The order of the day reflects the piety of Fray Damián. Church bell at sunrise, when all attend Mass. Copious breakfast for forty-five minutes, then everyone to work on the building projects supervised by Fray Damián, who is an outstanding builder.
Lunch at noon, again well provided, and siesta for all. At two in the afternoon return to work, and at five the church bell again, whereupon the entire population reports to the church to recite the Doctrina Cristiana, which includes: Way of the Cross, Lord’s Prayer, Hail Mary, Apostle’s Creed, Confiteor, Precepts of the Church, Seven Sacraments, seasonal points of faith, and concluding with the Four Last Things. It is heartening to hear these Indians who only a few years ago followed pagan beliefs about rocks and rivers recite in unison the holy words that mean they are now approaching salvation.
At meals Fray Domingo served us with beef, mutton, cabrito and chickens. He also provided squash, potatoes, watermelons and lentils. From the carefully tended orchard he had all the fruits of the season, including peaches, pears and plums, with dried cherries. In obedience to the strict prohibition issued by our King in order to protect the industries of Spain, the mission grows no grapes or olives, although I believe each would prosper here were they allowed.
Then Father Espejo listed in detail some sixty valuable items owned by the mission, divided into five categories, and samples from each will indicate the material progress Fray Damián had made:
FOR THE WOMEN
1 loom
3 spinning wheels
4 scissors
17 needles
7 candle molds
FOR PROTECTION
3 harquebuses
5 pistols
20 bullet molds
6 swords
FOR THE MEN
5 plowshares
7 hoes
5 scythes
1 pair tongs
7 shovels
FOR THE BUILDERS
2 planes
2 iron wedges
5 sledgehammers
67 iron nails
FOR GOD
2 incense burners
3 small bells
5 sets of altar cloths
The report ended with two footnotes, the first displaying pride, the second confusion:
This mission owns several treasures, a statue of San Antonio de Padua, carved in Zacatecas, and a set of fourteen Stations of the Cross, painted on canvas in Spain. It also has two fine blue habits of linen-and-wool, plus three iron shovels, gifts from His Majesty the King.
As to the charge so often voiced that ‘the only Indians who ever convert are old people about to die,’ I confess that this is justified. Young braves refuse to give up their dancing and other favored abominations, but older warriors as they approach death listen attentively to Fray Damián’s preaching. Soldiers at the presidio sneer: ‘The friars catch only falling leaves,’ but I told them: ‘Three souls saved, even in extremis, are still three brands saved from the burning, and you should rejoice in their salvation,’ but the soldiers laughed, as young men will.
In his summary paragraphs he delivered his judgment as to this mission, saying in part:
Santa Teresa de Casafuerte, in its exemplary conduct and its fruitful relationship with its presidio, justifies in unmatched perfection the accepted Spanish theory of governing new provinces: to Christianize, to civilize, to utilize. I can foresee only continued blessings for Béxar, and as soon as I return to Zacatecas, I shall recommend to the Council of the Indies that civilian settlers from Spain be brought here to establish the city which shall complement this fine venture.
In a separate memorandum, which he discussed with neither of the Saldañas, Espejo proposed an idea that would bring great happiness to each of the brothers:
Béxar is now so firmly established, even though its population is minimal, that the time has come when more wives ought to be encouraged to join their husbands at the presidio. This will give the Indians and mestizos a taste of true Spanish civilization, which can only edify them. I therefore propose that Benita Liñán de Saldaña be allowed and encouraged to move with her three sons to Béxar immediately. I know this lady. She is a splendid example of Spanish womanhood at its best and will add honor to the presidio.
The proposal was quickly adopted by the military in Zacatecas, and one morning in December 1729 a soldier posting in from the Rio Grande shouted at the gates of the presidio: ‘We come bringing great treasure!’ and he caused so much excitement that Fray Damián was summoned from his mission labors and was present when a mule train came up to the presidio bearing Benita. When she stepped down, dust-covered, Damián gasped, for at twenty-five and the mother of three rambunctious sons, she was far more beautiful than before. Throwing her arms wide, as if to embrace the entire wilderness, she cried: ‘I am so glad to be here!’
