At Misiones San Jose, Santa Clara, San Rafael, San Francisco y Santa Cruz, DON GUILLERMO HARTNELL found ‘poverty, everywhere grim depletion of neophytes by disease and desertion, and resentment against greedy administrators’

+++  He found that their town house had been whitewashed in his absence, and that new “cattle-branding places” had been built at the ranch.  Dona Teresa seemed to have managed better than her letters led him to believe.

  While at Alisal, Hartnell received a letter from Hugo Reid, asking him to intercede with Alvarado or Jimeno for the grant of ‘Rancho Santa Anita’ near San Gabriel.  Reid claimed title in the name of his Indian wife and her Indian children and concluded sentimentally: “You are no doubt long ere this once more in the bozom of your family, enjoying with double zest after your petty absence, that hearfelt satisfaction and felicity which every good man feels in the center of those dependent and cherished by him.”

  During the last week of August, Hartnell resumed the role of ‘visitador’.  Conditions in the northern missions (San Jose, Santa Clara, San Rafael, San Francisco, Santa Cruz) did not differ materially from those in southern and central California.  Everywhere there was poverty, everywhere grim depletion of neophytes by disease and desertion, and resentment against greedy administrators.  But the only place where violence flared was at Sonoma, where Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, the ‘comandante general’ who was also ‘administrador’ of San Francisco Solano, declined to open his records to his former tutor, or even to admit him within mission precincts.  Hartnell protested with spirit, but was forced to accept a prepared report on the state of the mission.  Senor Vallejo traded on the fact that he was Alvarado’s uncle, a person entitled to privilege.  He typified the arrogance that derives from inherited wealth and impregnable position.

  At Yerba Buena, on September 23, Hartnell recorded having finished the inspection of accounts “which are as one might expect since the administrator does not know how to read or write.”  The Indians here complained that they had to work too hard and did not receive sufficient food or clothes.  Santa Cruz was the last stop for Senores Hartnell and Castro; and ‘el visitador’ wrote to the Governor:  ”The Indians ask for their liberty and to have the little that is left distributed to them.  They greatly fear the present administrator.”

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Dona Maria Teresa de la Guerra Hartnell wrote to DON GUILLLERMO HARTNELL: ‘Your loving wife who longs to embrace you unendingly’

+++  Not only the administrators, in fear of losing their lucrative positions, but members of the ‘gente de razon’ who had profited by nepotism, were beginning to fear, even to hate, Hartnell and his zeal for reform.  Don Manuel Cota had spewed verbal venom upon him and attempted physical violence.  Pio Pico’s animosity, though more subtly and politely expressed, was no less violent.  Don Francisco Castillo felt he had been insulted at San Fernando, and Senor Valle was angry that ‘el visitador’ had not supported his claim to ‘Rancho San Francisco’.  These were only a few of the open enemies accumulated on what Alvarado had fondly believed would be a good-will tour.

  Hartnell had been without illusion all along.  So perhaps it did not come as too great a shock when he received a warning from a friend named Nicolas Den.  This Irish doctor wrote from Santa Barbara in Indian dialect telling “me to be vigilant because he has learned that some harm to my person is planned before I leave this neighbourhood” [Hartnell's 'Diario', entry of July 20].

  How welcome, in the atmosphere of hate where he now so often found himself, was a love letter received simultaneously from Dona Teresa.  The handwriting is atrocious, but the sentiment that inspired it is beautiful and undying.  After fourteen years of married life, and bearing him eleven children, Teresa ends her laboriously written epistle (translation): “And now, goodbye dear heart, I shall never again stay alone so long.  Your loving wife who longs to embrace you unendingly.”

  A letter to Don Manuel Jimeno, dated July 27, shows that at least one of Hartnell’s enemies decided threats will get him nowhere.

  ’Senor Manuel Cota presented himself to me with all humility at La Purisima Mission, putting himself at my disposal and urging me to reinstate him in the administration of Santa Barbara.  I answered that by no means  could I return to him his position now; that it was necessary for him first to cancel or settle Mission accounts which he had left pending with many of the tradesmen and inhabitants of Santa Barbara, to submit them to me and then we would see.  But to Your Excellency I shall say frankly that by no means should he be reestablished in his present position, and I am ready to prove it when it is necessary.’

