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Brutal Appetites
The Social Relations of the California Mission

Douglas Monroy

Editor's Introduction

Nowhere in North America was the labor of Native Americans more important than in California, first to the European settlers and then to the Yankees. In most other areas of North America, Europeans and Yankees benefited only indirectly from Indian labor via involvement in trade. Moreover, despite labor shortages and a willingness to deprive Indians of their lands and exterminate them if necessary, relatively few attempts were made in North America to coerce or enslave Native American labor.

In California, however, the story was different. A whole set of circumstances made Native Americans by far the most important source of labor in California from the 1770s until the early 1850s, circumstances ranging from a scarcity of alternative sources of labor, at least until the gold rush brought flocks of white settlers in the 1850s; to the geographic isolation of California, which both limited the number of Hispanic, European, and American settlers and circumscribed the Native Americans' ability to flee and resist; to the desire of Spanish missionaries to "civilize" the Indians. Between 1769 and the secularization of the missions in 1834, approximately sixty thousand Indians worked in the missions. Following the secularization of the missions, a majority of the California Native Americans worked on the large ranchos of the californios. A system of debt peonage and vagrancy laws tied most Indians to the land, although they were technically "free."

The conquest of California by the United States in 1846 did little to alter the status of the Indian. Apprenticeship laws, kidnappings, and vagrancy statutes resulted in the de facto slavery of thousands of Indians. Other Indians found themselves sucked into the increasingly thick web of

capitalist market relations that had begun during the Mexican California period (1821-1846) and that accelerated dramatically after the gold rush. With their traditional means of subsistence increasingly undermined, they were forced to work in growing numbers as wage laborers for whites in the mines and the fields.

In this extract from his book Thrown Among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California , Douglas Monroy describes how the Spanish looked down on the Indians because of the natives' apparent lack of a work ethic. He argues that both the Europeans and the Anglo-Americans failed to appreciate the extent to which abundance and Native American spiritual values engendered a system that "produced only as much as the need for food and shelter demanded, with a work rhythm the environment dictated."

Accordingly, the Spanish believed that to convert the Indians into gente de razón , the work habits and social mores of the natives would have to be transformed. Beginning in the 1770s, the padres attempted to impose this transformation in the missions by purging the Native Americans of their libertine values—for example, by clothing and sexually segregating them.

At the same time, the missionaries attempted to impose a European work discipline on their neophyte work force. The mission sundials and clocks symbolized this determination to introduce a new regime. Confined, restrained, and disciplined, the Indians became highly productive workers, toiling in all facets of a very diverse mission agricultural economy. They also worked as nonagricultural laborers and even as artisans. The missions became the centerpiece of the California economy, providing food and other commodities to the pueblos and presidios. The padres also hired out their Indian work force to the presidios and to members of the gente de razón .

During the early nineteenth century, as the hide and tallow trade with New England began to flourish, the California mission economy became increasingly linked to the world economy. Monroy painstakingly demonstrates this but argues that "the relationship between the producers, the neophytes, and those who controlled production, the Catholic fathers, remained fundamentally constant."

Although Monroy stresses that a variety of factors lured or forced many coastal Indians into the missions and that many Native Americans accommodated themselves to the new regime, he also shows that Indians resisted in a number of ways, from running away to other forms of

noncooperation. In the concluding segment of his selection, he recounts several instances in which Indians attacked their padres and collectively attempted to overthrow the missionary order.

The native people of California followed the ways of their ancestors and, in return, they survived. For them, acting in history meant the repetition of these ancient ways. Repeating their ceremonial dances connected their bodies to these historical cycles and to their ancestors, and interwove their flesh and their spirits with the cosmos. Time existed as a line on a cylinder in which they emphasized that which could and should be repeated for the cosmos to continue. Their myths, their sacred history, told them how to be. They had to exist in the ways they always had, or, in Mircea Eliade's words, practice "the cyclical recurrence of what has been before, in a word, eternal return." Little did they know, or could they know, that a tribe of strangers from a place called Iberia, who had already visited them but gone away, was growing increasingly worried about incursions by a people from Russia. Decisions made as a result of these fears would quickly shred the delicate fabric their ancestors had so carefully woven over thousands of years. They would be thrown into a European conception of linear history, complete with its notion of progress. Now the passage of time would take these native people to new places in their relationship to the cosmos.^[1]

Europeans and Anglo-Americans consistently perceived Indians as lazy. Juan Bautista de Anza, in a typical Spanish characterization of the people he encountered in California, referred to a "free tribe that is indolent by nature." These people were obviously neither indolent nor free. But their work rhythms gave this impression to all who observed them from an accumulationist perspective. Indians worked intermittently rather than steadily, as survival and nature, rather than a daily schedule or clock, demanded. Most of their food was seasonal; acorns ripened and grasshoppers were abundant in a wingless stage only at particular times. Moreover, ritual may have required that certain animals be killed only at the time deities prescribed, as was true with other tribes. At these junctures people exerted themselves steadily and intensely in a disciplined fashion to procure their livelihoods. The men hunted, and the women gathered and stored food for lean times. Then they rested and loafed. In addition, their ecosystem could not tolerate intensive, accumulationist exploitation—there were only so many animals and oak trees. For this "affluence without abundance" they worked less than people with a plethora of labor-saving

devices, maybe ten to fifteen hours a week excluding rituals, and produced only as d only as e need for food and shelter demanded, with a work rhythm the environment dictated.^[2]

The Spanish would make the Indians into gente de razón , or people of reason. The phrase encapsulates the wholeness of the Spanish vision for the Indians of California. Of course, to a Spaniard, to be de razón meant to be Catholic, Castilian-speaking, settled into tax-paying towns, working in agriculture, and loyal to his majesty, the king of Spain. But even more fundamentally, to be de razón meant that one's reason, with some help from the fear of God, would produce an individual who internalized the need to manage, or even renounce, instinct for the good of the social organization. Human reason, moreover, provided the basis for humans technologically to work their will over nature. By contrast, for Indians, human reason studied nature—which included magic. Such reflection then prepared people to act so as to function with nature. Nature constantly engaged in biological reproduction and encouraged humans to do likewise. The Indians, apparently, engaged in plenty of such "natural" procreative activity, to the great trepidation of the Christian padres. The Indians' actions did not seem at all rational to the other culture. Evidently undisciplined Indian instinct, the playground of the devil, seemed to rule the Indians, rather than reason. An anonymous pundit discerned the issue in Alta California nicely, remarking, "Such, then, is the issue: if its inhabitants are addicted to independence."^[3] It was the lot of the Franciscan priests to break the Indians of their addiction to what the Spanish perceived as the Satanic offshoot of liberty and independence—libertinage.

