Eternity Street

by John Mack Faragher

  DESPITE THE FOCUS OF ANGELENOS on the increasing incidence of murder, lethal violence had long been part of their experience. It originated in the turmoil of colonial conquest. Fearful of encroachments by the British or Russians, Spaniards invaded California with plans to transform the region into a buffer colony to protect the silver mines of northern Mexico. Lacking the large, mobile settler populations of the British colonies on the Atlantic coast, their strategy was to transform indigenous Indian peoples into a colonial workforce. The natives of California, Spanish monarch Carlos III decreed in 1770, should be “taught Christianity and reduced to obedience to my Royal officials.” Missionaries of the Franciscan order, supported by soldiers of the frontier army, were to concentrate the gentiles—the Spanish term for unconverted Indians—at mission compounds, where they would be converted to the Catholic faith and taught to labor in the fields, transforming them into what one early governor of California described as “useful vassals for our religion and state.”

  The Spaniards assured themselves that the conquest and incorporation of native peoples into the empire was righteous and just because it provided them with temporal civilization and heavenly salvation. In the words of one missionary: “Shall we think that God created these men merely to condemn them to Inferno, after passing in this world a life so miserable as that which they live?” The theory was that once the Indians had been Christianized and Hispanicized, they would be restored to their original position as the lawful proprietors of the soil, with all the privileges and responsibilities of other subjects of the Spanish crown. To the natives, who expressed no discontent with the existing state of their world, the justice of the conquest was not so clear. The promised return of their lands in the distant future offered slight consolation. Yet it was a pledge they would remember. The manner in which Spanish authorities operated the missions, as well as the manner in which Mexican authorities would decommission them, exposed the promise for the lie it was.

  In 1771 Franciscan missionaries founded Mission San Gabriel Archángel, the fourth of what would become a string of twenty-one California missions stretching from San Diego to Sonoma. Over the subsequent half century the mission fathers at San Gabriel baptized some twenty-five thousand converts. The Gabrieleños, as the missionaries called the neófitos of San Gabriel, not only produced their own sustenance but provided abundant material support for the entire colonial enterprise in California. By 1821, the year Mexico won its independence from Spain after a decade of violent struggle, the neófitos at San Gabriel tended large herds of cattle and horses, worked extensive fields of wheat, corn, and beans, as well as vineyards and orchards, and labored in workshops producing leather, pottery, bricks, candles, soap, and other domestic goods. Under the direction of Father José María de Zalvidea and his mayordomo Claudio López—uncle of José Domingo Féliz—Mission San Gabriel won a well-deserved reputation as the very model of Indian productivity.

  But that achievement came at the cost of significant violence, reproduced over several generations. The local inhabitants had permitted the missionaries to establish their first outpost at the narrows of Río San Gabriel, but soon they fell victim to the violence of frontier soldiers. According to Junípero Serra, father-president of the California missions, “the soldiers, clever as they are at lassoing cows and mules, would catch an Indian woman with their lassos to become prey to their unbridled lust.” The soldiers thought of native women as the spoils of conquest, and they “shot down with bullets” any native man who dared to intervene. The soldiers were incorrigible, Serra complained. “Even the young boys who came to the mission were not safe from their baseness.” The terror at the narrows did not abate until 1775, when a powerful winter storm turned the river into a torrent, destroying the mission compound and forcing the Franciscans to relocate to higher ground, several miles northwest. The Indians who resided at el misión vieja, the old mission site, as the area became known, celebrated the move as a liberation. They remained implacable foes of the padres.

  FOR THE NATIVE PEOPLES of southern California, who spoke half a dozen languages and dialects and lived in hundreds of autonomous rancherías, organizing a unified resistance to the Spanish invasion proved impossible. “They had little basis for recognizing or understanding the colonial structure which eventually engulfed them,” one historian concludes. In exchange for food, clothing, and other goods, Indians went to work for the missionaries, constructing buildings, digging irrigation ditches, and planting crops. Initially few showed any interest in conversion and baptism, but over time many became devout Catholics. Their theological understanding may have been deficient, but no more so than that of ordinary parishioners elsewhere in Christendom.

