Mission: Impossible

Steven W. Hackel. Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769–1850. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. xx + 496 pp. Illustrations, tables, maps, appendices, and index. $59.95 (cloth); $22.50 (paper).

James A. Sandos. Converting California: Indians and Franciscans in the Missions. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. xix + 251 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, and index. $35.00.

In the spring of 1770, Franciscan missionary Junípero Serra led a column of Spanish men in procession on the shores of the Pacific Ocean at Monterey, California. Although the Spanish empire had occupied portions of the Americas for nearly three centuries, Alta California, as they called it, remained to them terra incognita, a land occupied by demons and savages awaiting the blessings of European religion and civilization. To claim Spanish possession of this land and "to frighten away the infernal enemies," Serra sprinkled the ground with holy water, raised an enormous cross, and performed a makeshift mass in the open air.

Next, to establish Spain's legal claim to Alta California, the appointed governor, Gaspar de Portolá, ritually appropriated the land, throwing earth to the four winds and raising the king's flag to note his new authority over this distant realm. Anchored in the adjoining bay, Portolá's and Serra's compadres tolled bells and fired cannons in celebration of their achievement and in anticipation of glories yet to come. Representing the sacred and secular arms of Spanish colonization, these two men would work together (though not always in harmony) to incorporate this country and its peoples into the vast Spanish empire.

We do not know what the local Indians thought of this baroque spectacle, but it is safe to assume that they did not share the newcomers' vision. They lived in a relatively abundant environment with plentiful harvests from both land and sea. They had managed to avoid large-scale warfare with their neighbors. They possessed a satisfying and powerful religious tradition with an abundance of otherworldly powers that aided them in their lives. Rather than anticipating great benefits from the Spaniards, they may well have feared them, having heard tales of Iberian rapacity from their neighbors along the Mexican frontier. Whatever their thoughts, they proceeded cautiously, awaiting further evidence of Spanish intentions before determining their response. They could scarcely have imagined the transforming flood of events initiated by these strange ceremonies.

Over the ensuing decades, Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish civil authorities would struggle to control the rapidly changing world of Alta California, with varying degrees of success. Franciscans built twenty-one missions along the California coast and baptized more than seventy thousand Indians, but they were eventually pushed aside in the 1830s under a policy of secularization. Spanish authorities extended the reach of their American empire, but soon lost their new territory to Mexican independence. Indians gained access to powerful goods and social networks, but they also suffered under an oppressive labor regime and died in droves from European diseases. These complex experiences have generated extensive debate among historians, who have alternately praised and condemned the missions for more than two centuries.

The first historical account appeared remarkably early. In 1787, Francisco Palou published a Spanish account of Alta California's missions, centered on the life of his former professor and fellow missionary, the recently deceased Junípero Serra. In the hagiographic tradition, Palou praised Serra's efforts among the Indians as a holy example of unselfish sacrifice that rescued thousands of Indians from their natural state of sin. "If this sacred Province had but known how to produce a grove of such 'juniper' trees," he wrote, "there would not have remained by now, in all that wide region of pagan people, a single heathen of savage life, but all would have been civilized and converted to our Holy Catholic Faith." Palou recognized that his was not an academic history, even by eighteenth-century standards. "I know very well that some of those who read of new adventures...