The padres regarded the Indians as children. They were sin razón to the Franciscans, people who had not attained the age of reason (about seven years), and thus their dependent little ones. "They are our children," Father Serra wrote to the viceroy, "for none except us has engendered them in Christ. The result is we look upon them as a father looks upon his family. We shower all our love and care upon them." The llavera , or woman in charge of keys for the Indian women's monjerio , or dormitory, remembered how Padre Zalvidea "cared much for his mission children, as he called the Indians he himself had converted to Christianity." "No matter how old they are," confirmed Padre Juan Calzada, guardian of the College of San Fernando, in 1818, "California Indians are always children."^[4] Moreover, by reducing Indians to Christianity and settled agricultural ways, the padres ripped from under them their economic and cultural supports. Traditional hierarchies were apparently destroyed as the Indians,

despite their previous status in their clans, all became as children—not only in the view of the European Franciscans but in their physical and emotional dependence on the mission system as well. In trying to wean Indians from the bosom of mother nature and rear them to become civilized Christians, the padres only succeeded in infantilizing them.

The padres had all the obligations and duties of fathers toward children as well as the rights and privileges. They could arbitrarily regulate the activities of their dependents according to their desires for their children's development. As Don José del Carmen Lugo remembered, "The minor faults which the Indians committed, the kind that the father of a family would punish, these padres could correct themselves." Pablo Tac, a Luiseño Indian, recalled his experience at the mission with the padres: "None of the neophytes can go to the garden or enter to gather the fruit. But if he wants some he asks the missionary who immediately will give him what he wants, for the missionary is their father." The padres were to be loving and stern, with love forthcoming when the Indians internalized, or at least complied with, the fathers' wishes. They monitored their children constantly. In the sacristy of Mission San Gabriel one can see a large, round, framed mirror with a sign saying, "Used by the padres during mass to watch the movements of the Indians." The medieval mind generally perceived those who had not reached the age of reason as innately licentious and unconstrained, even more sinful than the adult sons of Adam. Padre Tapis of Mission Santa Barbara punished Indian transgressions of European mores "with the authority which Almighty God concedes to parents for the education of their children." "They are treated with tolerance," affirmed Father President Lasuén in 1801, "or dealt with more or less firmly . . . while awaiting the time when they will gently submit themselves to rational restraint."^[5]

The first step in reining in the Indians' unbridled spontaneity and wildness was their reduction and confinement to missions, where they could be parented and taught the Catholic faith. Those "who live dispersed and vagrant in that extensive land," as Viceroy Bucareli perceived them, would have to be settled and clothed on their way to civilization. Recall that in Serra's view the Indians must first be clothed "for decency and modesty," especially the frail sex. Fathers Gil y Taboada and Zalvidea of San Gabriel replied to the Interrogatorio that "although they are much addicted to nudity, we make every effort to have them go decently covered. The dress which for the present is given for that purpose is the frazada or blanket, a short tunic which we call the Cotón , and a narrow cloth which serves as

covering and which we call the taparabo or breechcloth for men. For the women, a blanket, tunic, and a skirt." Now that the Indians appeared on their way toward looking like Spaniards, or at least not like naked savages, they would have to sound like Spaniards too.^[6]

The missionaries presented the Castilian language to the Indians in mixed ways and with mixed results. The padres largely, though not always, made a serious effort both to learn the native languages and to teach Spanish to the Indians. Adult Indians did not take quickly to the new idiom, if at all, so special efforts were made to teach the children their prayers in Spanish. At the same time, at least at San Gabriel, the mission "has the catechism in the respective idioms of the natives or tribes of which its population is composed; but they are not approved by the Bishops, because not only is it difficult but well nigh impossible for the Bishops to find an interpreter who could revise them; for even composing them the missionaries found it a matter of much labor and patience." Padre Zalvidea, who wrote these words, was probably one of the few with any facility in an Indian language. The llavera of the mission remembered that he taught the Indians to pray "in their own language." In 1811 each mission received an interrogatorio , or questionnaire, from the Spanish government; the replies about language vary. At San Fernando "there are those who understand Spanish, but they speak it imperfectly." At Santa Barbara "several neophytes understand Spanish somewhat," and at San Luis Rey "many of the Christians, especially the men, speak and understand Spanish, although not perfectly." These are statements of padres with an interest in demonstrating the success of their teaching. The father president summed up the situation: "Some speak Spanish, although with much difficulty." One Indian, whose narrative of mission life survives, did learn Spanish. However, typical of such "successes," he was raised in the mission. On the whole, it would appear that the adult Indians did not s did not language with which to learn the Word.^[7]

The friars at San Luis Rey asserted, with a sureness suspect when considered against other friars' statements about Indian indolence, that "the new Christians regulate themselves by the clock of the mission; and for timing their rest, meals, and work, we sound the bell." Each mission had a clock and usually two bells, the larger one to note the time for prayers and devotions and the smaller one the temporal duties. At Mission San Carlos excavators in the 1920s uncovered a sundial on which "all around the dial, carved in stone, were objects and figures indicating, apparently, the various duties to be performed by the neophytes at the hour marked by the

shadow of the gnomon." There came to be, in other words, a new regulator of activities for the neophyte Indians, one they neither comprehended nor internalized.

Time for such people had been rather circular, or, more accurately, cylindrical, as we have already seen. The important events were repeatable ones. Time was not linear, with every event leading to some new place in history, nor abstractly represented, with minutes and hours dividing days, or weeks dividing months. The seasons were the important events, and they came, went, and came back again in the same fashion each time. Padre Serra had an alarm clock at Mission San Carlos, and the padres at Santa Clara received "a wooden clock with little bells for hours and quarter hours." These clocks, powerful symbols of European work discipline, did not sound meaningfully in the ears of the neophytes. "They satiate themselves today, and give little thought to tomorrow," whined Padre Lasuén. "If they are put to work, nobody goads them on. They sit down; they recline; they often go away, and come back when it suits them." The strength of the old habits and practices earned the Indians a reputation for laziness in the world of the timepiece.^[8] This reputation they would carry with them through the European phase of their history. It would further justify the Spanish view that only force could hold them in the missions because they were brutal (in the Latin sense of the word, that is, irrational and insensible) and the later Yankee Protestant view that they deserved to die.

