Black Robes in Lower California

By Peter Masten Dunne

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1952.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Apr 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520316744

Peter Masten Dunne

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PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED IN THIS SERIES

Educational Foundations of the Jesuits

in Sixteenth-Century New Spain

By Jerome V. Jacobsen, S.J., PhD.

Pioneer Blac, Robes on the West Coast

By Peter Masten Dunne, S.J., PhD.

Pioneer Jesuits in Northern Mexico

By Peter Masten Dunne, S.J., PhD.

Early Jesuit Missions in Tarahumara

By Peter Masten Dunne, S.J., PhD.

BLACK ROBES IN LOWER CALIFORNIA

Black Robes in

kower Çalifomia

By Peter Masten Dunne, S.J.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles • 1968

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY AND LOS ANGELES

CALIFORNIA

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

LONDON, ENGLAND

COPYRIGHT, I952, BY

THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

SECOND PRINTING, 1968

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO

FATHER JOHN BERNARD MCGLOIN

ONETIME PUPIL

SCHOLAR, AUTHOR, AND LOYAL

FRIEND

PREFACE

FOR MANY years there has been a need for the story of the Jesuit Missions of Lower California in a single volume. Parts of the record have received expert treatment by such modern historians as Bolton, Decorme, and Engelhardt. The last mentioned has given the history in much detail, but has united it with the Franciscan and Dominican periods. Besides, Father Engelhardt wrote many years ago and important documents have since been made available from the various archives and collections mentioned in the bibliography and in the notes. It is hoped, therefore, that the present work will shed additional light upon the seventy-year activity of the Jesuits in Baja California (1697-1768), as well as upon the missionary activities and organizations of the west coast of North America.

The present writer has profited by the criticisms, constructive and sympathetic, which have been published in the reviews appearing in the standard historical periodicals, criticisms concerned with alleged deficiencies in the preceding three monographs on the early Jesuit missions. According to some reviewers there has been a lack of interpretation which one scholar considered to be a general defect of the Bolton school of historiography. I have been grateful for these scholarly refletions and have endeavored to profit by them.

A paragraph or two on this point of interpretation may not be out of place. The factual narrative in this sort of work is of first importance. Then each scholar will interpret according to his philosophy and, unless he be inexorably impartial, according to his sympathies or antipathies. A Jesuit writing on Jesuits will be suspected of looking through rose-colored glasses and some of my Aindly critics have implied that 1 have done so. Perhaps this has been true. Bolton is neither Jesuit nor Catholic and yet his Rim of Christendom is bright with admiration for his hero, Eusebio Francisco Kino, and of Jesuit missionary activity. I do not know that he has been criticized for over-coloring the picture. As a matter of fact he wrote from what the record offered him. He could, of course, show greater enthusiasm for his subject than could a Jesuit. Another may praise; one may not praise oneself.

One of my reviewers writing on the fourth volume in this series said that I did not indicate the reasons why the missionaries failed to win the sympathies of the Indian during the later years of the Jesuit period. Assertion of such failure is a generality and therefore inac- vii curate. Indications of Indian affection for their black-robed padre were numerous at the time of the expulsion, for instance in Tarahumara and in various parts of Lower Califomia. Reasons for the repeated uprisings in Tarahumara were indicated and certain missionary methods were criticized, for instance, the endeavor to coax the Indian down from his mountain caves to live in the more concentrated and physically less wholesome environment of the mission pueblo. Perhaps my reviewer wanted my criticisms to be more sharp and more at length. The modern secularist or neo-pagan (if the word be not too blunt) will not approve of any effort to propagate Christianity among the heathen.

So, I come to an important reflection. The biologist, the anthropologist (if he be merely that), and the theologian will differ in some of their attitudes toward, and some of their interpretations of, the Christian missionary effort. All will agree, I thinly, that from the biological standpoint the coming of the European to the Western Hemisphere was unfortunate for the aborigines, because both in Anglo- America and in Hispanic America the Indians were decimated directly by shooting, and indirectly by forced labor and epidemic diseases brought by the European. The last mentioned too, the heaviest toll of Indian life in Hispanic America. Therefore, biologically speaking, it was a mistake for the missionaries to concentrate the Indians into pueblos where they were repeatedly decimated by disease.

The anthropologist, if he be narrow in his specialty, will disapprove likewise of the whole European invasion, for it brought about a clash of cultures, it often robbed the Indian of his land, and it just as often destroyed his religion (if he had any), his culture (if any existed), together with his mores, customs, and tribal integrity. But if the White Man had not come the anthropologist would not be here today to study the ancient Red Man. Add to the above the deplorable destruction in some places of the Indian’s temples, his monuments, his inscriptions, and his works of art. Here the archeologist will rightly disapprove. The scientist and the historian will be careful of generalization. Widely among the Amerindian any hind of cultural refinement in the European sense was nonexistent, or was already in decline, or had been destroyed by intertribal enmity and conquest. For instance, in Bolivia the ancient Aymara culture as represented at Tiahuanacu, already in decline, was ultimately destroyed by the Inca conquest just as in Mexico tribal cultures in the anthropological sense were injured by the Aztecs. On the other hand the European brought biological and anthropological advantages: the elimination of human sacrifice, of cannibalism where it existed, and of the pest, especially among the more backward peoples, of almost constant intertribal warfare. This was especially true among certain tribes of Northern Mexico and of Baja California.

