Picturesque Pala Part 2

One morning just about a century ago, a monk fastened a cross in the still soft adobe on the top of the bell tower and at the foot of the cross he planted a cactus as a token that the cross would conquer the wilderness. From that day to this this cactus has rested its spiny side against that cross, and together--the one the hope and the inspiration of the ages, and the other a savage among the scant bloom of the desert--they have calmly surveyed the labor, the opulence, the decline, and the ruin of a hundred years.

One writer sweetly says of it:

It is rooted in a crack of the adobe tower, close to the spot where the Christian symbol is fixed, and seemed, I thought, to typify how little of material substance is needed by the soul that dwells always at the foot of the cross.

Another story has it that when Padre Peyri ordered the cross placed, it was of green oak from the Palomar mountains. Naturally, the birds came and perched on it, and probably nested at its foot, using mud for that purpose. In this soft mud a chance seed took lodgment and grew.

Be this as it may the birds have always frequented it since I have known it, some of them even nesting in the th.o.r.n.y cactus slabs. On one visit I found a tiny cactus wren bringing up its brood there, while on another occasion I could have sworn it was a mocking-bird, for it poured out such a flood of melody as only a mocking-bird could, but whether the nest there belonged to the glorious songster, or to some other feathered creature, I could not watch long enough to tell.

Other birds too, have utilized this tower from which to launch forth their symphonies and concertos. In the early mornings of several of my visits, I have gone out and sat, perfectly entranced, at the rich torrents of exquisite and independent melody each bird poured forth in prodigal exuberance, and yet which all combined in one chorus of sweetness and joy as must have thrilled the priestly builder, if, today, from his heavenly home he be able to look down upon the work of his hands.

It must not be forgotten, in our admiration for the separate-standing Campanile of Pala, and the general belief that it is the only example in the world, that others of the Franciscan Missions of California practically have the same architectural feature. While the well-known campanile of the Mission San Gabriel is not, in strict fact, a separate standing one, the bell-tower itself is merely an extension of the mission wall and practically stands alone. The same method of construction is followed at Mission Santa Ines. The fachada of the church is extended, to the right, as a wall, which is simply a detached belfry. And, as is well known, the campanile of San Juan Capistrano, erected after the fall of the bell-tower of the grand church in the earthquake of 1812, is a mere wall, closing up a pa.s.sage between two buildings, with pierced apertures in which the bells are hung.

CHAPTER V.

The Decline of San Luis Rey and Pala.

The original purpose of the Spanish Council, as well as of the Church, in founding the Missions of California, was to train the Indians in the ways of Christianity and civilization, and, ultimately, to make citizens of them when it was deemed they had progressed far enough and were stable enough in character to justify such a step.

How long this training period would require none ventured to a.s.sert, but whether fifty years, a hundred, or five hundred, the Church undertook the task and was prepared to carry it out.

When, however, the republic of Mexico fell upon evil days and such self-seekers as Santa Anna became president, the greedy politicians of Mexico and the province of California saw an opportunity to feather their own nests at the expense of the Indians. Let the reader for a few moments picture the general situation. Here, in California, there were twenty-one Missions and quite a number of branches, or _asistencias_. In each Mission from one to three thousand Indians were a.s.sembled, under competent direction and business management. It can readily be seen that fields grew fertile, flocks and herds increased, and possessions of a variety of kinds multiplied under such conditions. All these acc.u.mulations, however, it must not be forgotten, were not regarded by the padres as their own property, or that of the Church. They were merely held in trust for the benefit of the Indians, and, when the time eventually arrived, were to be distributed as the sole and individual property of the Indians.

Had that time arrived? There is but one opinion in the minds of the authorities, even those who do not in all things approve of the missionaries and their work. For instance, Hittell says:

In other cases it has required hundreds of years to educate savages up to the point of making citizens, and many hundreds to make good citizens. The idea of at once transforming the idle, improvident and brutish natives of California into industrious, law-abiding and self-governing town people was preposterous.

Yet this--the making of citizens of the Indians--was the plea under which the Missions were secularized. The plea was a paltry falsehood.

The Missions were the plum for which the politicians strove. Here is what Clinch writes of San Luis Rey:

Under Peyri's administration, despite its disadvantages of soil, San Luis Rey grew steadily in population and material prosperity. In 1800 cattle and horses were six hundred and sheep sixteen hundred. The wheat harvest gave two thousand bushels, but corn and beans were failures and barley only gave a hundred and twenty fanegas. Ten years later 11,000 fanegas of all kinds of grain were gathered as a crop. Cattle had grown to ten thousand five hundred and sheep and hogs nearly ten thousand. The Indians had increased to fifteen hundred. Fourteen hundred and fifty had been baptized while there had been only four hundred deaths recorded. By 1826 the parent mission counted nearly three thousand Christian Indians and nearly a thousand gathered at Pala, six leagues from the central establishment. A church was built there and a priest usually resided at it. At its best time San Luis Rey counted nearly thirty thousand cattle, as many sheep and over two thousand horses as the property of its three thousand Indians. Its average grain crop was about thirteen thousand bushels. San Gabriel surpa.s.sed it in farming prosperity with a crop which reached thirty thousand bushels in a year, but in population, in live stock, in the low death rate among its Indians and in the character of its church and buildings, San Luis Rey continued to the end first among the Franciscan missions.

