A Cross of Thorns: The Enslavement of California’s Indians by the Spanish Missions

A CROSS OF THORNS

The Enslavement of California’s Indians by the Spanish Missions

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR

A CROSS OF THORNS

"Mr. Castillo tells a story of which far too many people are simply not aware, the enslavement of California Indians under the mission system. While many Americans know of the Trail of Tears and other Indian atrocities, most do not know of the atrocities perpetrated on Indian people in California. A Cross of Thorns sheds light on this period in history."

—Ben Nighthorse-Campbell, U.S. Senator, retired

"A Cross of Thorns pulls back the veil of lies, deceit, and cover-ups that has been perpetuated for nearly two hundred years."

—from the Foreword by Valentin Lopez, chair of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band of the Costanoan/Ohlone Indians

"Veteran journalist Elias Castillo has written a searing examination of the brutality and exploitation of the California mission system. A Cross of Thorns is brave, unsparing and ambitious, a tour de force that is one of the most significant contributions to this important topic."

—Jon Talton, author of the David Mapstone Mysteries, the Cincinnati Casebooks and the thriller Deadline Man

"Elias Castillo’s A Cross of Thorns throws the light of truth on a shamefully dark chapter in American history—the brutal treatment of Native Americans subjugated and forced into slave labor conditions for the prosperity of the California missions."

—Ron Miller, former television critic for the San Jose Mercury News, author of Mystery! A Celebration, and co-author of Masterpiece Theatre

A CROSS OF THORNS

The Enslavement of California’s Indians by the Spanish Missions

Elias Castillo

Fresno, California

A Cross of Thorns

Copyright © 2015 by Elias Castillo. All rights reserved.

Cover images copyright Shutterstock.

Published by Craven Street Books

An imprint of Linden Publishing

2006 South Mary Street, Fresno, California 93721

(559) 233-6633 / (800) 345-4447

CravenStreetBooks.com

Craven Street Books and Colophon are trademarks of

Linden Publishing, Inc.

ISBN 978-1-61035-242-0

eISBN 978-1-61035-257-4

135798642

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Preface

Chapter 1: Saving Souls

Chapter 2: Conquest

Chapter 3: Servants of God

Chapter 4: Los Indios

Chapter 5: Friar Junípero Serra: The Beginning

Chapter 6: An Ordeal of Tears

Chapter 7: The Missions

Illustrations

Chapter 8: Mission Life

Chapter 9: A Vision Darkened

Chapter 10: Rebellion

Chapter 11: After the Missions

Epilogue

Appendix

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

I most gratefully acknowledge the endless patience and support I received from my wife Cathy and the invaluable guidance of my agent, Michael Hamilburg. Encouragement and help was received gratefully from Michael Cronk and Diane McNutt, Joanne Jacobs and John Wakerly, Linda and Robert Faiss, Ron and Darla Miller, Daniel Bauer, William and Kathie Briggs, Dennis Rockstroh, and Peter Unsinger.

I also owe a debt of gratitude to the University of California’s Bancroft Library, Mexico’s Archivo General de La Nación, and the Santa Barbara Mission Historical Archive for their dedication in preserving the documents, records and letters of the mission era, providing the critical proof and insight that was needed to complete this book. Finally, my heartfelt appreciation goes to Stanford University’s Cecil H. Green Library, as well as to the California Room of the San Jose State University Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library for its magnificent collection of books documenting California’s mission era.

Foreword

Until now, the true and full history of the California missions has never been told. When visitors tour the missions, they are usually presented with stories and images of peaceful, loving priests and soldiers who treated the Indians as adored children.

These stories belie the truth of the missions, where Native Americans suffered under harsh and brutal conditions. As a young boy, I listened to stories from my elders about the cruelty of the missions. There were tales of how native women were captured—with their thumbs tied together with leather straps to form human chains—and marched forcibly from their tribal lands to the missions. If the Indians did not cooperate, the soldiers, at times, killed them. In one incident, more than two hundred women and children of the Orestimba tribe (living near what is now the town of Newman) were being taken to Mission San Juan Bautista. When, after passing the summit at the Orestimba Narrows, these women refused to go any farther, the Spanish commander ordered the women and children killed with sabers and their remains scattered.

The oral traditions of our tribal band, the Amah Mutsun, taught us stories of how certain Spaniards would appear when the Indians were first brought into the missions so they could get their pick of the young girls and boys for their perverted appetites, always with the tacit approval of the priests. Our elders told us that because the soldiers at the Monterey Presidio were raping so many of the Indian women and girls at Mission Monterey, the priests moved the compound to Carmel.

