Some of the natives became restless during the mission era and, with the help of Spanish horses, escaped to freedom before the gold rush struck a devastating blow to their world.

By Diana Serra Cary

ANY MENTION OF the California Indians usually evokes pastoral scenes from that Arcadian time known as the Spanish mission era. Because colorful mission pageants and Ramona plays provided a favorite form of live entertainment for newcomers to the Golden State during the 1920s and early 1930s, this halcyon image has become fixed in the public mind.

True, things began peaceably enough when Spanish Franciscans founded Mission San Diego de Alcalá in July 1769 with the intent to Christianize the natives. But the peace could not last. Contrary to popular belief, a large percentage of California Indians--and there were some 300,000 of them in the 18th century--were neither placid nor compliant. Proud spirits among them fiercely resisted being reduced to subservient copies of these pious and intrusive white strangers.

In sharp contrast to the textbook version, the reportedly tranquil mission era was actually rife with conflict. Indian rebels fled the coastal missions, secretly plotted and led revolts. They even resorted to arson and murder in order to return to the wild, repeatedly risking severe reprisals for their unquenchable desire to be free. The missionaries had an equally unquenchable desire of their own--to obey Christ's admonition to go forth and preach the Gospel to all men.

At the outset of the mission era, everything was in short supply. Drought and rodents ruined crops, milk cows died, desperately needed clothing did not come from Mexico; hunger and nakedness followed. The missionaries were forced to let the neophytes make brief forays back into their native habitats to gather acorns and seeds and to kill game so that they wouldn't starve. In 1773, only a concerted slaughter of predatory grizzly bears by Captain Pedro Fáges--who was the commandant, or governor, of the California settlement--and 14 soldiers near Mission San Luis Obispo de Toloso saved the day.

With these rocky beginnings behind them, the missions of Alta California (there would be 21 in all by 1823) became increasingly populous and prosperous. But having no immunity against European diseases, the natives were periodically decimated by lethal epidemics of measles, dysentery, cholera, diphtheria and smallpox. The abiding resident killers were tuberculosis and syphilis.

Despite the soaring death rate among converts, during their first four decades the missions flourished. Inside their thick adobe walls natives from various coastal tribes were taught everything from farming to making and playing musical instruments. They learned to speak Spanish, butcher cattle, shear sheep, weave cloth and sing Latin hymns in choir, as well as produce such everyday necessities as shoes, saddles, candles, soap and wine. By 1800 uncounted thousands of mission cattle, sheep and horses were roaming the golden oak-studded hills and grasslands of as many as 18 missions bejeweling California's sunny coast from San Diego to San Francisco. Their total neophyte population had also reached an all-time high of close to 21,000 souls. But offsetting this institutional success was the rising incidence of flight, unrest and simmering rebellion.

Behind the one-dimensional image of benevolent friars molding primitive heathen souls into "civilized" adults, mission Indians were beset by serious psychological and emotional conflicts. Those not born within the system suffered the severe cultural shock of being uprooted from their natural homes and habits, an invisible ailment that their zealous mentors did not see or comprehend.

While many neophytes enjoyed what was a more reliable, varied and probably nutritious diet than in the wild, and while many neophytes took genuine pleasure in mastering crafts and skills, runaways remained a constant drain. Most fugitives fled to the villages of unconverted tribes or tribelets in the wild interior, groups that were often loath to take in Christian Indians. Some rebels hid out in the dense tule swamps of the well-watered San Joaquin Valley (a valley called Los Tulares by the Spaniards). Nearly all were pursued by small parties of Spanish soldiers and "loyal" mission neophytes, assigned the thankless job of dragging deserters back to the regimen and confinement they despised.

This vicious cycle engendered hostility between those who were loyal to the mission system and the fugitives they were told to capture. It also set both mission rebels and their pursuers against the headmen of many interior tribes. Most of the latter held all mission Indians in contempt and resented having these two contentious mission factions embroil free villagers in their endless fights with each other. As early as 1780, armed clashes occurred pitting neophytes from the coastal missions against the unconverted tribes--conflicts that stemmed from the interior Indians' constant dilemma of whether fellow Indians should be given sanctuary or returned to their Christian imprisonment.