The Christian missionary s outlook was not restricted to what was merely the natural. For him the Indian possessed a soul which it was good and wholesome to save for a better lot in the future life. The sciences of biology and anthropology were nonexistent in former centuries, but Christian faith in the acceptance of a divine revelation was very much a part of the psychology of the Spaniard and Portuguese in the New World and of all Christian missionaries in general. The missionary desired only the Indians’ good here and in the hereafter (according to his philosophy) and he worked hard, often heroically, for both purposes according to the knowledge of his times. For him the saving of a soul was paramount, but other advantages were considered too and often imparted: peace, security, inner happiness, the abolition of superstitions (product of ignorance and fear) and faith in a supreme being with the assurance of present and future happiness. In the mind of the Christian this was all to the good. In addition, the missions raised the Indians standard of living, improved his agriculture, taught him how to barter, and imparted some knowledge of language and the arts. Therefore, the validity of making Christian neophytes was never questioned by the missionary and in the broad Christian outlook of modern times is still not disputed. The scientist, if he be narrow in his specialty, may question this validity, and if he be consistent he may regret that missionaries spread Christianity throughout western Europe from which has sprung our Western cultural inheritance. Let not the Franks be Christianized; let flourish the paganism of ancient Rome.

Let us come back, therefore, to the assertion made earlier in this preface: interpretations of the missionary effort will differ according to the philosophy or the lack of it in the mind of the twentiethcentury scholar, scientist or historian, and in the mind of the interested twentieth-century layman.

I wish to express my gratitude to those who have been of assistance to me in the preparation of this volume. To my reviewers and critics have all been fynd) who have been helpful to me in the expansion of my attitudes and to my Jesuit confrères who read the manuscript and whose suggestions have been constructive; to Herbert Eugene Bolton, inspirer and editor of this series, for his en- thusisatic encouragement and valuable aid afforded in permitting the use of his rich collection of documents and transcripts; to Father Gerardo Decorme, S.J., of Ysleta, Texas, for his archival direction and enlightenment and for the gift of transcripts of important documents; to Father Constantino Bayle, S.J., of Razon y Fe in Madrid, for procuring and sending to San Francisco indispensable materials from the Archivo General de las Indias in Seville; to Lie. Julio Jiménez Rueda and Lie. Agustin Y ânes of the National Archives of Mexico for courteously performing the same service; to Father Joseph C. Teschitei, S.J., for procuring from Germany valuable letters of missionaries; to Father Joaquin Cardoso, S.J., for the indication of documents existent in the Biblioteca Nacional of Mexico City; and to the staffs of the Bancroft Library, University of California, and of the Huntington Library, San Marino, for their fyndly and courteous assistance. Finally I wish to thank Mrs. Walter H. Brandenburg of Pasadena for much first-hand information concerning Baja California, Mrs. Richard Jones of Los Angeles who has gone over and over the manuscript and who with infinite pains has prepared the index, and to Miss Lucie E. N. Dobbie of the University of California Press for expert editing of the manuscript and for personal interest in the improvement of the narrative.

CONTENTS

CONTENTS

Chapter I A HARD LAND

Chapter II PRELUDE TO PERMANENCY

Chapter III SALVATIERRA AND PERMANENCE

Chapter IV ASSURED CONTINUITY

Chapter V UGARTE GOES TO CALIFORNIA

Chapter VI LAND ROUTE TO THE PENINSULA

Chapter VII ALMOST STARVED OUT

Chapter VIII BETTER YEARS

Chapter IX TWO NEW MISSIONS

Chapter X DEATH OF SALVATIERRA

Chapter XI SALVATIERRA’S LEGACY

Chapter XII HARBOR HUNTING

Chapter XIII UGARTE BUILDS A SHIP

Chapter XIV SOUTH TO LA PAZ

Chapter XV TIP OF THE PENINSULA

Chapter XVI HEAD OF THE GULF

Chapter XVII THREE MOUNTAIN MISSIONS

Chapter XVIII THE SOUTHERNMOST CAPE

Chapter XIX TARAVAL

Chapter XX REBELLION SEARS THE SOUTH

Chapter XXI THE AFTERMATH

Chapter XXII A FUTILE TWELVEMONTH

Chapter XXIII RECONSTRUCTION

Chapter XXIV ARRIVAL OF GERMAN JESUITS

Chapter XXV CONSAG EXPLORES

Chapter XXVI A PADRE AT HIS POST

Chapter XXVII ECONOMICS

Chapter XXVIII AGAIN THE NORTH

Chapter XXIX THE LAST DECADE

Chapter XXX THE LAST MISSION

Chapter XXXI THE GATHERING STORM

Chapter XXXII THE END

Appendix I THE RECORD BOOK OF SANTA ROSALIA DE MULEGÉ

Appendix II NOTE ON INDIAN LANGUAGES AND TRIBES

Appendix III INDIAN POPULATION FIGURES COMPARED

Appendix IV TROUBLES OF A HISTORIAN

Appendix V LIST OF JESUIT MISSIONARIES IN LOWER CALIFORNIA*

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Chapter I

A HARD LAND

THE NORTH AMERICAN continent from its southwest extremity thrusts a long, misshapen finger into the waters of what the early Spaniards called the Mar del Sur, the South Sea. This peninsula, seven hundred miles in length and of varying widths, is separated from the mainland by an equally long and thin gulf, the waters of which are as treacherous as the land they touch is forbidding. Not many years after the conquest of Mexico (1521) Cortes’ exploring parties discovered this peninsula. Later visitors applied to it the name California, from a fabled land written of in a novel by the contemporary Spanish romanticist Juan de Montalvo. The name passed over to the gulf too. In the course of time the Spanish South Sea became the Pacific Ocean, and when the fair regions lying north of the peninsula were discovered and settled, the peninsula acquired the name Baja (Lower) California, while the Spaniards called the northern coastal hills and valleys Alta California.¹

From the tip of the peninsula to its base, which is attached to the mainland, this flintlike land is one of peaks and mountain ranges and barren plateaus.² Near the extreme south rise the isolated summits of Las Victorias; a little farther north the Sierra de la Giganta lifts a barrier of rock three hundred miles in length, prohibiting entrance to the interior from the east. The Giantess, crowned by the three lofty peaks, Las Virgines, thrusts her spurs down to the California sea and terminates in the north at an elevation of 5,000 feet in Goldman Peak. Farther to the northwest and stretching in parts almost from coast to coast of this crooked finger of land is the elevated Vizcaino desert. Its great plateaus are cut with valleys and arroyos, sections are cleft by sharp ravines and barrancas or strewn with lava-studded sweeps and declivities. The desert’s base is sand and soil and baking rocks, where the rain seldom falls. From this parched ground sprouts almost every kind of cactus: the cholla or arborescent cactus; the thin and thorny poles of the cirio; the pitahaya, garambullo, yucca, and elephant tree, with part of its root system above ground, gnarled like twisted elephants’ trunks. The variety of cacti would fill a book with names. Tiny balls of gray that coax to be caressed but are prepared to spit fire into a friendly hand, venomous snakelike arms that crawl along the ground seeking a place in the sun. There are plants with thin, tangled arms bristling through all their length with needle points; there are others with fruit edible and palatable yet spiked with bunched points. From some species of cactus the Indians made cords; but they never learned to extract the juice and make a fermented drink. Sage and briars, too, vie with the more prickly creation, and in some open spaces a fringe of grass and a spangle of blossoms gladden a patch of barren earth.

North of Vizcaino desert the summits of many crooked sierras close the skyline; still farther on loom the sharp-edged crests of the Sierra San Pedro Mártir. They rise blue in the clear distance dominated by two pointed peaks 10,000 feet in elevation. Like a fixed bar or flange the sierra ties the peninsula of Lower California to the mainland north. Its western ridges support the only important stand of timber in the peninsula. These slopes, feathered with pine, the haunt of the bighorn, the mountain lion, and the deer, run down to the hot deserts of the western coast. In areas to the south rarely does an oasis, nurtured by spring or stream, render the landscape inviting and make the ground fertile. In the more watered spots grow thickets of mesquite and forests of palm.

It is not, therefore, surprising that Miguel Venegas, the early Jesuit and classical historian of Baja California, deems it a land the most unfortunate, ungrateful, and miserable of the world, and that Father Wenceslaus Link, one of its last black-robed missionaries, described the country as … nothing but rocks, cliffs, declivitous mountains, and measureless sandy wastes, broken only by impassable granite walls.³

Southeast along the narrow length of the land is the Llano de Magdalena extending as far as the peaks and mountains of the southern tip or toe; in width the Llano stretches from the coast of the Pacific to the feet of the Sierra de la Giganta. This southern desert is separated from the northern by more than a hundred miles of a lofty but forbidding mesa, extension of the great sierra, which here thrusts to the west, almost as far as the sea, rough volcanic formations overlying sandstone buried between loose and shattered fragments of lava. Boulder-strewn plateaus and sandy wastes, as in the north, make this part of the peninsula sterile, for here, too, the rain seldom if ever falls.⁴

The Giantess, rising to a height of 6,000 feet, blocks off both deserts from the waters of the gulf with gargantuan slabs of steep rock and primeval lava frozen in fantastic forms. The lava flowing down and westward eons ago spilled over the basic sandstone and has made a setting of stark desolation.

Two canyons cut into the western flank of La Giganta. They are watered by streams which creep out from under the primeval rock and which create two green strips of fertile land. Deep in one of these oases, called Comondu by the Indians, the pioneer Black Robes placed the mission which became known as San José Co- mondú, in the other canyon, a few leagues to the north, they placed Purísima Concepcion. Farther north on the western slopes of the Giantess the missionaries came upon an even more fertile spot, where the rocky mesa opened unexpectedly and disclosed a verdant arroyo fringed and feathered with palm and watered by a clear and abundant stream. It was the Indian Kadakaaman, which the Black Robes christened San Ignacio, and it became the peninsula’s most flourishing mission, as in the twentieth century, richly colored by its past, it is Baja California’s most charming town.

The west coast of the peninsula, as it curves southeast washed by the Pacific, is marked by wide indentations and capacious bays. Sebastian Vizcaino Bay half encloses a great body of water almost at the middle of the peninsula and is set off and protected by the razorbacked Cedros Island, a lump of raw material, misplaced and forgotten. Farther south is one of the fine harbors of the world, Magdalena Bay, with an entrance as picturesque as that of the Golden Gate of Alta California. But most of the coast is parched and ugly, and spurs of barren hills poke their denuded forms out into the sea. Cabrillo, Vizcaino, the Manila galleons, and the plodding explorations of the Black Robes have made these desolated coasts historical in all their isolation.

The rocky backbone of Lower California terminates south in the historic and picturesque cape which the Spaniards called the Cabo de San Lucas. Here for half a mile a solid slab of granite is flung athwart the sea and for millennia the rock has been wrought upon by wind and wave and carved roughly into domes and pinnacles, and slashed and broken into cliffs and sharp ravines. The ocean of Balboa and the Sea of Cortes are forever held apart by the apex of a territory; the granite bastions of the cape are fit terminal for so sharp a finger of land.

A few miles east of the peninsula’s jagged point is the open bay or harborage of San José del Cabo, called by the early Spaniards San Bernabe. Beyond a belt of dunes extends the largest oasis of Lower California, watered by three generous springs, the last of which, nineteen miles inland, is the source of the Rio de San José. The early missionaries did well to choose this spot for their most southerly mission, San José del Cabo. The name of the mission has passed over to the town which in the mid-twentieth century numbered some six thousand inhabitants. The products of the oasis—corn, sugar cane, tobacco, and figs; lemons, oranges, and limes; pomegranates and dates—made San José del Cabo the most thriving community of the peninsula.

In the time of Cortes the first explorers reached the eastern coast of this land by sailing from the southern mainland into the gulf. A century and a half later the missionaries first set foot upon this coast by sailing across the gulf. Bays and coves innumerable are here protected by the more than twenty islands which hug the shore. The Giantess lifts up a bastion of rock and pushes spurs into the waters of the gulf. In places along the coast the first barriers of the Giantess rise up from the sea like corrugated iron, stark and black. The bay of La Paz, a hundred miles north of the tip, is the most ancient spot; famed Loreto of mission lore farther north is near a cove protected by Carmen Island and to the north by a tongue of jagged rock. Still to the north lies the Bahia de la Concepcion which plunges southwards deep into the land. Here a western indentation forms Coyote Bay; its sprinkled islands float like giant cinders dropped upon the water, and its steep western margin, nude and treeless, is roughened by chunks of lava. Near the mouth of the bay and around a rocky pinnacle, Sombrerito Point (for it juts up like the crown of a sombrero), there flows into the gulf through an estuary a delightful stream creating an oasis. The Indians called it Mulegé, and the spot was ideal for a mission. In time one was founded here: Santa Rosalia Mulegé. Beyond and to the north is San Carlos Bay, the Sal- sipuedes Channel, and the great, barren bulk of Angel de la Guarda Island. Farther on and near the thirtieth parallel the fine Bahia de San Luis, later called Gonzaga Bay, offered harborage for craft carrying supplies for Santa Maria, the last of the Jesuit missions.

But no harbor on this eastern side compares with La Paz in the south. The round half-moon of the bay bites so deep into the thin peninsula that at this point the shores of the Pacific are a mere twenty- five miles to the southwest. The peninsula’s widest girth is about half way from the southern tip, where it broadens to one hundred and twenty-five miles, thickened by the curving peninsula which forms the southern lines of Vizcaino Bay. It was from the eastern coast, so variegated and often so hazardous, that the missionary Black Robes sailed to the forbidding land. Their port of entry was almost always Loreto, a third of the distance north of the southern tip or toe.

The missionaries often spoke of pearls along the eastern coast of Lower California, especially from La Paz north. The fisheries, worked by Spanish colonials, unjustly exploited the natives and proved harmful to the morale of the mission Indians. The padres wrote likewise of the rich and interesting bird life of the coast and of the multitudinous life of the sea, with its monsters and its common fish and mollusks.⁵ They knew of the sea elephants and seals, of the whales which infest the waters of the gulf, of the tintero shark, the swordfish, and of the more harmless yellowtail and garoupa. Clavigero does not mention that vast lumpish member of the skate family, the mobula, which has a weight of four thousand pounds and floats in the sun near the surface with spinal fin protruding, a sure hit for the harpoon. But Father Clavigero knew the manta or giant ray and says, speaking of one specimen, that its width was twelve feet, its length from the nose to the beginning of its tail nine and one-half feet, and the thickness in the middle of its body two feet. Its tail was fifteen feet in length, and its skin, thicker than that of an ox, was covered with strong spines like thorns. ⁶ The seamen who manned the mission transports had experiences with the giants of the sea. The craft San Firmin which was carrying twenty men over to the peninsula late in 1699 was attacked by that fighting monster, the swordfish. It leaped yards above the water and made a lunge for the poop, piercing with its rasped sword not only the outer wooden covering of the boat, but two other thick planks of the ship’s side.⁷

It seems that the fish which swam the waters of the gulf were as misshapen as the land. But the missionaries were not especially interested in these anomalies of the sea which have become the delight of the twentieth-century sportsman; nor in the birds of the sea, the blue-footed boobie, frigate birds, and the colonies of elegant tern; in the duck hawk and the osprey; in oyster catchers and the great blue herons. Father Baegert, however, describes in detail the natural history of this hard land where he worked and sweat; and Father Fernando Consag in his famous voyage to the head of the gulf in 1746 took notice of great herds of seal and flocks of myriad birds.

If the padres were fascinated by the sheer savagery of some of the mission terrain or by the beauty of long vistas or of distant mountain cordilleras, they did not say so. Nor were the men of their age generally affected by the grandeurs which nature spread before them.

Another thing the fathers were slow to learn and to their loss and sorrow: the season of the chubasco, that cyclonic wind storm which, with fearful suddenness, blows up from the south and falls upon the gulf waters with devastating strength, whipping its surface to fury and churning up waves to the height of thirty feet and more. Many a mission ship, sailing at the wrong season, was thus caught and sank and a missionary lost his life. The padres finally learned and modern mariners well know that the bad season is from the end of July through October, and during that time shipping on the gulf takes care to hug the coast and to keep near the sheltered coves and bays of the peninsula.

The missionaries then, seemingly uninterested in the beauty of mountain cordillera and valley vista, or in the intriguing variety of bird life and of that of the sea, did with a direct and concentrated singleness of purpose fix their attention upon creating out of the human materials which they found before them good and happy Christians.

The natives were of a piece with the land upon which they lived; they sprawled upon the lowest levels of the cultural scale of the Amerindians. Did the land drag its aborigines down to the ragged and unkempt condition of its physical surface, or had the Californians, already the backwash of nobler representatives of their race, been driven down into this pocket by stronger peoples of the north? The answer rests not with the historian but with the anthropologist and is nebulous and uncertain in any case. The most authentic picture of the lower California Indian has been left us by the missionary who labored to bring to him the amenities of Western Europe’s religion and civilization, These men were normally kind- hearted and sympathetic and often held their spiritual charges in sincere and even mystic affection; they were therefore not inclined to exaggerate the moral and social backwardness of their actual or prospective neophytes.⁸

It is true, that at one time the peninsula was inhabited by a still more primitive people than those the early explorer and the missionary met. From rocks painted with figures of men and animals which the missionaries observed in certain caves they concluded, as did the early Jesuit historian Clavigero, that earlier a more cultured people had lived upon this inhospitable waste. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries archeologists entered these same caves and examined others where rocks were painted in yellow, red, green, and black and the colors were placed high on the cave wall. There were pictures, too, which showed the outlines of men clothed in garments. In the sierra of San Pedro Mártir at the base of granite walls which rise from a large tinaja, or natural cistern, there are pecked on the face of the cliff figures and signs of various kinds. Such cliff-writings or petroglyphs have been discovered likewise in the Arroyo Grande of Lower California’s northeast corner and near Mission San Fernando Velicatá, the first of the Franciscan chain, northwest of the Jesuit mission of Santa Maria.⁹ But the people who made these figures and painted the cave rocks had long since disappeared and given place to the lowly creature whom the missionary knew and described.¹⁰