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DON GUILLERMO HARTNELL suspended Don Manuel Cota for disrepecting Padre Narciso Duran, putting the latter back in charge of Mision Santa Barbara

+++  Next day Hartnell receives a note from Father Narciso Duran warning him that Cota had become “devil-possessed or rather a demon; that he had dragged an Indian by the hair and when the Padre wanted to separate them the administrator knocked him down, treating his scandalously!”  Duran advises taking three or four soldiers to subdue the madman, but Hartnell writes: “I went immediately to the mission but without any soldiers. . . . I reproached Cota for the lack of respect which he had shown the padre; and as it was lacking with me too (not recognizing me as his chief) . . . I made known to him the suspension of his position.”

  Don Guillermo gave over direction of Santa Barbara Mission to Padre Duran during the suspension of Senor Cota, and wrote to Manuel Jimeno of all he had done lately, trying to help the abused Indians.  At the same time, in fulfillment of Duran’s desire, he said:  ”I also sent word to the administrators from San Buenaventura to San Diego suggesting to them that, in regard to worship, the padres . . . . should have the power to punish on their own authority any offense which the latter [neophytes] might commit in this direction.”

  On July 13, Don Guillermo is still in Santa Barbara, sending another letter to his brother-in-law:

  ’Very satisfactory were the contents of your Excellency’s two official notes dated the 7th of this month, in which you impart to me the agreeable news that all my transactions and arrangement from San Diego to San Fernando have been approved as much by Your Excellency’s honorable predecessor as by Your Excellency himself: and I shall try in the future to so conduct myself that I may merit the continued approbation of my superiors.’

  Hartnell was backed by the government in every move he made, and could report with some satisfaction that “for a time at least the neophytes became more contented and industrious under Father Duran’s supervision.”  In spite of recent despoliation, considerable increase in livestock and agriculture was noted by Hartnell at the end of 1839; also, the buildings were in better repair than elsewhere.

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At Santa Barbara, as at San Buenaventura, DON GUILLERMO HARTNELL, ‘el visitador finds a state of destitution among the Indians who had not deserted the mission’

+++  While Don Carlos counted cattle on outlying mission ‘ranchos’, Don Guillermo wrote a letter of reproof to the administrator, Don Francisco del Castillo.  To the Governor he reported that “in regard to accounts nothing can be cleared up here.”  Crops were good because of an unprecedented absence of grasshoppers and rust.  But the Indians complained that the ‘San Francisco Rancho’,”in ordinary years the only place where there is any certainty of harvesting a crop,” was being taken from them to be given to Don Antonio del Valle. A decade earlier, Don Alfredo Robinson had called this ‘vecino’ “a dried up little piece of vanity.”  Hartnell advised against a grant which, “for the sake of pleasing one individual who does not at all deserve to be preferred,” would cause “incalculable damage to the whole working community.”

  Receiving no answer from the Governor, ‘el visitador’ inquires of Don Manuel Jimeno, his brother-in-law, ‘if my operations have met with the approval of the Senor referred to.”  Jimeno informs him immediately of Alvarado’s illness, and of his own heading of the provisional government.  On July 6, at Santa Barbara, Hartnell helps Don Jose de la Guerra with his correspondence and himself write to Senores Jimeno and Alvarado.  To Don Juan he writes as teacher to erring pupil:

  ”God grant that you may recover soon, but if you do not take wise measures for your own improvement. . . . . God is not obliged to do miracles.”  Alvarado was becoming too fond of the bottle and the life of ease.  Hartnell must have been thinking, while composing this letter, of a similar one sent to him long ago in South America by an older friend who feared his downfall from self-indulgence.

  At Santa Barbara, as at San Buenaventura, ‘el visitador’ finds a state of destitution among the Indians who had not deserted the mission.  He is  welcomed by Father Antonio Jimeno, brother to Don Manuel, and taken for a walk in the vineyard.  He learns distressing things about Don Manuel Cota’s administration of mission affairs. “Indeed,” reads an entry of July 8, “I found out that he had put down scarcely half of the cattle that he was sending to various individuals of the presidio.”

