Chapter 2 No.2

If the little grief-stricken band of monks who stood weeping around Junipero Serra's grave in 1784 could have foreseen the events of the next thirty years, their weeping would have been turned into exultant joy; but not the most daring enthusiast among them could have dreamed of the harvest of power destined to be raised from the seed thus sown in weakness.

Almost with his dying breath Father Junipero had promised to use "all his influence with God" in behalf of the missions. In the course of the next four months after his death more converts were baptized than in the whole three years previous; and it became at once the common belief that his soul had passed directly into heaven, and that this great wave of conversions was the result of his prayers. Prosperity continued steadily to increase. Mission after mission was successfully founded, until, in 1804, the occupation of the sea-coast line from San Francisco to San Diego was complete, there being nineteen mission establishments only an easy day's journey apart from each other.

The ten new missions were founded in the following order: Santa Barbara, Dec. 4, 1786; La Purissima, Dec. 8, 1787; Santa Cruz, Sept. 25, 1791; Soledad, Oct. 9, 1791; San José, June 11, 1797; San Juan Bautista, June 24, 1797; San Miguel, July 25, 1797; San Fernando Rey, Sept. 8, 1797; San Luis Rey de Francia, June 18, 1798; Santa Inez, Sept. 7, 1804.

Beginnings had also been made on a projected second line, to be from thirty to fifty miles back from the sea; and this inland chain of settlements and development promised to be in no way inferior to the first. The wealth of the mission establishments had grown to an almost incredible degree. In several of them massive stone churches had been built, of an architecture at once so simple and harmonious that, even in ruins, it is to-day the grandest in America; and it will remain, so long as arch, pillar, or dome of it shall stand, a noble and touching monument of the patient Indian workers who built, and of the devoted friars who designed, its majestic and graceful proportions.

In all of the missions were buildings on a large scale, providing for hundreds of occupants, for all the necessary trades and manufactures, and many of the ornamental arts of civilized life. Enormous tracts of land were under high cultivation; the grains and cool fruits of the temperate zone flourishing, in the marvellous California air, side by side with the palm, olive, grape, fig, orange, and pomegranate. From the two hundred head of cattle sent by the wise Galvez, had grown herds past numbering; and to these had been added vast flocks of sheep and herds of horses. In these nineteen missions were gathered over twenty thousand Indians, leading regular and industrious lives, and conforming to the usages of the Catholic religion.

A description of the San Luis Rey Mission, written by De Mofras, an attaché of the French Legation in Mexico in 1842, gives a clear idea of the form, and some of the methods, of the mission establishments:-

"The building is a quadrilateral, four hundred and fifty feet square; the church occupies one of its wings; the fa?ade is ornamented with a gallery. The building is two stories in height. The interior is formed by a court ornamented with fountains, and decorated with trees. Upon the gallery which runs around it open the dormitories of the monks, of the majors-domo, and of travellers, small workshops, schoolrooms, and storerooms. The hospitals are situated in the most quiet parts of the mission, where also the schools are kept. The young Indian girls dwell in halls called monasteries, and are called nuns. Placed under the care of Indian matrons, who are worthy of confidence, they learn to make cloth of wool, cotton, and flax, and do not leave the monastery until they are old enough to be married. The Indian children mingle in schools with those of the white colonists. A certain number chosen among the pupils who display the most intelligence learn music, chanting, the violin, flute, horn, violoncello, or other instruments. Those who distinguish themselves in the carpenters' shops, at the forge, or in agricultural labors are appointed alcaldes, or overseers, and charged with the directions of the laborers."

Surrounding these buildings, or arranged in regular streets upon one side of them, were the homes of the Indian families. These were built of adobe, or of reeds, after the native fashion. The daily routine of the Indians' life was simple and uniform. They were divided into squads of laborers. At sunrise the Angelus bell called them to mass. After the mass they breakfasted, and then dispersed to their various labors. At eleven they were again summoned together for dinner, after which they rested until two, when they went again to work, and worked until the evening Angelus, just before sunset. After prayers and supper they were in the habit of dancing and playing games until bedtime. Their food was good. They had meat at noon, accompanied by posale, a sort of succotash made of corn, beans, and wheat, boiled together. Their breakfast and supper were usually of porridge made from different grains, called atole and pinole.

The men wore linen shirts, pantaloons, and blankets. The overseers and best workmen had suits of cloth like the Spaniards. The women received every year two chemises, one gown, and a blanket. De Mofras says:-

"When the hides, tallow, grain, wine, and oil were sold at good prices to ships from abroad, the monks distributed handkerchiefs, wearing apparel, tobacco, and trinkets among the Indians, and devoted the surplus to the embellishment of the churches, the purchase of musical instruments, pictures, church ornaments, etc.; still they were careful to keep a part of the harvest in the granaries to provide for years of scarcity."

The rule of the friars was in the main a kindly one. The vice of drunkenness was severely punished by flogging. Quarrelling between husbands and wives was also dealt with summarily, the offending parties being chained together by the leg till they were glad to promise to keep peace. New converts and recruits were secured in many ways: sometimes by sending out parties of those already attached to the new mode of life, and letting them set forth to the savages the advantages and comforts of the Christian way; sometimes by luring strangers in with gifts; sometimes, it is said, by capturing them by main force; but of this there is only scanty evidence, and it is not probable that it was often practised. It has also been said that cruel and severe methods were used to compel the Indians to work; that they were driven under the lash by their overseers, and goaded with lances by the soldiers. No doubt there were individual instances of cruelty; seeds of it being indigenous in human nature, such absolute control of hundreds of human beings could not exist without some abuses of the power. But that the Indians were, on the whole, well treated and cared for, the fact that so many thousands of them chose to remain in the missions is proof. With open wilderness on all sides, and with thousands of savage friends and relatives close at hand, nothing but their own free will could have kept such numbers of them loyal and contented. Forbes, in his history of California, written in 1832, says:-

"The best and most unequivocal proof of the good conduct of the fathers is to be found in the unbounded affection and devotion invariably shown toward them by their Indian subjects. They venerate them not merely as friends and fathers, but with a degree of devotion approaching to adoration."

The picture of life in one of these missions during their period of prosperity is unique and attractive. The whole place was a hive of industry: trades plying indoors and outdoors; tillers, herders, vintagers by hundreds, going to and fro; children in schools; women spinning; bands of young men practising on musical instruments; music, the scores of which, in many instances, they had themselves written out; at evening, all sorts of games of running, leaping, dancing, and ball-throwing, and the picturesque ceremonies of a religion which has always been wise in availing itself of beautiful agencies in color, form, and harmony.

At every mission were walled gardens with waving palms, sparkling fountains, groves of olive trees, broad vineyards, and orchards of all manner of fruits; over all, the sunny, delicious, winterless California sky.

More than mortal, indeed, must the Franciscans have been, to have been able, under these conditions, to preserve intact the fervor and spirit of self-abnegation and deprivation inculcated by the rules of their order. There is a half-comic pathos in the records of occasional efforts made by one and another of the presidents to check the growing disposition toward ease on the part of the friars. At one time several of them were found to be carrying silver watches. The watches were taken away, and sent to Guadalajara to be sold, the money to be paid into the Church treasury. At another time an order was issued, forbidding the wearing of shoes and stockings in place of sandals, and the occupying of too large and comfortable rooms. And one zealous president, finding that the friars occasionally rode in the carts belonging to their missions, had all the carts burned, to compel the fathers to go about on foot.

The friars were forced, by the very facts of their situation, into the exercise of a constant and abounding hospitality; and this of itself inevitably brought about large departures from the ascetic régime of living originally preached and practised. Most royally did they discharge the obligations of this hospitality. Travellers' rooms were kept always ready in every mission; and there were even set apart fruit orchards called "travellers' orchards." A man might ride from San Diego to Monterey by easy day's journeys, spending each night as guest in a mission establishment. As soon as he rode up, an Indian page would appear to take his horse; another to show him to one of the travellers' rooms. He was served with the best of food and wine as long as he liked to stay, and when he left he might, if he wished, take from the mission herd a fresh horse to carry him on his journey. All the California voyagers and travellers of the time speak in glowing terms of this generous and cordial entertaining by the friars. It was, undoubtedly, part of their policy as representatives of the State, but it was no less a part of their duty as Franciscans.

Some of the highest tributes which have been paid to them, both as men and as administrators of affairs, have come from strangers who, thus sojourning under their roofs, had the best opportunity of knowing their lives. Says Forbes:-

"Their conduct has been marked by a degree of benevolence, humanity, and moderation probably unexampled in any other situation.... I have never heard that they have not acted with the most perfect fidelity, or that they ever betrayed a trust, or acted with inhumanity."

This testimony is of the more weight that it comes from a man not in sympathy with either the religious or the secular system on which the friars' labors were based.

The tales still told by old people of festal occasions at the missions sound like tales of the Old World rather than of the New. There was a strange difference, fifty years ago, between the atmosphere of life on the east and west sides of the American continent: on the Atlantic shore, the descendants of the Puritans, weighed down by serious purpose, half grudging the time for their one staid yearly Thanksgiving, and driving the Indians farther and farther into the wilderness every year, fighting and killing them; on the sunny Pacific shore, the merry people of Mexican and Spanish blood, troubling themselves about nothing, dancing away whole days and nights like children, while their priests were gathering the Indians by thousands into communities, and feeding and teaching them.

The most beautiful woman known in California a half-century ago[2] still lives in Santa Barbara, white-haired, bright-eyed, eloquent-tongued to-day. At the time of her marriage, her husband being a brother of the Superior of the Santa Barbara mission, her wedding banquet was spread on tables running the whole length of the outer corridor of the mission. For three days and three nights the feasting and dancing were kept up, and the whole town was bid. On the day after her wedding came the christening or blessing of the right tower of the church. She and her husband, having been chosen godfather and godmother to the tower, walked in solemn procession around it, carrying lighted candles in their hands, preceded by the friar, who sprinkled it with holy water and burned incense. In the four long streets of Indians' houses, then running eastward from the mission, booths of green boughs, decorated with flowers, were set up in front of all the doors. Companies of Indians from other missions came as guests, dancing and singing as they approached. Their Indian hosts went out to meet them, also singing, and pouring out seeds on the ground for them to walk on. These were descendants of the Indians who, when Viscayno anchored off Santa Barbara in 1602, came out in canoes, bringing their king, and rowed three times around Viscayno's ship, chanting a chorus of welcome. Then the king, going on board the ship, walked three times around the deck, chanting the same song. He then gave to the Spaniards gifts of all the simple foods he had, and implored them to land, promising that if they would come and be their brothers, he would give to each man ten wives.

With the increase of success, wealth, and power on the part of the missions came increasing complexities in their relation to the military settlements in the country. The original Spanish plan of colonization was threefold,-religious, military, and civil. Its first two steps were a mission and a presidio, or garrison,-the presidio to be the guard of the mission; later was to come the pueblo,[3] or town. From indefiniteness in the understanding of property rights, and rights of authority, as vested under these three heads, there very soon arose confusion, which led to collisions,-collisions which have not yet ceased, and never will, so long as there remains a land-title in California to be quarrelled over. The law records of the State are brimful of briefs, counter-briefs, opinions, and counter-opinions regarding property issues, all turning on definitions which nobody has now clear right to make, of old pueblo and presidio titles and bounds.

In the beginning there were no grants of land; everything was done by royal decree. In the form of taking possession of the new lands, the Church, by right of sacred honor, came first, the religious ceremony always preceding the military. Not till the cross was set up, and the ground consecrated and taken possession of, in the name of God, for the Church's purposes, did any military commander ever think of planting the royal standard, symbolizing the king's possession. In the early days the relations between the military and the ecclesiastical representatives of the king were comparatively simple: the soldiers were sent avowedly and specifically to protect the friars; moreover, in those earlier days, soldiers and friars were alike devout, and, no doubt, had the mission interests more equally at heart than they did later. But each year's increase of numbers in the garrisons, and of numbers and power in the missions, increased the possibilities of clashing, until finally the relations between the two underwent a singular reversal; and the friars, if disposed to be satirical, might well have said that, however bad a rule might be which would not work both ways, a rule which did was not of necessity a good one, it being now the duty of the missions to support the presidios; the military governors being authorized to draw upon the friars not only for supplies, but for contributions of money and for levies of laborers.[4]

On the other hand, no lands could be set off or assigned for colonists without consent of the friars, and there were many other curious and entangling cross-purpose powers distributed between friars and military governors quite sufficient to make it next to impossible for things to go smoothly.

The mission affairs, so far as their own internal interests were concerned, were administered with admirable simplicity and system. The friars in charge of the missions were responsible directly to the president, or prefect, of the missions. He, in turn, was responsible to the president, or guardian, of the Franciscan College in San Fernando, in Mexico. One responsible officer, called procurador, was kept in the city of Mexico to buy supplies for the missions from stipends due, and from the drafts given to the friars by the presidio commanders for goods furnished to the presidios. There was also a syndic, or general agent, at San Bias, who attended to the shipping and forwarding of supplies. It was a happy combination of the minimum of functionaries with the maximum of responsibility.

The income supporting the missions was derived from two sources, the first of which was a fund, called the "Pious Fund," originally belonging to the Jesuit order, but on the suppression of that order, in 1868, taken possession of by the Spanish Government in trust for the Church. This fund, begun early in the eighteenth century, was made up of estates, mines, manufactories, and flocks,-all gifts of rich Catholics to the Society of Jesus. It yielded an income of fifty thousand dollars a year, the whole of which belonged to the Church, and was to be used in paying stipends to the friars (to the Dominicans in Lower as well as to the Franciscans in Upper California), and in the purchasing of articles needed in the missions. The missions' second source of income was from the sales of their own products: first to the presidios,-these sales paid for by drafts on the Spanish or Mexican Government; second, to trading ships, coming more and more each year to the California coast.

As soon as revolutionary troubles began to agitate Spain and Mexico, the income of the missions from abroad began to fall off. The Pious Fund was too big a sum to be honestly administered by any government hard pressed for money. Spain began to filch from it early, to pay the bills of her wars with Portugal and England; and Mexico, as soon as she had the chance, followed Spain's example vigorously, selling whole estates and pocketing their price, farming the fund out for the benefit of the State treasury, and, finally, in Santa Anna's time, selling the whole outright to two banking-houses. During these troublous times the friars not only failed frequently to receive their regular stipends allotted from the interest of this Pious Fund, but their agent was unable to collect the money due them for the supplies furnished to the presidios. The sums of which they were thus robbed by two governments-that, being ostensibly of the Catholic faith, should surely have held the Church's property sacred-mounted up in a few years to such enormous figures that restitution would have been practically impossible, and, except for their own internal sources of revenue, the missions must have come to bankruptcy and ruin.

However, the elements which were to bring about this ruin were already at work,-were, indeed, inherent in the very system on which they had been founded. The Spanish Government was impatient to see carried out, and to reap the benefit of, the pueblo feature of its colonization plan. With a singular lack of realization of the time needed to make citizens out of savages, it had set ten years as the period at the expiration of which the Indian communities attached to the missions were to be formed into pueblos,-the missions to be secularized, that is, turned into curacies, the pueblo being the parish. This was, no doubt, the wise and proper ultimate scheme,-the only one, in fact, which provided either for the entire civilization of the Indian or the successful colonization of the country. But five times ten years would have been little enough to allow for getting such a scheme fairly under way, and another five times ten years for the finishing and rounding of the work. It is strange how sure civilized peoples are, when planning and legislating for savages, to forget that it has always taken centuries to graft on or evolve out of savagery anything like civilization.

Aiming towards this completing of their colonization plan, the Spanish Government had very early founded the pueblos of Los Angeles and San José. A second class of pueblos, called, in the legal phrase of California's later days, "Presidial Pueblos," had originated in the settlement of the presidios, and gradually grown up around them. There were four of these,-San Diego, Monterey, Santa Barbara, and San Francisco.

It is easy to see how, as these settlements increased, of persons more or less unconnected with the missions, there must have grown up discontent at the Church's occupation and control of so large a proportion of the country. Ready for alliance with this discontent was the constant jealousy on the part of the military authorities, whose measures were often-and, no doubt, often rightly-opposed by the friars. These fomenting causes of disquiet reacted on the impatience and greed in Spain; all together slowly, steadily working against the missions, until, in 1813, the Spanish Cortes passed an act decreeing their secularization. This was set forth in sounding phrase as an act purely for the benefit of the Indians, that they might become citizens of towns. But it was, to say the least of it, as much for Spain as for the Indians, since, by its provisions, one half of the mission lands were to be sold for the payment of Spain's national debt. This act, so manifestly premature, remained a dead letter; but it alarmed the friars, and with reason. It was the tocsin of their doom, of the downfall of their establishments, and the ruin of their work.

Affairs grew more and more unsettled. Spanish viceroys and Mexican insurgents took turns at ruling in Mexico, and the representatives of each took turns at ruling in California. The waves of every Mexican revolution broke on the California shore. The College of San Fernando, in Mexico, also shared in the general confusion, and many of its members returned to Spain.

From 1817 to 1820 great requisitions were made by the Government upon the missions. They responded generously. They gave not only food, but money. They submitted to a tax, per capita, on all their thousands of Indians, to pay the expenses of a deputy to sit in the Mexican Congress. They allowed troops to be quartered in the mission buildings. At the end of the year 1820 the outstanding drafts on the Government, in favor of the missions, amounted to four hundred thousand dollars.

It is impossible, in studying the records of this time, not to feel that the friars were, in the main, disposed to work in good faith for the best interests of the State. That they opposed the secularization project is true; but it is unjust to assume that their motives in so doing were purely selfish. Most certainly, the results of the carrying out of that project were such as to prove all that they claimed of its untimeliness. It is easy saying, as their enemies do, that they would never have advocated it, and were not training the Indians with a view to it: but the first assertion is an assumption, and nothing more; and the refutation of the second lies in the fact that even in that short time they had made the savages into "masons, carpenters, plasterers, soap-makers, tanners, shoe-makers, blacksmiths, millers, bakers, cooks, brick-makers, carters and cart-makers, weavers and spinners, saddlers, ship hands, agriculturists, herdsmen, vintagers;-in a word, they filled all the laborious occupations known to civilized society."[5] Moreover, in many of the missions, plots of land had already been given to individual neophytes who seemed to have intelligence and energy enough to begin an independent life for themselves. But it is idle speculating now as to what would or would not have been done under conditions which never existed.

So long as Spain refused to recognize Mexico's independence, the majority of the friars, as was natural, remained loyal to the Spanish Government, and yielded with reluctance and under protest, in every instance, to Mexico's control. For some years President Sarria was under arrest for refusing to take the oath of allegiance to the Mexican republic. Nevertheless, it not being convenient to remove him and fill his place, he performed all his functions as president of the missions through that time. Many other friars refused to take the oath, and left the country in consequence. During three years the secularization project was continually agitated, and at intervals measures initiatory to it were decreed and sometimes acted upon.

The shifting governors of unfortunate California legislated for or against the mission interests according to the exigencies of their needs or the warmness or lukewarmness of their religious faith.

An act of one year, declaring the Indians liberated, and ordering the friars to turn over the mission properties to administrators, would be followed a few years later by an act restoring the power of the friars, and giving back to them all that remained to be rescued of the mission properties and converts. All was anarchy and confusion. During the fifty-five years that California was under Spanish rule she had but nine governors. During the twenty-four that she was under Mexican misrule she had thirteen. It would be interesting to know what the Indian populations thought, as they watched these quarrellings and intrigues among the Christians who were held up to them as patterns for imitation.

In a curious pamphlet left by one of the old friars, Father Boscana, is told a droll story of the logical inferences some of them drew from the political situations among their supposed betters. It was a band of San Diego Indians. When they heard that the Spanish viceroy in the city of Mexico had been killed, and a Mexican made emperor in his place, they forthwith made a great feast, burned up their chief, and elected a new one in his stead. To the stringent reproofs of the horrified friars they made answer: "Have you not done the same in Mexico? You say your king was not good, and you killed him. Well, our captain was not good, and we burned him. If the new one turns out bad, we will burn him too,"-a memorable instance of the superiority of example to precept.