Roughly there were two main divisions among the natives contacted by the Jesuits: the Guaicuros who lived to the south of Loreto, and the Cochimies who lived to the north. The latter were the more dependable and made the best neophytes, but in their manner of living, their religious ideas, and their tribal relationships they differed little from those of the south. The Pericú branch of the most southern Guaicuros left the worst record in mission annals and reports.¹¹

First of all, the padres of the eighteenth century came upon a naked people. The men wore nothing at all, which was a mild shock to some of the missionaries, and the women merely two pieces of woven reed grass, one in front and one in back, suspended from a waist cord, and draped down close to the knees. Among tribes farther to the north some women also went about naked, others clothed themselves with skins. Though the men wore no clothes, they decked themselves out in ornaments. What the feather was to the North American Indian of the east, strings of beads were to the Californian. These were made of pearls, berries, white round shells from small snails, and pieces of shell and mother of pearl. The Pericúes wore their hair long and covered with a sort of peruke made of pearls interwoven with white feathers. These strung ornaments the men, and also the women of some groups, used as bracelets, armlets, and necklaces; these last often hung down as far as the waist. The stringlike girdle worn by some of the men, especially leaders or medicine men, had dangling from it berries, snail shells, and deer hoofs.

Neither the nakedness of the men nor the odd variety of ornaments surprised the old-time missionary so much as the natives’ utter lack of permanent habitation. Most of these people built no houses, made use of no wigwams, erected not even a crude enramada, or shelter made of leaves and branches. Walking over flinty hill or thicket- choked dale to seek out their rude diet of berries, bugs, and roots, they stopped where they happened to be at nightfall and there they sprawled naked under night’s canopy, be the place wholesome or filthy, snake infested or insect ridden. Often, however, they returned to a common resting place or to a ranchería. There were at times two exceptions to these primitive habits. If a strong, cold wind was blowing at night the natives would force into the ground a curved shelter of rough stakes or branches and huddle on the leeward side of the rude protection. Sometimes too they slept within a circle of rocks which they had piled two or three feet high. Nevertheless the missionaries noted that they were ineluctably attached to the particular spot or region of California’s rocks and deserts in which they had been reared, seldom wandered more than thirty hours’ walk from their local habitat, and they always returned. There was no house on the peninsula when the fathers first came, nor the vestige of one, and ‘not a hut, nor an earthen jar, nor an instrument of metal, nor a piece of cloth." ¹² Personal belongings were thus at a minimum: a tray, a bowl, a small stick for making fire, a sharp bone which served as an awl, and two nets. These were their household goods. They traveled light!

Perhaps the fact that the Lower Californians were constant wanderers within the very limited district of their birth helps to explain the lack of fabricated dwellings. Habit inured them to their comfortless regime. Indeed, they could not bear a roof above them, as the missionaries soon discovered, for when in time of epidemic the padre would place the more seriously afflicted in one of the mission buildings, he would soon find them out again sprawling in the open air. It was a racial claustrophobia. Their wanderings were necessitated by their search for food and they would devour almost anything, from the louse they picked from one another’s hair to a loathsome white worm, the size of a man’s thumb, endemic to the country. Included in their diet were bitter roots, scrawny and tasteless dates, insipid fruits; locusts, lizards, snakes, green caterpillars, worms of all kinds, spiders, and other insects. Animals, such as the wildcat and the deer, were highly prized by them, and when they came by dog meat they considered it a delicacy. They ate no human flesh, however, as did some tribes across the gulf before the padres came to them. There was one animal the Californians would not touch. It was the badger, because, explains the early Jesuit historian Clavigero with not even a glint of humor, this animal bore some resemblance to themselves. In the south they shunned the mountain lion, believing they would die if they killed it.

Two other eating habits were sufficiently disgusting and would be almost unbelievable were it not for the fact that they were attested to by the missionaries who worked among them and reaffirmed by the historian. A big season for the California Indians was the ripening of the fruit of the pitahaya cactus. They celebrated the opening of the period in raucous festivity and devoured the fruit until they were stuffed beyond satiety. But at this time they took care to evacuate at a fixed spot, they allowed their excrement to dry, and then, because the small seeds of the fruit had not been digested, they would with infinite patience pick through the dried material and segregate the seeds one by one. Then they would toast them, grind them into a dark and mealy powder, and devour over again in the winter time the noisome concoction. The Spanish soldiers, with pungent humor, referred to this process as the secunda cosecha, or the second harvest.

One of the later missionaries, the Alsatian Jakob Baegert, described this practice in a letter to his brother which he wrote in 1752 just sixteen months after his arrival at his mission of San Luis Gonzaga. And after the description he exclaims: Oh, what a nation this is, miserable and indescribable beyond compare! ¹³

The other habit was hardly less revolting if more ingenious. Since meat was a delicacy to them, they wished to make it last as long as possible, and these children of the rocks and cacti devised a means whereby literally they could eat their cake and still have it. They would tie a toothsome morsel of meat to a string, chew it with gusto and swallow it, the string hanging from the mouth. After two or three minutes, shall we say of enjoyment, they would pull up the little piece, and begin chewing and swallowing all over again. This process would be repeated until there was no longer any substance left to the morsel of meat. They went farther still. The Indians of the northeast passed around the pipe of peace, and the inhabitants of southern South America today draw from the same bombilla, or tube, a draught of mat¿ from a cup, so, too, these Californians, eight or ten of them, would sit around and enjoy their food. After the first person had chewed, swallowed, and then violently extracted from his stomach the now mellow tidbit, he would hand the dangling morsel to his neighbor, who would chew awhile and then pass it on to the third. The process continued until all had enjoyed their bite and swallow and until the piece was literally chewed up. The natives were, of course, adept in this practice, since they were taught it in childhood.¹⁴

After the foregoing descriptions, it will be less shocking to learn that during mission days, when a cow or bullock was skinned, the neophytes would scrape the soft and smelly hides in order to obtain some of the fresh blood or other juices and fat. Not content with this, they would lick the skins with their tongues in order to obtain the greases. These people were great gormandizers, and the Alsatian missionary Baegert reports that he had known one man to devour twenty- five pounds of meat in as many hours and to do away with seventeen watermelons at a sitting. One of the more elementary refinements introduced by the mission system was to get these crude natives to desist from eating insects, snakes, and disgusting worms and to replace this diet with the grains and the corn which the missionary imported and later raised in the more fertile patches of the peninsula.

