and lamenting. It was with great difficulty that the soldiers could keep them from tearing Father Junipero's habit piecemeal 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 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 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 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 Portuguese, 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."
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 Carenova, 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 his 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.
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 José, 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, had grown herds past numbering; and to these had been added vast flocks of sheep and herds of horses.