At last, in 1834, the final blow fell on the missions. The Governor of California, in compliance with instructions received from Mexico, issued an authoritative edict for their secularization. It was a long document, and had many significant provisions in it. It said that the Indians were now to be "emancipated." But the 16th article said that they "should be obliged to join in such labors of community as are indispensable, in the opinion of the political chief, in the cultivation of the vineyards, gardens, and fields, which for the present remain unapportioned." This was a curious sort of emancipation; and it is not surprising to read, in the political records of the time, such paragraphs as this: "Out of one hundred and sixty Indian families at San Diego, to whom emancipation was offered by Governor Figueroa, only ten could be induced to accept it." The friars were to hand over all records and inventories to stewards or administrators appointed. Boards of magistrates were also appointed for each village. One half of the movable property was to be divided among the "emancipated persons," and to each head of a family was to be given four hundred square yards of land. Everything else-lands, movable properties, property of all classes-was to be put into the hands of the administrator, to be held subject to the Federal Government. Out of these properties the administrators were to provide properly for the support of the father or fathers left in charge of the church, the church properties, and the souls of the "emancipated persons." A more complete and ingenious subversion of the previously existing state of things could not have been devised; and it is hard to conceive how any student of the history of the period can see, in its shaping and sudden enforcing, anything except bold and unprincipled greed hiding itself under specious cloaks of right. Says Dwinelle, in his "Colonial History:"-

"Beneath these specious pretexts was undoubtedly a perfect understanding between the Government of Mexico and the leading men in California, that in such a condition of things the Supreme Government might absorb the Pious Fund, under the pretence that it was no longer necessary for missionary purposes, and thus had reverted to the State as a quasi escheat, while the co-actors in California should appropriate the local wealth of the missions by the rapid and sure process of administering their temporalities."

Of the manner in which the project was executed, Dwinelle goes on to say:-

"These laws, whose ostensible purpose was to convert the missionary establishments into Indian pueblos, their churches into parish churches, and to elevate the Christianized Indians to the rank of citizens, were after all executed in such a manner that the so-called secularization of the missions resulted in their plunder and complete ruin, and in the demoralization and dispersion of the Christianized Indians."

It is only just to remember, however, that these laws and measures were set in force in a time of revolution, when even the best measures and laws could have small chance of being fairly executed, and that a government which is driven, as Mexico was, to recruiting its colonial forces by batches of selected prison convicts, is entitled to pity, if not charity, in our estimates of its conduct. Of course, the position of administrator of a mission became at once a political reward and a chance for big gains, and simply, therefore, a source and centre of bribery and corruption.

Between the governors-who now regarded the mission establishments as State property, taking their cattle or grain as freely as they would any other revenue, and sending orders to a mission for tallow as they would draw checks on the treasury-and the administrators, who equally regarded them as easy places for the filling of pockets, the wealth of the missions disappeared as dew melts in the sun. Through all this the Indians were the victims. They were, under the administrators, compelled to work far harder than before; they were ill-fed and ill-treated; they were hired out in gangs to work in towns or on farms, under masters who regarded them simply as beasts of burden; their rights to the plots of land which had been set off for them were, almost without exception, ignored. A more pitiable sight has not often been seen on earth than the spectacle of this great body of helpless, dependent creatures, suddenly deprived of their teachers and protectors, thrown on their own resources, and at the mercy of rapacious and unscrupulous communities, in time of revolution. The best comment on their sufferings is to be found in the statistics of the mission establishments after a few years of the administrators' reign.

In 1834 there were, according to the lowest estimates, from fifteen to twenty thousand Indians in the missions. De Mofras's statistics give the number as 30,620. In 1840 there were left, all told, but six thousand. In many of the missions there were less than one hundred. According to De Mofras, the cattle, sheep, horses, and mules, in 1834, numbered 808,000; in 1842, but 6,320. Other estimates put the figures for 1834 considerably lower. It is not easy to determine which are true; but the most moderate estimates of all tell the story with sufficient emphasis. There is also verbal testimony on these points still to be heard in California, if one has patience and interest enough in the subject to listen to it. There are still living, wandering about, half blind, half starved, in the neighborhood of the mission sites, old Indians who recollect the mission times in the height of their glory. Their faces kindle with a sad flicker of recollected happiness, as they tell of the days when they had all they wanted to eat, and the padres were so good and kind: "Bueno tiempo! Bueno tiempo," they say, with a hopeless sigh and shake of the head.

Under the new régime the friars suffered hardly less than the Indians. Some fled the country, unable to bear the humiliations and hardships of their positions under the control of the administrators or majors-domo, and dependent on their caprice for shelter and even for food. Among this number was Father Antonio Peyri, who had been for over thirty years in charge of the splendid mission of San Luis Rey. In 1800, two years after its founding, this mission had 369 Indians. In 1827 it had 2,686; it owned over twenty thousand head of cattle, and nearly twenty thousand sheep. It controlled over two hundred thousand acres of land, and there were raised in its fields in one year three thousand bushels of wheat, six thousand of barley, and ten thousand of corn. No other mission had so fine a church. It was one hundred and sixty feet long, fifty wide, and sixty high, with walls four feet thick. A tower at one side held a belfry for eight bells. The corridor on the opposite side had two hundred and fifty-six arches. Its gold and silver ornaments are said to have been superb.

When Father Peyri made up his mind to leave the country, he slipped off by night to San Diego, hoping to escape without the Indians' knowledge. But, missing him in the morning, and knowing only too well what it meant, five hundred of them mounted their ponies in hot haste, and galloped all the way to San Diego, forty-five miles, to bring him back by force. They arrived just as the ship, with Father Peyri on board, was weighing anchor. Standing on the deck, with outstretched arms he blessed them, amid their tears and loud cries. Some flung themselves into the water and swam after the ship. Four reached it, and clinging to its sides, so implored to be taken that the father consented, and carried them with him to Rome, where one of them became a priest.

There were other touching instances in which the fathers refused to be separated from their Indian converts, and remained till the last by their side, sharing all their miseries and deprivations. De Mofras, in his visit to the country in 1842, found, at the mission of San Luis Obispo, Father Azagonais, a very old man, living in a hut, like the Indians, sleeping on a rawhide on the bare ground, with no drinking-vessel but an ox-horn, and no food but some dried meat hanging in the sun. The little he had he shared with the few Indians who still lingered there. Benevolent persons had offered him asylum; but he refused, saying that he would die at his post. At the San Antonio mission De Mofras found another aged friar, Father Gutierrez, living in great misery. The administrator of this mission was a man who had been formerly a menial servant in the establishment; he had refused to provide Father Gutierrez with the commonest necessaries, and had put him on an allowance of food barely sufficient to keep him alive.

At Soledad was a still more pitiful case. Father Sarria, who had labored there for thirty years, refused to leave the spot, even after the mission was so ruined that it was not worth any administrator's while to keep it. He and the handful of Indians who remained loyal to their faith and to him lived on there, growing poorer and poorer each day; he sharing his every morsel of food with them, and starving himself, till, one Sunday morning, saying mass at the crumbling altar, he fainted, fell forward, and died in their arms, of starvation. This was in 1838. Only eight years before, this Soledad mission had owned thirty-six thousand cattle, seventy thousand sheep, three hundred yoke of working oxen, more horses than any other mission, and had an aqueduct, fifteen miles long, supplying water enough to irrigate twenty thousand acres of land.

For ten years after the passage of the Secularization Act, affairs went steadily on from bad to worse with the missions. Each governor had his own plans and devices for making the most out of them, renting them, dividing them into parcels for the use of colonists, establishing pueblos on them, making them subject to laws of bankruptcy, and finally selling them. The departmental assemblies sometimes indorsed and sometimes annulled the acts of the governors. In 1842 Governor Micheltorena proclaimed that the twelve southern missions should be restored to the Church, and that the Government would not make another grant of land without the consent of the friars. This led to a revolution, or rather an ebullition, and Micheltorena was sent out of the country. To him succeeded Pio Pico, who remained in power till the occupation of California by the United States forces in 1846. During the reign of Pio Pico, the ruin of the mission establishments was completed. They were at first sold or rented in batches to the highest bidders. There was first a preliminary farce of proclamation to the Indians to return and take possession of the missions if they did not want them sold. These proclamations were posted up in the pueblos for months before the sales. In 1844 the Indians of Dolores, Soledad, San Miguel, La Purissima, and San Rafael[6] were thus summoned to come back to their missions,-a curious bit of half conscience-stricken, half politic recognition of the Indians' ownership of the lands, the act of the Departmental Assembly saying that if they (the Indians) did not return before such a date, the Government would declare said missions to be "without owners," and dispose of them accordingly. There must have been much bitter speech in those days when news of these proclamations reached the wilds where the mission Indians had taken refuge.

At last, in March, 1846, an act of the Departmental Assembly made the missions liable to the laws of bankruptcy, and authorized the governor to sell them to private persons. As by this time all the missions that had any pretence of existence left had been run hopelessly into debt, proceedings in regard to them were much simplified by this act. In the same year the President of Mexico issued an order to Governor Pico to use all means within his power to raise money to defend the country against the United States; and under color of this double authorization the governor forthwith proceeded to sell missions right and left. He sold them at illegal private sales; he sold them for insignificant sums, and for sums not paid at all; whether he was, to use the words of a well-known legal brief in one of the celebrated California land cases, "wilfully ignorant or grossly corrupt," there is no knowing, and it made no difference in the result.

One of the last acts of the Departmental Assembly, before the surrender of the country, was to declare all Governor Pico's sales of mission property null and void. And one of Governor Pico's last acts was, as soon as he had made up his mind to run away out of the country, to write to some of his special friends and ask them if there were anything else they would like to have him give them before his departure.

On the 7th of July, 1846, the American flag was raised in Monterey, and formal possession of California was taken by the United States. The proclamation of Admiral Sloat on this memorable occasion included these words: "All persons holding title to real estate, or in quiet possession of lands under color of right, shall have those titles and rights guaranteed to them." "Color of right" is a legal phrase, embodying a moral idea, an obligation of equity. If the United States Government had kept this guarantee, there would be living in comfortable homesteads in California to-day many hundreds of people that are now homeless and beggared,-Mexicans as well as Indians.

The army officers in charge of different posts in California, in these first days of the United States' occupation of the country, were perplexed and embarrassed by nothing so much as by the confusion existing in regard to the mission properties and lands. Everywhere men turned up with bills of sale from Governor Pico. At the San Diego mission the ostensible owner, one Estudillo by name, confessed frankly that he "did not think it right to dispose of the Indians' property in that way; but as everybody was buying missions, he thought he might as well have one."

In many of the missions, squatters, without show or semblance of title, were found; these the officers turned out. Finally, General Kearney, to save the trouble of cutting any more Gordian knots, declared that all titles of missions and mission lands must be held in abeyance till the United States Government should pronounce on them.

For several years the question remained unsettled, and the mission properties were held by those who had them in possession at the time of the surrender. But in 1856 the United States Land Commission gave, in reply to a claim and petition from the Catholic Bishop of California, a decision which, considered with reference to the situation of the mission properties at the time of the United States' possession, was perhaps as near to being equitable as the circumstances would admit. But, considered with reference to the status of the mission establishments under the Spanish rule, to their original extent, the scope of the work, and the magnificent success of their experiment up to the time of the revolutions, it seems a sadly inadequate return of property once rightfully held. Still, it was not the province of the United States to repair the injustices or make good the thefts of Spain and Mexico; and any attempt to clear up the tangle of confiscations, debts, frauds, and robberies in California, for the last quarter of a century before the surrender, would have been bootless work.

The Land Commissioner's decision was based on the old Spanish law which divided church property into two classes, sacred and ecclesiastical, and held it to be inalienable, except in case of necessity, and then only according to provisions of canon law; in the legal term, it was said to be "out of commerce." The sacred property was that which had been in a formal manner consecrated to God,-church buildings, sacred vessels, vestments, etc. Ecclesiastical property was land held by the Church, and appropriated to the maintenance of divine worship, or the support of the ministry; buildings occupied by the priests, or necessary for their convenience; gardens, etc. Following a similar division, the property of the mission establishments was held by the Land Commission to be of two sorts,-mission property and church property: the mission property, embracing the great tracts of land formerly cultivated for the community's purpose, it was decided, must be considered as government property; the church property, including, with the church buildings, houses of priests, etc., such smaller portions of land as were devoted to the immediate needs of the ministry, it was decided must still rightfully go to the Church. How many acres of the old gardens, orchards, vineyards, of the missions could properly be claimed by the Church under this head, was of course a question; and it seems to have been decided on very different bases in different missions, as some received much more than others. But all the church buildings, priests' houses, and some acres of land, more or less, with each, were pronounced by this decision to have been "before the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo solemnly dedicated to the use of the Church, and therefore withdrawn from commerce;" "such an interest is protected by the provisions of the treaty, and must be held inviolate under our laws." Thus were returned at last, into the inalienable possession of the Catholic Church, all that were left of the old mission churches, and some fragments of the mission lands. Many of them are still in operation as curacies; others are in ruins; of some not a trace is left,-not even a stone.

At San Diego the walls of the old church are still standing, unroofed, and crumbling daily. It was used as a cavalry barracks during the war of 1846, and has been a sheepfold since. Opposite it is an olive orchard, of superb hoary trees still in bearing; a cactus wall twenty feet high, and a cluster of date palms, are all that remain of the friars' garden.

At San Juan Capistrano, the next mission to the north, some parts of the buildings are still habitable. Service is held regularly in one of the small chapels. The priest lives there, and ekes out his little income by renting some of the mouldering rooms. The church is a splendid ruin. It was of stone, a hundred and fifty feet long by a hundred in width, with walls five feet thick, a dome eighty feet high, and a fine belfry of arches in which four bells rang. It was thrown down by an earthquake in 1812, on the day of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Morning mass was going on, and the church was thronged; thirty persons were killed, and many more injured.

The little hamlet of San Juan Capistrano lies in harbor, as it were, looking out on its glimpse of sea, between two low spurs of broken and rolling hills, which in June are covered with shining yellow and blue and green, iridescent as a peacock's neck. It is worth going across the continent to come into the village at sunset of a June day. The peace, silence, and beauty of the spot are brooded over and dominated by the grand gray ruin, lifting the whole scene into an ineffable harmony. Wandering in room after room, court after court, through corridors with red-tiled roofs and hundreds of broad Roman arches, over fallen pillars, and through carved doorways, whose untrodden thresholds have sunk out of sight in summer grasses, one asks himself if he be indeed in America. On the interior walls are still to be seen spaces of brilliant fresco-work, in Byzantine patterns of superb red, pale green, gray and blue; and the corridors are paved with tiles, large and square. It was our good fortune to have with us, in San Juan Capistrano, a white-haired Mexican, who in his boyhood had spent a year in the mission. He remembered as if it were yesterday its bustling life of fifty years ago, when the arched corridor ran unbroken around the great courtyard, three hundred feet square, and was often filled with Indians, friars, officers, and gay Mexican ladies looking on at a bull-fight in the centre. He remembered the splendid library, filled from ceiling to floor with books, extending one whole side of the square: in a corner, where had been the room in which he used to see sixty Indian women weaving at looms, we stood ankle-deep in furzy weeds and grass. He showed us the doorway, now closed up, which led into the friars' parlor. To this door, every Sunday, after mass, came the Indians, in long processions, to get their weekly gifts. Each one received something,-a handkerchief, dress, trinket, or money. While their gifts were being distributed, a band of ten or twelve performers, all Indians, played lively airs on brass and stringed instruments. In a little baptistery, dusky with cobweb and mould, we found huddled a group of wooden statues of saints, which once stood in niches in the church; on their heads were faded and brittle wreaths, left from the last occasion on which they had done duty. One had lost an eye; another a hand. The gilding and covering of their robes were dimmed and defaced. But they had a dignity which nothing could destroy. The contours were singularly expressive and fine, and the rendering of the drapery was indeed wonderful,-flowing robes and gathered and lifted mantles, all carved in solid wood.

There are statues of this sort to be seen in several of the old mission churches. They were all carved by the Indians, many of whom showed great talent in that direction. There is also in the office of the justice-or alcalde, as he is still called-of San Juan Capistrano, a carved chair of noticeably bold and graceful design made by Indian workmen. A few tatters of heavy crimson brocade hang on it still, relics of the time when it formed part of a gorgeous paraphernalia and service.

Even finer than the ruins of San Juan Capistrano are those of the church at San Luis Rey. It has a perfectly proportioned dome over the chancel, and beautiful groined arches on either hand and over the altar. Four broad pilasters on each side of the church are frescoed in a curious mixing of blues, light and dark, with reds and black, which have faded and blended into a delicious tone. A Byzantine pulpit hanging high on the wall, and three old wooden statues in niches, are the only decorations left. Piles of dirt and rubbish fill the space in front of the altar, and grass and weeds are growing in the corners; great flocks of wild doves live in the roof, and have made the whole place unclean and foul-aired. An old Mexican, eighty years old, a former servant of the mission, has the ruin in charge, and keeps the doors locked still, as if there were treasure to guard. The old man is called "alcalde" by the village people, and seems pleased to be so addressed. His face is like wrinkled parchment, and he walks bent into a parenthesis, but his eyes are bright and young. As he totters along, literally holding his rags together, discoursing warmly of the splendors he recollects, he seems indeed a ghost from the old times.

The most desolate ruin of all is that of the La Purissima Mission. It is in the Lompoc valley, two days' easy journey north of Santa Barbara. Nothing is left there but one long, low adobe building, with a few arches of the corridor; the doors stand open, the roof is falling in: it has been so often used as a stable and sheepfold, that even the grasses are killed around it. The painted pulpit hangs half falling on the wall, its stairs are gone, and its sounding-board is slanting awry. Inside the broken altar-rail is a pile of stones, earth, and rubbish, thrown up by seekers after buried treasures; in the farther corner another pile and hole, the home of a badger; mud-swallows' nests are thick on the cornice, and cobwebbed rags of the old canvas ceiling hang fluttering overhead. The only trace of the ancient cultivation is a pear-orchard a few rods off, which must have been a splendid sight in its day; it is at least two hundred yards square, with a double row of trees all around, so placed as to leave between them a walk fifty or sixty feet wide. Bits of broken aqueduct here and there, and a large, round stone tank overgrown by grass, showed where the life of the orchard used to flow in, it has been many years slowly dying of thirst. Many of the trees are gone, and those that remain stretch out gaunt and shrivelled boughs, which, though still bearing fruit, look like arms tossing in vain reproach and entreaty; a few pinched little blossoms seemed to heighten rather than lessen their melancholy look.

At San Juan Bautista there lingers more of the atmosphere of the olden time than is to be found in any other place in California. The mission church is well preserved; its grounds are enclosed and cared for; in its garden are still blooming roses and vines, in the shelter of palms, and with the old stone sun-dial to tell time. In the sacristy are oak chests, full of gorgeous vestments of brocades, with silver and gold laces. On one of these robes is an interesting relic. A lost or worn-out silken tassel had been replaced by the patient Indian workers with one of fine-shredded rawhide; the shreds wound with silver wire, and twisted into tiny rosettes and loops, closely imitating the silver device. The church fronts south, on a little green locust walled plaza,-the sleepiest, sunniest, dreamiest place in the world. To the east the land falls off abruptly, so that the paling on that side of the plaza is outlined against the sky, and its little locked gate looks as if it would open into the heavens. The mission buildings used to surround this plaza; after the friars' day came rich men living there; and a charming inn is kept now in one of their old adobe houses. On the east side of the church is a succession of three terraces leading down to a valley. On the upper one is the old graveyard, in which it is said there are sleeping four thousand Indians.

In 1825 there were spoken at this mission thirteen different Indian dialects.

Just behind the church is an orphan girls' school, kept by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart. At six o'clock every morning the bells of the church ring for mass as they used to ring when over a thousand Indians flocked at the summons. To-day, at the sound, there comes a procession of little girls and young maidens, the black-robed sisters walking before them with crossed hands and placid faces. One or two Mexican women, with shawls over their heads, steal across the faint paths of the plaza, and enter the church.

I shall always recollect the morning when I went, too. The silence of the plaza was in itself a memorial service, with locust blossoms swinging incense. It was barely dawn in the church. As the shrill yet sweet childish voices lifted up the strains of the Kyrie Eleison, I seemed to see the face of Father Junipero in the dim lighted chancel, and the benediction was as solemn as if he himself had spoken it. Why the little town of San Juan Bautista continues to exist is a marvel. It is shut out and cut off from everything; only two or three hundred souls are left in it; its streets are grass-grown; half its houses are empty. But it has a charm of sun, valley, hill, and seaward off-look unsurpassed in all California. Lingering out a peaceful century there are many old men and women, whose memories are like magic glasses, reproducing the pictures of the past. One such we found: a Mexican woman eighty-five years old, portly, jolly, keen-tongued, keen-eyed; the widow of one of the soldiers of the old mission guard. She had had twelve children; she had never been ill a week in her life; she is now the village nurse, and almost doctor. Sixty years back she remembered. "The Indians used to be in San Juan Bautista like sheep," she said, "by the thousand and thousand." They were always good, and the padres were always kind. Fifty oxen were killed for food every eight days, and everybody had all he wanted to eat. There was much more water then than now, plenty of rain, and the streams always full. "I don't know whether you or we were bad, that it has been taken away by God," she said, with a quick glance, half humorous, half antagonistic.