After careful enquiry Baegert arrived at the conclusion that before the Jesuits went to the Guaicuro tribesmen, among whom he labored at San Luis Gonzaga, the natives had no idea of a supreme being or of a future life either of reward or punishment.

Father Nicolas Tamaral, on the other hand, who was later murdered in the south in the uprising of 1734, considered that the Indians of the southern cape sprang from ancestors who had a certain knowledge of Christianity, for in the weird legends concerning the origin and development of their deities there was vaguely adumbrated, Tamaral thought, certain notions of the Trinity and of the Incarnation and Redemption, and of the fall of the angels.¹® Heaven for them was much more populated than was earth. According to all missionary accounts these southerners were the most degraded of all the natives and fomenters of trouble and revolt. Their leaders were mulattoes and others of mixed bloods. It seems probable that the notions of which Father Tamaral spoke were brought to them through the previous centuries by Europeans—Spanish explorers from the time of Cortes, pearl fishers who constantly touched upon these coasts, men of the Manila galleons, and Negroes known to have been dropped off here by these far eastern argosies. Even English and Dutch privateers who sometimes prowled about the more southerly regions of the peninsula may have spread among the natives some vague ideas of Christianity. Ugarte bears witness to the religion of the Cochimies of the north, and Taraval who resided among this tribe set down fifty points of their belief, which make up a story even more similar to Christianity than that of the southerners.

Blent in with this dark mélange of Christianity were superstitions of a stark and ridiculous nature. For the southerners the stars were blinking metal plates which begot the deity Purutabui. The moon gave birth to Cucunumic, another mystic personage of the upper regions. Over all this brood of gods ruled the all-powerful Wac! The northerners, the Cochimies, had a King of Dung. To honor him they thought themselves obliged to poultice their heads with animal or even human excrement. Of a softer nature than those of the south, the Cochimies cultivated some sterner superstitions by which they thought to propitiate the nether god Veloz. It was considered a service to sacrifice their lives for one or another of their gods, to fling themselves off the point of a pinnacle of rock. Some did just this and were dashed and broken in the ravines below. Another homage was to tumble in a thorny clump of cactus and roll about in the comfortable bed. A more rational service was to offer sacrifice by abstaining from the favorite luxury, the ripened prickly pear, for a whole season. The Liyu or, more commonly, Monqui, who held a central geographical position within a fan of leagues about Loreto, were similar to Baegert’s Guaicuros southwest: they had no idea of a supreme being. This tribe believed in imps and demons; the master devil was Gumonco who scattered seeds of pestilence over the tribes. He shaped for his pleasure the bays and inlets of the coast to provide for himself quantities of fish. This nebulous and fearsome person demanded propitiation also, and so these poor Monqui Indians, before the coming of the Black Robe, used to gather on the beach of a delightful little cove, the later Puerto Escondido, and there weave all day long capacious garments of human hair to be worn by the medicine men. Gumonco was pleased at this for the wizards were his servants. The demon employed too a handful of imps who scoured the coasts for delicious fish.¹⁶

The Guaicuros, according to missionary Baegert, lived conformably to the vacuity of their beliefs. They married without previous promise or present contract, in a total absence of formality, and in the presence of no one, not even of their parents. Plurality of wives was common, especially in the south, and there was not only frequent exchange of wives but a sort of universal promiscuity. Group would meet with group for the sole purpose of enjoying a general license in matters of sex. The Guaicuro language possessed no word for husband, except to designate a male who had been with a woman. Even after the introduction of Christianity had changed such primitive customs in the mission country, the padre would see a boy and a girl whom he had just married with the formality of the Christian rite leave after the ceremony and each go his own way without a word and in opposite directions, bent on their constant task of seeking food. Bride and groom would not come together until the evening, and the following day it would be the same: each wandered off for himself, vagabond like, ranging the hills and the rocks for their worms and berries. Such was their married life.

At death, amid the howls and shrieks of the women relatives but with never a tear, the deceased would be dropped into a shallow grave wrapped in a deerskin. Sometimes the dead were cremated. Some, having fallen into a coma, were buried alive, and the missionary wrote that he once saved the life of an Indian girl about to be buried by nothing more complicated than giving her a good dose of chocolate. She lived, said he, for many years thereafter.

These Indians cared little for their children, and life was cheap. A father, especially if he had several wives, took no notice whatever of his offspring, and a child was killed if its mother could not support it. Procured abortions were frequent among the newly married women, because they held a belief that the first child would be sickly or weak. The women gave birth alone, with no attendants, often in the woods while gathering roots and berries. The mother would then walk back with her offspring to the place where she intended to pass the night. Possessing no garments, the mothers first bathed their infants in fresh urine and then powdered them over with charcoal to keep the infants warm. With urine, too, the women washed their own faces, but Clavigero reminds us that they stopped short of cleansing their teeth with it, as did the ancient Celtiberians, if the report of Diodorus Siculus be true. In the northern fringe of the Lower California mission system the Black Robes discovered an equally astonishing custom for keeping babies warm: a hole was dug in the sand and a fire lighted within to heat the soil. The baby was then set down to take the place of the ashes and covered over with hot sand up to the neck. The missionaries abolished this barbarous practice.

Other habits of cleanliness, or rather lack of them, among these Californians can best be left to the imagination. With the same large shell with which they had just been cleaning out the stalls of the mules and carrying away the offal of the sheep and goats they would come to the mission house and receive in the container their ration of wheat or corn. Mothers had been known to cleanse the running noses of their babies by licking them with the tongue.

