In the popular mind there is a misapprehension that is as
deep-seated as it is ill-founded. It is that the California
Missions are the only Missions (except one or two in Arizona and a
few in Texas) and that they are the oldest in the country. This is
entirely an error. A look at a few dates and historic facts will
soon correct this mistake.
Cortés had conquered Mexico; Pizarro was conqueror in
Peru; Balboa had discovered the South Sea (the Pacific Ocean) and
all Spain was aflame with gold-lust. Narvaez, in great pomp and
ceremony, with six hundred soldiers of fortune, many of them of
good families and high social station, in his five specially built
vessels, sailed to gain fame, fortune and the fountain of perpetual
youth in what we now call Florida.
Disaster, destruction, death—I had almost said entire
annihilation—followed him and scarce allowed his expedition to
land, ere it was swallowed up, so that had it not been for the
escape of Cabeza de Vaca, his treasurer, and a few others, there
would have been nothing left to suggest that the history of the
start of the expedition was any other than a myth. But De Vaca and
his companions were saved, only to fall, however, into the hands of
the Indians. What an unhappy fate! Was life to end thus? Were all
the hopes, ambitions and glorious dreams of De Vaca to terminate in
a few years of bondage to degraded savages?
Unthinkable, unbearable, unbelievable. De Vaca was a man of
power, a man of thought. He reasoned the matter out. Somewhere on
the other side of the great island—for the world then thought of
the newly-discovered America as a vast island—his people were to
be found. He would work his way to them and freedom. He
communicated his hope and his determination to his companions in
captivity. Henceforth, regardless of whether they were held as
slaves by the Indians, or worshiped as demigods,—makers of great
medicine,—either keeping them from their hearts’ desire, they
never once ceased in their efforts to cross the country and reach
the Spanish settlements on the other side. For eight long years the
weary march westward continued, until, at length, the Spanish
soldiers of the Viceroy of New Spain were startled at seeing men
who were almost skeletons, clad in the rudest aboriginal garb, yet
speaking the purest Castilian and demanding in the tones of those
used to obedience that they be taken to his noble and magnificent
Viceroyship. Amazement, incredulity, surprise, gave way to
congratulations and rejoicings, when it was found that these were
the human drift of the expedition of which not a whisper, not an
echo, had been heard for eight long years.
Then curiosity came rushing in like a flood. Had they seen
anything on the journey? Were there any cities, any peoples worth
conquering; especially did any of them have wealth in gold, silver
and precious stones like that harvested so easily by Cortés
and Pizarro?
Cabeza didn’t know really, but—, and his long pause and brief
story of seven cities that he had heard of, one or two days’
journey to the north of his track, fired the imagination of the
Viceroy and his soldiers of fortune. To be sure, though, they sent
out a party of reconnaissance, under the control of a good father
of the Church, Fray Marcos de Nizza, a friar of the Orders Minor,
commonly known as a Franciscan, with Stephen, a negro, one of the
escaped party of Cabeza de Vaca, as a guide, to spy out the
land.
Fray Marcos penetrated as far as Zuni, and found there the seven
cities, wonderful and strange; though he did not enter them, as the
uncurbed amorous demands of Stephen had led to his death, and
Marcos feared lest a like fate befall himself, but he returned and
gave a fairly accurate account of what he saw. His story was not
untruthful, but there are those who think it was misleading in its
pauses and in what he did not tell. Those pauses and eloquent
silences were construed by the vivid imaginations of his listeners
to indicate what the Conquistadores desired, so a grand and
glorious expedition was planned, to go forth with great sound of
trumpets, in glad acclaim and glowing colors, led by his Superior
Excellency and Most Nobly Glorious Potentate, Senyor Don Francisco
Vasquez de Coronado, a native of Salamanca, Spain, and now governor
of the Mexican province of New Galicia.
It was a gay throng that started on that wonderful expedition
from Culiacan early in 1540. Their hopes were high, their
expectations keen. Many of them little dreamed of what was before
them. Alarcon was sent to sail up the Sea of Cortés (now the
Gulf of California) to keep in touch with the land expedition, and
Melchior Diaz, of that sea party, forced his way up what is now the
Colorado River to the arid sands of the Colorado Desert in Southern
California, before death and disaster overtook him.