It can well be imagined, therefore, that when the Mexican politicians decided that the time had arrived to secularize the Missions, San Luis Rey would be one of the first to be laid hold of. Pablo de la Portilla and later, Pio Pico, were appointed the commissioners, and it seems to be the general opinion that they were no better than those who operated at the other Missions, and of whom Hittell writes:

The great ma.s.s of the commissioners and their officials, whose duty it became to administer the properties of the missions, and especially their great numbers of horses, cattle, sheep and other animals, thought of little else and accomplished little else than enriching themselves. It cannot be said that the spoliation was immediate; but it was certainly very rapid. A few years sufficed to strip the establishments of everything of value and leave the Indians, who were in contemplation of law the beneficiaries of secularization, a shivering crowd of naked, and, so to speak, homeless wanderers upon the face of the earth.

It is almost impossible for one who has not given the matter due study to realize the demoralizing effect upon the Indians and the Mission buildings of this infamous course of procedure. The Indians speedily became the prey of the vicious, the abandoned, the hyenas and vultures of so-called civilization. Deprived of the parental care of the fathers, and led astray on every hand, their corruption spelt speedy extinction, and two or three generations saw this largely accomplished. Only those Indians who were too far away to be easily reached escaped, or partially escaped, the general destruction. The processes were swift, the results lamentably certain.

CHAPTER VI.

The Author of Ramona at Pala.

When Helen Hunt Jackson, the gifted author of the romance _Ramona_--over which hundreds of thousands of Americans have shed bitter tears in deep sympathy with the wrongs perpetrated upon the Indians--was visiting the Mission Indians of California, in 1883, she wrote the following sketch of Pala. This is copied from her _California and the Missions_, by kind permission of the publishers, Little, Brown & Co., of Boston:

One of the most beautiful appanages of the San Luis Rey Mission, in the time of its prosperity, was the Pala Valley.

It lies about twenty-five miles east (twenty miles, Ed.) of San Luis, among broken spurs of the Coast Range, watered by the San Luis River, and also by its own little stream, the Pala Creek. It was always a favorite home of the Indians; and at the time of the secularization, over a thousand of them used to gather at the weekly ma.s.s in its chapel. Now, on the occasional visits of the San Juan Capistrano priest, to hold service there, the dilapidated little church is not half filled, and the numbers are growing smaller each year. The buildings are all in decay; the stone steps leading to the belfry have crumbled; the walls of the little graveyard are broken in many places, the paling and the graves are thrown down. On the day we were there, a memorial service for the dead was going on in the chapel; a great square altar was draped with black, decorated with silver lace and ghostly funereal emblems; candles were burning; a row of kneeling black-shawled women were holding lighted candles in their hands; two old Indians were chanting a Latin hymn from a tattered missal bound in rawhide; the whole place was full of chilly gloom, in sharp contrast to the bright valley outside, with its sunlight and silence. This ma.s.s was for the soul of an old Indian woman named Margarita, sister of Manuelito, a somewhat famous chief of several bands of the San Luisenos. Her home was at the Potrero,--a mountain meadow, or pasture, as the word signifies,--about ten miles from Pala, high up the mountainside, and reached by an almost impa.s.sable road. This farm--or "saeter" it would be called in Norway--was given to Margarita by the friars; and by some exceptional good fortune she had a t.i.tle which, it is said, can be maintained by her heirs. In 1871, in a revolt of some of Manuelito's bands, Margarita was hung up by her wrists till she was near dying, but was cut down at the last minute and saved.

One of her daughters speaks a little English; and finding that we had visited Pala solely on account of our interest in the Indians, she asked us to come up to the Potrero and pa.s.s the night. She said timidly that they had plenty of beds, and would do all that they knew how to do to make us comfortable.