Because the romantic 20th-century image of California mission Indians has long been one of meekly passive peons, it isn't easy to envision them as dashing mounted cavaliers. But by a curious twist of fate, the unlikely instrument of the rebels' eventual liberation turned out to be the showy Spanish horse.

"Indians, even if descended from kings," read one of the first and most strictly enforced New World prohibitions of the Spanish crown, "are not allowed to ride horses under penalty of death." Through some bureaucratic oversight, this all-powerful authority had given the missionaries a completely contradictory mandate--to turn the natives into self-supporting Christians, and to do so, preferably, within the fiscally attractive time frame of 10 short years.

Such a near miracle had been possible in Mexico, where more culturally advanced sedentary Indians had already been systematically missionized for two centuries. Mexico's missions were located near enough to large cities so that maestros in various crafts and trades could aid the padres in the time-consuming work of training neophytes. But in isolated California, where immense herds of livestock now grazed over thousands of unfenced acres, and with no more than two priests permitted by royal command to staff each mission, it was imperative the Indians be taught how to breed, brand, break and, yes, even ride horses!

Out of this dire necessity, many California Indians happily became vaqueros. These original North American cowboys developed into superlative horsemen whose genius in the saddle rivaled that of the more widely known Sioux and Cheyenne warriors of the Great Plains.

By the beginning of the second decade of the 19th century the population of California's missions had begun dropping dramatically. The constant erosion from desertions, steadily declining fertility among Indian women and the high death rate from disease were starting to take their toll. During a measles epidemic in 1806, the mean death rate for children in all the missions was 335 per thousand. In San Francisco alone it was 880, virtually wiping out an entire generation there under 10 years of age. The average mission sick bay housed anywhere from 100 to 300 patients a day. Ironically, between 1776 and 1825 there was only one qualified physician in all of Alta California.

Underlining the missions' shocking decline, neophytes no longer ran away singly, but were now leaving en masse. In a frantic effort to recruit fresh converts to carry on their religious mandate, the missionaries began penetrating the central valleys that they previously had left untouched. In 1806, one such priest-recruiter reported his amazement at sighting a single wild horse in a valley far removed from the coastal settlements. Twenty-five years later this same remote valley was overrun with herds of both gentle saddle stock and wild mustangs. The cause is not hard to find.

If horses had proliferated in the interior, so, too, had the number of runaway Indian vaqueros who now knew everything there was to know about horses. These rebel leaders taught their free Indian friends how to ride, and soon the two groups were alternating in making monthly raids on the mission horse herds, skillfully running off thousands of head every 30 days.

In 1827 the American mountain man Jedediah Smith made his first visit to the California interior. Pleased to find it rich in fine Spanish horses, he purchased 400 from their Indian owners and drove them east for sale. Word got around. Soon more mountain men and traders from Canada came visiting, ready to steal, buy or trade for good mounts. Men from the distant province of New Mexico also traveled the Old Spanish Trail from Santa Fe to Los Angeles and then headed north, offering to trade their province's handwoven wool serapes and blankets for mules. The nearly naked Indians took an instant shine to this warm and attractive article of trade. Back in Santa Fe, word of how cheaply California mules could be obtained caused a sensation and a stampede. The Nuevomexicanos became steady customers, and California's interior a busy emporium.

In 1846 the United States declared war on Mexico. Joe Walker, an enterprising mountain man turned guide, happened to be in the San Joaquin Valley at the time. He got wind that the U.S. Army was marching to the West Coast and might be needing remounts. He stole as many as he could and purchased, at around 50 cents a head, as many animals as he reckoned he could sell. Walker and a few companions pushed the sizable herd slowly east to Bent's Fort, on the North Fork of the Arkansas River. He found an army of 1,700 soldiers bivouacked there and quickly sold his entire herd of 1,800 mounts for an average $10 a head.

