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William Henry Hudson - The Famous Missions of California
Such, in briefest outline, is the story of the planting of the twenty-one missions of Alta California. This
story, as we have seen, brings us down to the year 1823. But by this time, as we follow the chronicles,
our attention has already begun to be diverted from the forces which still made for growth and success to
those which ere long were to co-operate for the complete undoing of the mission system and the ruin of
all its work.
Perhaps it was in the nature of things (if one may venture here to employ a phrase too often used out of
mere idleness or ignorance) that the undertaking which year by year had been carried forward with so
much energy and success, should after a while come to a standstill; and the commonest observation of
life will suffice to remind us that when progress ceases, retrogression is almost certain to set in. The
immense zeal and unflagging enthusiasm of Junipero Serra and his immediate followers could not be
transmitted by any rite or formula to the men upon whose shoulders their responsibilities came presently
to rest. Men they were, of course, of widely varying characters and capabilities - some, unfortunately,
altogether unworthy both morally and mentally, of their high calling; many, on the contrary, genuine
embodiments of the great principles of their order - humane, benevolent, faithful in the discharge of daily
duty, patient alike in labour and trial, and careful administrators of the practical affairs which lay within
their charge. But without injustice it may be said of them that for the most part they possessed little of the
tremendous personal force of their predecessors, and a generous endowment of such personal force was
as needful now as it ever had been.
Not unless we wish to emulate Southey's learned friend, who wrote whole volumes of hypothetical
history in the subjunctive mood, it is hardly necessary for present purposes to discuss the internal
changes which, had the missions been left to themselves, might in the long run have brought about their
decay. For as a matter of fact the missions were not left to themselves. The closing chapter of their
history, to which we have now to turn, is mainly concerned, not with their spiritual management, or with
their success or failure in the work they had been given to do, but with the general movement of political
events, and the upheavals which preceded the final conquest of California by the United States.
In considering the attitude of the civil authorities towards the mission system, and their dealings with it,
we must remember that the Spanish government had from the first anticipated the gradual transformation
of the missions into pueblos and parishes, and with this, the substitution of the regular clergy for the
Franciscan padres. This was part of the general plan of colonization, of which the mission settlements
were regarded as forming only the beginning. Their work was to bring the heathen into the fold of the
church, to subdue them to the conditions of civilization, to instruct them in the arts of peace, and thus to
prepare them for citizenship; and this done, it was purposed that they should be straightway removed
from the charge of the fathers and placed under civil jurisdiction. No decisive step towards the
accomplishment of this design was, however, taken for many years; and meanwhile, the fathers jealously
resisted every effort of the government to interfere with their prerogatives. At length, with little
comprehension of the nature of the materials out of which citizens were thus to be manufactured, and
with quite as little realization of the fact that the paternal methods of education adopted by the padres
were calculated, not to train their neophytes to self-government, but to keep them in a state of perpetual
tutelage, the Spanish Cortes decreed that all missions which had then been in existence ten years should
at once be turned over to bishops, and the Indians attached to them made subject to civil authority.
Though promulgated in 1813, this decree was not published in California till 1820, and even then was
practically a dead letter. Two years later, California became a province of the Mexican Empire, and in
due course the new government turned its attention to the missions, in 1833 ordering their complete
secularization. The atrocious mishandling by both Spain and Mexico of the funds by which they had
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