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DON GUILLERMO HARTNELL ‘was pleasantly surprised at the look of things’ at Misiones San Fernando y San Gabriel

+++  The mission has planted 22 fanegas of wheat, 2 of barley, 4 of corn, 3 1/2 of beans, 1 1/2 of peas, and 1/2 of lentils, all in good condition.’

  To Padre Zalvidea or even Don Alfredo Robinson these figures must have seemed pitifully small in contrast with the past.  In 1829, Don Alfredo had estimated the population as from twelve to fifteen hundred, and said that it probably possessed “from eighty to over a hundred thousand head of cattle, besides horses, mules, and sheep and countless numbers which run at large.”  But Hartnell found hope in the fact that Bandini was encouraging his charges to emerge from hopeless lethargy, to commence the task of rebuilding from the ruins.  He continues his report:

  ’The vineyards, too, promise to produce more than last year.  The Indians have worked hard to enclose them with walls; now all the vineyards have them except the large one that is being enclosed with a wooden fence; the farming lands also have their walls.’

  In Zalvidea’s day, no protective fencing had been necessary, save cactus hedges to keep the cattle out of vegetable and flower gardens close to the mission buildings.

  On June 13, while ‘el visitador’ is examining the accounts, he notes:

  ’Nothing in them can be understood clearly before the time of the present administrator, because he took over without inventory, and many documents are lacking, especially the ‘libro maestro’ that was used in the time of Padre Sanchez.’

  After mass, on the fifteenth, Hartnell and Castro mounted their horses for a day’s ride to San Fernando Mission.  Here Don Guillermo was pleasantly surprised at the look of things, as he had been at San Gabriel.  Crops were good.  Grapes of best quality were forming on the 30,000 vines that composed the mission vineyard, and “a stately garden was in front, with many choice fruit trees.”  But on entering the mission to examine the records, ‘el visitador’ found them in hopeless confusion.

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DON GUILLERMO HARTNELL found evidence, in his June 1839 inventory, that Mision San Gabriel had been restored by Don Juan Bandini to ‘a semblance of its former constructive activity’

+++  Though the queen of the missions had suffered despoliation during first enforcement of the Secularization Act (see Hugo Reid’s letters on the subject, in the appendix of ‘A Scotch Paisano’), she was fortunate in having a few members of the ‘gente de razon’ living near-by who interested themselves in the welfare of the Indians.  Slowly these succeeded in ending an ugly display of greed by other ‘vecinos.’  Most influential was an old lady named Dona Eulalia Perez, who had served as housemother of the mission in Zalvidea’s day.  Upon retirement to her ‘Rancho de San Pasqual’ (a grant of mission land from Father Zalvidea), she took an Indian family to live with her.  The man, Pablo, was to oversee ‘las cosas del campo’ and his beautiful wife, Victoria, acted as Dona Eulalia’s companion.  They had four children who were the delight of the old lady’s heart.

  With an uncounted number of his race, Pablo succumbed to smallpox.  Not long afterward, the Scotsman, Hugo Reid, married the young Indian widow and adopted her children.  She brought him a dower of land, given by the mission fathers to Pablo in recognition of faithful service; and Reid became as ardent as Dona Eulalia in his championship of Victoria’s people.

  When Bandini came to live near San Gabriel, early in 1838, he was antagonistic to the neophytes.  His own ranch at Tecate near San Diego had been sacked by hostile Indians, who left nothing but a smoking ruin of his home and bloody carcasses of the livestock they could not take with them.  But close association with his ‘compadre’ Hugo Reid  and the intelligent and good Victoria caused him to become more reasonable in his attitude; so much  so that Governor Alvarado, after granting him ‘el Rancho Jurupa’ in the neighbourhood of San Gabriel, appointed him ‘administrador’ of the mission.

