California's Missions

By 1824, a line of 21 Spanish missions, established through the efforts of overland explorer Gaspar de Portola and Franciscan Padre Junipero Serra, wiggled up the Coast of California from San Diego to San Francisco.

The history of these missions is not a successful one, although there were plenty of saints, heroes, and scholars among the Spanish clergy. Too, the founding Franciscans were among the most enlightened of Catholic sects. For the most part, these are beautiful places to visit, and many of them house small museums and lush gardens.

The military detachments assigned to guard California's missions often behaved brutally and lecherously toward natives, but the padres meant well, their aim being to rescue these "heathens" from their Godless way of life and teach them how to live as "people of reason."

The Franciscan's egalitarian theology held that no creature, human or otherwise, is better than another in the eyes of God—but the Church was suffering from a Middle Ages hangover in those days, and it was still considered acceptable to use force in booting out the demons. In some missions, Indians were penned up and removed from their family units as the padres deemed fit. Those who ran off were often chased down, dragged back to the mission, and severely punished.

Still, this was more humane than rounding up native peoples, clapping them in chains, and auctioning them off to the highest bidder, as the European slave-trading nations (including Spain itself) allowed their merchants to do. At least the Franciscans regarded the natives they encountered as human beings.

In 1834, the missions were secularized by order of the newly independent Mexican government, a policy pursued by high-minded Spanish officials since 1813. The long-term plan throughout the mission era was to return mission property to the Indians after they had been molded into a devout and chaste class of dirt farmer.

It didn't work out that way, however, as all those overly-generous land grants to white settlers—along with the reluctance of most Indians to give up the freedom they'd known for thousands of years—kept most of the land in European and American hands. Indians who lived farther from the missions, in California's valley; mountain; and North Coast regions, had something of a reprieve until the gold rush began and farmers and settlers pushed them out.