But not for very long. Throughout the late sixteenth and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Spanish disease and Spanish cruelty took a large but mostly uncalculated toll. Few detailed records of what happened during that time exist, but a wealth of research in other locales has shown the early decades following Western contact to be almost invariably the worst for native people, because that is when the fires of epidemic disease burn most freely. Whatever the population of California was before the Spanish came, however, and whatever happened during the first few centuries following Spanish entry into the region, by 1845 the Indian population of California had been slashed to 150,000 (down from many times that number prior to European contact) by swarming epidemics of influenza, diphtheria, measles, pneumonia, whooping cough, smallpox, malaria, typhoid, cholera, tuberculosis, dysentery, syphilis, and gonorrhea—along with everyday settler and explorer violence.136 As late as 1833 a malaria epidemic brought in by some Hudson’s Bay Company trappers killed 20,000 Indians by itself, wiping out entire parts of the great central valleys. “A decade later,” writes one historian, “there still remained macabre reminders of the malaria epidemic: collapsed houses filled with skulls and bones, the ground littered with skeletal remains.”137
Terrible as such deaths must have been, if the lives that preceded them were lived outside the Spanish missions that were founded in the eighteenth century, the victims might have counted themselves lucky. Two centuries earlier the Puritan minister John Robinson had complained to Plymouth’s William Bradford that although a group of massacred Indians no doubt “deserved” to be killed, “Oh, how happy a thing had it been, if you had converted some before you had killed any!”138 That was probably the only thing the New England Puritans and California’s Spanish Catholics would have agreed upon. So, using armed Spanish troops to capture Indians and herd them into the mission stockades, the Spanish padres did their best to convert the natives before they killed them.
And kill they did. First there were the Jesuit missions, founded early in the eighteenth century, and from which few vital statistics are available. Then the Franciscans took the Jesuits’ place. At the mission of Nuestra Señora de Loreto, reported the Franciscan chronicler Father Francisco Palóu, during the first three years of Franciscan rule 76 children and adults were baptized, while 131 were buried. At the mission of San José Cumundu during the same time period 94 were baptized, while 241 died. At the mission of Purisima de Cadegomó, meanwhile, 39 were baptized—120 died. At the mission of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe the figures were similar: 53 baptisms, 130 deaths. The same held true at others, from the mission of Santa Rosaliá de Mulegé, with 48 baptisms and 113 deaths, to the mission of San Ignacio, with 115 baptisms and 293 deaths—all within the same initial three-year period.139
For some missions, such as those of San José del Cabo and Santiago de las Coras, no baptism or death statistics were reported, because there were so few survivors (“nearly all are ill with syphilis,” Father Palóu wrote) that there was no reason to do any counting. Overall, however, during those three years alone, between a quarter and a third of the California Indians died who were under Franciscan control. We will never know how many died during the earlier decades when the Jesuits were in charge. However, “if it goes on at this rate,” lamented Father Palóu, “in a short time Old California will come to an end.”140
Old California, perhaps, but not the missions. Not if anything within the padres’ power could be done. And what was done was that they simply brought more natives in, under military force of arms. Although the number of Indians within the Franciscan missions increased steadily from the close of those first three disastrous years until the opening decade or so of the nineteenth century, this increase was entirely attributable to the masses of native people who were being captured and force-marched into the mission compounds. Once thus confined, the Indians’ annual death rate regularly exceeded the birth rate by more than two to one. This is an overall death-to-birth ratio that, in less than half a century, would completely exterminate a population of any size that was not being replenished by new conscripts. The death rate for children in the missions was even worse. Commonly, the child death rate in these institutions of mandatory conversion ranged from 140 to 170 per thousand—that is, three to four times the birth rate—and in some years it climbed to 220 and 265 and even 335 per thousand. Year in and year out, then, from one of every six to one of every three Indian children who were locked up in the missions perished.141
In fact, it may have been even worse than that. The figures above were generated from available resources in the late 1930s. Recently, an analysis has been conducted on data from more than 11,000 Chumash Indians who passed through the missions of Santa Barbara, La Purisima, and Santa Inés in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Perhaps the most complete data set and detailed study ever done on a single mission Indian group’s vital statistics, this analysis shows that 36 percent of those Chumash children who were not yet two years old when they entered the mission died in less than twelve months. Two-thirds died before reaching the age of five. Three of four died before attaining puberty. At the same time, adolescent and young adult female deaths exceeded those of males by almost two to one, while female fertility rates steadily spiraled downward. Similar patterns—slightly better in some categories, slightly worse in others—have been uncovered in another study of 14,000 mission Indians in eight different Franciscan missions.142
In short, the missions were furnaces of death that sustained their Indian population levels for as long as they did only by driving more and more natives into their confines to compensate for the huge numbers who were being killed once they got there. This was a pattern that held throughout California and on out across the southwest. Thus, for example, one survey of life and death in an early Arizona mission has turned up statistics showing that at one time an astonishing 93 percent of the children born within its walls died before reaching the age of ten—and yet the mission’s total population did not drastically decline.143
