Part 6

The curtain rises on False Bay, San Diego—a piece of scene-staging that would do credit to any metropolitan playhouse. A little group of monks and soldiers sit disconsolately in their camp in the foreground; they are awaiting the arrival of Portola, their leader, who has gone northward to explore the coast and whose return they momentarily hope for. They have suffered from disease and hunger; hostile Indians have continually harried them and shown no signs of being converted to Christianity, despite the efforts of the monks. The soldiers are quite ready to re-embark in the crippled little San Carlos, lying temptingly in the harbor, and to return to Mexico for good. Here enters the hero of the play, Father Serra, and his influence is at once apparent, for complaint ceases and the rough soldiers become respectful. He addresses cheerful words to the dejected men—speaking like a hero and prophet—and to some extent rouses their depressed spirits. But the gloom is doubly deep when Portola staggers on the scene with the wretched remnant of his band of explorers—unkempt, footsore, starving, many of them sick and wounded—and declares that the port of Monterey has not been found—that all is lost. They must return to Mexico and when Father Serra insists that if all go he will remain here alone, Portola tells him he will not be allowed to do so. They will compel him to board the ship. The priest pleads for one more day of grace; he is to baptize his first native—an Indian child—and this may be the turning point of their fortunes. In the midst of the ceremony the savage parents become terror-stricken, snatch the babe from Serra's arms and flee to their retreat in the mountains. The sad outcome of the ceremony only confirms Portola in his determination to sail on the following morning; the San Antonio, which was despatched months ago for relief supplies, has never been heard of—she must have been lost at sea—there is no hope! The sooner they sail the greater the chance of reaching home—all are ordered to prepare for embarking. Serra raises his hands to heaven in deep contrition; it was his pride and vain glory, he laments, over his promise of success that has been punished—it is just; but he pleads in desperation with the soldier not to turn his back on God's work—to wait one more day; God may yet work a miracle to prevent the overthrow of the plans to save the heathen. His words fall on deaf ears, but while he pleads the watch sets up a joyful cry—a light is seen rounding Point Loma—the good ship San Antonio comes—the spirits of all revive—the mission is saved! It is indeed a thrilling and dramatic climax; the ship glides into the harbor in a truly realistic manner and the denouement is creditable alike to author and stage director.

The second act pictures the court of San Carlos at Monterey fourteen years later. It is rich with the semi-tropical splendor of that favored spot; green trees, waving palms, and flowers lend color and cheeriness to the gray cloisters through which the brown-robed figures march with solemn decorum. It is the great day when all the mission fathers—nine in number at that time—have assembled at Monterey to make report of progress of their respective stations to the president, the beloved Junipero. He has aged since we saw him last; hardships and wounds have left their furrows on his face, but it still glows with the old-time zeal. His strength of character comes out in one of the opening incidents—the military captain of the presidio comes to carry off a beautiful half-breed girl to whom he has taken a fancy, but the soldier's arrogance speedily fades before the stern rebuke of Father Serra, his sword is wrested from him by the athletic young "fighting parson" of San Luis Obispo, and he is ignominiously ejected from the mission.

In the second act it seems to me that the influence of Oberammergau can be seen in opulence of color and picturesque effects. The fathers gather about a long table and Serra listens with pious approbation to the optimistic reports of his subordinates. As an example of the fervent and self-sacrificing spirit of the aged president, as illustrated by the play, we may quote from Serra's address on this memorable occasion:

"Francisco, my beloved brother, and you, my brethren, all bear me witness that I have never sought for world honor; I have asked only to serve God in the wilderness, laboring to bring the light of Christ to the heathen. I would gladly be forgotten when I lie down with death in this poor robe of our Franciscan brotherhood, my hands empty, and rich only in the love of God and my fellow-man. But oh, California is dear to me! It is the country of my heart. It were sweet to be remembered here by the peoples which shall some day crowd these golden shores and possess these sweet valleys and shining hills that I have loved so well. My feet have wandered every mile of the way between the great harbor of St. Francis and San Diego's Harbor of the Sun so many, many times! and on this, my last journey which I have just taken, I stopped often amid the oaks and cypress, kissing the ground in loving farewell. I have looked down from the hilltops and embraced in my soul every vale carpeted with poppies and aflame with wild flowers as the mocking bird and the linnet sang to me on the way. To be remembered in California—ah, God grant that I shall not be forgotten in this dear and lovely land."

After this the pageantry begins—there is a church procession and the fathers with approving interest inspect the examples of handiwork proudly exhibited by the Indian pupils of San Carlos. The festivities begin; the spectators and performers, some scores in all, are artistically grouped on the stage. There are Indian and Spanish dances and the dark, gaudily dressed senoritas who perform the latter never fail of an encore—the rather high-stepping hilarity affording a pleasing relief from the more serious and even somber parts of the play. The young women have become adepts in these roles; in many cases they are of Spanish descent and take with natural aptitude to the fandango and castanets. The Indians, as well, have their dances and ceremonies—all carefully studied—and I doubt not that the second act of the play gives a fair idea of the peaceful, industrious, and yet joyous life that prevailed at many of these missions in their halcyon days. The entertainment wanes, the crowd breaks up and melts away, just as in real life, and finally Father Junipero alone remains on the scene, his features fairly beaming with satisfaction and devotion in the waning light. Finally, overcome by the labors and excitement of the day, he falls asleep at the foot of the cross in the mission court, after having offered the following beautiful and touching prayer:

"Hear, oh Lord, Thy servant Junipero, whose days upon the earth are about to close, even as the day has now closed upon this scene. Bring to the foot of Thy cross these wild gentiles of the plains and hills. Bless this dear and lovely land of California, its white peaks of glory and its sunlit valleys, where the wild flowers are ever blooming. Bless California now and in the centuries to come when newer peoples shall crowd her golden shores. This is the prayer, O Lord, of Junipero, Thy servant, who is old and worn and who soon must say farewell. Amen."

The third scene, as I have already intimated, was rewritten for the second year and much improved, though the staging remained practically unchanged. In the first draft the heroine falls a victim to the bullets of American soldiers, who fire upon the helpless Indians coming to bury their dead priest in the ruined cloisters of San Juan Capistrano. She had spurned the love advances of the captain, who rushes into the ruin only to find her breathing her last. All of which seemed incongruous and left a painful recollection with the audience; but on our second visit to San Gabriel playhouse we were delighted by a happy change in the ending of the play.

The new version shows the ivy-covered ruins of Capistrano seventy years later than the time of the second act. Confiscation by the Mexican Government has ruined the property of the missions and American occupation still further hastened their dissolution and decay. An old Indian shepherd is telling his story to a youth and declares that he was the first Indian child baptized by the sainted Serra. He is interrupted by the entrance of Senora Yorba, a lovely, devout Spanish lady who grieves over the destruction of the old regime and comes at times to muse and pray at the deserted altar, and in a graceful monologue she laments the downfall of the mission and the cessation of its beneficent work. While she is at her devotions a small company of wretched Indians enter the ruin, bearing the dead body of the padre, who ministered to them in their retreats in the hills; they would bury him in the consecrated ground of the old mission. Senora Yorba mourns with the Indians and joins them in laying the body to rest. In the folds of the dead priest's robe she discovers the golden chalice, richly bejeweled, which he had rescued from the ruined church and which the loyal natives—though they knew its value—would have interred with him. In the closing scene of the play the Senora, with a look of rapt devotion, raises the golden cup aloft and solemnly promises that she will lay it on the altar of Santa Barbara, the nearest mission still unforsaken.

The curtain falls on the melancholy scene; we pass out into the May-day sunlight and gaze reverently on the gray old mission across the way. The play has given to it new meaning, just as Oberammergau on another May day gave us a new conception of the old story that has never lost its interest to humanity. I am very sure that there are few people who witness either the famous and very ancient play of the Bavarian peasants or the very recent and less pretentious production of the artists of San Gabriel, who are not spiritually elevated and benefited thereby.

Within easy reach of the city, either by trolley or motor, is San Fernando, the next link in the mission chain to the north of San Gabriel. We made our first journey thither on a showery April day, following a steady downpour for nearly twenty-four hours. The country was at its best, as it always is in California after a spring rain. We edged our way out of the city, along the wide sweep of Sunset Boulevard to Los Feliz Avenue, which soon brought us into the San Fernando road at Glendale. From here a straight-away dash of twenty miles to the northwest takes one to the mission—one of the easiest and most delightful runs in the vicinity of Los Angeles.

It was a brilliant day, despite a dark cloud-curtain whose fringes hovered over the peaks of the rugged mountains in the north toward which we were rapidly coursing. We swept along the narrow valley—then a desert, cactus-studded plain—reaching on our left to low, green hills which stood in sharp outline against the deep azure of the sky. On the right, closer at hand, were low foothills, dominated by the distant mountains—their summits white with snow and touched in places by clouds of dazzling brilliance. Directly in front of us we saw the glistening phalanx of a summer shower, which rapidly advanced to meet us, giving us barely time to raise our cape top before it was upon us. Such a rain in our home state would have meant liquid roads and constant danger, but on this perfect highway it only heightened our enjoyment as our steadily purring engine carried us along the smooth wet surface. The green hills to the left and the cloudless sky above them seemed doubly glorious through the crystal curtain of the falling raindrops.

By the time we reached the village of San Fernando, the rain had ceased and we paused to inquire the whereabouts of the mission. We saw about us at the time a straggling, unsubstantial-looking hamlet which bore little resemblance to the smart, well-improved town that greeted us a year later—but so it often is in California. Then a new double boulevard with a parked center stretched away to the southeast—the work of an enterprising land company—with the inviting sign, "Speed limit one hundred miles per hour," but we were content with a fraction of this generous figure. The mission is about a mile out of the town and is best approached by the new boulevard, since this gives the advantage of a little distance for the front view, which the public road, directly passing, does not allow. Before you see the building itself you will note the two giant palms, over a century old, and perhaps a hundred feet high—all that remain of the many planted by the monks.

The structure is long, low, solid-looking—utterly devoid of artistic touches save the graceful, rounded arches of the long "portello" and the simple grille-work of wrought iron that still covers a few of the windows—work of the rude artisans of a hundred years ago. The old tile roof is the glory of San Fernando; the huge, semicircular tiles are time-stained to a color combination to delight the eye of an artist. Moss greens, silver grays, dull reds, and soft browns predominate, blending together in a most pleasing manner. Back from the mission extends a row of old-time living apartments, now little more than shapeless heaps of adobe, while the huge church, a little farther to the rear, seems approaching the final stages of dissolution. It was once a massive structure, built as well as loving care and endless industry could do—walls five or six feet in thickness, bound together at the top by heavy beams perhaps fifteen inches square. Traces of the ancient decorations appear, though they are nearly effaced by the weather, to which they have been long exposed. Apparently the earthquake began the work of ruin and long neglect has done the rest.

One enters the church with some trepidation, for it seems as if the cracked and crazy structure may stagger to shapeless ruin at any moment. What a pity that the material of California's missions was not enduring stone, like the English abbeys, rather than the quickly disintegrating adobe! Back of the church is a pathetic little burying ground where wooden crosses and simple memorials indicate that the present parishioners of San Fernando are the poorest of the poor,—probably a few wretched Mexican families such as the one we found in charge of the mission.

I have anticipated, perhaps, in describing the church before the mission itself, but, after all, the church is a part of the exterior with which I have been dealing. On our first visit we found a Mexican family living in two or three of the damp, cavernous rooms of the old building. They could speak but little English, but it was easy to see that visitors were welcome, and gratuities no doubt afforded their means of livelihood. When we returned a year later, another family was in possession and had reduced sightseeing to a business basis. We were required to pay "two bits" entrance fee and an extra charge was assessed for a peep into the ruinous church, all doors and rents in the wall having been religiously boarded up. Each member of our party was given a lighted lantern—a wise precaution, it proved, for there were dilapidated and broken stairways and unsound floors in the dimly lighted building. There was little enough to see; only a series of prison-like cells with tiny windows piercing the massive walls, with earthen floors, and rude beamed ceilings—surely life at best was hard and comfortless at San Fernando, and the fathers had little advantage over their Indian charges. There was one large room, apparently for assembly purposes, on the second floor. Our Mexican guide grinned gleefully as he pointed out a little conduit in the wall through which wine flowed from the presses to vats in the ample cellars; evidently the fathers made a plentiful supply of the genial liquor to counteract the hardships they must have endured.

One need explore but a corner of the mission; he will find it typical of the whole huge structure, perhaps two hundred feet in length. There is a pathetic little chapel—the altar covered with tinsel and gewgaws—where services are held at long intervals. As a whole, the building is in fair condition and a little intelligent repair and restoration would insure its preservation for many years to come. It is, in some respects, one of the most typical of the missions; except for decay, which has not impaired the structure or interior arrangement to any great extent, it stands to-day much as it did one hundred years ago and gives an excellent idea of the domestic life of the padres and their converts. A narrow stairway led to a platform on the roof and coming out of the dimly lighted interior into the broad sunlight—for the rain had ceased—we were struck with the remarkable beauty of the situation.

The mission stands in the center of the wide plain at the head of the valley, around which sweeps a circle of green hills and mountains, their rounded tops and rugged peaks lending infinite variety to the skyline. On one hand blue vapors softened the snowy summits; on the other, the sky bent down, crystal clear, to the gently undulating contour of the hills. The fertile plain was being rapidly brought under cultivation—dotted with fruit-tree groves and ranch-houses, with here and there a village—and this was before the coming of the waters of the great Owens River Aqueduct. It would take a bold flight of the imagination to picture the future of the San Fernando Valley—anything I might write would be ancient history before my book could get to the press. The whole plain will become a garden of wondrous beauty; only the mountains and hills will abide unchanged.