In their highly profitable stolen horses, rebel leaders at last possessed something of solid market value and a seemingly inexhaustible article of trade. Now when a runaway set out to seek refuge in an interior Indian village, he first caught for himself a horse of proven stamina to cover the ground ahead, then cut out as many more head from the mission herd as he could handily drive alone. Two or three would serve as gifts to placate his volatile Indian hosts, the remainder he would sell to white men for as much as the traffic would bear.

The successful rebels most always spoke fluent Spanish, possessed keen intelligence, had mastered an impressive number of European crafts and skills entirely unknown to the free tribes, and sometimes could even read and write. Ironically enough, the rebel owed his many accomplishments to the very same mentors he was now stealing blind. Several such capable and talented vaqueros became charismatic leaders who rose to become headmen of the villages that had given them sanctuary.

Among the Plains Indians, the fine art of stealing horses from enemy tribes carried immense sociocultural weight and symbolic value. For a young Cheyenne, Sioux or Comanche warrior, a horse raid offered the chance to test his mettle and display both his horsemanship and valor in the hot skirmishes that were often sparked by and followed such raids. To be "rich in horses" was the ultimate compliment and status symbol to a Plains Indian.

But the California Indians invested no such social or cultural values in their brass-tacks business of stealing mission horses. Their raids were undertaken strictly for money, mobility and as a means of maintaining their own cherished freedom. With their on-the-hoof loot the rebels had created neither a cultural rite nor a moral value system, but an independent and self-sustaining economy all their own.

Still, that was something significant, especially in light of the fact that the 1822 overthrow of Spanish rule in Mexico had introduced the new and unstable Mexican government to the region. A corrupt spoils system led politicos to square off against each other in power struggles in which the high stakes were land grants, money and political clout. It was no accident that California played host to a dozen venal Mexican governors between 1821 and 1846.

Under the new regime, daily life for ordinary Spanish settlers and soldiers, known as Californios, became calamitous. Presidio soldiers' salaries went unpaid for months, and supplies and mail appeared sporadically or not at all. Now, in exchange for bare necessities and the few amenities they could afford, strapped California rancheros traded hides and tallow from their cattle herds to hard-nosed Yankee captains whose merchant ships put in at ports along the coast.

Finally, in 1835, destroying the very underpinnings on which the province had been founded, the Mexican government cut off payment of all former "royal stipends" to missions and missionaries. Crowning that blow, the fanatically anti-Spanish faction ordered every Spaniard banished from Mexican soil. Since California's missionaries were nearly all Spanish-born, the final 1845 enforcement of this law of secularization spelled the wholesale abandonment of California's mission Indian population.

As had been practiced in Mexico under Spanish rule, upon the dissolution of a mission each family head or adult male over 20 was to receive 33 acres of mission land as his own. Half of each mission's livestock, equipment and seeds were to be divided equally among all its resident Indians. In California, however, most mission lands (but not all) ultimately fell into the hands of Mexican politicos or were illegally seized by cunning and manipulative Californios. They stole mission livestock, dispossessed the rightful neophyte landowners and even stripped the tiles from mission roofs to adorn their own.

The homeless natives were faced with several grim choices--fight for what was left of their lands, go to work for the hated Californios, seek jobs in larger coastal cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles, or escape into the interior. The most successful survivors did the latter.

Indian rebels now cast a vengeful eye on the Californios' thriving ranches, figuring the horses there could be run off as easily as the mission herds had been. In 1845, rebel leaders launched a series of systematic horse raids on the most prosperous ranches between San José and Santa Barbára. These incessant and financially devastating raids brought the beleaguered rancheros to their knees, stripping them of horses to the point where many no longer had enough mounts for their vaqueros to work their great herds of cattle. This divestment at the hands of their Indian enemies rendered many Californios helpless against the American invaders, who in 1848 emerged victors in their conflict with Mexico and took over the long-coveted province as part of the spoils of war.

For a time, Americans managed to impose an orderly, semimilitary rule over its chaotic Mexican society. But in January 1848 gold was discovered, and before long all semblance of social and political order crumbled amid the chaos, violence and death that ensued in the mad scramble to claim the region's newfound riches. Forty-Niners poured into California's interior from every corner of the globe.