Brushing aside the soldiers who tried to help with her children, she ran first to her husband, kissing him ardently and displaying their sons. Then she turned, saw Damián waiting beside the wall, and ran to him, throwing her arms about him and kissing him on the cheek: ‘Brother Damián, I am honored of God to be allowed to share in your work. These are your nephews.’
The next year was a period of some confusion for Fray Damián: he dined frequently at the presidio, once such an alien and unfriendly place, and there he saw how well Benita had raised her sons; he found many other excuses for visiting, and was invariably heartened by her continued liveliness, though he would never admit even to himself why he kept going there. In his quiet, austere way he was in love, and sometimes when he labored on some new mission structure he felt a deep hunger to see her again, to satisfy himself that she was there, and to appreciate the fact that she was a woman, totally different from himself and wonderful in her unique way. Seeing her, listening to her charming manner with her sons was enough, he thought, and in a subtle act of self-deception he began to convince himself that he visited only to help her with her eldest boy, Ramón, now seven: ‘That one, Benita, he’d make a fine priest.’
‘How foolish! He’s a rowdy little boy who hates to sit still while you say prayers. He has no sense of vocation and little likelihood of ever attaining one.’ Damián ignored this sensible assessment and continued visiting the boy, but with no constructive results.
When Alvaro said one day: ‘I do not like the idea of your Fray Domingo spending so much time at the ranch,’ Damián assured his brother that much good work was being done there with cattle and goats and sheep. But Alvaro’s apprehension focused on other matters: ‘It’s the Apache. They keep moving closer, and sooner or later I fear they’ll try to attack the ranch.’ Again Damián protested: ‘Domingo has the touch of God. He saves souls, and given time, he’ll bring peace even to the Apache.’
Alvaro grew quite serious: ‘You don’t seem to understand. With three walled missions here at Béxar, with this stout presidio, with the armed huts in the village, I’m still afraid the Apache will attack one night. Imagine what they might do at an unprotected ranch.’
‘God ordered us to establish that ranch,’ Damián said. ‘He will protect it.’
‘I hope so, because I won’t be able to.’
Some days later, when Domingo had returned to the mission, Damián accompanied him to the presidio, where the three leaders consulted, the fat little friar trying to convince Captain Alvaro that life at the ranch was safe: ‘Each week the Apache understand a little better what Christianity means, and the salvation it will bring them.’
‘Are they living at the ranch? Real converts, I mean?’
‘No, but they do come in now and then, and I talk with them.’
Alvaro stood up and saluted: ‘You’re a brave man, Domingo. Much braver than I, and may God protect you.’
‘I dance with them. I sing with them. I pray with them. And that’s the pathway to salvation.’
Faithful to his promise, Father Espejo did forward his urgent appeal to the king, begging him to send civilian settlers to Béxar, but before any response was pos
sible, the growing town was tripled in size by an extraordinary event. In early 1731 three faltering missions wasting away in the north were transferred to San Antonio de Béxar, where they joined the three already in operation. Of course, the buildings themselves were not transported; they were so forlorn and storm-shattered, they could not have been moved, but the six friars and the best of their Indian helpers made long treks through Tejas, expressing robust satisfaction when they saw the vastly improved site they were to occupy.
How beautiful their names are, Fray Damián thought, as he helped the three new missions select their locations: Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción, San Juan Capistrano, San Francisco de la Espada. Like shining beads on a rosary.
When they were in place—the first two on the eastern bank of the river, like the earliest mission, San Antonio de Valero; the third on the western bank, like Santa Teresa and San José—Damián warned the new friars: ‘Your success will depend on two things. Prayers to help you do better at converting Indians than we’ve done. And securing an assured water supply for the fields that will feed you and your Indians.’