While many California Indians were raised knowing the history of the missions from the Native perspective, we were unaware of the history of the Franciscan priests or the Spanish and Mexican governments. A Cross of Thorns tells us, in a comprehensive way, how the priests conspired to enslave the Indians and ignore the goals of the Spanish Crown and, subsequently, the Mexican government. This book documents how the Roman Catholicism of that era viewed the Indians of the New World as heathens whose faith was based on entities it considered demonic. The Spaniards who went to the New World were initially only interested in obtaining wealth and then returning to Spain. But as the empire’s regional power grew, the Spanish crown wanted to protect its land and thwart Russian expansion into California. Therefore, the Spanish (and, later, Mexican) government sought to use the Indians as a labor force to support their various goals, not the needs of the church. But in time it was the church which had the greatest impact on the lives of the Indians.

A Cross of Thorns pulls back the veil of lies, deceit, and cover-ups that has been perpetuated for nearly 200 years. It provides irrefutable evidence, which the author, Elias Castillo, has painstakingly footnoted so there can be no question as to its veracity. It is this evidence—this truth—that California’s church-owned missions must address in order to publicly confront the terrible deeds that were committed.

Each year at Mission San Juan Bautista, more than forty thousand fourth graders take field trips to see the historical site. The children learn, incorrectly, that the missions treated the Indians with love and warmth. To this day, nothing at the mission describes how over eighty-four tribes were taken to this mission and how very few survived. Records show that thousands of Indians died there during the mission era.

The California State Department of Education helps perpetuate these lies. School textbooks covering California history, required at all elementary schools in the state, never describe fully how there were over four hundred tribes at first contact with the Spaniards. They describe inadequately how these tribes lived, how they prayed, or their special relationship with Mother Earth. Nor do they discuss how the missions were responsible for killing 40 percent of all California Indians. The history books also describe Father Junípero Serra as a loving, peaceful man with only one concern—caring for the Indians.

Rather than tell these lies, the history books should teach how Father Serra’s principal goal was to baptize as many Indian souls as he could in his lifetime. In his letters, Serra described the Indians’ gods as demonic, and considered the Indians to be barbarous pagans. He wrote that only Catholicism could save the Indians from evil, believing that punishment was important to rid the demons from their souls. For this reason, natives were lashed regularly, sometimes so severely that death followed.

Father Serra also believed that for him to successfully save the Indians, he had to suppress their culture. The result is a profound and lasting trauma stemming from the Spanish period, as well as from the Mexican and early American periods. It is an illness that persists in many of our tribal members today. Issues of alcoholism, drug addition, suicide, and poverty among our people are directly linked to this history. These conditions have hampered our people from giving their children a strong sense of identity, raising them to be optimistic, or having love for all things. How, then, can we pass along the thousands of years of indigenous knowledge that originally came from our ancestors?

A Cross of Thorns offers a comprehensive look into the thinking of the mission system’s Franciscan friars and vividly describes their scant regard for the Indians’ traditions and culture. We look forward to the day when the Roman Catholic Church, the state of California, and the Franciscans tell the true story of the missions. We are grateful to Elias Castillo for writing this very important book.

Valentin Lopez

Chair, Amah Mutsun Tribal Band of the Costanoan/Ohlone Indians

Preface

For more than a century, the terrible reality of California’s twenty-one Catholic missions has been obfuscated by a myth that portrays those compounds as sites where Franciscan friars and Indians peacefully existed, sharing a mutually loving and near-idyllic existence—despite mission records and letters written by the founding friars themselves describing a completely opposite reality. The mission myth continues unabated, ignoring the suffering and deaths of thousands of Indians within those walls. Visitors entering the majority of restored missions, cared for by Catholic organizations, stroll through ancient colonnades, chapels, carefully trimmed gardens, and walls covered by flowering vines. No mention is made of the darkness that enveloped those sites from 1769 to the 1830s.

Across California, streets, playgrounds, and even schools have been named after Padre Junípero Serra, the Franciscan leader who led the effort to found the missions, and who advocated that only by using blows and holding them captives in those compounds could the Indians in the missions be civilized, a twisted viewpoint that would claim the lives of tens of thousands of California Indians. Yet Serra is revered by many in California as a gentle friar who loved and treated the Indians as if they were his children. In Sacramento, on the grounds of the state capitol, there is a bronze statue of Serra gazing at a map of California marked with the location of each mission. San Francisco has a gigantic statue of Serra overlooking the entrance to its famed Golden Gate Park. In Washington, D.C., in the National Statuary Hall of the nation’s Capitol Building, there is a statue of Serra holding a model of a mission in one hand and a large cross in the other.