"It was not only a new state and a new order of things in the moral order, but also in the physical world," commented an eyewitness, Samuel Ward, to those turbulent times. "Never previously had from fifty to one hundred thousand men assembled without a viceroy or an army, much less without government as in California, to appropriate to themselves, by the democratic right of the strongest, the virgin treasures of the earth." As lawlessness took over, social chaos descended into anarchy. The Indians, of course, paid the price.

Many Indians who had never been touched by the mission system took out legal mining claims on their own tribal lands. Entire families worked together, the men shoveling river gravel, the children carrying it in buckets to the women, who sat on the riverbanks and used finely woven native baskets to wash out the valuable nuggets and dust. Even the freedom-loving rebel leaders abandoned their lucrative wild horse enterprise in the universal rush for gold. But Indian-hating whites often drove them out at gunpoint. Other miners took a different tack, shrewdly hiring Indians to do the backbreaking labor of mining for them, paying the ignorant natives a mere pittance a day to harvest white miners' gold.

In the lawless mining regions, Indian males were often hunted and shot down for sport like wild game. Indian women, left widowed, homeless and starving, were raped and driven into prostitution to survive. Others were forced into concubinage with brutal white men who then turned them out as soon as white women became available. Syphilis was now rampant among men and women alike, and many Indian children were born with the disease.

Those Indian men and women who went to the cities to hire themselves out as field hands and domestics to both Californios and Yankee newcomers were virtually enslaved through a crafty system of perpetual indentured servitude. In Los Angeles, Indian field workers were rounded up in corrals every Friday night and one half of their dollar-a-day wage was paid them in brandy instead of cash. On Monday morning, having been drunk all weekend, they were taken from jail to the corral, where employers herded them back into the fields. Life for them was a deadly cycle of slave labor, chronic alcoholism and early death.

After California became a state in 1850, many humane citizens were horrified to see the suffering of the defenseless natives. The new state appointed three commissioners to create a viable system of Indian reservations, but federal unwillingness to fund it crippled their efforts. Although state and federal government policies were never completely in accord, over the next decade both state militia and federal troops agreed enough to settle various Indian tribes on nine temporary reservations in the northern part of the state. But by then the Indian population had been decimated.

Although in 1860 no reliable statistics were available, according to careful population studies since made by University of California scholar Sherbourne F. Cook, it has been established that there were 310,000 Indians living in California in 1769 when the Spaniards first arrived. By 1821 perhaps 200,000 remained. By 1848 they numbered 150,000. After California became a state in 1850, this number plummeted to 30,000, and an 1880 census listed a mere 20,500. "It was," says historian Albert L. Hurtado, "a catastrophe for the Indians."

Still, some determined individuals among the Indians met the challenges and managed to prosper. In the late 1840s the patriarch Juan Onesimo and his Rumsen Indian family were living on their own sizable land tract in Carmel Valley, near Mission San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo (Mission Carmel), where Juan was born in mission times and where he had been taught to play the violin. Saving money to buy livestock, this self-sufficient family raised corn, onions and tomatoes and marketed their produce in nearby Monterey. Each November 4, for as long as he lived, Juan Onesimo and a small choir of Indian survivors gathered in the half-ruined church, decorating the altar with flowers and candles and celebrating the Feast Day of its titular saint by singing the old Latin hymns to the accompaniment of Juan's violin.

On October 2, 1921--with the family still independent and prospering--Juan's three grandsons helped lay the cornerstone for a new Carmel Mission wing. And long after the death of the Rumsen patriarch, Juan Onesimo's descendants returned his venerable violin to the mission, where it remains on exhibit in the museum of the completely restored Mission Carmel Basilica.

Juan's violin lends a touch of reality to the romantic notion that the Spanish mission era was really as peaceful as those 1920s poets and playwrights believed it to be. But behind it lies a greater reality--the courage and persevering spirit it took for even one Indian family to survive the tragedies faced by California's native Americans for more than 200 years on the intrusive white man's ever-changing frontier.