The Santa Barbara Mission is still in the charge of Franciscans, the only one remaining in their possession. It is now called a college for apostolic missionary work, and there are living within its walls eight members of the order. One of them is very old,-a friar of the ancient régime; his benevolent face is well known throughout the country, and there are in many a town and remote hamlet men and women who wait always for his coming before they will make confession. He is like St. Francis's first followers: the obligations of poverty and charity still hold to him the literal fulness of the original bond. He gives away garment after garment, leaving himself without protection against cold; and the brothers are forced to lock up and hide from him all provisions, or he would leave the house bare of food. He often kneels from midnight to dawn on the stone floor of the church, praying and chanting psalms; and when a terrible epidemic of small-pox broke out some years ago, he labored day and night, nursing the worst victims of it, shriving them, and burying them with his own hands. He is past eighty, and has not much longer to stay. He has outlived many things beside his own prime: the day of the sort of faith and work to which his spirit is attuned has passed by forever.

The mission buildings stand on high ground, three miles from the beach, west of the town and above it, looking to the sea. In the morning the sun's first rays flash full on its front, and at evening they linger late on its western wall. It is an inalienable benediction to the place. The longer one stays there the more he is aware of the influence on his soul, as well as of the importance in the landscape of the benign and stately edifice.

On the corridor of the inner court hangs a bell which is rung for the hours of the daily offices and secular duties. It is also struck whenever a friar dies, to announce that all is over. It is the duty of the brother who has watched the last breath of the dying one to go immediately and strike this bell. Its sad note has echoed many times through the corridors. One of the brothers said, last year,-

"The first time I rang that bell to announce a death, there were fifteen of us left. Now there are only eight."

The sentence itself fell on my ear like the note of a passing-bell. It seems a not unfitting last word to this slight and fragmentary sketch of the labors of the Franciscan Order in California.

Still more fitting, however, are the words of a historian, who, living in California and thoroughly knowing its history from first to last, has borne the following eloquent testimony to the friars and their work:-

"The results of the mission scheme of Christianization and colonization were such as to justify the plans of the wise statesman who devised it, and to gladden the hearts of the pious men who devoted their lives to its execution.

"At the end of sixty years the missionaries of Upper California found themselves in the possession of twenty-one prosperous missions, planted on a line of about seven hundred miles, running from San Diego north to the latitude of Sonoma. More than thirty thousand Indian converts were lodged in the mission buildings, receiving religious culture, assisting at divine worship, and cheerfully performing their easy tasks.... If we ask where are now the thirty thousand Christianized Indians who once enjoyed the beneficence and created the wealth of the twenty-one Catholic missions of California, and then contemplate the most wretched of all want of systems which has surrounded them under our own government, we shall not withhold our admiration from those good and devoted men who, with such wisdom, sagacity, and self-sacrifice, reared these wonderful institutions in the wilderness of California. They at least would have preserved these Indian races if they had been left to pursue unmolested their work of pious beneficence."[7]

Note.-The author desires to express her acknowledgments to H. H. Bancroft, of San Francisco, who kindly put at her disposal all the resources of his invaluable library; also to the Superior of the Franciscan College in Santa Barbara, for the loan of important books and manuscripts and the photograph of Father Junipero.

THE PRESENT CONDITION OF THE MISSION INDIANS IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA.

The old laws of the kingdom of the Indies are interesting reading, especially those portions of them relating to Indians. A certain fine and chivalrous quality of honor toward the helpless and tenderness toward the dependent runs all through their quaint and cumbrous paragraphs.

It is not until one studies these laws in connection with the history of the confusions and revolutions of the secularization period, and of the American conquest of California, that it becomes possible to understand how the California Mission Indians could have been left so absolutely unprotected, as they were, in the matter of ownership of the lands they had cultivated for sixty years.

"We command," said the Spanish king, "that the sale, grant, and composition of lands be executed with such attention that the Indians be left in possession of the full amount of lands belonging to them, either singly or in communities, together with their rivers and waters; and the lands which they shall have drained or otherwise improved, whereby they may by their own industry have rendered them fertile, are reserved, in the first place, and can in no case be sold or aliened. And the judges who have been sent thither shall specify what Indians they may have found on the land, and what lands they shall have left in possession of each of the elders of tribes, caciques, governors, or communities."

Grazing estates for cattle are ordered to be located "apart from the fields and villages of the Indians." The king's command is that no such estates shall be granted "in any parts or place where any damage can accrue to the Indians." Every grant of land must be made "without prejudice to the Indians;" and "such as may have been granted to their prejudice and injury" must be "restored to whomever they by right shall belong."

"In order to avoid the inconveniences and damages resulting from the sale or gift to Spaniards of tracts of land to the prejudice of Indians, upon the suspicious testimony of witnesses," the king orders that all sales and gifts are to be made before the attorneys of the royal audiencias, and "always with an eye to the benefit of the Indians;" and "the king's solicitors are to be protectors of the Indians and plead for them." "After distributing to the Indians what they may justly want to cultivate, sow, and raise cattle, confirming to them what they now hold, and granting what they may want besides, all the remaining land may be reserved to us," says the old decree, "clear of any incumbrance, for the purpose of being given as rewards, or disposed of according to our pleasure."

In those day's everything in New Spain was thus ordered by royal decrees. Nobody had grants of land in the sense in which we use the word. When the friars wished to reward an industrious and capable Indian, and test his capacity to take care of himself and family, by giving him a little farm of his own, all they had to do, or did, was to mark off the portion of land, put the Indian on it and tell him it was his. There would appear to have been little more formality than this in the establishing of the Indian pueblos which were formed in the beginning of the secularization period. Governor Figueroa, in an address in 1834, speaks of three of these, San Juan Capistrano, San Dieguito, and Las Flores, says that they are flourishing, and that the comparison between the condition of these Indians and that of the Spanish townsmen in the same region is altogether in favor of the Indians.

On Nov. 16, 1835, eighty-one "desafiliados"-as the ex-neophytes of missions were called-of the San Luis Rey Mission settled themselves in the San Pasqual valley, which was an appanage of that mission. These Indian communities appear to have had no documents to show their right, either as communities or individuals, to the land on which they had settled. At any rate, they had nothing which amounted to a protection, or stood in the way of settlers who coveted their lands. It is years since the last trace of the pueblos Las Flores and San Dieguito disappeared; and the San Pasqual valley is entirely taken up by white settlers, chiefly on pre-emption claims. San Juan Capistrano is the only one of the four where are to be found any Indians' homes. If those who had banded themselves together and had been set off into pueblos had no recognizable or defensible title, how much more helpless and defenceless were individuals, or small communities without any such semblance of pueblo organization!

Most of the original Mexican grants included tracts of land on which Indians were living, sometimes large villages of them. In many of these grants, in accordance with the old Spanish law or custom, was incorporated a clause protecting the Indians. They were to be left undisturbed in their homes: the portion of the grant occupied by them did not belong to the grantee in any such sense as to entitle him to eject them. The land on which they were living, and the land they were cultivating at the time of the grant, belonged to them as long as they pleased to occupy it. In many of the grants the boundaries of the Indians' reserved portion of the property were carefully marked off; and the instances were rare in which Mexican grantees disturbed or in any way interfered with Indians living on their estates. There was no reason why they should. There was plenty of land and to spare, and it was simply a convenience and an advantage to have the skilled and docile Indian laborer on the ground.

But when the easy-going, generous, improvident Mexican needed or desired to sell his grant, and the sharp American was on hand to buy it, then was brought to light the helplessness of the Indians' position. What cared the sharp American for that sentimental clause, "without injury to the Indians"? Not a farthing. Why should he? His government, before him, had decided that all the lands belonging to the old missions, excepting the small portions technically held as church property, and therefore "out of commerce," were government lands. None of the Indians living on those lands at the time of the American possession were held to have any right-not even "color of right"-to them. That they and their ancestors had been cultivating them for three quarters of a century made no difference. Americans wishing to pre-empt claims on any of these so-called government lands did not regard the presence on them of Indian families or communities as any more of a barrier than the presence of so many coyotes or foxes. They would not hesitate to certify to the land office that such lands were "unoccupied." Still less, then, need the purchaser of tracts covered by old Mexican grants hold himself bound to regard the poor cumberers of the ground, who, having no legal right whatever, had been all their years living on the tolerance of a silly, good-hearted Mexican proprietor. The American wanted every rod of his land, every drop of water on it; his schemes were boundless; his greed insatiable; he had no use for Indians. His plan did not embrace them, and could not enlarge itself to take them in. They must go. This is, in brief, the summing up of the way in which has come about the present pitiable state of the California Mission Indians.

In 1852 a report in regard to these Indians was made to the Interior Department by the Hon. B. D. Wilson, of Los Angeles. It is an admirable paper, clear and exhaustive. Mr. Wilson was an old Californian, had known the Indians well, and had been eyewitness to much of the cruelty and injustice done them. He says:-

"In the fall of the missions, accomplished by private cupidity and political ambition, philanthropy laments the failure of one of the grandest experiments ever made for the elevation of this unfortunate race."

He estimates that there were at that time in the counties of Tulare, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, and San Diego over fifteen thousand Indians who had been connected with the missions in those counties. They were classified as the Tulare?os, Cahuillas, San Luise?os, and Diegue?os, the latter two being practically one nation, speaking one language, and being more generally Christianized than the others. They furnished, Mr. Wilson says, "the majority of the laborers, mechanics, and servants of San Diego and Los Angeles counties." They all spoke the Spanish language, and a not inconsiderable number could read and write it. They had built all the houses in the country, had taught the whites how to make brick, mud mortar, how to use asphalt on roofs; they understood irrigation, were good herders, reapers, etc. They were paid only half the wages paid to whites; and being immoderate gamblers, often gambled away on Saturday night and Sunday all they had earned in the week. At that time in Los Angeles nearly every other house in town was a grog-shop for Indians. In the San Pasqual valley there were twenty white vagabonds, all rum-sellers, squatted at one time around the Indian pueblo. The Los Angeles ayuntamiento had passed an edict declaring that "all Indians without masters"-significant phrase!-must live outside the town limits; also, that all Indians who could not show papers from the alcalde of the pueblo in which they lived, should be treated as "horse thieves and enemies."

On Sunday nights the squares and streets of Los Angeles were often to be seen full of Indians lying about helpless in every stage of intoxication. They were picked up by scores, unconscious, carried to jail, locked up, and early Monday morning hired out to the highest bidders at the jail gates. Horrible outrages were committed on Indian women and children. In some instances the Indians armed to avenge these, and were themselves killed.

These are a few out of hundreds of similar items to be gathered from the newspaper records of the time. Conditions such as these could have but one outcome. Twenty years later, when another special report on the condition of the California Mission Indians was asked for by the Government, not over five thousand Indians remained to be reported on. Vice and cruelty had reaped large harvests each year. Many of the rich valleys, which at the time of Mr. Wilson's report had been under cultivation by Indians, were now filled by white settlers, the Indians all gone, no one could tell where. In some instances whole villages of them had been driven off at once by fraudulently procured and fraudulently enforced claims. One of the most heart-rending of these cases was that of the Temecula Indians.

The Temecula valley lies in the northeast corner of San Diego County. It is watered by two streams and has a good soil. The Southern California Railroad now crosses it. It was an appanage of the San Luis Rey Mission, and the two hundred Indians who were living there were the children and grandchildren of San Luis Rey neophytes. The greater part of the valley was under cultivation. They had cattle, horses, sheep. In 1865 a "special agent" of the United States Government held a grand Indian convention there. Eighteen villages were represented, and the numbers of inhabitants, stock, vineyards, orchards, were reported. The Indians were greatly elated at this evidence of the Government's good intentions toward them. They set up a tall liberty-pole, and bringing forth a United States flag, which they had kept carefully hidden away ever since the beginning of the civil war, they flung it out to the winds in token of their loyalty. "It is astonishing," says one of the San Diego newspapers of the day, "that these Indians have behaved so well, considering the pernicious teachings they have had from the secessionists in our midst."

There was already anxiety in the minds of the Temecula Indians as to their title to their lands. All that was in existence to show that they had any, was the protecting clause in an old Mexican grant. To be sure, the man was still alive who had assisted in marking off the boundaries of their part of this original Temecula grant; but his testimony could establish nothing beyond the letter of the clause as it stood. They earnestly implored the agent to lay the case before the Interior Department. Whether he did or not I do not know, but this is the sequel: On April 15, 1869, an action was brought in the District Court, in San Francisco, by five men, against "Andrew Johnson, Thaddeus Stevens, Horace Greeley, and one thousand Indians, and other parties whose names are unknown." It was "a bill to quit title," an "action to recover possession of certain real estate bounded thus and thus." It included the Temecula valley. It was based on grants made by Governor Micheltorena in 1844. The defendants cited were to appear in court within twenty days.

The Indians appealed to the Catholic bishop to help them. He wrote to one of the judges an imploring letter, saying, "Can you not do something to save these poor Indians from being driven out?" But the scheme had been too skilfully plotted. There was no way-or, at any rate, no way was found-of protecting the Indians. The day came when a sheriff, bringing a posse of men and a warrant which could not be legally resisted, arrived to eject the Indian families from their houses and drive them out of the valley. The Indians' first impulse was as determined as it could have been if they had been white, to resist the outrage. But on being reasoned with by friends, who sadly and with shame explained to them that by thus resisting, they would simply make it the duty of the sheriff to eject them by force, and, if necessary, shoot down any who opposed the executing of his warrant, they submitted. But they refused to lift hand to the moving. They sat down, men and women, on the ground, and looked on, some wailing and weeping, some dogged and silent, while the sheriff and his men took out of the neat little adobe houses their small stores of furniture, clothes, and food, and piled them on wagons to be carried-where?-anywhere the exiles chose, so long as they did not chance to choose a piece of any white man's land.

A Mexican woman is now living in that Temecula valley who told me the story of this moving. The facts I had learned before from records of one sort and another. But standing on the spot, looking at the ruins of the little adobe houses, and the walled graveyard full of graves, and hearing this woman tell how she kept her doors and windows shut, and could not bear to look out while the deed was being done, I realized forcibly how different a thing is history seen from history written and read.

It took three days to move them. Procession after procession, with cries and tears, walked slowly behind the wagons carrying their household goods. They took the tule roofs off the little houses, and carried them along. They could be used again. Some of these Indians, wishing to stay as near as possible to their old home, settled in a small valley, only three miles and a half away to the south. It was a dreary, hot little valley, bare, with low, rocky buttes cropping out on either side, and with scanty growths of bushes; there was not a drop of water in it. Here the exiles went to work again; built their huts of reeds and straw; set up a booth of boughs for the priest, when he came, to say mass in; and a rude wooden cross to consecrate their new graveyard on a stony hill-side. They put their huts on barren knolls here and there, where nothing could grow. On the tillable land they planted wheat or barley or orchards,-some patches not ten feet square, the largest not over three or four acres. They hollowed out the base of one of the rocky buttes, sunk a well there, and found water.

I think none of us who saw this little refugee village will ever forget it. The whole place was a series of pictures; and knowing its history, we found in each low roof and paling the dignity of heroic achievement. Near many of the huts stood great round baskets woven of twigs, reaching half-way up to the eaves and looking like huge birds'-nests. These were their granaries, holding acorns and wheat. Women with red pottery jars on their heads and on their backs were going to and from the well; old men were creeping about, bent over, carrying loads of fagots that would have seemed heavy for a donkey; aged women sitting on the ground were diligently plaiting baskets, too busy or too old to give more than a passing look at us. A group of women was at work washing wool in great stone bowls, probably hundreds of years old. The interiors of some of the houses were exquisitely neat and orderly, with touching attempts at adornment,-pretty baskets and shelves hanging on the walls, and over the beds canopies of bright calico. On some of the beds, the sheets and pillow-cases were trimmed with wide hand-wrought lace, made by the Indian women themselves. This is one of their arts which date back to the mission days. Some of the lace is beautiful and fine, and of patterns like the old church laces. It was pitiful to see the poor creatures in almost every one of the hovels bringing out a yard or two of their lace to sell; and there was hardly a house which had not the lace-maker's frame hanging on the wall, with an unfinished piece of lace stretched in it. The making of this lace requires much time and patience. It is done by first drawing out all the lengthwise threads of a piece of fine linen or cotton; then the threads which are left are sewed over and over into an endless variety of intricate patterns. Sometimes the whole design is done in solid button-hole stitch, or solid figures are filled in on an open network made of the threads. The baskets were finely woven, of good shapes, and excellent decorative patterns in brown and black on yellow or white.

Every face, except those of the very young, was sad beyond description. They were stamped indelibly by generations of suffering, immovable distrust also underlying the sorrow. It was hard to make them smile. To all our expressions of good-will and interest they seemed indifferent, and received in silence the money we paid them for baskets and lace.

The word "Temecula" is an Indian word, signifying "grief" or "mourning." It seems to have had a strangely prophetic fitness for the valley to which it was given.

While I am writing these lines, the news comes that, by an executive order of the President, the little valley in which these Indians took refuge has been set apart for them as a reservation. No doubt they know how much executive orders creating Indian reservations are worth. There have been several such made and revoked in California within their memories. The San Pasqual valley was at one time set apart by executive order as a reservation for Indians. This was in 1870. There were then living in the valley between two and three hundred Indians; some of them had been members of the original pueblo established there in 1835.

The comments of the California newspapers on this executive order are amusing, or would be if they did not record such tragedy. It was followed by an outburst of virtuous indignation all along the coast. One paper said:

"The iniquity of this scheme is made manifest when we state the fact that the Indians of that part of the State are Mission Indians who are settled in villages and engaged in farming like the white settlers.... It would be gross injustice to the Indians themselves as well as to the white settlers in San Pasqual.... These Indians are as fixed in their habitations as the whites, and have fruit-trees, buildings, and other valuable improvements to make them contented and comfortable. Until within the past two or three years they raised more fruit than the white settlers of the southern counties. There is belonging to an Indian family there a fig-tree that is the largest in the State, covering a space sixty paces in diameter.... A remonstrance signed by over five hundred citizens and indorsed by every office-holder in the county has gone on to Washington against this swindle.... This act on the part of the Government is no better than highway robbery, and the persons engaged in it are too base to be called men. There is not a person in either of these valleys that will not be ruined pecuniarily if these orders are enforced."

Looking through files of newspapers of that time, I found only one that had the moral courage to uphold the measure. That paper said,-

"Most of the inhabitants are now Indians who desire to be protected in their ancient possessions; and the Government is about to give them that protection, after a long delay."

One editor, having nearly exhausted the resources of invective and false statement, actually had the hardihood to say that Indians could not be induced to live on this reservation because "there are no acorn-bearing trees there, and the acorns furnish their principal food."

The congressmen and their clients were successful. The order was revoked. In less than four years the San Pasqual Indians are heard from again. A justice of the peace in the San Pasqual valley writes to the district attorney to know if anything can be done to protect these Indians.

"Last year," he says, "the heart of this rancheria (village) was filed on and pre-empted. The settlers are beginning to plough up the land. The Los Angeles Land Office has informed the Indians that, not being citizens, they cannot retain any claim. It seems very hard," says the judge, "aside from the danger of difficulties likely to arise from it."

About this time a bill introduced in Congress to provide homes for the Mission Indians on the reservation plan was reported unfavorably upon by a Senate committee, on the ground that all the Mission Indians were really American citizens. The year following, the chief of the Pala Indians, being brought to the county clerk's office to register as a voter, was refused on the ground that, being an Indian, he was not a citizen. In 1850 a small band of Indians living in San Diego County were taxed to the amount of six hundred dollars, which they paid, the sheriff said, "without a murmur." The next year they refused. The sheriff wrote to the district attorney, who replied that the tax must be paid. The Indians said they had no money. They had only bows, arrows, wigwams, and a few cattle. Finally, they were compelled to drive in enough of their cattle to pay the tax. One of the San Diego newspapers spoke of the transaction as "a small business to undertake to collect taxes from a parcel of naked Indians."

The year before these events happened a special agent, John G. Ames, had been sent out by the Government to investigate and report upon the condition of the Mission Indians. He had assured them "of the sincere desire of the Government to secure their rights and promote their interests, and of its intention to do whatever might be found practicable in this direction." He told them he had been "sent out by the Government to hear their story, to examine carefully into their condition, and to recommend such measures as seemed under the circumstances most desirable."