  There is evidence that Don Juan Bandini restored at San Gabriel a semblance of its former constructive activity.  Hartnell takes inventory in June of 1839:

  ’There are in the mission and adjacent ranchos 221 tame horses, 1480 mares with their colts, 13 mules, 81 0xen, 1040 sheep, 981 head of cattle and 2 old herding-asses.  The Indian population that has been counted is composed of 369 people, namely: 174 men, 121 women, 41 boys, 12 girls, 21 children. . .

+++

DON GUILLERMO HARTNELL found Mision San Gabriel under administrator Don Juan Bandini ‘quite peaceful in contrast with rumblings of dissatisfaction from the south’

+++  ’They say that with the padre they will work happily even if he doesn’t give them anything, because they know and believe that when the padre doesn’t give it to them it is because there is nothing to give.  Finally I told them I would send their complaints to the government.’

  This conciliatory ending offended Don Santiago, whose conscience was clear.  He handed in his resignation, explaining that only grief and no profit had been his lot as admiinistrator.  ”He urges me,” notes ‘el vistador’, “to tell the government that his resignation will be accompanied by a statement that will explain the reasonss for the decadence of the Mission of San Juan Capistrano.”  Hartnell regretted Arguello’s act in resigning, considering him one of the few honest administrators.

  A communicaton came from Pio Pico, asking Hartnell’s aid in forcing runaway Indians back to San Luis Rey “because the ranch without laborers will soon come to total ruin.”  When ‘el visitador’ did not act quickly enough to please the imperious Don Pio, he wrote threateningly: “If the fugitive Indians are not put at my disposal, I must resign from the administration of San Luis Rey.”  Hartnell did not doubt that this would benefit the poor, ravaged institution, but he was disturbed, because a series of resignations, with attendant gossip, was not in line with his policy of “promoting harmony among all classes.”

  The interlude at San Gabriel Mission seems quite peaceful in contrast with rumblings of dissatisfaction from the south.  Don Juan Bandini was an able adminstrator, and he showed an all too rare understanding of the Indians.  Don Guillermo notes:

   ‘On June 8 I began to inspect the accounts of Senor Bandini; they seem to be in good order. 

  ’June 9 . . . . I assembled the Indians to count them.  After informing them of the object of my visit they were asked, at the request of Senor Bandini himself, if they were happy with their administrator and with the work of the Mission, if they had enough to eat, if they knew that he would help them in regard to clothing . . . . and, finally, if they had any complaint to make against him.  They all showed themselves to be very happy and there was not a single complaint.’

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Neophytes at Mision San Juan Capistrano didn’t like Mexican administrator Don Santiago Arguello; they asked DON GUILLERMO HARTNELL to have him removed

+++  According to Hugo Reid, he always preached to them in their own tongue and was godly looking, a tall man of commanding presence, fair complexion, and red-gold hair.  Courtly manners hinted at nobility of rank as well as of spirit.  Even in his maddest moments he never betrayed annoyance at others, only at himself.

  Zalvidea’s literary contributions were a diary of exploration in 1806, and a powerful petition written in 1827 on behalf of the Indians.  At San Gabriel he became renowned as a viticulturist, and of all physical evidences of his accomplishment there, he seemed proudest of the extensive vineyards.

  Most of his time at Capistrano was spent in reading devotional books and walking about the mission gardens.  Occasionally he would stop to make strange gestures and exclaim, “Va-te, Satanas,” as if in mortal conflict with the evil one.  Some thought him crazy during these moments of intense concentration, because he paid no heed to warnings of danger.  It is said that, while he was in a trance, wild cattle could charge upon him without harming him or evoking more than an admonition: “Shame, for throwing dirt upon this book!”

  An entry of June 5 in Hartnell’s diary tells of a disturbing incident at Capistrano concerned with Senor Arguello whom the Indians disliked:

  ’When I made the Indians see [by talking their language] that I had not found in the conduct of the administrator any cause to take his post away from him, they, both men and women, became greatly excited, shouting that if I did not remove him everyone was going to run away because they were tired of feeding as many mouths and furnishing clothing for as many people as compose the administrator’s family.  Neither the padre, who was exhorting them to patience and obedience to the government, nor I, who said all I could to calm them, could succeed in quieting them.  At first they wanted the administrator removed immediately . . . . but when the padre assured them that anybody else who might be put in would be worse than the present, and that I absolutely refused to do such an act of injustice, they asked to be left alone under the rule of the padre since they know that the mission is not in a condition to pay the salary of the administrator.  

