Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 5, 2025
To the reader, thinker, and poet the memories and associations of these Missions form, next to the gifts of Nature, the greatest charm of Southern California; and, happily, although that semi-patriarchal life has passed away, its influence still lingers; for, scattered along the coast some struggling in poverty, some lying in neglect are the adobe churches, cloisters, and fertile Mission-fields of San Juan Capistrano, San Fernando Rey, Santa Monica, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz, all of which still preserve the soft and gracious names, so generously given in those early days, and fill us with a genuine reverence for the sandaled monks, who by incessant toil transformed this barren region into a garden, covered these boundless plains with flocks and herds, and dealt so wisely with the Indians that even their poor descendants, to-day, reverence their memory.
Santa Marguerita Rancho, with its boundless expanse of grass-covered pasturage lands, its thousands of head of cattle and horses, its thousands of acres of bean lands, ready for seed, is worth going miles to see. At noon we reached San Juan Capistrano. We drove into the grounds of the hospitable Judge Egan.
Inverted lightning flashes leapt upward, and after them great, rolling white, yellow, red and blue flames. The smoke, the smell of roasting vegetation, the roar and crackle of the conflagration, and the heat engendered were all noticeable as far away as Capistrano and Santa Barbara. Down from the sky, through the surface of the grass, the incendiaries burned great patches clear to the earth.
The next morning she was up with the first faint grey of dawn, although she was so stiff and lame that every movement caused her agony; but this wore off gradually as soon as she set out once more after breakfast with the fathers. We shall not follow her journey in detail. The second day was easier as she had only seventy-five miles to cover to reach San Juan Capistrano.
It was not as though he were going to a poor and mean mission, as were some of those in Nueva California. Father Zalvidea had been more than once to San Juan Capistrano, fifty miles south of San Gabriel, and knew well that it was large, although not as rich as it had been at one time; but his was the nature of the cat, which always returns to its old home.
Like music also were the names of the missions San Juan Capistrano, San Luis Rey de Francia, San Miguel, Santa Ynes their very list is a song. So there, by-and-by, was our continent, with the locomotive whistling from Savannah to Boston along its eastern edge, and on the western the scattered chimes of Spain ringing among the unpeopled mountains.
On Seventh Street are the arched corridors of San Fernando, San Juan Capistrano, San Miguel and San Antonio de Padua; inside is an extensive patio and the automobiles stop close to the Campanile reproducing the curved pediments of San Gabriel.
At San Gabriel alone a hundred cattle were slaughtered every Saturday as food for the Indians themselves. The hides of all slain animals were carefully preserved, and either tanned for home use or shipped East. Dana in Two Years Before the Mast gives interesting pictures of hide-shipping at San Juan Capistrano.
In glowing words Padre Francisco tells of idle farms, confiscated flocks, and ruined works of utility. Beautiful San Luis Rey is crumbling to decay. Its bells hang silent. The olive and vine scatter their neglected fruits. The Padres are driven off to Mexico. The pious fund is in profane coffers. San Juan Capistrano shines out a lonely ruin in the southern moonlight.
The only man, in fact, who produced a similar effect in Germany during the fifteenth century, was an Italian, born in the Abruzzi, named Giovanni Capistrano. Those natures which bear within them this religious vocation and this commanding earnestness, wore then in Northern countries an intuitive and mystical aspect.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking