Mission San Buenaventura: The Aqueduct the Chumash Built Without Wages

Easter morning, seventeen eighty-two. Father Junipero Serra knelt in the dirt of a coastal valley and dedicated the ninth and final mission he would personally found. He named it San Buenaventura. The Chumash had lived in this valley for centuries. Now they were invited, in the way Spanish missions invited, to become neophytes.

Neophyte was the word for a Chumash person who had been baptized into the mission system. Baptism was not always voluntary. And once baptized, leaving was not permitted. Mission records classified it as desertion. The punishment for desertion was to be returned by force.

Between eighteen oh five and eighteen fifteen, Chumash neophytes under the direction of Friar Cambon built a seven-mile network of stone-masonry viaducts and earthen ditches to bring water from the Ventura River to the mission complex. The engineering was sophisticated: elevated aqueducts crossing varied terrain, open channels moving water across the dry coastal plain, a hydraulic system with no equivalent in pre-American California. The workers who built it received no wages. They received their daily maintenance within the mission system, which they were not free to leave.

A portion of the aqueduct still stands near Cañada Larga Road, a hundred feet of dressed stone nearly seven feet high, built by people whose names the mission records did not preserve. The Great Flood of eighteen sixty-two destroyed most of the rest.

The mission you are passing is still an active parish. Mass is said in the same building the Chumash neophytes raised from the ground. The aqueduct that fed it is a county historical landmark. The labor that made both of them possible is not on the sign at the entrance.