Mission San Miguel Arcangel and the Reed Family Murders
Near Paso Robles, California
Just north of Paso Robles stands Mission San Miguel Arcangel, the sixteenth of California's twenty-one missions. Father Fermin Lasuen founded it on July twenty-fifth, seventeen ninety-seven, choosing a spot beside a Salinan village called Vahca, halfway between the missions at San Luis Obispo and San Antonio. Its interior walls still hold vivid frescoes painted by Salinan artists under the direction of Esteban Munras, among the best preserved original mission art in California.
But the mission also holds a darker story. After Mexico secularized the missions, the buildings passed into private hands. In eighteen forty-six, a former British sailor named William Reed acquired the mission and ran it as a kind of roadside inn during the Gold Rush.
In December of eighteen forty-eight, a group of deserting sailors stopped at the mission, and Reed unwisely bragged about the gold he had made. That night, the intruders murdered eleven people, the Reed family and their household, in what is often called the first recorded mass murder in California history. A passing traveler discovered the bodies stacked inside.
A posse chased the killers down the coast, where several died in a shootout or were later executed. Today the mission is a quiet, active parish again, but its old adobe walls still remember that terrible night.
