles volunteers to repel the intruders. By this time he had attained a prominent position in the affairs of the pueblo; had been alcalde and, under Governor Michelorena, inspector of public works. It was like the fighting of children, --the impetuous attempts that heterogeneous little bands of Californians here and there made to hold their country. They were plucky from first to last; for they were everywhere at a disadvantage, and fought on, quite in the dark as to what 213 202 Mexico meant to do about them, --whether she might not any morning deliver them over to the enemy. Of all Don Antonio's graphic narratives of the olden time, none is more interesting than those which describe his adventures during the days of this contest. On one of the first approaches made by the Americans to Los Angeles, he went out with his little haphazard company of men and boys to meet them. He had but one cannon, a small one, tied by ropes on a cart axle. He had but one small keg of powder which was good for anything; all the rest was bad, would merely go off "pouf, pouf," the sen˜ora said, and the ball would pop down near the mouth of the cannon. With this bad powder he fired his first shots. The Americans laughed; this is child's play, they said, and pushed on closer. Then came a good shot, with the good powder, tearing into their ranks and knocking them right and left; another, and another. "Then the Americans began to think, these are no pouf balls; and when a few more were killed, they ran away and left their flag behind them. And if they had only known it, the Californians had only one more charge left of the good powder, and the next minute it would have been the Californians that would have had to run away themselves," merrily laughed the sen˜ora, as she told the tale.

This captured flag, with important papers, was intrusted to Don Antonio to carry to the Mexican headquarters at Sonora. He set off with an escort of soldiers, his horse decked with silver trappings; his 214 203 sword, pistols, all of the finest: a proud beginning of a journey destined to end in a different fashion. It was in winter time; cold rains were falling. By night he was drenched to the skin, and stopped at a friendly Indian's tent to change his clothes. Hardly had he got them off when the sound of horses' hoofs was heard. The Indian flung himself down, put his ear to the ground, and exclaimed, "Americanos! Americanos! Almost in the same second they were at the tent's door. As they halted, Don Antonio, clad only in his drawers and stockings, crawled out at the back of the tent, and creeping on all fours reached a tree, up which he climbed, and sat safe hidden in the darkness among its branches listening, while his pursuers cross-questioned the Indian, and at last rode away with his horse. Luckily, he had carried into the tent the precious papers and the captured flag: these he intrusted to an Indian to take to Sonora, it being evidently of no use for him to try to cross the country thus closely pursued by his enemies.

All night he lay hidden; the next day he walked twelve miles across the mountains to an Indian village where he hoped to get a horse. It was dark when he reached it. Cautiously he opened the door of the hut of one whom he knew well. The Indian was preparing poisoned arrows; fixing one on the string and aiming at the door, he called out angrily, "Who is there?"--"It is I, Antonio."--"Don't make a sound," whispered the Indian, throwing down his arrow, springing to the door, coming out, 215 204 and closing it softly. He then proceeded to tell him that the Americans had offered a reward for his head, and that some of the Indians in the rancheria were ready to betray or kill him. While they were yet talking, again came the sound of the Americans' horses' hoofs galloping in the distance. This time there seemed no escape. Suddenly Don Antonio, throwing himself on his stomach, wriggled into a cactus patch near by. Only one who has seen California cactus thickets can realize the desperateness of this act. But it succeeded. The Indian threw over the cactus plants and old blanket and some refuse stalks and reeds; and there once more, within hearing of all his baffled pursuers said, the hunted man lay, safe, thanks to Indian friendship. The crafty Indian assented to all the Americans proposed, said that Don Antonio would be sure to be caught in a few days, advised them to search in a certain rancheria which he described, a few miles off, and in an opposite direction from the way in which he intended to guide Don Antonio. As soon as the Americans had gone, he bound up Antonio's feet in strips of rawhide, gave him a blanket and an old tattered hat, the best his stores afforded, and then led him by a long and difficult trail to a spot high up in the mountains where the old women of the band were gathering acorns. By the time they reached this place, blood was trickling from Antonio's feet and legs, and he was well-nigh fainting with fatigue and excitement. Tears rolled down the old women's cheeks 216 205 when they saw him. Some of them had been servants in his father's house, and loved him. One brought gruel; another bathed his feet; others ran in search of healing leaves of different sorts. Bruising these in a stone mortar, they rubbed him from head to foot with the wet fibre. All his pain and weariness vanished as by magic. His wounds healed, and in a day he was ready to set off for home. There was but one pony in the old women's camp. This was old, vicious, blind of one eye, and with one ear cropped short; but it looked to Don Antonio far more beautiful than the gay steed on which he had ridden away from Los Angeles three days before. There was one pair of ragged shoes of enormous size among the old women's possessions. These were strapped on his feet by leathern thongs, and a bit of old sheepskin was tied around the pony's body. Thus accoutred and mounted, shivering in his drawers under his single blanket, the captain and flagbearer turned his face homeward. At the first friend's house he reached he stopped and begged for food. Some dried meat was given to him, and a stool on the porch offered to him. It was the house of a dear friend, and the friend's sister was his sweet-heart. As he sat there eating his meat, the women eyed him curiously. One said to the other, "How much he looks like Antonio!" At last the sweet-heart, coming nearer, asked him if he were "any relation of Don Antonio." "No," he said. Just at that moment his friend rode up, gave one glance at 217 206 the pitiful beggar sitting on his porch, shouted his name, dashed toward him, and seized him in his arms. Then was a great laughing and half-weeping, for it had been rumored that he had been taken prisoner by the Americans.

From this friend he received a welcome gift of a pair of trousers, many inches too short for his legs. At the next house his friend was as much too tall, and his second pair of gift trousers had to be rolled up in thick folds around his ankles.

Finally he reached Los Angeles in safety. Halting in a grove outside the town, he waited till twilight before entering. Having disguised himself in the rags which he had worn from the Indian village, he rode boldly up to the porch of his father's house, and in an impudent tone called for brandy. The terrified women began to scream; but his youngest sister, fixing one piercing glance on his face, laughed out gladly, and cried, "You can't fool me; you are Antonio."

Sitting in the little corner room, looking out through the open door on the gay garden and breathing its spring air, gay even in midwinter, and as spicy then as the gardens of other lands are in June, I spent many an afternoon listening to such tales as this. Sunset always came long before its time, it seemed, on these days.

Occasionally, at the last moment, Don Antonio would take up his guitar, and, in a voice still sympathetic and full of melody, sing an old Spanish love-song, brought to his mind by thus living over 218

A Veranda in Los Angeles

219 220 209 the events of his youth. Never, however, in his most ardent youth, could his eyes have gazed on his fairest sweetheart's face with a look of greater devotion than that with which they now rest on the noble, expressive countenance of his wife, as he sings the ancient and tender strains. Of one of them I once won from her, amid laughs and blushes, a few words of translation:-- "Let us hear the sweet echoOf your sweet voice that charms me.The one that truly loves you,He says he wishes to love;That the one who with ardent love adores you,Will sacrifice himself for you.Do not deprive me,Owner of me,Of that sweet echoOf your sweet voice that charms me."

Near the western end of Don Antonio's porch is an orange-tree, on which were hanging at this time twenty-five hundred oranges, ripe and golden among the glossy leaves. Under this tree my carriage always waited for me. The sen˜ora never allowed me to depart without bringing to me, in the carriage, farewell gifts of flowers and fruit: clusters of grapes, dried and fresh; great boughs full of oranges, more than I could lift. As I drove away thus, my lap filled with bloom and golden fruit, canopies of golden fruit over my head, I said to myself often: "Fables are prophecies. The Hesperides have come true."

221 222

OUTDOOR INDUSTRIES IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

223 224

OUTDOOR INDUSTRIES IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

CLIMATE is to a country what temperament is to a man, --Fate. The figure is not so fanciful as it seems; for temperament, broadly defined, may be said to be that which determines the point of view of a man's mental and spiritual vision, --in other words, the light in which he sees things. And the word "climate" is, primarily, simply a statement of bounds defined according to the obliquity of the sun's course relative to the horizon, --in other words, the slant of the sun. The tropics are tropic because the sun shines down too straight. Vegetation leaps into luxuriance under the nearly vertical ray: but human activities languish; intellect is supine; only the passions, human nature's rank weed-growths, thrive. In the temperate zone, again, the sun strikes the earth too much aslant. Human activities develop; intellect is keen; the balance of passion and reason is normally adjusted: but vegetation is slow and restricted. As compared with the productiveness of the tropics, the best that the temperate zone can do is scanty.

There are a few spots on the globe where the conditions of the country override these laws, and do 225 214 away with these lines of discrimination in favors. Florida, Italy, the South of France and of Spain, a few islands, and South California complete the list.

These places are doubly dowered. They have the wealths of the two zones, without the drawbacks of either. In South California this results from two causes: first, the presence of a temperate current in the ocean, near the coast; second, the configuration of the mountain ranges which intercept and reflect the sun's rays, and shut South California off from the rest of the continent. It is, as it were, climatically insulated, --a sort of island on land. It has just enough of sea to make its atmosphere temperate. Its continental position and affinities give it a dryness no island could have; and its climatically insulated position gives it an evenness of temperature much beyond the continental average.

It has thus a cool summer and a temperate winter, --conditions which secure the broadest and highest agricultural and horticultural possibilities. It is the only country in the world where dairies and orange orchards will thrive together.

It has its own zones of climate; not at all following lines parallel to the equator, but following the trend of its mountains. The California mountains are a big and interesting family of geological children, with great gaps in point of age, the Sierra Nevada being oldest of all. Time was when the Sierra Nevada fronted directly on the Pacific, and its rivers dashed down straight into the sea. But that is ages ago. 226 215 Since then have born out of the waters the numerous coast ranges, all following more or less closely the shore line. These are supplemented at Point Conception by east and west ranges, which complete the insulating walls of South, or semi-tropic, California. The coast ranges are the youngest of the children born; but the ocean is still pregnant of others. Range after range, far out to sea, they lie with their attendant valleys, biding their time, popping their heads out here and there in the shape of islands.

This colossal furrow system of mountains must have its correlative system of valleys; hence the great valley divisions of the country. There may be said to be four groups or kinds of these: the low and broad valleys, so broad that they are plains; the high mountain valleys; the rounded plateaus of the Great Basin, as it is called, of which the Bernardino Mountains are the southern rim; and the river valleys or can˜ons, --these last running at angles to the mountain and shore lines.

When the air in these valleys becomes heated by the sun, it rushes up the slopes of the Sierra Nevada as up a mighty chimney. To fill the vacuum thus created, the sea air is drawn in through every break in the coast ranges as by a blower. In the upper part of the California coast it sucks in with fury, as through the Golden Gate, piling up and demolishing high hills of sand every year, and cutting grooves on the granite fronts of mountains.

227 216

The country may be said to have three distinct industrial belts: the first, along the coast, a narrow one, from one to fifteen miles wide. In this grow some of the deciduous fruits, corn, pumpkins, and grain. Dairy and stock interests flourish. The nearness of the sea makes the air cool, with fogs at night. There are many cie´nagas , or marshy regions, where grass is green all the year round, and water is near the surface everywhere. Citrus fruits do not flourish in this belt, except in sheltered spots at the higher levels.

The second industrial belt comprises the shorter valleys opening toward the sea; a belt of country averaging perhaps forty miles in width. In this belt all grains will grow without irrigation; all deciduous fruits, including the grape, flourish well without irrigation; the citrus fruits thrive, but need irrigation.

The third belt lies back of this, farther from the sea; and the land, without irrigation, is worthless for all purposes except pasturage. That, in years of average rainfall, is good.

