The Santa Ynez Mission was much damaged by the heavy earthquake that in 1812 ruined other Missions.  Here the Indians raised large crops of wheat and herded many cattle.  Over a thousand Indians, it is said, attacked this church in 1822, but the priest in charge frightened them away by firing guns.  This warlike conduct so displeased the Padres, who wished the natives ruled by kindness, that the poor priest was sent away from the Mission.

One of the early Missions was San Luis Obispo, where services are still held.  It was specially noted for a fine blue cloth woven by the Indians from the wool of the Mission flocks of sheep.  The Indians there also wove blankets, and cloth from cotton raised upon their own lands.

San Juan Bautista, or St. John the Baptist, north of Monterey, had a splendid chime of nine bells said to have been brought from Peru and to have very rich, mellow tones.  San Miguel had a bell hung up on a platform in front of the church, and now at Santa Ysabel, sixty miles from San Diego, where the Mission itself is only a heap of adobe ruins, two bells hang on a rude framework of logs.  The Indian bell-ringer rings them by a rope fastened to each clapper.  The bells were cast in Spain and much silver jewellery and household plate were melted with the bell-metal.  Near them the Diegueno Indians worship in a rude arbor of green boughs with their priest, Father Antonio, who has worked for thirty years among the tribe.  They live on a rancheria near by and are making adobe bricks, hoping soon to build a church like the old Mission long since crumbled away.

The last of the Missions was built in 1823 at Sonoma, and proved very active in church work, some fifteen hundred Indians having been there baptized.

Father Junipero Serra died at more than seventy years of age, at San Carlos.  During all his life in America he endured great hardships and suffering to bring the gospel to the heathen as he had dreamed of doing in his boyish days.  A monument to his memory has been erected at Monterey by Mrs. Stanford, but the Missions he founded are his best and most lasting remembrances.

BEFORE THE GRINGOS CAME

This is the story Senora Sanchez told us children as we sat on the sunny, rose-covered porch of her old adobe house at Monterey one summer afternoon.  And as she talked of those early times she worked at her fine linen “drawn-work” with bright, dark eyes that needed no glasses for all her eighty years and snow-white hair.

“When I was a girl, California was a Mexican republic,” said the Senora, “and Los Gringos, as we called the Americans, came in ships from Boston.  They brought us our shoes and dresses, our blankets and groceries; all kinds of goods, indeed, to trade for hides and tallow, which was all our people had to sell in those days.  For no one raised anything but cattle then, and all summer long the cows cropped the rich clover and wild oats till they were fat and ready to kill.  In the fall the Indians and vaqueros, or cowboys as you children call them, drove great herds of cattle to the Missions near the ocean where the Gringos came with their ship-loads of fine things and waited for trading-days.