For decades, the California State Department of Education has required every elementary school in the state to teach fourth grade pupils of the supposed contributions of not only Junípero Serra, but of the missions themselves. Many Californians recall building a model of a mission as a school assignment.

A Cross of Thorns delves into the reality of mission life, the brutal punishments suffered by mission Indians, their captivity, and the forced labor they endured as neophytes. Letters residing in Californian and Mexican archives, accounts of travelers, and scholarly studies have provided the detailed accounts and analyses needed for this book. It is my hope that this work will put an end to a myth that has existed for far too long.

I was first prompted to consider writing this book nearly eight years ago, when I wrote an op-ed article for the San Francisco Chronicle criticizing a proposed U.S. Senate bill to provide $10 million in matching federal funds to help restore the missions. The Senate version of the bill mistakenly described the missions as places where the Indian and Spanish cultures lovingly melded to create California’s early way of life. In that article, I described the missions as little more than death camps run by Franciscan friars where thousands of California’s Indians perished. My goal was not to oppose the restorations. It was to advocate that, if the bill was approved, the truth regarding the treatment of the Indians, including the great numbers who died, be presented at each of the missions.

The reaction to the article astounded me—numerous readers emphatically supported what I had written. One elementary school teacher told me she had refused to teach her pupils anything about the missions because she knew how the Indians had suffered within them. Others praised my piece, telling me it was about time the truth was told about the missions.

Shortly after the article’s publication, I learned it had been read in its entirety into the United States Congressional Record by then-Congressman Jim Gibbons of Nevada, who cautioned that, in the wake of my article, care should be taken in the wording of the Senate bill in view of the Indians’ suffering. All language praising the missions was removed when the House passed the bill subsequently signed into law by then-President George W. Bush. Having my article read into the Congressional Record was the final factor that solidified my resolve to write this book.

1

Saving Souls

Earth is the Center of the Universe. All planets revolve around it, pushed by powerful angels.

—Friar Junípero Serra (despite scientific proof to the contrary, Serra clung to that belief all his life)

Six years after founding the first California mission in San Diego, Friar Junípero Serra wrote a letter requesting that four Indians who had dared flee from Mission Carmel be severely whipped two or three times.

That little known request was made to Spanish military commander Fernando de Rivera y Moncada on July 31, 1775. In the letter, Serra cavalierly describes the search party that recaptured the runaways as going to the mountains to search for my lost sheep. The request that Rivera flog the Indians is a chilling contrast to the pervasive image of Serra as a gentle and kind priest who never mistreated the mission Indians. In reality, Serra, a respected theologian who considered Indians subhuman, had hurled a cloak over the entirety of California’s coast, enveloping it in a darkness filled with death and suffering. Not only does Serra ask Rivera to lash the Indians, he also inquires if the commander needs shackles to punish them further: If your Lordship does not have shackles, with your permission they may be sent from here. . . .¹

That single revelatory sentence from Junípero Serra’s own pen is indicative of the horrors that befell the Indians that Serra and his fellow Franciscans had enticed into those first missions. What were shackles and chains doing in a mission where friars and Indians supposedly worked together in a loving atmosphere? Additionally, what authorization was given to Serra and the friars to enslave not only the Indians, but also their children and their children’s offspring and impose forced labor on them? Serra’s mandate from the Spanish king was to educate the Indians and then release them. Instead, he took it upon himself to effectively imprison them for life and use the Native Americans as forced labor.

Underlying the Franciscan friars’ disdain of the Indians was the fact that they valued the souls of their captives far more than their material existence on earth. The Friars’ utmost goal was to ensure that upon death those souls, kept free of sin, ascended to heaven, thereby fulfilling their Franciscan vows to Christianize the Indians. The Franciscans thus tightly restrained the Indians’ ability to enjoy life or engage in amorous adventures. It mattered little if the Indians suffered. Their deaths were not mourned by the Franciscans, but were, rather, rejoiced as another soul sent to heaven and God.

Indians who grieved and wept over the loss of a loved one were ordered whipped. Likewise, Indian mothers who suffered a miscarriage were not allowed to grieve over losing their child. Instead, they were accused of committing abortion and at times whipped. The Franciscans would punish these women by having them cradle a grotesquely carved figure of an infant and, humiliated, stand outside the mission church. This harsh treatment was aimed at preventing Indian women from aborting their pregnancies in an attempt to spare their infants from suffering the intolerable conditions of existence within the missions.

A robust birth rate was considered critical by the Franciscans to counter the terrible death rate that developed in each compound. Friars harangued Indian women to have more babies. Yet despite these efforts, the death rate within the missions was so appalling that more Indians died than were born annually, crippling an Indian population that was already reeling from disease, malnutrition, depression, and physical abuse.

