The Staff of Leadership: Indian Authority in the Missions of Alta California

Abstract

I N I769, Spain set out to defend the Pacific Coast against settlement by other European powers by developing a series of colonial outposts that eventually stretched from San Diego to San Francisco. In this region, known to Europeans as Alta California, Spain depended on religious missions more than military fortifications or civilian towns to solidify its control. During the second half of the eighteenth century, missions had declined in importance in the rest of northern New Spain. In I767, the crown expelled the Jesuits from Spain and its colonies and gradually converted most surviving missions in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas to parishes overseen by secular priests.1 But in Alta California, Franciscan missions steadily increased in number and power as the most important centers of interaction between Indians and Spaniards. By i82I, when Spanish rule gave way to Mexican independence, roughly 70,000 Indians had been baptized in the region's twenty missions. Even after more than five decades of demographic disaster brought on by the ravages of disease, mission Indians still outnumbered Spanish settlers and soldiers 2I,750 to 3,400; missions outnumbered military garrisons by a ratio of five to one and civilian settlements by six to one.2 The Franciscans' strategies to convert and control Indians in Alta California have sparked an intense debate that has recently involved the general public as well as scholars. Public interest has focused on the canonization of Fray Junipero Serra, founding father of the California missions, and more generally on Indian-Spanish relations in those missions.3 Promoters of the Spanish colonial past portray the Franciscans as saving childlike Indians