‘A good deal of book-borrowing back and forth always went on between Don Jose at ‘la casa de la Guerra’ in Santa Barbara and DON GUILLERMO HARTNELL’s home in Monterey

+++  The de la Guerras owned a silver tea set adequate to serve one hundred guests.  And Hartnell’s father-in-law was among the few Californians to value books as possessions.  On Don Jose’s shelves were to be found the true classics of Spanish literature.  A good deal of book-borrowing back and forth always went on between ‘la casa de la Guerra’ and the Hartnell home in Monterey.  ++  In the years before his marriage, Don Guillermo had become popular with some young blades of good family living in the capital.  Inspired perhaps by Atherton’s Poetical Society in Lima, he encouraged them to form a Historical Society.  According to Juan Bautista Alvarado (then a fifteen-year-old who, in company with his sixteen-year-old uncle, Mariano Guadalupe Valleoj, was being tutored by Hartnell), the aim of the society was “to preserve the records of their father’s achievements.”  But almost all of the second and third generation of Spanish-Californians lacked even the fundamentals of a liberal education, and few had any appreciation of the past.  They considered such a project unnatural.  Only one meeting was held for the original purpose “at which,”  Juan Bautista Alvarado reports in his manuscript reminiscences, in the Bancroft Library, “unfortunately politics forced history to take a back seat!”  ++  In addition to politics, seasonal ranch work, feats of horsemanship, serenading, dancing, and the observance of Roman Catholic religious customs sufficiently occupied these young men.  It required leisure to appreciate the natural beauty and fertility of the land, and to maintain the trusting, close relationship which made of life among the Spanish-Californians a secure and happy span of existence.  Such interest in the present and preoccupation with happiness turned their sisters into good wives and mothers who did not trouble their heads over insoluble problems.  The clear-cut tenets of their religion, as taught and practiced by the influential padres, made deviations from the moral code practically unknown among women of the ‘gente de razon.’  ++  Most young girls of conventional upbringing learned something of the three R’s, but marrying in the early teens, as so many did, and immediately launching large families, left no time for further study.  …  +++