  The native people of southern California were also pushed to the mission by an ecological crisis set in motion by colonization. Over millennia the Indians had used fire to keep down the growth of trees and encourage the abundance of grasses on the hillsides and plains, creating a landscape suited to their gathering economy, which utilized grasses, tubers, nuts, and small game. But that environment turned out to be perfect for the livestock economy of the Spaniards. Rapidly multiplying herds of cattle voraciously consumed and trampled native plants, crippling the indigenous economy in a very few years. By itself this would have been a disaster, but accompanied by the introduction of previously unknown diseases—waterborne bacterial and viral infections like typhoid and hepatitis, as well as sexually transmitted diseases such as gonorrhea and syphilis—it amounted to a catastrophe. By the late 1770s irrigation agriculture was producing abundant crops at Mission San Gabriel, and the availability of food was the single greatest inducement for Indians who, in the words of one Franciscan, were “very poor on account of the scarcity of wild seeds and game.” Desperately hungry Indians, in the candid words of another missionary, were “usually caught by the mouth.” As for disease, there was simply nothing to be done about it. Sickness and death cast an everlasting pall over the missions.

  There was sporadic resistance. A rebellion at Mission San Diego in 1775—provoked by the abuse of native women—cost the lives of three Spaniards, including a priest. Ten years later the residents of several rancherías near Mission San Gabriel organized another uprising, planning to enter the mission at night, overwhelm the guard, and murder the mission fathers as they slept. But the rebels were betrayed by one of their own. The largest revolt took place among the Chumash people of the Santa Barbara vicinity in 1824. Buildings were sacked and hundreds of neófitos fled to the interior before Mexican soldiers succeeded in crushing them.

  Conversion, the Franciscans insisted, was voluntary. Yet once natives agreed to baptism they lost their individual independence. At San Gabriel neófitos were required to live in cramped dormitories, with unmarried women segregated in a separate, locked facility to protect their chastity. They were required to wear a common costume, shirts of drab woolen or cotton cloth that hung below their thighs. They were obligated to schedule their lives by the tolling of mission bells that summoned them to the fields, to their meals, their prayers, and their nightly curfew. Mission life required a radical break with traditional ways, and it comes as no surprise that many Indians suffered buyers’ remorse and attempted to escape. Fugitivism decimated the ranks at Mission San Gabriel. The most determined runaways joined resisting bands in the mountains or deserts. The Franciscans treated fugitivism as a serious problem, for not only did it deprive them of converts and workers, but it encouraged others to do likewise. So the missionaries instructed the soldiers to bring the runaways back by any means necessary. Neófitos hauled back to the mission were subjected to severe punishment.

  Franciscan punishment included short rations, solitary confinement, and public humiliation, but the most common penance was flogging. The lash was the universal symbol of discipline in Hispanic culture. Missionaries beat Indians, just as masters beat servants, husbands beat wives, and parents beat children. Neófitos were whipped not only for running away but for shirking work, missing chapel,
or violating the European sexual mores so dear to the celibate Franciscans. Father Zalvidea of Mission San Gabriel, a dedicated pastor and brilliant manager, believed deeply in the value of corporal punishment. A ranchero described Zalvidea as “a man of talent,” with a mind “as ambitious as it was powerful, and as cruel as it was ambitious.” Not only did he punish the Indians severely, “but he was, in his chastisements, most cruel.” He “must assuredly have considered whipping as meat and drink to them, for they had it morning, noon and night.” Zalvidea saw evil lurking everywhere, including his own soul. “He struggled constantly with the devil,” one neófito testified, and in an attempt to overcome his wicked impulses “constantly flogged himself, wore haircloth, drove nails into his feet, and, in short, tormented himself in a manner most cruel.”

