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Twenty-one Steps: Life in California's Old Spanish Missions
| Article
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21449 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 2001 |
3,138 Words |
| Author
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Branley Allan Branson And Mary Lou Branson
Branley Allan Branson is professor emeritus of biology at
Eastern Kentucky University. He and his wife, Mary Lou
Branson, have collaborated on several magazine articles. The
authors greatly appreciate the assistance provided them by the
Public Affairs Office at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. |
From architecture to religion to culture, the missions have helped make coastal California the place it is today. Meet the padres who built their vision and the Native Americans whose lives were changed by it. Among California's many treasures, one of the most quintessentially Californian is the string of twenty-one colonial Spanish missions that extends from San Diego in the south to Sonoma in the north. The missions were not established simultaneously but over a fairly extended period. Spanish imperial expansion was not primarily powered by religious fervor, however. The history of the mission churches extends back more than two hundred years before the first cross was erected in 1769 in Alta (or "upper") California, as the Spanish called the present-day U.S. state of California to differentiate it from Baja (or "lower") California.
For over a century, the Catholic missionary orders had petitioned the Spanish crown for the permission and financial resources needed to found missions in Alta California. It was hoped that the padres' religious zealotry would establish Spanish dominion over the native population, something the military forces had failed to do. Yet politics insinuated itself. King Carlos III believed that the Jesuit order coveted political power in the New World. When an assassin attempted to kill him, the king blamed the Jesuits and drove them from Spain. In June 1767, armed units expelled all Jesuit residents from Mexico City. Many died as they walked through the desert to the Pacific coast. King Carlos' edict directed the Franciscan College of San Fernando in Mexico City to replace the expelled Jesuits with members of its own order. Thus, in 1769, as the Spanish prepared to "rescue" Alta California from the Russians, the college selected a 56-year-old priest, Fr. Jun’pero Serra, a diminutive man who had spent twenty years as a missionary in Mexico. He would serve as president of the Alta California missions, none of which had yet been established. In less than twenty years, Serra established a foundation that undergirded the development of the western coast of the present United States.
The first expedition into Alta California was mounted under the leadership of Don Gaspar de Portol? with Father Serra in charge of the missionaries. Serra felt that his calling was not only saving souls--he personally baptized more than seven thousand Indians and confirmed five thousand others--but also teaching agriculture, crafts, writing, and music. His path eventually became El Camino Real (the Royal Way), which runs from Mexico throughout much of coastal California. Many of the missions the padres established formed the nuclei of small towns and villages, several of which grew into important cities
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