Colonial Rosary: The Spanish and Indian Missions of California (review)

The late Marin Ridge used to advise scholars that it was better to write a "C" level book on an "A" quality topic, rather than the reverse, because at least the writer's name would become recognized by a larger audience. What would Martin have said about this book that addresses an important subject but with near failing results? Despite the deployment of scholarly impedimenta, Lake demonstrates no real understanding of California's missions or their historiography. She cites romantically influenced popular books and modern scholarship side by side apparently seeing no differences between them. And she frequently gets things wrong. After observing that the pre-contact native population ranged from an astonishing "700,000 to one million" using a journalist as her source, she later cites the most frequently quoted demographer's figure of 310,00 for all California that she mistakes for all the Indians in the mission zone alone (pp. 9, 165).

Lake misunderstands the missionary practice of Indian initiation into the Church. Franciscans named newly baptized Indians neophytes and called gentiles those Indians unbaptized. Catechumen, a term Lake does not use, described an unbaptized Indian preparing for baptism by learning to recite the prayer schedule Franciscans prescribed, the doctrina. Beginning with Junípero Serra, first Father President of the Alta California missions, missionaries and later writers have equated baptism with conversion by referring to neophytes as converts, meaning that they had totally rejected Indian religiosity for Christianity. That is a problematic issue I first raised 17 years ago in an article that Lake cites but does not comprehend. She states correctly, that "calling mission Indians converts is presumptuous" and then proceeds to call them converts throughout the book. She goes on to define neophyte with the description of a catechumen and to object to the word "gentile" as "inappropriate to a balanced study of the Indian" (p. 7) even though it is an accepted and non pejorative term compared to say pagan or heathen. For Lake, "[b]aptism and indoctrination were the first steps to conversion" (p. 66), but that was the reverse of the actual process.

These mistakes and many others are not cosmetic but structural, deriving from lack of familiarity with the subject. She accepts the myth created in the early twentieth century that there was a single Camino Real, or royal road, linking all the missions and today is approximated by California State Highway 101 and Interstate Five. Not so. Lake claims that Catholicism eliminated human sacrifice in California but it was never practiced there. Lake asserts that the first mission, San Diego was built "inside the presidio" (p. 43) and then presents a primary source that contradicts her, describing how both mission and presidio were built separately and apart. She claims that missions San Diego and San Carlos (Carmel) were moved from their original sites because of water problems, ignoring the primary reason given by Serra for their relocation was to prevent soldier immorality—concubinage or rape—with native women. "Subject to ongoing debate," writes Lake, "is the balance of free will and coercion in the conversion of missions Indians, and where force was involved, its degree and nature" (p. 42). This is a "hot button" topic in California mission history and after this sentence Lake drops it.

Ohio University Press should have submitted Lake's manuscript to rigorous peer review. Instead it chose to market the book aggressively with simultaneous publication in cloth and paper. Professionals can do nothing to prevent amateurs from practicing history without a license but we can warn an unsuspecting public. If you are interested in California's missions, this is not your book.