  In the Spanish rhetoric of empire, the Indians of California were “reduced to obedience.” The program succeeded all too literally. Historians estimate that when Spanish colonization began in the 1770s coastal California was home to some 60,000 native people. Over the subsequent half century that number fell by nearly two-thirds. At Mission San Gabriel the death rate outpaced the birthrate by two to one, meaning that from the beginning the survival of the mission community depended on the recruitment of new converts. Eventually the supply of unconverted Indians ran short. The number of neófitos at San Gabriel peaked at 1,701 in 1817 and fell precipitously thereafter. Even the Franciscans had to acknowledge the pathos of their project. “The Indian population is declining,” the father-president of the missions wrote in 1820. “They live well free, but as soon as we reduce them to a Christian and community life they decline in health. They fatten, sicken, and die.”

  THE PUEBLO OF LOS ANGELES arose in the shadow of the mission at San Gabriel. It began as a project of the Spanish military, skeptical of the ability of the missions to supply the soldiers garrisoned at California’s four presidios. The advantages of the site where the pueblo was planted were first noted by Franciscan missionary Juan Crespi, a diarist with the Gaspar de Portolá expedition of 1769. “We entered a very spacious valley, well grown with cottonwoods and alders,” he wrote, “among which ran a beautiful river from the north-northwest, and then, doubling the point of a steep hill, went on afterwards to the south.” The river he christened Nuestra Señora de los Angeles de Porciúncula, in honor of the Italian birthplace of the Franciscan order. Even during the dry summer, when Crespi first saw it, the river ran high as it passed through the notch in the hills. That would be a good location for a dam diverting water for irrigation, he reasoned. Continuing southward, the river fanned out across the floodplain, depositing rich sediment that invited cultivation. “The soil is black and loamy, capable of producing every kind of grain and fruit which may be planted,” Crespi wrote. The site, he concluded, had “all the requisites for a large settlement.”

  Indeed, a village called Yang-na, with several hundred residents, was already located there. From the east side of the river, Crespi saw several dozen dome-shaped structures scattered amid stands of timber along the river’s west bank. As he and his companions surveyed the scene, a group of eight men, “as naked as Adam in Paradise before he sinned,” emerged from the trees and made their way across a shallow ford in the river, chanting songs and smoking clay pipes. They bore gifts, grass baskets brimming with pine nuts and strings of beautiful shell discs. “We gave them a little tobacco and glass beads,” Crespi noted, “and they went away well pleased.”

  Yang-na was still there a dozen years later, on September 4, 1781, when soldiers from Mission San Gabriel, under the command of Corporal José Vicente Féliz—grandfather of José Domingo Féliz—escorted the original group of pobladores, or settlers, to the site. The eleven families—twenty-three adults and twenty-one children—had come overland from northern New Spain several weeks before. Following instructions issued by the military governor, Féliz oversaw the laying out of el pueblo de la Reyna de los Angeles—the town of the Queen of the Angels—immediately north of the ranchería, and remained with the settlers to supervise the location of a plaza, the distribution of house lots and fields, and the construction of a dam and the zanja madre, the mother ditch channeling water from the river for irrigation and domestic use. Having proved his talent for administration, Féliz won appointment as comisionado, charged with oversight of the security of the new pueblo.

  Almost immediately the residents of Yang-na went to work for the pobladores. Although they would suffer many of the same negative effects of colonization as the neófitos, these people continued to enjoy their own autonomous community life. They labored in the fields planted along the river and worked as muleteers, water carriers, or domestic servants. Social mixing between Indians and settlers was common and extensive. The pobladores themselves, classified in official documents as mestizos and mulattos, were the offspring of several generations of mixing in Mexico, although they claimed status as gente de razón, people of reason, a term that said less about race than about culture. Indians were classified as people without reason, sin razón, but that certainly didn’t prevent colonists from engaging with them. Some pobladores learned the native language, and a number of men married native women. That kind of easy sociability worried the authorities. Military governor Pedro de Fages objected to “the pernicious familiarity prevailing in the pueblo with the gentiles,” and introduced rules designed to separate the two groups. Indians would no longer be permitted to enter the homes of pobladores and would be required to return to their ranchería at night. Such rules were honored more in the breach than in the observance.