The soils of South California are chiefly of the cretaceous and tertiary epochs. The most remarkable thing about them is their great depth. It is not uncommon, in making wells, to find the soil the same to a depth of one hundred feet; the same thing is to be observed in can˜ons, cuts, and exposed bluffs on the sea-shore. This accounts for the great fertility of much of the land. Crops are raised year after 228 217 year, sometimes for twenty successive years, on the same fields, without the soil's showing exhaustion; and what are called volunteer crops, sowing themselves, give good yields for the first, second, and even third year after the original planting.

To provide for a wholesome variety and succession of seasons, in a country where both winter and summer were debarred full reign, was a meteorological problem that might well have puzzled even Nature's ingenuity. But next to a vacuum, she abhors monotony; and to avoid it, she has, in California, resorted even to the water-cure, --getting her requisite alternation of seasons by making one wet and the other dry.

To define the respective limits of these seasons becomes more and more difficult the longer one stays in California, and the more one studies rainfall statistics. Generally speaking, the wet season may be said to be from the middle of October to the middle of April, corresponding nearly with the outside limits of the north temperate zone season of snows. A good description of the two seasons would be--and it is not so purely humorous and unscientific as it sounds--that the wet season is the season in which it can rain, but may not; and the dry season is the season in which it cannot rain, but occasionally does.

Sometimes the rains expected and hoped for in October do not begin until March, and the whole country is in anxiety; a drought in the wet season meaning drought for a year, and great losses. There 229 218 have been such years in California, and the dread of them is well founded. But often the rains, coming later than their wont, are so full and steady that the requisite number of inches fall, and the year's supply is made good. The average rainfall in San Diego County is ten inches; in Los Angeles, San Bernardino, and Ventura counties, fifteen; in Santa Barbara, twenty. These five counties are all that properly come under the name of South California, resting the division on natural and climatic grounds. The political division, if ever made, will be based on other than natural or climatic reasons, and will include two, possibly three, more counties.

The pricelessness of water in a land where no rain falls during six months of the year cannot be appreciated by one who has not lived in such a country. There is a saying in South California that if a man buys water he can get his land thrown in. This is only an epigrammatic putting of the literal fact that the value of much of the land depends solely upon the water which it holds or controls.

Four systems of irrigation are practised: First, flooding the land. This is possible only in flat districts, where there are large heads of water. It is a wasteful method, and is less and less used each year. The second system is by furrows. By this system a large head of water is brought upon the land and distributed in small streams in many narrow furrows. The streams are made as small as will run across the ground, and are allowed to run only twenty-four hours 230

Mountain Irrigation

231 232 221 at a time. The third system is by basins dug around tree roots. To these basins water is brought by pipes or ditches; or, in mountain lands, by flumes. The fourth system is by sub-irrigation. This is the most expensive system of all, but is thought to economize water. The water is carried in pipes laid from two to three feet under ground. By opening valves in these pipes the water is let out and up, but never comes above the surface.

The appliances of one sort and another belonging to these irrigation systems add much to the picturesqueness of South California landscapes. Even the huge, tower-like, round-fanned windmills by which the water is pumped up are sometimes, spite of their clumsiness, made effective by gay colors and by vines growing on them. If they had broad, stretching arms, like the Holland windmills, the whole country would seem a-flutter.

The history of the industries of South California since the American occupation is interesting in its record of successions, --successions not the result of human interventions and decisions so much as of climatic fate, which in epoch after epoch created different situations.

The history begins with the cattle interest; hardly an industry, perhaps, or at any rate an unindustrious one, but belonging in point of time at the head of the list of the ways and means by which money has been made in the country. It dates back to the old mission days, --to the two hundred head of cattle 233 222 which the wise Galvez brought, in 1769, for stocking the three missions projected in Upper California.

From these had grown, in the sixty years of the friars' unhindered rule, herds of which it is no exaggeration to say that they covered thousands of hills and were beyond counting. It is probable that even the outside estimates of their numbers were short of the truth. The cattle wealth, the reckless ruin of the secularization period, survived, and was the leading wealth of the country at the time of its surrender to the United States. It was most wastefully handled. The cattle were killed, as they had been in the mission days, simply for their hides and tallow. Kingdoms full of people might have been fed on the beef which rotted on the ground every year, and the California cattle ranch in which either milk or butter could be found was an exception to the rule.

Into the calm of this half-barbaric life broke the fierce excitement of the gold discovery in 1849. The swarming hordes of ravenous miners must be fed; beef meant gold. The cattlemen suddenly found in their herds a new source of undreamed-of riches. Cattle had been sold as low as two dollars and a half a head. When the gold fever was at its highest, there were days and places in which they sold for three hundred. It is not strange that the rancheros lost their heads, grew careless and profligate.

Then came the drought of 1864, which killed off cattle by thousands of thousands. By thousands they were driven over steep places into the sea to save 234 223 pasturage, and to save the country from the stench and the poison of their dying of hunger. In April of that year fifty thousand head were sold in Santa Barbara for thirty-seven and a half cents a head. Many of the rancheros were ruined; they had to mortgage their lands to live; their stock was gone; they could not farm; values so sank that splendid estates were not worth over ten cents an acre.

Then came in a new set of owners. From the north and from the interior poured in the thriftier sheep men, with big flocks; and for a few years the wide belt of good pasturage land along the coast was chiefly a sheep country.

Slowly farmers followed; settling, in the beginning, around town centres such as Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Ventura. Grains and vegetables were grown for a resource when cattle and sheep should fail. Cows needed water all the year round; corn only a few months. A wheat-field might get time to ripen in a year when by reason of a drought a herd of cattle would die.

Thus the destiny of the country steadily went on toward its fulfilling, because the inexorable logic of the situation forced itself into the minds of the population. From grains and vegetables to fruits was a short and natural step, in the balmy air, under the sunny sky, and with the traditions and relics of the old friars' opulent fruit growths lingering all through the land. Each palm, orange-tree, and vineyard left on the old mission sites was a way-signal to the new 235 224 peoples; mute, yet so eloquent, the wonder is that so many years should have elapsed before the road began to be thronged.

Such, in brief, is the chronicle of the development of South California's outdoor industries down to the present time; of the successions through which the country has been making ready to become what it will surely be, the Garden of the world, --a garden with which no other country can vie; a garden in which will grow, side by side, the grape and the pumpkin, the pear and the orange, the olive and the apple, the strawberry and the lemon, Indian corn and the banana, wheat and the guava.

The leading position which the fruit interest will ultimately take has been reached only in Los Angeles County. There the four chief industries, ranged according to their relative importance, stand as follows: Fruit, grain, wool, stock, and dairy. This county may be said to be pre-eminently the garden of the Garden. No other of the five counties can compete with it. Its fruit harvest is nearly unintermitted all the year round. The main orange crop ripens from January to May, though oranges hang on the trees all the year. The lemon, lime, and citron ripen and hang, like the orange. Apricots, pears, peaches, nectarines, strawberries, currants, and figs are plentiful in June; apples, pears, peaches, during July and August. Late in July grapes begin, and last till January. September is the best month of all, having grapes, peaches, pomegranates, walnuts, almonds, and 236 225 a second crop of figs. From late in August till Christmas, the vintage does not cease.

Head Gate of Irrigating Ditch

The county has a sea-coast line of one hundred miles, and contains three millions of acres; two-thirds mountain and desert, the remaining million good pasturage and tillable land. What is known as the great Los Angeles valley has an area of about sixty miles in length by thirty in width, and contains the three rivers of the county, --the Los Angeles, the Santa Ana, and the San Gabriel. Every drop of the water of these rivers and of the numberless little 237 226 springs and streams ministering to their system is owned, rated, utilized, and, one might almost add, wrangled over. The chapters of these water litigations are many and full; and it behooves every new settler in the county to inform himself on that question first of all, and thoroughly.

In the Los Angeles valley lie several lesser valleys, fertile and beautiful; most notable of these, the San Gabriel valley, where was the site of the old San Gabriel Mission, twelve miles east of the town of Los Angeles. This valley is now taken up in large ranches, or in colonies of settlers banded together for mutual help and security in matter of water rights. This colony feature is daily becoming more and more an important one in the development of the whole country. Small individual proprietors cannot usually afford the purchase of sufficient water to make horticultural enterprises successful or safe. The incorporated colony, therefore, offers advantages to large numbers of settlers of a class that could not otherwise get foothold in the country, --the men of comparatively small means, who expect to work with their hands, and await patiently the slow growth of moderate fortunes, --a most useful and abiding class, making a solid basis for prosperity. Some of the best results in South California have already been attained in colonies of this sort, such as Anaheim, Riverside, and Pasadena. The method is regarded with increasing favor. It is a rule of give and take, which works equally well for both country and settlers.

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The South California statistics of fruits, grain, wool, honey, etc., read more like fancy than like fact, and are not readily believed by one unacquainted with the country. The only way to get a real comprehension and intelligent acceptance of them is to study them on the ground. By a single visit to a great ranch one is more enlightened than he would be by committing to memory scores of Equalization Board Reports. One of the very best, if not the best, for this purpose is Baldwin's ranch, in the San Gabriel valley. It includes a large part of the old lands of the San Gabriel Mission, and is a principality in itself.

There are over a hundred men on its pay-roll, which averages $4,000 a month. Another $4,000 does not more than meet its running expenses. It has $6,000 worth of machinery for its grain harvests alone. It has a dairy of forty cows, Jersey and Durham; one hundred and twenty work-horses and mules, and fifty thoroughbreds.

It is divided into four distinct estates: the Santa Anita, of 16,000 acres; Puente, 18,000; Merced, 20,000; and the Potrero, 25,000. The Puente and Merced are sheep ranches, and have 20,000 sheep on them. The Potrero is rented out to small farmers. The Santa Anita is the home estate. On it are the homes of the family and of the laborers. It has fifteen hundred acres of oak grove, four thousand acres in grain, five hundred in grass for hay, one hundred and fifty in orange orchards, fifty of 239 228 almond trees, sixty of walnuts, twenty-five of pears, fifty of peaches, twenty of lemons, and five hundred in vines; also small orchards of chestnuts, hazel-nuts, and apricots; and thousands of acres of good pasturage.

From whatever side one approaches Santa Anita in May, he will drive through a wild garden, --asters, yellow and white; scarlet pentstemons, blue larkspur, monk's-hood; lupines, white and blue; gorgeous golden eschscholtzia, alder, wild lilac, white sage, --all in riotous flowering.

Entering the ranch by one of the north gates, he will look southward down gentle slopes of orchards and vineyards far across the valley, the tints growing softer and softer, and blending more and more with each mile, till all melt into a blue or purple haze. Driving from orchard to orchard, down half-mile avenues through orchards skirting seemingly endless stretches of vineyard, he begins to realize what comes of planting trees and vines by hundreds and tens of hundreds of acres, and the Equalization Board Statistics no longer appear to him even large. It does not seem wonderful that Los Angeles County should be reported as having sixty-two hundred acres in vines, when here on one man's ranch are five hundred acres. The last Equalization Board Report said the county had 256,135 orange and 41,250 lemon trees. It would hardly have surprised him to be told that there were as many as that in the Santa Anita groves alone. The effect on the eye of such huge tracts, planted with a single sort of tree, is to increase 240 229 enormously the apparent size of the tract; the mind stumbles on the very threshold of the attempt to reckon its distances and numbers, and they become vaster and vaster as they grow vague.

