CLO

LOSE beside the king's highway, where it crosses the vast fruit-bearing plain between the green serranos of the Temescals and the blue Sierra Madre, winter-capped with snow, stands the ancient church of San Gabriel Arcangel and what is left of the Spanish mission founded by the Little Brothers of Saint Francis in the eighteenth century. The church is long and narrow, built of stone covered with pale yellow plaster. Ten square buttresses rise at equal intervals along the massive wall, topping the eaves with pyramidal copings. At the sacristy end is a unique belfry, a wing-wall pierced with five arches, where the bells hang at different heights, clear-outlined in the open spaces. At the other end a stairway climbs halfway up the side to the entrance of the choir.

There is no beauty of façade or portal to relieve the severity of the building; no spire or tower to lift it up. Yet there is so much of strength and patience in its look, the summer sun and winter rain have weathered it to such mellow tints of old ivory, the high-arched bell-wall is so quaint and lovely, that San Gabriel has a charm for the eyes and a picture for the memory. It lifts its long buttressed side behind the dusty row of trees where the trolley-car clangs along the dusty street, among the modern cottages of wood and stucco which have sprung up in the old Spanish village, like a relic of another age. It seems a border citadel of the ancient faith, an outpost of the adventurous cross, something between a shrine and a fortress.

And so, in fact, it was, a hundred years ago. For here, in 1771, the Spanish followers of Saint Francis of Assisi established the fourth of a chain of mission-stations reaching from San Diego in the south to San Francisco de Solano in the north. These were the frontier stations of the conversion and civilizing of the Indians.

This strange and daring enterprise of the cross was in truth the opening of the wonderland of California.

Juan Cabrillo, a Portuguese captain, had discovered the coast as far north as Monterey in 1542, and died on one of the lonely channel islands off Santa Barbara, leaving his ships to sail back to Mexico without him. Sir Francis Drake, the English explorer and sea-fighter, had landed in a little bay north of San Francisco in 1579, and spent a month in refitting his ships after the rough buffeting of a treasurechase in the Spanish Main. Sebastian Vizcaino had made a voyage of exploration in 1602, touching here and there, probably as far north as Oregon. Doubtless many other captains and adventurers had seen the long Pacific coast, with its rare and shallow harbors and its hilly islands, or crossed some southern pass of the Californian mountains in search of the fabled Cibola and its gold and precious stones.

But none of these birds of passage ever lighted upon the bay of San Francisco, the greatest of the world's harbors, or even dreamed of its existence. There was no settlement of white men in California, nor any real knowledge of its marvelous beauty and rich resources for seven generations after Juan Cabrillo made his momentous and fatal voyage.

Then came the brown-cowled, rope-girdled Little Brothers of Saint Francis in 1769, pushing north from Mexico with pilgrim's staff and pastor's cross, to bring the gospel to the wild and ignorant “gentiles" who roamed and fought and starved between the mountains and the sea. That was the real beginning of California. Mission after mission sprang up by the magic of hard work,-San Diego de Alcala, San Carlos Borromeo, San Antonio de Padua, San Gabriel Arcangel, San Luis Obispo, San Francisco de Asis, -for now the great

bay was discovered, and named after the dear little poor man of Assisi,-San Juan Capistrano, Santa Clara, Santa Barbara, San José de Guadalupe, and so on, until there were twenty-one of these great establishments linked together by the long trace of the king's highway,-El Camino Real, -which ran for seven hundred miles from its starting-point in Sonoma.

Around these missions some thirty thousand Indians were gathered, and taught how to live in this world as well as how to prepare for the next. The broad acres were brought under the plow, and yielded abundant harvests. Grape-vines and fruit-trees were planted. The green serranos were covered with flocks and herds. The rude native crafts of pottery, basketry, skindressing, and boat-building were developed and improved. The work-shops and mills were full of busy laborers. Weaving and carpentry and stone-cutting and brick- and tile-making were taught.

The California Indians were a roving, quarreling race of ignorant tribes, lazy and shiftless and miserable, many of them filthy and degraded, all of them exposed to starvation, if the hunting and fishing were not good and the acorn-crop, which was their main reliance, failed. Out of this low estate they were drawn together and lifted up into something like a people, with a common knowledge not only of the hopes and restraints of religion, but also of the arts of decent living.

I know it is the fad nowadays to condemn work like this if it is done by a missionary, and to exalt the virtues and the joys of the savage, the "primitive man. Writers who go out to visit him (with an extremely civilized traveling-equipment), and spend a few weeks or months in camp near him, speak as if it were a crime to bring him out of his blissful ignorance and his unbreeched, bathless felicity. And doubtless it is true that there is a certain kind of so-called civilization, cruel beneath its smooth manners, vicious beneath its fashionable customs, and incurably silly beneath its mask of sapient elegance, which is less desirable than some kinds of barbarism.

But this was not the kind of civilization that the mission fathers brought to California. Nor were the people to whom they came so happy in their pristine, lazy, dirty lot that they lost by

changing it. I suppose that the descriptions of the "Digger" Indians of the Pacific coast which were in our geographybooks fifty years ago were, so to speak, embroidered with horrors. But even according to the more judicious account of their condition which is given by one of their closest students and best friends, Mr. George Wharton James, they were in a state which was far from blissful when the "padres" came to them. And of the mission-training, at once spiritual and practical, Mr. James writes:

Under this régime it is unquestionably true that the lot of the Indians was immeasurably improved from that of their aboriginal condition. They were kept in a state of reasonable cleanliness, were well clothed, were taught and required to do useful work, learned many new and helpful arts, and were instructed in the elemental matters of the Catholic faith. All these

things were a direct advance.

San Gabriel, owing to its fortunate situation in the fertile plain, near to the mother-mountains which gave a shelter from the north winds and sent unfailing streams of water from their forest-clad slope and cañons, prospered abundantly, and was named "the Queen of the Missions." The numerous Indians of the region were of several tribes, hostile to one another, and at first inclined to make war upon the mission. There were depredations and forays and night attacks, usually, it must be confessed, in revenge for outrages committed by the Spanish soldiers of the guard. There were incursions of the fierce Yuma and Mohave tribes from the Colorado River, and the house of peace was often in a state of siege. But the good work of the Little Brothers flourished through all trials and perturbations.

Within less than twenty years more than a thousand dark-skinned neophytes gathered about the altar; four thousand head of cattle fed in the green pastures; six thousand sheep were herded upon the hills; vineyard and garden and orchard yielded their fruits; the broad grain-fields were golden with a harvest of many thousands of bushels; and the dusky reapers reaped in the sunshine, and the herdsmen tended their flocks on the hillside, and the horsemen rode among the broad-boughed

oaks in the meadows or loped along the rough cañon-trails, seeking their cattle.

Year by year the work grew, and the prosperity increased. The shops were full of busy artisans. Boys and girls in the school learned to read and write after a fashion. The looms clacked, and the anvils clanged with the making of plowshares and pruning-hooks.

An asistencia, with a new chapel, was established at the lately founded town of Los Angeles, eight miles toward the sea; another was built at San Bernardino, fifty miles toward the mountains and the dangerous land of the Mohaves and Yumas. Intercourse was opened with the naked Indians on the island of Santa Catalina, and the woolen cloth of the mission was traded for their well-made mortars and bowls of soapstone. A great grist-mill, with walls five feet thick, was built on a waterway coming down from Los Robles Cañon; and a sawmill was put up below it. In 1812 an earthquake partly destroyed the church, but it was promptly rebuilt by the indefatigable Pa

The kaleidoscopic government of that time carried out its plan with a high and clumsy hand, destroying far more than it acquired. In 1833 the process of breaking up the system under which so much spiritual and temporal good had been accomplished, was begun. By 1846 it was finished, and Pio Pico, the last Mexican Governor of Alta California, turned over the remnant of the San Gabriel property to speculators, "in payment for past services to the Government."

dre Zalvidea as it stands to-day.

So for more than sixty years San Gabriel, flower of missions, spread abroad her branches and brought forth fruit. Then ruin came upon her and all her sisters.

They were too successful, too rich, perhaps too dictatorial in the stewardship of their increased goods. The eye of envy fell upon them. The covetous heart, which is the canker of politics, hungered for their possessions without their work. Mexico, broken away from Spain and passing through a carnival of revolutions, resolved to do what the Spanish Cortes had proposed in 1813-to "secularize". that is, in plainer words-to take the property of the missions.

LXXXVII-23

The Indians were dispersed, landless

and leaderless, to

starve among the hills or become the dissolute riffraff of the towns; the cattle and sheep were slaughtered; the great farms and pasture-lands were transferred at ruin

prices to political favorites and landgrabbers; the very cloisters and churches were sold for a song; and through the length of California. the inexorable hand. of time began the swift rending and crumbling of those long corridors and broken arches, those thick-timbered roofs

and deep-windowed walls, those square, low-domed bell-towers and flattened gables and curved pediments and corniced doorways, which are the monuments of the mission fathers and their converts, the most picturesque and pathetic ruins of the New World.

