The Impact of the Missions
Historians and others continue to debate the question of the impact of the missions on the California Indians. Some scholars believe that the missions benefited the Native people; others regard their impact as catastrophic.
One sad fact is beyond dispute: the Indians at the missions suffered a high death rate, caused primarily by diseases for which they lacked immunity. The concentration of Indians in large numbers at the missions, the changes in diet, and the imposition of an alien discipline all contributed to the high rate of death. During the mission period, the Native population from San Diego to San Francisco fell from an estimated 72,000 to 18,000--a decline of more than 75 percent.
In recent years historians have come to appreciate the value of the testimony of California Indians who lived in the Spanish missions. Their testimony provides an "inside look" at mission life.
The testimony of Pablo Tac, a mission Indian born at San Luis Rey, offers a positive view. He and another Luiseño youth were taken to Rome by a missionary in 1833. In the manuscript of his testimony, deposited in the Vatican Library, Tac expressed thanks to God for the coming of the missionaries to his country. He did observe, however, that thousands of his people died "as a result of the sickness that came to California."
Victoria, a Tongva woman who grew up in Mission San Gabriel, testified that mission life was filled with misery, humiliation, and terror. She reported that the missionaries punished an Indian woman who had a miscarriage by having her head shaved, by being flogged every day for fifteen days, and by wearing iron shackles on her feet for three months, and by "having to appear every Sunday in church, on the steps leading up to the altar, with a hideous painted wooden child in her arms."
Lorenzo Asisaro, a neophyte at Mission Santa Cruz, testified that the mission Indians were subject to strict discipline: "The Indians at the missions were very severely treated by the padres, often punished by fifty lashes on the bare back. They were governed somewhat in the military style, having sergeants, corporals, and overseers, who were Indians, and they reported to the padres any disobedience or infraction of the rules, and then came the lash without mercy, the women the same as the men. The lash was made of rawhide."
The Native people of California responded to the Spanish missions in a variety of ways. Some cooperated fully while others resisted.
Passive resistance by mission Indians included strategies of noncooperation, work slowdowns, and the destruction of tools and equipment. Others resisted by running away. Soldiers stationed at the missions were charged with the duty of tracking down and bringing back the fugitives.
Active resistance to the missions included short-lived revolts, occasional attempts to murder individual missionaries, and raids on mission herds by mission fugitives and unconverted Indians. The first violent attack occurred in 1769 at San Diego, just a month after the mission was founded. The most successful instance of violent resistance was the destruction of two interior missions founded along the Colorado River. The Yuma people in 1781 attacked the missions and killed thirty soldiers and four missionaries.
Four years later, a 24-year-old Tongva shaman named Toypurina participated in an Indian conspiracy to destroy Mission San Gabriel. Like other Native leaders, Toypurina probably regarded the missionaries as a threat to her traditional status and authority. When questioned about her role in planning the revolt, Toypurina said: "I hate the padres and all of you, for living here on my native soil, for trespassing upon the land of my forefathers."
The Spanish missions in California were visited by several European expeditions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The records from these expeditions provide historians with an "outside look" at mission operations.
The first outsider to visit the missions was Jean Francois Galaup de La Pérouse, the leader of a voyage of scientific exploration for the French government. La Pérouse praised the character of the individual missionaries--"these men, truly apostolic, who have abandoned the idle life of a cloister to give themselves up to fatigues, cares, and anxieties of every kind." La Pérouse was less complimentary, however, of the missionaries' treatment of the California Indians.
In the following passage, La Pérouse compares Mission San Carlos Borromeo with the slave plantations he had earlier visited in the West Indies: "In a word, everything reminded us of a habitation in Saint Domingo, or any other West Indian [slave] colony. The men and women are assembled by the sound of the bell, one of the religious conducts them to their work, to church, and to all other exercises. We mention it with pain. The resemblance is so perfect, that we saw men and women loaded with irons, others in the stocks; and at length the noise of the strokes of a whip struck our ears...."
One of the most observant European visitors to Spanish California was the English naval officer George Vancouver, leader of an around-the-world voyage of exploration. He visited San Francisco Bay in November 1792, and also traveled to the missions at Santa Clara, Monterey, and San Diego. The following year he returned to California, and in the winter of 1794 he came back to Monterey for a final visit.
Vancouver persisted in referring to California as "New Albion," always using the name applied to California by the Englishman Francis Drake during his visit in 1579.