There were various ways in which the mission Indians died. The most common causes were the European-introduced diseases—which spread like wildfire in such cramped quarters—and malnutrition. The personal living space for Indians in the missions averaged about seven feet by two feet per person for unmarried captives, who were locked at night into sex-segregated common rooms that contained a single open pit for a toilet. It was perhaps a bit more space than was allotted a captive African in the hold of a slave ship sailing the Middle Passage. Married Indians and their children, on the other hand, were permitted to sleep together—in what Russian visitor V.M. Golovnin described in 1818 as “specially constructed ‘cattle-pens.’” He explained:
I cannot think of a better term for these dwellings that consist of a long row of structures not more than one sagene [seven feet] high and 1½—2 sagenes wide, without floor or ceiling, each divided into sections by partitions, also not longer than two sagenes, with a correspondingly small door and a tiny window in each—can one possibly call it anything but a barnyard for domestic cattle and fowl? Each of these small sections is occupied by an entire family; cleanliness and tidiness are out of the question: a thrifty peasant usually has a better-kept cattle-pen.144
Under such conditions Spanish-introduced diseases ran wild: measles, smallpox, typhoid, and influenza epidemics occurred and re-occurred, while syphilis and tuberculosis became, as Sherburne F. Cook once said, “totalitarian” diseases: virtually all the Indians were afflicted by them.145
As for malnutrition, despite agricultural crop yields on the Indian-tended mission plantations that Golovnin termed “extraordinary” and “unheard of in Europe,” along with large herds of cattle and the easily accessible bounty of sea food, the food given the Indians, according to him, was “a kind of gruel made from barley meal, boiled in water with maize, beans, and peas; occasionally they are given some beef, while some of the more diligent [Indians] catch fish for themselves.”146 On average,
according to Cook’s analyses of the data, the caloric intake of a field-laboring mission Indian was about 1400 calories per day, falling as low as 715 or 865 calories per day in such missions as San Antonio and San Miguel. To put this in context, the best estimate of the caloric intake of nineteenth-century African American slaves is in excess of 4000 calories per day, and almost 5400 calories per day for adult male field hands. This seems high by modern Western standards, but is not excessive in terms of the caloric expenditure required of agricultural laborers. As the author of the estimate puts it: “a diet with 4206 calories per slave per day, while an upper limit [is] neither excessive nor generous, but merely adequate to provide sufficient energy to enable one to work like a slave.” Of course, the mission Indians also worked like slaves in the padres’ agricultural fields, but they did so with far less than half the caloric intake, on average, commonly provided a black slave in Mississippi, Alabama, or Georgia.147
Even the military commanders at the missions acknowledged that the food provided the Indians was grossly insufficient, especially, said one, given “the arduous strain of the labors in which they are employed” labors, said another, which last “from morning to night” and labors, noted a third, which are added to the other “hardships to which they are subjected.”148 Caloric intake, of course, is but one part of the requirement for a sufficient diet. The other part is nutritional value. And the most thorough study of the composition of the mission Indians’ diets reveals them to have been seriously deficient in high-quality protein, and in Vitamins A and C, and riboflavin.149 The resulting severe malnutrition, of course, made the natives all the more susceptible to the bacterial and viral infections that festered in the filthy and cramped living conditions they were forced to endure—just as it made them more likely to behave lethargically, something that would bring more corporal punishment down upon them. Not surprisingly, osteological analyses of California mission Indian skeletal remains, compared with those of Indians who lived in the same regions prior to European contact, show the long bones of the mission Indians to be “significantly smaller than those of their prehistoric and protohistoric predecessors,” leading to the conclusion that such differences “reflect retarded growth, possibly attributable to the nutritional deficiency of the mission diet or the combined effects of poor nutrition and infectious disease.”150
When not working directly under the mission fathers’ charge, the captive natives were subject to forced labor through hiring-out arrangements the missions had with Spanish military encampments. The only compensation the natives received for this, as for all their heavy daily labors, was the usual inadequate allotment of food. As one French visitor commented in the early nineteenth century, after inspecting life in the missions, the relationship between the priest and his flock “would . . . be different only in name if a slaveholder kept them for labor and rented them out at will; he too would feed them.” But, we now know, he would have fed them better.151
In short, the Franciscans simultaneously starved and worked their would-be converts to death, while the diseases they and others had imported killed off thousands more. The similarity of this outcome to what had obtained in the slave labor camps of Central and South America should not be surprising, since California’s Spanish missions, established by Father Junípero Serra (aptly dubbed “the last conquistador” by one admiring biographer and currently a candidate for Catholic sainthood), were directly modeled on the genocidal encomienda system that had driven many millions of native peoples in Central and South America to early and agonizing deaths.152
Others died even more quickly, not only from disease, but from grotesque forms of punishment. To be certain that the Indians were spiritually prepared to die when their appointed and rapidly approaching time came, they were required to attend mass in chapels where, according to one mission visitor, they were guarded by men “with whips and goads to enforce order and silence” and were surrounded by “soldiers with fixed bayonets” who were on hand in case any unruliness broke out. These were the same soldiers, complained the officially celibate priests, who routinely raped young Indian women. If any neophytes (as the Spanish called Indians who had been baptized) were late for mass, they would have “a large leathern thong, at the end of a heavy whip-staff, applied to their naked backs.”153 More serious infractions brought more serious torture.