The orange orchard is not the unqualifiedly beautiful spectacle one dreams it will be; nor, in fact, it so beautiful as it ought to be, with its evergreen shining foliage, snowy blossoms, and golden fruit hanging together and lavishly all the year round. I fancy that if travellers told truth, ninety-nine out of a hundred would confess to a grievous disappointment at their first sight of the orange at home. In South California the trees labor under the great disadvantage of being surrounded by bare brown earth. How much this dulls their effect one realizes on finding now and then a neglected grove where grass has been allowed to grow under the trees, to their ruin as fruit-bearers, but incomparably heightening their beauty. Another fatal defect in the orange-tree is its contour. It is too round, too stout for its height; almost as bad a thing in a tree as in a human being. The uniformity of this contour of the trees, combined with the regularity of their setting in evenly spaced rows, gives large orange groves a certain tiresome quality, which one recognizes with a guilty sense of being shamefully ungrateful for so much splendor of sheen and color. The exact spherical shape of the fruit possibly helps on this tiresomeness. One wonders if oblong bunches of long-pointed and curving fruit, banana-like, set 241 230 irregularly among the glossy green leaves, would not look better; which wonder adds to ingratitude an impertinence, of which one suddenly repents on seeing such a tree as I saw in a Los Angeles garden in the winter of 1882, --a tree not over thirty feet high, with twenty-five hundred golden oranges hanging on it, among leaves so glossy they glittered in the sun with the glitter of burnished metal. Never the Hesperides saw a more resplendent sight.

But the orange looks its best plucked and massed; it lends itself then to every sort and extent of decoration. At a citrus fair in the Riverside colony in March, 1882, in a building one hundred and fifty feet long by sixty wide, built of redwood planks, were five long tables loaded with oranges and lemons; rows, plates, pyramids, baskets; the bright redwood walls hung with great boughs, full as when broken from the tree; and each plate and pyramid decorated with the shining green leaves. The whole place was fairly ablaze, and made one think of the Arabian Nights' Tales. The acme of success in orange culture in California is said to have been attained in this Riverside colony, though it is only six years old, and does not yet number two thousand souls. There are in its orchards 209,000 orange-trees, of which 28,000 are in bearing, 20,000 lemon-trees, and 8,000 limes.

The profits of orange culture are slow to begin but, having once begun, mount up fast. Orange orchards at San Gabriel have in many instances 242 231 netted $500 an acre annually. The following estimate, the result of sixteen years' experience, is probably a fair one of the outlay and income of a small orange grove: --

10 acres of land, at $75 per acre$750.00

1000 trees, at $75 per hundred750.00

Ploughing and harrowing, $2.50 per acre20.00

Digging holes, planting, 10 cents each100.00

Irrigating and planting10.00

Cultivation after irrigation9.50

3 subsequent irrigations during the year30.00

3 subsequent cultivations the first year13.50

Total cost, first year$1,683.00

This estimate of cost of land is based on the price of the best lands in the San Gabriel valley. Fair lands can be bought in other sections at lower prices.

Second year. --An annual ploughing in January$25.00

Four irrigations during year40.00

Six cultivations during year27.00

Third year125.00

Fourth year150.00

Fifth year200.00

Interest on investment1,000.00

Total$3,250.00

If first-class, healthy, thrifty budded trees are planted, they will begin to fruit the second year. The third year, a few boxes may be marketed. The fourth year, there will be an average yield of at least 75 oranges to the tree, which will equal:

75,000, at $10 per thousand net$750.00

The fifth year, 250 per tree, 250,000, at $10 perthousand2,500.00

Total$3,250.00

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The orchard is now clear gain, allowing $1,000 as interest on the investment. The increase in the volume of production will continue, until at the end of the tenth year an average of 1,000 oranges to a tree would not be an extraordinary yield.

To all these formulas of reckoning should be added one with the algebraic x representing the unknown quantity, and standing for insect enemies at large. Each kind of fruit has its own, which must be fought with eternal vigilance. No port in any country has more rigid laws of quarantine than are now enforced in California against these insect enemies. Grafts, cuttings, fruit, if even suspected, are seized and compelled to go through as severe disinfecting processes as if they were Cuban passengers fresh from a yellow-fever epidemic.

The orange's worst enemy is a curious insect, the scale-bug. It looks more like a mildew than like anything alive; is usually black, sometimes red. Nothing but violent treatment with tobacco will eradicate it. Worse than the scale-bug, in that he works out of sight underground, is the gopher. He has gnawed every root of a tree bare before a toothmark on the trunk suggests his presence, and then it is too late to save the tree. The rabbit also is a pernicious ally in the barking business; he, however, being shy, soon disappears from settled localities; but the gopher stands not in fear of man or men. Only persistent strychnine on his door-sills and thrust down his winding stairs, will save the orchard in which he has founded a community.

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The almond and the walnut orchards are beautiful features in the landscape all the year round, no less in the winter, when their branches are naked, than in the season of their full leaf and bearing. In fact, the broad spaces of filmy gray made by their acres when leafless are delicious values in contrast with the solid green of the orange orchards. The exquisite revelation of tree systems which stripped boughs give is seen to more perfect advantage against a warm sky than a cold one, and is heightened in effect standing side by side with the flowing green pepper-trees and purple eucalyptus.

In the time of blossoms, an almond orchard seen from a distance is like nothing so much as a rosy-white cloud, floated off a sunset and spread on the earth. Seen nearer, it is a pink snow-storm, arrested and set on stalks, with an orchestra buzz of bees filling the air.

It is a pity that the almond-tree should not be more repaying; for it will be a sore loss to the beauty of the country when the orchards are gone, and this is only a question of time. They are being uprooted and cast out. The crop is a disappointing one, of uncertain yield, and troublesome to prepare. The nuts must be five times handled: first picked, then shucked, then dried, then bleached, and then again dried. After the first drying, they are dipped by basketfuls into hot water, then poured into the bleachers, --boxes with perforated bottoms. Underneath these is a sulphur fire to which the nuts must 245 234 be exposed for fifteen or twenty minutes. Then they are again spread in a drying-house. The final gathering them up to send to market makes really a sixth handling; and after all is said and done, the nuts are not very good, being flavorless in comparison with those grown in Europe.

The walnut orchard is a better investment, and no less a delight to the eye. While young, the walnut-tree is graceful; when old, it is stately, It is a sturdy bearer, and if it did not bear at all, would be worth honorable place and room on large estates, simply for its avenues of generous shade. It is planted in the seed, and transplanted at two or three years old, with only twenty-seven trees to an acre. They begin to bear at ten years, reach full bearing at fifteen, and do not give sign of failing at fifty.

Most interesting of all South California's outdoor industries is the grape culture. To speak of grape culture is to enter upon a subject which needs a volume. Its history, its riches, past and prospective, its methods, its beautiful panorama of pictures, each by itself is worth study and exhaustive treatment. Since the days of Eshcol, the vine and the vineyard have been honored in the thoughts and the imaginations of men; they furnished shapes and designs for the earliest sacred decorations in the old dispensation, and suggestions and symbols for divine parables in the new. No age has been without them, and no country whose sun was warm enough to make them thrive. It is safe to predict that so long as the visible frame 246 235 of the earth endures, "wine to make glad the heart of man" will be made, loved, celebrated, and sung.

To form some idea of California's future wealth from the grape culture, it is only necessary to reflect on the extent of her grape-growing country as compared with that of France. In France, before the days of the phylloxera, 5,000,000 of people were supported entirely by the grape industry, and the annual average of the wine crop was 2,000,000,000 gallons, with a value of $400,000,000. The annual wine-yield of California is already estimated at about 10,000,000 gallons. Nearly one-third of this is made in South California, chiefly in Los Angeles County, where the grape culture is steadily on the increase, five millions of new vines having been set out in the spring of 1882.

The vineyards offer more variety to the eye than the orange orchards. In winter, when leafless, they are grotesque, their stocky, twisted, hunchback stems looking like Hindoo idols or deformed imps, no two alike in a square mile, all weird, fantastic, uncanny. Their first leafing out does not do away with this; the imps seem simply to have put up green umbrellas; but presently the leaves widen and lap, hiding the uncouth trunks, and spreading over all the vineyard a beautiful, tender green, with lights and shades breaking exquisitely in the hollows and curves of the great leaves. From this on, through all the stages of blossoms and seed-setting, till the clusters are so big and purple that they gleam out everywhere 247 236 between the leaves, --sometimes forty-five pounds on a single vine, if the vine is irrigated, twelve if it is left to itself. Eight tons of grapes off one acre have been taken in the Baldwin ranch. There were made there, in 1881, 100,000 gallons of wine and 50,000 of brandy. The vintage begins late in August, and lasts many weeks, some varieties of grapes ripening later than others. The vineyards are thronged with Mexican and Indian pickers. The Indians come in bands, and pitch their tents just outside the vineyard. They are good workers. The wine-cellars and the great crushing-vats tell the vineyards' story more emphatically even than the statistical figures. A vat that will hold 1,000 gallons piled full of grapes, huge wire wheels driving round and round in the spurting, foaming mass, the juice flying off through trough-like shoots on each side into seventy great vats; below, breathless men working the wheels, loads of grapes coming up momently and being poured into the swirling vat, the whole air reeking with winy flavor. The scene makes earth seem young again, old mythologies real; and one would not wonder to see Bacchus and his leopards come bowling up, with shouting Pan behind.

The cellars are still, dark, and fragrant. Forty-eight great oval-shaped butts, ten feet in diameter, holding 2,100 gallons each, I counted in one cellar. The butts are made of Michigan oak, and have a fine yellow color, which contrasts well with the red stream of the wine when it is drawn.

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Notwithstanding the increase of the grape culture, the price of grapes is advancing, some estimates making it forty per cent higher than it was five years ago. It is a quicker and probably a more repaying industry than orange-growing. It is reckoned that a vineyard in its fourth year will produce two tons to the acre; in the seventh year, four; the fourth year it will be profitable, reckoning the cost of the vineyard at sixty dollars an acre, exclusive of the first cost of the land. The annual expense of cultivation, picking, and handling is about twenty-five dollars. The rapid increase of this culture has been marvellous. In 1848 there were only 200,000 vines in all California; in 1862 there were 9,500,000; in 1881, 64,000,000, of which at least 34,000,000 are in full bearing.

Such facts and figures are distressing to the advocates of total abstinence; but they may take heart in the thought that a by no means insignificant proportion of these grapes will be made into raisins, canned, or eaten fresh.

The raisin crop was estimated at 160,000 boxes for 1881. Many grape-growers believe that in raisin-making will ultimately be found the greatest profit. The Americans are a raisin-eating people. From Malaga alone are imported annually into the United States about ten tons of raisins, one-half the entire crop of the Malaga raisin district. This district has an area of only about four hundred square miles. In California an area of at least twenty thousand square miles is adapted to the raisin.

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A moderate estimate of the entire annual grape crop of California is 119,000 tons. "Allowing 60,000 tons to be used in making wines, 2,000 tons to be sent fresh to the Eastern States, and 5,000 tons to be made into raisins, there would still remain 52,000 tons to be eaten fresh or wasted, --more than one hundred pounds for each resident of California, including children."*

John G. Hittell's Commerce and Industries of the Pacific Coast.

The California wines are as yet of inferior quality. A variety of still wines and three champagnes are made; but even the best are looked on with distrust and disfavor by connoisseurs, and until they greatly improve they will not command a ready market in America. At present it is to be feared that a large proportion of them are sold under foreign labels.

Prominent among the minor industries is honey-making. From the great variety of flowers and their spicy flavor, especially from the aromatic sages, the honey is said to have a unique and delicious taste, resembling that of the famous honey of Hymettus.

