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In 1846 Pico sold all that remained of San Juan Bautista the orchard to O. Deleissèques for a debt, and though he did not obtain possession at the time, the United States courts finally confirmed his claim. This was the last act in the history of the once prosperous Mission. The entrance at San Juan Bautista seems more like that of a prison than a church.
Frijoles and pumpkins were also obtained, delicacies of no common order. December 16. A court-martial was convened this morning for the trial of Pico, the principal prisoner, on the charge, I understood, of the forfeiture of his parole which had been taken on a former occasion. The sentence of the court was, that he should be shot or hung, I do not know which.
In Fayal and Pico the most careless observer from the anchorage of Horta can scarcely fail to associate the number of smooth conical hills with former volcanic activity; and in looking over Captain Vidal's beautiful charts of the Azores, nearly all the principal hills throughout the group are seen to have their craters or caldeiras.
Mofras gives the number of Indians in 1842 as five hundred, but an official report of 1844 gives only one hundred. The Mission retained the ranches of Santa Isabel and El Cajon until 1844-1845, and then, doubtless, they were sold or rented in accordance with the plans of Pio Pico. To-day nothing but the fachada of the church remains, and that has recently been braced or it would have fallen.
Thus, walking or riding, one seldom sees the immediate foreground, but a changing background of soft valleys, an endless patchwork of varied green rising to the mountains in the interior of the island, or sinking to the blue sea, beyond which the mountain Pico rears its graceful outline across the bay.
In 1845 Juan Manso and Andrés Pico leased the Mission at a rental of $1120, the affairs having been fairly well administered by Padre Orday after its return to the control of the friars. A year later it was sold by Pio Pico, under the order of the assembly, for $14,000, to Eulogio Célis, whose title was afterwards confirmed by the courts.
Still, as a race, they, like the old church, are but a wreck of former greatness. A ride of eight miles brought us to the town of Tucson, through which our wagons passed to the Pico Chico Mountain, five miles beyond, where we made our camp. This was formerly an old Mexican fort, and was abandoned in 1853, after the survey of the boundary line between Mexico and the United States.
"I came down with Rosita Pico, whose father, you know, once owned this property," she said. "She's gone on to her cousins at Los Osos Rancho to-night, but comes here to-morrow for a visit. She knows the place well; in fact, she once had a romantic love affair here. But she is very entertaining. It will be a little change for us," she added, naively.
That it was the inference drawn by the Pope and clung to even some time after the crime and while rumours of a different sort were rife, is shown by the perquisition made in the house of Antonio Pico della Mirandola, who had a daughter whom it was conceived might have been the object of the young duke's nocturnal visit, and whose house was near the place where Gandia was flung into the Tiber.
The population was reported as 400 in 1842, and it is supposed that possibly 250 still lived at the Mission in 1845. On May 5, 1846, Pico sold all the property to Andrés Pico and J.B. Alvarado for $12,000, but the sale never went into effect. Mission San José de Guadalupe and the pueblo of the same name are not, as so many people, even residents of California, think, one and the same.
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