Without religion or morals these people were nevertheless very superstitious. South of Loreto the Guaicuros feared dire results should they kill a mountain lion. The dead lion would bring death to the killer. If a deer was slain the hunter must not eat its flesh, for he would never thereafter be able to kill another. Mountain lions, therefore, multiplied, and in mission days did great damage to the herds and flocks. The stalwart missionary, Juan de Ugarte, in his center of San Javier, dispelled this fear by slaying one of the beasts himself and hauling it into camp on his mule. At one stroke Ugarte dispelled a superstition and gained a reputation.

The medicine men, called by California Indians guamas, played skillfully upon the credulity of the people.¹⁷ These men formed a closed caste recruited among the most astute of the young braves who were secretly initiated into the mysteries and practices of the guamas. One modern anthropologist, although he was speaking of Alta California, has stated that here on the West Coast the power and prestige superstitiously conceded the medicine man was greater than anywhere else in North America.¹⁸ The guamas worked on the fears and superstitions of their victims by pretending to inflict sickness and misfortune as well as to heal and cure. Customs differed with regions; in some areas one guama diagnosed the disease and another applied the remedy. The guama was usually required to go to the sick when called, and, if he refused, and the sick man died, the guama would be mulcted of his fee. If the patient died the guama might be slain by the relatives.

When called to attend the sick or effect a cure the guama enhanced the effect of awe and dread by daubing himself with minium and painting his face a vivid red, or he smeared it with charcoal, thus appearing as ugly as the devil himself. In some regions the guamas dressed in long garments woven of human hair and wore a headdress of sparrow hawk feathers and carried fans made of feathers. Farther to the south the guamas wore a crown made of deer tails and had two strings of deer hoofs dangling from their waists.

In curing the sick the guamas’ chief instrument was a piece of wood with marks on it from which he made a show of reading the nature of the illness. After determining the illness he applied plasters made of herbs or fruit juices to the affected parts. In another method of curing the guama smeared his face with urine, put a thorn or thistle in his mouth and approached the patient carrying a tube filled with tobacco smoke. He placed one end of the tube upon the afflicted part and drew in the tobacco smoke. At a given moment he took the thorn from his mouth and boastfully displayed it as having been drawn from the patient, thus indicating the cause of the sickness.¹⁹ If the patient did not immediately recover, the guama made an incision with his fingernail in the skin of a female relative, daughter or sister, and allowed the blood to drip upon the body of the patient. Or, in desperation, the guama would insert his fingers into the patient’s mouth and make a show of extracting the vicious humors. If the patient fell asleep after this treatment his relatives would strike him on the head with a rock to awaken him and, if he died, the women would lament with great howls and shrieks, furiously beating their heads and punching their noses in token of their grief. Apparently the women of Baja California were given to doing physical violence to themselves. Sir Francis Drake saw the women in Alta California scratch their faces with their nails or with rocks until the blood flowed as a demonstration of respect for a god. The padres who witnessed the self-flagellation in Baja California never saw the women in tears. Apparently these barbarous manifestations of grief—or respect for a deity—were part of the ritual of ceremony and nothing more.

The guama’s fee for attendance was small bundles of human hair.

If he failed to achieve a cure, the guama might be compelled to return his fee. Besides the fee, so called, the people were obliged to donate to the guama feathers, the first and best fruits of the season, the finest fish, and the largest seeds. Those who failed to give these things were likely to suffer dire consequences; the guama might impose a penance of fasting or he might make reluctant or tardy donors the object of rough and wild invective in public. These propitiatory offerings were made to the guama whether or not his services to the sick resulted, ultimately, in recovery or death.

These medicine men, usually old fellows, pretended to be in touch with the devil so that they intimidate all the rest [of the people]. A missionary of the post-Jesuit period who worked at Guadalupe witnessed and described their wiles. Their unending speeches and their eloquence carried to extreme lengths and the singular energy of their actions explain why they are held as oracles and why the others consider themselves obliged to give them the best fruits, grains, and other supplies nor do the men dare even to deny them their women. These hechiceros (wizards), as their counterparts on the mainland were called by the Spaniards, gained and retained their prestige by wild stories of their power and prowess which their poor tribesmen believed. Terror prevented any contradiction, since even the saliva of a hechicero would cause death! The natives stood panic- stricken before the medicine man and would take his word even against the evidence of their own senses and of their own experience. The missionary continues: It is a cause of amazement that these simpletons are of such slight intelligence that they believe the hechicero so readily even against the evidence of what they see. The wizard tells them he is going to accompany the dead to the other side of the north, and even though they see that he remains where he is and does not move they believe him and they gulp down many another tomfoolery of like nature. ²⁰

When the Indians of several or many villages came together for their festivities the hechicero exercised his full authority. The season was at the ripening of the cactus fruit and usually at the new moon. The people would forgather to eat, dance, and carouse. The medicine man worked hard on such occasions, directing all. He delivers himself of a great speech accompanied by a thousand movements of the body and with ridiculous gestures from which he emerges hoarse and tired out and his fatigue lasts for many days, as I myself have seen, writes the missionary. The hechicero tells the women they will die if they enter his house to gaze upon his feathers and his collected bundles of human hair, and this superstition is deeply imbedded in their consciousness even though experience gives it the lie, for I myself, says the author of the manuscript called the Descripción breve de la California, have made them enter and even take hold of this hair while nothing at all happens to them. ²¹

Most of the padres considered these medicine men to be in league with an evil spirit and practitioners of black magic. In an age when demonology ran riot these good missionaries were inclined to attribute almost every adverse happening to the machination of forces of evil, even though Spaniards generally did not go to the cruel extremes, in the matter of witchcraft, as the northern Europeans and North Americans with their witch hunting, witch torture, and execution. However, the missionaries soon discovered, as did Tamaral at Purísima and Helen at Guadalupe, that there were legions of other make-believe medicine men, uninitiated deceivers, who had never been admitted into the closed circle of the authentic practitioner. The fathers discovered that there were many minor impostors who were in the game for what they could get out of it, just like the professional guama. From these deceits they collected prestige and especially the offerings of the faithful. Some natives made their donations, either to guamas or false guamas, in a sincere act of propitiating their divinity; most gave the gifts through fear of the threatened consequences of not giving: sundry calamities, sickness, and death.