The crop for 1881, in the four southern counties, was estimated at three millions of pounds; a statistic that must seem surprising to General Fre´mont, who, in his report to Congress of explorations on the Pacific coast in 1844, stated that the honey-bee could not exist west of the Sierra Nevadas.

The bee ranches are always picturesque; they are usually in can˜ons or on wooded foot-hills, and their 250 239 villages of tiny bright-colored hives look like gay Lilliputian encampments.

Wind Break of Eucalyptus Trees to protect Orchards

It has appeared to me that men becoming guardians of bees acquire a peculiar calm philosophy, and are superior to other farmers and outdoor workers. It would not seem unnatural 251 240 that the profound respect they are forced to entertain for insects so small and so wholly at their mercy should give them enlarged standards in many things; above all, should breed in them a fine and just humility toward all creatures.

A striking instance of this is to be seen in one of the most beautiful can˜ons of the San Gabriel valley, where, living in a three-roomed, redwood log cabin, with a vine-covered booth in front, is an old man kings might envy.

He had a soldier's warranty deed for one hundred and sixty acres of land, and he elected to take his estate at the head of a brook-swept gorge, four-fifths precipice and rock. In the two miles between his cabin and the mouth of the gorge, the trail and the brook change sides sixteen times. When the brook is at its best, the trail goes under altogether, and there is no getting up or down the can˜on. Here, with a village of bees for companions, the old man has lived for a dozen years. While the bees are off at work, he sits at home and weaves, out of the gnarled stems and roots of manzanita and laurels, curious baskets, chairs, and brackets, for which he finds ready market in Los Angeles. He knows every tree and shrub in the can˜on, and has a fancy for collecting specimens of all the native woods of the region. These he shapes into paper-cutters, and polishes them till they are like satin. He came from Ohio forty years ago, and has lived in a score of States. The only spot he likes as well as this gorge 252 241 is Don Yana, on the Rio Grande River, in Mexico. Sometimes he hankers to go there and sit under the shadow of big oaks, where the land slopes down to the river; but "the bee business," he says, "is a good business only for a man who has the gift of continuance;" and "it's no use to try to put bees with farms; farms want valleys, bees want mountains."

"There are great back-draws to the bee business, the irregularities of the flowers being chief; some years there's no honey in the flowers at all. Some explain it on one hypothesis and some on another, and it lasts them to quarrel over."

His phrases astonish you; also the quiet courtesy of his manner, so at odds with his backwoodsman's garb. But presently you learn that he began life as a lawyer, has been a judge in his time; and when, to show his assortment of paper-cutters, he lifts down the big book they are kept in, and you see that it is Voltaire's "Philosophical Dictionary," you understand how his speech has been fashioned. He keeps a diary of every hive, the genealogy of every swarm.

"No matter what they do, --the least thing, --we note it right down in the book. That's the only way to learn bees," he says.

On the outside wall of the cabin is fastened an observation hive, with glass sides. Here he sits, watch in hand, observing and noting; he times the bees, in and out, and in each one of their operations. He watches the queen on her bridal tour in the air; once the drone bridegroom fell dead on his note-book. 253 242 "I declare I couldn't help feeling sort of sorry for him," said the old man.

In a shanty behind the house is the great honey-strainer, a marvellous invention, which would drive bees mad with despair if they could understand it. Into a wheel, with perforated spokes, is slipped the comb full of honey, the cells being first opened with a hot knife. By the swift turning of this wheel, the honey flies out of the comb, and pours through a cylinder into a can underneath, leaving the comb whole and uninjured, ready to be put back into the hive for the patient robbed bees to fill again. The receiving-can will hold fifteen hundred pounds; two men can fill it in a day; a single comb is so quickly drained that a bee might leave his hive on his foraging expedition, and before he could get his little load of honey and return, the comb could be emptied and put back. It would be vastly interesting to know what is thought and said in bee-hives about these mysterious emptyings of combs.

A still more tyrannical circumvention has been devised, to get extra rations of honey from bees: false combs, wonderful imitations of the real ones, are made of wax. Apparently the bees know no difference; at any rate, they fill the counterfeit full of real honey. These artificial combs, carefully handled, will last ten or twelve years in continual use.

The highest yield his hives had ever given him was one hundred and eighty pounds a hive.

"That's a good yield; at that rate, with three or 254 243 four hundred hives, I'd do very well," said the old man. "But you're at the mercy of speculators in honey as well as everything else. I never count on getting more than four or five cents a pound. They make more than I do."

The bee has a full year's work in South California: from March to August inexhaustible forage, and in all the other months plenty to do, --no month without some blossoms to be found. His time of danger is when apricots are ripe and lady-bugs fly.

Of apricots, bees will eat till they are either drunk or stuffed to death; no one knows which. They do not live to get home. Oddly enough, they cannot pierce the skins themselves, but have to wait till the lady-bug has made a hole for them. It must have been an accidental thing in the outset, the first bee's joining a lady-bug at her feast of apricot. The bee, in his turn, is an irresistible treat to the bee-bird and lizard, who pounce upon him when he is on the flower; and to a stealthy moth, who creeps by night into hives and kills hundreds.

"Nobody need think the bee business is all play," was our old philosopher's last word. "It's just like everything else in life, and harder than some things."

The sheep industry is, on the whole, decreasing in California. In 1876 the wool crop of the entire State was 28,000 tons; in 1881, only 21,500. This is the result, in part, of fluctuations in the price of wool, 255 244 but more of the growing sense of the greater certainty of increase from agriculture and horticulture.

The cost of keeping a sheep averages only $1.25 a year. Its wool sells for $1.50, and for each hundred there will be forty-five lambs, worth seventy-five cents each. But there have been droughts in California which have killed over one million sheep in a year; there is always, therefore, the risk of losing in one year the profits of many.

The sheep ranches are usually desolate places: a great stretch of seemingly bare lands, with a few fenced corrals, blackened and foul-smelling; the home and out-buildings clustered together in a hollow or on a hill-side where there is water; the less human the neighborhood the better.

The loneliness of the life is, of itself, a salient objection to the industry. Of this the great owners need know nothing; they can live where they like. But for the small sheepmen, the shepherds, and, above all, the herders, it is a terrible life, --how terrible is shown by the frequency of insanity among herders. Sometimes, after only a few months of the life, a herder goes suddenly mad. After learning this fact, it is no longer possible to see the picturesque side of the effective groups one so often comes on suddenly in the wildernesses: sheep peacefully grazing, and the shepherd lying on the ground watching them, or the whole flock racing in a solid, fleecy, billowy scamper up or down a steep hill-side, with the dogs leaping and barking on all sides at once. One scans 256 245 the shepherd's face alone, with pitying fear lest he may be losing his wits.

A shearing at a large sheep ranch is a grand sight. We had the good fortune to see one at Baldwin's, at La Puente. Three thousand sheep had been sheared the day before, and they would shear twenty-five hundred on this day.

A shed sixty feet long by twenty-five wide, sides open; small pens full of sheep surrounding it on three sides; eighty men bent over at every possible angle, eighty sheep being tightly held in every possible position, eighty shears flashing, glancing, clipping; bright Mexican eyes shining, laughing Mexican voices jesting. At first it seemed only a confused scene of phantasmagoria. As our eyes became familiarized, the confusion disentangled itself, and we could note the splendid forms of the men and their marvellous dexterity in using the shears. Less than five minutes it took from the time a sheep was grasped, dragged in, thrown down, seized by the shearer's knees, till it was set free, clean shorn, and its three-pound fleece tossed on a table outside. A good shearer shears seventy or eighty sheep in a day; men of extra dexterity shear a hundred. The Indians are famous for skill at shearing, and in all their large villages are organized shearing-bands, with captains, that go from ranch to ranch in the shearing-season. There were a half-dozen Indians lying on the ground outside this shearing-shed at Puente, looking on wistfully. The Mexicans had 257 246 crowded them out for that day, and they could get no chance to work.

A pay clerk stood in the centre of the shed with a leathern wallet full of five-cent pieces. As soon as a man had sheared his sheep, he ran to the clerk, fleece in hand, threw down the fleece, and received his five-cent piece. In one corner of the shed was a barrel of beer, which was retailed at five cents a glass; and far too many of the five-cent pieces changed hands again the next minute at the beer barrel. As fast as the fleeces were tossed out from the shed, they were thrown up to a man standing on the top of the roof. This man flung them into an enormous bale-sack, swinging wide-mouthed from a derrick; in the sack stood another man, who jumped on the wool to pack it down tight.

As soon as the shearers perceived that their pictures were being drawn by the artist in our party, they were all agog; by twos and threes they left their work and crowded around the carriage, peering, commenting, asking to have their portraits taken, quizzing those whose features they recognized; it was like Italy rather than America. One tattered fellow, whose shoeless feet were tied up in bits of gunny-bags, was distressed because his trousers were too short. "Would the gentleman kindly make them in the drawing a little farther down his legs? It was an accident they were so short." All were ready to pose and stand, even in the most difficult attitudes, as long as was required. Those who had 258

Bagging Wool for Transportation

259 260 249 done so asked, like children, if their names could not be put in the book; so I wrote them all down: "Juan Canero, Juan Rivera, Felipe Ybara, Jose´ Jesus Lope´z, and Domingo Garcia." The space they will fill is a little thing to give; and there is a satisfaction in the good faith of printing them, though the shearers will most assuredly never know it.

The faces of the sheep being shorn were piteous; not a struggle, not a bleat, the whole of their unwillingness and terror being written in their upturned eyes. "As a sheep before her shearers is dumb" will always have for me a new significance.

The shepherd in charge of the Puente ranch is an Italian named Gaetano. The porch of his shanty was wreathed with vines and blossoms, and opened on a characteristic little garden, half garlic, the other half pinks and geraniums. As I sat there looking out on the scene, he told me of a young man who had come from Italy to be herder for him, and who had gone mad and shot himself.

"Three go crazy last year," he said. "Dey come home, not know noting. You see, never got company for speak at all."

This young boy grew melancholy almost at once, was filled with abnormal fears of the coyotes, and begged for a pistol to shoot them with. "He want my pistol. I not want give. I say, You little sick; you stay home in house; I send oder man. My wife she go town buy clothes for baptism one baby got. 261 250 He get pistol in drawer while she gone." They found him lying dead with his catechism in one hand and the pistol in the other. As Gaetano finished the story, a great flock of two thousand shorn sheep were suddenly let out from one of the corrals. With a great burst of bleating they dashed off, the colly running after them. Gaetano seized his whistle and blew a sharp call on it. The dog halted, looked back, uncertain for a second; one more whistle, and he bounded on.

"He know," said Gaetano. "He take dem two tousand all right. I like better dat dog as ten men."

On the list of South California's outdoor industries, grain stands high, and will always continue to do so. Wheat takes the lead; but oats, barley, and corn are of importance. Barley is always a staple, and averages twenty bushels to the acre.

Oats average from thirty to forty bushels an acre, and there are records of yields of considerably over a hundred bushels.

Corn will average forty bushels an acre. On the Los Angeles River it has grown stalks seventeen feet high and seven inches round.

The average yield of wheat is from twenty to twenty-five bushels an acre, about thirty-three per cent more than in the States on the Atlantic slope.

In grains, as in so many other things, Los Angeles County is far in advance of the other counties. In 1879 there were in the county 31,500 acres in 262 251 wheat; in 1881, not less than 100,000; and the value of the wheat crop for 1882 was reckoned $1,020,000.