And if ever some natives dared attempt an escape from the padres’ efforts to lead them to salvation—as, according to the Franciscans’ own accounts, the Indians constantly did—there would be little mercy shown. From the time of the missions’ founding days, Junipero Serra traveled from pulpit to pulpit preaching fire and brimstone, scourging himself before his incarcerated flock, pounding his chest with heavy rocks until it was feared he would fall down dead, burning his breast with candles and live coals in imitation of San Juan Capistrano.154 After this sort of self-flagellating exertion, Father Serra had no patience for Indians who still preferred not to accept his holy demands of them. Thus, on at least one occasion when some of his Indian captives not only escaped, but stole some mission supplies to support them on their journey home, “his Lordship was so angered,” recalled Father Palóu, “that it was necessary for the fathers who were there to restrain him in order to prevent him from hanging some of them. . . . He shouted that such a race of people deserved to be put to the knife.”155
It was not necessary for starving and desperate Indians to steal food or supplies, however, to suffer the perverse punishments of the mission fathers. The padres also were concerned about the continuing catastrophic decline in the number of babies born to their neophyte charges. At some missions the priests decided the Indians intentionally were refraining from sex, as the natives of the Caribbean supposedly had done, in an effort to spare their would-be offspring the tortures of life as a slave. Some of the Indians may indeed have been purposely avoiding sex, although by themselves the starvation-level diets, along with the disease and enormous stress of the Indians’ mission existence, were more than sufficient to cause a collapse in the birth rate.156 In either case, here is a first-hand account of what happened at mission Santa Cruz when a holy and ascetic padre named Ramon Olbés came to the conclusion that one particular married couple was behaving with excessive sexual inhibition, thereby depriving him of another child to enslave and another soul to offer up to Christ:
He [Father Olbés] sent for the husband and he asked him why his wife hadn’t borne children. The Indian pointed to the sky (he didn’t know how to speak Spanish) to signify that only God knew the cause. They brought an interpreter. This [one] repeated the question of the father to the Indian, who answered that he should ask God. The Fr. asked through the interpreter if he slept with his wife, to which the Indian said yes. Then the father had them placed in a room together so that they would perform coitus in his presence. The Indian refused, but they forced him to show them his penis in order to affirm that he had it in good order. The father next brought the wife and placed her in the room. The husband he sent to the guardhouse with a pair of shackles. . . . Fr. Olbés asked her if her husband slept with her, and she answered that, yes. The Fr. repeated his question “why don’t you bear children?” “Who knows!” answered the Indian woman. He had her enter another room in order to examine her reproductive parts.
At this point the woman resisted the padre’s attempted forced inspection; for that impertinence she received fifty lashes, was “shackled, and locked in the nunnery.” He then gave her a wooden doll and ordered her to carry it with her, “like a recently born child,” wherever she went. Meanwhile, her husband remained in jail, only leaving once each day to attend mass—and during all the time he was outside the guardhouse he was required to undergo the public humiliation of wearing on his head “cattle horns affixed with leather.”157
From time to time some missions permitted certain of their captives to return home for brief visits, under armed guard. “This short time is the happiest period of their existence,” wrote one foreign observer,
“and I myself have seen them going home in crowds, with loud rejoicings.” He continues:
The sick, who can not undertake the journey, at least accompany their happy countrymen to the shore where they embark and sit there for days together mournfully gazing on the distant summits of the mountains which surround their homes; they often sit in this situation for several days, without taking any food, so much does the sight of their lost home affect these new Christians. Every time some of those who have the permission run away, and they would probably all do it, were they not deterred by their fears of the soldiers.158
There was, of course, good reason for the Indians to fear the consequences of running away and being caught. Since even the most minor offenses in the missions carried a punishment of fifteen lashes, while middling infractions, including fighting, “brought one hundred lashes and a set of shackles at the guard house,” those who were captured while trying to break free of mission captivity might count themselves lucky to be whipped 100 times and clapped in irons affixed to a heavy log. For as one traveler described the condition of some attempted escapees he had seen: “They were all bound with rawhide ropes and some were bleeding from wounds and some children were tied to their mothers.” He went on:
Some of the run-away men were tied on sticks and beaten with straps. One chief was taken out to the open field and a young calf which had just died was skinned and the chief was sewed into the skin while it was yet warm. He was kept tied to a stake all day, but he died soon and they kept his corpse tied up.159
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