The guama of the peninsula, like the hechicero in the missions of the mainland, often became the bitter enemy of the missionary and caused him no end of trouble. The reason is not far to seek. The missionary did two things to ruin them: he uncovered their wiles and their deceits, and he robbed them of the prestige which they had hitherto enjoyed. Venegas, the contemporary and classic historian of these missions, describes them in eighteenth-century style as the most depraved people who lived in the land and they are the ministers of the devil, chosen by him as his agents in order to aid him in the ruin and perdition of this unhappy race.

The most diverting characteristic of these poor savages was their childlike nature. They simply never grew up. Father Baegert considered that indolence, lying, and thieving were their three original sins. To work in the sowing of a field and have to wait for three or four months to gather in the fruit of their labor was beyond them. In this the Californians were not dissimilar to those other children of the southern continent among whom the Black Robe organized the most prosperous and successful mission system of the New World, the Guaranis of Paraguay. These, if given a cow for a continual supply of milk, could not resist killing it for the ready meat. A group of Californians, when given a small herd of twelve goats in order that they might enjoy the same luxury, killed the animals forthwith in order to devour the strong flesh.

Father Wenceslaus Link tells us that in the early days of his northern mission of San Borja he was caring for a great treasure in this parched land: a little truck garden near his dwelling. One fine day he was to carry the Blessed Sacrament to a grievously ill neophyte. Out of respect for the Host (according to an old European custom) he asked his Indians to strew the ground with herbs along part of the way he intended to go. Nothing was better to hand than the lettuce and sprouting corn of the missionary’s garden. Before the padre could bat an eye his neophytes had pulled up everything he had planted and been caring for and had scattered the greenage all the way to the sick man’s lying place, for he would not be under a roof. It was then Link realized what infants these Californians were. Not in malice, it seems, but for sport they pierced with an arrow the fine mount of one of the padres for which he had refused a high price and which was indispensable for his missionary travels. That same day they childishly slew nineteen head of cattle. This sort of thing became of such frequent occurrence at Baegert’s mission of San Luis that he gave over trying to increase his herd of four hundred head of cattle and as large a number of sheep and goats, for they would be destroyed piecemeal by his neophytes. Baegert complains of such actions on the part of the natives more than any of the other padres. Judging from his Nachrichten he seems unsympathetic by nature. Perhaps he was also too severe, so that his Indians took it out on him by decimating his flocks and herds and by stealing his goods. But then, Baegert says that the neighboring missions were robbed too. Nevertheless, flocks and herds multiplied in some of the other establishments, so that it seems we should take the Alsatian missionary’s statement with a grain of salt.

Two incidents will serve to show the Californians’ infantilism. A group of natives came one day upon some large earthen jars along the west shore, probably jettisoned by a passing Manila galleon or left there by its sailors. Their wide-eyed wonder at the first sight of these strange objects seems never to have abated and they regarded them with superstitious awe. The jars were carried to a cave and placed near the entrance with the mouths turned toward the cave’s opening. The Indians came frequently to gaze at these mysterious objects with wide-open mouths. In their dances they were used to imitating the cries and the actions of the wild animals of the peninsula, so now they took to imitating, with what grimaces can well be imagined, the open mouths of the jars. Shortly after an epidemic spread among the group. It was the general opinion that the sickness came from the open mouths of the jars. The wise men met in council and it was solemnly decided these mouths must be stopped up. Since an Indian could not approach the objects now without danger of death, the leaders chose some young, strong men to sneak in at the side of the jars and from behind thrust grass into the openings. By so doing they thought to end the dreaded effluvia of disease.

Another tale is still more revealing. In the early days of the missions in this land a neophyte was sent by his padre to a neighboring mission to carry two loaves of bread as a gift to the missionary. An accompanying note explained the gift and other matters. The poor fellow could not refrain from tasting the bread on the way and, finding it good, he consumed both the loaves. Arriving at the mission he handed the father the note which told of the bread. When the missionary asked for the loaves the Indian denied having received them, for he could not guess how the padre could have knowledge of this. Sometime later, perhaps as another test of native psychology, the same Californian was sent down to the same mission with another gift of bread. This time the neophyte would be smart: he would eat the bread, but, so that the father could not know it, he hid the explanatory note under a rock while he devoured the precious cargo. Then he took the note again, went down to the mission, and handed the letter to the padre. But where are the loaves? demanded the Black Robe. The Indian replied with childish simplicity: I confess to you, father, that the first letter told you the truth, because it really saw me eat the bread; but this other [letter] is a liar because it tells you what it has not seen. ²²

The Lower California Indians were the greatest thieves and liars in the world. Nothing was safe from them, not the food in the father’s kitchen, not his pots and pans, not even the ornaments of the church or the sacerdotal robes of the sacristy. The Alsatian, Father Baegert, perhaps more worldly and certainly less sympathetic than some of his Latin confreres, saw through some of the tall tales about the natives’ knowledge of God and even of the Trinity before the coming of the missionary. He simply did not accept them. The Californians, wrote he, are masters in this kind of lies and deception and they are the least scrupulous as to the means used. On the other hand, to accept their word and thus allow oneself to be deceived is very human. ²³ He is here evidently referring to the reports of other missionaries and to other accounts concerning the former religious ideas of the Californians which he considered exaggerated or untrue. And it is certain that some of the early missionaries of the mainland, uncritical as was their age and prone to accept the marvelous and to see the devil everywhere, swallowed much too readily and reported too enthusiastically the great yarns spun out with coarse thread by Tepehuán or Tarahumar hechicero. As asserted earlier, Baegert held that the Californians had in former times no idea of a supreme being.

Thus were these poor people the greatest deceivers and at the same time exceedingly dull and dumb. But when it came to shirking unpleasant tasks and getting out of work, for which they had the greatest horror, they were smart enough. Father