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
