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"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."

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 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 régime 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 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.

The most beautiful woman known in California a half-century ago[2] 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 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,[3] 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.

In the beginning there were no grants of land; 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 preceding 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 presidios; the military governors being authorized to draw upon the friars not only for supplies, but for contributions of money and for levies of laborers.[4]

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 in 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 Bias, 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 1868, 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 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 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 colonization plan, the Spanish Government had very early founded the pueblos of Los Angeles and San José. 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.

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; 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, brick-makers, 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."[5] 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.

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 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 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 16th 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 square yards of land. Everything else—lands, movable properties, property of all classes—was to be put into the hands of the administrator, to be held subject to the Federal Government. Out of these properties the administrators were to provide 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 co-actors 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."

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 missions 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, 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.

Under the new régime 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 majors-domo, 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 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, 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 the 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. 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[6] 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 owners," 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.

At last, in March, 1846, an act of the Departmental Assembly made the missions liable to the laws of bankruptcy, 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 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 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, 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.

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, 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 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.

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 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 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 the La Purissima Mission. It is in the Lompoc valley, two days' easy journey north of Santa Barbara. Nothing 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; 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 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, 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 régime; 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 St. 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 small-pox 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 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 following eloquent testimony to the friars and their work:—