The incoming friars encouraged Fray Damián to tell them more about bringing water onto their land, and they were so persistent in seeking his advice that he ended by laying out the three additional ditches which would in future years account for much of Béxar’s growth. Having shown the newcomers how to survey so as to avoid costly aqueducts unless they were inescapable, he continued to counsel the friars until work actually started, then found himself once more with a shovel, demonstrating how the digging should be done.
Fray Damián was forty-five years old when the new missions started functioning, rather tired and increasingly emaciated in appearance, but he was so eager to help these servants of God get started correctly that he labored on their ditches as if he were a member of their missions, and when at last the precious water began to flow, he felt as if he had helped write a small addition to the Acts of the Apostles.
There was at San Juan Capistrano, the mission which honored a saintly man who had worked among the Bulgarians in much the way that Damián worked with the Indians, a young mestizo friar named Eusebio who, because of his extreme sanctity, had been allowed to take major orders, and he was so awed by this privilege that he honored with extra seriousness each precept of the Franciscans. Particularly, he wore about his waist the long heavily knotted cord that served a double purpose: it was a belt holding the blue habit close to the body, but also a flagellum, a scourge to be applied whenever one felt he was indulging in vainglory. Sometimes when Damián paused in his work, he would see Eusebio walking under the trees, beating himself with his knots and crying ‘Mea culpa, mea culpa.’
One morning as Damián dug in the ditch at one of the new missions he noticed Eusebio sitting on a log, striking himself. ‘Really, you’re not required to punish yourself that way.’
‘I’m vain,’ the young friar mumbled. ‘Far too proud of the high position to which God has promoted me.’ And he struck himself again.
‘Stop it! If God did the promoting …’
‘Are you never vainglorious?’
‘I have little to be vain about. At this mission Fray Domingo saves the souls. I dig the ditches.’
‘But is your mind never troubled?’
‘On the night I was assigned to Bèxar, I cried: “I have sin upon me. I’m unworthy to be a shepherd.” ’
‘What changed your mind?’
‘Work.’
‘But the great battles of faith?’
This last word seemed to animate Damián, for he put down his shovel and climbed from the irrigation ditch to take his place beside the young friar. ‘I take great solace from the Epistle of James,’ he said, quoting haphazardly as his memory allowed from the startling second chapter which gave Protestant rigorists so much trouble:
‘What does it profit if a man say he has faith, but has not works?
Can faith save him?
‘Faith, if it has not works, is dead, being alone.
‘You see then that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only.
‘For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also.’
The young man stared at him, but Damián merely kicked at the earth as he said: ‘I know that I am lesser than Domingo, who does the work of God, but I find comfort in doing the work of man. Domingo builds castles in heaven, I build adobe huts here on earth. And I do believe that God sometimes wants both.’
‘You never lash yourself?’
‘In the morning I’m too hopeful that on this day I shall be permitted to accomplish something good. At night I’m too conscious of another failure.’
‘Is Domingo really a holy man?’
‘He’s a good man, and sometimes that’s better.’
‘His goodness, what does it consist of?’
‘He brings happiness in his sack … wherever he goes.’
‘Was he not rebuked for lewd dancing?’
Damián ignored this painful charge, shifting the emphasis: ‘From our ranch he attempts to bring peace to the Apache …’
‘I’d be terrified to move anywhere near them.’
‘Have you converted any Indians, Eusebio?’
‘One. A very old man about to die. He sent his wife running for me, and when I reached him he said with a smile: “Now!” and five minutes later he was dead, still smiling.’
‘With your prayers, Eusebio, you saved one man. With his songs and his courage Domingo may save an entire tribe, thousands of Apache living at last in peace … a glory to the goodness of God.’
‘I would be afraid to try,’ Eusebio said, rising and whipping himself again, while Fray Damián climbed back into the ditch, determined to help bring water to Misión San Juan Capistrano.