  The Franciscans didn’t like what was transpiring at the pueblo any better than the military authorities. The Angelenos were “a set of idlers,” one missionary complained. “For them the Indian is errand-boy, vaquero, and digger of ditches—in short, general factotum. Confident that the gentiles are working, the pobladores pass the day singing. The young men wander on horseback through the rancherías soliciting the women to immorality.” There was truth to the complaint, but it also reflected a resentment about gentiles who might avoid the mission yet enjoy the benefits of civilization by working for the settlers. The Indians of Los Angeles “should have been the first to receive Holy Baptism,” another Franciscan grumbled, yet they “still abide in the shadows of paganism.”

  The chorus of complaint continued as long as the Franciscans remained in California. “If there is anything to be done, the Indian has to do it,” Father-President Narciso Durán wrote after a visit to Los Angeles in 1831, the pueblo’s fiftieth anniversary. “If he fails to do it, nothing will be done. Is anything to be planted? The Indian must do it. Is the wheat to be harvested? Let the Indian come. Are adobes or tiles to be made, a house to be erected, a corral to be built, wood to be hauled, water to be brought for the kitchen? Let the Indian do it.” Meanwhile, for Angelenos “it is walk about, play the gentleman, eat, be idle, generally at the cost of the Indian’s hard labor, so that in reality it seems as if nature had destined the Indian to be the slave of the gente de razón.” It was an ironic conclusion, coming as it did from the chief executive officer of an institution founded and maintained on the forced labor of neófitos.

  THE HARD DEMOGRAPHIC FACTS of the California missions—the exceptionally high mortality and low fertility of neófitos—determined that the recently converted, most of them deficient in civilized comportment, were always in the majority. In theory, the missionaries held Indian property in trust against the day when neófitos were judged capable of autonomous life, at which time they were supposed to be emancipated, provided with their fair share of mission land and other property, and organized into self-governing pueblos, a process known as secularización. But under the prevailing circumstances Franciscan missionaries could not envision a future in which their “Indian children” would be sufficiently mature to govern themselves. “According to the laws, the natives are to be free from tutelage at the end of ten years,” the governor noted in 1796. “But those of California, at the rate they are
advancing, will not reach the goal in ten centuries.”

  The pressure to secularize the missions came from the rising generation of California colonists, the sons of soldiers and territorial officials. After Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821, this new generation began to refer to themselves as hijos del país and Californios. Many of them embraced the values espoused by Mexican liberals—individualism, republicanism, and free trade. The new Mexican congress swept away the mercantile restrictions of the Spanish period and opened California’s ports to the world. Strong international demand for shoe leather and candles stimulated a booming trade in cattle hide and tallow. Why should all that revenue go to the church? The time had come, these young Californios argued, to privatize mission land, emancipate the Indians, then set them to work for a new class of landowners. Secularization of the missions was their prime objective, the Californio version of liberty.

  The initial attempt at secularization in California came from José María Echeandía, the first appointed governor following the adoption of Mexico’s 1824 republican constitution. A well-educated military engineer, secular in outlook, Echeandía actively encouraged liberal values among young Californios. He promoted the establishment of local ayuntamientos as well as a territorial diputación, or legislature. He introduced a process of indirect election for councilmen and legislators in which gente de razón voted for commissarios, who in turn made the selections for office. These institutions became the political classroom for the rising generation of politically active Californios. In an attempt to “remove the yoke” from the backs of the Indians, as Echeandía put it, he launched a plan for the emancipation of neófitos, appointing civil administrators to assume control over the missions and assigning them the task of shutting down operations and distributing land and other productive property to neófitos and Californios.