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DON GUILLERMO HARTNELL visited Padre Jose Maria de Zalvidea, a friend of his youth, at Mision San Juan Capistrano

+++  Only this handful of people remained, descended from the 1300 neophytes who were living in or near the mission on December 8, 1812.  That fateful day, an earthquake toppled down the bell tower, and many were killed kneeling in prayer below.  This act of God commenced the destruction of Capistrano.  Few repairs were attempted in the years between the earthquake and the various secularization decrees which accelerated disintegration of the mission.

  The ‘visitador’ finds that “all the people ask to have the administrator sent away.”  But Don Santiago is able to refute their charges, supported by the padre, Jose Maria de Zalvidea, a friend of Hartnell’s youth.

  Don Guillermo welcomed an interlude when he could visit with Father Zalvidea, the man who by his intelligence and energy and devotion raised San Gabriel to leading place among the missions.  After twenty years of service he had been transferred in 1826 to hospitalization at San Juan Capistrano, suffering from a nervous breakdown.  But Hartnell found him, at fifty-nine years of age, not greatly changed from the days of his dealing with Macala y Arnel.  Always Zalvidea had certain eccentricities, and inflicted frequent punishments on himself in the tradition of the founding fathers.  Serra used a stone to beat his breast, and by his bedside kept a thong of iron links for scourging himself.  Zalvidea made frequent use of the scourge and, under his coarse robe, always wore a belt with iron points penetrating his flesh.  His health had become impaired by self-flagellation and abstemiousness, as much as by hard work and heavy responsibility.

  Born in Spain, he had escaped exile from California by playing no part in politics.  In 1829 he swore allegiance to the Mexican Republic “so far as was consistent with his profession.”  Nine years later, Zalvidea declined a pension provided by his order, plus passage to a fine home and distinguished family in Spain, because he know of no one to take his place in California.

  His service at Capistrano proved less spectacular than at San Gabriel, since times were changing, and he had fewer tools with which to work miracles.  But the simple Indian venerated him as a saint.

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DON GUILLERMO HARTNELL tried to ‘distribute to each [neophyte] what suited him from the common property’ in the ‘pueblo de las Flores’ near Mision San Luis Rey

+++  According to the administrator, Don Pio Pico, most of the Indians have run away, a few live in the nearby ‘pueblo de las Flores.’  Death and desolation pervades the establishment where Father Peyri often was able to count 1500 neophytes at work or prayer under his benevolent depotism.  An entry on the last day of May reads:

  ’We left San Luis with the administrator.  In the pueblo of Las Flores the Indians presented themselves so that the possessions might be distributed to them that, up to now, they have held in community; and I agreed to their request at the advice of Don Pio Pico and after having considered information that I acquired in other ways.  In the four years that they have lived in community, instead of having added to the possessions that were given to them, they have used up half of them and blame each other, saying that since nobody counted on anything for himself everyone considered that he had the right to take possession of what belonged to all’

  After evaluating what remains of the Indians’ real estate and livestock, and listening to pleas of destitution, Don Guillermo addresses the assembly in serious tone.  Using his own words:

  ’I advised the Indians that the intention of the government at the time of giving them their liberty was to increase possessions that had been allotted them; and that already they had seen by experience in communal life, instead of having progressed, they were losing everything.  I wanted to . . . . distribute to each one what particularly suited him from the common property; but I warned everyone that it should be understood that he who squandered what was allotted to him, and did not try in the future to make sure of his livelihood by working hard, would lose his rights as a ‘poblano’ and would have to return to his mission to work again under supervision.  Everyone seemed happy, at least on the surface.’

  Next stop is San Juan Capistrano, to investigate complaints concerning the administration of Don Santiago Arguello.  Hartnell notes in his diary of June 12:

  ”Today after Mass I assembled the Indian population and counted 32 men, 21 women, 10 girls, 5 old women, and 6 children.”

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