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Updated: June 23, 2025
Their conduct soon gained them the love and esteem of the fierce Indians, and they brought their children to be taught, and were baptized with their whole families. Every day strengthened their attachment to the Padres: they built them houses to live in, and a temple for worship; and at last, without any compulsion, the chiefs acknowledged the authority of the King of Castile.
My mother told me all this, Senor, for that was long before I was born, more than fifteen years. She was a young girl then. My mother told the Indians how good the padres were to them at San Diego, and did all she could to bring them to work for the mission. I was her first child, and, at her wish, the padre named me after himself Antonio.
At the missions the padres had schools where they taught the young Indians something of reading and writing, religious services and songs, and the trades necessary for life. This, with their duties in the church and the extensive building and planting of the mission settlements, took all the time of the hard-working priests.
It is generally supposed that the circuit rider is a device of the Methodist church, but history clearly reveals that long prior to the time of the sainted Wesley, and the denomination he founded, the padres were "riding the circuit," or walking, visiting the various rancherías which had no settled pastor.
There were so few mountain passes by which to enter Santa Barbara that they were easily held, and of course the padres were anxious to keep their Indians from running away, lest they should show the wilder tribes the way to get in and commit depredations. These peaceable Indians paid tribute to intermediary tribes to hold the passes and do their fighting.
There was no regular priest settled here, for in 1810 the citizens complained that the San Gabriel padres did not pay enough attention to their sick. In August of 1814 the corner-stone of the new chapel was laid by Padre Gil of San Gabriel, but nothing more than laying the foundation was done for four years. Then Governor Sola ordered that a higher site be chosen.
On the morning of the day before the one set for the beginning of the march toward Lower California, the padres went to the heights overlooking the bay, where they remained watching and praying. At sea a heavy fog hung over the water. Hour after hour passed as they gazed out on the lovely bay. Noon came, but they would not return to the mission to rest or eat.
Indeed civilization whether dealt out with friendly hands or thrust upon the natives at the point of the bayonet seems to have been equally poisonous on both sides of the continent." "True, philosopher, but would you call the work of these padres impressionless, when it has permeated all California?
Without slavish adherence to any style, without copying anything, they are creating, expressing, even as did the Franciscan padres, beautiful thoughts in stone, brick, wood and reinforced concrete.
Even the Digger Indians, squatting in the sun beside his door and gazing stolidly at the town and the bay beyond, would sell their souls for which the gray-gowned padres prayed ineffectively in the chapel at Dolores their wives or their other, dearer possessions for a very little bottle of the stuff that was fast undoing the civilizing work of the Mission.
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