Hernando Cortés had completed his conquest of the Valley of Mexico in 1521, which meant that by 1730 the Spaniards had controlled the country for two hundred and nine years, and while it is true that they had constructed on Indian foundations a chain of glowing cities like Puebla, Oaxaca, Guanajuato, Zacatecas and the charming settlement at Saltillo, they had not accomplished much in remote areas like Tejas. In 1730, Béxar, the leading town, contained a population of some two hundred, Spaniards and Mexicans, only fourteen of which were civilians not associated with either the military or the friars at the missions.
But now the letter which Father Espejo had sent to Spain requesting that true-born Spanish settlers be dispatched to Tejas to build a civilian community reached the king, who had for some years been contemplating just such a solution to his problems in northern Mexico:
In my opinion we can never secure a frontier province like Tejas until we populate it with trusted men and women of pure Spanish blood, preferably those born in Spain or the Canaries. I advocate sending over a large number of farmers direct from Spain or such persons already in Cuba.
But even though he was an absolute monarch with exceptional powers, he had been unable to move his conservative bureaucracy from their cautious ways, so that the intervening years had seen nothing accomplished in the populating of Tejas. Now, with this new proposal before him, he confronted his ministers and said: ‘The time has come. How about those recalcitrants in the Canaries?’ And thus he initiated an intricate series of movements which would eventually bring to Tejas its earliest formal colony of civilian settlers.
The Canary Islands lay in the Atlantic Ocean, far removed from Spain and opposite the coastline of Morocco. The islands had been populated centuries earlier by a dark-skinned people from the mainland of Africa, but in time they were conquered by Spain and brought into the bosom of Spanish religion and culture. They were Spaniards, but of a different cast.
The Canaries consisted of seven major islands, none large, and of these, the poorest in material goods but the most stubborn in resisting authority was Lanzarote, the one nearest Africa. By a curious chance it rested on approximately the same parallel of latitude as Béxar (29°/30′), so tha
t in making the move to Tejas, these Canary Islanders would be leaping, as it were, some five thousand eight hundred miles due west to a somewhat comparable climate. The king, in suggesting that the Tejas settlers be drawn from the Canaries, had Lanzarote specifically in mind, for he had recently received a confidential report regarding these unfortunate Islanders:
I know the people of Lanzarote occupy an island with miserably poor soil, but they have never shown the slightest interest in farming or even in properly tending their scrawny sheep and goats. While we all know that the people of the Canaries are generally illiterate, those of Lanzarote are by far the most ignorant. And although our government gives them royal aid, they consistently eat more than they produce. Never have they contributed in any way to the social or economic advancement of our Kingdom and I see no hope for improvement in the future. I recommend that the Crown transplant a number of Lanzarote families to Tejas, where under changed conditions they might under pressure learn to become useful citizens. At least we should give my recommendation a trial.
To this proposal the king gave hearty approval, and steps were taken to deposit a group of Lanzarote families at the doorstep of the Misión Santa Teresa in Béxar.
For the king’s command to take effect, his officials had to convince the political leader of Lanzarote that the idea was prudent, and now they were thrown up against one of the wiliest, most contentious, arrogant, conniving and headstrong men of that time.
He was Juan Leal Goras, and according to traditional Spanish custom, he should have been called Leal, his father’s name, but he stubbornly insisted that his name was Goras, and so he was known. Now in his fifties, he had five children and one eye, having lost the other in an argument with a mule. Obstinately, he refused to wear a patch over the missing eye, and with moisture trickling down his cheek, pointed the gaping hole offensively at anyone with whom he spoke. He was illiterate, a deficiency which did not prevent him from becoming the most litigious man in the Canaries; he initiated lawsuits against everyone—priest, king’s official, neighbor with a goat, the sea captain of a little ship plying between the islands—and even when he won, he enjoyed prolonging the hearings in hopes of gaining a mite more advantage.
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