One might be in many a dear-priced hotel less comfortably lodged and served than we were by these hospitable Indians in their mud house, floored with earth. In my bedroom were three beds, all neatly made, with lace-trimmed sheets and pillow-cases and patchwork coverlids. One small square window with a wooden shutter was the only aperture for air, and there was no furniture except one chair and a half-dozen trunks. The Indians, like the Norwegian peasants, keep their clothes and various properties all neatly packed away in boxes or trunks. As I fell asleep, I wondered if in the morning I should see Indian heads on the pillows opposite me; the whole place was swarming with men, women, and babies, and it seemed impossible for them to spare so many beds; but, no, when I waked, there were the beds still undisturbed; a soft-eyed Indian girl was on her knees rummaging in one of the trunks; seeing me awake, she murmured a few words in Indian, which conveyed her apology as well as if I had understood them. From the very bottom of the trunk she drew out a gilt-edged china mug, darted out of the room, and came back bringing it filled with fresh water. As she set it in the chair, in which she had already put a tin pan of water and a clean coa.r.s.e towel, she smiled, and made a sign that it was for my teeth. There was a thoughtfulness and delicacy in the attention which lifted it far beyond the level of its literal value. The gilt-edged mug was her most precious possession; and, in remembering water for the teeth, she had provided me with the last superfluity in the way of white man's comfort of which she could think.

The food which they gave us was a surprise; it was far better than we had found the night before in the house of an Austrian colonel's son, at Pala. Chicken, deliciously cooked, with rice and chile; soda-biscuits delicately made; good milk and b.u.t.ter, all laid in orderly fashion, with a clean tablecloth, and clean, white stone china. When I said to our hostess that I regretted very much that they had given up their beds in my room, that they ought not to have done it, she answered me with a wave of her hand that "It was nothing; they hoped I had slept well; that they had plenty of other beds." The hospitable lie did not deceive me, for by examination I had convinced myself that the greater part of the family must have slept on the bare earth in the kitchen.

They would not have taken pay for our lodging, except that they had had heavy expenses connected with Margarita's funeral.... We left at six o'clock in the morning; Margarita's husband, the "captain," riding off with us to see us safe on our way. When we had pa.s.sed the worst gullies and boulders, he whirled his horse, lifted his ragged old sombrero with the grace of a cavalier, smiled, wished us good-day and good luck, and was out of sight in a second, his little wild pony galloping up the rough trail as if it were as smooth as a race-course.

Between the Potrero and Pala are two Indian villages, the Rincon and Pauma. The Rincon is at the head of the valley, snugged up against the mountains, as its name signifies, in a "corner." Here were fences, irrigating ditches, fields of barley, wheat, hay and peas; a little herd of horses and cows grazing, and several flocks of sheep. The men were all away sheep-shearing; the women were at work in the fields, some hoeing, some clearing out the irrigating ditches, and all the old women plaiting baskets. These Rincon Indians, we were told, had refused a school offered them by the Government; they said they would accept nothing at the hands of the Government until it gave them a t.i.tle to their lands.

[Ill.u.s.tration: An Old San Luis Rey Mission Indian.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Pala Campanile from the Graveyard.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Just Entering Pala Valley on the Road from Oceanside.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: An Ancient Pala Indian.]

CHAPTER VII.

Further Desolation

Cursed by the common fate of the Missions Pala suffered severely. In thirty years all its glory had departed as Mrs. Jackson graphically pictures in the preceding chapter. But Pala was destined to receive another blow. This is explained by Professor Frank J. Polley, formerly President of the Southern California Historical Society. In the early 'nineties he visited Pala and from an article published by him in 1893 the following accompanying extracts are quoted:

Mr. Viele, the present owner of most of the old Mission property, is the only white man residing nearby. His store and dwelling is a long, low adobe, opposite the church.

Nearby is his blacksmith shop, and in the open s.p.a.ce between the church ruins and the river are the remains of the brush booths used by the people at the yearly festival, and these, with the remnants of the mission buildings, corral walls, and the quaint Indian church with its beautiful bell tower, const.i.tute the Pala of today.

The question naturally arises: How did Mr. Viele gain possession and ownership of the Mission property? In the course of his narrative Professor Polley gives the answer:

Trading with the Indians is a slow but simple process. An uncouth Indian figure in strange garb will silently enter the store, and, with hat in hand, stand motionless in the center of the room until Mrs. Viele chooses to recognize him. Then follow rapid sentences in the guttural tone, she executes her judgment in supplying his wants and hands out the parcel, but the figure stands silently and motionless as before. Time pa.s.ses, and soon the Indian is leaning against the center post. A little later the position is swiftly changed, and next when one thinks of him the figure has vanished and rejoined the group who are smoking their cigarettes by the fence. Money is seldom paid until after their crops are sold.

With the squaw the transaction is different in this respect.