The great San Fernando valley, formerly the property of the San Fernando Mission, is the chief wheat-producing section of the county. The larger part of this valley is in two great ranches. One of them was bought a few years ago for $275,000; and $75,000 paid down, the remainder to be paid in instalments. The next year was a dry year; crops failed. The purchaser offered the ranch back again to the original owners, with his $75,000 thrown in, if they would release him from his bargain. They refused. The next winter rains came, the wheat crop was large, prices were high, and the ranch actually paid off the entire debt of $200,000 still owing on the purchase.

From such figures as these, it is easy to see how the California farmer can afford to look with equanimity on occasional droughts. Experience has shown that he can lose crops two years out of five and yet make a fair average profit for the five years.

The most beautiful ranch in California is said to be the one about twelve miles west of Santa Barbara, belonging to Elwood Cooper. Its owner speaks of it humorously as a little "pocket ranch." In comparison with the great ranches whose acres are counted by tens of thousands, it is small, being only two thousand acres in extent; but in any other part of the world except California, it would be thought a wild jest to 263 252 speak of an estate of two thousand acres as a small one.

Ten years ago this ranch was a bare, desolate sheep ranch, --not a tree on it, excepting the oaks and sycamores in the can˜on. To-day it has twelve hundred acres under high cultivation; and driving from field to field, orchard to orchard, one drives, if he sees the whole of the ranch, over eleven miles of good made road. There are three hundred acres in wheat, one hundred and seventy in barley; thirty-five hundred walnut-trees, twelve thousand almond, five thousand olive, two thousand fig and domestic fruit trees, and one hundred and fifty thousand eucalyptus-trees, representing twenty-four varieties; one thousand grapevines; a few orange, lemon, and lime trees. There are on the ranch one hundred head of cattle, fifty horses, and fifteen hundred sheep.

These are mere bald figures, wonderful enough as statistics of what may be done in ten years' time on South California soil, but totally inadequate even to suggest the beauty of the place.

The first relief to the monotony of the arrow-straight road which it pleased an impatient, inartistic man to make westward from Santa Barbara, is the sight of high, dark walls of eucalyptus-trees on either side of the road. A shaded avenue, three quarters of a mile long, of these represents the frontages of Mr. Cooper's estate. Turning to the right, through a break in this wall, is a road, with dense eucalyptus woods on the left and an almond orchard on the right. It winds and 264 253 turns past knolls of walnut grove, long lines of olive orchard, and right-angled walls of eucalyptus-trees shutting in wheat-fields. By curves and bends and sharp turns, all the time with new views, and new colors from changes of crop, with exquisite glimpses of the sea shot through here and there, it finally, at the end of a mile, reaches the brink of an oak-canopied can˜on. In the mouth of this can˜on stands the house, fronting south on a sunny meadow and garden space, walled in on three sides by eucalyptus-trees.

To describe the oak kingdom of this can˜on would be to begin far back of all known kingdoms of the country. The branches are a network of rafters upholding roof canopies of boughs and leaves so solid that the sun's rays pierce them only brokenly, making on the ground a dancing carpet of brown and gold flecks even in winter, and in summer a shade lighted only by starry glints.

Farther up the can˜on are sycamores, no less stately than the oaks, their limbs gnarled and twisted as if they had won their places by splendid wrestle.

These oak-and-sycamore-filled can˜on are the most beautiful of the South California can˜ons; though the soft, chaparral-walled can˜ons would, in some lights, press them hard for supremacy of place. Nobody will ever, by pencil or brush or pen, fairly render the beauty of the mysterious, undefined, undefinable chaparral. Matted, tangled, twisted, piled, tufted, --everything is chaparral. All botany may be 265 254 exhausted in describing it in one place, and it will not avail you in another. But in all places, and made up of whatever hundreds of shrubs it may be, it is the most exquisite carpet surface that Nature has to show for mountain fronts or can˜on sides. Not a color that it does not take; not a bloom that it cannot rival; a bank of cloud cannot be softer, or a bed of flowers more varied of hue. Some day, between 1900 and 2000, when South California is at leisure and has native artists, she will have an artist of can˜ons, whose life and love and work will be spent in picturing them, --the royal oak canopies; the herculean sycamores; the chameleon, velvety chaparral; and the wild, throe-built, water-quarried rock gorges, with their myriad ferns and flowers.

At the head of Mr. Cooper's can˜on are broken and jutting sandstone walls, over three hundred feet high, draped with mosses and ferns and all manner of vines. I saw the dainty thalictrum, with its clover-like leaves, standing in thickets there, fresh and green, its blossoms nearly out on the first day of February. Looking down from these heights over the whole of the ranch, one sees for the first time the completeness of its beauty. The eucalyptus belts have been planted in every instance solely with a view to utility, --either as wind-breaks to keep off known special wind-currents from orchard or grain-field, or to make use of gorge sides too steep for other cultivation. Yet, had they been planted with sole reference to landscape effects, they could not 266 255 better have fallen into place. Even out to the very ocean edge the groves run, their purples and greens melting into the purples and greens of the sea when it is dark and when it is sunny blue, --making harmonious lines of color, leading up from it to the soft grays of the olive and the bright greens of the walnut orchards and wheat-fields. When the almond-trees are in bloom, the eucalyptus belts are perhaps most superb of all, with their dark spears and plumes waving above and around the white and rosy acres.

The leading industry of this ranch is to be the making of olive oil. Already its oil is known and sought; and to taste it is a revelation to palates accustomed to the compounds of rancid cocoanut and cotton-seed with which the markets are full. The olive industry will no doubt ultimately be one of the great industries of the whole country: vast tracts of land which are not suitable or do not command water enough for orange, grape, or grain culture, affording ample support to the thrifty and unexacting olive. The hill-slopes around San Diego, and along the coast line for forty or fifty miles up, will no doubt one day be as thickly planted with olives as is the Mediterranean shore. Italy's olive crop is worth thirty million dollars annually, and California has as much land suited to the olive as Italy has.

The tree is propagated from cuttings, begins to bear the fourth year, and is in full bearing by the tenth or twelfth. One hundred and ten can be planted to an acre. Their endurance is enormous. 267 256 Some of the orchards planted by the friars at the missions over a hundred years ago are still bearing, spite of scores of years of neglect; and there are records of trees in Nice having borne for several centuries.

The process of oil-making is an interesting spectacle, under Mr. Cooper's oak-trees. The olives are first dried in trays with slat bottoms, tiers upon tiers of these being piled in a kiln over a furnace fire. Then they are ground between stone rollers, worked by huge wheels turned by horse-power. The oil, thus pressed out, is poured into huge butts or tanks. Here it has to stand and settle three or four months. There are faucets at different levels in these butts, so as to draw off different layers of oil. After it has settled sufficiently, it is filtered through six layers of cotton batting, then through one of French paper, before it is bottled. It is then of a delicate straw color, with a slight greenish tint, --not at all of the golden yellow of the ordinary market article. That golden yellow and the thickening in cold are sure proofs of the presence of cotton-seed in oil, --the pure oil remaining limpid in a cold which will turn the adulterated oils white and thick. It is estimated that an acre of olives in full bearing will pay fifteen hundred dollars a year if pickled, and two thousand dollars a year made into oil.

In observing the industries of South California and studying their history, one never escapes from an undercurrent of wonder that there should be any 268 257 industries or industry there. No winter to be prepared for; no fixed time at which anything must be done or not done at all; the air sunny, balmy, dreamy, seductive, making the mere being alive in it a pleasure; all sorts of fruits and grains growing a-riot, and taking care of themselves, --it is easy to understand the character, or, to speak more accurately, the lack of character, of the old Mexican and Spanish Californians.

There was a charm in it, however. Simply out of sunshine, there had distilled in them an Orientalism as fine in its way as that made in the East by generations of prophets, crusaders, and poets. With no more curiosity than was embodied in "Who knows?"--with no thought or purpose for a furture more defined than "Some other time; not to-day," --without greeds, and with the unlimited generosities of children, --no wonder that to them the restless, inquisitive, insatiable, close-reckoning Yankee seemed the most intolerable of all conquerors to whom they could surrender. One can fancy them shuddering, even in heaven, as they look down to-day on his colonies, his railroads, his crops, --their whole land humming and buzzing with his industries.

One questions also whether, as the generations move on, the atmospheres of life in the sunny empire they lost will not revert more and more to their type, and be less and less of the type they so disliked. Unto the third and fourth generation, perhaps, pulses may keep up the tireless Yankee beat; but sooner or 269 258 later there is certain to come a slacking, a toning-down, and a readjusting of standards and habits by a scale in which money and work will not be the highest values. This is "as sure as that the sun shines," for it is the sun that will bring it about.

270

CHANCE DAYS IN OREGON

271 272

CHANCE DAYS IN OREGON

THE best things in life seem always snatched on chances. The longer one lives and looks back, the more he realizes this, and the harder he finds it to "make option which of two," in the perpetually recurring cases when "there's not enough for this and that," and he must choose which he will do or take. Chancing right in a decision, and seeing clearly what a blunder any other decision would have been, only makes the next such decision harder, and contributes to increased vacillation of purpose and infirmity of will, until one comes to have serious doubts whether there be not a truer philosophy in the "toss up" test than in any other method. "Heads we go, tails we stay," will prove right as many times out of ten as the most painstaking pros and cons, weighing, consulting, and slow deciding.

It was not exactly by "heads and tails" that we won our glimpse of Oregon; but it came so nearly to the same thing that our recollections of the journey are still mingled with that sort of exultant sense of delight with which the human mind always regards a purely fortuitous possession.

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Three days and two nights on the Pacific Ocean is a round price to pay for a thing, even for Oregon, with the Columbia River thrown in. There is not so misnamed a piece of water on the globe as the Pacific Ocean, nor so unexplainable a delusion as the almost universal impression that it is smooth sailing there. It is British Channel and North Sea and off the Hebrides combined, --as many different twists and chops and swells as there are waves. People who have crossed the Atlantic again and again without so much as a qualm are desperately ill between San Francisco and Portland. There is but one comparison for the motion; it is as if one's stomach were being treated as double teeth are handled when country doctors are forced to officiate as dentists, and know no better way to get a four-pronged tooth out of its socket than to turn it round and round till it is torn loose.

Three days and two nights! I spent no inconsiderable portion of the time in speculations as to Monsieur Antoine Crozat's probable reasons for giving back to King Louis his magnificent grant of Pacific coast country. He kept it five years, I believe. In that time he probably voyaged up and down its shores thoroughly. Having been an adventurous trader in the Indies, he must have been well wonted to seas; and being worth forty millions of livres, he could afford to make himself as comfortable in the matter of a ship as was possible a century and a half ago. His grant was a princely domain, 274 263 an empire five times larger than France itself. What could he have been thinking of, to hand it back to King Louis like a worthless bauble of which he had grown tired? Nothing but the terrors of sea-sickness can explain it. If he could have foreseen the steam-engine, and have had a vision of it flying on iron roads across continents and mountains, how differently would he have conducted! The heirs of Monsieur Antoine, if any such there be to-day, must chafe when they read the terms of our Louisiana Purchase.

