John J. OHagan - Lands Never Trodden: The Franciscans and the California Missions

Cover photo Sandra Bauser Photography and Digital Art
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2013 by John J. OHagan. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews and articles. All inquiries should be addressed to: Caxton Press, 312 Main Street, Caldwell, Idaho 83605.

ISBN 978-087004-574-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

OHagan, John J.

Lands never trodden : the Franciscans and the California missions / John J. OHagan.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-87004-563-9

1. Missions, Spanish--California--History. 2. Franciscans--Missions--California--History. 3. California--History--To 1846. 4. Indians of North America--Missions--California--History. 5. Spanish mission buildings--California--History. I. Title.

F864.O36 2013
979.401--dc23

2012051630

Lithographed and bound in the United States of America

CAXTON PRESS
Caldwell, Idaho
184121

T ABLE OF C ONTENTS

Mosqueda Portrait: Junipero Serra.
Reprinted with the permission of the Santa Barbara Mission Archive Library.

A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is dedicated to Rick Chivaroli. Your thoughtfulness and generosity were the genesis of this work. With our ThanksJohn and Letitia

Not that it is worth anybodys attention, but it may help to a knowledge of these lands that had never before been trodden by a Christian foot. from a letter written by Junipero Serra, July 3, 1769, as he began founding the California missions.

Chapter 1

I NTRODUCTION

I n 1769, a year before some nervous British soldiers fired on an unruly crowd on the edge of Boston Harbor, at the extreme other end of the American continent on the edge of San Diego Harbor, a group of Franciscan missionaries laid the beginnings of Mission San Diego de Alcala. Before the United States would declare its independence from Great Britain in 1776, five more such missions had been founded. When the Treaty of Paris formally concluded the Revolutionary War, and recognized the United States of America as a new world power, the number of missions on the still virtually unknown west coast of the continent had grown to nine. The missions continued to grow until in 1823, forty years before the beginning of our Civil War, they comprised a chain of twenty-one thriving enterprises, covering 600 miles from San Diego to Sonoma.

The missions as an institution didnt last a hundred years, but the missions as monuments to faith, dedication, and perseverance are with us today. Virtually all of the missionsor some part of each of themcontinue in existence today, more than two hundred years later. A thoughtful examination of these complexes, their history, and particularly of the lives invested in them can provide us with significant insight into a way of life that brought to our soil a religious zeal and dedication of singular purpose seen nowhere else in the United States. Further, in studying these institutions we will gain significant insight into some highly important events, largely ignored in the standard histories.

In Europe in the eighteenth-century, nameless serfs were perfecting towering churches, at the urging and with the financing of kings, cardinals and city-states. In that same century, in what was then Spains Alta California, nameless serfs were constructing towering churches, urged only by driven priests and using whatever material could be sweated from the land around them. Bernard Duhaut-Cilly, who was traveling along the California coast on a trading expedition in 1827, made a particularly astute observation about Mission Santa Barbara that could apply to all the missions. Duhaut-Cilly commented at length on the difficulties faced by Father Ripoll in building Santa Barbara, noting that the natives, previously unschooled in any sort of building techniques and taught by equally-unschooled priests, had erected what he unhesitatingly referred to as edifices. It was not just the finished buildings that drew his admiration. He commented on the difficulty of first wresting the raw materials from the land, then transporting them over prodigious distances, only then commencing to build. Unlike in Europe, there was no system to arrange for supplies and craftsmen to complete the project. First the timber had to be felled, the stone quarried, and both transported over roads that likely had not existed but had been built for the sole purpose of bringing the material to the site. Consciously or not, the process of building the missions had to be something along the line of, We are to build a mission. First we must find material, next we must get the material to the site, next we must build roads from there to here, next we must train the natives, next we must begin building and always we must constantly supervise and oversee. Despite this excruciating process, as Duhaut-Cilly noted... [Father Ripoll] took little more time to complete the building than would have been needed in Spain.

Duhaut-Cilly was describing Mission Santa Barbara and the work done by Padre Antonio Ripoll. All of his points, in describing the difficulties and challenges in building that mission, would be equally valid with regard to every one of the missions. In fact, the argument can be made that Father Ripoll, in completing the building Duhaut-Cilly so much admired, had a relatively easy task. Ripoll was actually working on the fourth church at Santa Barbara almost forty years after work began on the first church. And Father Ripoll had a much more structured support system in place than had Fathers Antonio Paterna and Cristobal Oramas, who founded Santa Barbara in 1786.

The work so admired by Duhaut-Cilly almost two hundred years ago still survives, marking a culture older than our history as a country. History is written by the victors and the California missions have had not just one but two victors to muddy the record. Neither the Mexican government after independence from Spain, nor the American government after the Mexican-American War, had any interest in enhancing the status nor recognizing the accomplishments of the culture they had just displaced.

Because that culture ended up being the losing culture in our history, and because it is located on the extreme edge of our westward expansion, it has never garnered the attention of popular historians, and has only minimally been considered by serious historians. A Religious History of the American People , written in 1974, devotes only two pages of more than eleven hundred to the California missions, while it gives an entire chapter to Roman Catholicism in the American Colonies. Even the four-volume History of the Catholic Church in the United States , while it does have a chapter entitled The Catholic Church in the Spanish Colonies, turns out to be discussing Florida, Carolina and Virginia, where ironically there is hardly any trace of those endeavors. It completely ignores California.

Every fourth grade student in California completes a study of the California missions, but throughout the rest of the country, they are virtually unknown. They remain unknown until, often by happenstance, on a visit to one of the Golden States more famous attractions, a starkly beautiful whitewashed building appears in a valley or even more incongruously on a major city street. Then there might be a quick visit, a tour and a brief history. The story of each of these buildings and the story of the entire endeavor is so much more than can be learned in a quick tour of an empty, silent church.