Mr. Ames found in the San Pasqual valley a white man who had just built for himself a good house, and claimed to have pre-empted the greater part of the Indians' village. He "had actually paid the price of the land to the register of the land office of the district, and was daily expecting the patent from Washington. He owned that it was hard to wrest from these well-disposed and industrious creatures the homes they had built up. 'But,' said he, 'if I had not done it, somebody else would; for all agree that the Indian has no right to public lands.'"

This sketch of the history of the San Pasqual and Temecula bands of Indians is a fair showing of what, with little variation, has been the fate of the Mission Indians all through Southern California. The combination of cruelty and unprincipled greed on the part of the American settlers, with culpable ignorance, indifference, and neglect on the part of the Government at Washington has resulted in an aggregate of monstrous injustice, which no one can fully realize without studying the facts on the ground. In the winter of 1882 I visited this San Pasqual valley. I drove over from San Diego with the Catholic priest, who goes there three or four Sundays in a year, to hold service in a little adobe chapel built by the Indians in the days of their prosperity. This beautiful valley is from one to three miles wide, and perhaps twelve long. It is walled by high-rolling, soft-contoured hills, which are now one continuous wheat-field. There are, in sight of the chapel, a dozen or so adobe houses, many of which were built by the Indians; in all of them except one are now living the robber whites, who have driven the Indians out; only one Indian still remains in the valley. He earns a meagre living for himself and family by doing day's work for the farmers who have taken his land. The rest of the Indians are hidden away in the ca?ons and rifts of the near hills,-wherever they can find a bit of ground to keep a horse or two and raise a little grain. They have sought the most inaccessible spots, reached often by miles of difficult trail. They have fled into secret lairs like hunted wild beasts. The Catholic priest of San Diego is much beloved by them. He has been their friend for many years. When he goes to hold service, they gather from their various hiding-places and refuges; sometimes, on a special fête day, over two hundred come. But on the day I was there, the priest being a young man who was a stranger to them, only a few were present. It was a pitiful sight. The dilapidated adobe building, empty and comfortless; the ragged poverty-stricken creatures, kneeling on the bare ground,-a few Mexicans, with some gaudiness of attire, setting off the Indians' poverty still more. In front of the chapel, on a rough cross-beam supported by two forked posts, set awry in the ground, swung a bell bearing the date of 1770. It was one of the bells of the old San Diego Mission. Standing bareheaded, the priest rang it long and loud: he rang it several times before the leisurely groups that were plainly to be seen in doorways or on roadsides bestirred themselves to make any haste to come. After the service I had a long talk, through an interpreter, with an aged Indian, the oldest now living in the county. He is said to be considerably over a hundred, and his looks corroborate the statement. He is almost blind, and has snow-white hair, and a strange voice, a kind of shrill whisper. He says he recollects the rebuilding of the San Diego Mission; though he was a very little boy then, he helped to carry the mud mortar. This was one hundred and three years ago. Instances of much greater longevity than this, however, are not uncommon among the California Indians. I asked if he had a good time in the mission. "Yes, yes," he said, turning his sightless eyes up to the sky; "much good time," "plenty to eat," "atole," "pozzole," "meat;" now, "no meat;" "all the time to beg, beg;" "all the time hungry." His wife, who is older than he, is still living, though "her hair is not so white." She was ill, and was with relatives far away in the mountains; he lifted his hand and pointed in the direction of the place. "Much sick, much sick; she will never walk any more," he said, with deep feeling in his voice.

During the afternoon the Indians were continually coming and going at the shop connected with the inn where we had stopped, some four miles from the valley. The keeper of the shop and inn said he always trusted them. They were "good pay." "Give them their time and they'll always pay; and if they die their relations will pay the last cent." Some of them he would "trust any time as high as twenty dollars." When I asked him how they earned their money, he seemed to have no very distinct idea. Some of them had a little stock; they might now and then sell a horse or a cow, he said; they hired as laborers whenever they could get a chance, working at sheep-shearing in the spring and autumn, and at grape-picking in the vintage season. A few of them had a little wheat to sell; sometimes they paid him in wheat. There were not nearly so many of them, however, as there had been when he first opened his shop; not half so many, he thought. Where had they gone? He shrugged his shoulders. "Who knows?" he said.

The most wretched of all the Mission Indians now, however, are not these who have been thus driven into hill fastnesses and waterless valleys to wrest a living where white men would starve. There is in their fate the climax of misery, but not of degradation. The latter cannot be reached in the wilderness. It takes the neighborhood of the white man to accomplish it. On the outskirts of the town of San Diego are to be seen, here and there, huddled groups of what, at a distance, might be taken for piles of refuse and brush, old blankets, old patches of sail-cloth, old calico, dead pine boughs, and sticks all heaped together in shapeless mounds; hollow, one perceives on coming nearer them, and high enough for human beings to creep under. These are the homes of Indians. I have seen the poorest huts of the most poverty-stricken wilds in Italy, Bavaria, Norway, and New Mexico; but never have I seen anything, in shape of shelter for human creatures, so loathsome as the kennels in which some of the San Diego Indians are living. Most of these Indians are miserable, worthless beggars, drunkards of course, and worse. Even for its own sake, it would seem that the town would devise some scheme of help and redemption for such outcasts. There is a school in San Diego for the Indian children; it is supported in part by the Government, in part by charity; but work must be practically thrown away on children that are to spend eighteen hours out of the twenty-four surrounded by such filth and vice.

Coming from the study of the records of the old mission times, with the picture fresh and vivid of the tranquil industry and comfort of the Indians' lives in the mission establishments, one gazes with double grief on such a spectacle as this. Some of these Indian hovels are within a short distance of the beach where the friars first landed, in 1769, and began their work. No doubt, Father Junipero and Father Crespí, arm in arm, in ardent converse, full of glowing anticipation of the grand future results of their labors, walked again and again, up and down, on the very spot where these miserable wretches are living to-day. One cannot fancy Father Junipero's fiery soul, to whatever far sphere it may have been translated, looking down on this ruin without pangs of indignation.

There are still left in the mountain ranges of South California a few Indian villages which will probably, for some time to come, preserve their independent existence. Some of them number as many as two or three hundred inhabitants. Each has its chief, or, as he is now called, "capitan." They have their own system of government of the villages; it is autocratic, but in the main it works well. In one of these villages, that of the Cahuillas, situated in the San Jacinto range, is a school whose teacher is paid by the United States Government. She is a widow with one little daughter. She has built for herself a room adjoining the school-house. In this she lives alone, with her child, in the heart of the Indian village; there is not a white person within ten miles. She says that the village is as well-ordered, quiet, and peaceable as it is possible for a village to be; and she feels far safer, surrounded by these three hundred Cahuillas, than she would feel in most of the California towns. The Cahuillas (pronounced Kaweeyahs) were one of the fiercest and most powerful of the tribes. The name signifies "master," or "powerful nation." A great number of the neophytes of the San Gabriel Mission were from this tribe; but a large proportion of them were never attached to any mission.

Their last great chief, Juan Antonio, died twenty years ago. At the time of the Mexican War he received the title of General from General Kearney, and never afterward appeared in the villages of the whites without some fragmentary attempts at military uniform. He must have been a grand character, with all his barbarism. He ruled his band like an emperor, and never rode abroad without an escort of from twenty to thirty men. When he stopped one of his Indians ran forward, bent down, took off his spurs, then, kneeling on all-fours, made of his back a stool, on which Juan stepped in dismounting and mounting. In 1850 an Indian of this tribe, having murdered another Indian, was taken prisoner by the civil authorities and carried to Jurupa to be tried. Before the proceedings had begun, Juan, with a big following of armed Indians, dashed up to the court-house, strode in alone, and demanded that the prisoner be surrendered to him.

"I come not here as a child," he said. "I wish to punish my people my own way. If they deserve hanging, I will hang them. If a white man deserves hanging, let the white man hang him. I am done."

The prisoner was given up. The Indians strapped him on a horse, and rode back to their village, where, in an open grave, the body of the murdered man had been laid. Into this grave, on the top of the corpse of his victim, Juan Antonio, with his own hands, flung the murderer alive, and ordered the grave instantly filled up with earth.

There are said to have been other instances of his dealings with offenders nearly as summary and severe as this. He is described as looking like an old African lion, shaggy and fierce; but he was always cordial and affectionate in his relations with the whites. He died in 1863, of small-pox, in a terrible epidemic which carried off thousands of Indians.

This Cahuilla village is in a small valley, high up in the San Jacinto range. The Indians are very poor, but they are industrious and hard-working. The men raise stock, and go out in bands as sheep-shearers and harvesters. The women make baskets, lace, and from the fibre of the yucca plant, beautiful and durable mats, called "cocas," which are much sought after by California ranchmen as saddle-mats. The yucca fibres are soaked and beaten like flax; some are dyed brown, some bleached white, and the two woven together in a great variety of patterns.

In the San Jacinto valley, some thirty miles south of these Cahuillas, is another Indian village called Saboba. These Indians have occupied and cultivated this ground since the days of the missions. They have good adobe houses, many acres of wheat-fields, little peach and apricot orchards, irrigating ditches, and some fences. In one of the houses I found a neatly laid wooden floor, a sewing-machine, and the walls covered with pictures cut from illustrated newspapers which had been given to them by the school teacher. There is a Government school here, numbering from twenty to thirty; the children read as well as average white children of their age, and in manners and in apparent interest in their studies, were far above the average of children in the public schools.

One of the colony schemes, so common now in California, has been formed for the opening up and settling of the San Jacinto valley. This Indian village will be in the colony's way. In fact, the colony must have its lands and its water. It is only a question of a very little time, the driving out of these Saboba families as the Temeculas and San Pasquales were driven,-by force, just as truly as if at the point of the bayonet.

In one of the beautiful ca?ons opening on this valley is the home of Victoriano, an aged chief of the band. He is living with his daughter and grandchildren, in a comfortable adobe house at the head of the ca?on. The vineyard and peach orchard which his father planted there, are in good bearing. His grandson Jesus, a young man twenty years old, in the summer of 1881 ploughed up and planted twenty acres of wheat. The boy also studied so faithfully in school that year-his first year at school-that he learned to read well in the "Fourth Reader;" this in spite of his being absent six weeks, in both spring and autumn, with the sheep-shearing band. A letter of his, written at my request to the Secretary of the Interior in behalf of his people, is touching in its simple dignity.

San Jacinto, Cal., May 29, 1882.

Mr. Teller.

Dear Sir,-At the request of my friends, I write you in regard to the land of my people.

More than one hundred years ago, my great-grandfather, who was chief of his tribe, settled with his people in the San Jacinto valley. The people have always been peaceful, never caring for war, and have welcomed Americans into the valley.

Some years ago a grant of land was given to the Estudillos by the Mexican Government. The first survey did not take in any of the land claimed by the Indians; but four years ago a new survey was made, taking in all the little farms, the stream of water, and the village. Upon this survey the United States Government gave a patent. It seems hard for us to be driven from our homes that we love as much as other people do theirs; and this danger is at our doors now, for the grant is being divided and the village and land will be assigned to some of the present owners of the grant.

And now, dear sir, after this statement of facts, I, for my people (I ask nothing for myself), appeal to you for help.

Cannot you find some way to right this great wrong done to a quiet and industrious people?

Hoping that we may have justice done us, I am

Respectfully yours,

José Jesus Castillo.

He was at first unwilling to write it, fearing he should be supposed to be begging for himself rather than for his people. His father was a Mexican; and he has hoped that on that account their family would be exempt from the fate of the village when the colony comes into the valley. But it is not probable that in a country where water is gold, a stream of water such as runs by Victoriano's door will be left long in the possession of any Indian family, whatever may be its relations to rich Mexican proprietors in the neighborhood. Jesus's mother is a tall, superbly formed woman, with a clear skin, hazel nut-brown eyes that thrill one with their limpid brightness, a nose straight and strong, and a mouth like an Egyptian priestess. She is past forty, but she is strikingly handsome still; and one does not wonder at hearing the tragedy of her early youth, when, for years, she believed herself the wife of Jesus's father, lived in his house as a wife, worked as a wife, and bore him his children. Her heart broke when she was sent adrift, a sadder than Hagar, with her half-disowned offspring. Money and lands did not heal the wound. Her face is dark with the sting of it to-day. When I asked her to sell me the lace-trimmed pillow-case and sheet from her bed, her cheeks flushed at first, and she looked away haughtily before replying. But, after a moment, she consented. They needed the money. She knows well that days of trouble are in store for them.

Since the writing of this paper news has come that the long-expected blow has fallen on this Indian village. The colony scheme has been completed; the valley has been divided up; the land on which the village of Saboba stands is now the property of a San Bernardino merchant. Any day he chooses, he can eject these Indians as the Temecula and the San Pasqual bands were ejected, and with far more show of legal right.

In the vicinity of the San Juan Capistrano Mission are living a few families of Indians, some of them the former neophytes of the mission. An old woman there, named Carmen, is a splendid specimen of the best longevity which her race and the California air can produce. We found her in bed, where she spends most of her time,-not lying, but sitting cross-legged, looking brisk and energetic, and always busy making lace. Nobody makes finer lace than hers. Yet she laughed when we asked if she could see to do such fine work without spectacles.

"Where could I get spectacles?" she said, her eyes twinkling. Then she stretched out her hand for the spectacles of our old Mexican friend who had asked her this question for us; took them, turned them over curiously, tried to look through them, shook her head, and handed them back to him with a shrug and a smile. She was twenty years older than he; but her strong, young eyes could not see through his glasses. He recollected her well, fifty years before, an active, handsome woman, taking care of the sacristy, washing the priests' laces, mending vestments, and filling various offices of trust in the mission. A sailor from a French vessel lying in the harbor wished to marry her; but the friars would not give their consent, because the man was a drunkard and dishonest. Carmen was well disposed to him, and much flattered by his love-making. He used to write letters to her, which she brought to this Mexican boy to read. It was a droll sight to see her face, as he, now white-haired and looking fully as old as she, reminded her of that time and of those letters, tapping her jocosely on her cheek, and saying some things I am sure he did not quite literally translate to us. She fairly colored, buried her face in her hands for a second, then laughed till she shook, and answered in voluble Spanish, of which also I suspect we did not get a full translation. She was the happiest Indian we saw; indeed, the only one who seemed really gay of heart or even content.

A few rods from the old mission church of San Gabriel, in a hut made of bundles of the tule reeds lashed to sycamore poles, as the San Gabriel Indians made them a hundred years ago, live two old Indian women, Laura and Benjamina. Laura is one hundred and two years old, Benjamina one hundred and seventeen. The record of their baptisms is still to be seen in the church books, so there can be no dispute as to their age. It seems not at all incredible, however. If I had been told that Benjamina was a three-thousand-year-old Nile mummy, resuscitated by some mysterious process, I should not have demurred much at the tale. The first time I saw them, the two were crouching over a fire on the ground, under a sort of booth porch, in front of their hovel. Laura was making a feint of grinding acorn-meal in a stone bowl; Benjamina was raking the ashes, with her claw-like old fingers, for hot coals to start the fire afresh; her skin was like an elephant's, shrivelled, black, hanging in folds and welts on her neck and breast and bony arms; it was not like anything human; her shrunken eyes, bright as beads, peered out from under thickets of coarse grizzled gray hair. Laura wore a white cloth band around her head, tied on with a strip of scarlet flannel; above that, a tattered black shawl, which gave her the look of an aged imp. Old baskets, old pots, old pans, old stone mortars and pestles, broken tiles and bricks, rags, straw, boxes, legless chairs,-in short, all conceivable rubbish,-were strewn about or piled up in the place, making the weirdest of backgrounds for the aged crones' figures. Inside the hut were two bedsteads and a few boxes, baskets, and nets; and drying grapes and peppers hung on the walls. A few feet away was another hut, only a trifle better than this; four generations were living in the two. Benjamina's step-daughter, aged eighty, was a fine creature. With a white band straight around her forehead close to the eyebrows and a gay plaid handkerchief thrown on above it, falling squarely each side of her face, she looked like an old Bedouin sheik.

Our Mexican friend remembered Laura as she was fifty years ago. She was then, even at fifty-two, celebrated as one of the swiftest runners and best ball-players in all the San Gabriel games. She was a singer, too, in the choir. Coaxing her up on her feet, patting her shoulders, entreating and caressing her as one would a child, he succeeded in persuading her to chant for us the Lord's Prayer and part of the litanies, as she had been wont to do it in the old days. It was a grotesque and incredible sight. The more she stirred and sang and lifted her arms, the less alive she looked. We asked the step-daughter if they were happy and wished to live. Laughing, she repeated the question to them. "Oh, yes, we wish to live forever," they replied. They were greatly terrified, the daughter said, when the railway cars first ran through San Gabriel. They thought it was the devil bringing fire to burn up the world. Their chief solace is tobacco. To beg it, Benjamina will creep about in the village by the hour, bent double over her staff, tottering at every step. They sit for the most part silent, motionless, on the ground; their knees drawn up, their hands clasped over them, their heads sunk on their breasts. In my drives in the San Gabriel valley I often saw them sitting thus, as if they were dead. The sight had an indescribable fascination. It seemed that to be able to penetrate into the recesses of their thoughts would be to lay hold upon secrets as old as the earth.

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 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 mass 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 ghastly funereal emblems; candles were burning; a row of kneeling black-shawled women were holding lighted candies in their hands; two old Indians were chanting a Latin Mass 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 mass was for the soul of an old Indian woman named Margarita, sister of Manuelito, a somewhat famous chief of several bands of the San Luise?os. Her home was at the Potrero,-a mountain meadow, or pasture, as the word signifies,-about ten miles from Pala, high up the mountain-side, and reached by an almost impassable 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 title 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 pass 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 coarse 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 butter, all laid in orderly fashion, with a clean table-cloth, 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 just been forced to give so much for the mass for Margarita's soul, and it had been hard for them to raise the money. Twelve dollars the priest had charged for the mass; and in addition they had to pay for the candles, silver lace, black cloth, etc., nearly as much more. They had earnestly desired to have the mass said at the Potrero, but the priest would not come up there for less than twenty dollars, and that, Antonia said, with a sigh, they could not possibly pay. We left at six o'clock in the morning; Margarita's husband, the "capitan," riding off with us to see us safe on our way. When we had passed 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 title to their lands.

The most picturesque of all the Mission Indians' hiding-places which we saw was that on the Carmel River, a few miles from the San Carlos Mission. Except by help of a guide it cannot be found. A faint trail turning off from the road in the river-bottom leads down to the river's edge. You follow it into the river and across, supposing it a ford. On the opposite bank there is no trail, no sign of one. Whether it is that the Indians purposely always go ashore at different points of the bank, so as to leave no trail; or whether they so seldom go out, except on foot, that the trail has faded away, I do not know. But certainly, if we had had no guide, we should have turned back, sure we were wrong. A few rods up from the river-bank, a stealthy narrow footpath appeared; through willow copses, sunk in meadow grasses, across shingly bits of alder-walled beach it creeps, till it comes out in a lovely spot,-half basin, half rocky knoll,-where, tucked away in nooks and hollows, are the little Indian houses, eight or ten of them, some of adobe, some of the tule-reeds: small patches of corn, barley, potatoes, and hay; and each little front yard fenced in by palings, with roses, sweet-peas, poppies, and mignonette growing inside. In the first house we reached, a woman was living alone. She was so alarmed at the sight of us that she shook. There could not be a more pitiful comment on the state of perpetual distrust and alarm in which the poor creatures live, than this woman's face and behavior. We tried in vain to reassure her; we bought all the lace she had to sell, chatted with her about it, and asked her to show us how it was made. Even then she was so terrified that although she willingly took down her lace-frame to sew a few stitches for us to see, her hands still trembled. In another house we found an old woman evidently past eighty, without glasses working button-holes in fine thread. Her daughter-in-law-a beautiful half-breed, with a still more beautiful baby in her arms-asked the old woman, for us, how old she was. She laughed merrily at the silly question. "She never thought about it," she said; "it was written down once in a book at the Mission, but the book was lost."

There was not a man in the village. They were all away at work, farming or fishing. This little handful of people are living on land to which they have no shadow of title, and from which they may be driven any day,-these Carmel Mission lands having been rented out, by their present owner, in great dairy farms. The parish priest of Monterey told me much of the pitiable condition of these remnants of the San Carlos Indians. He can do little or nothing for them, though their condition makes his heart ache daily. In that half-foreign English which is always so much more eloquent a language than the English-speaking peoples use, he said: "They have their homes there only by the patience of the thief; it may be that the patience do not last to-morrow." The phrase is worth preserving: it embodies so much history,-history of two races.