Three days and two nights--from Thursday morning till Saturday afternoon--between San Francisco and the mouth of the Columbia, and then we had to lie at Astoria the greater part of Sunday night before the tide would let us go on up the river. It was not waste time, however. Astoria is a place curious to behold. Seen from the water, it seems a tidy little white town nestled on the shore, and well topped off by wooded hills. Landing, one finds that it must be ranked as amphibious, being literally half on land and half on water. From Astoria proper--the old Astoria, which Mr. Astor founded, and Washington Irving described--up to the new town, or upper Astoria, is a mile and a half, two-thirds bridges and piers. Long wooden wharves, more streets than wharves, resting on hundreds of piles, are built out to deep water. They fairly fringe the shore; and the street nearest the water is little more than a succession of bridges 275 264 from wharf to wharf. Frequent bays and inlets make up, leaving unsightly muddy wastes when the tide goes out. To see family washing hung out on lines over these tidal flats, and the family infants drawing their go-carts in the mud below, was a droll sight. At least every other building on these strange wharf streets is a salmon cannery, and acres of the wharf surfaces were covered with salmon nets spread out to dry. The streets were crowded with wild-looking men, sailor-like, and yet not sailor like, all wearing india-rubber boots reaching far above the knee with queer wing-like flaps projecting all around at top. These were the fishers of salmon, two thousand of them, Russians, Finns, Germans, Italians, --"every kind on the earth," an old restaurant-keeper said, in speaking of them; "every kind on the earth, they pour in here, for four months, from May to September. They're a wild set; clear out with the salmon, 'n' don't mind any more 'n the fish do what they leave behind 'em."

All day long they kill time in the saloons. The nights they spend on the water, flinging and trolling and drawing in their nets, which often burst with the weight of the captured salmon. It is a strange life, and one sure to foster a man's worst traits rather than his best ones. The fishermen who have homes and families, and are loyal to them, industrious and thrifty, are the exception.

The site of Mr. Astor's original fort is now the terraced yard of a spruce new house on the corner 276 265 of one of the pleasantest streets in the old town. These streets are little more than narrow terraces rising one above the other on jutting and jagged levels of the river-bank. They command superb off-looks across and up and down the majestic river, which is here far more a bay than a river. The Astoria people must be strangely indifferent to these views; for the majority of the finest houses face away from the water, looking straight into the rough wooded hillside.

Uncouth and quaint vehicles are perpetually plying between the old and the new towns; they jolt along fast over the narrow wooden roads, and the foot-passengers, who have no other place to walk, are perpetually scrambling from under the horses' heels. It is a unique highway: pebbly beaches, marshes, and salt ponds, alder-grown cliffs, hemlock and spruce copses on its inland side; on the water-side, bustling wharves, canneries, fishermen's boarding-houses, great spaces filled in with bare piles waiting to be floored; at every turn shore and sea seem to change sides, and clumps of brakes, fresh-hewn stumps, maple and madrona trees, shift places with canneries and wharves; the sea swashes under the planks of the road at one minute, and the next is an eighth of a mile away, at the end of a close-built lane. Even in the thickest settled business part of the town, blocks of water alternate with blocks of brick and stone.

The statistics of the salmon-canning business 277 266 almost pass belief. In 1881 six hundred thousand cases of canned salmon were shipped from Astoria. We ourselves saw seventy-five hundred cases put on board one steamer. There were forty eight-pound cans in each case; it took five hours' steady work, of forty "long-shore men," to load them. These long-shore men are another shifting and turbulent element in the populations of the river towns. They work day and night, get big wages, go from place to place, and spend money recklessly; a sort of commercial Bohemian, difficult to handle and often dangerous. They sometimes elect to take fifty cents an hour and all the beer they can drink, rather than a dollar an hour and no beer. At the time we saw them, they were on beer wages. The foaming beer casks stood at short intervals along the wharf, --a pitcher, pail, and mug at each cask. The scene was a lively one: four cases loaded at a time on each truck, run swiftly to the wharf edge, and slid down the hold; trucks rattling, turning sharp corners; men laughing, wheeling to right and left of each other, tossing off mugs of beer, wiping their mouths with their hands, and flinging the drops in the air with jests, --one half forgave them for taking part wages in the beer, it made it so much merrier.

On Sunday morning we waked up to find ourselves at sea in the Columbia River. A good part of Oregon and Washington Territory seemed also to be at sea there. When a river of the size of the Columbia 278 267 gets thirty feet above low-water mark, towns and townships go to sea unexpectedly. All the way up the Columbia to the Willamette, and down the Willamette to Portland, we sailed in and on a freshet, and saw at once more and less of the country than could be seen at any other time. At the town of Kalama, facetiously announced as "the water terminus of the Northern Pacific Railroad," the hotel, the railroad station, and its warehouses were entirely surrounded by water, and we sailed, in seemingly deep water, directly over the wharf where landings were usually made. At other towns on the way we ran well up into the fields, and landed passengers or freight on stray sand-spits, or hillocks, from which they could get off again on the other side by small boats. We passed scores of deserted houses, their windows open, the water swashing over their doorsills; gardens with only tops of bushes in sight, one with red roses swaying back and forth, limp and helpless on the tide. It seemed strange that men would build houses and make farms in a place where they are each year liable to be driven out by such freshets. When I expressed this wonder, an Oregonian replied lightly, "Oh, the river always gives them plenty of time. They've all got boats, and they wait till the last minute always, hoping the water'll go down."--"But it must be unwholesome to the last degree to live on such overflowed lands. When the water recedes, they must get fevers."--"Oh, they get used to it. After they've 279 268 taken about a barrel of quinine, they're pretty well acclimated."

Other inhabitants of the country asserted roundly that no fevers followed these freshets; that the trade-winds swept away all malarial influences; that the water did no injury whatever to the farms, --on the contrary, made the crops better; and that these farmers along the river bottoms "couldn't be hired to live anywhere else in Oregon."

The higher shore lines were wooded almost without a break; only at long intervals an oasis of clearing, high up, an emerald spot of barley or wheat, and a tiny farm-house. These were said to be usually lumbermen's homes; it was warmer up there than in the bottom, and crops thrived. In the not far-off day when these kingdoms of forests are overthrown, and the Columbia runs unshaded to the sea, these hill shores will be one vast granary.

The city of Portland is on the Willamette River, fourteen miles south of the junction of that river with the Columbia. Seen from its water approach, Portland is a picturesque city, with a near surrounding of hills wooded with pines and firs, that make a superb sky-line setting to the town and to the five grand snow-peaks of which clear days give a sight. These dark forests and spear-top fringes are a more distinctive feature in the beauty of Portland's site than even its fine waters and islands. It is to be hoped that the Portland people will appreciate their value, and never let their near hills be shorn of trees. 280 269 Not one tree more should be cut. Already there are breaks in the forest horizons, which mar the picture greatly; and it would take but a few days of ruthless woodchoppers' work to rob the city forever of its backgrounds, turning them into unsightly barrens. The city is on both sides of the river, and is called East and West Portland. With the usual perversity in such cases, the higher ground and the sunny eastern frontage belong to the less popular part of the city, the west town having most of the business and all of the fine houses. Yet in times of freshet its lower streets are always under water; and the setting-up of back-water into drains, cellars, and empty lots is a yearly source of much illness. When we arrived, two of the principal hotels were surrounded by water; from one of them there was no going out or coming in except by planks laid on trestle-work in the piazzas, and the air in the lower part of the town was foul with bad smells from the stagnant water.

Portland is only thirty years old, and its population is not over twenty-five thousand; yet it is said to have more wealth per head than any other city in the United States except New Haven. Wheat and lumber and salmon have made it rich. Oregon wheat brings such prices in England that ships can afford to cross the ocean to get it; and last year one hundred and thirty-four vessels sailed out of Portland harbor, loaded solely with wheat or flour.

The city reminds one strongly of some of the rural 281 270 towns in New England. The houses are unpretentious, wooden, either white or of light colors, and uniformly surrounded by pleasant grounds, in which trees, shrubs, and flowers grow freely, without any attempt at formal or decorative culture. One of the most delightful things about the town is its surrounding of wild and wooded country. In an hour, driving up on the hills to the west, one finds himself in wildernesses of woods: spruce, maple, cedar, and pine; dogwood, wild syringa, honeysuckle, ferns, and brakes fitting in for undergrowth; and below all, white clover matting the ground. By the roadsides are Linnæ, red clover, yarrow, May-weed, and dandelion, looking to New England eyes strangely familiar and unfamiliar at once. Never in New England woods and roadsides do they have such a luxurious diet of water and rich soil, and such comfortable warm winters. The white clover especially has an air of spendthrifty indulgence about it which is delicious. It riots through the woods, even in their densest, darkest depths, making luxuriant pasturage where one would least look for it. On these wooded heights are scores of dairy farms, which have no clearings except of the space needful for the house and outbuildings. The cows, each with a bell at her neck, go roaming and browsing all day in the forests. Out of thickets scarcely penetrable to the eye come everywhere along the road the contented notes of these bells' slow tinkling at the cows' leisure. The milk, cream, and butter from 282 271 these dairy farms are of the excellent quality to be expected, and we wondered at not seeing "white clover butter" advertised as well as "white clover honey." Land in these wooded wilds brings from forty to eighty dollars an acre; cleared, it is admirable farm land. Here and there we saw orchards of cherry and apple trees, which were loaded with fruit; the cherry-trees so full that they showed red at a distance.

The alternation of these farms with long tracts of forest, where spruces and pines stand a hundred and fifty feet high, and myriads of wild things have grown in generations of tangle, gives to the country around Portland a charm and flavor peculiarly its own; even into the city itself extends something of the same charm of contrast and antithesis; meandering footpaths, or narrow plank sidewalks with grassy rims, running within stone's-throw of solid brick blocks and business thoroughfares. One of the most interesting places in the town is the Bureau of Immigration of the Northern Pacific Railroad. In the centre of the room stands a tall case, made of the native Oregon woods. It journeyed to the Paris and the Philadelphia Expositions, but nowhere can it have given eloquent mute answer to so many questions as it does in its present place. It now holds jars of all the grains raised in Oregon and Washington; also sheaves of superb stalks of the same grains, arranged in circles, --wheat six feet high, oats ten, red clover over six, and timothy grass 283 272 eight. To see Swedes, Norwegians, Germans, Irish, come in, stand wonderingly before this case, and then begin to ask their jargon of questions, was an experience which did more in an hour to make one realize what the present tide of immigration to the New Northwest really is than reading of statistics could do in a year. These immigrants are pouring in, it is estimated, at the rate of at least a hundred and fifty a day, --one hundred by way of San Francisco and Portland, twenty-five by the Puget Sound ports, and another twenty-five overland by wagons; no two with the same aim, no two alike in quality or capacity. To listen to their inquiries and their narratives, to give them advice and help, requires almost preternatural patience and sagacity. It might be doubted, perhaps, whether this requisite combination could be found in an American; certainly no one of any nationality could fill the office better than it is filled by the tireless Norwegian who occupies the post at present. It was touching to see the brightened faces of his countrymen, as their broken English was answered by him in the familiar words of their own tongue. He could tell well which parts of the new country would best suit the Hardanger men, and the men from Eide. It must have been hard for them to believe his statements, even when indorsed by the home speech. To the ordinary Scandinavian peasant, accustomed to measuring cultivable ground by hand-breadths, and making gardens in pockets in rocks, tales of hundreds of 284 273 unbroken miles of wheat country, where crops average from thirty-five to forty-five bushels an acre, must sound incredible; and spite of their faith in their countryman, they are no doubt surprised when their first harvest in the Willamette or Umpqua valley proves that his statements were under, rather than over, the truth.

The Columbia River steamers set off from Portland at dawn, or thereabouts. Wise travellers go on board the night before, and their first morning consciousness is a wonder at finding themselves afloat, --afloat on a sea; for it hardly seems like river voyaging when shores are miles apart, and, in many broad vistas, water is all that can be seen. These vistas, in times of high water, when the Columbia may be said to be fairly "seas over," are grand. They shine and flicker for miles, right and left, with green feathery fringes of tree-tops, and queer brown stippled points and ridges, which are house gables and roof-trees, not quite gone under. One almost forgets, in the interest of the spectacle, what misery it means to the owners of the gables and roof-trees.