The Indians had to adapt themselves not only to an entirely new conception of time discipline. Tools have a power of their own, and they press people to transform their sense of, and relationship to, nature. Consider, for example, the making of a plow from a tree. Tree, as the Indians understood it, was a spirit-inhabited being that gave acorns or other fruits, provided fuel, and welcomed birds. The deities had arranged its nature that way and given it a spirit that encouraged it to act in the world with those purposes. To make tools from it, people had to transform their sense of tree. Its mechanical and technical potentialities had to be separated from its literally animated pith. If it became the (or any) tree, simply a thing, then its wood could be used without fear of retribution from any spirits. This is not to say that Christian Europe had cast out thoroughly all the pagan spirits from peasant consciousness by this time. Nonetheless, the European spirit world, embodied and unified in the Christian concept of the one true God, transcended earthly life and objects; it had despiritualized the world. Europeans encountered simply a tree, which they could use without fear of retribution from the spirit world for acting inappropriately toward it and

its prescribed function. Making use of technology—or more accurately the Iberians' prototechnology or handicrafts, which had at least the potential to improve the material quality of life for the California Indians—required a metamorphosis of the Indian relationship to nature and all its beings.

The Indian relationship to animals is particularly important in this regard and will help clarify this idea. Animals and humans, their spirits and their flesh, together formed the Indian creature world. All beings, two-legged, four-legged, and winged, coexisted in the spirit part of the world. This notion gave the Indians of California and the rest of the Americas a certain oneness with animals. The oneness was not always harmonious because they often preyed on one another, but it was a oneness the Europeans had lost or transcended. For the latter, the laws of science came to govern all anatomies, which they increasingly perceived as simply mechanical because the influence of the spirits, especially that of the Devil, had become mere shadows in the light of the one true God. Animals, then, came to have otherness for Europeans when they rigorously separated mind and spirit from their own bodies and denied animals a spiritual nature. Christian Europe perceived all bodies as only corporeal, the human soul as ethereal, and animals as having no souls or spirits. Not only does this view divide the self into two sometimes-warring parts, but it also changes people's relations to animals. Humans and animals no longer coexisted in the European spirit world as they still did for the people of the California coast before 1769. Animals were no longer companions but others that humans could utilize as they did the trees. (Curiously enough, the founder of the padres' order, Saint Francis of Assisi, in some ways sought to restore human and animal companionship. All were God's creatures to Saint Francis, but he distinguished between "irrational animals" and "human beings made in the image of God." Only the latter had souls, though they all could be "brothers.") In Genesis 1:28 God told humans to "rule over the fish in the sea, the birds of heaven, and every living thing that moves upon the earth." For Indians, though, their essential oneness with these creatures in the spiritual world required that they maintain a certain equality with animals in the material world.

Thus, for Indians to use an ox-driven wooden plow required a tremendous transformation of their orientation toward the cosmos. The ox and the tree lost the old spirits that had animated them and formed part of their essence. The mass production of animals for food and as trade items, such as occurred with the huge mission cattle herds, further alienated people from an interconnected and companionate relationship to animals,

except to keep them as dependent pets. Many of the Europeans' tools and skills could well have advantaged the Indians, but they could not find a place in the firmly held Indian worldview. The sacristy of Mission San Gabriel displays cabinets that the neophytes constructed with fantastically carved drawer handles depicting grotesque heads. Though such images were not uncommon in Iberian cathedrals, we cannot help but wonder what spirits still animated these drawers and knobs even after instruction in European religion and wood handicrafts. Such custom, habit, and story, so long in their formulations, could not have been transformed without considerable consequences, including the resistance and destruction of tribal peoples. Indeed, tools only fatally confused and disordered the California Indian world.^[9]

Tools developed initially in cultures only when someone, in the words of Lewis Mumford, "performed the stunning act of dissociating" a function such as lifting from its essence as something that only arms performed. Levers could do lifting only when lifting was dissociated from what usually did it, thus allowing something else to fulfill that particular function. The Indian view of nature's beings as animated stood between them and the use of the Europeans' tools. Those without technics could not control and manol and mane environment because it was not separated from humankind but animated with genuinely kindred spirits. Thus the environment, and each of its constituents, was endowed with the same caprices and unruly fears and urges that humans had. Technology, which insists upon arrangement, regularity, and, most important, a sense that humans can work their own productive will on, rather than with, nature, cannot manage a disorderly and inconsistent world. It requires that the body be accessible to manipulation by authority for specified operations and not be susceptible to spirits or desires. In a way, then, Father Peyri was correct when he wrote that "apathy reigns over the Indians." At least I think we can understand why he believed this.^[10]

The padres brought to the Indians an institution ideally suited to enable them to make the leap to a mechanical mind-set. The mission, with its thoroughgoing efforts to restrain the bodily appetites, could have provided the discipline necessary for the separation of the world into physical and animated spheres if the Indians were willing to accept such a division. Loathing and then denying the body reinforced its split from the mind, making it easier to allow machines, in Mumford's words, "to counterfeit this or that action of the body." The teachings of the church about the sinful nature of the flesh, so susceptible to devilish influence, meshed nicely with the demands of technical transformation in which objects must be

dissociated from their spirits, desires, whims, and animation. Christianity helped in this regard when it ejected the spirits that animated all things and replaced them with a single omnipotent Spirit. Moreover, though the ways of this new God often proved inscrutable, at least He had a great plan, which His law regulated, and He had created an orderly world. Bringing the Indians the Word, the padres believed, would free them from their animist view of the world and help them understand its regular and consistent essence. Padre Lasuén showed dim awareness of this situation: "Here then we have the greatest problem of the missionary: how to transform a savage race such as these into a society that is human, Christian, civil, and industrious. This can be accomplished only by 'denaturalizing' them. It is easy to see what an arduous task this is, for it requires them to act against nature." But nature and its spirits did prove stronger than the Europeans' earnest efforts—the Indians usually took to neither God nor industry.^[11]

Herein ultimately lies the meaning of de razón as well. To become like the Europeans, the Indians would have to achieve the same split of body and mind that their civilizers accepted. The mind must control the body both for religion and for technology. Reason must control appetite and nature. Padre Venegas stated the problem with the Indians from the de razón point of view thoroughly if not sympathetically: "Their characteristics are stupidity and insensibility; want of knowledge and reflection; inconstancy, impetuosity and blindness of appetite; an excessive sloth and abhorrence of fatigue; an incessant love of pleasure, and amusement of every kind, however trifling or brutal; in fine, a most wretched want of everything which constitutes the real man, and renders him rational, inventive, tractable, and useful to himself and society." Yes, they were as children to the Europeans—not yet grown to the age of reason wherein the mind would successfully (usually) battle the body for control and subjugate its desires to the need both for internally disciplined productive activity and for the appropriately humble relationship to God so that His plan would be revealed.^[12]

The resistance or indifference of the Indians to this particular form of reason and European-style maturation was attributed either to their brutish nature or to the workings of the Devil, or to both. This explanation for their apparent unwillingness to adopt the conquerors' ways produced and justified coercion of the Indians. Padre Lasuén, upset at a failure to increase troops at the presidios, wrote in 1797 that if the authorities

withdraw or altogether remove soldiers from the limited garrisons . . . they may lose everything. The majority of our neophytes have not yet acquired

much love for our way of life; and they see and meet their pagan relatives in the forest, fat and robust and enjoying complete liberty.

They will go with them, then, when they no longer have any fear and respect for the force, such as it is, which restrains them.

Even that most notable of soldier-loathers, Padre Serra, noted "that the presidio needs more people to contain the uneasy and pernicious disposition of these natural Christians and heathens."^[13] The first restraint, and likely the most important one the fathers imposed on their Indio children, was the severe limitation of their sexuality.

In California the priests confronted their antithesis. The fathers were usually sexually restrained, punctual, monotheistic, sedentary, and bent on accumulating wealth for the missions. In their minds, of course, what they did was virtuous, and what the Indians did, largely the opposite, was sinful. The Indians were everything the Europeans (with the exception of many soldiers) had been trying to transcend or repress. By terrorizing and generally restricting women who realized Satan's will through their "insatiable lust," the Europeans conquered "carnal lust." Sexuality was a fearful, if not devilish, issue for these fathers. They confronted primitive and apparently uncontrolled and infantile beings who represented that over which their civilization thought it had triumphed. The California padres, like virtually all European fathers, knew what to do with people whose alleged sexuality threatened their sense of restraint and civilization. They controlled them with seeming kindness, infantilized them, and then coerced them to discipline their sexual relations. The priests unilaterally transferred their role of loving, kind, protective European father, and ruthless castigator of their errant, incontinent, and lesser charges, to the California Indians. Indeed, not only would the subjugation of the Indians' physical intimacy elevate Indians to their standards and inculcate a body-mind duality, but also the padres could overcome any of their own ambivalence about their own victory over desire through the rigorous control of someone else—their Indian children.

The padres enforced sexual restraint with lock and key. Few things were locked up in Spanish California, but an exception was the securing of unmarried Indian women, and sometimes men, in the missions. The model for this practice was the locking up of daughters by their fathers. Class tensions do not seem to have produced sufficient anxiety among property holders that they felt the need to make fast their private property, though the missions secured supplies from the neophytes. There seem to have been enough material goods on the bounteous California coast to supply all and limit the fear of losing goods. Instead, the padres feared too much

sex, or at least sex Christian marriage had not confined. The padres divided up traditional Indian families to take control of them. They knew from experience that children raised in the mission were much more likely to become Hispanicized than their parents, who were largely set in their libertine ways. Wives and husbands lived in a ranchería very near the mission with their little children. The llavera at lavera at n Gabriel, Eulalia Pérez, remembered how "the girls [mujercitas ] were brought to the monjerio when they were seven to nine years of age, and were tended there until they left to marry." Indian girls were socialized to European ways in "what was commonly called the monjerio," as another woman recalled from the era, "under the care of an older Indian woman who was like the matron. She watched them carefully . . . and never lost sight of them." A very few settler women, well-trained Indian women, or, later on, sometimes soldiers' wives served as la madre abadesa (abbess). She had the job of keeping the young Indias "secure from any insult." They could not come out until the morning; the llavera made sure that the door was locked and then gave the key to the padre.^[14]

Properly confined, restrained, disciplined, and denaturalized—in short, reduced—the Indians could now engage in actual production in the missions. Unlike in the Rio Grande Valley, where the natives had evolved a sophisticated agricultural system in which surpluses were produced and stored and which the intruders could appropriate, in California the initial Spanish colonizers had to depend on their supply system from San Bias, on the coast of central Mexico, for sustenance until the missions could start producing. Anza's first expedition to San Gabriel (1774) found the priests and guards existing on only three corn tortillas and some herbs a day. On that journey Padre Francisco Garcés, formerly of Mission San Javier del Bac in Tucson, noted in his diary, "We found the mission in extreme poverty, as is true of all the rest. . .. We were sorry on both sides, the fathers at having so little to give, either of animals or provisions, and we at having brought nothing to relieve them of their want." By the time of Anza's second expedition (1776), Padre Font reported milk, cheese, and butter from "fat cows," a small flock of sheep, hogs, and some chickens at San Gabriel. "I do not remember having eaten fatter or finer mutton," he wrote. Nature had taken its course with the few livestock that boats had carried from the lower to the upper California missions. Fortunately, the missions soon started producing a bounty from the hospitable California soil. Once the land could be planted in corn, beans, and wheat, not only could the missionaries supply themselves and the neophytes with an abundance of food, but so too could the presidios partake of the plenty.

Now, moreover, food, which was utterly crucial to the conversion effort, could be offered to the heathens consistently. The Indians would not wander off when the handouts were over, and the padres would not have to fear starving the rest of the mission inhabitants. The generosity of California's coastal soil and temperate climate compensated for the lack of willing and able neophyte producers, who were now hesitatingly and falteringly engaging in sedentary agriculture on land over which the Indians had roamed and gathered their sustenance only a few years previously.^[15]