In Mr. Wilson's report are many eloquent and strong paragraphs, bearing on the question of the Indians' right to the lands they had under cultivation at the time of the secularization. He says:-

"It is not natural rights I speak of, nor merely possessory rights, but rights acquired and contracts made,-acquired and made when the laws of the Indies had force here, and never assailed by any laws or executive acts since, till 1834 and 1846; and impregnable to these.... No past maladministration of laws can be suffered to destroy their true intent, while the victims of the maladministration live to complain, and the rewards of wrong have not been consumed."

Of Mr. Wilson's report in 1852, of Mr. Ames's report in 1873, and of the various other reports called for by the Government from time to time, nothing came, except the occasional setting off of reservations by executive orders, which, if the lands reserved were worth anything, were speedily revoked at the bidding of California politicians. There are still some reservations left, chiefly of desert and mountainous lands, which nobody wants, and on which the Indians could not live.

The last report made to the Indian Bureau by their present agent closes in the following words:-

"The necessity of providing suitable lands for them in the form of one or more reservations has been pressed on the attention of the Department in my former reports; and I now, for the third and perhaps the last time, emphasize that necessity by saying that whether Government will immediately heed the pleas that have been made in behalf of these people or not, it must sooner or later deal with this question in a practical way, or else see a population of over three thousand Indians become homeless wanderers in a desert region."

I have shown a few glimpses of the homes, of the industry, the patience, the long-suffering of the people who are in this immediate danger of being driven out from their last footholds of refuge, "homeless wanderers in a desert."

If the United States Government does not take steps to avert this danger, to give them lands and protect them in their rights, the chapter of the history of the Mission Indians will be the blackest one in the black record of our dealings with the Indian race.

It must be done speedily if at all, for there is only a small remnant left to be saved. These are in their present homes "only on the patience of the thief; and it may be that the patience do not last to-morrow."

ECHOES IN THE CITY OF THE ANGELS.

The tale of the founding of the city of Los Angeles is a tale for verse rather than for prose. It reads like a page out of some new "Earthly Paradise," and would fit well into song such as William Morris has sung.

It is only a hundred years old, however, and that is not time enough for such song to simmer. It will come later, with the perfume of century-long summers added to its flavor. Summers century-long? One might say a stronger thing than that of them, seeing that their blossoming never stops, year in nor year out, and will endure as long as the visible frame of the earth.

The twelve devout Spanish soldiers who founded the city named it at their leisure with a long name, musical as a chime of bells. It answered well enough, no doubt, for the first fifty years of the city's life, during which not a municipal record of any sort or kind was written,-"Nuestra Se?ora Reina de los Angeles," "Our Lady the Queen of the Angels;" and her portrait made a goodly companion flag, unfurled always by the side of the flag of Spain.

There is a legend, that sounds older than it is, of the ceremonies with which the soldiers took possession of their new home. They were no longer young. They had fought for Spain in many parts of the Old World, and followed her uncertain fortunes to the New. Ten years some of them had been faithfully serving Church and King in sight of these fair lands, for which they hankered, and with reason.

In those days the soft, rolling, treeless hills and valleys, between which the Los Angeles River now takes its shilly-shallying course seaward, were forest slopes and meadows, with lakes great and small. This abundance of trees, with shining waters playing among them, added to the limitless bloom of the plains and the splendor of the snow-topped mountains, must have made the whole region indeed a paradise.

Navarro, Villavicencia, Rodriguez, Quintero, Moreno, Lara, Banegas, Rosas, and Canero, these were their names: happy soldiers all, honored of their king, and discharged with so royal a gift of lands thus fair.

Looking out across the Los Angeles hills and meadows to-day, one easily lives over again the joy they must have felt. Twenty-three young children there were in the band, poor little waifs of camp and march. What a "braw flitting" was it for them, away from the drum-beat forever into the shelter of their own sunny home! The legend says not a word of the mothers, except that there were eleven of them, and in the procession they walked with their children behind the men. Doubtless they rejoiced the most.

The Fathers from the San Gabriel Mission were there, with many Indian neophytes, and Don Felipe, the military governor, with his showy guard of soldiers.

The priests and neophytes chanted. The Cross was set up, the flag of Spain and the banner of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels unfurled, and the new town marked out around a square, a little to the north of the present plaza of Los Angeles.

If communities, as well as individuals, are happy when history finds nothing to record of them, the city of the Queen of the Angels must have been a happy spot during the first fifty years of its life; for not a written record of the period remains, not even a record of grants of land. The kind of grant that these worthy Spanish soldiers and their sons contented themselves with, however, hardly deserved recording,-in fact, was not a grant at all, since its continuance depended entirely on the care a man took of his house and the improvement he put on his land. If he left his house unoccupied, or let it fall out of repair, if he left a field uncultivated for two years, any neighbor who saw fit might denounce him, and by so doing acquire a right to the property. This sounds incredible, but all the historical accounts of the time agree on the point. They say,-

"The granting authorities could, and were by law required, upon a proper showing of the abandonment, to grant the property to the informant, who then acquired the same and no better rights than those possessed by his predecessor."

This was a premium indeed on staying at home and minding one's business,-a premium which amounted to coercion. One would think that there must have been left from those days teeming records of alienated estates, shifted tenures, and angry feuds between neighbor and neighbor. But no evidence remains of such strifes. Life was too simple, and the people were too ignorant.

Their houses were little more than hovels, built of mud, eight feet high, with flat roofs made of reeds and asphaltum. Their fields, with slight cultivation, produced all they needed; and if anything lacked, the rich vineyards, wheat-fields, and orchards of the San Gabriel Mission lay only twelve miles away. These vineyards, orchards, and granaries, so near at hand, must have been sore temptation to idleness. Each head of a family had been presented, by the paternal Spanish king, with "two oxen, two mules, two mares, two sheep, two goats, two cows, one calf, an ass, and one hoe." For these they were to pay in such small instalments as they were able to spare out of their pay and rations, which were still continued by the generous king.

In a climate in which flowers blossom winter and summer alike, man may bask in sun all the year round if he chooses. Why, then, should those happy Spanish soldiers work? Even the king had thought it unnecessary, it seems, to give them any implements of labor except "one hoe." What could a family do, in the way of work, with "one hoe"? Evidently, they did not work, neither they, nor their sons, nor their sons' sons after them; for, half a century later, they were still living a life of almost incredible ignorance, redeemed only by its simplicity and childlike adherence to the old religious observances.

Many of those were beautiful. As late as 1830 it was the custom throughout the town, in all the families of the early settlers, for the oldest member of the family-oftenest it was a grandfather or grandmother-to rise every morning at the rising of the morning star, and at once to strike up a hymn. At the first note every person in the house would rise, or sit up in bed and join in the song. From house to house, street to street, the singing spread; and the volume of musical sound swelled, until it was as if the whole town sang.

The hymns were usually invocations to the Virgin, to Jesus, or to some saint. The opening line of many of them was,-

"Rejoice, O Mother of God."

A manuscript copy of one of these old morning songs I have seen, and had the good fortune to win a literal translation of part of it, in the soft, Spanish-voiced, broken English, so pleasant to hear. The first stanza is the chorus, and was repeated after each of the others:-

"Come, O sinners,

Come, and we will sing

Tender hymns

To our refuge.

"Singers at dawn,

From the heavens above,

People all regions;

Gladly we too sing.

"Singing harmoniously,

Saying to Mary,

'O beautiful Queen,

Princess of Heaven!

"'Your beautiful head

Crowned we see;

The stars are adorning

Your beautiful hair;

"'Your eyebrows are arched,

Your forehead serene;

Your face turned always

Looks toward God;

"'Your eyes' radiance

Is like beautiful stars;

Like a white dove,

You are true to your spouse.'"

Each of these stanzas was sung first alone by the aged leader of the family choir. Then the rest repeated it; then all joined in the chorus.

It is said that there are still to be found, in lonely country regions in California, Mexican homes in which these sweet and holy "songs before sunrise" are sung.

Looking forward to death, the greatest anxiety of these simple souls was to provide themselves with a priest's cast-off robe to be buried in. These were begged or bought as the greatest of treasures; kept in sight, or always at hand, to remind them of approaching death. When their last hour drew near, this robe was flung over their breasts, and they died happy, their stiffening fingers grasping its folds. The dead body was wrapped in it, and laid on the mud floor of the house, a stone being placed under the head to raise it a few inches. Thus the body must lie till the time of burial. Around it, day and night, squatted, praying and singing, friends who wished not only to show their affection for the deceased, but to win indulgences for themselves; every prayer said thus, by the side of a corpse, having a special and specified value.

A strange demarkation between the sexes was enforced in these ceremonies. If it were a woman who lay dead, only women might kneel and pray and watch with her body; if a man, the circle of watchers must be exclusively of men.

A rough box, of boards nailed together, was the coffin. The body, rolled in the old robe whose virtues had so comforted its last conscious moments, was carried to the grave on a board, in the centre of a procession of friends chanting and singing. Not until the last moment was it laid in the box.

The first attempts to introduce more civilized forms of burial met with opposition, and it was only by slow degrees that changes were wrought. A Frenchman, who had come from France to Los Angeles, by way of the Sandwich Islands, bringing a store of sacred ornaments and trinkets, and had grown rich by sale of them to the devout, owned a spring wagon, the only one in the country. By dint of entreaty, the people were finally prevailed upon to allow their dead to be carried in this wagon to the burial-place. For a long time, however, they refused to have horses put to the wagon, but drew it by hand all the way; women drawing women, and men drawing men, with the same scrupulous partition of the sexes as in the earlier ceremonies. The picture must have been a strange one, and not without pathos,-the wagon, wound and draped with black and white, drawn up and down the steep hills by the band of silent mourners.

The next innovation was the introduction of stately catafalques for the dead to repose on, either in house or church, during the interval between their death and burial. There had been brought into the town a few old-fashioned, high-post, canopied bedsteads, and from these the first catafalques were made. Gilded, decorated with gold and silver lace, and hung with white and black draperies, they made a by no means insignificant show, which doubtless went far to reconcile people's minds to the new methods.

In 1838 there was a memorable funeral of a woman over a hundred years old. Fourteen old women watched with her body, which lay stretched on the floor, in the ancient fashion, with only a stone beneath the head. The youngest of these watchers was eighty-five. One of them, Tomasa Camera by name, was herself over a hundred years old. Tomasa was infirm of foot; so they propped her with pillows in a little cart, and drew her to the house that she might not miss of the occasion. All night long, the fourteen squatted or sat on rawhides spread on the floor, and sang and prayed and smoked: as fine a wake as was ever seen. They smoked cigarettes, which they rolled on the spot, out of corn-husks slit fine for the purpose, there being at that day in Los Angeles no paper fit for cigarettes.

Outside this body-guard of aged women knelt a circle of friends and relatives, also chanting, praying, and smoking. In this outer circle any one might come and go at pleasure; but into the inner ring of the watching none must come, and none must go out of it till the night was spent.

With the beginning of the prosperity of the City of the Angels, came the end of its primeval peace. Spanish viceroys, Mexican alcaldes and governors, United States commanders, naval and military, followed on each other's heels, with or without frays, ruling California through a succession of tumultuous years. Greedy traders from all parts of the world added their rivalries and interventions to the civil and military disputation. In the general anarchy and confusion, the peaceful and peace-loving Catholic Fathers were robbed of their lands, their converts were scattered, their industries broken up. Nowhere were these uncomfortable years more uncomfortable than in Los Angeles. Revolts, occupations, surrenders, retakings, and resurrenders kept the little town in perpetual ferment. Disorders were the order of the day and of the night, in small matters as well as in great.

The Californian fought as impetuously for his old way of dancing as for his political allegiance. There are comical traditions of the men's determination never to wear long trousers to dances; nor to permit dances to be held in houses or halls, it having been the practice always to give them in outdoor booths or bowers, with lattice-work walls of sycamore poles lashed together by thongs of rawhide.

Outside these booths the men sat on their horses looking in at the dancing, which was chiefly done by the women. An old man standing in the centre of the enclosure directed the dances. Stopping in front of the girl whom he wished to have join the set, he clapped his hands. She then rose and took her place on the floor; if she could not dance, or wished to decline, she made a low bow and resumed her seat.

To look in on all this was great sport. Sometimes, unable to resist the spell, a man would fling himself off his horse, dash into the enclosure, seize a girl by the waist, whirl around with her through one dance, then out again and into the saddle, where he sat, proudly aware of his vantage. The decorations of masculine attire at this time were such as to make riding a fine show. Around the crown of the broad-brimmed sombrero was twisted a coil of gold or silver cord; over the shoulders was flung, with ostentatious carelessness, a short cloak of velvet or brocade; the waistcoats were embroidered in gold, silver, or gay colors; so also were the knee-breeches, leggings, and stockings. Long silken garters, with ornamented tassels at the ends, were wound round and round to hold the stockings in place. Even the cumbrous wooden stirrups were carved in elaborate designs. No wonder that men accustomed to such braveries as these saw ignominy in the plain American trousers.

They seem to have been a variety of Centaur, these early Californian men. They were seldom off their horses except to eat and sleep. They mounted, with jingling silver spur and glittering bridle, for the shortest distances, even to cross a plaza. They paid long visits on horseback, without dismounting. Clattering up to the window or door-sill, halting, throwing one knee over the crupper, the reins lying loose, they sat at ease, far more at ease than in a house. Only at church, where the separation was inevitable, would they be parted from their horses. They turned the near neighborhood of a church on Sunday into a sort of picket-ground, or horse-trainers' yard, full of horse-posts and horses; and the scene was far more like a horse-fair than like an occasion of holy observance. There seems to have been a curious mixture of reverence and irreverence in their natures. They confessed sins and underwent penances with the simplicity of children; but when, in 1821, the Church issued an edict against that "escandalosisima" dance, the waltz, declaring that whoever dared to dance it should be excommunicated, the merry sinners waltzed on only the harder and faster, and laughed in their priests' faces. And when the advocates of decorum, good order, and indoor dancing gave their first ball in a public hall in Los Angeles, the same merry outdoor party broke every window and door in the building, and put a stop to the festivity. They persisted in taking this same summary vengeance on occasion after occasion, until, finally, any person wishing to give a ball in his own house was forced to surround the house by a cordon of police to protect it.

The City of the Angels is a prosperous city now. It has business thoroughfares, blocks of fine stone buildings, hotels, shops, banks, and is growing daily. Its outlying regions are a great circuit of gardens, orchards, vineyards, and corn-fields, and its suburbs are fast filling up with houses of a showy though cheap architecture. But it has not yet shaken off its past. A certain indefinable, delicious aroma from the old, ignorant, picturesque times lingers still, not only in byways and corners, but in the very centres of its newest activities.

Mexican women, their heads wrapped in black shawls, and their bright eyes peering out between the close-gathered folds, glide about everywhere; the soft Spanish speech is continually heard; long-robed priests hurry to and fro; and at each dawn ancient, jangling bells from the Church of the Lady of the Angels ring out the night and in the day. Venders of strange commodities drive in stranger vehicles up and down the streets: antiquated carts piled high with oranges, their golden opulence contrasting weirdly with the shabbiness of their surroundings and the evident poverty of their owner; close following on the gold of one of these, one has sometimes the luck to see another cart, still more antiquated and rickety, piled high with something-he cannot imagine what-terra-cotta red in grotesque shapes; it is fuel,-the same sort which Villavicencia, Quintero, and the rest probably burned, when they burned any, a hundred years ago. It is the roots and root-shoots of manzanita and other shrubs. The colors are superb,-terra-cotta reds, shading up to flesh pink, and down to dark mahogany; but the forms are grotesque beyond comparison: twists, querls, contortions, a boxful of them is an uncomfortable presence in one's room, and putting them on the fire is like cremating the vertebr? and double teeth of colossal monsters of the Pterodactyl period.

The present plaza of the city is near the original plaza marked out at the time of the first settlement; the low adobe house of one of the early governors stands yet on its east side, and is still a habitable building.

The plaza is a dusty and dismal little place, with a parsimonious fountain in the centre, surrounded by spokes of thin turf, and walled at its outer circumference by a row of tall Monterey cypresses, shorn and clipped into the shape of huge croquettes or brad-awls standing broad end down. At all hours of the day idle boys and still idler men are to be seen basking on the fountain's stone rim, or lying, face down, heels in air, in the triangles of shade made by the cypress croquettes. There is in Los Angeles much of this ancient and ingenious style of shearing and compressing foliage into unnatural and distorted shapes. It comes, no doubt, of lingering reverence for the traditions of what was thought beautiful in Spain centuries ago; and it gives to the town a certain quaint and foreign look, in admirable keeping with its irregular levels, zigzag, toppling precipices, and houses in tiers one above another.

One comes sometimes abruptly on a picture which seems bewilderingly un-American, of a precipice wall covered with bird-cage cottages, the little, paling-walled yard of one jutting out in a line with the chimney-tops of the next one below, and so on down to the street at the base of the hill. Wooden staircases and bits of terrace link and loop the odd little perches together; bright green pepper-trees, sometimes tall enough to shade two or three tiers of roofs, give a graceful plumed draping at the sides, and some of the steep fronts are covered with bloom, in solid curtains, of geranium, sweet alyssum, heliotrope, and ivy. These terraced eyries are not the homes of the rich: the houses are lilliputian in size, and of cheap quality; but they do more for the picturesqueness of the city than all the large, fine, and costly houses put together.

Moreover, they are the only houses that command the situation, possess distance and a horizon. From some of these little ten-by-twelve flower-beds of homes is a stretch of view which makes each hour of the day a succession of changing splendors,-the snowy peaks of San Bernardino and San Jacinto in the east and south; to the west, vast open country, billowy green with vineyard and orchard; beyond this, in clear weather, shining glints and threads of ocean, and again beyond, in the farthest outing, hill-crowned islands, misty blue against the sky. No one knows Los Angeles who does not climb to these sunny outlying heights, and roam and linger on them many a day. Nor, even thus lingering, will any one ever know more of Los Angeles than its lovely outward semblances and mysterious suggestions, unless he have the good fortune to win past the barrier of proud, sensitive, tender reserve, behind which is hid the life of the few remaining survivors of the old Spanish and Mexican régime.

Once past this, he gets glimpses of the same stintless hospitality and immeasurable courtesy which gave to the old Franciscan establishments a world-wide fame, and to the society whose tone and customs they created an atmosphere of simple-hearted joyousness and generosity never known by any other communities on the American continent.

In houses whose doors seldom open to English-speaking people, there are rooms full of relics of that fast-vanishing past. Strongholds also of a religious faith, almost as obsolete, in its sort and degree, as are the garments of the aged creatures who are peacefully resting their last days on its support.

In one of these houses, in a poverty-stricken but gayly decorated little bedroom, hangs a small oil-painting, a portrait of Saint Francis de Paula. It was brought from Mexico, fifty-five years ago, by the woman who still owns it, and has knelt before it and prayed to it every day of the fifty-five years. Below it is a small altar covered with flowers, candlesticks, vases, and innumerable knick-knacks. A long string under the picture is hung full of tiny gold and silver votive offerings from persons who have been miraculously cured in answer to prayers made to the saint. Legs, arms, hands, eyes, hearts, heads, babies, dogs, horses,-no organ, no creature, that could suffer, is unrepresented. The old woman has at her tongue's end the tale of each one of these miracles. She is herself a sad cripple; her feet swollen by inflammation, which for many years has given her incessant torture and made it impossible for her to walk, except with tottering steps, from room to room, by help of a staff. This, she says, is the only thing her saint has not cured. It is her "cross," her "mortification of the flesh," "to take her to heaven." "He knows best." As she speaks, her eyes perpetually seek the picture, resting on it with a look of ineffable adoration. She has seen tears roll down its cheeks more than once, she says; and it often smiles on her when they are alone. When strangers enter the room she can always tell, by its expression, whether the saint is or is not pleased with them, and whether their prayers will be granted. She was good enough to remark that he was very glad to see us; she was sure of it by the smile in his eye. He had wrought many beautiful miracles for her. Nothing was too trivial for his sympathy and help. Once when she had broken a vase in which she had been in the habit of keeping flowers on the altar, she took the pieces in her hands, and standing before him, said: "You know you will miss this vase. I always put your flowers in it, and I am too poor to buy another. Now, do mend this for me. I have nobody but you to help me." And the vase grew together again whole while she was speaking. In the same way he mended for her a high glass flower-case which stood on the altar.

Thus she jabbered away breathlessly in Spanish, almost too fast to be followed. Sitting in a high chair, her poor distorted feet propped on a cushion, a black silk handkerchief wound like a turban around her head, a plaid ribosa across her shoulders, contrasting sharply with her shabby wine-colored gown, her hands clasped around a yellow staff, on which she leaned as she bent forward in her eager speaking, she made a study for an artist.

