At Soledad was a still more pitiful case. Father Sarria, who had labored there for thirty years, refused to leave the spot, even after the mission was so ruined that it was not worth any administrator's while to keep it. He and the handful of Indians who remained loyal to their faith and to him lived on there, growing poorer and poorer each day; he sharing his every morsel of food with them, and starving himself, till, one Sunday morning, saying mass at the crumbling altar, he fainted, fell forward, and died in their arms, of starvation. This was in 1838. Only eight years before, this Soledad mission had owned thirty-six thousand cattle, seventy thousand sheep, three hundred yoke of working oxen, more horses than any other mission, and had an aqueduct, fifteen miles long, supplying water enough to irrigate twenty thousand acres of land.
For ten years after the passage of the Secularization Act, affairs went steadily on from bad to worse with the missions. Each governor had his own plans and devices for making the most out of them, renting them, dividing them into parcels for the use of colonists, establishing pueblos on them, making them subject to laws of bankruptcy, and finally selling them. The departmental assemblies sometimes indorsed and sometimes annulled the acts of the governors. In 1842 Governor Micheltorena proclaimed that the twelve southern missions should be restored to the Church, and that the Government would not make another grant of land without the consent of the friars. This led to a revolution, or rather an ebullition, and Micheltorena was sent out of the country. To him succeeded Pio Pico, who remained in power till the occupation of California by the United States forces in 1846. During the reign of Pio Pico, the ruin of the mission establishments was completed. They were at first sold or rented in batches to the highest bidders. There was first a preliminary farce of proclamation to the Indians to return and take possession of the missions if they did not want them sold. These proclamations were posted up in the pueblos for months before the sales. In 1844 the Indians of Dolores, Soledad, San Miguel, La Purissima, and San Rafael[6] were thus summoned to come back to their missions,—a curious bit of half conscience-stricken, half politic recognition of the Indians' ownership of the lands, the act of the Departmental Assembly saying that if they (the Indians) did not return before such a date, the Government would declare said missions to be "without owners," and dispose of them accordingly. There must have been much bitter speech in those days when news of these proclamations reached the wilds where the mission Indians had taken refuge.
At last, in March, 1846, an act of the Departmental Assembly made the missions liable to the laws of bankruptcy, and authorized the governor to sell them to private persons. As by this time all the missions that had any pretence of existence left had been run hopelessly into debt, proceedings in regard to them were much simplified by this act. In the same year the President of Mexico issued an order to Governor Pico to use all means within his power to raise money to defend the country against the United States; and under color of this double authorization the governor forthwith proceeded to sell missions right and left. He sold them at illegal private sales; he sold them for insignificant sums, and for sums not paid at all; whether he was, to use the words of a well-known legal brief in one of the celebrated California land cases, "wilfully ignorant or grossly corrupt," there is no knowing, and it made no difference in the result.
One of the last acts of the Departmental Assembly, before the surrender of the country, was to declare all Governor Pico's sales of mission property null and void. And one of Governor Pico's last acts was, as soon as he had made up his mind to run away out of the country, to write to some of his special friends and ask them if there were anything else they would like to have him give them before his departure.
On the 7th of July, 1846, the American flag was raised in Monterey, and formal possession of California was taken by the United States. The proclamation of Admiral Sloat on this memorable occasion included these words: "All persons holding title to real estate, or in quiet possession of lands under color of right, shall have those titles and rights guaranteed to them." "Color of right" is a legal phrase, embodying a moral idea, an obligation of equity. If the United States Government had kept this guarantee, there would be living in comfortable homesteads in California to-day many hundreds of people that are now homeless and beggared,—Mexicans as well as Indians.
The army officers in charge of different posts in California, in these first days of the United States' occupation of the country, were perplexed and embarrassed by nothing so much as by the confusion existing in regard to the mission properties and lands. Everywhere men turned up with bills of sale from Governor Pico. At the San Diego mission the ostensible owner, one Estudillo by name, confessed frankly that he "did not think it right to dispose of the Indians' property in that way; but as everybody was buying missions, he thought he might as well have one."
In many of the missions, squatters, without show or semblance of title, were found; these the officers turned out. Finally, General Kearney, to save the trouble of cutting any more Gordian knots, declared that all titles of missions and mission lands must be held in abeyance till the United States Government should pronounce on them.
For several years the question remained unsettled, and the mission properties were held by those who had them in possession at the time of the surrender. But in 1856 the United States Land Commission gave, in reply to a claim and petition from the Catholic Bishop of California, a decision which, considered with reference to the situation of the mission properties at the time of the United States' possession, was perhaps as near to being equitable as the circumstances would admit. But, considered with reference to the status of the mission establishments under the Spanish rule, to their original extent, the scope of the work, and the magnificent success of their experiment up to the time of the revolutions, it seems a sadly inadequate return of property once rightfully held. Still, it was not the province of the United States to repair the injustices or make good the thefts of Spain and Mexico; and any attempt to clear up the tangle of confiscations, debts, frauds, and robberies in California, for the last quarter of a century before the surrender, would have been bootless work.
The Land Commissioner's decision was based on the old Spanish law which divided church property into two classes, sacred and ecclesiastical, and held it to be inalienable, except in case of necessity, and then only according to provisions of canon law; in the legal term, it was said to be "out of commerce." The sacred property was that which had been in a formal manner consecrated to God,—church buildings, sacred vessels, vestments, etc. Ecclesiastical property was land held by the Church, and appropriated to the maintenance of divine worship, or the support of the ministry; buildings occupied by the priests, or necessary for their convenience; gardens, etc. Following a similar division, the property of the mission establishments was held by the Land Commission to be of two sorts,—mission property and church property: the mission property, embracing the great tracts of land formerly cultivated for the community's purpose, it was decided, must be considered as government property; the church property, including, with the church buildings, houses of priests, etc., such smaller portions of land as were devoted to the immediate needs of the ministry, it was decided must still rightfully go to the Church. How many acres of the old gardens, orchards, vineyards, of the missions could properly be claimed by the Church under this head, was of course a question; and it seems to have been decided on very different bases in different missions, as some received much more than others. But all the church buildings, priests' houses, and some acres of land, more or less, with each, were pronounced by this decision to have been "before the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo solemnly dedicated to the use of the Church, and therefore withdrawn from commerce;" "such an interest is protected by the provisions of the treaty, and must be held inviolate under our laws." Thus were returned at last, into the inalienable possession of the Catholic Church, all that were left of the old mission churches, and some fragments of the mission lands. Many of them are still in operation as curacies; others are in ruins; of some not a trace is left,—not even a stone.
At San Diego the walls of the old church are still standing, unroofed, and crumbling daily. It was used as a cavalry barracks during the war of 1846, and has been a sheepfold since. Opposite it is an olive orchard, of superb hoary trees still in bearing; a cactus wall twenty feet high, and a cluster of date palms, are all that remain of the friars' garden.
At San Juan Capistrano, the next mission to the north, some parts of the buildings are still habitable. Service is held regularly in one of the small chapels.