Coronado himself crossed Arizona to Zuni—the pueblo of the
Indians that Fray Marcos had gazed upon from a hill, but had not
dared approach—and took it by storm, receiving a wound in the
conflict which laid him up for a while and made it necessary to
send his lieutenant, the Ensign Pedro de Tobar, to further
conquests to the north and west. Hence it was that Tobar, and not
Coronado, discovered the pueblos of the Hopi Indians. He also sent
his sergeant, Cardenas, to report on the stories told him of a
mighty river also to the north, and this explains why Cardenas was
the first white man to behold that eloquent abyss since known as
the Grand Canyon. And because Cardenas was Tobar’s subordinate
officer, the high authorities of the Santa Fé Railway—who
have yielded to a common-sense suggestion in the Mission
architecture of their railway stations, and romantic, historic
naming of their hotels—have called their Grand Canyon hotel, El
Tovar, their hotel at Las Vegas, Cardenas, and the one
at Williams (the junction point of the main line with the Grand
Canyon branch), Fray Marcos.
Poor Coronado, disappointed as to the finding and gaining of
great stores of wealth at Zuni, pushed on even to the eastern
boundaries of Kansas, but found nothing more valuable than great
herds of buffalo and many people, and returned crestfallen,
broken-hearted and almost disgraced by his own sense of failure, to
Mexico. And there he drops out of the story. But others followed
him, and in due time this northern portion of the country was
annexed to Spanish possessions and became known as New Mexico.
In the meantime the missionaries of the Church were active
beyond the conception of our modern minds in the newly conquered
Mexican countries.
The various orders of the Roman Catholic Church were
indefatigable in their determination to found cathedrals, churches,
missions, convents and schools. Jesuits, Franciscans and Dominicans
vied with each other in the fervor of their efforts, and Mexico was
soon dotted over with magnificent structures of their erection.
Many of the churches of Mexico are architectural gems of the first
water that compare favorably with the noted cathedrals of Europe,
and he who forgets this overlooks one of the most important factors
in Mexican history and civilization.
The period of expansion and enlargement of their political and
ecclesiastical borders continued until, in 1697, Fathers Kino and
Salviaterra, of the Jesuits, with indomitable energy and
unquenchable zeal, started the conversion of the Indians of the
peninsula of Lower California.
In those early days, the name California was not applied,
practically speaking, to the country we know as California. The
explorers of Cortés had discovered what they imagined was an
island, but afterwards learned was a peninsula, and this was soon
known as California. In this California there were many Indians,
and it was to missionize these that the God-fearing,
humanity-loving, self-sacrificing Jesuits just named—not
Franciscans—gave of their life, energy and love. The names of
Padres Kino and Salviaterra will long live in the annals of Mission
history for their devotion to the spiritual welfare of the Indians
of Lower California.
The results of their labors were soon seen in that within a few
years fourteen Missions were established, beginning with San Juan
Londa in 1697, and the more famous Loreto in 1698.
When the Jesuits were expelled, in 1768, the Franciscans took
charge of the Lower California Missions and established one other,
that of San Fernando de Velicatá, besides building a stone
chapel in the mining camp of San Antonio Real, situated near
Ventana Bay.
The Dominicans now followed, and the Missions of El Rosario,
Santo Domingo, Descanso, San Vicenti Ferrer, San Miguel Fronteriza,
Santo Tomás de Aquino, San Pedro Mártir de Verona, El
Mision Fronteriza de Guadalupe, and finally, Santa Catarina de los
Yumas were founded. This last Mission was established in 1797, and
this closed the active epoch of Mission building in the peninsula,
showing twenty-three fairly flourishing establishments in all.
It is not my purpose here to speak of these Missions of Lower
California, except in-so-far as their history connects them with
the founding of the Alta California Missions. A later
chapter will show the relationship of the two.
The Mission activity that led to the founding of Missions in
Lower California had already long been in exercise in New Mexico.
The reports of Marcos de Nizza had fired the hearts of the zealous
priests as vigorously as they had excited the cupidity of the
Conquistadores. Four Franciscan priests, Marcos de Nizza,
Antonio Victoria, Juan de Padilla and Juan de la Cruz, together
with a lay brother, Luis de Escalona, accompanied Coronado on his
expedition. On the third day out Fray Antonio Victoria broke his
leg, hence was compelled to return, and Fray Marcos speedily left
the expedition when Zuni was reached and nothing was found to
satisfy the cupidity of the Spaniards. He was finally permitted to
retire to Mexico, and there died, March 25, 1558.
