|
Ella M. Sexton - Stories of California
One of the early Missions was San Luis Obispo, where services are still held. It was specially noted for a
fine blue cloth woven by the Indians from the wool of the Mission flocks of sheep. The Indians there also
wove blankets, and cloth from cotton raised upon their own lands.
San Juan Bautista, or St. John the Baptist, north of Monterey, had a splendid chime of nine bells said to
have been brought from Peru and to have very rich, mellow tones. San Miguel had a bell hung up on a
platform in front of the church, and now at Santa Ysabel, sixty miles from San Diego, where the Mission
itself is only a heap of adobe ruins, two bells hang on a rude framework of logs. The Indian bell-ringer
rings them by a rope fastened to each clapper. The bells were cast in Spain and much silver jewellery and
household plate were melted with the bell-metal. Near them the Diegueno Indians worship in a rude
arbor of green boughs with their priest, Father Antonio, who has worked for thirty years among the tribe.
They live on a rancheria near by and are making adobe bricks, hoping soon to build a church like the old
Mission long since crumbled away.
The last of the Missions was built in 1823 at Sonoma, and proved very active in church work, some
fifteen hundred Indians having been there baptized.
Father Junipero Serra died at more than seventy years of age, at San Carlos. During all his life in
America he endured great hardships and suffering to bring the gospel to the heathen as he had dreamed
of doing in his boyish days. A monument to his memory has been erected at Monterey by Mrs. Stanford,
but the Missions he founded are his best and most lasting remembrances.
BEFORE THE GRINGOS CAME
This is the story Senora Sanchez told us children as we sat on the sunny, rose-covered porch of her old
adobe house at Monterey one summer afternoon. And as she talked of those early times she worked at
her fine linen "drawn-work" with bright, dark eyes that needed no glasses for all her eighty years and
snow-white hair.
"When I was a girl, California was a Mexican republic," said the Senora, "and Los Gringos, as we called
the Americans, came in ships from Boston. They brought us our shoes and dresses, our blankets and
groceries; all kinds of goods, indeed, to trade for hides and tallow, which was all our people had to sell in
those days. For no one raised anything but cattle then, and all summer long the cows cropped the rich
clover and wild oats till they were fat and ready to kill. In the fall the Indians and vaqueros, or cowboys
as you children call them, drove great herds of cattle to the Missions near the ocean where the Gringos
came with their ship-loads of fine things and waited for trading-days.
"For weeks every one worked hard, killing the cattle, stripping off their skins and hanging the green or
fresh hides over poles to dry in the sun. When dried hard and stiff as a board the skins were folded
hair-side in, and were then worth about two dollars apiece. The beef-suet, or fat, from these cattle was
put into large iron kettles and melted. While still hot it was dipped out with wooden dippers into rawhide
bags, each made from an animal's skin. When cold and hard these bags of tallow were sewed up with
leather strings, and thus they were taken to Boston.
"So much beef was on hand at such times that not even the hungry Indians could eat it all while it was
fresh. The nicest pieces were cut into long strips, dipped into a boiling salt brine full of hot red peppers
and hung up to dry where the sunshine soon turned the meat into carne seca, or dried beef. We put it
away in sacks, and very good it was all the year for stews, and to eat with the frijoles, or red beans, and
tortillas, which were corn-cakes.
|