She was very beautiful in her youth, she said; her cheeks so red that people thought they were painted; and she was so strong that she was never tired; and when, in the first year of her widowhood, a stranger came to her "with a letter of recommendation" to be her second husband, and before she had time to speak had fallen on his knees at her feet, she seized him by the throat, and toppling him backward, pinned him against the wall till he was black in the face. And her sister came running up in terror, imploring her not to kill him. But all that strength is gone now, she says sadly; her memory also. Each day, as soon as she has finished her prayers, she has to put away her rosary in a special place, or else she forgets that the prayers have been said. Many priests have desired to possess her precious miracle-working saint; but never till she dies will it leave her bedroom. Not a week passes without some one's arriving to implore its aid. Sometimes the deeply distressed come on their knees all the way from the gate before the house, up the steps, through the hall, and into her bedroom. Such occasions as these are to her full of solemn joy, and no doubt, also, of a secret exultation whose kinship to pride she does not suspect.

In another unpretending little adobe house, not far from this Saint Francis shrine, lives the granddaughter of Moreno, one of the twelve Spanish soldiers who founded the city. She speaks no word of English; and her soft black eyes are timid, though she is the widow of a general, and in the stormy days of the City of the Angels, passed through many a crisis of peril and adventure. Her house is full of curious relics, which she shows with a gentle, half-amused courtesy. It is not easy for her to believe that any American can feel real reverence for the symbols, tokens, and relics of the life and customs which his people destroyed. In her mind Americans remain to-day as completely foreigners as they were when her husband girded on his sword and went out to fight them, forty years ago. Many of her relics have been rescued at one time or another from plunderers of the missions. She has an old bronze kettle which once held holy water at San Fernando; an incense cup and spoon, and massive silver candlesticks; cartridge-boxes of leather, with Spain's ancient seal stamped on them; a huge copper caldron and scales from San Gabriel; a bunch of keys of hammered iron, locks, scissors, reaping-hooks, shovels, carding-brushes for wool and for flax: all made by the Indian workmen in the missions. There was also one old lock, in which the key was rusted fast and immovable, which seemed to me fuller of suggestion than anything else there of the sealed and ended past to which it had belonged; and a curious little iron cannon, in shape like an ale-mug, about eight inches high, with a hole in the side and in the top, to be used by setting it on the ground and laying a trail of powder to the opening in the side. This gave the Indians great delight. It was fired at the times of church festivals, and in seasons of drought to bring rain. Another curious instrument of racket was the matrarca, a strip of board with two small swinging iron handles so set in it that, in swinging back and forth, they hit iron plates. In the time of Lent, when all ringing of bells was forbidden, these were rattled to call the Indians to church. The noise one of them can make when vigorously shaken is astonishing. In crumpled bundles, their stiffened meshes opening out reluctantly, were two curious rush-woven nets which had been used by Indian women fifty years ago in carrying burdens. Similar nets, made of twine, are used by them still. Fastened to a leather strap or band passing around the forehead, they hang down behind far below the waist, and when filled out to their utmost holding capacity are so heavy that the poor creatures bend nearly double beneath them. But the women stand as uncomplainingly as camels while weight after weight is piled in; then slipping the band over their heads, they adjust the huge burden and set off at a trot.

"This is the squaw's horse," said an Indian woman in the San Jacinto valley one day, tapping her forehead and laughing good-naturedly, when the shopkeeper remonstrated with her husband, who was heaping article after article, and finally a large sack of flour, on her shoulders; "squaw's horse very strong."

The original site of the San Gabriel Mission was a few miles to the east of the City of the Angels. Its lands are now divided into ranches and colony settlements, only a few acres remaining in the possession of the Church. But the old chapel is still standing in a fair state of preservation, used for the daily services of the San Gabriel parish; and there are in its near neighborhood a few crumbling adobe hovels left, the only remains of the once splendid and opulent mission. In one of these lives a Mexican woman, eighty-two years old, who for more than half a century has washed and mended the priests' laces, repaired the robes, and remodelled the vestments of San Gabriel. She is worth crossing the continent to see: all white from head to foot, as if bleached by some strange gramarye; white hair, white skin, blue eyes faded nearly to white; white cotton clothes, ragged and not over clean, yet not a trace of color in them; a white linen handkerchief, delicately embroidered by herself, always tied loosely around her throat. She sits on a low box, leaning against the wall, with three white pillows at her back, her feet on a cushion on the ground; in front of her, another low box, on this a lace-maker's pillow, with knotted fringe stretched on it; at her left hand a battered copper caldron, holding hot coals to warm her fingers and to light her cigarettes. A match she will never use; and she has seldom been without a cigarette in her mouth since she was six years old. On her right hand is a chest filled with her treasures,-rags of damask, silk, velvet, lace, muslin, ribbon, artificial flowers, flosses, worsteds, silks on spools; here she sits, day in, day out, making cotton fringes and, out of shreds of silk, tiny embroidered scapulars, which she sells to all devout and charitable people of the region. She also teaches the children of the parish to read and to pray. The walls of her hovel are papered with tattered pictures, including many gay-colored ones, taken off tin cans, their flaunting signs reading drolly,-"Perfection Press Mackerel, Boston, Mass.," "Charm Baking Powder," and "Knowlton's Inks," alternating with "Toledo Blades" and clipper-ship advertisements. She finds these of great use in both teaching and amusing the children. The ceiling, of canvas, black with smoke, and festooned with cobwebs, sags down in folds, and shows many a rent. When it rains, her poor little place must be drenched in spots. One end of the room is curtained off with calico; this is her bedchamber. At the other end is a raised dais, on which stands an altar, holding a small statuette of the Infant Jesus. It is a copy in wood of the famous Little Jesus of Atoches in Mexico, which is worshipped by all the people in that region. It has been her constant companion and protector for fifty years. Over the altar is a canopy of calico, decorated with paper flowers, whirligigs, doves, and little gourds; with votive offerings, also, of gold or silver, from grateful people helped or cured by the Little Jesus. On the statuette's head is a tiny hat of real gold, and a real gold sceptre in the little hand; the breast of its fine white linen cambric gown is pinned by a gold pin. It has a wardrobe with as many changes as an actor. She keeps these carefully hid away in a small camphor-wood trunk, but she brought them all out to show to us.

Two of her barefooted, ragged little pupils scampered in as she was unfolding these gay doll's clothes. They crowded close around her knees and looked on, with open-mouthed awe and admiration: a purple velvet cape with white fringe for feast days; capes of satin, of brocade; a dozen shirts of finest linen, embroidered or trimmed with lace; a tiny plume not more than an inch long, of gold exquisitely carved,-this was her chief treasure. It looked beautiful in his hat, she said, but it was too valuable to wear often. Hid away here among the image's best clothes were more of the gold votive offerings it had received: one a head cut out of solid gold; several rosaries of carved beads, silver and gold. Spite of her apparently unbounded faith in the Little Jesus' power to protect her and himself, the old woman thought it wiser to keep these valuables concealed from the common gaze.

Holding up a silken pillow some sixteen inches square, she said, "You could not guess with what that pillow is filled." We could not, indeed. It was her own hair. With pride she asked us to take it in our hands, that we might see how heavy it was. For sixteen years she had been saving it, and it was to be put under her head in her coffin. The friend who had taken us to her home exclaimed on hearing this. "And I can tell you it was beautiful hair. I recollect it forty-five years ago, bright brown, and down to her ankles, and enough of it to roll herself up in." The old woman nodded and laughed, much pleased at this compliment. She did not know why the Lord had preserved her life so long, she said; but she was very happy. Her nieces had asked her to go and live with them in Santa Ana; but she could not go away from San Gabriel. She told them that there was plenty of water in the ditch close by her door, and that God would take care of the rest, and so he had; she never wants for anything; not only is she never hungry herself, but she always has food to give away. No one would suppose it, but many people come to eat with her in her house. God never forgets her one minute. She is very happy. She is never ill; or if she is, she has two remedies, which, in all her life, have never failed to cure her, and they cost nothing,-saliva and ear-wax. For a pain, the sign of the cross, made with saliva on the spot which is in pain, is instantaneously effective; for an eruption or any skin disorder, the application of ear-wax is a sure cure. She is very glad to live so close to the church; the father has promised her this room as long as she lives; when she dies, it will be no trouble, he says, to pick her up and carry her across the road to the church. In a gay painted box, standing on two chairs, so as to be kept from the dampness of the bare earth floor, she cherishes the few relics of her better days: a shawl and a ribosa of silk, and two gowns, one of black silk, one of dark blue satin. These are of the fashions of twenty years ago; they were given to her by her husband. She wears them now when she goes to church; so it is as if she were "married again," she says, and is "her husband's work still." She seems to be a character well known and held in some regard by the clergy of her church. When the bishop returned a few years ago from a visit to Rome, he brought her a little gift, a carved figure of a saint. She asked him if he could not get for her a bit of the relics of Saint Viviano. "Oh, let alone!" he replied; "give you relics? Wait a bit; and as soon as you die, I'll have you made into relics yourself." She laughed as heartily, telling this somewhat unecclesiastical rejoinder, as if it had been made at some other person's expense.

In the marvellously preserving air of California, added to her own contented temperament, there is no reason why this happy old lady should not last, as some of her Indian neighbors have, well into a second century. Before she ceases from her peaceful, pitiful little labors, new generations of millionnaires in her country will no doubt have piled up bigger fortunes than this generation ever dreams of, but there will not be a man of them all so rich as she.

In the western suburbs of Los Angeles is a low adobe house, built after the ancient style, on three sides of a square, surrounded by orchards, vineyards, and orange groves, and looking out on an old-fashioned garden, in which southernwood, rue, lavender, mint, marigolds, and gillyflowers hold their own bravely, growing in straight and angular beds among the newer splendors of verbenas, roses, carnations, and geraniums. On two sides of the house runs a broad porch, where stand rows of geraniums and chrysanthemums growing in odd-shaped earthen pots. Here may often be seen a beautiful young Mexican woman, flitting about among the plants, or sporting with a superb Saint Bernard dog. Her clear olive skin, soft brown eyes, delicate sensitive nostrils, and broad smiling mouth, are all of the Spanish madonna type; and when her low brow is bound, as is often her wont, by turban folds of soft brown or green gauze, her face becomes a picture indeed. She is the young wife of a gray-headed Mexican se?or, of whom-by his own most gracious permission-I shall speak by his familiar name, Don Antonio. Whoever has the fortune to pass as a friend across the threshold of this house finds himself transported, as by a miracle, into the life of a half-century ago. The rooms are ornamented with fans, shells, feather and wax flowers, pictures, saints' images, old laces, and stuffs, in the quaint gay Mexican fashion. On the day when I first saw them, they were brilliant with bloom. In every one of the deep window-seats stood a cone of bright flowers, its base made by large white datura blossoms, their creamy whorls all turned outward, making a superb decoration. I went for but a few moments' call. I stayed three hours, and left carrying with me bewildering treasures of pictures of the olden time.

Don Antonio speaks little English; but the se?ora knows just enough of the language to make her use of it delicious, as she translates for her husband. It is an entrancing sight to watch his dark, weather-beaten face, full of lightning changes as he pours out torrents of his nervous, eloquent Spanish speech; watching his wife intently, hearkening to each word she uses, sometimes interrupting her urgently with, "No, no; that is not it,"-for he well understands the tongue he cannot or will not use for himself. He is sixty-five years of age, but he is young: the best waltzer in Los Angeles to-day; his eye keen, his blood fiery quick; his memory like a burning-glass bringing into sharp light and focus a half-century as if it were a yesterday. Full of sentiment, of an intense and poetic nature, he looks back to the lost empire of his race and people on the California shores with a sorrow far too proud for any antagonisms or complaints. He recognizes the inexorableness of the laws under whose workings his nation is slowly, surely giving place to one more representative of the age. Intellectually he is in sympathy with progress, with reform, with civilization at its utmost; he would not have had them stayed, or changed, because his people could not keep up, and were not ready. But his heart is none the less saddened and lonely.

This is probably the position and point of view of most cultivated Mexican men of his age. The suffering involved in it is inevitable. It is part of the great, unreckoned price which must always be paid for the gain the world gets, when the young and strong supersede the old and weak.

A sunny little southeast corner room in Don Antonio's house is full of the relics of the time when he and his father were foremost representatives of ideas and progress in the City of the Angels, and taught the first school that was kept in the place. This was nearly a half-century ago. On the walls of the room still hang maps and charts which they used; and carefully preserved, with the tender reverence of which only poetic natures are capable, are still to be seen there the old atlases, primers, catechisms, grammars, reading-books, which meant toil and trouble to the merry, ignorant children of the merry and ignorant people of that time.

The leathern covers of the books are thin and frayed by long handling; the edges of the leaves worn down as if mice had gnawed them: tattered, loose, hanging by yellow threads, they look far older than they are, and bear vivid record of the days when books were so rare and precious that each book did doubled and redoubled duty, passing from hand to hand and house to house. It was on the old Lancaster system that Los Angeles set out in educating its children; and here are still preserved the formal and elaborate instructions for teachers and schools on that plan; also volumes of Spain's laws for military judges in 1781, and a quaint old volume called "Secrets of Agriculture, Fields and Pastures," written by a Catholic Father in 1617, reprinted in 1781, and held of great value in its day as a sure guide to success with crops. Accompanying it was a chart, a perpetual circle, by which might be foretold, with certainty, what years would be barren and what ones fruitful.

Almanacs, histories, arithmetics, dating back to 1750, drawing-books, multiplication tables, music, and bundles of records of the branding of cattle at the San Gabriel Mission, are among the curiosities of this room. The music of the first quadrilles ever danced in Mexico is here: a ragged pamphlet, which, no doubt, went gleeful rounds in the City of the Angels for many a year. It is a merry music, simple in melody, but with an especial quality of light-heartedness, suiting the people who danced to it.

There are also in the little room many relics of a more substantial sort than tattered papers and books: a branding-iron and a pair of handcuffs from the San Gabriel Mission; curiously decorated clubs and sticks used by the Indians in their games; boxes of silver rings and balls made for decorations of bridles and on leggings and knee-breeches. The place of honor in the room is given, as well it might be, to a small cannon, the first cannon brought into California. It was made in 1717, and was brought by Father Junipero Serra to San Diego in 1769. Afterward it was given to the San Gabriel Mission, but it still bears its old name, "San Diego." It is an odd little arm, only about two feet long, and requiring but six ounces of powder. Its swivel is made with a rest to set firm in the ground. It has taken many long journeys on the backs of mules, having been in great requisition in the early mission days for the firing of salutes at festivals and feasts.

Don Antonio was but a lad when his father's family removed from the city of Mexico to California. They came in one of the many unfortunate colonies sent out by the Mexican Government during the first years of the secularization period, having had a toilsome and suffering two months, going in wagons from Mexico to San Blas, then a tedious and uncomfortable voyage of several weeks from San Blas to Monterey, where they arrived only to find themselves deceived and disappointed in every particular, and surrounded by hostilities, plots, and dangers on all sides. So great was the antagonism to them that it was at times difficult for a colonist to obtain food from a Californian. They were arrested on false pretences, thrown into prison, shipped off like convicts from place to place, with no one to protect them or plead their cause. Revolution succeeded upon revolution, and it was a most unhappy period for all refined and cultivated persons who had joined the colony enterprises. Young men of education and breeding were glad to earn their daily bread by any menial labor that offered. Don Antonio and several of his young friends, who had all studied medicine together, spent the greater part of a year in making shingles. The one hope and aim of most of them was to earn money enough to get back to Mexico. Don Antonio, however, seems to have had more versatility and capacity than his friends, for he never lost courage; and it was owing to him that at last his whole family gathered in Los Angeles and established a home there. This was in 1836. There were then only about eight hundred people in the pueblo, and the customs, superstitions, and ignorances of the earliest days still held sway. The missions were still rich and powerful, though the confusions and conflicts of their ruin had begun. At this time the young Antonio, being quick at accounts and naturally ingenious at all sorts of mechanical crafts, found profit as well as pleasure in journeying from mission to mission, sometimes spending two or three months in one place, keeping books, or repairing silver and gold ornaments.

The blowpipe which he made for himself at that time his wife exhibits now with affectionate pride; and there are few things she enjoys better than translating to an eager listener his graphic stories of the incidents and adventures of that portion of his life.

While he was at the San Antonio Mission, a strange thing happened. It is a good illustration of the stintless hospitality of those old missions, that staying there at that time were a notorious gambler and a celebrated juggler who had come out in the colony from Mexico. The juggler threatened to turn the gambler into a crow; the gambler, after watching his tricks for a short time, became frightened, and asked young Antonio, in serious good faith, if he did not believe the juggler had made a league with the devil. A few nights afterward, at midnight, a terrible noise was heard in the gambler's room. He was found in convulsions, foaming at the mouth, and crying, "Oh, father! father! I have got the devil inside of me! Take him away!"

The priest dragged him into the chapel, showered him with holy water, and exorcised the devil, first making the gambler promise to leave off his gambling forever. All the rest of the night the rescued sinner spent in the chapel, praying and weeping. In the morning he announced his intention of becoming a priest, and began his studies at once. These he faithfully pursued for a year, leading all the while a life of great devotion. At the end of that time preparations were made for his ordination at San José. The day was set, the hour came: he was in the sacristy, had put on the sacred vestments, and was just going toward the church door, when he fell to the floor, dead. Soon after this the juggler was banished from the county, trouble and disaster having everywhere followed on his presence.

On the first breaking out of hostilities between California and the United States, Don Antonio took command of a company of Los Angeles volunteers to repel the intruders. By this time he had attained a prominent position in the affairs of the pueblo; had been alcalde and, under Governor Michelorena, inspector of public works. It was like the fighting of children,-the impetuous attempts that heterogeneous little bands of Californians here and there made to hold their country. They were plucky from first to last; for they were everywhere at a disadvantage, and fought on, quite in the dark as to what Mexico meant to do about them,-whether she might not any morning deliver them over to the enemy. Of all Don Antonio's graphic narratives of the olden time, none is more interesting than those which describe his adventures during the days of this contest. On one of the first approaches made by the Americans to Los Angeles, he went out with his little haphazard company of men and boys to meet them. He had but one cannon, a small one, tied by ropes on a cart axle. He had but one small keg of powder which was good for anything; all the rest was bad, would merely go off "pouf, pouf," the se?ora said, and the ball would pop down near the mouth of the cannon. With this bad powder he fired his first shots. The Americans laughed; this is child's play, they said, and pushed on closer. Then came a good shot, with the good powder, tearing into their ranks and knocking them right and left; another, and another. "Then the Americans began to think, these are no pouf balls; and when a few more were killed, they ran away and left their flag behind them. And if they had only known it, the Californians had only one more charge left of the good powder, and the next minute it would have been the Californians that would have had to run away themselves," merrily laughed the se?ora as she told the tale.

This captured flag, with important papers, was intrusted to Don Antonio to carry to the Mexican headquarters at Sonora. He set off with an escort of soldiers, his horse decked with silver trappings; his sword, pistols, all of the finest: a proud beginning of a journey destined to end in a different fashion. It was in winter time; cold rains were falling. By night he was drenched to the skin, and stopped at a friendly Indian's tent to change his clothes. Hardly had he got them off when the sound of horses' hoofs was heard. The Indian flung himself down, put his ear to the ground, and exclaimed, "Americanos! Americanos!" Almost in the same second they were at the tent's door. As they halted, Don Antonio, clad only in his drawers and stockings, crawled out at the back of the tent, and creeping on all fours reached a tree up which he climbed, and sat safe hidden in the darkness among its branches listening, while his pursuers cross-questioned the Indian, and at last rode away with his horse. Luckily, he had carried into the tent the precious papers and the captured flag: these he intrusted to an Indian to take to Sonora, it being evidently of no use for him to try to cross the country thus closely pursued by his enemies.

