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"Very early on, as they were tying an Indian chief named 'Hatuey' to the stake, a Franciscan friar urged him to take Jesus to his heart so that his soul might go to heaven, rather than descend into hell. Hatuey replied that if heaven was where the Christians went, he would rather go to hell.' [ Would it have taken a genius to figure out that the ones with the express tickets to hell were the Catholic monsters, rather than the innocent pagans?]
'Much later, and thousands of miles to the west,' as Father Ascension put it, 'this realm of California is very large and embraces much territory, nearly all inhabited by numberless people.'
But not for very long. Throughout the late sixteenth and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Spanish disease and Spanish cruelty took a large but mostly uncalculated toll. Few detailed records of what happened during that time exist, but a wealth of research in other locales has shown the early decades following Western contact to be almost invariably the worst for native people, because that is when the fires of epidemic disease burn most freely. Whatever the population of California was before the Spanish came, however, and whatever happened during the first few centuries following Spanish entry into the region, by 1845 the Indian population of California had been slashed to 150,000 (down from many times that number prior to European contact) by swarming epidemics of influenza, diphtheria, measles, pneumonia, whooping cough, smallpox, malaria, typhoid, cholera, tuberculosis, dysentery, syphilis, and gonorrhea -- along with everyday settler and explorer violence."' {p. 135--6}
Using armed Spanish troops to capture Indians and herd them into the mission stockades, the Spanish padres did their best to convert the natives before they killed them. And kill they did. First there were the Jesuit missions, founded early in the eighteenth century, and from which few vital statistics are available. Then the Franciscans took the Jesuits' place. . . . [ Most people just assume that the 'missions' were about 'doing the Lord's work' for the benefit of God and the Indians. The recorded history of this time and place, however, do not bear this out.]
And what was done was that they brought more natives in, under military force of arms. Although the number of Indians within the Franciscan missions increased steadily from the close of those first three disastrous years [ when the number of deaths caused the Indian population living in the missions to decline] until the opening decade of the nineteenth century, this increase was entirely attributable to the masses of native people who were being captured and force-marched into the mission compounds. Once thus confined, the Indians' annual death rate regularly exceeded the birth rate by more than two to one. This is an overall death-to-birth ratio that, in less than half a century, would completely exterminate a population of any size that was not being replenished by new conscripts. The death rate for children in the missions was even worse. Commonly, the child death rate in these institutions of mandatory conversion ranged from . . . one of every six to every three. . .
In short, the missions were furnaces of death that sustained the Indian population levels for as long as they did only by driving more and more natives into their confines to compensate for the huge number were being killed once they got there. This was a pattern that held throughout California and on out across the southwest. Thus, for example, one survey of life and death in an early Arizona mission has turned up statistics showing that at one time an astonishing 93% of children born within its walls died before reaching the age of ten. . . { p.136--7 }
There were various ways in which the mission Indians died. The common causes were the European-introduced diseases -- which spread like wildfire in such cramped quarters -- and malnutrition. The personal space for Indians in the missions averaged about seven feet by two feet per person for unmarried captives, who were locked at night into sex--segregated common rooms that contained a single open pit for a toilet. It was perhaps a bit more space than was allotted a captive African in the hold of a slave ship sailing the Middle Passage. Married Indians and their children, on the other hand, were permitted to sleep together -- in what Russian visitor V.M. Golovnin described in 1818 as 'specially constructed 'cattle--pens.' ' He explained: I cannot think of a better term for these dwellings that consist of a long row of structures not more than 7 feet high and 10 to 14 feet wide, without floor or ceiling, each divided into sections by partitions, also not longer than 14 feet, with a correspondingly small door and a tiny window in each -- can one possibly call it anything but a barnyard for domestic cattle and fowl? Each of these small sections is occupied by an entire family; cleanliness and tidiness are out of the question: a thrifty peasant usually has a better--kept cattle--pen.'' Under such conditions Spanish--introduced diseases ran wild: measles, smallpox, typhoid, and influenza epidemics occurred and re--occurred, while syphilis and tuberculosis became, as Sherburne F. Cook once said, 'totalitarian' diseases: virtually all the Indians were afflicted by them. As for malnutrition, despite agricultural crop yields on the