Initially, the soldiers assigned to the missions were to provide both the labor necessary to get the enterprises under way and a model of de razón work habits. Hispanicized Indians from Baja California assisted them in this task and functioned, in Bancroft's words, "as servants of all work in the new missions." One of the military guards also held the position of mayordomo (Serra's 1773 trip to Mexico established the right of missions to employ such a soldier) and directed the labors of the neophytes. Under the mayordomo were the caporales , who were "selected from the more intelligent Indians who understood a goodly part of the Spanish language." These caporales interpreted and transmitted orders and, once they approached a state of razón , "assisted . . . the mayordomo in the policing and the work generally." Besides sowing, tending gardens and fruit orchards, and raising livestock, the Indians had to begin construction of the edifices that would house and train them until they could be settled into pueblos of their own. The first buildings were no more than lean-tos, at least at San Gabriel and Santa Barbara. Then in the 1780s the Indians were directed in the raising of structures with walls made of willow poles filled in with mud and tule-thatched roofs. Sharpened poles formed a stockade surrounding the structures. In 1792 the government in Mexico sent twenty artisans to further train Indians (even those de razón) in masonry, carpentry, tailoring, and leatherworking. Their instruction had some effect on the productive abilities of the missions, though most of the skilled mechanics returned to Mexico in 1800. By 1795 the various artisans and workers of Mission San Gabriel had raised the edifice to half its intended height with stone and mortar, and by 1801 it had a vaulted, albeit cracked, roof. (An earthquake in December 1812, however, knocked all this down.) Learning European skills was a long process for the Indians, one that was never completed.^[16]

It is difficult to discern precisely how much work the mayordomos and priests got out of the neophytes. In 1799 investigators for Governor Borica reported that the Indians worked from six to nine hours a day, depending on the season, and more at harvesttime. The padres maintained that the

neophytes worked only four to six hours a day, with only half of them working at any given time. The Indians soon learned passive resistance to this rudimentary industrial discipline. Father Lasuén noted that "the healthy are clever at feigning sickness, and they know that they are generally believed, and . . . even when there is only a doubt, the missionary will always give them dispensation from work." Generally, the neophytes' workday began about two hours after sunrise, following breakfast and the assignment of tasks. Between eleven o'clock and noon they ate, and then they rested until two o'clock. At five o'clock came worship and the end of work. The Indians worked six to eight hours a day, thirty to forty hours a week, at an easy pace that did not require undue strain. The men herded the "half-wild stock," plowed, tended, and harvested crops, and labored in the mission workshops. "The women," la Pérouse observed, "have no other employment than their household affairs, the care of their children, and the roasting and grinding of corn." Though most of these tasks were "both tedious and laborious," in the adventurous Frenchman's words, it seems clear that the quantity of work was not injurious to the Indians.^[17]

But the missions produced—ah, but they produced! Simultaneously they introduced the novice Christians to European methods of production and relationship to nature, on the one hand, and assumed responsibility for provisioning the far northern frontier of New Spain, on the other. Once in motion, the missions relieved San Bias from responsibility for supplying the presidios with food. Mission San Gabriel, the "Queen of the Missions," emerged as the largest producer in California under the direction of the tormented Padre Zalvidea. The mission's obraje , or workshop, had looms, forges, and facilities for carpentry and the production of bricks, wheels, carts, plows, yokes, tiles, soap, candles, earthenware, adobes, shoes, and belts. By 1800 the obrajes wove California wool into clothing for the neophytes, and there was enough soap to keep everyone clean, if they chose to use it. Some leather goods still had to be imported from Mexico, however. The mission ranchos raised cattle, pigs, chickens, geese, and sheep. Fruit trees, grapevines (which yielded a claret and a brandy famous in all of Hisall of Hisica), wheat, corn, potatoes, beans, garbanzos, lentils, squash, watermelon, and cantaloup all grew in abundance. The magnitude and diversity of production, based in agriculture but expanding into light artisanal manufacturing, might lead one to believe that the missions were indeed securing California by successfully occupying and inhabiting the remote territory.^[18]

The statistics are striking. According to Bancroft, between 1783 and 1790 the number of mission horses, mules, and cattle increased from 4,900

to 22,000, while sheep, goats, and swine increased from 7,000 to 26,000. Between 1790 and 1800 these numbers trebled. In 1783 the missions produced 22,500 bushels of grain, in 1790, 37,500, and in 1800, 75,000. By 1810, a year of decline, the missions counted 116,306 head of cattle, 16,782 horses, and 1,561 mules. By 1821 there were 149,730 head of cattle, 19,830 horses, and 2,011 mules. In 1819 Mission San Fernando, in the shadow of Mission San Gabriel, had 12,800 cattle. At the time of the disestablishment of the missions in 1834, the Queen of the Missions had 163,578 vines, 2,333 fruit trees, 12,980 head of cattle, plus 4,443 "cattle loaned to various individuals," 2,938 horses, and 6,548 sheep.^[19]

The harvest of cattle and other agricultural products outpaced that of Christians. For example, in 1785 there were only one and a third head of cattle to each neophyte. Six years later the ratio increased to three to one, and by 1800 to four to one. By 1810 there were 6.2 head of cattle to each mission Indian, and by 1820, 7.3, a monumental feat of both nature and the padres. The soil and climate of California produced more than the various inhabitants could consume.^[20]

Although most contemporaries of the missions seemed to believe that the Indians were well fed, there is conflicting evidence about the quality and quantity of nutrition the Indians realized from mission largess. Mission San Gabriel, reported the friars at the turn of the century, "gives them sufficient time so that they have three meals of corn, wheat, beans, and meat a day. Likewise, in their respective seasons is given them an abundance of cheese, milk, melons, peaches, and all other kinds of Spanish fruits." The llavera of the mission confirmed the padres' optimistic estimation of their charges' diets. Breakfast was usually pozole (boiled barley and beans) and meat; lunch consisted of pozole with meat and vegetables, and atole, and meat. On holidays they got chocolate. The rancheros, José del Carmen Lugo, José María Amador, and Carlos Híjar, agreed that the Indians were well fed. "Everything was given to them in abundance, and they always went away satisfied but lazy, for they did not like to go to work," declared the latter. "This sort of food," la Pérouse added, "of which the Indians are extremely fond . . ., they eat without either butter or salt, and it would certainly to us be a most insipid mess." The neophytes supplemented this European-style food with their traditional nuts and berries, which the fathers reluctantly allowed them to gather from the wild.