The history of the old mission which has been engaging our attention was not important as compared with many of its contemporaries. And, speaking of history, I have been wondering whether I should burden my pages with dates and incidents concerning these ancient memorials, but perhaps a short sketch, given in as few words as may tell the bare outlines of each mission as we visit it, will be of service to pilgrims who follow us.

San Fernando was seventeenth of the California missions in order of founding, and was considered a necessity by the padres to fill in the gap between San Gabriel and Ventura, being about thirty miles from either. Padre Lasuen performed the dedicatory ceremonies on September 8, 1797, and by the end of the year, fifty-five neophytes had been enlisted. These, in three years, had increased to three hundred, and the record reads that they possessed five hundred horses and about as many sheep, and harvested a crop of one thousand bushels of grain. The first church, built in 1802, was almost destroyed by the great quake of 1812, which left its impress on nearly every mission of the entire chain. The church was repaired and its shattered remnants are what we see to-day.

San Fernando never prospered greatly, though at one time there were nearly a thousand Indians on its rolls. It was cramped for want of productive land and its decline began many years before the act of confiscation by the Mexicans. This occurred in 1834, when the Government agent computed the wealth of the mission at around one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, of which the "liquors" represented more than seven thousand. In January, 1847, General John C. Fremont took possession of the scanty remains of the property and the active history of San Fernando was ended. Mr. George Wharton James, to whose interesting book, "The Old Missions of California," I am indebted for much of the foregoing information, tells of an important incident in San Fernando's history as follows:

"Connected with the mission of San Fernando is the first discovery of California gold. Eight years before the great days of '49, Francisco Lopez, the major-domo of the mission, was in the canyon of San Feliciano, which is about eight miles westerly from the present town of Newhall, and, according to Don Abul Stearns, 'with a companion while in search of some stray horses about midday stopped under some trees and tied their horses to feed. While visiting in the shade, Lopez with a sheath knife dug up some wild onions, and in the dirt discovered a piece of gold. Searching further he found more. On his return to town he showed these pieces to his friends, who at once declared there must be a placer of gold there.'

"Then the rush began. As soon as the people in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara heard of it they flocked to the new 'gold fields' in hundreds. And the first California gold dust ever coined at the government at Philadelphia came from these mines. It was taken around Cape Horn on a sailing vessel by Alfred Robinson, the translator of Boscana's 'Indians of California,' and consisted of 18.34 ounces, and made $344.75, or over nineteen dollars to the ounce.

"Davis says that in the first two years after the discovery not less than from $80,000 to $100,000 was gathered. Don Antonio Coronel, with three Indian laborers, in 1842 took out $600 worth of dust in two months."

No doubt this discovery and others which followed had a far-reaching effect on the destinies of California. The influx of Americans who were attracted by the love of gold was beyond question a strong factor in bringing about the annexation of the state to the American Union by the treaty of 1849.

V

THE INLAND ROUTE TO SAN DIEGO

There may be a more delightful drive in the world than the sixty miles between Los Angeles and the Riverside country following Foothill Boulevard on an ideal California April day, but it would take an ocular demonstration to make us believe it! On such a day we made our first run over this road and perhaps the peculiarly favorable conditions for first impressions may have unduly prejudiced us, though many subsequent trips never dispelled the charm.

Leaving the city by the Broadway Tunnel and pursuing the broad curves of Pasadena Avenue to Orange Grove—which we could never traverse too often—we turned into the long stretch of Colorado Street, which leads directly into the broad oak-bordered Foothill Boulevard. Here we came into the first open country, some dozen miles from the center of Los Angeles, and until we reached the outposts of Monrovia, we ran between the sylvan glades of the Baldwin Oaks. To the left rose the rugged bulk of Mount Wilson, and peak after peak stretched away before us to the white summit of Old Baldy—as Mount San Antonio is popularly known—which rises to an altitude of more than ten thousand feet. It was a mottled spring day, rich in gorgeous cloud effects such as are not common in California; blue-gray cumulus clouds rolled above the mountains, occasionally obscuring Old Baldy's white pate and showing many entrancing phases of light and color. Beneath, a blue haze stole softly down the slopes to the tender green of the foothills. The sky above was peculiarly beautiful—pearl gray, deep blue and snowy white, all shading into each other, with lucent patches of pale blue breaking through here and there.

We paused at the Seven Oaks Inn in Monrovia and were delighted with its artistic "atmosphere" and cleanly, appetizing service. It is modeled on the higher-class English country inn—just a hint of the Lygon Arms at Broadway or the Red Horse at Stratford. Its main room had an immense fireplace with many cozy chairs, a most inviting place to spend a dull evening, and its windows looked out on pleasant gardens whose shady nooks had an equally strong lure for the daytime. We only regretted that our plans did not admit of a longer acquaintance with the attractive Seven Oaks.