Mission Santa Ines and the Chumash Revolt of 1824
Near Los Olivos, California
In nearby Solvang stands Mission Santa Ines, founded on the seventeenth of September, eighteen oh four, by Father Estevan Tapis as the nineteenth of California's Spanish missions. It was placed halfway between the missions at Santa Barbara and La Purisima to relieve their crowding and to draw in the Chumash living north of the coast range. Within months the baptismal register held more than one hundred names.
But mission life meant hard labor, confinement, and harsh discipline, and in eighteen twenty-four the resentment exploded. On the twenty-first of February a Mexican soldier severely beat a young Chumash boy who had come to visit an imprisoned relative in the guardhouse at Santa Ines. The Chumash rose up, firing arrows and setting mission buildings ablaze in what became the largest organized Native resistance of California's Spanish and Mexican eras, spreading to the missions at Santa Barbara and La Purisima as well.
The fighting was deadly. In the struggle at Santa Ines that first day, historians record that fifteen Chumash women and children died, four men perished in the fires, and one soldier was killed. Hundreds fled into the mountains, and Spanish friars spent months trying to coax them back.
On the sixteenth of May the governor announced a general pardon for most who had taken part. The mission still stands, and the tribe still remembers.