By contrast, Sherburne Cook refers to the Indians' diet as "suboptimal, . . . a level of nutrition probably insufficient for ordinary maintenance and certainly below the optimum necessary to provide a high resistance to infection." He estimates a daily intake of only two thousand to twenty-one

hundred calories. (In comparison, slaves in the American South consumed about a thousand more calories a day, but this was in 1859, the height of slavery. Moreover, slaves were generally larger and worked harder than the neophytes.) Cook asserts that the missionized Indians foraged because "conversion frequently outran cultivation." In other words, the padres had to let the Indians have their native foods or they would be hungry and run away. E. B. Webb agrees that injections of such food into the diet kept them from fleeing but emphasizes that it was an "occasional vacation." Cook's otherwise brilliant book is here problematic, in my opinion. As we have seen, the quantity of food produced changed over the brief history of the missions. In this matter Cook is ahistorical. For example, his statistics for beef consumption derive from 1796. Only ten years later cattle production increased 50 percent and 15 years later 100 percent. Furthermore, different missions produced different quantities of food, depending on the environment and the fortitude of the padres. Cook does not address caloric consumption in the mature missions, and it actually appears to have differed only insignificantly from that of comparable groups. The point, though, is that the California environment and the diligence of the padres enabled the stabilized missions to adequately feed their neophytes.^[21]

The missions produced plenty of surplus food, which needed some outlet if production were to continue. Some went to the presidios as early as the late 1770s, and some went to trade. The missions were surely the most successful producers in Alta California by 1800. The fledgling ranchos, the tiny pueblos such as Los Angeles, and the presidial fields did not produce nearly as much. For example, in 1782 Los Angeles could contribute only $15 to support Spain's war with England, whereas Mission San Gabriel gave $134. The year 1810, however, marks an important watershed in mission-presidial economic relations. In September of that year Padre Hidalgo's famous "Grito de Dolores," the call to take up arms for the independence of Mexico, caused such chaos that few or no supplies could make their way north to the far frontier. After that time the presidios thoroughly depended on the missions for food, though it is important to remember that the missions depended on the presidios for a market through which to earn much-needed exchange credits.

The vast majority of Indians working at the presidios were actually hired from the missions. They received a small wage, usually about two reales a day, credited to the mission account, and food and clothing, in exchange for all types of labor including field work, personal service, adobe making, general repair and maintenance and other construction work, and blacksmithing. Skilled neophytes earned a little more, and sometimes pay

was only one and a half reales a day. The first decade of the nineteenth century appears to have been the heyday of the mission as labor contractor for the presidios. There is some evidence of decline in the practice after 1810 in the mission account books, but it may only reflect the increasing inability of the presidios to pay. In 1815 Padre Zalvidea wrote to Comandante de la Guerra, "The governor's letter was received offering [illegible] and the fifty Indians that the Sergeant of the Los Angeles garrison requested are on their way." Indian labor was still crucial to the military after 1810 even if it could not pay for it on a regular basis. The padres initiated a practice of great significance for the history of California after the mission period when they hired out their surplus mission Indians to the gente de razón. By the turn of the century there were few de razón families without an Indian servant. The labor of Indians on the ranchos left an indelible stamp on the history of production in California, and the padres facilitated this organization of work. Suffice it to say that hiring out of Indians provided an important source of income for the missions close to a pueblo or presidio.^[22]

The padres considered such income central to entral to uation of their mission. The number of souls saved still measured the success of their enterprise, but the fathers nevertheless sought to save some money too. The crown's laxity in delivering its annual allotments to both the missions and the presidios encouraged them to test out more reliable sources of support. Of course, the events following 1810 intensified this desire for financial independence from the crown—indeed, made it into a requirement. The American and British trading ships that began to appear off the coast, especially after 1796, suited the padres' needs for hard cash and provided an outlet for their surplus production. As early as 1794 Governor Borica was sufficiently concerned about smuggling to wrest promises from the padres that they would not engage in such trade. It became customary for American vessels, especially those involved in the fur trade, to materialize in several ports on their way down the coast to replenish their supplies and see if anyone had anything to sell. William Shaler, a genuine Connecticut Yankee, stealthily appeared in the courts of several missionaries. His journal contains this advice and information:

For several years past, the American trading ships have frequented this coast in search of furs, for which they have left in the country about 25,000 dollars annual, in specie and merchandise. The government has used all their endeavors to prevent this intercourse, but without effect, and the consequence has been a great increase of wealth and industry among the inhabitants. The missionaries are the principal monopolizers of the fur trade,

but this intercourse has enabled the inhabitants to take part in it. At present, a person acquainted with the coast may always procure abundant supplies of provisions.

Earnest producers of valuable surpluses in service of the faith, the padres were no match for this son of Calvin when it came to marketing and commerce. Robert Archibald notes that "some twenty or at least one-half of the pious padres were in his debt. Of these, only four had honored their notes."^[23]

The missions provided for more than the local economy. The padres brought California into the world market through their trade with New England. Despite their dependence on the paternalism of the Spanish crown for their very existence, the friars itched for freer trade relations with those outside the realm, even though the restrictive trade requirements of Spanish mercantilism were integral aspects of this system that had fostered missionization in the first place. This desire for freedom from such mercantile and colonial fetters is familiar from the American and Latin American revolutions. The friars had a much more amenable trade situation with the end of Spanish mercantilism in 1821; ironically, however, they had remained largely loyal to Spain during Mexico's struggle for independence and had refused to take an oath of obedience to the constitution of 1824. But financially strapped Mexico did impose customs duties, which in turn encouraged the friars to smuggle even by means of ships engaged in legitimate trade. Juan Bandini, a Spaniard who journeyed to Peru, where he started his family before establishing himself as a ranchero in southern California, describes how trade generally operated in the 1820s:

The commerce of the ships which resort to this coast is entirely confined to the missions; that with private individuals being of little importance. As soon as a vessel arrives at a port the captain puts himself in communication with the minister of the neighboring mission; the latter asks for a list of the articles for sale, selects those that are needed, such as iron, carpenters tools, dyes, hand mills to grind wheat . . ., cotton clothes, thread as well as gaudy colored bandanas of the cheapest quality, also such articles as may be necessary for the use of churches, stills to make brandy and copper boilers to render the tallow and make soap, kitchen utensils and tableware.