All night he lay hidden; the next day he walked twelve miles across the mountains to an Indian village where he hoped to get a horse. It was dark when he reached it. Cautiously he opened the door of the hut of one whom he knew well. The Indian was preparing poisoned arrows: fixing one on the string and aiming at the door, he called out, angrily, "Who is there?"-"It is I, Antonio."-"Don't make a sound," whispered the Indian, throwing down his arrow, springing to the door, coming out and closing it softly. He then proceeded to tell him that the Americans had offered a reward for his head, and that some of the Indians in the rancheria were ready to betray or kill him. While they were yet talking, again came the sound of the Americans' horses' hoofs galloping in the distance. This time there seemed no escape. Suddenly Don Antonio, throwing himself on his stomach, wriggled into a cactus patch near by. Only one who has seen California cactus thickets can realize the desperateness of this act. But it succeeded. The Indian threw over the cactus plants an old blanket and some refuse stalks and reeds; and there once more, within hearing of all his baffled pursuers said, the hunted man lay, safe, thanks to Indian friendship. The crafty Indian assented to all the Americans proposed, said that Don Antonio would be sure to be caught in a few days, advised them to search in a certain rancheria which he described, a few miles off, and in an opposite direction from the way in which he intended to guide Don Antonio. As soon as the Americans had gone, he bound up Antonio's feet in strips of rawhide, gave him a blanket and an old tattered hat, the best his stores afforded, and then led him by a long and difficult trail to a spot high up in the mountains where the old women of the band were gathering acorns. By the time they reached this place, blood was trickling from Antonio's feet and legs, and he was well-nigh fainting with fatigue and excitement. Tears rolled down the old women's cheeks when they saw him. Some of them had been servants in his father's house, and loved him. One brought gruel; another bathed his feet; others ran in search of healing leaves of different sorts. Bruising these in a stone mortar, they rubbed him from head to foot with the wet fibre. All his pain and weariness vanished as by magic. His wounds healed, and in a day he was ready to set off for home. There was but one pony in the old women's camp. This was old, vicious, blind of one eye, and with one ear cropped short; but it looked to Don Antonio far more beautiful than the gay steed on which he had ridden away from Los Angeles three days before. There was one pair of ragged shoes of enormous size among the old women's possessions. These were strapped on his feet by leathern thongs, and a bit of old sheepskin was tied around the pony's body. Thus accoutred and mounted, shivering in his drawers under his single blanket, the captain and flag-bearer turned his face homeward. At the first friend's house he reached he stopped and begged for food. Some dried meat was given to him, and a stool on the porch offered to him. It was the house of a dear friend, and the friend's sister was his sweetheart. As he sat there eating his meat, the women eyed him curiously. One said to the other, "How much he looks like Antonio!" At last the sweetheart, coming nearer, asked him if he were "any relation of Don Antonio." "No," he said. Just at that moment his friend rode up, gave one glance at the pitiful beggar sitting on his porch, shouted his name, dashed toward him, and seized him in his arms. Then was a great laughing and half-weeping, for it had been rumored that he had been taken prisoner by the Americans.

From this friend he received a welcome gift of a pair of trousers, many inches too short for his legs. At the next house his friend was as much too tall, and his second pair of gift trousers had to be rolled up in thick folds around his ankles.

Finally he reached Los Angeles in safety. Halting in a grove outside the town, he waited till twilight before entering. Having disguised himself in the rags which he had worn from the Indian village, he rode boldly up to the porch of his father's house, and in an impudent tone called for brandy. The terrified women began to scream; but his youngest sister, fixing one piercing glance on his face, laughed out gladly, and cried, "You can't fool me; you are Antonio."

Sitting in the little corner room, looking out through the open door on the gay garden and breathing its spring air, gay even in midwinter, and as spicy then as the gardens of other lands are in June, I spent many an afternoon listening to such tales as this. Sunset always came long before its time, it seemed, on these days.

Occasionally, at the last moment, Don Antonio would take up his guitar, and, in a voice still sympathetic and full of melody, sing an old Spanish love-song, brought to his mind by thus living over the events of his youth. Never, however, in his most ardent youth, could his eyes have gazed on his fairest sweetheart's face with a look of greater devotion than that with which they now rest on the noble, expressive countenance of his wife, as he sings the ancient and tender strains. Of one of them, I once won from her, amid laughs and blushes, a few words of translation:-

"Let us hear the sweet echo

Of your sweet voice that charms me.

The one that truly loves you,

He says he wishes to love;

That the one who with ardent love adores you,

Will sacrifice himself for you.

Do not deprive me,

Owner of me,

Of that sweet echo

Of your sweet voice that charms me."

Near the western end of Don Antonio's porch is an orange-tree, on which were hanging at this time twenty-five hundred oranges, ripe and golden among the glossy leaves. Under this tree my carriage always waited for me. The se?ora never allowed me to depart without bringing to me, in the carriage, farewell gifts of flowers and fruit: clusters of grapes, dried and fresh; great boughs full of oranges, more than I could lift. As I drove away thus, my lap filled with bloom and golden fruit, canopies of golden fruit over my head, I said to myself often: "Fables are prophecies. The Hesperides have come true."

CHANCE DAYS IN OREGON.

The best things in life seem always snatched on chances. The longer one lives and looks back, the more he realizes this, and the harder he finds it to "make option which of two," in the perpetually recurring cases when "there's not enough for this and that," and he must choose which he will do or take. Chancing right in a decision, and seeing clearly what a blunder any other decision would have been, only makes the next such decision harder, and contributes to increased vacillation of purpose and infirmity of will, until one comes to have serious doubts whether there be not a truer philosophy in the "toss up" test than in any other method. "Heads we go, tails we stay," will prove right as many times out of ten as the most painstaking pros and cons, weighing, consulting, and slow deciding.

It was not exactly by "heads and tails" that we won our glimpse of Oregon; but it came so nearly to the same thing that our recollections of the journey are still mingled with that sort of exultant sense of delight with which the human mind always regards a purely fortuitous possession.

Three days and two nights on the Pacific Ocean is a round price to pay for a thing, even for Oregon, with the Columbia River thrown in. There is not so misnamed a piece of water on the globe as the Pacific Ocean, nor so unexplainable a delusion as the almost universal impression that it is smooth sailing there. It is British Channel and North Sea and off the Hebrides combined,-as many different twists and chops and swells as there are waves. People who have crossed the Atlantic again and again without so much as a qualm are desperately ill between San Francisco and Portland. There is but one comparison for the motion: it is as if one's stomach were being treated as double teeth are handled, when country doctors are forced to officiate as dentists, and know no better way to get a four-pronged tooth out of its socket than to turn it round and round till it is torn loose.

Three days and two nights! I spent no inconsiderable portion of the time in speculations as to Monsieur Antoine Crozat's probable reasons for giving back to King Louis his magnificent grant of Pacific coast country. He kept it five years, I believe. In that time he probably voyaged up and down its shores thoroughly. Having been an adventurous trader in the Indies, he must have been well wonted to seas; and being worth forty millions of livres, he could afford to make himself as comfortable in the matter of a ship as was possible a century and a half ago. His grant was a princely domain, an empire five times larger than France itself. What could he have been thinking of, to hand it back to King Louis like a worthless bauble of which he had grown tired? Nothing but the terrors of sea-sickness can explain it. If he could have foreseen the steam-engine, and have had a vision of it flying on iron roads across continents and mountains, how differently would he have conducted! The heirs of Monsieur Antoine, if any such there be to-day, must chafe when they read the terms of our Louisiana Purchase.

Three days and two nights-from Thursday morning till Saturday afternoon-between San Francisco and the mouth of the Columbia, and then we had to lie at Astoria the greater part of Sunday night before the tide would let us go on up the river. It was not waste time, however. Astoria is a place curious to behold. Seen from the water, it seems a tidy little white town nestled on the shore, and well topped off by wooded hills. Landing, one finds that it must be ranked as amphibious, being literally half on land and half on water. From Astoria proper-the old Astoria, which Mr. Astor founded, and Washington Irving described-up to the new town, or upper Astoria, is a mile and a half, two thirds bridges and piers. Long wooden wharves, more streets than wharves, resting on hundreds of piles, are built out to deep water. They fairly fringe the shore; and the street nearest the water is little more than a succession of bridges from wharf to wharf. Frequent bays and inlets make up, leaving unsightly muddy wastes when the tide goes out. To see family washing hung out on lines over these tidal flats, and the family infants drawing their go-carts in the mud below, was a droll sight. At least every other building on these strange wharf streets is a salmon cannery, and acres of the wharf surfaces were covered with salmon nets spread out to dry. The streets were crowded with wild-looking men, sailor-like, and yet not sailor-like, all wearing india-rubber boots reaching far above the knee, with queer wing-like flaps projecting all around at top. These were the fishers of salmon, two thousand of them, Russians, Finns, Germans, Italians,-"every kind on the earth," an old restaurant-keeper said, in speaking of them; "every kind on the earth, they pour in here, for four months, from May to September. They're a wild set; clear out with the salmon, 'n' don't mind any more 'n the fish do what they leave behind 'em."

All day long they kill time in the saloons. The nights they spend on the water, flinging and trolling and drawing in their nets, which often burst with the weight of the captured salmon. It is a strange life, and one sure to foster a man's worst traits rather than his best ones. The fishermen who have homes and families, and are loyal to them, industrious and thrifty, are the exception.

The site of Mr. Astor's original fort is now the terraced yard of a spruce new house on the corner of one of the pleasantest streets in the old town. These streets are little more than narrow terraces rising one above the other on jutting and jagged levels of the river-bank. They command superb off-looks across and up and down the majestic river, which is here far more a bay than a river. The Astoria people must be strangely indifferent to these views; for the majority of the finest houses face away from the water, looking straight into the rough wooded hillside.

Uncouth and quaint vehicles are perpetually plying between the old and the new towns; they jolt along fast over the narrow wooden roads, and the foot-passengers, who have no other place to walk, are perpetually scrambling from under the horses' heels. It is a unique highway: pebbly beaches, marshes, and salt ponds, alder-grown cliffs, hemlock and spruce copses on its inland side; on the water-side, bustling wharves, canneries, fishermen's boarding-houses, great spaces filled in with bare piles waiting to be floored; at every turn shore and sea seem to change sides, and clumps of brakes, fresh-hewn stumps, maple and madrone trees, shift places with canneries and wharves; the sea swashes under the planks of the road at one minute, and the next is an eighth of a mile away, at the end of a close-built lane. Even in the thickest settled business part of the town, blocks of water alternate with blocks of brick and stone.

The statistics of the salmon-canning business almost pass belief. In 1881 six hundred thousand cases of canned salmon were shipped from Astoria. We ourselves saw seventy-five hundred cases put on board one steamer. There were forty eight-pound cans in each case; it took five hours' steady work, of forty "long-shore men," to load them. These long-shore men are another shifting and turbulent element in the populations of the river towns. They work day and night, get big wages, go from place to place, and spend money recklessly; a sort of commercial Bohemian, difficult to handle and often dangerous. They sometimes elect to take fifty cents an hour and all the beer they can drink, rather than a dollar an hour and no beer. At the time we saw them, they were on beer wages. The foaming beer casks stood at short intervals along the wharf,-a pitcher, pail, and mug at each cask. The scene was a lively one: four cases loaded at a time on each truck, run swiftly to the wharf edge, and slid down the hold; trucks rattling, turning sharp corners; men laughing, wheeling to right and left of each other, tossing off mugs of beer, wiping their mouths with their hands, and flinging the drops in the air with jests,-one half forgave them for taking part wages in the beer, it made it so much merrier.

On Sunday morning we waked up to find ourselves at sea in the Columbia River. A good part of Oregon and Washington Territory seemed also to be at sea there. When a river of the size of the Columbia gets thirty feet above low-water mark, towns and townships go to sea unexpectedly. All the way up the Columbia to the Willamette, and down the Willamette to Portland, we sailed in and on a freshet, and saw at once more and less of the country than could be seen at any other time. At the town of Kalama, facetiously announced as "the water terminus of the Northern Pacific Railroad," the hotel, the railroad station, and its warehouses were entirely surrounded by water, and we sailed, in seemingly deep water, directly over the wharf where landings were usually made. At other towns on the way we ran well up into the fields, and landed passengers or freight on stray sand-spits, or hillocks, from which they could get off again on the other side by small boats. We passed scores of deserted houses, their windows open, the water swashing over their door-sills; gardens with only tops of bushes in sight, one with red roses swaying back and forth, limp and helpless on the tide. It seemed strange that men would build houses and make farms in a place where they are each year liable to be driven out by such freshets. When I expressed this wonder, an Oregonian replied lightly, "Oh, the river always gives them plenty of time. They've all got boats, and they wait till the last minute always, hoping the water'll go down."-"But it must be unwholesome to the last degree to live on such overflowed lands. When the water recedes, they must get fevers."-"Oh, they get used to it. After they've taken about a barrel of quinine, they're pretty well acclimated."

Other inhabitants of the country asserted roundly that no fevers followed these freshets; that the trade-winds swept away all malarial influences; that the water did no injury whatever to the farms,-on the contrary, made the crops better; and that these farmers along the river bottoms "couldn't be hired to live anywhere else in Oregon."

The higher shore lines were wooded almost without a break; only at long intervals an oasis of clearing, high up, an emerald spot of barley or wheat, and a tiny farm-house. These were said to be usually lumbermen's homes; it was warmer up there than in the bottom, and crops thrived. In the not far-off day when these kingdoms of forests are overthrown, and the Columbia runs unshaded to the sea, these hill shores will be one vast granary.

The city of Portland is on the Willamette River, fourteen miles south of the junction of that river with the Columbia. Seen from its water approach, Portland is a picturesque city, with a near surrounding of hills, wooded with pines and firs, that make a superb sky-line setting to the town, and to the five grand snow-peaks, of which clear days give a sight. These dark forests and spear-top fringes are a more distinctive feature in the beauty of Portland's site than even its fine waters and islands. It is to be hoped that the Portland people will appreciate their value, and never let their near hills be shorn of trees. Not one tree more should be cut. Already there are breaks in the forest horizons, which mar the picture greatly; and it would take but a few days of ruthless wood choppers' work to rob the city forever of its backgrounds, turning them into unsightly barrens. The city is on both sides of the river, and is called East and West Portland. With the usual perversity in such cases, the higher ground and the sunny eastern frontage belong to the less popular part of the city, the west town having most of the business and all of the fine houses. Yet in times of freshet its lower streets are always under water; and the setting-up of back-water into drains, cellars, and empty lots is a yearly source of much illness. When we arrived, two of the principal hotels were surrounded by water; from one of them there was no going out or coming in except by planks laid on trestle-work in the piazzas, and the air in the lower part of the town was foul with bad smells from the stagnant water.

Portland is only thirty years old, and its population is not over twenty-five thousand; yet it is said to have more wealth per head than any other city in the United States except New Haven. Wheat and lumber and salmon have made it rich. Oregon wheat brings such prices in England that ships can afford to cross the ocean to get it; and last year one hundred and thirty-four vessels sailed out of Portland harbor, loaded solely with wheat or flour.

The city reminds one strongly of some of the rural towns in New England. The houses are unpretentious, wooden, either white or of light colors, and uniformly surrounded by pleasant grounds, in which trees, shrubs, and flowers grow freely, without any attempt at formal or decorative culture. One of the most delightful things about the town is its surrounding of wild and wooded country. In an hour, driving up on the hills to the west, one finds himself in wildernesses of woods: spruce, maple, cedar, and pine; dogwood, wild syringa, honeysuckle, ferns and brakes fitting in for undergrowth; and below all, white clover matting the ground. By the roadsides are Linn?a, red clover, yarrow, May-weed, and dandelion, looking to New England eyes strangely familiar and unfamiliar at once. Never in New England woods and roadsides do they have such a luxurious diet of water and rich soil, and such comfortable warm winters. The white clover especially has an air of spendthrifty indulgence about it which is delicious. It riots through the woods, even in their densest, darkest depths, making luxuriant pasturage where one would least look for it. On these wooded heights are scores of dairy farms, which have no clearings except of the space needful for the house and outbuildings. The cows, each with a bell at her neck, go roaming and browsing all day in the forests. Out of thickets scarcely penetrable to the eye come everywhere along the road the contented notes of these bells' slow tinkling at the cows' leisure. The milk, cream, and butter from these dairy farms are of the excellent quality to be expected, and we wondered at not seeing "white clover butter" advertised as well as "white clover honey." Land in these wooded wilds brings from forty to eighty dollars an acre; cleared, it is admirable farm land. Here and there we saw orchards of cherry and apple trees, which were loaded with fruit; the cherry trees so full that they showed red at a distance.

The alternation of these farms with long tracts of forest, where spruces and pines stand a hundred and fifty feet high, and myriads of wild things have grown in generations of tangle, gives to the country around Portland a charm and flavor peculiarly its own; even into the city itself extends something of the same charm of contrast and antithesis; meandering footpaths, or narrow plank sidewalks with grassy rims, running within stone's-throw of solid brick blocks and business thoroughfares. One of the most interesting places in the town is the Bureau of Immigration of the Northern Pacific Railroad. In the centre of the room stands a tall case, made of the native Oregon woods. It journeyed to the Paris and the Philadelphia Expositions, but nowhere can it have given eloquent mute answer to so many questions as it does in its present place. It now holds jars of all the grains raised in Oregon and Washington Territory; also sheaves of superb stalks of the same grains, arranged in circles,-wheat six feet high, oats ten, red clover over six, and timothy grass eight. To see Swedes, Norwegians, Germans, Irish, come in, stand wonderingly before this case, and then begin to ask their jargon of questions, was an experience which did more in an hour to make one realize what the present tide of immigration to the New Northwest really is than reading of statistics could do in a year. These immigrants are pouring in, it is estimated, at the rate of at least a hundred and fifty a day,-one hundred by way of San Francisco and Portland, twenty-five by the Puget Sound ports, and another twenty-five overland by wagons; no two with the same aim, no two alike in quality or capacity. To listen to their inquiries and their narratives, to give them advice and help, requires almost preternatural patience and sagacity. It might be doubted, perhaps, whether this requisite combination could be found in an American; certainly no one of any nationality could fill the office better than it is filled by the tireless Norwegian who occupies the post at present. It was touching to see the brightened faces of his countrymen, as their broken English was answered by him in the familiar words of their own tongue. He could tell well which parts of the new country would best suit the Hardanger men, and the men from Eide. It must have been hard for them to believe his statements, even when indorsed by the home speech. To the ordinary Scandinavian peasant, accustomed to measuring cultivable ground by hand-breadths, and making gardens in pockets in rocks, tales of hundreds of unbroken miles of wheat country, where crops average from thirty-five to forty-five bushels an acre, must sound incredible; and spite of their faith in their countryman, they are no doubt surprised when their first harvest in the Willamette or Umpqua valley proves that his statements were under, rather than over, the truth.

The Columbia River steamers set off from Portland at dawn, or thereabouts. Wise travellers go on board the night before, and their first morning consciousness is a wonder at finding themselves afloat,-afloat on a sea; for it hardly seems like river voyaging when shores are miles apart, and, in many broad vistas, water is all that can be seen. These vistas, in times of high water, when the Columbia may be said to be fairly "seas over," are grand. They shine and flicker for miles, right and left, with green feathery fringes of tree-tops, and queer brown stippled points and ridges, which are house gables and roof-trees, not quite gone under. One almost forgets, in the interest of the spectacle, what misery it means to the owners of the gables and roof-trees.

At Washougal Landing, on the morning when we went up the river, all that was to be seen of the warehouse on the wharf at which we should have made landing was the narrow ridge-line of its roof; and this was at least a third of a mile out from shore. The boat stopped, and the passengers were rowed out in boats and canoes, steering around among tree-tops and houses as best they might.

The true shore-line of the river we never once saw; but it cannot be so beautiful as was the freshet's shore of upper banks and terraces,-dark forests at top, shifting shades of blue in every rift between the hills, iridescent rainbow colors on the slopes, and gray clouds, white-edged, piled up in masses above them, all floating apace with us, and changing tone and tint oftener than we changed course.

As we approached the Cascade Mountains, the scenery grew grander with every mile. The river cuts through this range in a winding ca?on, whose sides for a space of four or five miles are from three to four thousand feet high. But the charm of this pass is not so much in the height and grandeur as in the beauty of its walls. They vary in color and angle, and light and shadow, each second,-perpendicular rock fronts, mossy brown; shelves of velvety greenness and ledges of glistening red or black stone thrown across; great basaltic columns fluted as by a chisel; jutting tables of rock carpeted with yellow and brown lichen; turrets standing out with firs growing on them; bosky points of cottonwood trees; yellow and white blossoms and curtains of ferns, waving out, hanging over; and towering above all these, peaks and summits wrapped in fleecy clouds. Looking ahead, we could see sometimes only castellated mountain lines, meeting across the river, like walls; as we advanced they retreated, and opened with new vistas at each opening. Shining threads of water spun down in the highest places, sometimes falling sheer to the river, sometimes sinking out of sight in forest depths midway down, like the famed fosses of the Norway fjords. Long sky-lines of pines and firs, which we knew to be from one hundred to three hundred feet tall, looked in the aerial perspective no more than a mossy border along the wall. A little girl, looking up at them, gave by one artless exclamation a true idea of this effect. "Oh," she cried, "they look just as if you could pick a little bunch of them." At intervals along the right-hand shore were to be seen the white-tented encampments of the Chinese laborers on the road which the Northern Pacific Railroad Company is building to link St. Paul with Puget Sound. A force of three thousand Chinamen and two thousand whites is at work on this river division, and the road is being pushed forward with great rapidity. The track looked in places as if it were not one inch out of the water, though it was twenty feet; and tunnels which were a hundred and thirty feet high looked only like oven mouths. It has been a hard road to build, costing in some parts sixty-five thousand dollars a mile. One spot was pointed out to us where twenty tons of powder had been put in, in seven drifts, and one hundred and forty cubic yards of rock and soil blown at one blast into the river. It is an odd thing that huge blasts like this make little noise, only a slight puff; whereas small blasts make the hills ring and echo with their racket.