For a time Mission activity in New Mexico remained dormant, not
only on account of intense preoccupation in other fields, but
because the political leaders seemed to see no purpose in
attempting the further subjugation of the country to the north (now
New Mexico and Arizona). But about forty years after Coronado,
another explorer was filled with adventurous zeal, and he applied
for a charter or royal permission to enter the country, conquer and
colonize it for the honor and glory of the king and his own
financial reward and honorable renown. This leader was Juan de
Oñate, who, in 1597, set out for New Mexico accompanied by
ten missionary padres, and in September of that year established
the second church in what is now United States territory. Juan de
Oñate was the real colonizer of this new country. It was in
1595 that he made a contract with the Viceroy of New Spain to
colonize it at his own expense. He was delayed, however, and could
not set out until early in 1597, when he started with four hundred
colonists, including two hundred soldiers, women and children, and
great herds of cattle and flocks of sheep. In due time he reached
what is now the village of Chamita, calling it San Gabriel de los
Españoles, a few miles north of Santa Fé, and there
established, in September, 1598, the first town of New Mexico, and
the second of the United States (St. Augustine, in Florida, having
been the first, established in 1560 by Aviles de Menendez).
The work of Oñate and the epoch it represents is
graphically, sympathetically and understandingly treated, from
the Indian’s standpoint, by Marah Ellis Ryan, in her
fascinating and illuminating novel, The Flute of the Gods,
which every student of the Missions of New Mexico and Arizona (as
also of California) will do well to read.
New Mexico has seen some of the most devoted missionaries of the
world, one of these, Fray Geronimo de Zarate Salmeron, having left
a most interesting, instructive account of “the things that have
been seen and known in New Mexico, as well by sea as by land, from
the year 1538 till that of 1626.”
This account was written in 1626 to induce other missionaries to
enter the field in which he was so earnest a laborer. For eight
years he worked in New Mexico, more than 280 years ago. In 1618 he
was parish priest at Jemez, mastered the Indian language and
baptized 6566 Indians, not counting those of Cia and Santa Ana. “He
also, single-handed and alone, pacified and converted the lofty
pueblo of Acoma, then hostile to the Spanish. He built churches and
monasteries, bore the fearful hardships and dangers of a
missionary’s life then in that wilderness, and has left us a most
valuable chronicle.” This was translated by Mr. Lummis and appeared
in The Land of Sunshine.
The missionaries who accompanied Juan de Oñate in 1597
built a chapel at San Gabriel, but no fragment of it remains,
though in 1680 its ruins were referred to. The second church in New
Mexico was built about 1606 in Santa Fé, the new city
founded the year before by Oñate. This church, however, did
not last long, for it was soon outgrown, and in 1622, Fray Alonzo
de Benavides, the Franciscan historian of New Mexico, laid the
foundation of the parish church, which was completed in 1627. When,
in 1870, it was decided to build the stone cathedral in Santa
Fé, this old church was demolished, except two large chapels
and the old sanctuary. It had been described in the official
records shortly prior to its demolition as follows: “An adobe
building 54 yards long by 9-1/2 in width, with two small towers not
provided with crosses, one containing two bells and the other
empty; the church being covered with the Crucero (the place
where a church takes the form of a cross by the side chapels),
there are two large separate chapels, the one on the north side
dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary, called also ‘La
Conquistadorea;’ and on the south side the other dedicated to St.
Joseph.”
Sometime shortly after 1636 the old church of San Miguel was
built in Santa Fé, and its original walls still form a part
of the church that stands to-day. It was partially demolished in
the rebellion of 1680, but was restored in 1710.
In 1617, nearly three hundred years ago, there were eleven
churches in New Mexico, the ruins of one of which, that of Pecos,
can still be seen a few miles above Glorieta on the Santa Fé
main line. This pueblo was once the largest in New Mexico, but it
was deserted in 1840, and now its great house, supposed to have
been much larger than the many-storied house of Zuni, is entirely
in ruins.
It would form a fascinating chapter could I here tell of the
stirring history of some of the Missions established in New Mexico.
There were martyrs by the score, escapes miraculous and wonderful.
Among the Hopis one whole village was completely destroyed and in
the neighborhood of seven hundred of its men—all of them—slain by
their fellow-Hopis of other towns, simply because of their
complaisance towards the hated, foreign long-gowns (as the
Franciscan priests were called). Suffice it to say that Missions
were established and churches built at practically all of the
Indian pueblos, and also at the Spanish settlements of San Gabriel
and Santa Cruz de la Canyada, many of which exist to this day. In
Texas, also, Missions had been established, the ruins of the chief
of which may be visited in one day from the city of San
Antonio.