The missionaries brought Christianity to the Indians and the world market to California, especially after 1822. José del Carmen Lugo remembered how "when I was twelve or fourteen years old I used to see carretas loaded with hides and tallow headed for the ships at San Pedro." It was mainly these hides and tallow that the padres exchanged for manufactured goods,

at the rate of two dollars (about fourteen reales) for each arroba (twenty-five pounds) of tallow and each cowhide. This trade with the Yankees was seductive indeed. "The missions produced grain in great quantities," Lugo noted, "but they had to feed their numerous neophytes. Later the missions increased production near the ports, because they were in a position to sell their surpluses such as hides and tallow." It is probably impossible to know what proportion of this trade was aboveboard, though Bandini asserted that "the duties collected [at the port] . . . are never sufficient . . ., and as they [the mission] control all branches of business and are exempt from all taxes it is not to be wondered but that the public funds are short."^[24]

Some of the produce of the lands held in trust for the Indians was now transformed into commodities. Whereas initially production was only for subsistence, now some was for gain. California previously had a barter economy, but because of the increasing volume of trade with foreigners, money was now becoming the medium of exchange. The missions were clearly the economic mainstay of Alta California. They supplied the military and the townspeople, the trade of their surpluses brought in manufactured goods, and it was they who were the earnest and vital producers. The priests kept precise records in their leather-bound account books. They paid close attention to their transactions with the presidios. Usually the balance in their books favored the missions over the presidios, and they received a signed warrant for payment from the habilitado general , or paymaster, in Mexico City. When payment was not forthcoming, the balance was carried over to the next year. When they could not collect the debts of persons with whom they had traded, they would often send a collector and pay him a commission. The missions functioned as banks, allowing one to discharge his debt to another by having the mission pay out and charging it to his mission account. The mission paid either from its small cash reserves or in kind. They protected their monopolies. For example, Lugo asserted that the fathers, out of egoism, would not let the ranchos have orange and lemon seeds.^[25] Providing an outlet for the products of Indian labor, their increasing trade also strengthened the Indian labor system at the missions, which brought to California economic independence and security from foreign intrusion. Lurking in the background, however, were the decline of the neophyte population and the continuous unfolding of liberalism, which would bring freedom, if not equality, to the mission Indians.

Narratives such as the following often give the impression that events happened quickly: the Indians were baptized, and the soldiers outraged them; they had to change their relationship to animals, but the old spirits

still had some effect; the padres smuggled, and the capitalist world market embraced the missions. Actually, much time passed between events. It is vital to remember that on most days not much happened. Although the padres did indeed draw California into the capitalist market, and that very market encouraged production for gain beyond the Indians' subsistence, in no way can we say that the prevailing social relations were correspondingly transformed. What prevailed on a daily basis can tell us much more about the nature of human interaction at the missions than can inclusion in the world marketplace. Yes, the involvement in the world capitalist system had important effects on California society, and this incorporation of mission production even strengthened their system. However, the relationship between the producers, the neophytes, and those who controlled production, the Catholic fathers, remained fundamentally constant. This relationship, moreover, made an indelible mark on the future of California.

Not surprisingly, the padres' actions to discipline the Indians to enhance production and instill faith provoked resentment and rebelliousness. Sherburne Cook calculates that 10 percent of the neophytes ran away at one point or another and that 40 percent of the runaways made good on their efforts. Fleeing was only one sign that many Indians did not take to their new environment. A social scientist may incline toward abstractions and generalizations about why an Indian would take flight, but it is important to remember that Indians reacted in concrete ways to concrete situations; they did not philosophize about, and then respond to, their situation. A number of huidos [escapees] from Mission San Antonio de Padua, south of Monterey, were questioned after their capture about why they absconded. The most typical response was that they "had been flogged for leaving [including simply wandering off] without permission." Many left when a loved one died. The comment "Twice, when he went out to hunt food or to fish, Father Danti had him whipped" exemplifies nicely the dynamics of punishment and flight. This neophyte most likely just wanted something of his customary food to eat. He could understand no reason why he should not hunt or fish. To the padre, his action was treason and apostasy. Freely accepting baptism and subjecting himself to the king of Spain, the former heathen had accepted certain obligations, which he was now fleeing. Punishment seemed entirely appropriate to the padre and confounding or despotic to the Indian. Thus, the chosen forms of chastisement could never have their intended effect of deracinating the natives, who perceived them as arbitrary. The Indian decided to decamp in response to his baffling situation. Returned to the fold, he was, of course, whipped.^[26]

On occasion neophytes attacked the fathers. The initial revolts at San Diego and Toypurina's efforts at San Gabriel attempted to expel an unwanted interloper and restore the old ways. Later struggles revolved around the already-established social relations between the feudal and Catholic fathers and their neophyte Christian charges. Events at San Gabriel in late 1810 illustrate a transitional form of revolt containing aspects of both sorts of insurrection. As many as eight hundred men, mostly gentiles, poised themselves to strike at the mission in November. Had they attacked, they easily would have wiped out Mission San Gabriel. Yet the new ways had by this time irrevocably altered Indian life. The raid intended not only to end the mission but also to redress grievances of the Franciscan entrada. It seems that both neophytes and gentile Indians cooperated in the pilfering of the mission storehouses. Some had been caught and imprisoned for what the Indians likely considered just expropriation of goods. Besides, they were probably hungry, given the interlopers' pressures on their food supply. Thus agitated, instead of eliminating the productive mission they made off with three thousand sheep (which were recaptured). Two contradictory impulses motivated this action: to eradicate the Spanish priests, and to appropriate the mission as a source of food. This sort of rebelliousness, existing within the mission structure, now prevailed. Acts of revenge took place within the mind-set of an institutionalized mission. Nazario, for example, Padre Panto's cook, used cuchasquelaai , an herb, to poison the "rigorous disciplinarian" of Mission San Diego, who died six months later in 1812. He was not the first priest to be so afflicted either. In 1801 at Mission San Miguel, north of San Juan Capistrano, Padre Francisco Pujol died of a violent illness. His two companions, padres Carnicier and Martínez, survived their seizures, for which several Migueleños claimed credit.^[27]

One striking episode provides a window (somewhat opaque, given the lack of records and the passage of time) into the dynamics of the padres' discipline and punishment of Indians. In 1812 several of the neophytes plotted revenge on Father Andrés Quintana (of the cat-o'-nine-tails), who had journeyed from his home in Álava, Spain, to California, where in 1805 he assumed his duties at Mission Santa Cruz. It is unclear whether the Indians responded to fears of a new iron strap to punish fornication and theft, which the padre had ordered, or were getting even for his brutal whipping of the neophyte Donato. What is clear, though, is the dynamic of the punishment spectacle. The ritual, intended as a lesson for the group, this time catalyzed the neophytes' solidarity, and the violence this time boomeranged. Between nine and sixteen Indians conspired to smother the

padre so that the death would look natural. They began their revenge by first crushing one of his testicles after ambushing him on his way to administer the last rites to the Indian gardener, who was feigning death. They shut him in his rooms, squeezed out his breath, and unlocked the monjerio. Then "the young people of both sexes gathered and had their fun," as one Indian recalled. The essential castration of the padre was the first step toward the superabundant restoration of the Indians' sexual mores. From the Indian point of view the padre received a punishment befitting the crime he committed against them.