Like her European sister, every piece of cloth has to be unrolled before purchasing; otherwise it is much the same as with the men. Both men and women are very coa.r.s.e, education and morality are on a very low plane, the marital vow seems to be but little regarded, and it is no uncommon thing to see, within the shadow of the mission walls, five or six couples living in common in one room. The race is fast dying out from disease, for which the white people are largely responsible. Unable to cope with these new ills, suspicious of the government doctor, and treated like common property by the lower white element in the mountain regions, the Indians are jealous and distrustful of all; even the sick, instead of being brought to the settlement for treatment, are secreted in the hills. One old squaw of uncertain age came each day in a clumsy shuffle to the gate, and there sank her fat body into an almost indistinguishable heap of rags and flesh. The gift of a cigarette would temporarily arouse her to animation; otherwise she would sit there for hours, apparently oblivious to all that was pa.s.sing, and certainly ignored by all in the house except myself. The education of the Indian here is a serious problem. They do not attend the county school, nor are they encouraged to come, as their morals are demoralizing to the rest of the cla.s.s. The chief, or captain, is elected by the tribe, and, though only about 30 years of age, the present one has had his position a long time. His duties are light, and he is careful in executing his authority. He is a reasonably bright fellow, speaks English fairly well and often succeeds in securing justice for his tribe in the way of government supplies. The balance of his time he cultivates a little patch of garden, and seems to enjoy life after the Indian fashion.

Procuring the church keys was not so simple a matter, as the building is now closed and services are held at very rare intervals. This is the result of litigation. The law has invaded this sheltered haven. Years ago, when times were different and the mission was making some pretense to be a living church, in the course of their duties a party of government surveyors came here. As a result of their surveys one of them told Mr. Viele in confidence that the entire mission holdings, olive orchards and lands were all on government property. Mr. Viele at once took steps to claim all, and did so. The secret leaked out, and others came in and attempted to settle on parts of the property under various claims of t.i.tle, and soon the Catholic church and the claimants were engaged in a long lawsuit, which proved the death struggle of the church's interests. Mr. Viele emerged victorious, sole owner of the church, the orchard, the bells, and even the graveyard. Afterward, by deed of gift, he gave the church authorities the tumble-down ruin of the church, the dark adobe robing room, the bells and the graveyard, but, because Mr. Viele still withheld the valuable lands from the church, no services are held there, and the quarrel has gone on year by year. Mr. Viele clings to what he terms his legal rights, and the church is locked up and the Indian left largely to his own devices. Once in possession of the keys, we found them immense pieces of iron, and it took some time to unlock the door. The services of one of the Indian pupils materially a.s.sisted us in our investigations. The church is a veritable curiosity, narrow, long, low and dark, with adobe walls and heavy beams roughly set in the sides to furnish support for the roof. Canes and tules const.i.tute this part of the structure. The earthen walls are covered with rude paintings of Indian design and of strange coloring that have preserved their tone very well indeed. Great square bricks badly worn pave the floor, and, set in deep niches along the walls at intervals, are various utensils of battered copper and bra.s.s that would arouse the cupidity of a collector of bric-a-brac. The door is strongly barred and has iron plates set with large rivets. The strange light that comes through the narrow windows and broken roof sheds an unnatural glow on the paintings upon the walls and puts into strange relief the ruined altar far distant in the church. Three wooden images yet remain upon the altar, but they are sadly broken and their vestments are gone. One is a statue of St. Louis, and is held in great veneration by the Indians. They say it was secretly brought from the San Luis Rey Mission and placed here for safe keeping. When the annual reunion of the Indians takes place this image is decorated in cheap trappings and occupies the post of honor in the procession. The robing room is a small, dark apartment behind the altar, where not a ray of light could enter. We dragged a trunkful of altar trappings and saints' vestments out into the light. The dust lay thickly upon the garments in these old chests, and it is to be hoped that no one with a shade less of morality than we had will ever explore their treasures, or the church may be robbed and the images suffer much loss of their decorative attire. Undoubtedly everything of value has long since been removed, but what remains is very quaint and odd, being largely of Indian workmanship. Everything about this simple structure spoke of slow and patient work by the native workmen, and it needed but little imaginative power to conjure up the scene when men were hauling trees from the mountains, making the shallow, square bricks, preparing the adobe, and later painting these walls as earnestly perhaps as did some of the greater artists in the gorgeous chapels of cultivated Rome. The hinges creaked loudly and the great key grated harshly in the rusty lock as we spent some time in securing the fastenings at our departure. The beauty of the valley and the bright sunlight were in great contrast to the cool shadows of the dimly-lighted church. Once outside, we again made the circuit of the outlying walls, where birds sing and gra.s.ses grow from the ruined walls of the adobes.

Through gaps in them we pa.s.sed from one enclosure to another, this one roofless, that one nearly so, and a third so patched up as to hold a few Indians who make it their home, and in tiny gardens cultivate a few flowers or vegetables and prepare their food in basins sunken in the firm earth. A few baskets are yet left in this community, but of poor quality, the more valuable ones having been long since gathered by collectors, or sold and gambled by the Indians themselves.

Many curious relics still exist, however, for those who are willing to pay several times the value of each article.

Pala remained in much the same condition described above, its Indians slowly decreasing in numbers, until the events occurred described in the following chapters.