Between the lower cascades and the upper cascades is a portage of six miles, past fierce waters, in which a boat could scarcely live. Here we took cars; they were overfull, and we felt ourselves much aggrieved at being obliged to make the short journey standing on one of the crowded platforms. It proved to be only another instance of the good things caught on chances. Next to me stood an old couple, the man's neck so burnt and wrinkled it looked like fiery red alligator's skin; his clothes, evidently his best, donned for a journey, were of a fashion so long gone by that they had a quaint dignity. The woman wore a checked calico sun-bonnet, and a green merino gown of as quaint a fashion as her husband's coat. With them was a veritable Leather Stocking,-an old farmer, whose flannel shirt, tied loosely at the throat with a bit of twine, fell open, and showed a broad hairy breast of which a gladiator might have been proud.

The cars jolted heavily, making it hard to keep one's footing; and the old man came near being shaken off the step. Recovering himself, he said, laughing, to his friend,-

"Anyhow, it's easier'n a buckin' Cayuse horse."

"Yes," assented the other. "'T ain't much like '49, is it?"

"Were you here in '49?" I asked eagerly.

"'49!" he repeated scornfully. "I was here in '47. I was seven months comin' across from Iowa to Oregon City in an ox team; an' we're livin' on that same section we took up then; an' I reckon there hain't nobody got a lien on to it yet. We've raised nine children, an' the youngest on em's twenty-one. My woman's been sick for two or three years; this is the first time I've got her out. Thought we'd go down to Columbus, an' get a little pleasure, if we can. We used to come up to this portage in boats, an' then pack everything on horses an' ride across."

"We wore buckskin clo'es in those days," interrupted Leather Stocking, "and spurs with bells; needn't do more 'n jingle the bells, 'n' the horse'd start. I'd like to see them times back agen, too. I vow I'm put to 't now to know where to go. This civilyzation," with an indescribably sarcastic emphasis on the third syllable, "is too much for me. I don't want to live where I can't go out 'n' kill a deer before breakfast any mornin' I take a notion to."

"Were there many Indians here in those days?" I asked.

"Many Injuns?" he retorted; "why, 'twas all Injuns. All this country 'long here was jest full on 'em."

"How did you find them?"

"Jest 's civil 's any people in the world; never had no trouble with 'em. Nobody never did have any thet treated 'em fair. I tell ye, it's jest with them 's 't is with cattle. Now there 'll be one man raise cattle, an' be real mean with 'em; an' they'll all hook, an' kick, an' break fences, an' run away. An' there 'll be another, an' his cattle 'll all be kind, an' come ter yer when you call 'em. I don't never want to know anythin' more about a man than the way his stock acts. I hain't got a critter that won't come up by its name an' lick my hand. An' it's jest so with folks. Ef a man's mean to you, yer goin' to be mean to him, every time. The great thing with Injuns is, never to tell 'em a yarn. If yer deceive 'em once, they won't ever trust yer again, 's long's yer live, an' you can't trust them either. Oh, I know Injuns, I tell you. I've been among 'em here more 'n thirty year, an' I never had the first trouble yet. There's been troubles, but I wa'n't in 'em. It's been the white people's fault every time."

"Did you ever know Chief Joseph?" I asked.

"What, old Jo! You bet I knew him. He's an A No. 1 Injun, he is. He's real honorable. Why, I got lost once, an' I came right on his camp before I knowed it, an' the Injuns they grabbed me; 't was night, 'n' I was kind o' creepin' along cautious, an' the first thing I knew there was an Injun had me on each side, an' they jest marched me up to Jo's tent, to know what they should do with me. I wa'n't a mite afraid; I jest looked him right square in the eye. That's another thing with Injuns; you've got to look 'em in the eye, or they won't trust ye. Well, Jo, he took up a torch, a pine knot he had burnin', and he held it close't up to my face, and looked me up an' down, an' down an' up; an' I never flinched; I jest looked him up an' down's good's he did me; 'n' then he set the knot down, 'n' told the men it was all right,-I was 'tum tum;' that meant I was good heart; 'n' they gave me all I could eat, 'n' a guide to show me my way, next day, 'n' I couldn't make Jo nor any of 'em take one cent. I had a kind o' comforter o' red yarn, I wore round my neck; an' at last I got Jo to take that, jest as a kind o' momento."

The old man was greatly indignant to hear that Chief Joseph was in Indian Territory. He had been out of the State at the time of the Nez Percé war, and had not heard of Joseph's fate.

"Well, that was a dirty mean trick!" he exclaimed,-"a dirty mean trick! I don't care who done it."

Then he told me of another Indian chief he had known well,-"Ercutch" by name. This chief was always a warm friend of the whites; again and again he had warned them of danger from hostile Indians. "Why, when he died, there wa'n't a white woman in all this country that didn't mourn 's if she'd lost a friend; they felt safe's long's he was round. When he knew he was dyin' he jest bade all his friends good-by. Said he, 'Good-by! I'm goin' to the Great Spirit;' an' then he named over each friend he had, Injuns an' whites, each one by name, and said good-by after each name."

It was a strange half-hour, rocking and jolting on this crowded car platform, the splendid tossing and foaming river with its rocks and islands on one hand, high cliffs and fir forests on the other; these three weather-beaten, eager, aged faces by my side, with their shrewd old voices telling such reminiscences, and rising shrill above the din of the cars.

From the upper cascades to the Dalles, by boat again; a splendid forty miles' run, through the mountain-pass, its walls now gradually lowering, and, on the Washington Territory side of the river, terraces and slopes of cleared lands and occasional settlements. Great numbers of drift-logs passed us here, coming down apace, from the rush of the Dalles above. Every now and then one would get tangled in the bushes and roots on the shore, swing in, and lodge tight to await the next freshet.

The "log" of one of these driftwood voyages would be interesting; a tree trunk may be ten years getting down to the sea, or it may swirl down in a week. It is one of the businesses along the river to catch them, and pull them in to shore, and much money is made at it. One lucky fisher of logs, on the Snake River Fork, once drew ashore six hundred cords in a single year. Sometimes a whole boom gets loose from its moorings, and comes down stream, without breaking up. This is a godsend to anybody who can head it off and tow it in shore; for by the law of the river he is entitled to one half the value of the logs.

At the Dalles is another short portage of twelve miles, past a portion of the river which, though less grand than its plunge through the Cascade Mountains, is far more unique and wonderful. The waters here are stripped and shred into countless zigzagging torrents, boiling along through labyrinths of black lava rocks and slabs. There is nothing in all Nature so gloomy, so weird, as volcanic slag; and the piles, ridges, walls, palisades of it thrown up at this point look like the roof-trees, chimneys, turrets of a half-engulfed Pandemonium. Dark slaty and gray tints spread over the whole shore, also; it is all volcanic matter, oozed or boiled over, and hardened into rigid shapes of death and destruction. The place is terrible to see. Fitting in well with the desolateness of the region was a group of half-naked Indians crouching on the rocks, gaunt and wretched, fishing for salmon; the hollows in the rocks about them filled with the bright vermilion-colored salmon spawn, spread out to dry. The twilight was nearly over as we sped by, and the deepening darkness added momently to the gloom of the scene.

At Celilo, just above the Dalles, we took boat again for Umatilla, one hundred miles farther up the river.

Next morning we were still among lava beds: on the Washington Territory side, low, rolling shores, or slanting slopes with terraces, and tufty brown surfaces broken by ridges and points of the black slag; on the Oregon side, high brown cliffs mottled with red and yellow lichens, and great beaches and dunes of sand, which had blown into windrows and curving hillock lines as on the sea-shore. This sand is a terrible enemy for a railroad to fight. In a few hours, sometimes, rods of the track are buried by it as deep as by snow in the fiercest winter storms.

The first picture I saw from my state-room windows, this morning, was an Indian standing on a narrow plank shelf that was let down by ropes over a perpendicular rock front, some fifty feet high. There he stood, as composed as if he were on terra firma, bending over towards the water, and flinging in his salmon net. On the rocks above him sat the women of his family, spreading the salmon to dry. We were within so short a distance of the banks that friendly smiles could be distinctly seen; and one of the younger squaws, laughing back at the lookers-on on deck, picked up a salmon, and waving it in her right hand ran swiftly along towards an outjutting point. She was a gay creature, with scarlet fringed leggings, a pale green blanket, and on her head a twisted handkerchief of a fine old Dürer red. As she poised herself, and braced backwards to throw the salmon on deck, she was a superb figure against the sky; she did not throw straight, and the fish fell a few inches short of reaching the boat. As it struck the water she made a petulant little gesture of disappointment, like a child, threw up her hands, turned, and ran back to her work.

At Umatilla, being forced again to "make option which of two," we reluctantly turned back, leaving the beautiful Walla Walla region unvisited, for the sake of seeing Puget Sound. The Walla Walla region is said to be the finest stretch of wheat country in the world. Lava slag, when decomposed, makes the richest of soil,-deep and seemingly of inexhaustible fertility. A failure of harvests is said never to have been known in that country; the average yield of wheat is thirty-five to forty bushels an acre, and oats have yielded a hundred bushels. Apples and peaches thrive, and are of a superior quality. The country is well watered, and has fine rolling plateaus from fifteen hundred to three thousand feet high, giving a climate neither too cold in winter nor too hot in summer, and of a bracing quality not found nearer the sea. Hearing all the unquestionable tributes to the beauty and value of this Walla Walla region, I could not but recall some of Chief Joseph's pleas that a small share of it should be left in the possession of those who once owned it all.

From our pilot, on the way down, I heard an Indian story, too touching to be forgotten, though too long to tell here except in briefest outline. As we were passing a little village, half under water, he exclaimed, looking earnestly at a small building to whose window-sills the water nearly reached: "Well, I declare, Lucy's been driven out of her house this time. I was wondering why I didn't see her handkerchief a-waving. She always waves to me when I go by." Then he told me Lucy's story.

She was a California Indian, probably of the Tulares, and migrated to Oregon with her family thirty years ago. She was then a young girl, and said to be the handsomest squaw ever seen in Oregon. In those days white men in wildernesses thought it small shame, if any, to take Indian women to live with them as wives, and Lucy was much sought and wooed. But she seems to have had uncommon virtue or coldness, for she resisted all such approaches for a long time.

Finally, a man named Pomeroy appeared; and, as Lucy said afterward, as soon as she looked at him, she knew he was her "tum tum man," and she must go with him. He had a small sloop, and Lucy became its mate. They two alone ran it for several years up and down the river. He established a little trading-post, and Lucy always took charge of that when he went to buy goods. When gold was discovered at Ringgold Bar, Lucy went there, worked with a rocker like a man, and washed out hundreds of dollars' worth of gold, all which she gave to Pomeroy. With it he built a fine schooner and enlarged his business, the faithful Lucy working always at his side and bidding. At last, after eight or ten years, he grew weary of her and of the country, and made up his mind to go to California. But he had not the heart to tell Lucy he meant to leave her. The pilot who told me this story was at that time captain of a schooner on the river. Pomeroy came to him one day, and asked him to move Lucy and her effects down to Columbus. He said he had told her that she must go and live there with her relatives, while he went to California and looked about, and then he would send for her. The poor creature, who had no idea of treachery, came on board cheerfully and willingly, and he set her off at Columbus. This was in the early spring. Week after week, month after month, whenever his schooner stopped there, Lucy was on the shore, asking if he had heard from Pomeroy. For a long time, he said, he couldn't bear to tell her. At last he did; but she would not believe him. Winter came on. She had got a few boards together and built herself a sort of hut, near a house where lived an eccentric old bachelor, who finally took compassion on her, and to save her from freezing let her come into his shanty to sleep. He was a mysterious old man, a recluse, with a morbid aversion to women; and at the outset it was a great struggle for him to let even an Indian woman cross his threshold. But little by little Lucy won her way: first she washed the dishes; then she would timidly help at the cooking. Faithful, patient, unpresuming, at last she grew to be really the old man's housekeeper as well as servant. He lost his health, and became blind. Lucy took care of him till he died, and followed him to the grave, his only mourner,-the only human being in the country with whom he had any tie. He left her his little house and a few hundred dollars,-all he had; and there she is still, alone, making out to live by doing whatever work she can find in the neighborhood. Everybody respects her; she is known as "Lucy" up and down the river. "I did my best to hire her to come and keep house for my wife, last year," said the pilot. "I'd rather have her for nurse or cook than any white woman in Oregon. But she wouldn't come. I don't know as she's done looking for Pomeroy to come back yet, and she's going to stay just where he left her. She never misses a time, waving to me, when she knows what boat I'm on; and there isn't much going on on the river she don't know."

It was dusk when the pilot finished telling Lucy's story. We were shooting along through wild passages of water called Hell Gate, just above the Dalles. In the dim light the basaltic columnar cliffs looked like grooved ebony. One of the pinnacles has a strange resemblance to the figure of an Indian. It is called the Chief, and the semblance is startling,-a colossal figure, with a plume-crowned head, turned as if gazing backward over the shoulder; the attitude stately, the drapery graceful, and the whole expression one of profound and dignified sorrow. It seemed a strangely fitting emphasis to the story of the faithful Indian woman.

It was near midnight when we passed the Dalles. Our train was late, and dashed on at its swiftest. Fitful light came from a wisp of a new moon and one star; they seemed tossing in a tumultuous sea of dark clouds. In this glimmering darkness the lava walls and ridges stood up, inky black; the foaming water looked like molten steel, the whole region more ghastly and terrible than before.

There is a village of three thousand inhabitants at the Dalles. The houses are set among lava hillocks and ridges. The fields seemed bubbled with lava, their blackened surfaces stippled in with yellow and brown. High up above are wheat-fields in clearings, reaching to the sky-line of the hills. Great slopes of crumbling and disintegrating lava rock spread superb purple and slate colors between the greens of forests and wheat-fields. It is one of the memorable pictures on the Columbia.

To go both up and down a river is a good deal like spending a summer and a winter in a place, so great difference does it make when right hand and left shift sides, and everything is seen from a new stand-point.

The Columbia River scenery is taken at its best going up, especially the gradual crescendo of the Cascade Mountain region, which is far tamer entered from above. But we had a compensation in the clearer sky and lifted clouds, which gave us the more distant snow-peaks in all their glory; and our run down from the Dalles to Portland was the best day of our three on the river. Our steamer was steered by hydraulic pressure; and it was a wonderful thing to sit in the pilot-house and see the slight touch of a finger on the shining lever sway the great boat in a second. A baby's hand is strong enough to steer the largest steamboat by this instrument. It could turn the boat, the captain said, in a maelstrom, where four men together could not budge the rudder-wheel.

The history of the Columbia River navigation would make by itself an interesting chapter. It dates back to 1792, when a Boston ship and a Boston captain first sailed up the river. A curious bit of history in regard to that ship is to be found in the archives of the old Spanish government in California. Whenever a royal decree was issued in Madrid in regard to the Indies or New Spain, a copy of it was sent to every viceroy in the Spanish Dominions; he communicated it to his next subordinate, who in turn sent it to all the governors, and so on, till the decree reached every corner of the king's provinces. In 1789 there was sent from Madrid, by ship to Mexico, and thence by courier to California, and by Fages, the California governor, to every port in California, the following order:-

"Whenever there may arrive at the port of San Francisco a ship named the 'Columbia,' said to belong to General Washington of the American States, commanded by John Kendrick, which sailed from Boston in 1787, bound on a voyage of discovery to the Russian settlements on the northern coast of the peninsula, you will cause said vessel to be examined with caution and delicacy, using for this purpose a small boat which you have in your possession."

Two months after this order was promulgated in the Santa Barbara presidio, Captain Gray, of the ship "Washington," and Captain Kendrick of the ship "Columbia," changed ships in Wickmanish harbor. Captain Gray took the "Columbia" to China, and did not sail into San Francisco harbor at all, whereby he escaped being "examined with caution and delicacy" by the small boat in possession of the San Francisco garrison. Not till the 11th of May, 1792, did he return and sail up the Columbia River, then called the Oregon. He renamed it, for his ship, "Columbia's River;" but the possessive was soon dropped.

When one looks at the crowded rows of steamboats at the Portland wharves now, it is hard to realize that it is only thirty-two years since the first one was launched there. Two were built and launched in one year, the "Columbia" and the "Lot Whitcomb." The "Lot Whitcomb" was launched on Christmas Day; there were three days' feasting and dancing, and people gathered from all parts of the Territory to celebrate the occasion.

It is also hard to realize, when standing on the Portland wharves, that it is less than fifty years since there were angry discussions in the United States Congress as to whether or not it were worth while to obtain Oregon as a possession, and in the Eastern States manuals were being freely distributed, bearing such titles as this: "A general circular to all persons of good character wishing to emigrate to the Oregon Territory." Even those statesmen who were most earnest in favor of the securing of Oregon did not perceive the true nature of its value. One of Benton's most enthusiastic predictions was that an "emporium of Asiatic commerce" would be situated at the mouth of the Columbia, and that "a stream of Asiatic trade would pour into the valley of the Mississippi through the channel of Oregon." But the future of Oregon and Washington rests not on any transmission of the riches of other countries, however important an element in their prosperity that may ultimately become. Their true riches are their own and inalienable. They are to be among the great feeders of the earth. Gold and silver values are unsteady and capricious; intrigues can overthrow them; markets can be glutted, and mines fail. But bread the nations of the earth must have. The bread-yielder controls the situation always. Given a soil which can grow wheat year after year with no apparent fatigue or exhaustion, a climate where rains never fail and seed-time and harvest are uniformly certain, and conditions are created under which the future success and wealth of a country may be predicted just as surely as the movements of the planets in the heavens.

There are three great valleys in western Oregon,-the Willamette, the Umpqua, and the Rogue River. The Willamette is the largest, being sixty miles long by one hundred and fifty wide. The Umpqua and Rogue River together contain over a million of acres. These valleys are natural gardens; fertile to luxuriance, and watered by all the westward drainage of the great Cascade Range, the Andes of North America, a continuation of the Sierra Nevada. The Coast Range Mountains lie west of these valleys, breaking, but not shutting out, the influence of the sea air and fogs. This valley region between these two ranges contains less than a third of the area of Washington and Oregon. The country east of the Cascade Mountains is no less fertile, but has a drier climate, colder winters, and hotter summers. Its elevation is from two to four thousand feet,-probably the very best elevations for health. A comparison of statistics of yearly death-rates cannot be made with absolute fairness between old and thick-settled and new and sparsely settled countries. Allowance must be made for the probably superior health and strength of the men and women who have had the youth and energy to go forward as pioneers. But, making all due allowance for these, there still remains difference enough to startle one between the death-rates in some of the Atlantic States and in these infant empires of the New Northwest. The yearly death-rate in Massachusetts is one out of fifty-seven; in Vermont one out of ninety-seven; in Oregon one out of one hundred and seventy-two; and in Washington Territory one out of two hundred and twenty-eight.

As we glided slowly to anchorage in Portland harbor, five dazzling snow-white peaks were in sight on the horizon,-Mount Hood, of peerless shape, strong as if it were a bulwark of the very heavens themselves, yet graceful and sharp-cut as Egypt's pyramids; St. Helen's, a little lower, yet looking higher, with the marvellous curves of its slender shining cone, bent on and seemingly into the sky, like an intaglio of ice cut in the blue; miles away in the farthest north and east horizons, Mounts Tacoma and Adams and Baker, all gleaming white, and all seeming to uphold the skies.

These eternal, unalterable snow-peaks will be as eternal and unalterable factors in the history of the country as in its beauty to the eye. Their value will not come under any head of things reckonable by census, statistics, or computation, but it will be none the less real for that: it will be an element in the nature and character of every man and woman born within sight of the radiant splendor; and it will be strange if it does not ultimately develop, in the empire of this New Northwest, a local patriotism and passionate loyalty to soil as strong and lasting as that which has made generations of Swiss mountaineers ready to brave death for a sight of their mountains.