Those who dared criticize Serra and his Franciscans for their treatment of the Native Americans risked being crushed by the power of the Roman Catholic Church, with its power of excommunication, or being literally torn to pieces by the Inquisition, which could conduct an investigation using horrendous means of torture against anyone who dared challenge the church or its hierarchy.

Despite that threat, the Spanish military commanders and governors of California opposed the friars’ use of the Indians as forced labor to work the missions’ enormous tracts of land, although they had to carefully choose their battles when it came to confronting the powerful Franciscans. Spanish officials feared that—bolstered by captive Indian labor—the missions would eventually control the economy in California by growing the power of their huge agricultural holdings, estates which covered hundreds of thousands of acres of the best land that California had to offer. Those lands provided rich pastures where mission livestock herds numbering in the tens of thousands could graze and quickly multiply.

Spanish military commanders and governors attempted to delay the founding of new missions by stipulating that the soldiers to be assigned to those compounds could not be spared to hunt runaways, or join the friars in swooping down on neighboring villages and threatening the Indians with a hellish afterlife if they did not join their missions. This tactic was effective and slowed down the missions’ advance across the California coastline. Still, while Serra was himself restricted to founding nine missions, his wily successors were able to eventually entice Spanish officials into permitting them to found twelve others, stretching along the Alta California coastline from San Diego to San Francisco Bay.

Cruelty toward the Indians was a common denominator in each mission. One friar, Gerónimo Boscana, who studied the Indians’ beliefs, wrote they . . . may be compared to a species of monkey . . . .² Others, including Serra’s successor, Friar Fermín Francisco de Lasuén, held similar thoughts, calling them ungrateful liars who were never to be trusted.

The mission Indians, called neophytes by the friars, had terrible, sadistic punishments inflicted on them by the Franciscans. In one incident, the leader of a group of recaptured runaways had his hands and legs bound, then had the skin of a newly slaughtered calf tightly wrapped around him and sewn shut. He was tied to a post and left to suffocate under a hot sun that slowly shrank the calf skin. The description of that nightmarish event was provided by a Russian seal hunter, Vassili Petrovitch Tarakanoff, who had been captured on the coast in 1815 and held for several years in mission San Fernando before being released.³

There were other similar incidents of great cruelty. At Mission San Francisco, the captain of a trading ship came upon Franciscan friars using a red hot iron to burn crosses into the faces of a group of men, women, and children who had tried to escape from the mission. In Southern California, thugs appointed by friars from the ranks of their Indians at Mission San Gabriel used a bullwhip, nearly ten feet long, to beat the natives.⁴

One distinguished visitor to Mission Carmel was shocked at the fetid squalor in which the Indians were forced to live. Jean-François de Galaup, Comte de Lapérouse, a French admiral leading a major expedition ordered by King Louis XVI to explore the Pacific Rim, arrived at Monterey in 1786 amid pomp and circumstance. He commanded two ships carrying many of France’s renowned scientists.⁵

Escorted to Mission Carmel, Lapérouse was appalled at what he saw. Bedraggled Indians, some in shackles and stocks, were being walked to a work site accompanied by Indian guards who swung whips to ensure their staying together. The sight, he wrote in his log, was no different than the slave plantations his expedition had visited on the islands of the Caribbean. He described the policies of the Franciscans toward the mission Indians as reprehensible, adding they were beating the Indians for violations that in Europe would be considered insignificant.

As the first non-Spanish European to visit the mission, Lapérouse had expected more from the Spanish settlement. Instead of cathedrals and beautiful Spanish colonial buildings and courtyards, he found only crudely made adobe huts with roofs made of branches and twigs (the design of the missions would be greatly improved years later). For Lapérouse, it was a sordid sight. The French admiral wrote how much better it would be if the Franciscans treated the Indians in a manner that gave priority to their individual human rights, rather than ensnaring them with a rigid and relentless set of rules.

Serra and his fellow Franciscans obviously did not share this attitude. For them, the mission Indians were to be treated more like mere chattel. They were to be fed, encouraged to marry and reproduce, kept free of sin, provide forced labor, and ultimately give up their souls to God. Serra’s and the friars’ lack of compassion for the Indians stemmed from their minds being mired in the dark ages, suffused with the attitude that Spanish Catholicism was to be rigidly followed and that Spaniards were members of a master race—all others and non-Catholics were beneath them. The innovations in philosophy and technology wrought by the Renaissance meant little to them.