Indian--tended mission plantations that Golovnin termed 'extraordinary' and 'unheard of in Europe,' along with large herds of cattle and the easily accessible bounty of sea food, the food given the Indians, according to him, was 'a kind of gruel made from barley meal, boiled in water with maize, beans, and peas; occasionally they are given some beef, while some of the more diligent [Indians] catch fish for themselves.' On average, according to Cook's analyses of the data, the caloric intake of a field--laboring mission Indian was about 1400 calories per day, falling as low as 715 or 865 calories per day in such missions as San Antonio and San Miguel. To put this in context, the best estimate of the caloric intake of nineteenth-century African American slaves is in excess of 4000 calories per day, and almost 5400 calories per day for adult male field hands. This seems high by modern Western standards, but is not excessive in terms of the caloric expenditure required of agricultural laborers. As the author of the estimate puts it: 'a diet with 4206 calories per slave per day, while an upper limit [is] neither excessive nor generous, but merely adequate to provide sufficient energy to enable one to work like a slave.' Of course, the mission Indians also worked like slaves in the padres' agricultural fields, but they did so with far less than half the caloric intake, on average, commonly provided a black slave in Mississippi, Alabama, or Georgia. Even the military commanders at the missions acknowledged that the food provided the Indians was grossly insufficient, especially, said on given 'the arduous strain of the labors in which they are employed'; labors, said another, which last 'from morning to night'; and labors, note a third, which are added to the other 'hardships to which they are subjected.' . . . The resulting severe malnutrition, of course, made the natives all the more susceptible to the bacterial and viral infections that festered in the filthy and cramped living conditions they were force to endure -- just as it made them more likely to behave lethargically, something that would bring more corporal punishment down upon them. . .
When not working directly under the mission fathers' charge, the captive natives were subject to forced labor through hiring-out arrangements the missions had with Spanish military encampments. The only compensation the natives received for this, as for all their heavy daily labors, was the usual inadequate allotment of food. As one French visitor commented in the early nineteenth century, after inspecting life in the missions, the relationship between the priest and his flock 'would . . . be different only in name, if a slaveholder kept them for labor and rented them out at will; he too would feed them.' But, we now know, he would have fed them better.
In short, the Franciscans simultaneously starved and worked their would be converts to death, while the diseases they and others had imported killed off thousands more. The similarity of this outcome to what had obtained in the slave labor camps of Central and South America should not I surprising, since California's Spanish missions, established by Father Junípero Sera aptly dubbed 'the last conquistador' by one admiring biographer, and currently a candidate for Catholic sainthood), were direct modeled on the genocidal encomienda system that had driven many millions of native peoples in Central and South America to early and agonizing deaths. Others died even more quickly, not only from disease, but from grotesque forms of punishment. To be certain that the Indians were spiritually prepared to die, when their appointed and rapidly approaching time came they were required to attend mass in chapels where, according to one mission visitor, they were guarded by men 'with whips and goads to enforce order and silence' and were surrounded by 'soldiers with fixed bayonets' who were on hand in case any unruliness broke out. These were the same soldiers, complained the officially celibate priests, who routinely raped young Indian women. If any neophytes (as the Spanish called Indians who had been baptized) were late for mass, they would have 'a large leathern thong, at the end of a heavy whip-staff, applied to their naked backs.'' More such infractions brought more serious torture.
And if ever some natives dared attempt an escape from the padres' -- as to lead them to salvation -- as, according to the Franciscans' own accounts, the Indians constantly did -- there would be little mercy shown. From the time of the missions' founding days, Junípero Serra traveled from it to pulpit preaching fire and brimstone, scourging himself before his incarcerated flock, pounding his chest with heavy rocks until it was feared he would fall down dead, burning his breast with candles and live coals in imitation of San Juan Capistrano. After this sort of self-flagellating exertion, Father Serra had no patience for Indians who still preferred not to it his holy demands of them. Thus, on at least one occasion when of his Indian captives not only escaped, but stole some mission supplies to support them on their journey home, 'his Lordship was so ant,' recalled Father Paulo, 'that it was necessary for the fathers who there to restrain him in order to prevent him from hanging some of . He shouted that such a race of people deserved to be put to knife." { p.138--40 }
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