At Washougal Landing, on the morning when we went up the river, all that was to be seen of the warehouse on the wharf at which we should have made landing was the narrow ridge-line of its roof; and this was at least a third of a mile out from shore. The boat stopped, and the passengers were rowed out in boats and canoes, steering around among tree-tops and houses as best they might.

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The true shore-line of the river we never once saw; but it cannot be so beautiful as was the freshet's shore of upper banks and terraces, --dark forests at top, shifting shades of blue in every rift between the hills, iridescent rainbow colors on the slopes, and gray clouds, white-edged, piled up in masses above them, all floating apace with us, and changing tone and tint oftener than we changed course.

As we approached the Cascade Mountains, the scenery grew grander with every mile. The river cuts through this range in a winding can˜on, whose sides for a space of four or five miles are from three to four thousand feet high. But the charm of this pass is not so much in the height and grandeur as in the beauty of its walls. They vary in color and angle, and light and shadow, each second, --perpendicular rock fronts, mossy brown; shelves of velvety greenness and ledges of glistening red or black stone thrown across; great basaltic columns fluted as by a chisel; jutting tables of rock carpeted with yellow and brown lichen; turrets standing out with firs growing on them; bosky points of cottonwood-trees; yellow and white blossoms and curtains of ferns, waving out, hanging over; and towering above all these, peaks and summits wrapped in fleecy clouds. Looking ahead, we could see sometimes only castellated mountain lines, meeting across the river, like walls; as we advanced they retreated, and opened with new vistas at each opening. Shining threads of water spun down in the highest places, 286 275 sometimes falling sheer to the river, sometimes sinking out of sight in forest depths midway down, like the famed fosses of the Norway fjords. Long skylines of pines and firs, which we knew to be from one hundred to three hundred feet tall, looked in the aerial perspective no more than a mossy border along the wall. A little girl, looking up at them, gave by one artless exclamation a true idea of this effect. "Oh," she cried, "they look just as if you could pick a little bunch of them." At intevals along the right-hand shore were to be seen the white-tented encampments of the Chinese laborers on the road which the Northern Pacific Railroad Company is building to link St. Paul with Puget Sound. A force of three thousand Chinamen and two thousand whites is at work on this river division, and the road is being pushed forward with great rapidity. The track looked in places as if it were not one inch out of the water, though it was twenty feet; and tunnels which were a hundred and thirty feet high looked only like oven mouths. It has been a hard road to build, costing in some parts sixty-five thousand dollars a mile. One spot was pointed out to us where twenty tons of powder had been put in, in seven drifts, and one hundred and forty cubic yards of rock and soil blown at one blast into the river. It is an odd thing that huge blasts like this make little noise, only a slight puff; whereas small blasts make the hills ring and echo with their racket.

Between the lower cascades and the upper cascades 287 276 is a portage of six miles, past fierce waters, in which a boat could scarcely live. Here we took cars; they were over-full, and we felt ourselves much aggrieved at being obliged to make the short journey standing on one of the crowded platforms. It proved to be only another instance of the good things caught on chances. Next me stood an old couple, the man's neck so burnt and wrinkled it looked like fiery red alligator's skin; his clothes, evidently his best, donned for a journey, were of a fashion so long gone by that they had a quaint dignity. The woman wore a checked calico sunbonnet, and a green merino gown of as quaint a fashion as her husband's coat. With them was a veritable Leather Stocking, --an old farmer, whose flannel shirt, tied loosely at the throat with a bit of twine, fell open, and showed a broad hairy breast of which a gladiator might have been proud.

The cars jolted heavily, making it hard to keep one's footing; and the old man came near being shaken off the step. Recovering himself, he said, laughing, to his friend, --

"Anyhow, it's easier'n a buckin' Cayuse horse."

"Yes," assented the other. "'T ain't much like '49, is it?"

"Were you here in '49?" I asked eagerly.

"'49!" he repeated scornfully. "I was here in '47. I was seven months comin' across from Iowa to Oregon City in an ox team; an' we're livin' on that same section we took up then; an' I reckon there 288 277 hain't nobody got a lien on to it yet. We've raised nine children, an' the youngest on 'em 's twenty-one. My woman's been sick for two or three years; this is the first time I've got her out. Thought we'd go down to Columbus, an' get a little pleasure, if we can. We used to come up to this portage in boats, an' then pack everything on horses an' ride across."

"We wore buckskin clo'es in those days," interrupted Leather Stocking, "and spurs with bells; need n't do more 'n jingle the bells, 'n' the horse'd start. I'd like to see them times back agen, too. I vow I'm put to 't now to know where to go. This civilyzation," with an indescribably sarcastic emphasis on the third syllable, "is too much for me. I don't want to live where I can't go out 'n' kill a deer before breakfast any mornin' I take a notion to."

"Were there many Indians here in those days?" I asked.

"Many Injuns?" he retorted; "why, 't was all Injuns. All this country 'long here was jest full on 'em."

"How did you find them?"

"Jest 's civil 's any people in the world; never had no trouble with 'em. Nobody never did have any thet treated 'em fair. I tell ye, it's jest with them 's 't is with cattle. Now there 'll be one man raise cattle, an' be real mean with 'em; an' they'll all hook, an' kick, an' break fences, an' run away. An' there 'll be another, an' his cattle 'll all be kind, an' come ter yer when you call 'em. I don't 289 278 never want to know anythin' more about a man than the way his stock acts. I hain't got a critter that won't come up by its name an' lick my hand. An' it's jest so with folks. Ef a man's mean to you, yer goin' to be mean to him, every time. The great thing with Injuns is, never to tell 'em a yarn. If yer deceive 'em once, they won't ever trust yer again, 's long's yer live, an' you can't trust them either. Oh, I know Injuns, I tell you. I've been among 'em here more 'n thirty year, an' I never had the first trouble yet. There 's been troubles, but I wa'n't in 'em. It's been the white people's fault every time."

"Did you ever know Chief Joseph?" I asked.

"What, old Jo! You bet I knew him. He's an A No. 1 Injun, he is. He's real honorable. Why, I got lost once, an' I came right on his camp before I knowed it, an' the Injuns they grabbed me; 't was night, 'n' I was kind o' creepin' along cautious, an' the first thing I knew there was an Injun had me on each side, an' they jest marched me up to Jo's tent, to know what they should do with me. I wa'n't a mite afraid; I jest looked him right square in the eye. That's another thing with Injuns; you've got to look 'em in the eye, or they won't trust ye. Well, Jo, he took up a torch, a pine knot he had burnin', and he held it close't up to my face, and looked me up an' down, an' down an' up; an' I never flinched; I jest looked him up an' down 's good 's he did me; 'n' then he set the knot down, 290 279 'n' told the men it was all right, --I was`tum tum;' that meant I was good heart; 'n' they gave me all I could eat, 'n' a guide to show me my way, next day, 'n' I could n't make Jo nor any of 'em take one cent. I had a kind o' comforter o' red yarn, I wore round my neck; an' at last I got Jo to take that, jest as a kind o' momento."

The old man was greatly indignant to hear that Chief Joseph was in Indian Territory. He had been out of the State at the time of the Nez Perce´ war, and had not heard of Joseph's fate.

"Well, that was a dirty mean trick!" he exclaimed, --"a dirty mean trick! I don't care who done it."

Then he told me of another Indian chief he had known well, --"Ercutch" by name. This chief was always a warm friend of the whites; again and again he had warned them of danger from hostile Indians. "Why, when he died, there wa'n't a white woman in all this country that did n't mourn 's if she 'd lost a friend; they felt safe 's long 's he was round. When he knew he was dyin', he jest bade all his friends good-by. Said he, `Good-by! I'm goin' to the Great Spirit!' an' then he named over each friend he had, Injuns an' whites, each one by name, and said good-by after each name."

It was a strange half-hour, rocking and jolting on this crowded car platform, the splendid tossing and foaming river with its rocks and islands on one hand, high cliffs and fir forests on the other; these three 291 280 weather-beaten, eager, aged faces by my side, with their shrewd old voices telling such reminiscences, and rising shrill above the din of the cars.

From the upper cascades to the Dalles, by boat again; a splendid forty miles' run, through the mountain-pass, its walls now gradually lowering, and, on the Washington Territory side of the river, terraces and slopes of cleared lands and occasional settlements. Great numbers of drift-logs passed us here, coming down apace, from the rush of the Dalles above. Every now and then one would get tangled in the bushes and roots on the shore, swing in, and lodge tight to await the next freshet.

The "log" of one of these driftwood voyages would be interesting; a tree trunk may be ten years getting down to the sea, or it may swirl down in a week. It is one of the businesses along the river to catch them, and pull them in to shore, and much money is made at it. One lucky fisher of logs, on the Snake River Fork, once drew ashore six hundred cords in a single year. Sometimes a whole boom gets loose from its moorings, and comes down stream, without breaking up. This is a godsend to anybody who can head it off and tow it in shore; for by the law of the river he is entitled to one-half the value of the logs.

At the Dalles is another short portage of twelve miles, past a portion of the river which, though less grand than its plunge through the Cascade Mountains, is far more unique and wonderful. The 292 281 waters here are stripped and shred into countless zigzagging torrents, boiling along through labyrinths of black lava rocks and slabs. There is nothing in all Nature so gloomy, so weird, as volcanic slag; and the piles, ridges, walls, palisades of it thrown up at this point look like the roof-trees, chimneys, turrets of a half-engulfed Pandemonium. Dark slaty and gray tints spread over the whole shore, also; it is all volcanic matter, oozed or boiled over, and hardened into rigid shapes of death and destruction. The place is terrible to see. Fitting in well with the desolateness of the region was a group of half-naked Indians crouching on the rocks, gaunt and wretched, fishing for salmon; the hollows in the rocks about them filled with the bright vermilion-colored salmon spawn, spread out to dry. The twilight was nearly over as we sped by, and the deepening darkness added momently to the gloom of the scene.

At Celilo, just above the Dalles, we took boat again for Umatilla, one hundred miles farther up the river.

Next morning we were still among lava beds: on the Washington Territory side, low, rolling shores, or slanting slopes with terraces, and tufty brown surfaces broken by ridges and points of the black slag; on the Oregon side, high brown cliffs mottled with red and yellow lichens, and great beaches and dunes of sand, which had blown into windrows and curving hillock lines as on the sea-shore. This sand is a terrible enemy for a railroad to fight. In a few 293 282 hours, sometimes, rods of the track are buried by it as deep as by snow in the fiercest winter storms.

The first picture I saw from my state-room windows, this morning, was an Indian standing on a narrow plank shelf that was let down by ropes over a perpendicular rock front, some fifty feet high. There he stood, as composed as if he were on terra firma , bending over towards the water, and flinging in his salmon net. On the rocks above him sat the women of his family, spreading the salmon to dry. We were within so short a distance of the banks that friendly smiles could be distinctly seen; and one of the younger squaws, laughing back at the lookers-on on deck, picked up a salmon, and waving it in her right hand, ran swiftly along towards an outjutting point. She was a gay creature, with scarlet fringed leggings, a pale green blanket, and on her head a twisted handkerchief of a fine old Du¨rer red. As she poised herself, and braced backwards to throw the salmon on deck, she was a superb figure against the sky; she did not throw straight, and the fish fell a few inches short of reaching the boat. As it struck the water she made a petulant little gesture of disappointment, like a child, threw up her hands, turned, and ran back to her work.