Even advances in science were ignored by Serra. The diminutive friar stubbornly maintained, even in the eighteenth century, that earth was the center of the universe, with all the planets revolving around it, pushed by angels using great powers. To him, witches were also a reality, trailing evil as they flew through the night.⁶ Serra felt it was his duty to defend those beliefs that the great thinkers of his time had declared utter nonsense.

This insight into Serra’s thinking raises the question of what other beliefs and factors motivated the Franciscans to act in such a savage manner toward the Native peoples of California? For answers, one must become cognizant of the great maelstrom that Spain unleashed on the New World after its discovery by Cristóbal Colón in 1492, a period that spanned more than 300 years.

2

Conquest

We came to serve God and the king, and also to get rich.

—Bernal Díaz del Castillo, an officer with Hernán Cortés, explaining in 1568 why the Spanish conquistadores had traveled to the New World.

In 1767, Spain sought to protect and bolster its flagging empire. King Carlos III, an enlightened monarch, had ordered his emissaries in Mexico to populate Alta California in the most immediate and efficient manner possible.

The monarch feared it would only be a matter of time before Russian fur hunters in Alaska, who were successfully hunting seals and sea otters for their expensive pelts, would move down the coast to begin hunting on California’s beaches and lay claim to the region. Yet Spain had few resources for such a massive undertaking. Its once powerful army and bountiful wealth had long ago disappeared, squandered on expensive European conquests from which the nation had gained little or nothing.

California was a remote land in the outermost reaches of Spain’s domain in North America. No Europeans had ever settled in that region, a land shunned by early Spanish maritime explorers who had found there nothing of value. Without gold, of which none was evident to them, the area was worthless. Despite that assessment, the king could ill afford to lose the region to Russia, which would threaten the rest of Spain’s New World, a vast domain weakened by poverty and the oppressive trading policies set by earlier Spanish rulers.

Had the year been 1550, Spain could have easily organized an expedition to Alta California, launching galleons filled with thousands of soldiers to guard its lands. The nation’s treasury was then brimming with the conquered riches of the New World, and across Mexico, Central and South America, and in Europe, Spain was financing its enlarging armies and navy with its newly found fortunes in gold and silver.

The Iberian Peninsula was basking in the golden afterglow of the discovery of the New World by Cristóbal Colón (Christopher Columbus) in 1492. Spain had used the booty from the New World to rebuild the exhausted forces of its monarchs, Isabel I and Fernando II, Los Reyes Católicos, who had led the final bloody battles that destroyed the 800-hundred-year-long Moorish reign over their country.

The conquest of the Moors had begun in the northern region of Castile, where Spaniards had established a stronghold against Arab invaders from North Africa. Spain’s Catholic armies, in battle after battle, had slowly and methodically pushed the Moors southward until the only Muslim outpost left was the grand city of Granada in southern Spain. It finally yielded on January 2, 1492.

Aiding the royal couple in their final push to Granada had been the church, which hailed the conquest as a means of forcing all Muslims out of Europe. In the wake of the reconquest, and bolstered by their Roman Catholic faith, the Spaniards considered themselves invincible warriors.

Yet scarcely had the queen and king taken a deep breath before the problem of financing their reign began looming. As they sought to find sources of revenue, Columbus, the Italian seafarer turned Spaniard, appeared before the court with a proposition that had the potential of solving Spain’s money problem. Columbus believed a new, shorter trade route across the ocean would allow Spain to reap the riches of Asia and fill its vaults with gold. He proposed to sail westward across the Atlantic to reach China and India, instead of following the arduous, dangerous route around Africa. Isabel listened with rapt attention.

In the end, the Queen agreed to finance Columbus’s voyage. In early August, 1492, just months after the Spanish monarchs had brought Moorish Granada to its knees, the Italian sea captain set sail from Palos, Spain, commanding three ships: the Pinta, the Santa Maria (his flagship), and the Niña.

It took Columbus and his crews thirty-three days before they became the first Europeans to set foot on the western part of the New World. After spotting land, they dropped their anchors off an island Columbus named San Salvador. Rowboats were lowered from the ships and on October 12, Columbus, with banners and Spain’s flag flying, claimed the land in the name of Los Reyes Católicos, Isabel and Fernando.

Columbus was ecstatic. He believed he had found an outlying Asian island and that China was just over the horizon. But the island natives who greeted him did not appear to be Asian. Their tools and weapons were made of obsidian and other stones, whereas in India and Southeast Asia steel was commonly used for such objects. Columbus brushed aside that fact and reveled in establishing Spain’s dominion over a new part of Asia—a land teeming with wildlife, massive forests, rivers and lakes, untold mineral wealth, and Indian nations. In that initial voyage, he also laid claim to other islands, including Cuba and Hispaniola, the latter of which would later be divided into the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

Columbus returned to