Rawls, James. California History, Vol. 71, No. 3, Indians of California (Fall, 1992), pp. 342-361.
The California Mission as Symbol and Myth
European contact with the California Indians began within a half-century of the epoch- making voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1492. Portuguese navigator Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo sailed into San Diego Bay in 1542 and proceeded slowly northward-along the coast of Alta California. The people encountered by Cabrillo evoked expressions of curiosity and wonder. "They were dressed in skins," Cabrillo wrote of the Chumash he observed along the Santa Barbara Channel, "and wore their hair very long and tied up with long strings interwoven with the hair, there being attached to the strings many gewgaws of flint, bone, and wood. Thus was the first recorded encounter between Europeans and the native people of California.
Sustained contact with the California Indians began much later, with the advent of permanent Spanish settlement in the late eighteenth century. The primary instrument of colonization in California, as in scores of earlier frontiers of the Spanish empire, was the mission. The missions of California illustrate well the unique blend of church and crown, of secular and spiritual matters, so characteristic of the Spanish empire. The Spanish missionaries believed that effective Christianization could not be separated from the larger process of acculturation. Their aim was to bring about a rapid and thoroughgoing transformation of the native people. The Indians were to be Hispanicized at the missions not only in religion, but also in social organization, language, dress, work habits, and virtually every other aspect of their lives. The missions of California were reduccion or congregacion missions at which the Indians were "reduced" from their "free, undisciplined" state to become regulated and disciplined members of Spanish colonial society. The missionaries exercised an absolute authority over the converted Indians, or neophytes, in matters both spiritual and temporal.
In addition to transforming the way of life of the California Indians the missions also inadvertently contributed to their destruction. During the mission period, the native population of California declined dramatically. Much of the decline was caused by the introduction of new diseases for which the Indians lacked immunity. The missions themselves ended in the 1830s after California passed from Spanish to Mexican control. Through the process known as secularization, the missionaries were replaced by "secular" clergy, the missions were converted essentially to parish churches, and their control over the Indian population was removed. Many of the former mission Indians were taken over by a new elite of Hispanic landowners, the rancheros, and they continued to work without interruption for their new masters.
In the more than two centuries that have passed since the founding of the California missions, these colonial institutions of Spain have been the subject of a wide variety of interpretations. Although the Franciscan missionaries and their supporters at the time maintained that the missions protected the Indians from the rest of the colonials, visitors to California in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries often portrayed the missions as oppressive institutions in which the Indians were victims of mistreatment and exploitation. A century later, the image of the missions was transformed into an overwhelmingly positive or nostalgic one, in which the Indians were viewed as beneficiaries of a benign institution. By the early twentieth century, this positive image had become an important part of California's regional identity. This essay will examine both how and why this image has changed. To borrow a phrase from Henry Nash Smith, it is a study of the California mission as "symbol and myth."
First Views from the Outside
Beginning with the visit of Jean Francois Galaup de La Perouse in 1786, more than a score of prominent European travelers visited the missions and wrote about them in their journals, reports, and reminiscences. These writings constitute California's earliest literature; and--it is here that we find our first clear image of the missions and their impact on the indigenous people. While many of these early visitors recorded with appreciation acts of hospitality and generosity of individual padres, they often condemned the institution of the mission with powerful expressions of censure and portrayed the Indians as victims of a cruel system of exploitation.
The reports of La Perouse illustrate well this early, hostile view. La Perouse was the leader of a round-the-world voyage of discovery officially sponsored by the French government. In the published accounts of his-voyage, La Perouse likened the California mission Indians to slaves. At Mission San Carlos Borromeo, La Perouse commented, "everything reminded us of a habitation in Saint Domingo, or any other West Indian [slave] colony. The men and women are assembled by the sound of the bell, one of the religious conducts them to their work, to church, and to all other exercises. We mention it with pain, the resemblance [to a slave colony] is so perfect, that we saw men and women loaded with irons, others in the stocks; and at length the noise of the strokes of a whip struck our ears.''
What most disturbed La Perouse about the mission was its authoritarian structure, in which the missionaries possessed absolute temporal and spiritual power over the neophytes. La Perouse, imbued with the natural rights ideology of the Enlightenment and a decidedly anti-clerical bias, viewed the California missions as an institution that violated basic human rights. "I confess," wrote La P4rouse, "that, being more friendly to the 'rights of man' than to theology, I could have wished them to the principle of Christianity to have [added] a legislation, which by degrees, might, have made citizens of these men. whose state at this moment differs scarcely anything-from that of the negroes in slave colonies." La Perouse offered many specific criticisms of the missions. He condemned the missionaries for inflicting on the Indians corporal punishments for actions that in Europe were not considered criminal offenses; and for not allowing the neophytes to renounce their sacred vows and freely return to their native villages. Those who attempted to leave the mission, he noted, were forced to return by squads of soldiers and were then publicly flogged.
What is important to realize about La Perouse’s views of the missions is that they were typical of those Of many early visitors to California. Throughout the California travel literature, La Perouse’s criticisms were echoed and amplified. In this hostile view, the California missions appeared as a symbol of Spanish exploitation and the Indians as hapless victims of cruel mistreatment. Other examples of this hostile view are not difficult to find. Auguste Bernard Duhaut-Cilly, a captain in the French merchant marine, visited California in the 1820s and described the missions as an "atrocious system" of human slavery that was vainly disguised "under the appearance of humanity and of amelioration in man's lot," but nevertheless wag slavery. Duhaut-Cilly gave us an unforgettable portrait of Pomponio, an escaped Costanoan neophyte from Mission San Francisco de Asis. Pomponio escaped, was placed in irons, and then escaped again. Duhaut-Cilly portrayed this mission fugitive as a man of great courage and strength, desperately seeking to regain his freedom.