The denouement of the story is also interesting. One of the Indians, Lino, took a break from his diversion with one of the women to make sure the father was actually dead. Lino found him recovering and then with some of the others "crushed the Padre's other testicle," finally killing him. The death of the priest raised suspicions. In the investigation, according to some accounts, the padre's stomach was cut open to see if he had been poisoned, but "because of modesty they did not discover" his altered condition. A few years later several Indian women, squabbling, were overheard accusing one another's husband of the deed. The assassins were arrested and tried in 1816. Though the authorities in Mexico took Quintana's cruelty into account (testimony was given that he had beaten two neophytes almost to death), five of the culprits received two hundred lashes and sentences of two to ten years at hard labor at the Santa Barbara or San Diego presidio. Lino died in 1817, and only one of the convicts is said to have lived through his punishment.^[28]

Such patricide occurred infrequently, yet Quintana's case best illuminates the underlying tensions of the Indian-padre relationship. (The Indian informant about these events at Santa Cruz reported, however, that the neophytes stoned Quintana's successor, Padre Alba.)^[29] Does the uniqueness of the Indian actions toward the unfortunate, but unconsciously trouble-seeking, cleric relegate the instance to footnotes or anecdotes about Old California? No; such episodes isolate, clarify, and condense the fermenting tensions that everyday activities and Indian apathy concealed. These stresses characterize most societies and historical epochs and seem to move history. Remaining generally submerged, they flare up at rather random moments in events worthy of note.

What the Indians at Santa Cruz did after emasculating the father was included in an event in 1824, this time to the south, at Mission Santa Barbara. In February of that year Chumash neophytes directed a revolt against the soldiers of missions Santa Inez, La Purísima, and Santa Barbara. The trouble started at Santa Inez when Corporal Cota ordered a neophyte

flogged. The ritual of chastisement reversed itself again when the oneness of the Indians, rather than the reassertion of the Europeans' power, emerged from the violent ceremony. The transgressor's companions attacked the soldiers and padres, and while the soldiers successfully defended themselves and the ministers, the neophytes burned mission buildings. The revolt quickly spread to La Purísima and Santa Barbara but remained confined to actions against the soldiers, who retaliated viciously, at least at Santa Barbara. The soldiers sacked the Indians' houses and killed indiscriminately. The various tensions of the soldiers of Mexican California that had been simmering since 1810, especially the loss of a steady payroll and supply system, now erupted. There seems to be little doubt that the revolt happened in a context of soldiers' increasing demands for Indian-produced necessities and their escalating abuse of Indians. Padre Antonio Ripoll of Santa Barbara cried over the news of the rebellion of his children. Though the target of the Chumash revolt differed from that of the Santa Cruz episode, both insurrections disclosed tensions that existed within the social relations of mission society. At least one incident of the Chumash revolt was similar to events at Santa Cruz. During the revolt, Father Ripoll reported, the neophyte Andrés "separated the exchanged wives and returned them to their proper husbands." Five witnesses testified after the revolt that carnality reigned. The official report states, "When the Christians arrived in the valley they exchanged their women for those of the gentiles without distinction as to married and unmarried women, for they were all mixed up among the Indians." As difficult as it may be to discern precisely what happened, clearly two different understandings of conjugal relations existed at Mission Santa Barbara.^[30]

In other words, at both Mission Santa Cruz and Mission Santa Barbara the neophyte Indians associated insurrection against the Europeans with rebellion against the sexual discipline the missions had instituted. Revolt encompassed restoration of the sexual license their culture validated. The imposition of European productive, spiritual, and sexual ways, together with the introduction of European diseases, produced various Indian responses. They responded with apathy toward the clock and labor, apostatized and fled the Word of God, and occasionally revolted against punishment for such flights and sexual transgressions. They emerged thoroughly diseased from this harsh and bewildering journey. These Indian adaptations, defiances, and ruinations distill for us the significant social tensions of California mission culture and society. Not only were the neophytes diseased and, in the eyes of the padres, incapable of discipline and indolent, but they were now genuinely threatening too. It is only in hindsight that

we know that these instances of revolt did not portend general insurrection. Californians orally relating their memoirs to one of Bancroft's assistants in the 1870s attributed the Chumash revolt to a carefully planned conspiracy. The continuation of the mission effort proved more and more doubtful, regardless of the increasing population pressures on the land.^[31]

The end of the missions was contained in their beginning, when the soldiers brought diseases and the priests sought to upset the Indians' delicate balance with nature and replace it with their particular notions of subduing and replenishing the earth. Formally, however, the mission period came to a close during the years of the secularization, 1833 to the early 1840s. The social relations that mission California produced in those few years derived from many factors—Iberian political and religious imperialism, patriarchal relations between Spanish fathers and Indian children, the conflict over the relationship of humans to labor and nature, and disease. Clearly, production in California entailed much more than providing (converted) producers with tools to work the landscape and then markets for the products of their labor. We see here how a culture emerges as well. The sometimes explosive, sometimes degenerating interplay of conquering proselytizers and native heathens, the efforts of each to adapt to or force the other's acquiescence, and the unfolding of history produced this curious syncretic culture of Alta California. The Spaniards had the best of intentions; they meant to bring reason and salvation to the Indians. Instead, they shredded their native culture and infested them with fleas and microbes. Then the padres buried the Indians.

Further Reading

Archibald, Robert. The Economic Aspects of the California Missions . 1978.

Cook, Sherburne E The Conflict Between the California Indian and White Civilization . 1976.

Costo, Rupert, and Jeanette Costo, eds. The Missions of California: A Legacy of Genocide . 1987.

Heizer, Robert E, and Albert B. Elsasser. The Natural World of the California Indians . 1980.

Hurtado, Albert. "California Indians and the Workaday West: Labor, Assimilation, and Survival." California History 69 (Spring 1990): 2-11.

———. Indian Survival on the California Frontier . 1988.

"Indians of California." Special issue. California History 71 (Fall 1992).

Kroeber, Theodora. Ishi in Two Worlds . 1961.

Monroy, Douglas. Thrown Among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California . 1990.

Phillips, George Harwood. Chiefs and Challengers: Indian Resistance and Cooperation in Southern California . 1975.

———. Indians and Intruders in Central California, 1769-1849 . 1993.

Rawls, James J. Indians of California: The Changing Image . 1984.

Weber, David J. The Mexican Frontier, 1821-1846: The American Southwest Under Mexico . 1982.