At Umatilla, being forced again to "make option which of two," we reluctantly turned back, leaving the beautiful Walla Walla region unvisited, for the sake of seeing Puget Sound. The Walla Walla region is said to be the finest stretch of wheat 294 283 country in the world. Lava slag, when decomposed, makes the richest of soil, --deep and seemingly of inexhaustible fertility. A failure of harvests is said never to have been known in that country; the average yield of wheat is thirty-five to forty bushels an acre, and oats have yielded a hundred bushels. Apples and peaches thrive, and are of a superior quality. The country is well watered, and has fine rolling plateaus from fifteen hundred to three thousand feet high, giving a climate neither too cold in winter nor too hot in summer, and of a bracing quality not found nearer the sea. Hearing all the unquestionable tributes to the beauty and value of this Walla Walla region, I could not but recall some of Chief Joseph's pleas that a small share of it should be left in the possession of those who once owned it all.

From our pilot, on the way down, I heard an Indian story, too touching to be forgotten, though too long to tell here except in briefest outline. As we were passing a little village, half under water, he exclaimed, looking earnestly at a small building to whose window-sills the water nearly reached: "Well, I declare, Lucy's been driven out of her house this time. I was wondering why I did n't see her handkerchief a-waving. She always waves to me when I go by." Then he told me Lucy's story.

She was a California Indian, probably of the Tulares, and migrated to Oregon with her family thirty years ago. She was then a young girl, and 295 284 said to be the handsomest squaw ever seen in Oregon. In those days white men in wildernesses thought it small shame, if any, to take Indian women to live with them as wives, and Lucy was much sought and wooed. But she seems to have had uncommon virtue or coldness, for she resisted all such approaches for a long time.

Finally, a man named Pomeroy appeared; and, as Lucy said afterward, as soon as she looked at him, she knew he was her "tum tum man," and she must go with him. He had a small sloop, and Lucy became its mate. They two alone ran it for several years up and down the river. He established a little trading-post, and Lucy always took charge of that when he went to buy goods. When gold was discovered at Ringgold Bar, Lucy went there, worked with a rocker like a man, and washed out hundreds of dollars' worth of gold, all which she gave to Pomeroy. With it he built a fine schooner and enlarged his business, the faithful Lucy working always at his side and bidding. At last, after eight or ten years, he grew weary of her and of the country, and made up his mind to go to California. But he had not the heart to tell Lucy he meant to leave her. The pilot who told me this story was at that time captain of a schooner on the river. Pomeroy came to him one day, and asked him to move Lucy and her effects down to Columbus. He said he had told her that she must go and live there with her relatives, while he went to California and looked 296 285 about, and then he would send for her. The poor creature, who had no idea of treachery, came on board cheerfully and willingly, and he set her off at Columbus. This was in the early spring. Week after week, month after month, whenever his schooner stopped there, Lucy was on the shore, asking if he had heard from Pomeroy. For a long time, he said, he could n't bear to tell her. At last he did; but she would not believe him. Winter came on. She had got a few boards together and built herself a sort of hut, near a house where lived an eccentric old bachelor, who finally took compassion on her, and to save her from freezing let her come into his shanty to sleep. He was a mysterious old man, a recluse, with a morbid aversion to women; and at the outset it was a great struggle for him to let even an Indian woman cross his threshold. But little by little Lucy won her way: first she washed the dishes; then she would timidly help at the cooking. Faithful, patient, unpresuming, at last she grew to be really the old man's housekeeper as well as servant. He lost his health, and became blind. Lucy took care of him till he died, and followed him to the grave, his only mourner, --the only human being in the country with whom he had any tie. He left her his little house and a few hundred dollars, --all he had; and there she is still, alone, making out to live by doing whatever work she can find in the neighborhood. Everybody respects her; she is known as "Lucy" up and down the river. "I did my best to hire her 297 286 to come and keep house for my wife, last year," said the pilot. "I'd rather have her for nurse or cook than any white woman in Oregon. But she would n't come. I don't know as she's done looking for Pomeroy to come back yet, and she's going to stay just where he left her. She never misses a time, waving to me, when she knows what boat I'm on; and there is n't much going on on the river she don't know."

It was dusk when the pilot finished telling Lucy's story. We were shooting along through wild passages of water called Hell Gate, just above the Dalles. In the dim light the basaltic columnar cliffs looked like grooved ebony. One of the pinnacles has a strange resemblance to the figure of an Indian. It is called the Chief, and the semblance is startling, --a colossal figure, with a plume-crowned head, turned as if gazing backward over the shoulder; the attitude stately, the drapery graceful, and the whole expression one of profound and dignified sorrow. It seemed a strangely fitting emphasis to the story of the faithful Indian woman.

It was near midnight when we passed the Dalles. Our train was late, and dashed on at its swiftest. Fitful light came from a wisp of a new moon and one star; they seemed tossing in a tumultuous sea of dark clouds. In this glimmering darkness the lava walls and ridges stood up, inky black; the foaming water looked like molten steel, the whole region more ghastly and terrible than before.

There is a village of three thousand inhabitants at 298 287 the Dalles. The houses are set among lava hillocks and ridges. The fields seemed bubbled with lava, their blackened surfaces stippled in with yellow and brown. High up above are wheat-fields in clearings, reaching to the sky-line of the hills. Great slopes of crumbling and disintegrating lava rock spread superb purple and slate colors between the greens of forests and wheat-fields. It is one of the memorable pictures on the Columbia.

To go both up and down a river is a good deal like spending a summer and a winter in a place, so great difference does it make when right hand and left shift sides, and everything is seen from a new stand-point.

The Columbia River scenery is taken at its best going up, especially the gradual crescendo of the Cascade Mountain region, which is far tamer entered from above. But we had a compensation in the clearer sky and lifted clouds, which gave us the more distant snow-peaks in all their glory; and our run down from the Dalles to Portland was the best day of our three on the river. Our steamer was steered by hydraulic pressure; and it was a wonderful thing to sit in the pilot-house and see the slight touch of a finger on the shining lever sway the great boat in a second. A baby's hand is strong enough to steer the largest steamboat by this instrument. It could turn the boat, the captain said, in a maelstrom, where four men together could not budge the rudder-wheel.

The history of the Columbia River navigation would make by itself an interesting chapter. It 299 288 dates back to 1792, when a Boston ship and a Boston captain first sailed up the river. A curious bit of history in regard to that ship is to be found in the archives of the old Spanish government in California. Whenever a royal decree was issued in Madrid in regard to the Indies or New Spain, a copy of it was sent to every viceroy in the Spanish Dominions; he communicated it to his next subordinate, who in turn sent it to all the governors, and so on, till the decree reached every corner of the king's provinces. In 1789 there was sent from Madrid, by ship to Mexico, and thence by courier to California, and by Fages, the California governor, to every port in California, the following order:--

"Whenever there may arrive at the port of San Francisco a ship named the `Columbia,' said to belong to General Washington of the American States, commanded by John Kendrick, which sailed from Boston in 1787, bound on a voyage of discovery to the Russian settlements on the northern coast of the peninsula, you will cause said vessel to be examined with caution and delicacy, using for this purpose a small boat which you have in your possession."

Two months after this order was promulgated in the Santa Barbara presidio, Captain Gray, of the ship "Washington," and Captain Kendrick of the ship "Columbia," changed ships in Wickmanish harbor. Captain Gray took the "Columbia" to China, and did not sail into San Francisco harbor at all, whereby he escaped being "examined with caution and 300 289 delicacy" by the small boat in possession of the San Francisco garrison. Not till the 11th of May, 1792, did he return and sail up the Columbia River, then called the Oregon. He renamed it, for his ship, "Columbia's River;" but the possessive was soon dropped.

When one looks at the crowded rows of steamboats at the Portland wharves now, it is hard to realize that it is only thirty-two years since the first one was launched there. Two were built and launched in one year, the "Columbia" and the "Lot Whitcomb." The "Lot Whitcomb" was launched on Christmas Day; there were three days' feasting and dancing, and people gathered from all parts of the Territory to celebrate the occasion.

It is also hard to realize, when standing on the Portland wharves, that it is less than fifty years since there were angry discussions in the United States Congress as to whether or not it were worth while to obtain Oregon as a possession, and in the Eastern States manuals were being freely distributed, bearing such titles as this: "A general circular to all persons of good character wishing to emigrate to the Oregon Territory." Even those statesmen who were most earnest in favor of the securing of Oregon did not perceive the true nature of its value. One of Benton's most enthusiastic predictions was that an "emporium of Asiatic commerce" would be situated at the mouth of the Columbia, and that "a stream of Asiatic trade would pour into the valley of the 301 290 Mississippi through the channel of Oregon." But the future of Oregon and Washington rests not on any transmission of the riches of other countries, however important an element in their prosperity that may ultimately become. Their true riches are their own and inalienable. They are to be among the great feeders of the earth. Gold and silver values are unsteady and capricious; intrigues can overthrow them; markets can be glutted, and mines fail; but bread the nations of the earth must have. The bread-yielder controls the situation always. Given a soil which can grow wheat year after year with no apparent fatigue or exhaustion, a climate where rains never fail and seed-time and harvest are uniformly certain, and conditions are created under which the future success and wealth of a country may be predicted just as surely as the movements of the planets in the heavens.

There are three great valleys in western Oregon, --the Willamette, the Umpqua, and the Rogue River. The Willamette is the largest, being sixty miles long by one hundred and fifty wide. The Umpqua and Rogue River together contain over a million of acres. These valleys are natural gardens; fertile to luxuriance, and watered by all the west-ward drainage of the great Cascade Range, the Andes of North America, a continuation of the Sierra Nevada. The Coast Range Mountains lie west of these valleys, breaking, but not shutting out, the influence of the sea air and fogs. This valley 302 291 region between these two ranges contains less than a third of the area of Washington and Oregon. The country east of the Cascade Mountains is no less fertile, but has a drier climate, colder winters, and hotter summers. Its elevation is from two to four thousand feet, --probably the very best elevations for health. A comparison of statistics of yearly death-rates cannot be made with absolute fairness between old and thick-settled and new and sparsely settled countries. Allowance must be made for the probably superior health and strength of the men and women who have had the youth and energy to go forward as pioneers. But, making all due allowance for these, there still remains difference enough to startle one between the death-rates in some of the Atlantic States and in these infant empires of the New Northwest. The yearly death-rate in Massachusetts is one out of fifty-seven; in Vermont one out of ninety-seven; in Oregon one out of one hundred and seventy-two; and in Washington Territory one out of two hundred and twenty-eight.

As we glided slowly to anchorage in Portland harbor, five dazzling snow-white peaks were in sight on the horizon, --Mount Hood, of peerless shape, strong as if it were a bulwark of the very heavens themselves, yet graceful and sharp-cut as Egypt's pyramids; St. Helen's, a little lower, yet looking higher, with the marvellous curves of its slender shining cone, bent on and seemingly into the sky, like an intaglio of ice cut in the blue; miles away, in 303 292 the farthest north and east horizons, Mounts Tacoma and Adams and Baker, all gleaming white, and all seeming to uphold the skies.

These eternal, unalterable snow-peaks will be as eternal and unalterable factors in the history of the country as in its beauty to the eye. Their value will not come under any head of things reckonable by census, statistics, or computation, but it will be none the less real for that: it will be an element in the nature and character of every man and woman born within sight of the radiant splendor; and it will be strange if it does not ultimately develop, in the empire of this New Northwest, a local patriotism and passionate loyalty to soil as strong and lasting as that which has made generations of Swiss mountaineers ready to brave death for a sight of their mountains.