When all his watchers are plunged in sleep, he sharpens a knife, cuts off his heel and slips off one of his fetters; thus, without uttering the least sigh, he mutilates himself in a nervous and sensitive part. But imagine what strength of mind he needs to begin again this cruel operation; for he has yet gained only half of his freedom! He hesitates not; he takes off the other heel and flees, without fearing the acute pain which each step adds to his sufferings: it is by his bloody tracks that his escape is discovered the next day.
Pomponio eventually was recaptured and executed, Duhaut-Cilly noted, for having "done nothing but make use of the most natural right"---the right of liberty.
An English sea captain, Frederick Beechey, described the devastating impact of disease and ill-health on the neophyte population he witnessed during his visit to California in the 1820s. He and other English observers speculated that the ultimate result of the missions would not be the "civilization" of the coastal Indians, but rather their decimation. Not all accounts were as hostile as these, but generally the image of the missions in this early literature was of an oppressive, autocratic institution.
Why? How are we to account for this image? In part, the explanation is that the missions of California were indeed authoritarian institutions. Outside observers, bringing with them values shaped by the Enlightenment, judged the missions to be incompatible with their ideals of equality, liberty, and justice. The image also, however, was a clear reflection of the self-interest of the observers. We must keep in mind that these images were produced by the imperial rivals of Spain. Observers from France or England or Russia were often interested
in discrediting Hispanic accomplishments in the New World. Their hostile views of the missions served to show the failure, the inadequacies, the backwardness of Spanish efforts in California.
Such images were, in fact, latter-day manifestations of a long tradition of denigration of Spanish colonialism. Since at least the sixteenth century, rivals of Spain's claims in the New World had been picturing the Spaniards as especially cruel and inhumane in their treatment of Indians. This tradition---known as la leyenda negra or the "Black Legend"---was aimed at proving the Spaniards so cruel or so incompetent that they were unworthy to possess the lands they had claimed, and that they thus should be replaced by a more enlightened and enterprising people. The early European criticisms of the California missions can best be understood when placed in this larger context of the Black Legend. The expeditions initiated by La P6rouse in 1786 demonstrated the continuing international interest in California and the images of the "mission as an oppressive institution" and the "Indian as a victim of exploitation" would prove useful to anyone who wished to discredit the Spanish or Mexican presence in California.
American Perceptions
The first Anglo-Americans to reach California arrived around 1800; by 1846 there were perhaps as many as one thousand in the region. Initially they were occupied with hunting sea otter, trapping beaver, or gathering hides and tallow. Many of them followed in the tradition of their European predecessors, and described the missions in hostile terms.
The most widely read book on California, written by an American before the Gold Rush, was Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast (1840). When Dana visited California in the 1830s, the missions were already undergoing secularization and beginning the long process of decay. Dana did not romanticize their passing, nor did he criticize them as rigorously as La Perouse had done. But what Dana did say of the missions was generally hostile.
Dana believed that the missions had failed to accomplish much in the "civilizing" of the Indians. In the original 1840 edition of his book, he described the neophytes as "slaves" of the priests. At Mission San Diego, Dana was so distressed by the atmosphere there--"the stillness of death reigned," he wrote-- that he fled from the mission to the beach • at full gallop. He also described the injustice faced by the Indians of California, even outside of the missions. He interviewed a condemned Indian, about to be executed for a crime that would not have been a capital offense had it been committed by a Californio. Dana saw the institution of the mission through the eyes of an elite, Anglo-Protestant Yankee. In his view, the Hispanic people of California were unworthy to possess this land. The mission was a symbol for Dana of what was wrong with California under its Hispanic colonizers. It was an institution for the exploitation of the California Indians, revealing both the indolence and the cruelty of the Spanish-speaking Californians.
Dana's views were echoed by other early Anglo Americans in California. Thomas Jefferson Farnham visited the missions at Monterey and Santa Barbara in the 1830s. In his book Life and Adventures in California (1846), Farnham included some ghastly scenes of the missions. Like Dana, he was repelled by the evidence of death at the missions. The Santa Barbara mission cemetery had become so filled with dead Indians, he noted, that their bones had to be exhumed periodically to make way for new bodies. Farnham described what he saw in the mission courtyard: "Three or four cart-loads of skulls, ribs, spines, leg-bones, arm-bones, &c., lay in one corner. Beside them stood two hand-hearses with a small cross attached to each. About the walls hung the mould of death!”
Just as La Perouse had done a half-century earlier, Farnham described the missions as being like slave plantations. Not only were the Indians driven to work by the lash, he noted, but also "every Indian, male and female is obliged to attend the worship; and if they lag behind, a large leathern thong, at the end of a heavy whip-staff, is applied to their naked backs." Even in the church Farnham described a remarkable display of force:
In church, the males and females occupy different sides, with a broad aisle between them. In this aisle are stationed men with whips and goads to enforce order and silence, and keep them in a kneeling posture. By this arrangement, the untamed and vicious are generally made willing to comply with the forms of the service. In addition to these restraints, a guard of soldiers with fixed bayonets occupies one end of the church, who may suppress by their more powerful weapons any strong demonstrations against this comfortable mode of- worshipping God.