San Gabriel was restored to its true owners, with at least a part of its garden, when the United States took possession of California in 1846, and ever since it has been a parish church. But its revenues had vanished; its neophytes were scattered far and wide; its glory departed, never to

return.

Of all this I was thinking sadly some ten years ago as I sat on the steps that climb the long, yellow, buttressed wall

beside the street that was the king's highway, and watched a few casual Gabrieleños sauntering by to the little osteria with the giant grape-vine. What did they know of the story of their village? Who could tell it to them, and to the rest of the world, as it ought to be told, with color and movement and that vivid light without which there is neither truth nor romance?

ANITA

The half-blood Indian girl in the Mission Play.

Since then I have journeyed through California from Coronado to Shasta and heard some of the other stories with which that land is filled, stirring and marvelous. tales of the first explorers, of the troubled Mexican era, of the Bear Republic and the American Conquest, of the "Argonauts" and the "Hounds" and the "Vigilantes." But none of them all is comparable for sheer courage and large humanity, for unselfish motive and picturesque achievement and long results, with the

sixty-year adventure of the little sergeclad, sandal-shod Brothers of Saint Francis who came to Christianize the "gentiles." That is the best chapter in California's Heldenbuch. Who will tell that wonderful story simply, briefly, clearly, so that men can see it and feel it and remember it?

This year I went back to San Gabriel, and my question was answered. On the other side of the street, facing the ancient church, I saw a broad, low building in an inclosed yard, and over the gateway an inscription, "The Mission Play." I had heard of it before, and understood that it was one of the "things that everybody ought to see." But there are a good many of those things in California, and not all of them are equally rewarding. Popular pageants are often trying to the patience. Religious dramas sometimes shock the sense of reverence more deeply than they impress the conscience. It was not without some misgiving that I went with a pleasant company of friends into that plain inclosure to see what fortune had in store behind the fence.

The first thing was an ambulatory surrounding the playhouse, containing models of all the missions in the order of their founding, set in a mimic landscape of green hill and dale, and so arranged that when the broad side windows of the theater were open, you could look out and catch glimpses, as if far away, of the old churches and long colonnades.

The next thing was the playhouse itself, a complete and delightful surprise. It was not like a theater at all. It seemed as if some old monastic refectory, with its dark beams and high rafters, had been enlarged and fitted with benches for a thousand or fifteen hundred people. There were no galleries, no stage-boxes. The decoration was so simple that you forgot

it. The tone of color, the form and outline of the big room, had nothing crude or mean about them. They were of a simple dignity that made you feel at ease. The wide, low stage was framed in a broad band of dusky gold, with a dark-blue curtain hanging before it, as if some ancient picture were there waiting to be unveiled. And now before the curtain rises, let us hear how the play came to be. It was Frank Miller, the master of the inn at Riverside, who first perceived that the story of the California missions should be told in a pageant-shown to the eye as well as told to the ear. He found the man to write it: John Steven McGroarty, a Celt and a Californian, a poet and a journalist, a man of sincere faith and fertile fancy, unspoiled by literary fads and fashions, capable of feeling the beauty and pathos of the mission-story, and willing to tell it on the stage so simply that a child could see its meaning.

When the "book" was written, a company was formed, the playhouse was built, and the first performance given. Ever since then, except in the summer, it has been repeated several times a week, with growing audiences from month to month. The actors and the employees of the theater live in the little cottages of San Gabriel and the near-by towns. The whole enterprise is unique and characteristic. It is like one of the traveling companies of players in the time of Hamlet, only in this case the players stay at home and the travelers come to them.

But now the mission-bell hanging over the pulpit-stairway at the side of the theater announces that the play is to begin. Three figures pass slowly before the curtain in dumb-show: an Indian crouching and listening, as if he feared the coming of the white men; a soldier richly dressed and armed, representing the Spanish conquerors; a brown-robed missionary, holding up the cross in sign of his peaceful

errand. This is frankly symbolical, as in an old allegorical morality-play. One wonders if all is to follow in this fashion.

The curtain rises on the first act, and we see that the miracle-play, with its method historical rather than allegorical, is to be the model of this drama. But it is the miracle-play in a very modern form, with plenty of realistic detail and local color.

The scene is the False Bay of San Diego in 1770: a little company of soldiers and priests camped in the foreground, discouraged and demoralized by the eight months' absence of their military leader Portolá, who has led the larger part of the expedition northward on foot to seek the port of Monterey; in the background, the dark bulk of Point Loma and the broad Pacific; in the lonely harbor, the little lame ship San Carlos, like a perilous invitation to give up the enterprise and go home to La Paz. Sickness, hunger, and quarrels